Vicious Circle

If I’d been thinking about it, of course, I’d have realized that someone on Gwillam’s team had to be watching the doors. It would be out of character for him to miss a trick like that. As I laid Pen down with her head right up against the doors, where clean, breathable air was filtering in from outside, Po lumbered out of the roiling blackness, backlit by the fires of hell, effectively barring my way back into the nave. He was no longer even remotely human: He was the hyena thing that I’d seen at the Thames Collective and then again at the Whittington, his front limbs twice as long as his back ones so that he stood almost like an ape.

He loped toward me, grinning. It wasn’t a grin of amusement: it was more a question of unsheathing his main weaponry, which jutted from his jaws like steak knives. I watched him closely, tensing to jump when he did, but there wasn’t enough room in the narrow narthex to do much more than duck. Wherever I went, there wasn’t anywhere that was out of his reach.

Then a second figure appeared at his shoulder, walking unhurriedly toward him out of the growing inferno. She looked—well, right then she looked so good I would have cried, if I hadn’t already been crying because of the smoke.

“You should have woken me, Castor,” Juliet said reproachfully, a harsh rasp in back of her voice. “I almost missed this.”

Po turned and jumped in one movement, giving out a terrifying roar. He hit Juliet like a fanged and clawed meteorite, his muscular back limbs raking up from below to disembowel her even as his jaws fastened around her head.

That was the plan, anyway. She bent under him, sinuous and graceful, caught him on her hands, and threw him, using his own momentum, into the nearest row of pews. He was up again in an instant, but Juliet was quicker. As he advanced on her again she lifted up one of the pews, judging the balance perfectly and completely untroubled by the weight. She brought it down across his head and shoulders so fast it blurred.

Amazingly, there was still some fight in him: I suspect there might have been more, if it hadn’t been for what he was breathing. He closed with her and they both went down together as a gust of smoke and flame hid them from my sight.

I left Juliet to look after herself, knowing that she could. With the collapse of the ritual, Asmodeus seemed to have loosed whatever hold he had on her. I suspected there was nothing left of him in the church at all now. If there was, he certainly wasn’t on fighting form right then.

I went back to Pen, kicked the main doors of the church open, and dragged her out onto the cobbles outside. Then I slumped to my knees beside her, sucking in the cool air as if it was wine. Like wine, it made my head spin and a feeling of almost unbearable lightness expand inside my tortured chest.

The bubble burst as a gun muzzle was laid alongside my head.

“Give me the locket,” Fanke wheezed, his voice all the more terrifying for the bubbling sound of organic damage at the back of it. Even without turning to look at him, I could tell that this was a man with very little left to lose.

“I haven’t got it,” I said.

“Stand up. Spread your arms. Now, Castor!”

Maybe I’m just paranoid, but it seemed to me right then that my life expectancy was exactly as long as I could keep Fanke guessing. Once he had the locket, he’d be wanting to deal out some payback for his ruined ritual and his lost good looks. I took a gamble on his line of sight, letting the locket slide out of my hand into the space between Pen’s arm and body. Then I stood, very slowly, putting out my arms to either side, fingers spread.

Fanke’s hands patted down my pockets. His breathing was painful to hear: an uneven, drawn-out skirl with that liquid undertow which suggested vital fluids leaking into places where they weren’t meant to be. He went through my coat, then my trousers. When he came up empty, he pressed the gun a little more tightly against my cheek.

“Where is it?” he demanded.

“I think I left it inside,” I suggested. “On the altar.”

The gun scraped against my cheekbone as Fanke thumbed off the safety. “Then I think you’re dead,” he growled.

Certainly one of us was. There was a sound like someone ripping a silk scarf, and the gun clattered to the cobbles. Twisting my head I saw Fanke stiffen, his eyes wide in surprise, and take a step backward. He looked down at his stomach. His red robes hid the stains well, but blood began to patter and then to pour from out underneath them, pooling and then running in the gaps between the cobblestones to make a spreading grid pattern of red on black. Fanke touched his left side with a trembling hand; his robes seemed to be torn there, in several parallel slashes. They seemed to have just appeared there, as if by some magical agency, but the blood gave away the truth: they’d just been made from behind, passing straight through his body.