Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

They scrambled after me, fanning out along the length of the rail so that there was nowhere I could run to. This was the last place any of us wanted to be if the fire spread to cut us off from the main doors, but Fanke’s acolytes obviously cared more about completing the ritual than they did about their own safety. That’s what I’ve never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week: at least you can play chicken with him and know he’ll stick to the rules.

I sprinted for the altar, but only because there was nowhere else to sprint. It was a lousy place for a last stand, as the crucified Christ had already discovered. I tried to vault up onto it, but since my left hand was out of action I had to use my right, which as a southpaw I’m a lot less handy with. I didn’t quite clear the marble top of the altar, which projected out about six inches from the base all around: instead I caught it with my knee, slipped and fell back to the floor in a sprawling heap.

The Satanists converged on me, too many to fight and too damn stupid to scare. Then, amazingly, instead of trampling me down and tearing me apart in the time-honoured way of religious zealots everywhere, they hesitated and came to a stumbling halt, staring past me across the altar. I saw why a moment later, as something scratched and skittered along its upper surface, and a set of long, slender talons gripped the stone rim just above my head.

Then the thing that was up there jumped into the midst of the Satanists. It looked like a greyhound at first – but that was because the two overriding impressions were of grey fur and emaciated slenderness. It was nothing like a greyhound in the way it moved: it arced like a striking snake, mewled like a cat, swiped out to left and right with hands from which claws bristled like racks of scalpels lovingly ranged by size. One of the Satanists screamed, but the scream was cut short as blood plumed from his severed throat. Another staggered back clutching both hands to his face, purple gouts welling up between his splayed fingers. A third had a gun already in his hand, and fired, but the shot went wide and broke one arm off the Christ above the altar. It crashed down behind me, unheeded.

The Satanists broke to either side, the grey thing dancing like a dervish between them. I saw its face, and that was a horror with its own special resonance, even in the midst of this symphony of horrors: partly because of the misshapen snout forced into an insane grin by canines too large for it to contain – but mainly because it was Zucker’s face, and I saw the man within the beast.

I tightened my grip on the locket, but my charred fingers wouldn’t close all the way, and the loup-garou ’s eyes had already been drawn to the flash of incongruous gold from my blackened hand. He tensed to jump: but then the man with the gun fired again, and one of the beast’s legs gave way under it. Zucker made a squalling shriek, turning to face the new threat. It had already been dealt with, as Po – in human form – strode forward out of the smoke, took the gunman’s head in both of his hands and twisted it until it faced the wrong way on his neck.

I followed the example of most of the surviving Satanists and ran for it. Unfortunately, we were running into a storm: Fanke’s followers fell like threshed wheat as the sound of gunfire spread across the church. They seemed to prefer gunfire to what was behind them: several of them drew guns of their own and fired back. Dimly, through the spreading smoke, I saw black-robed figures moving up from the back of the church, skirting around the ceiling-high pyre in the centre where the film cans had exploded. Then a bullet whanged past on my left-hand side, knocking a fist-sized hole in the back of a pew, and I hit the deck.

I considered the merits of staying there until the whole thing had played itself out. Fanke couldn’t do anything without the locket, and that was still safe in my fire-blackened hand. But Gwillam’s Church commandos were after the same thing, and if they got it they’d exorcise Abbie without a second thought. I didn’t want to give them that chance. Admittedly, it was my fault they were here at all: the note I’d left stuffed into Sallis’s pants back at the South Bank Centre had invited them to join me here for an informal chat and a little light jihad. I’d hoped that their arrival – or Basquiat’s – might come at a point where I needed a diversion: the age-old game of ‘let’s you and him fight’ is one I’ve always liked.

But this was getting too hot for my liking – in the literal sense as well as the other. Pen and Juliet were still out in the open, where a stray bullet could hit them at any moment, and even without that the thickening smoke suggested that the fire was taking hold and spreading. Whatever happened, I didn’t have the luxury of just staying put.

At least the smoke would give me a little cover: it was also choking me, making my eyes water and my lungs ache and spasm with each breath, but you can’t have everything. I crawled on hands and knees to the end of the pew and then sprinted across to the outer aisle, where a line of pillars provided something more solid to hide behind. I snaked forward from one to the next, making for the open area in front of the altar rail where Pen and Juliet were lying.

The smoke was thick enough now so that I didn’t have to worry too much about hiding: gunfire was still echoing and re-echoing through the church, but if a bullet hit me it would only be by accident. Nobody could target through this, even by night-sight: on a night-scope, the church would be one large splodge of undifferentiated red, like spilled blood.

I found Pen first. She was unconscious, which didn’t surprise me. Hooking my hands under her shoulders, I hauled her towards where I remembered the doors being. I was out by a few yards, but there was a smoke-free corridor right up against the outer wall, caused by some freakish thermocline, so once I got there I could see where I was going. I dragged her along to the narthex – a lobby area barely ten feet across – and inside, relaxing in spite of myself to be in such a relatively small space after the terrible exposure of the church proper.

If I’d been thinking about it, of course, I’d have realised that someone on Gwillam’s team had to be watching the doors. It would be out of character for him to miss a trick like that. As I laid Pen down with her head right up against the doors, where clean, breathable air was filtering in from outside, Po lumbered out of the roiling blackness, backlit by the fires of Hell, effectively barring my way back into the nave. He was no longer even remotely human: he was the hyena thing that I’d seen at the Thames Collective and then again at the Whittington, his front limbs twice as long as his back ones so that he stood almost like an ape.

He loped towards me, grinning. It wasn’t a grin of amusement: it was more a question of unsheathing his main weaponry, which jutted from his jaws like steak knives. I watched him closely, tensing to jump when he did, but there wasn’t enough room in the narrow narthex to do much more than duck. Wherever I went, there wasn’t anywhere that would be out of his reach.

Then a second figure appeared at his shoulder, walking unhurriedly towards him out of the growing inferno. She looked – well, right then she looked so good I would have cried, if I hadn’t already been crying because of the smoke.

‘You should have woken me, Castor,’ Juliet said reproachfully, a harsh rasp in her voice. ‘I almost missed this.’

Po turned and jumped in one movement, giving out a terrifying roar. He hit Juliet like a fanged and clawed meteorite, his muscular back limbs raking up from below to disembowel her even as his jaws fastened around her head.