The Naming of the Beasts

Sitting precariously on the ridge, I inspected the damage. It made interesting reading. The demon had raked the slates with his fingernails, snapping several and scoring deep gouges in others, but he hadn’t punched at them or tried to tear them free. Pen was certainly right when she said that if it was a matter of strength alone he could have smashed his way in without even working up a sweat. So whatever had kept him at bay, it had nothing to do with the physical properties of slate and wood and lead flashing. Pen’s wards had taken the strength out of his hands and the will out of his cold, clammy heart.

That made them something special in the way of stay-nots. In St Albans, when I’d gone after the leader of the Anathemata, Father Thomas Gwillam, with Juliet riding shotgun, I’d seen my favourite succubus walk through a door that had a dozen different wards on it. They hurt her, but they didn’t slow her down. I’d seen her walk through Pen’s wards too, for that matter, seen it a dozen times, most recently when she’d brought me home after one of my epic drunks. The only thing different this time was that the demon Pen was keeping out was a passenger inside the body of her ex-lover. Food for thought. Maybe not all magical prophylactics were created equal; maybe, as in quantum physics, the observer was part of the system.

After I came down, I made up a list of people I should call: people who’d known Rafi at college and might possibly be on Asmodeus’ hit list now, and people he’d introduced me to later when we met up for one of our infrequent reunions. Some I didn’t have numbers for, and the numbers I did have, when I finally picked up the phone and tried, weren’t always live any more. But I put the word out (lie low, lock your doors and windows and don’t talk to strangers), and I asked everyone I could reach to call anyone else they knew who might have counted as a friend or acquaintance of Rafi’s either in Oxford or in London.

But Rafi had been born in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic, and for all I knew he had an entire extended family out there. Would Asmodeus go after them? He might be disinclined to try. Demons are chthonic powers, and they don’t respond well to air travel: the one time Juliet had tried it, it had knocked her out for days. Asmodeus could take a bus or a train, but it was a long trip and most of the demons I’ve met have tended to have a hard time with the concept of deferred gratification. Hopefully - assuming I was right in the first place about what he was doing - Asmodeus would start with the targets that were closest to hand.

All the same, I could ask Nicky Heath, my go-to dead guy, to pull up whatever family records he could find and maybe shake loose a few phone numbers for me. I had to try, anyway: the karmic weight I was carrying already from this fucking fiasco was heavy enough to stave half my ribs in, and I seriously didn’t want to add to it.

Nicky doesn’t like talking specifics over the phone. He has a paranoid streak wider than the Thames at Deptford, and prefers to take commissions on a face-to-face basis. That meant a pilgrimage out to Walthamstow, to the abandoned cinema he’d lovingly restored and re-equipped for an audience of one. It wasn’t a place I liked to linger: the decor is great, but being of the zombie persuasion, Nicky finds a temperature of three degrees Celsius a little on the warm side.

I called Gary Coldwood first, and told him about my late-night bare-knuckle fight with Asmodeus. He was solicitous for my health but oddly vague about the progress he’d made on the case.

‘I talked to about fifteen or twenty people,’ I said. ‘To tell them what had happened to Rafi if they didn’t already know, and to warn them that they might get a visit. But some of them must have thought I was just a crank. It might sound better coming from a copper - and you could probably get updated numbers for some of these other names. Do you want the list?’

‘Where are you now?’ Coldwood asked instead of answering me.

‘I’m at Pen’s, but I won’t be staying here for long. Sue Book has been trying to get hold of me for the past few days, so I need to go see her.’

‘Sue Book?’

‘Juliet’s lady love.’

Gary gave an involuntary exhalation, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. It was the same sound he always makes when he’s forcibly reminded of Juliet’s sexual orientation. He’s not homophobic; it just hurts him, fairly viscerally, that she’s not available.

‘Well where will you be in a couple of hours?’ he asked me.

‘Willesden Green, most likely. Sue works in the library over there.’

‘Okay. You know the Costella Café on Dudden Hill Lane?’

‘I can find it.’

‘Call me when you’re done. I’ll meet you there. If Asmodeus didn’t leave enough of your face for me to recognise, wear a red carnation in your buttonhole.’

I made a comment in which both buttonholes and arseholes figured largely, and hung up on the cheeky sod.