Juliet’s coarse laugh cut across me. ‘Faithful?’ she repeated. ‘Please. It’s only your species, Castor, that makes a virtue out of not following its instincts. If I’m hungry, I eat something. If I’m angry, I kill something. And if I feel lustful, I make someone satisfy me. Where does faithful come into the equation? It’s just a word you use to hobble someone you love. To tie them to you. It’s a weapon the weak use against the strong.’
‘Interesting choice of words,’ I commented, looking studiously at the dregs in my own cup.
‘Weapon? What would you call it?’
‘Not that word,’ I said. ‘The other one. Love. There was a time when you would have said desire or want. Two years on Earth has changed you more than you know, Juliet. I bet Baphomet wouldn’t even know his kid sister if he saw her now.’
I met her gaze again, and the silence stretched. It’s a high-risk strategy, needling a succubus. Normally I’d have been pretty sure where the line lay and when to stop, but this was a Juliet I didn’t recognise, and I tensed under her stare like a small rodent under a stooping buzzard.
Then she laughed, and I relaxed.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I have changed.’ She put down the cup and gave the waiter a tenth of a second’s glance – enough to make him come scampering over and give her the refill. He was happy to be of service, happy to be in the vicinity of this amazing woman, who for the moment was filling his mind to the exclusion of his wife, his kids, his other customers, his mortgage, the entirety of his past and the entirety of his future. He filled the cup and then made to raise the pot. Juliet rested a finger lightly on his hand, and he kept on pouring. Hot coffee splashed over the edge of the cup to soak into the tablecloth in a spreading brown stain.
‘Maybe I’ve changed too much,’ Juliet said. ‘Maybe I’ve lost something. A lot of what I’m doing right now bores me.’
The waiter made a small, helpless sound, a half-swallowed moan of dismay. Juliet wasn’t pressing down on his hand; she was holding him in place with the strength of her will, not with any physical force. The coffee had saturated the tablecloth now and was spattering down onto the floor and onto the waiter’s well-shined shoes.
‘Then maybe you need a new challenge,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, as opposed to the same old same old, like making guys have wet dreams while they’re awake. Too easy, surely?’
Juliet lifted her finger. The waiter took an involuntary step back as the skin-to-skin contact was broken, gasping like a landed fish.
‘Everything is too easy,’ Juliet said with heavy emphasis. ‘As I said, I’ll watch your woman for three days. If Asmodeus is really hunting her, that might be a fight – or a fuck – worth having. But three days is my limit. If he hasn’t come by then, he isn’t coming.’
‘Pen isn’t my woman,’ I pointed out scrupulously.
‘Then I’m even less interested. Let’s make it two days.’
Juliet stood up, leaving the refilled cup untouched in the centre of the swamped table. The waiter was staring at her with huge, hapless eyes, haunted by his own unrequitable desire. A lot of other people were staring too, but Juliet’s well used to that. It never bothers her.
We walked back to Sue’s house in silence. Juliet stopped me with a firm push to the chest as I made to walk in through the gate.
‘As you were, Castor.’
I stared at her in surprise. ‘I just wanted to say hi to Susan,’ I said. ‘Since I’m in the neighbourhood.’
Juliet smiled mockingly. ‘I’m sure you did,’ she agreed. ‘But she belongs to me, and I get to say who she talks to. I make sure she stays faithful. Go home. Tell your landlady she’s got a guardian angel. For two days, I think we said. After that, she’ll have to make her own arrangements.’
She walked to the door, let herself in and slammed it behind her.
As I stood there at the gate, my death-sense unexpectedly pricked up its metaphorical ears. I might have noticed it sooner, but Juliet’s emphatic presence tends to elbow almost everything else right out of my perceptual field.
This was a tiny ping on my metaphysical radar, but it was very close – and I didn’t see any ghosts or zombies abroad in the bright sunlight who could have been responsible for it. There was something familiar about it too, and whatever the association was, it had a negative feel to it. Negative. Recent. Necromantic. Out on the street in broad daylight . . .
I had it. This was what I’d felt when I held the stone I’d found in Pen’s garden: the invocation to Tlallik, whoever or whatever that sonofabitch might be.
Okay. So since I was here already and wasn’t invited in to tea, I might as well give the place the once-over at least. Hoping fervently that Juliet wasn’t watching out of the window, I hopped over the low wooden fence into Sue Book’s front garden – if that isn’t too grandiose a term for a lawn the size of an Oyster card, a dead-and-alive privet hedge and three beds of geraniums.
I squatted down and pushed aside the lower leaves of the hedge, looking for any evidence that someone had been there before me. At first, everything seemed to be kosher, but as I cast my gaze to left and right I caught a glimpse of red. In among the flowers, half-buried in the friable soil, was a second stone: grey like the first, and once again bearing a circular ward, crudely but legibly painted in bright red. It was fresher, so this time I could tell from the smell what the red was. It was nail varnish.
I photographed it, as I had the first, and put it back in place. It was clearly different from the first one I’d seen: not in the general design, which was identical, but in the collection of Aramaic symbols at the centre. Only two symbols this time. If the stones were summonings, and I saw no reason to doubt Nicky’s accuracy on that score, then they were summoning two different beings. Spirits of mischief, rage and paranoia, whistled up to drive Juliet off her head? No, that made no sense. One demon couldn’t possess another demon, and Juliet would know in a second if anyone tried to pull shit like that on her. Her succubus-sense would tingle, she’d follow the magic spoor to its source, and some unhappy necromancer would be trying to put his internal organs back with one hand while he wanked with the other. And in any case, the first pentagram I’d found had been at Pen’s house: Pen was still Pen, and as far as I knew, I was still me, not afflicted by any unusual mood swings or sudden bursts of indiscriminate rage.
Something else then. But what? And why? I’d promised Sue I’d sort out Juliet’s scary abreactions. My record with promises is a little patchy, but I was determined to keep this one. I couldn’t let Juliet be Somebody Else’s Problem, any more than I could do that with Rafi. On some things your room for manoeuvre is effectively zero.
I killed the rest of the day in various unproductive ways. I went to Bunhill Fields cemetery and sat among the old graves – old enough now to be completely ghost-free – to think about Rafi, and Asmodeus, and magic bullets. Normally I get good value for money out of that place. Something about the silence, or maybe the proximity to William Blake’s hallowed bones, makes my mind work at about 150 per cent efficiency when I’m there. Not this time though. I sat and watched the darkness come on, chasing the same few thoughts around in smaller and smaller circles. It would be hard enough to bring Asmodeus down, even with the gloves off and using every low blow in the book; doing it without killing Rafi seemed impossible.
I called Nicky Heath at odd intervals, got him on about the third or fourth time. He’d been down in the main auditorium of the Gaumont, fucking around with the seating layout yet again. I refrained from asking what the point of that was, given that he was the only one who ever got to sit there. Instead, I asked him if he had any news for me.