Vicious Circle

She looked different asleep. Still beautiful, but not dangerous. It was a kind of beauty that made me feel hollow and unmanned, as though it were a light shining on my own shabby inadequacy.

“Shit,” I muttered bleakly, to the night at large.

I’d finally put it all together, now that it was too late to be of any use. Why I felt like I recognized that fugitive presence I sensed the first time I came here—and then again when I met it in the poor possessed sods at the Whiteleaf mall. The only surprising thing was that I hadn’t nailed it down sooner when I was talking to Susan Book, because she was clearly as badly infected as anyone else who’d been in church last Saturday.

It was Asmodeus. This was why he’d suddenly let Rafi out from under, and this was where his other foot had come down.

Juliet had just picked a fight with one of the oldest and baddest bastards in hell. And she’d lost.

Where to now?

Fourteen

ITOOK JULIET BACK TO PEN’S AND LAID HER DOWN IN MY own bed; I sure as hell wasn’t likely to be using it myself for a while. But Pen wasn’t happy: she wasn’t happy at all.

She’d come back from Rafi’s assessment hearing so full of good feelings that she was in danger of overflowing—practically tap-dancing, because Rafi had stayed rational all the way through and made a really good impression on both of the independent doctors. They’d even given Webb a bit of a telling off for trying to delay proceedings.

But when she saw Juliet lying on my bed, death-white like a statue stolen from a mortuary, her mood took a downward plunge.

“That’s the thing that tried to kill you.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. I didn’t think Pen had gotten a good look at Juliet’s face, since at the time she’d been looking down the sights of a BB gun and firing filed-down rosary beads into her from behind—but I guess once you’ve seen Juliet, from any angle, the memory tends to stay etched on your brain.

“Fix, she’s evil.” There was a slight tremor to Pen’s voice, which I could well understand. “She’s so beautiful, but she . . . everything about her . . . She’s like a poisonous snake, that hypnotizes you so you’ll stand still while it bites.”

“That’s exactly what she is,” I agreed. “But she doesn’t bite anymore, Pen. We laid down some ground rules.”

Pen wasn’t reassured; it wasn’t her physical safety she was mainly worrying about. “She shouldn’t be here. This house is a shrine, Fix. You know that. I’ve worked really hard to make it into a place that chthonic powers will be attracted to. Powers of nature and light. If she stays here, they’ll feel the taint. They’ll leave, and I may never be able to bring them back.”

She was almost in tears. “The powers seem to cope with me okay,” I said, getting a little desperate now. “They can’t be all that fastidious, can they?”

“They weighed you,” Pen said. “You came out all right.”

“Well, can they weigh Juliet?”

She hesitated. Pen hates to judge anyone harshly. I could see her fighting against her instincts, and abruptly I felt sick with myself for trying to twist her arm.

“It’s okay,” I said, hefting that negligible weight in my arms again. “I’ll take her someplace else.”

But I was pissing in the wind. Back in the car again, driving into the center of town, I racked my brains for a somewhere else that would serve. Juliet was slumped across the backseat, exuding even in her unconscious state a sweet, rank smell that was trying to insinuate itself between my hindbrain and the more refined areas of gray matter, filling my mind with indelible, carnal imagery. Asleep or awake, she was still a venus flytrap. There was nowhere where she’d be safe.

My brain more or less on automatic as I fought against that smell and against myself, I’d swung west again: not toward Acton but into Paddington. What I had to do there shouldn’t take too long; maybe if I just covered Juliet with my coat, she’d go unnoticed until I got back. I didn’t have too much choice, anyway. There were so many ticking clocks around, it was getting hard to hear yourself think. The thing in St. Michael’s Church was getting stronger; the parishioners were still out there in the night with heads full of poisonous shit; Basquiat was sorting through the red tape so she could arrest me for murder; and the Anathemata had given me my final warning. The only way out of the box canyon was to keep moving forward as the walls closed in on both sides. Find Dennis Peace, find Abbie Torrington’s ghost, and maybe it would all fall into place. Maybe. Otherwise we were all going to hell in an overcrowded handbasket.

I parked as close as I could to Lancaster Gate station without hitting a double yellow; I didn’t want the car drawing any attention while I was gone, so it made sense to stay the right side of legal. I walked the rest of the way to Praed Street, and in through the ever-open gates of what used to be the genito-urinary clinic—the pox shop. For the past seven years, though, it had been given over to a more esoteric form of medicine: metamorphic ontology.