Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

That was the plan, anyway. She bent under him, sinuous and graceful, caught him on her hands and threw him, using his own momentum, into the nearest row of pews. He was up again in an instant, but Juliet was quicker. As he advanced on her again she lifted up one of the pews, judging the balance perfectly and completely untroubled by its weight. She brought it down across his head and shoulders so fast it blurred.

Amazingly, there was still some fight in Po: I suspect there might have been more if it hadn’t been for what he was breathing. He closed with her and they both went down together as a gust of smoke and flame hid them from my sight.

I left Juliet to look after herself, knowing that she could. With the collapse of the ritual, Asmodeus seemed to have loosed whatever hold he had on her: I suspected there was nothing left of him in the church at all now. If there was, he certainly wasn’t on fighting form right then.

I went back to Pen, kicked the main doors of the church open and dragged her onto the cobbles outside. Then I slumped to my knees beside her, sucking in the cool air as if it was wine. Like wine, it made my head spin and a feeling of almost unbearable lightness expand inside my tortured chest.

The bubble burst as a gun muzzle was laid alongside my head.

‘Give me the locket,’ Fanke wheezed, his voice all the more terrifying for the bubbling sound of organic damage at the back of it. Even without turning to look at him, I could tell that this was a man with very little left to lose.

‘I haven’t got it,’ I said.

‘Stand up. Spread your arms. Now, Castor!’

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but it seemed to me right then that my life expectancy was exactly as long as I could keep Fanke guessing. Once he had the locket, he’d be wanting to deal out some payback for his ruined ritual and his lost good looks. I took a gamble on his line of sight, letting the locket slide out of my hand into the space between Pen’s arm and body. Then I stood, very slowly, putting out my arms to either side, fingers spread.

Fanke’s hands patted down my pockets. His breathing was painful to hear: an uneven, drawn-out skirl with that liquid undertow which suggested vital fluids leaking into places where they weren’t meant to be. He went through my coat, then my trousers. When he came up empty, he pressed the gun a little more tightly against my cheek.

‘Where is it?’ he demanded.

‘I think I left it inside,’ I suggested. ‘On the altar.’

The gun scraped against my cheekbone as Fanke thumbed off the safety. ‘Then I think you’re dead,’ he growled.

Certainly one of us was. There was a sound like someone ripping a silk scarf, and the gun clattered to the cobbles. Twisting my head I saw Fanke stiffen, his eyes wide in surprise, and take a step backwards. He looked down at his stomach. His red robes hid the stains well, but blood began to patter and then to pour out from underneath them, pooling and then running in the gaps between the cobblestones to make a spreading grid pattern of red on black. Fanke touched his left side with a trembling hand: his robes seemed to be torn there, in several parallel slashes that seemed to have just appeared there, as if by some magical agency. But the blood gave away the truth: they’d just been made from behind, passing straight through his body.

Fanke gave a sound that was like an incredulous laugh, and then his lips parted as he murmured something that reached me only as a formless sigh: maybe it was the Satanist equivalent of ‘Father, into thy hands . . .’ He folded up on himself like an accordion – although that’s a lousy image because when you fold an accordion it doesn’t leak dark arterial red from every infold. He fell forward onto the cobbles, his head hitting the stones with enough force to shatter bone: but that didn’t matter much to him any more.

Zucker, still in animal form, limped around the body, staring at me with mad eyes. He could only use one of his front paws: the other was bent back against his chest. He must have sat on his haunches when he took that swipe at Fanke from behind – cutting right through the man’s torso below the ribs and turning his internal organs into rough-chopped chuck.

I took a step to the right, leading Zucker away from Pen. He followed, a trickle of drool hanging from his jaw. He was in a bad way, and it wasn’t just the bullet wound. His claws, so terrifying in a fight, slid on the cobbles as if he was having trouble staying upright. But he snarled deep in his throat as he advanced on me, and his eyes narrowed on some image of sweet murder.

I kept on backing, kept on shifting ground so he had to turn as he advanced to keep me in sight. His movements were getting slower and more uncoordinated. His chest rose and fell like a sheet cracking in the wind, but with barely any sound apart from a creak as though his jaws were grinding against each other at the corners.

‘You know which company is the biggest consumer of silver in the whole world?’ I asked Zucker conversationally. He didn’t answer. His good front leg buckled under him and he sank to the ground as if he was bowing to me.

‘Eastman Kodak,’ I said gently. ‘That’s what you’ve been breathing.’

His eyes closed, but his chest kept pumping prodigiously. He might even ride the poison out, but he was finished as far as this fight was concerned.

I went back to Pen. I had to kneel again, fighting off a wave of blackness that came out of nowhere. I was still in that position, just starting to struggle with the layers of duct tape around Pen’s wrists, when Juliet came out of the church. At a distance behind her and on either side came two of Gwillam’s men. They had automatic rifles levelled at her, but they didn’t make any attempt to use them: they’d probably seen what she’d done to Po, and if they had then they almost certainly didn’t fancy their own chances against her very much.

But right then Juliet herself didn’t look too healthy. She’d been breathing silver too, and it wasn’t agreeing with her any better than it had with Zucker. Of course, unlike Zucker she hadn’t taken any metal in the more handy .45 hollow-point form, so she was still on her feet. But there was a sway to her walk that wasn’t entirely voluntary, and her clenched teeth were visible between her slightly parted lips.

She crossed to me, looking down at Pen’s bound form with distant curiosity.

‘Is this a new hobby?’ she asked me.

‘Do me a fucking favour,’ I rasped, my voice as harsh as my mum’s in the morning back when she was on thirty a day. ‘Is there anyone still alive in there?’

Juliet glanced back towards the doors of the church, from which smoke was still issuing in thick, uneven gouts like blood from a wound. ‘The ones in priests’ robes are all dead,’ she said. ‘The werewolf, too. Most of these –’ she nodded towards Gwillam’s men ‘– seem to have survived. Who are they?’

‘The Sisters of Mercy,’ I said weakly. ‘Well, one of those church organisations, anyway.’

Juliet bared her teeth in a grimace. She doesn’t like religion any better than I do.

There was a clatter on the cobbles and I looked up to see Gwillam heading across to us, flanked by two more men with sub-machine guns. He made a sign that could almost have been a benediction, but it wasn’t: it was an order for the men to fan out, so that if they had to shoot us they’d bracket us from as wide an arc as possible. They obeyed silently, the barrels of their squat, ugly weapons all converging on me and on Juliet. She looked indifferent: I felt, I have to admit it, a little exposed.

Gwillam himself walked past us to where Zucker lay on the cobbles. He squatted down beside the corpse, which looked small and pathetic and undignified the way we all do in death, and put a hand on its forehead. His lips worked in silence, and I didn’t try to read them.