Vicious Circle (57 page)

I went back to Pen, kicked the main doors of the church open, and dragged her out 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 backward. He looked down at his stomach. His red robes hid the stains well, but blood began to patter and then to pour from out 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. They 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 anymore.

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 him conversationally. He didn’t answer. His good front leg buckled under him and he sank to the ground as if he were 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 leveled at her, but they didn’t make any attempt to use them. They must have 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 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 favor,” 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 toward 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 toward Gwillam’s men—”seem to have survived. Who are they?”

“The Sisters of Mercy,” I said weakly. “Well, one of those church organizations, 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 machine rifles. 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.

Then he stood again and turned to face me.

“You’re not human, are you?” he asked, and I realized that it was actually Juliet he was addressing.

“No.” She shook her head. “What about you?”

Gwillam’s brow furrowed. “Tell me your name and lineage,” he snapped
. “In nominibus angelorum qui habent potestatem in aere atque—”
He broke off as Juliet laughed a rich, suggestive laugh. Either she was recovering from the silver poisoning more quickly than I would have believed possible, or she was putting up a hell of a good front: but then, she always did that.

“I was old when your religion was young, O man,” she murmured in her throat. “I do not fear your god, and I will not come to heel like a bitch when you call on me, whether you know my name or not.”

“Then I’ll tell my men to shoot,” Gwillam said.

“And I will walk through the bullets and feed upon their hearts, new-ripped from their chests,” she said. “But you I will kill after the manner of my kind, for I am succubus and mazzikim. I will make you love me, and be lost.”

Gwillam’s face went pale, and I could see that that threat had gone home. It struck me, though, that Juliet was actually making the threat at all rather than just going ahead and doing it. Subtlety isn’t her strong point, as a rule. I wondered whether the silver she’d inhaled and the time she’d spent in thrall to Asmodeus had left her weaker than she looked.

With an effort, and slowly, Gwillam turned his attention to me.

“You killed the girl?” he demanded. “Snuffed out her spirit? Was that why the ritual failed?”

“You tell me,” I suggested.

His eyes narrowed, and he stared down at my hands as I fished the locket back up from where it lay in the crook of Pen’s armpit.

“No,” he said. “She’s still there.”

“If he goes for his Bible,” I said to Juliet without looking up, “feel free to rip his throat out.”

I stood, slowly.

“If I can prove to you that Abbie Torrington isn’t a threat anymore, then will you walk away?” I asked Gwillam.

“If you can prove that, yes,” he said, without a pause. “You have my word, Castor. I wouldn’t snuff out an innocent soul without powerful reason.”

I nodded. Good enough.

“Asmodeus already has a human host,” I said.

“I know that,” said Gwillam. “We assessed that situation two years ago, and decided that it was better not to act: to kill Rafael Ditko might simply set Asmodeus free to act on the human plane.”

“And you’d have to do it,” I reminded him bluntly, a bit annoyed by the supercilious tone. “With Asmodeus bonded to his flesh and spirit, killing him wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a picnic.”

Gwillam acknowledged the point with an impatient wave of the hand.

“I cut a lock of his hair,” I said, hesitating slightly because I shied away from saying this—from bringing what I’d just done out of hiding and nailing it down with words for other people to see. “Rafi’s hair. I tied it around my finger. And then when Fanke had made his invocation—when he’d summoned Asmodeus to feast on the sacrifice inside the circle—I got there first. It was Rafi’s hair that burned, not Abbie’s. It was Rafi’s soul that was consecrated and offered up, and it was Rafi’s soul that Asmodeus got a mouthful of as he came down to feed.”

Gwillam stared at me in dead silence, waiting for me to go on. Juliet was looking at me, too, her expression unreadable.

“Asmodeus had never entirely left Rafi. Part of him was stuck inside the stones here, waiting to be released by the offering of Abbie’s soul: the other half was still where it’s been for the past two years—stuck like shrapnel in Rafi Ditko’s flesh and spirit.”

Gwillam’s expression was one of profound shock. “So the demon—?”

“—was starting to eat
itself
. It’s like a very nasty version of trying to lift yourself up by your bootstraps. If Asmodeus devoured Rafi’s soul instead of Abbie’s, the ritual that was meant to free him was going to consume him at the same time. He had no choice but to back off, even if bailing out in the middle of the show aborted the ritual and undid everything that Fanke had managed to achieve. That was why it all fell apart in there. And that’s why Abbie doesn’t matter now—at least as a weapon in your fucking holy war. Asmodeus severed the link, and went scuttling back to the prison he was trying to escape from in the first place.”

“Rafael Ditko.”

“Rafi Ditko,” I agreed. My friend, who I’d just betrayed for the second time. And as if to make things worse than they were already, I saw that Pen’s eyes were open and she was hearing this. The gag taped across her mouth prevented her from commenting, except with her eyes—but they were eloquent enough.

Gwillam seemed impressed. “I have to congratulate you, Castor,” he said, with a solemn edge to his voice. “You’re easily ruthless enough to serve with the Anathemata, if you ever found the light. But—” he hesitated, massaging the bridge of his nose as if he was raising a slightly delicate subject with as much tact as he could “—why should that change my feelings about Abbie Torrington’s soul? She was consecrated to Asmodeus. What is there to stop some other adept, as ruthless and as lost to human feeling as Fanke, from finishing what he’s started?”

The question took me off guard, but I improvised as well as I could. “Nobody else knows about her,” I said. “You’ve just killed all of Fanke’s crew, and Zucker took care of Fanke himself.”

“True. But what has he written about this on his message boards? Whom has he confided in? What will his . . . parishioners in the satanist church do when they learn of his failure? No, you dealt very cleverly with the immediate problem, but in the longer term the threat still stands. The girl’s soul is still a detonator looking for the right bomb. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Render unto God that which is God’s.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to take his sanctimonious shit somewhere private and render it unto himself, but he hadn’t quite finished. “Yehoshua!” he said, almost in a singsong voice. “Yehoshua, of all men king and of all men brother, I praise thee and live in thine eyes! The vessels being diverse, one from another. What shall we do unto her, according to the law? And when it was day, he departed. Even unto Simon’s house.”

I was too slow out of the gate. I didn’t guess what he was doing until I glanced sideways at Juliet, realizing suddenly that there was a tension in her stillness. She was standing rigidly erect, completely unmoving, though the muscles in her neck stood out like cords.

“That was the cantrip that binds her,” Gwillam said. “Should I speak the cantrip that destroys her?”

I took an involuntary step toward him. The machine rifles converged on me like the eyes of snakes, targeting on movement. I stopped, realizing that I wouldn’t reach him alive.

“Should I speak the—?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t. Don’t do that.”

I would never have believed that he could get the measure of her so fast. But Juliet’s very power lay in filling your eyes and your nose and your mind with her essence: if you’re dealing with an exorcist, that’s a high-risk strategy. You take him out quickly, or you find that you’ve given him all the ammo he needs.

“Then give me the locket,” said Gwillam.

I looked down at the locket in my hand, but did nothing. The tableau stood for the space of three heartbeats.

“Castor—” Gwillam murmured warningly.

“You take the locket, and then you leave?”