She climbed off me. It hurt to be released from that weight, to feel her attention pass over me and shift away. I’d survived her attack again, and just like the first time it was agonising. My maddened hormones threshed in my innards like waves against a breakwater, and a fevered tremor went through me, leaving me breathless and weak. My teeth chattered out a crazy, Morse code lament. It was like the alcohol craving all over again, but worse.
Juliet hauled me to my feet without apparent effort even though I wasn’t able to contribute much to the process. She propped me against the side of the arch, looking me up and down with an abstracted frown, inspecting me for damage maybe.
‘Told you . . . a long time ago . . .’ I panted, ‘I wasn’t that kind of boy.’
‘Shut up, Castor.’ Juliet seemed to be her old self again, or something close to her old self, but it hadn’t improved her mood. Still, it shortened the odds on a meaningful dialogue.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I threw at her. ‘Explain to me what just happened.’
She took her hand away from my shoulder to see if I’d fall down again. I didn’t. Satisfied, she walked back to the edge of the pool and stared up into the grey void of the light well.
‘I lost control,’ she said at last.
‘You seem to have been doing that a lot lately.’
‘Yes.’
‘Any idea why?’
She took on that attentive stance again, shoulders rigid, head tilted slightly back. She was feeling for the presence of the fear-thing. Bearing in mind what had happened when she made contact a few minutes ago, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of sitting around and letting the two of them cuddle up some more.
‘Juliet,’ I called.
With visible reluctance, she turned and faced me.
‘Did this thing – this Tartarus whatever-it-is – do something to your mind?’
She gave a brief, harsh laugh. ‘The Gader’el? No, Castor. It’s just an animal.’
‘An animal?’
‘An animal from Hell. It’s dangerous, to the unwary, and hard to eradicate, but it can’t think. Its repertoire is just what you see here: it hides itself, and it strikes while your back is turned. It feeds on fear, in the same way that I feed on lust or the Shedim feed on the souls of murderers.’
I rubbed my bruised shoulder. ‘Then what?’ I said. ‘What the fuck is happening to you?’
She stared at me in silence. She was just a silhouette now, because the ghosts in the pool had gone and the blue light had died, but the red fires in Juliet’s eyes told me I had her attention and that she wasn’t entirely the Juliet I knew and sexually obsessed about, even now.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. She seemed to pull herself together. ‘We should leave. I startled the Gader’el, and interrupted its feeding. If it comes back again, it will be bolder.’
‘Why should it come back?’ I asked.
Juliet smiled a bleak, humourless smile. ‘Because you’re scared of me, Castor. Why else?’
On the pavement outside she made to walk away, but I reached out and caught her shoulder. It was a symbolic thing: light and slender as she was, she was as strong as ever, and she could have broken my grip without trying. She half-turned, waiting for me to speak.
‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Promise me you’ll go home.’
Silence.
‘Juliet, you can’t hunt tonight. I can’t let you.’
‘You can’t stop me,’ she said with dead finality.
‘I know,’ I acknowledged. ‘So give me a break, and don’t make me die trying. Go home to Sue. Have a quiet night in. Remind yourself what you’ve got to lose.’
‘Fuck you, Castor.’
‘Again?’ I made my tone astonished and outraged. ‘Are you insatiable, woman?’
In spite of herself, she laughed. But the feeble joke was a challenge too, and the word ‘woman’ gave her the benefit of the doubt.
‘I’ll go home,’ she agreed. ‘But tomorrow . . .’
‘Tomorrow we’ll figure something out.’
She nodded without conviction. Then she turned her back and walked away from me down the Strand. A staggering cluster of drunks on the opposite side of the street shouted out some sort of sleazy invitation to her, and I tensed, ready to intervene if necessary. But Juliet didn’t even seem to see them. Head down and shoulders squared, she marched on into the hot, breathless night.
Back in Turnpike Lane, paranoia still sitting like a monkey on my back, I reconnoitred thoroughly before approaching Pen’s door. Asmodeus had promised to leave me until last, but I knew exactly how much his word was worth.
I didn’t see or sense any sign of the demon’s presence, or any clue that he’d been there while I was away. In another way though, I felt myself surrounded and crowded by him. What he was doing wasn’t random – I knew that much. Behind the casual malevolence there was something much more calculating and purposeful, and much more threatening.
I let myself in quietly. I heard voices from downstairs, Pen’s basement sanctum, which surprised me, but only until I heard the laugh track. She’d fallen asleep in front of a repeat of some ancient sitcom, snoring away on the sofa while Reg Varney and Michael Robbins traded accusations of sexual dysfunction without ever using the word ‘penis’. I sat down next to her and stared at the screen while the flaccid shenanigans played themselves out. In a way it helped me to think, if only because thinking distracted me from On the Buses.
There was a way through this maze. It just meant figuring out where Asmodeus was going so I could get there first. Of course, I also had to get myself a secret weapon to use when I got there, because a tin whistle wasn’t going to do the job. It hadn’t even been enough to beat the Gader’el, which Juliet had dismissed as an animal.
The trouble was that you couldn’t get close enough to the Gader’el to perform an exorcism. I had its pattern clear in my mind now, but I knew damn well that as soon as I started to play, it would be on me hard enough and fast enough to knock the tune right out of my head. Close enough to play meant close enough to be attacked.
Inspiration came out of nowhere. No, it came out of thinking about Trudie, and the way she’d bootstrapped her own MO to create the meta-map of Asmodeus’ movements. The trick was seeing through the metaphor to the thing itself: distinguishing how your power actually worked from the interface you’d developed for it. It could be done. It could be done without risk even.
That solved Jenna-Jane’s problem. Now what about mine?
‘Fix.’ Pen stirred on the sofa beside me, rubbing her eyes. ‘What time is it?’
I didn’t bother to check my watch. ‘Later than you think,’ I said. ‘Like always. How was your day?’
She blinked and shook her head, restoring some shape to the incendiary mop of her hair. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, her voice husky and slurred with sleep. ‘Like one of your days. Alcohol, self-hatred, more alcohol and daytime TV.’
‘I don’t watch that much TV,’ I pointed out. ‘What do you hate yourself for?’
‘Just the obvious.’ She sat up, still groggy but gradually coming awake. ‘I can’t do this, Fix. I can’t sit here and wait for you to sort it out. I’m going to start looking for Rafi again tomorrow.’
‘You won’t find Rafi;’ I reminded her, my voice hard, ‘you’ll find Asmodeus.’
‘I don’t care. This isn’t any way to live.’
She was right. We were under siege, and it was affecting both of us in our different ways. The sense of pressure – the feeling of being stalked – was throwing me off my stride, so that I just kept running from one thing to the next instead of stopping to think about where I was going. Worse, I was letting Jenna-Jane set the agenda, when I should have been using her as she was using me: bouncing off her thick, impervious hide in the direction I most needed to go.