The Naming of the Beasts

Trudie looked as though she was picking her words with care. ‘The MOU exorcists aren’t your favourite people in the world, are they? They’re as bad as the Anathemata, in your book.’

‘So?’

‘So why does any of this matter to you? If you save some bunch of people you don’t really know and don’t really care about, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you did care about? Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? The redemption train. You’re standing on the footplate and sounding the whistle, Castor.’

‘The whistle’s all I’ve got,’ I muttered sourly as I punched the button for the lift. ‘Don’t knock it.’

I never did like being psychoanalysed, even before I grew up, read the literature and realised that Freud only got into that game to pick up girls. Maybe that was why I asked Trudie to cover for me on the Holborn beat while I went across town to see a woman about a tune. Or maybe I was still reluctant to trust her further than I had to, even though we were de facto partners now. She was still Anathemata on some level: still fighting the same war against the same enemies. It felt like all there could ever be between us was a truce. I arranged to meet her in an hour’s time, at Seven Dials, and headed west.

On one level I was close to screaming in frustration. Asmodeus had fallen off the map after his second visit to Pen’s house, the night before last, when he’d left me a knife and a neatly bisected button to remember him by. He was still out there somewhere, still working, and I didn’t even know what it was he was working towards. Just that it involved the deaths of everyone Rafi had ever known, that I couldn’t possibly stop that from happening, and - hardest to take of all - that those deaths would turn out to be some sort of horrendous fringe benefit. They weren’t the point. They arose out of some bigger scheme that Asmodeus had cooking.

Maybe his priorities were the same as they’d always been. ‘I’m thinking of going home for a while,’ the demon had told me, ‘when I’m free of this meat.’ He wanted to scrape Rafi off his shoe and rise in all his splendour, one hundred per cent guaranteed Hell-spawn: that had been on his mind ever since I’d inadvertently trapped him. So was that the big plan now?

He’d gone to the satanists first, but they’d let him down. The Anathemata had broken up the party before the mages of the SCA could complete their rituals and tear the man and the demon from their non-consensual embrace. Plan B had to be under way by now. Asmodeus wouldn’t stop because he’d been put down once; he’d just come back again harder than ever.

And now, when we were finally closing in on the brimstone-arsed bastard, I was trudging halfway across London on a different job entirely, working to an agenda set by Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. That zombie in Somers Town had been right, and so had old Rosie: the world had changed all right. It had shaken itself inside out and all of us who thought we had the high ground were living in the valley of the shadow. What goes around, comes around, and it turns out to be a chainsaw blade.

In Kensington Church Street, I gave Evelyn Caldessa the schematics I’d sketched out on the train, and asked her if what I wanted could even be done. Caldessa is an antique dealer, and a good friend of mine ever since she helped me out on the Abbie Torrington case. She’s imperturbable normally, having seen so much crazy shit in her seventy-four years that nothing surprises her any more. This commission made her raise an eyebrow though.

‘Well there’s no reason why not, in theory,’ she said, after scanning the sheets several times over, tracing the lines with her stick-like finger as she puzzled out the sequence. But despite that hopeful start, she shook her head dubiously.

‘In practice?’ I prompted.

Caldessa glanced across at her only other customer, a middle-aged man in a three-quarter-length fawn coat who was ogling a case full of porcelain shepherdesses with the furtive air of a punter in a porn shop. She clearly had some hopes that he was going to make a purchase; either that or she thought he might have sticky fingers.

‘None of the standard designs would work,’ she said. ‘They have a very tiny range, because the mechanism is very small and very crude. So you want something bespoke . . .’

‘I’m prepared to pay,’ I said, four words that have a magical effect in a lot of situations.

‘. . . but you want it done quickly. Bespoke and quick turnaround don’t sit well in the same sentence, dear heart. The people who I could ask to do this would enjoy the challenge, but they’d want to take weeks over it and charge you thousands.’

‘Okay,’ I said, rubbing my chin ruefully. ‘I thought I was prepared to pay, but it turns out I’m not. I can’t raise that kind of money, Evelyn. And the time won’t shift. If I can’t have it today, there’s no point having it at all. Tell me if there’s another way.’