The Naming of the Beasts

‘Castor!’ Trudie warned, but I had no intention of giving away professional secrets, and anyway it was all on the point of not mattering very much. I ignored her and went on. ‘They were meant to do an encore of their number from last time - carry out a sacrifice on a child who’d been born and raised and prayed over in all the right ways, and set him free. But they blew it. They couldn’t deliver.

‘That’s when he starts in on the murders. I think they’re a crude improvisation - trying to shake Rafi loose by making him despair. Certainly they weaken him. They keep him on the defensive. Maybe they loosen his hold on the body they both share.

‘But it’s plan C that Asmodeus is putting his money on. If Juliet can be made to devour Rafi - body and soul together - what will be left?’

Gil shrugged. ‘A greasy stain?’

‘The demon,’ Trudie said. ‘Just him, in some bodiless form. It has to be that. He wouldn’t respond to Juliet’s spell - he’d feel no lust for her, because it’s human lust she’s adapted herself to arouse. So he’d be indigestible. When she was finished, he’d still be there. It would just be Ditko who’d be gone.’

‘That’s insane,’ Gil objected.

‘I think it’s fucking genius,’ Nicky said. ‘As prison breaks go, it makes digging a tunnel under Rita Hayworth look like nothing at all.’

Juliet put one soft, caressing hand behind Asmodeus’ head, drawing his face in close to hers. Their lips met.

Presumably, on a psychic level, some vast ethereal centrifuge began to turn, slowly at first but with gathering speed and irresistible momentum. Being a man, Rafi was drawn to Juliet. There was nothing he could do to stop it. I’d been there and I knew how it felt: the desire that was so like despair that you poured your heart and soul and lungs and liver and lights into its welcoming emptiness, wanting nothing but to penetrate, to be accepted, to be swallowed up.

Asmodeus, being a demon, would stand out of that vortex, immune to its pull. He would watch Rafi succumb, experiencing the immense satisfaction of a long and complicated chain of events drawing to its inevitable conclusion. He had turned his enemies into the moving parts of a machine which would deliver him from his bondage; there couldn’t be many pleasures more visceral than that.

I heard a whimper come from Rafi’s lips, and I knew who it belonged to. On a different level entirely, I heard the whispering echo of the demon’s laugh.

And then, louder than either, I heard the liquescent, insinuating crunch as Juliet drove her makeshift blade home into Asmodeus’ chest.

His eyes widened and he drew in a shuddering, unsteady breath. He winced, almost in slow motion. It was as though he fought against the recognition of that pain, with all that it implied.

He took a single step back, staring down at his chest. The irregular triangle of glass, like a flattened icicle, protruded from the left side of his body, high up, more or less where you’d expect his heart to be. Blood welled up around it and poured down, saturating his shirt in an instant and spilling out across the fabric with the suddenness of the paint-bucket effect in Photoshop.

If it had been a knife, Asmodeus would have torn it out of his own flesh and cut Juliet’s throat with it. But it wasn’t a knife.

‘I thought silver was what you were supposed to use against demons and the undead,’ Gil said, with the tone of someone letting us down gently.

‘That’s the rule of silver,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘This is the rule of names.’