Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

He stood up, taking the clerk by surprise so that his ‘All rise’ sounded a little panicked.

The magistrate gathered up his papers. ‘These proceedings are adjourned for three days,’ he said, ‘and will resume on Thursday, in the afternoon session. Make a note, Mister Farrier, if you please.’

He swept out of the room without a backward glance.

Jenna-Jane put on her jacket while Pen just stood there looking like she’d lost a pound and found a plague sore. I knew what was going through her mind: with the power-of-attorney ploy kicked into the long grass, we had to shoot down Jenna-Jane’s stooges on the review panel or the whole thing would go through on the nod. On the other hand, the Honourable Mister Runcie – pompous and self-satisfied though he definitely was – struck me as being nobody’s fool. I still felt like we were in with a chance.

There were exits on both sides of the courtroom, so it had to be deliberate that Jenna-Jane took the longer route and paused in front of Pen on her way out.

‘I’m so sorry, Pamela,’ she said, looking limpidly sincere. ‘I want you to know that if Rafi is given into my care, all the resources of the unit will be brought to bear on him. If it’s possible to make him well again, we’ll do it.’

Pen stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. Then she drew back her arm in a staccato movement, fist clenched. But I was already moving, and I stepped in before she could bring it forward again, sliding between the two of them with my back to Pen. Felix Castor: human shield.

‘Jenna-Jane,’ I said, ‘you’re a sight for sore eyes. Actually, let me rephrase that. My eyes are scabbing over just from looking at you. I’m carrying a voice recorder, so why don’t you stop prejudicing your case and go play with your ECT machines?’

‘Felix.’ Jenna-Jane shook her head with mock exasperation. ‘You’re determined to hate me, but I have only respect and admiration for you. I’m hoping to welcome you back on board some day. There’s going to be a war, and I want you on my side. I’m determined on it. Perhaps your friend Rafi might actually be the bridge that brings us together.’

‘You mean you’re going to lay him down on the ground and trample on him?’ I said. ‘Tell it to the court.’

She raised her hands in surrender and walked on. I turned to Pen, who was trembling like a tuning fork.

‘Well, that went as well as could be expected,’ I said.

‘Fuck off, Fix,’ Pen answered, her eyes welling up with tears and instantly overflowing. ‘Fuck off and don’t talk to me.’

She turned her back and stalked away along the seats, tripping at one point over somebody’s briefcase and then kicking it out of her way as she righted herself. It wasn’t a dramatic exit, but it did the job.

What’s that old Groucho Marx line? No, never mind: I’ve got plenty of enemies. But if they ever start to thin out, most of my friends are right there in the wings ready to audition.

‘ There’s going to be a war. ’ Jenna-Jane Mulbridge actually believes that shit, and she isn’t the only one.

The dead only rose again because they were running ahead of the demons, the theory went, and now the demons had started to appear. There was a gaping hole in the walls of Creation: Hell was throwing its legions into the breach, and so far our side not only didn’t have an army, it didn’t even have a poster with a pointing finger on it.

The first and greatest of the exorcists, Peckham Steiner, had believed this too, and towards the end of his life he’d devoted his personal fortune to the building of defences that would give the living a fighting chance in that war when it was finally declared: the Thames Collective, a barracks for ghostbreakers on running water, where the dead and the damned couldn’t walk; the safe houses, protected by ramparts of water, earth and air, which I’d assumed were an urban legend until I’d actually seen one and figured out how it worked; a dozen wacky schemes full of customised craziness in every flavour you can think of. It was classic paranoid stuff: but at this point in my life I was finding it a lot harder to laugh it off.

If there was a war coming, then Rafi Ditko was conquered territory. Playing around with black magic, he’d opened up a door to Hell inside his own soul, and something – a big, bad bastard of a something that called itself Asmodeus – had stepped through. Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet and the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because – law or no law – you had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi for most of the time. The tunes I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a bit more wriggle room.

Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. Answering a panicked phone call from Rafi’s girlfriend, Ginny, I’d found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.

And then a few months ago, when I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price – letting Asmodeus loose on Earth – had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen understood: actually I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.

Pen – Pamela Elisa Bruckner – is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex a whole lot of other things, one way and another. And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together. The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months earlier in which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now Webb had formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane to get rid of Rafi, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead, where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie – replete with ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire – didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and I had to work together to clog her works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.

Meanwhile the war – if it was a war – was still in the ‘cold’ phase. Maybe that was only to be expected when the enemy were the dead.

I’d had more than enough of the legal profession to last me for one day, but a promise is a promise, even if your arm is halfway up your back while you’re giving it. I could have just called, but I needed to pick up some silver amalgam from a dentists’ supplier’s in Manor House, so Stoke Newington was almost on my way.

The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay turned out to be in a converted Victorian court built in chocolate-coloured brick, on the corner of a slightly drab row of terraces from a later era. There were window boxes on either side of the door, painted bright blue, but they contained nothing except bare soil. No flowers at this time of year.

The front door was pretty bare too: no wards, no sigils, no come-nots or stay-nots. Maybe the evil dead avoided lawyers out of professional courtesy, like sharks are supposed to do. I walked in off the street and found myself in a small reception area which, judging from its modest dimensions, must originally have been the front hall of a house. A wide, elbowed staircase took up a good half of the available space: what was left was dominated by a large venerable-looking photocopier. The inspection covers had been removed from the machine and were stacked up against the wall: an enormously fat, enormously pale bald man was on his knees in front of it, one hand thrust into its innards up to the elbow, looking like a vet trying to assist with a difficult birth. He glanced up at me as I entered, and then kept on staring as if he was trying to place the face. He had a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his half-open mouth hung down at the corners like a melting clock in a painting by Salvador Dali. A young brunette sitting at the reception desk in under the stairs watched him work with more attention than a busted photocopier seemed to merit. Maybe it was a slow day.