Thicker Than Water Read online

  I shrugged impatiently. ‘I don’t know. Hundreds? Thousands?’

  ‘Or tens of thousands. And not one of them has ever discussed these matters with the ones who summoned them.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s the truth. Not one of them. I told you a long time ago that there were certain things I wasn’t prepared to discuss with you. I told you this was one of them. It still is.’

  ‘What, because you’re afraid?’ I demanded, still hurting too much to be circumspect. ‘Because you think I’ll use the information against you in some way?’

  ‘Not you, perhaps. And not against me. But someone, sometime. Against my kind.’

  ‘Juliet, you’re working as a fucking exorcist. You’re already a class traitor, so what’s to be coy about?’

  She took a sudden step towards me, and the look on her face was so dark that I raised my fists, as if I had a hope in Hell against her if she wanted to take me out. But all she did was grasp my chin in her hand and hold my face in place as she brought her own up close. Mostly that only happens when I’m asleep and dreaming.

  ‘Do you see a difference between the public execution of a criminal and an act of genocide?’ she asked me, speaking very softly but very distinctly.

  ‘I’m fort of oppoved to bofe,’ I mumbled, unable to part my jaws.

  ‘Whereas I’m perfectly happy with the first, but by and large prefer not to abet the second.’ She let go of me, but she was still standing close enough that her achingly beautiful scent filled the air between us. ‘Understand me, Castor. It occurred to me not to allow you - any of you - to walk away with what you’ve learned today. A few more deaths in the course of the riot wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows or merited any special investigation. But I’ve gone native. I know that. I can’t help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy.

  ‘So you get to live. And you also get - at no additional cost - these three pieces of advice. Don’t push this topic any further. Don’t ask questions that you may not want to know the answers to. And don’t assume for a moment that if you make me choose between you and my entire race, I’ll choose you.’

  I was about to answer her, but I wasn’t able to because she pressed her lips to mine and kissed me, deeply and passionately.

  This was our third kiss, and it was different from the other two. The first, way back when Gabriel McClennan had first summoned Juliet, had been part of a concerted attempt to devour my flesh and spirit in accordance with her brief: it had been an attack, which I’d only survived through dumb luck and fortuitous rescue. The second had lent me enough of her strength to survive the hardest and most gruelling exorcism of my entire life: it was a gift, and I’d never stopped being grateful for it.

  This one was a warning. It was meant to remind me of her power, and of how little effort it would take her to destroy me.

  When Juliet finally removed her lips from mine I sagged backwards and almost fell. But she kept me upright with one strong arm around my waist.

  ‘I’d prefer,’ she said, ‘not to have to choose.’

  She propped me up against the wall, not without care, and walked away.

  Eventually I pulled myself together and became aware of the outside world again. Matt was still kneeling beside Anita on the walkway outside. I couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was still moving and speaking, whether her spirit was still present, but either way I suspected that he wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Coldwood was still talking on the phone on the landing below, directing his lackeys to take whatever they’d found down to the forensic lab on Lambeth Road and then stay with it until the results came through.

  I stumbled across to the lift and pressed the call button. It came at once and didn’t smell of piss, as befits an age of miracle and wonder. It made a scary grinding noise as it descended, though, and the floor shuddered and bucked under my feet as if some corner of the cage was scraping against the wall of the shaft. I was profoundly relieved when I got to the ground floor and the doors, after a few premonitory clicks and ratcheting sounds, slid open.

  Outside on the concrete apron, paramedics were tacking between the other towers and the fleet of waiting ambulances, carrying bodies on stretchers: all alive, thank God, but then again they’d have left the dead where they were as a substantially lower priority. The police and fire crews were moving too, clearing barricades and locking off stairwells while they conducted shouted conversations on walkie-talkies.

  I walked through the melee, unnoticed, and descended the steps to the New Kent Road. More ambulances here, and more cops. Also, away behind the barriers, the media crews and the disaster tourists.

  I almost walked past Trudie Pax without seeing her. She was sitting at the edge of the kerb, her shoulders slumped, staring at the ground.

  ‘Long night,’ I said. ‘How’s Bic?’

  She started at the sound of my voice, looked up at me as though for a moment she’d forgotten where she was.

  ‘Castor—’ She scrambled to her feet with a kind of urgency, but then didn’t seem to know what to do when she’d got there. Her hands moved without purpose, and I suddenly realised that she’d been crying.

  ‘What?’ I asked. A horrible portent crashed into me from nowhere: like a contact on my death-sense, but with no ghost present. ‘What’s wrong? Did something happen to the kid?’

  Trudie shook her head, but I read something else in her face: something like guilt, or maybe shame. I took a hold on her shoulders without even knowing I was doing it.

  ‘Where is he?’ I demanded. ‘Where did you take him?’

  Her gaze flicked left. I turned my head to see a light green tent where two or three nurses fussed around a huge water-heater while half a dozen others distributed the resultant hot horse-piss among the shell-shocked survivors: a comfort station.

  ‘He’s . . . in there,’ she said.

  And he was. I caught a sudden glimpse of him, still in his pyjamas, sitting next to his father while his mother knelt in front of him and wiped at his grimy face with a damp J-cloth, showing the same merciless assiduity that all mothers show when they decide that you need a public face-washing. And Bic was fighting back the way all kids do, by squirming and shifting around to make the task as hard as possible.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Trudie blurted. And he was. It was plain to see.

  ‘Then is there something else on your mind?’ I began. ‘Because you don’t look—’

  The penny started to drop as I was speaking, because my gaze had lingered on Bic and I finally saw what was staring me in the face. They were the wrong pyjamas: plain blue flannel rather than rampant superheroes. In a war zone? Someone had stopped to change him out of his old gear in the middle of all this? And not into outdoor clothes, but into another set of PJs?

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Trudie was saying, her voice high and strained. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

  I stared at her in sudden, near-incontinent horror. ‘While - while Cheadle was making you change—’

  ‘Father Gwillam had Sallis plant a GPS pip on the boy. He didn’t tell me, Castor. When I said that you should trust me, I meant it. I never lied to you. I’ve told them I won’t stay in the order—’

  I was already running. I had to get out past the police roadblocks and out onto a road where there was some traffic running. The Walworth Road: there ought to be some cabs there. But the crowds of onlookers seemed to stretch out to the crack of doom, and short of bludgeoning them to the ground there was no way to get through them at anything faster than an arthritic shuffle.

  Coldwood. I turned and headed back towards the steps, caught sight of him almost immediately coming down them. I headed towards him, but someone grabbed hold of my arm. Trudie again, her face red with crying.

  ‘Let me come with you. Let me help.’

  ‘When I need your help,’ I snarled, ‘I’ll swallow a razor blade. It’s quicker.’ I pul
led free with a savage wrench and yelled at Gary just as he was getting into the back of a big black cop-mobile. He saw me coming and stopped.

  ‘I need to get to Peckham,’ I panted.

  ‘Try walking for once,’ he told me coolly. ‘I’m about to get your brother off a murder charge, and then I’m back here all day dealing with the fallout from this shit-fest.’

  ‘Gary, I’m serious. I need to get to Peckham fucking now. It won’t wait.’

  He gave me a quizzical look and opened his mouth to argue the toss some more. With an agonised bellow of frustration, I grabbed his lapels and yelled into his face. ‘Asmodeus! Fucking Asmodeus! You remember St Michael’s church, in Acton? Abbie Torrington? The body bags at the Whiteleaf shopping mall?’

  ‘Get in,’ Gary said. And to the driver, ‘Take him where he tells you. I’ll scrape up an ARU and follow you.’

  Amazingly, Trudie Pax was still with me. She got into the other side of the car at the same time as I got in myself. Kicking her out again would have scratched an itch, but it would have wasted ten or twenty seconds - longer if she’d fought - and I could always do it once the car was moving.

  I told the driver Imelda Probert’s address and waited in an agony of impatience as he threaded his way slowly and carefully through the interlaced armies of firefighters and nurses. Once we were clear, though, he put the siren on and hit the reheat, slamming us back into the leather upholstery.

  Trudie was talking to me, but the words washed over me like whale-song. I was trying to decide which of the many appalling outcomes from this I was most afraid of.

  And which I was actually hoping for.

  25

  The front door of Imelda’s was broken in and hanging on a single hinge.

  On the second-floor landing, Rafi’s door seemed untouched, but closer inspection showed that someone had fired several bullets through the lock until the striking plate simply came away from the splintered door frame.

  No sign of Rafi, but Sallis was there. He was staring at nothing. His hands were clasped across his lower abdomen, but they hadn’t been able to halt the jack-in-the-box exuberance of bloody intestines that had spilled out through the huge hole in his lower torso. Feld was there, too: parts of him, anyway. Trudie was noisily sick in the corner of the room. I left her there, still sobbing and heaving.

  A trail of bloody footprints led up the stairs from the second floor to the third. Imelda’s door had been torn loose and thrown across the landing where it lay, in two separate pieces, on the floor.

  I went inside with my heart hammering a hectic, unsustainable beat like a schoolgirl’s skipping rope when she’s high on adrenalin and pushing it too far: about to fall, all tangled up in her own misjudgement; about to hit the asphalt one last and lasting time.

  Imelda was in her kitchen, which had become an abattoir. Her head was in Lisa’s lap, and Lisa was in shock: exhausted and bullied by grief into some private place from which she didn’t stir when I came in.

  But Imelda did stir. Amazingly, she wasn’t quite dead, though how a body could take so much damage, so much insult, and still not yield up the spirit it contained was a mystery beyond my fathoming.

  She couldn’t speak. Judging from the blood that covered her lower face like a painted-on beard, Asmodeus had torn out her tongue. But she could move her right arm, just barely. She lifted it, like Atlas hefting the weight of the world. It trembled, but it stayed aloft while her chest rose and fell three times. Three last, agonising breaths.

  She pointed at me.

  And I nodded, accepting both the accusation and the challenge in those tortured, furious eyes.

  You did this.

  You talked to him, and he wound his lies around you.

  You gave him to eat, and he grew stronger.

  You let fools follow you here, and the fools set him free. Whatever they thought to do - whether to destroy him or to bind him faster - in their blind arrogance they set him free.

  You killed me, Castor.

  And now you have to kill your best friend.

  extras

  www.orbitbooks.net

  about the author

  Mike Carey is the acclaimed writer of Lucifer and Hellblazer (now filmed as Constantine). He has also written extended runs for Marvel’s fan-favourite titles X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, the comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and a movie screenplay, Frost Flowers, soon to be produced by Hadaly/Bluestar Pictures. He lives in London with his wife, Linda, also a novelist and screenwriter, their three children and a cat named Tasha.

  For more information about Mike Carey visit www.mike-carey.co.uk

  Find out more about Mike and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net

  interview

  This is your fourth Felix Castor novel. Have you found the story branching off in areas you didn’t expect when you started or has everything gone exactly to plan?

  The plan is crucial, and everything conforms to the plan right up to the point where you start writing - then it instantly becomes irrelevant. No, I’m exaggerating for effect there. In terms of the big issues, the overall structure of the series, I’ve mostly stuck very close to what I originally had in mind. But a lot of the grace notes, incidentals, supporting cast and their arcs, came to me as I was writing and then were built into the whole. To take the most obvious example, Nicky Heath wasn’t dead in the original Castor pitch: I just had this great idea when I got to that part of The Devil You Know, that he’d be much more interesting as a zombie.

  There’s a bit from Mervyn Peake’s journal where he talks about sticking to the plan for Gormenghast while ‘staying on the qui vive for a better idea’. That’s what you find yourself doing: if you’ve built it right, the plan is the structural skeleton that gives you the luxury of improvising without falling apart.

  Did the idea for the Castor books come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

  The starting point was Castor himself: the idea of a Chandler-style private eye who’s actually a private exorcist. Then I had a subsidiary idea for the mechanics of the story - for how the various undead beings could be explained and connected to each other. Throwing those two ideas against each other gave me a rough vision of how the first three novels would play out, and the big reveal we might play towards in the longer term - if there was a longer term.

  Like you, Felix Castor hails from Liverpool but makes his home in London. The advantages to this ‘write what you know’ approach are obvious, but have you found any pitfalls to writing Castor’s history so much in line with your own?

  Yes! In Thicker Than Water, the fourth novel, I take Castor back to Liverpool. There’s a lot about his parents there, a lot about his brother Matthew, a lot about his relationships with other kids he knew in Walton. Without going into detail, there were whole chapters there that I wrote and then cut out because I realised after I’d written them that they were (a) confessional and (b) cathartic. They were there for me, not for the reader, and they just had to go. I also had to change some details for more mundane reasons, to avoid getting punched in the face the next time I see some of my friends and relatives.

  Your take on the supernatural is almost scientific in its logic. Do you think there is a scientific explanation for everything or do you have some belief in the supernatural?

  I’m an atheist when it comes to God, but an agnostic when it comes to most supernatural phenomena. Don’t get me wrong, I come at these things from a rationalist perspective - and I’m dead set against the way the rationalist consensus is now under attack by extremists in pretty much every organised religion. But I don’t necessarily see a fixed and unwavering line between the things that science can explain and the things that it can’t. Quantum physics, if you see it from one point of view, looks very much like superstition and mumbo jumbo. I’m a rationalist but not a materialist: I believe in spirit, in a sort of animistic essence that o
utlives the body, whether or not it can be seen and measured. So I don’t see any reason why the existence of ghosts, for example, offers any kind of affront to a scientific world view. The world is energies as well as objects, and we’re constantly realising that there are some beans we haven’t counted yet. You know, I’d better stop while there are still some metaphors I haven’t mixed.

  What advantages and disadvantages do you see in using fantasy as the vehicle for your stories?

  I never really had any choice. I don’t think I could write totally realistic fiction, although I’d be curious to try. For me, the spectrum that extends from horror through fantasy to science fiction is where I feel most comfortable and where I wanted to pitch my tent as a writer. Coming back to the previous question, not believing in Heaven doesn’t reconcile me any better to Earth. I’m happiest when I’m cutting off at an odd angle, playing with counter-factual worlds.

  It almost feels to me as though fantasy is a dimension - I mean, in the same way that length and height and breadth are dimensions. My step-father-in-law, Eric, finds it hard to read any fantastic literature because he can’t take that first step of investing belief in the fiction - of accepting its premises. I said to him once ‘so you’re like a guy who loves ice cream, but only ever eats vanilla’. It was a really unfair comparison, but I feel that strongly about the pleasures and experiences that fantasy has to offer. I’d feel like I was living in Flatland if I tried to write something that was wholly realistic.