Vicious Circle

Juliet’s breathing was shallow now, but even, and she was looking at me with something of her old, cold arrogance in her eyes.

That stare made a lot of possible words die in my throat. Finally I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you into that.”

“It’s all right,” she answered, her voice still a harsh rasp. “It was . . . interesting.”

“No, I mean I’m really sorry you were there. You killed a man, and probably blinded another. If I’d known you were going to let out your inner demon—”

She cut across me, remorseless. “One man was dead already. How many more do you think would have died if I hadn’t acted?”

“We can’t know that.”

“No,” she agreed, sounding almost contemptuous. “We can’t.”

“Was it worth it?” I asked, still shellshocked. “Did you get any kind of a handle on what we’re dealing with here?”

“Oh yes. Didn’t you?”

“No,” I admitted. “Although—” I fell silent. There had been something familiar in the way that formless evil had presented itself to my sixth sense, but it had been mixed up with a lot that was purely alien. The gestalt effect hadn’t been something I’d been able to focus my mind on for very long—like trying to join the dots when they were spinning separately in a whirlpool. I didn’t finish the sentence: there didn’t seem to be any good way of explaining what I’d felt. “Go ahead,” I said. “Give me the starting prices.”

“Soon,” said Juliet. “Not yet. And not here.” There was a long silence. Then she turned and stared at me. “Castor—” Her voice had a breathy echo to it that suggested she still hadn’t finished repairing the damage to her lung.

“What?”

“Is that how you dress for dinner?”

Eleven

THERE’S A THAI RESTAURANT UP BY OLD OAK COMMON where I’d eaten a few times before. It’s a perfect place for snacks and cocktails after work, or after summarily executing deranged riflemen in gutted malls—and since there’s no dress code, it doesn’t even matter if you’ve been shot through the chest and a massive exit wound has spoiled the line of your jacket.

To be fair, by the time we got there Juliet was looking almost as fresh and fragrant as if she’d just stepped out of the shower—an image I had to rein in sternly before my imagination got out of hand. The blood that had saturated her shirt front had disappeared, and the line of bruising along her jaw had faded to near invisibility. I’d seen Asmodeus do something similar to Rafi’s body when it had taken some damage in one of his rampages, but this was more extreme and a whole lot quicker—I guess because Rafi’s body was still made of real flesh and blood at the end of the day, while Juliet’s was made of—something else. I never know how to ask.

A maître d’ whose suavity was a little dented by Juliet’s black-eyed gaze seated us in the window—no doubt seeing what kind of effect she was likely to have on the passing trade. As soon as he’d left, she reached into her pocket and took out a thick wad of paper, which she unfolded and put down on the table between us.

“Patterson, Alfred,” she said, fanning them out. “Heffer, Laurence. Heffer, John. Jones, Kenneth. Montgomery, Lily.”

It was a sheaf of photocopied pages, all in the same format. Each one had a passport-size photo in the top right-hand corner: mostly men, a few women, all ordinary to the point of banality. The faces stared up at me with the terrified solemnity you’d expect from people whose lives had just body-swerved away from them into insanity and despair.

“These are police SIR sheets,” I said.

Juliet nodded, looking at the menu.

“How did you get hold of them?”

“A nice young constable at Oldfield Lane ran them off for me.”

I thought very carefully about the wording of the next question. “Did you bribe him, or—?”

“I let him hold my hand.”

A waiter had started to hover: he was barely more than a kid, with ginger curls and plump, freckled cheeks. He couldn’t take his eyes off Juliet. Of course, better men than me have fallen at that hurdle. I looked up, tapped the table with my fingertip. After a moment he turned with a slight effort to meet my gaze, as if he was unwilling to acknowledge that I was there. “Can I get you any drinks to start with?” he asked, in an artificially bright tone.

“I’ll take a whisky,” I said. “A bourbon if you’ve got it.”

“We’ve got Jack Daniel’s and Blanton’s.”

“Blanton’s. Thanks. On the rocks.”

“Bloody Mary,” said Juliet, predictably. The waiter tore himself away from us with difficulty and trotted off, looking back over his shoulder at her a couple of times before he disappeared from view.