The rolling door would probably lift if I got my hands underneath it and pulled, but there was no way of telling how much noise it would make. Instead, I went down on hands and knees and went under it.
If someone had been waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have been an easy target as I crawled through on all fours and scrambled to my feet again on the far side: this wasn’t exactly covert infiltration. But the room I found myself in, long and narrow, stacked from floor to ceiling on either side with boxes and crates, was thankfully devoid of bloodthirsty maniacs armed with broken pieces of furniture. I stood still for a moment or two, listening, but the silence was absolute. All the action was clearly happening somewhere else.
But as I moved forward into the room, I started to become aware of a whole range of sounds almost at the limits of my hearing: dull thumps and muffled shouts, softened by the distance so that if you closed your eyes you could almost convince yourself you were listening to a cricket match on the village green.
There was no door at the further end of the room – just a square arch which led out into a larger warehouse space. I threaded my way cautiously through this, the back of my neck prickling every time I passed a darkened aisle. I came across an elevator shaft big enough to take me and the Civic I’d rode in on, but the elevator itself was elsewhere: the gaping doors opened onto a vertical corridor of grey breeze-blocks whose bottom I couldn’t see. I kept on going, until finally a pair of black rubberised swing doors let me out into a tiled corridor. The posters on the wall here, advertising designer jeans at less than half price and three hundred top-up minutes with every new phone, told me that I wasn’t backstage any more: I was in the mall itself.
I expected the corridor to bring me out into the central arcade, but I’d got myself turned around somehow and I ended up in a blunt cul-de-sac facing the toilets and an ‘I speak your weight’ machine. The noises were fainter here, but as I turned around to go back the way I’d come my other sense – the one I use in my professional capacity – went haywire. Something was coming down the corridor treading in my footprints, and I didn’t need any pricking in my thumbs to tell me that it was wicked: it was dead, or it was undead, or it was something worse. And whatever it was, it was heading straight towards me. Another second would bring it around the bend in the corridor and right into my line of sight.
Since there was nowhere else to go, I took a silent step backwards, pushed open the door of the ladies’ toilet and slid inside. If the thing was already on my trail, then it would certainly follow me inside – but at least now I had a few seconds to prepare a suitable reception.
My own silver dagger is barely more than a fruit-parer: I keep it, like the chalice, mainly for ritual occasions. But the knife that the loup-garou had dropped the night before was still in my outside pocket. I took it out and slid the cardboard sleeve off the wickedly sharp blade. Then I took up position behind the door and waited.
Footsteps echoed hollowly on the tiling outside, coming towards me, and then stopped. There was a silence, which stretched agonisingly: I imagined the thing, whatever it was, standing in the corridor just on the other side of the door, its own senses straining as it tried to decide whether I’d gone for the gents or the distaff side.
Then the door opened, and I tensed to lunge at whatever came into view when it swung closed again. The only thing that stopped me was a sigh, which sounded both long-suffering and a little disappointed.
‘Castor.’
False-footed, I let the knife fall to my side. Juliet pulled the door back towards the closed position a little way, and stared at me around the edge of it. Under a floor-length coat of black leather she was dressed in blood-red silk: a rose in a gloved fist. In the medieval Romance of the Rose, floral metaphors were used as a way of smuggling smut past the vigilant eyes of the Church. I thought of roses opening, and had to wrench my mind back brutally from pathways that would take up too much time, and leave me too far off balance.
‘I thought so,’ Juliet said.
As always when I feel like an idiot, I went on the offensive. ‘You thought so? What about that infallible sense of smell of yours? You should have seen me coming a mile off.’
‘Too many other smells about,’ muttered Juliet, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, as if to make the point. ‘There’s something else walking around in this building, and it’s a lot bigger and ranker than you are.’
‘I suppose I should take that as a compliment.’
‘Take it however you like.’ I suddenly realised that she was rigidly tense: the muscles in her neck standing proud of her alabaster flesh like filigreed ropes, and her posture stiff with readiness. The last time I’d seen her like this, she’d been hunting me: whatever she was hunting now, I felt sorry both for it and for anyone else who got in the way.
‘So where are they?’ I asked her. She shot a glance at me as if she was surprised to find that I was still there. ‘The hostages,’ I clarified. ‘And the rioters?’
Juliet glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Up there,’ she said. ‘Almost directly above us.’
‘How do you want to play this? And what are you even doing here in the first place? Did you see Susan Book on the TV news?’
She shook her head, frowning momentarily as if I’d accused her of something faintly indecent. ‘No,’ she said tersely. ‘But if I had, it would have been that much clearer a confirmation. This is all connected to what happened at St Michael’s. I’m certain of it. I’m getting the same sense here that I got there – the scent that faded when I tried to focus on it. This thing has broken cover. If I can get close to it, I’ll be able to see it for what it is.’
I digested that statement with some difficulty, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. Having important conversations in the toilet is very much a girl thing.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘we don’t really have the faintest idea what’s going on here.’ She seemed about to interrupt, but I ploughed on. ‘All we know is that there are some people up on the mezzanine tearing the place apart, and some other people who got in the way of that. You could be right: maybe there is something making that happen, and maybe it’s the same something that’s setting up house over at the church. Doesn’t really matter in any case. Now that we’re here, the best thing we can do is pull our little playmate out of the line of fire and then get the hell out before the police start to lob in the tear gas.’
Juliet shook her head irritably. ‘I’m only interested in finding the thing that brought me here. The thing I’m smelling. By all means rescue Book, if you want to. I can’t see how she’s relevant.’
‘She’s in love with you,’ I told her.
‘What?’
‘Well, in lust, I mean. She’s got a bad dose of that stuff you dish out, anyway, and being as how she’s both devout and straight she doesn’t have any idea how to handle it. You mean to say you didn’t notice how she looks at you?’
‘I tune that information out,’ Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. ‘You’re not asking me to feel – whatever it’s called – guilt about this, are you?’
‘No.’ It was my turn to be impatient. ‘But think about it. She might not have got herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.’
‘Her emotions are no business of yours – or of mine.’
‘Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.’
Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously: she still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.