‘Nita,’ Matt said, his voice cracking, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. If you’d told me — if I’d known that you were pregnant–’
Anita stared at him, perplexed. ‘I knew you would have come,’ she murmured. ‘But — I didn’t want to make you come, Matty. Not like that. What would it have meant — if you married me because I blackmailed you? And if you gave up — everything else you wanted — to be with me? You would have — hated me.’
He shook his head in denial or protest, sobbing aloud now. Anita put a hand up to touch his face.
‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. You ought to bless me. Now that you’ve heard my confession.’
Matt didn’t bless her. I think I understood why he couldn’t do that, even though he knew the words would have comforted her. To say a blessing would have been to turn back into a priest: it was too big a jump from where he was, and in a direction that he simply couldn’t take right then.
He kissed her instead. The lips were rotting, because this was a body two years dead, and they weren’t even hers in the first place. But then, this was a kiss that had been pending for a lot longer than two years: it probably didn’t matter as much as you’d think.
Tired of waiting for me to get the hint on my own, Juliet grabbed my lapels and hauled me away, off the walkway into the ruins of Weston Block. It’s coming to something when I have to take lessons in tact from a pit-spawned monster.
Although, it suddenly struck me, that was a phrase that needed to be scanned.
‘Juliet,’ I said tentatively.
‘Yes, Castor?’
I picked my words carefully. ‘I’ve always had — some fixed ideas about Hell. They seemed to make sense, in terms of the available evidence. It’s kind of a point on a moral compass. It’s where bad people go when they die, and the demons that live there have to be bad too, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.’
Juliet stared at me, deadpan. ‘Yes. So?’
‘So — how much of that is bullshit?’
There was a silence during which we could hear Coldwood on the floor below us chewing out one of his subordinates. ‘Well, whichever corner is closest to the bloody underpass. Are you seeing wheelie bins? Well, right fucking there, then. Look behind them. I don’t care how much fucking mess there is–’
‘How many demons, Castor,’ Juliet asked me, in a tone of long-suffering patience, ‘have been summoned by how many necromancers and mages and scholars and hobbyists and enthusiastic imbeciles? Down the centuries, from the Middle Ages when the first grimoires were written, to the present day when the grimoires are almost irrelevant because you can raise a hell-hound with an incautious word? How many, would you say?’
I shrugged impatiently. ‘I don’t know. Hundreds? Thousands?’
‘Or tens of thousands. And not one of them has ever discussed these matters with the ones who summoned them.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Trust me,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s the truth. Not one of them. I told you a long time ago that there were certain things I wasn’t prepared to discuss with you. I told you this was one of them. It still is.’
‘What, because you’re afraid?’ I demanded, still hurting too much to be circumspect. ‘Because you think I’ll use the information against you in some way?’
‘Not you, perhaps. And not against me. But someone, sometime. Against my kind.’
‘Juliet, you’re working as a fucking exorcist. You’re already a class traitor, so what’s to be coy about?’
She took a sudden step towards me, and the look on her face was so dark that I raised my fists, as if I had a hope in Hell against her if she wanted to take me out. But all she did was grasp my chin in her hand and hold my face in place as she brought her own up close. Mostly that only happens when I’m asleep and dreaming.
‘Do you see a difference between the public execution of a criminal and an act of genocide?’ she asked me, speaking very softly but very distinctly.
‘I’m fort of oppoved to bofe,’ I mumbled, unable to part my jaws.
‘Whereas I’m perfectly happy with the first, but by and large prefer not to abet the second.’ She let go of me, but she was still standing close enough that her achingly beautiful scent filled the air between us. ‘Understand me, Castor. It occurred to me not to allow you — any of you — to walk away with what you’ve learned today. A few more deaths in the course of the riot wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows or merited any special investigation. But I’ve gone native. I know that. I can’t help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy.
‘So you get to live. And you also get — at no additional cost — these three pieces of advice. Don’t push this topic any further. Don’t ask questions that you may not want to know the answers to. And don’t assume for a moment that if you make me choose between you and my entire race, I’ll choose you.’
I was about to answer her, but I wasn’t able to because she pressed her lips to mine and kissed me, deeply and passionately.
This was our third kiss, and it was different from the other two. The first, way back when Gabriel McClennan had first summoned Juliet, had been part of a concerted attempt to devour my flesh and spirit in accordance with her brief: it had been an attack, which I’d only survived through dumb luck and fortuitous rescue. The second had lent me enough of her strength to survive the hardest and most gruelling exorcism of my entire life: it was a gift, and I’d never stopped being grateful for it.
This one was a warning. It was meant to remind me of her power, and of how little effort it would take her to destroy me.
When Juliet finally removed her lips from mine I sagged backwards and almost fell. But she kept me upright with one strong arm around my waist.
‘I’d prefer,’ she said, ‘not to have to choose.’
She propped me up against the wall, not without care, and walked away.
Eventually I pulled myself together and became aware of the outside world again. Matt was still kneeling beside Anita on the walkway outside. I couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was still moving and speaking, whether her spirit was still present, but either way I suspected that he wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Coldwood was still talking on the phone on the landing below, directing his lackeys to take whatever they’d found down to the forensic lab on Lambeth Road and then stay with it until the results came through.
I stumbled across to the lift and pressed the call button. It came at once and didn’t smell of piss, as befits an age of miracle and wonder. It made a scary grinding noise as it descended, though, and the floor shuddered and bucked under my feet as if some corner of the cage was scraping against the wall of the shaft. I was profoundly relieved when I got to the ground floor and the doors, after a few premonitory clicks and ratcheting sounds, slid open.
Outside on the concrete apron, paramedics were tacking between the other towers and the fleet of waiting ambulances, carrying bodies on stretchers: all alive, thank God, but then again they’d have left the dead where they were as a substantially lower priority. The police and fire crews were moving too, clearing barricades and locking off stairwells while they conducted shouted conversations on walkie-talkies.
I walked through the melee, unnoticed, and descended the steps to the New Kent Road. More ambulances here, and more cops. Also, away behind the barriers, the media crews and the disaster tourists.
I almost walked past Trudie Pax without seeing her. She was sitting at the edge of the kerb, her shoulders slumped, staring at the ground.
‘Long night,’ I said. ‘How’s Bic?’
She started at the sound of my voice, looked up at me as though for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.
‘Castor–’ She scrambled to her feet with a kind of urgency, but then didn’t seem to know what to do when she’d got there. Her hands moved without purpose, and I suddenly realised that she’d been crying.