Was it a trick of the light or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step towards the door and he moved in to block me, which conveniently blind-sided him as far as the window was concerned.
‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said, playing for seconds.
‘No?’ Todd raised a mildly sceptical eyebrow. ‘How come?’
‘The noise,’ I said. ‘Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.’
He aimed at my head, thought better of it, and lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful, but a safer shot.
‘Silencer,’ he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand and I dropped as his index finger squeezed, but he would still have hit me. Even with gravity on my side I can’t outrace a bullet.
But the window exploded inwards, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything so quickly that they left stroboscopic after-images on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backwards at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned, without any sense of haste or even of intention. It was more like watching someone practise the steps of a dance than anything else. It kicked Todd in the stomach: the sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed just as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inwards like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.
Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled. I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.
‘Not the saviour you were expecting?’ the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up almost into a foetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead: the kick to the stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.
I struggled up on one knee again, but then took a breather, my legs trembling. ‘Not exactly,’ I admitted hoarsely. ‘You told me you’d had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.’
‘Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs –’ he kissed his fingers. ‘– perfectly aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.’
I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were now free to move, although the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets – and my right shoulder throbbed agonisingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed into the fleshy part of it
I stood up, a little shakily. ‘Well, it’s all part of the service,’ I said. ‘At least, it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.’
‘No,’ Moloch agreed. ‘But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.’
‘Pick him up,’ I said, pointing at Todd. ‘Put him in the chair.’ Moloch nodded amiably, bent down and hauled the lawyer to his feet. Todd wasn’t dead: he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale and he screamed when Moloch lifted him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely, at an impossible angle.
Moloch dropped him into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet and I had darker work still to do.
‘See if you can find some rope,’ I muttered, without looking round. ‘He probably won’t stay upright any other way.’
The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard had taken that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope – about two hundred feet, unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little of him still in view apart from his pale face.
I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.
‘You started a sentence earlier,’ I reminded Todd. ‘You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?’
‘I forget,’ Todd said, with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of pain. And it was going to get worse before it got better.
‘Okay. Doesn’t matter,’ I reassured him. ‘Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here, in the flesh – even if it isn’t exactly your flesh – there’s another favour you can do me. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be messy and at the end of it I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be in but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I have to. Because if it works it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the set-up at the crematorium. About Inscription Night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defences they’ll have laid on. When it will all get started, and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect, and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll walk out the door and the cleaners will find you in the morning.’
Todd glanced up at me again, from under half-lidded eyes. The pain of his injured arm seemed to have driven him into mild shock: either that or he was controlling it with some kind of meditation technique, because there was something other-worldly about his calm. He breathed out through his nostrils, conveying a world of contempt. ‘You bluff badly, Castor,’ he murmured. ‘I’m a dead man already, so death doesn’t scare me. And I’ve got powerful friends. Torture me and kill me, I’ll just come back.’
‘If you’re dead, I can send you on your way,’ I countered. ‘That’s what I do.’ Moloch perked up at that, and looked around at me with a feral smile. The idea of catching Todd’s soul on the wing seemed to be a turn-on for him.
‘You,’ I said, pointing a finger at him, ‘stay out of this, or our deal’s cancelled. Try to take this one soul now and you’ll lose your chance of eating all the others. You understand me?’
Moloch’s answer came from between bared teeth. ‘Yes.’
‘Okay then.’ I turned to Todd again. ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said, ‘don’t you? I’m an exorcist. I have power to bind and break you.’
This time he managed a faint, sickly smile. ‘Do you?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Normally if I’m this close to a ghost, no matter what it’s wearing, I get a ping on my radar. When I met you and Scrub – sorry, I mean Leonard – downstairs here, I got nothing. And every time I’ve seen you outside this building . . . nothing all over again. You’ve got good camouflage, I have to say. I’d love to know how it’s done. But then, I guess you’ve been in the game long enough to have figured out a lot of the angles.’
Todd didn’t answer, but there was a glint in his eye as he looked at me: a hint of challenge, or mockery. Looking down at the music, fixing the opening beats in my mind, I slid my whistle out of my inside pocket again and shipped it into the operating position.
‘But here’s the bad news,’ I said. ‘John Gittings did manage to get a fix on you. I don’t know where he was standing, or what sort of tricks he used. He wasn’t a particularly smart guy, in my opinion, but he did it anyway. He nailed you and he got you down on paper.’ I cleared my throat and spat on the floor. ‘And that’s what I’m going to play for you this evening,’ I muttered, not looking at Todd.