The Naming of the Beasts

‘Kill it?’ Juliet’s flawless brow furrowed. ‘Why would I want to kill it? It smells of home.’

Something in the set of her mouth rang alarm bells in my mind. They were still vibrating anyway from my second round with the fear-thing, the Gader’el, so it didn’t take much to set them off. I started to climb to my feet.

I didn’t even see Juliet move. Something - her fist or her foot, I couldn’t be sure - hit me in the middle of my chest and knocked me sprawling. Then she was on top of me, her face about an inch from mine. She licked her lips and my heart surged, clamouring like a monkey in a cage. Her sex scent filled me in a second to bursting point, the way a water balloon held against a running tap is filled, distends and then explodes.

I tried to speak. ‘This . . . this is . . .’ Her parted lips, impossibly full and dark, were descending towards mine. It seemed like a waste of time talking when I could just give myself up to those lips and the terrible release they promised. But I’d been here once before, on Juliet’s event horizon, and survived. Clawing for purchase on that memory, some part of me was able to grab a microscopic distance from the agonising, all-consuming lust and remind me that I was about to die. ‘Bad idea,’ I forced out. ‘Sue . . .’

Juliet hesitated. A wave of some very human emotion - irritation, impatience, something like that - passed across her face, displacing for a moment the wanton mask she wore when she was hunting. I have no idea what had risen in her mind: the echo of an old argument maybe, a domestic quarrel between her and her human lover in the early, honeymoon days, about the ethics of devouring the odd guy on the side when you’re in a monogamous relationship.

Whatever it was, it gave me a window. I whistled into it: whistled Juliet. It was desperate improvisation. I couldn’t think around her, couldn’t pull myself out of her orbit, but as an exorcist I could put what I was feeling to good use. It was the summoning, the first phase of an exorcism, when you make the spirit you’re binding stand to attention and pay heed to you. I called Juliet back into herself, as I’d done for her once before after she fought Moloch at the Mount Grace Crematorium, and as I’d tried and failed to do for Lisa Probert.

Dumb luck counts for a lot in my business. Doing that gave me my second big insight of the night, the first one being when I looked at the lace handkerchief in the Roman matron’s hand and realised she wasn’t Roman at all. What I realised now was that Juliet was all wrong. There was a mismatch, a discord, between what I was playing and what I was feeling - between the Juliet I knew, whose soul-music I’d memorised by heart, and the Juliet who was crouched above me now preparing to devour me. They weren’t the same being. They overlapped, but they weren’t the same.

If I’d had time to think about the implications of that, I might have got the answer there and then, and everything that happened later might have played out differently. But the moment wasn’t really conducive to calm reflection. Juliet’s pheromones still saturated the air, my heart was still trying to start up a new career as a road drill, and it took all my effort, all my concentration, just to keep forcing that tune out between my pursed lips.

We must have stayed like that for the best part of a minute, a tableau from a Benny Hill sketch. Then Juliet leaned back, shifting her weight, and made a gesture with her right hand: stop. Seeing her hand from so close up, I noticed again that it was too long, the fingers impossibly tapered. Physically as well as psychically, Juliet was in a state of flux.

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?’