The Naming of the Beasts

‘You don’t want to do this, son,’ one of the goons said, holding out his hand for the axe. Son? He was probably younger than me.

‘Actually, Dad,’ I told him, ‘it would make my entire year. I’m aching for a little uncomplicated good news, you know?’

The man hesitated. A lot of thoughts were probably going through his mind, and I suspected it wasn’t used to handling that volume of traffic. Axe blades are generally kept blunt, but you don’t have to break skin to snap someone’s throat, especially someone like Jenna-Jane, who was past the first flush of youth. Did I look like the sort of man who’d commit cold-blooded murder in front of a dozen witnesses? Did his desire to make me eat the fire axe offset the trouble he could get into if Jenna-Jane died and the company he worked for had to pay damages to the MOU? How would it play on the ten o’clock news?

I don’t know exactly which argument swung the vote but finally the guy stepped aside. So did the men behind him, but they parted to both sides of the door so that I’d have to have my back to at least one of them as I went through.

‘Over there, numb-nuts,’ I said to the guy in charge, nodding toward the far corner of the room. ‘Go play doctors and nurses with the doctors and nurses.’ I returned my attention to Jenna-Jane. ‘There was a note,’ I said, ‘at the house. A note from Asmodeus. Do you have it on you? Think carefully before you lie to me, J-J, because I’m a desperate man already. You wouldn’t want to send me over the edge.’

‘It’s in my pocket,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘On the left-hand side. There’s no need for melodrama, Felix. I always intended to show it to you when you came back from Surrey.’

Holding the axe in place one-handed, I dipped into her pocket. There was a slip of paper there, folded into four. I took it out and glanced at it. All I could see were a few words, at random and upside down: ‘only possible place’. It looked like the real deal though. Asmodeus formed his letters in a style that was almost pointillist, from myriads of straight lines no bigger than ink flecks. It would take a lot of effort to forge, and I couldn’t see why she would have bothered. Despite that bland assurance, I was never meant to see this. I stuffed the note into my own pocket.

‘McClennan,’ I said, ‘we’re leaving. Bring Juliet.’

Juliet had been holding the throat of the lady doctor all this time, but she released her grip as Gil approached her. The woman staggered back from Juliet, her hands going to her bruised neck. That meant she backed into Gil, who steadied her with his hands around her shoulders.

‘Take off your coat,’ he told her, ‘and give it to me.’

The woman did as she was told without argument. She’d stared into Juliet’s black-on-black eyes at point-blank range. Juliet’s inner fires were at a low ebb right then, but even so that had to have left her shaken to her psychosexual core. There was no fight left in her.

Gil draped the coat over Juliet’s shoulders, very tentatively, being careful not to touch her. She stared at him with a feral intensity.

‘We have to go,’ he said.

For a few moments she seemed not to have understood, but finally she nodded and pushed herself away from the table. Her legs folded under her immediately and Gil caught her as she fell. His eyes widened. He must have been surprised, as I was when I carried her out of the Mount Grace crematorium, by how little she weighed. But it was more than that. He stared across the room at me, tense and alarmed. ‘She’s like ice,’ he said, ‘and she’s barely breathing.’

I hesitated. I could swap places with McClennan, and have him take charge of the Mexican stand-off while I used my whistle to try to bring Juliet back to herself. I’d done it before with varying degrees of success, so I already knew the tune. But setting off the fire alarm would have alerted the emergency services too. They were probably already on their way, and getting out of the building would be complicated if it was surrounded by a ring of fire engines and police cars.

‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ I said. ‘And she only breathes for show. She’ll make it.’ I turned my attention back to the security guards, who’d all relocated to the corner of the room, behind the operating table. ‘You stay there,’ I said. ‘If you follow us, I’ll play who’s-got-the-guillotine with the good professor here.’

We backed out of the room, Gil carrying Juliet. She seemed to have lapsed into a sort of waking dream state, muttering to herself and twitching fitfully in his arms.

‘You’re a marvel, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane muttered tightly as we retraced our steps through the cell blocks. ‘You came all this way to rescue a monster that’s lived on human flesh and human souls for millennia. Broke in here, terrorised and assaulted my staff, caused untold damage to my systems. I’ve known for a long time that you were losing your bearings, but this goes beyond anything I could have expected.’