Two thick trickles of blood were oozing from Matt’s nostrils to combine on his upper lip. He felt the bridge of his nose gingerly with one slightly shaky hand, still staring at Pen. She lowered the tray, suddenly self-conscious as the berserker moment passed. “Sorry, Fix,” she mumbled. “I’ll make you up some more.” She went out of the room, and a moment later, I heard her footsteps stomping heavily down the stairs.
I found that Pen’s act of cathartic violence had purged my own anger at Matt pretty effectively. “You shouldn’t talk about Rafi when she’s around,” I told him. “She was his—” I hesitated. There wasn’t an easy way to describe the way Rafi and Pen had circled each other, the intricacies of their sometime-never mating dance. “She loved him,” I said. “She still does.”
“And does she know what you did to him?” Matt snapped back, cradling his nose. It was already beginning to swell, the skin at the bridge not yet bruised but flushed dark red.
“Pretty much,” I said. “Yeah.”
Matt shot me one last look of exasperation, then followed Pen out of the room.
I got dressed, which was a complicated operation, because every move I made caused another set of muscles to report in unfit for duty. Mournfully consigning the remains of my many-pocketed greatcoat to the wastebasket, I shrugged on an antique trench coat that gave me an entirely misleading air of retro-chic.
I felt sick and sore, but also restless and uneasy. I couldn’t leave it alone, but I couldn’t make it go anywhere useful. Raising a succubus wasn’t an easy thing to do, or a safe one. Okay, it was true that she didn’t need to have been called and bound for any one particular purpose; it could just be coincidence. I tried that idea on for size. The thing that called itself Juliet had picked me at random from the slow-moving river of unaccompanied men that flowed through the West End of an evening. She didn’t know who I was, and she didn’t care.
Yeah, it was possible. Obviously, it was possible. She belonged to a predatory species, and although they lived somewhere else, they were known to use the Earth as a hunting ground. But Asmodeus had warned me—and warned Pen, too, telling her enough so that she could arm herself in advance. You’re going to take this case, and it’s going to kill you. Unless there were even worse horrors waiting in the wings, Juliet had to be what he was talking about—and this attack had to be related in some way to the archive ghost.
I found Pen down in the basement, which was where I expected her to be. She was feeding Arthur and Edgar when I knocked and came in. The birds ate liver, which Pen bought in industrial-size freezer packs and thawed one piece at a time. Her hands were stained red brown with watery blood. She looked around, then nodded her head at a fresh mug of milkless tea that was steaming on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and took a long slug; I knew enough about Pen’s herbal remedies to take it with fervent gratitude.
“Where’s Matty?” I asked, my voice still creaking slightly.
“He left,” she said, sliding another sliver of meat into Arthur’s clashing beak as Edgar cawed loudly for parity. “I’m sorry I hit him. Especially after he came out in the middle of the night to make sure you were all right. It was just—I think I was on edge after”—the pause stretched—“after seeing that thing.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “My brother believes in the mortification of the flesh. He should have thanked you.”
She made no answer.
“And I am,” I added. “Thanking you, I mean. When you barged in and did your Reservoir Dogs number, I was running out of breath. A few moments later, and I’d probably have been running out of internal organs, too.”
Pen was staring at me with troubled eyes.
“I’ll pay for the window,” I went on, conscious of the fact that I was only speaking to fill up the silence. “I’m wrapping up a job right now, so I’ll have seven hundred quid coming through in a day or so. That should more or less cover it, wouldn’t you say?”
She shook her head, but it wasn’t an answer to my question. “Fix,” she said woefully, “what the fuck have you got yourself into?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what I’ve got myself into. But I’d like to start finding out.”
“It’s just a straight exorcism, isn’t it? What’s the problem?”
I opened my empty hands—a minimalistic shrug. “I think it got personal.”
“Oh Christ, don’t say that!” Pen looked genuinely unhappy, and I could guess what she was thinking.
“Not like with Rafi,” I said. “It’s just—I almost fell down forty feet of stairwell last night, only this ghost waded in to stop me.”
“The ghost—”
“Right. And tonight, some bastard lets a succubus off the leash and gives it my scent. I want to know what I’m doing and who I’m doing it to. I want to know what else is at stake here.”
She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that.”
I pressed my advantage. “Pen, I hate to ask this, but would you be up to driving me somewhere? I don’t think I’d be safe behind a wheel right now.”
The discreet door on Greek Street was closed and locked, but there was a light on in a third-floor window. Right now, at four in the morning, someone was doing a photo shoot, or having their head massaged, or being spiritually healed. There’s a whole lot of sterling work that goes on while the city sleeps.
“And this Gabe McClennan is an exorcist,” Pen demanded. “Like you?”
“He’s an exorcist,” I allowed. “The rest of what you just said was actionable slander.”
In fact, in a profession not much known for its ethical probity or compassion, McClennan stood out as a twisting, weaseling, backstabbing bastard. I knew two or three guys from whom he’d stolen clients, money, or equipment, and half a dozen stories about people he’d screwed over. Someone even told me once that Gabe took a huge wad of cash from Peckham Steiner, the sanity-deficient granddaddy of all Ghostbusters, just before he died, on the pretext of building him a “safe house” where ghosts wouldn’t be able to touch him. But Steiner is likely to turn up sooner or later in any story that exorcists tell. I don’t normally listen to tattletale stuff like that unless I’ve got some personal experience to weigh it up against, so I’d been professionally courteous toward Gabe the first few times we’d met—and on one job, he’d actually sought me out because I had firsthand experience of a factory in Deptford he’d been asked to disinfect.
I’d agreed to help him and had offered him a thirty-seventy split, which he’d cheerfully accepted. Bearing the stories in mind, I asked for cash on the nose, and he counted it out into my hand underneath the green and yellow overpass at the Queen Mary’s end of the Mile End Road. Then we walked off in opposite directions, and before I’d gone a hundred yards, I was jumped and rolled by two guys who came at me from behind. They might have had nothing at all to do with McClennan, but it sure as hell looked like he was renegotiating the deal on the fly. At any rate, that was the last time we ever collaborated.
“Wait for me here,” I told Pen. “With the doors locked. Keep the keys in the ignition, and drive away if anybody comes.”
“Anybody but you, you mean?”
I gave her a solemn nod. “You’re on the ball, chief,” I said. “I like that in a woman.”
“After tonight, Felix, I think I know more than I ever wanted to know about what you like in a woman.”
I let that one pass. It was too close for comfort.
“What are you going to do if he’s not there?” she demanded.
By way of answer, I showed her the balding black velvet bag that held my lock picks. She shook her head in tired disapproval, but said nothing. She knows all about Tom Wilke and how I obtained my indefensible skills. She fervently disapproves, but right then I could see that it paled into insignificance next to all the other murky shit that was flying around.