shield.
“Jenna-Jane,” I said, “you’re a sight for sore eyes. Actually, let me rephrase that. My eyes are scabbing over just from looking
at you. I’m carrying a voice recorder, so why don’t you stop prejudicing your case and go play with your ECT machines?”
“Felix.” Jenna-Jane shook her head with mock exasperation. “You’re determined to hate me, but I have only respect and admiration
for you. I’m hoping to welcome you back on board someday. There’s going to be a war, and I want you on my side. I’m determined
on it. Perhaps your friend Rafi might actually be the bridge that brings us together.”
“You mean you’re going to lay him down on the ground and trample on him?” I said. “Tell it to the court.”
She raised her hands in surrender and walked on. I turned to Pen, who was trembling like a tuning fork. “Well, that went as
well as could be expected,” I said.
“Fuck off, Fix,” Pen answered, her eyes welling up with tears and instantly overflowing. “Fuck off and don’t talk to me.”
She turned her back and stalked away along the seats, tripping at one point over somebody’s briefcase and then kicking it
out of her way as she righted herself. It wasn’t a dramatic exit, but it did the job.
What’s that old Groucho Marx line? No, never mind: “I’ve got plenty of enemies. But if they ever start to thin out, most of
my friends are right there in the wings ready to audition.”
There’s going to be a war.
Jenna-Jane Mulbridge actually believes that shit, and she isn’t the only one.
The dead rose again only because they were running ahead of the demons, the theory went, and now the demons had started to
appear. There was a gaping hole in the walls of Creation: Hell was throwing its legions into the breach, and so far our side
not only didn’t have an army, it didn’t even have a poster with a pointing finger on it.
The first and greatest of the exorcists, Peckham Steiner, had believed, too, and toward the end of his life, he’d devoted
his personal fortune to the building of defenses that would give the living a fighting chance in that war when it was finally
declared: the Thames Collective, a barracks for ghostbreakers on running water, where the dead and the damned couldn’t walk;
the safe houses, protected by ramparts of water, earth, and air, which I’d assumed were an urban legend until I’d actually
seen one and figured out how it worked; a dozen wacky schemes full of customized craziness in every flavor you can think of.
It was classic paranoid stuff, but at this point in my life, I was finding it a lot harder to laugh it off.
If there was a war coming, then Rafi Ditko was conquered territory. Playing around with black magic, he’d opened up a door
to hell inside his own soul, and something—a big, bad bastard of a something that called itself Asmodeus—had stepped through.
Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet, and
the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because—law or no law—you
had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi most of the time. The tunes
I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a
bit more wriggle room.
Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. After answering a panicked
phone call from his girlfriend, Ginny, I found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but
this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that
Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.
And then a few months ago, when
“Jenna-Jane,” I said, “you’re a sight for sore eyes. Actually, let me rephrase that. My eyes are scabbing over just from looking
at you. I’m carrying a voice recorder, so why don’t you stop prejudicing your case and go play with your ECT machines?”
“Felix.” Jenna-Jane shook her head with mock exasperation. “You’re determined to hate me, but I have only respect and admiration
for you. I’m hoping to welcome you back on board someday. There’s going to be a war, and I want you on my side. I’m determined
on it. Perhaps your friend Rafi might actually be the bridge that brings us together.”
“You mean you’re going to lay him down on the ground and trample on him?” I said. “Tell it to the court.”
She raised her hands in surrender and walked on. I turned to Pen, who was trembling like a tuning fork. “Well, that went as
well as could be expected,” I said.
“Fuck off, Fix,” Pen answered, her eyes welling up with tears and instantly overflowing. “Fuck off and don’t talk to me.”
She turned her back and stalked away along the seats, tripping at one point over somebody’s briefcase and then kicking it
out of her way as she righted herself. It wasn’t a dramatic exit, but it did the job.
What’s that old Groucho Marx line? No, never mind: “I’ve got plenty of enemies. But if they ever start to thin out, most of
my friends are right there in the wings ready to audition.”
There’s going to be a war.
Jenna-Jane Mulbridge actually believes that shit, and she isn’t the only one.
The dead rose again only because they were running ahead of the demons, the theory went, and now the demons had started to
appear. There was a gaping hole in the walls of Creation: Hell was throwing its legions into the breach, and so far our side
not only didn’t have an army, it didn’t even have a poster with a pointing finger on it.
The first and greatest of the exorcists, Peckham Steiner, had believed, too, and toward the end of his life, he’d devoted
his personal fortune to the building of defenses that would give the living a fighting chance in that war when it was finally
declared: the Thames Collective, a barracks for ghostbreakers on running water, where the dead and the damned couldn’t walk;
the safe houses, protected by ramparts of water, earth, and air, which I’d assumed were an urban legend until I’d actually
seen one and figured out how it worked; a dozen wacky schemes full of customized craziness in every flavor you can think of.
It was classic paranoid stuff, but at this point in my life, I was finding it a lot harder to laugh it off.
If there was a war coming, then Rafi Ditko was conquered territory. Playing around with black magic, he’d opened up a door
to hell inside his own soul, and something—a big, bad bastard of a something that called itself Asmodeus—had stepped through.
Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet, and
the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because—law or no law—you
had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi most of the time. The tunes
I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a
bit more wriggle room.
Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. After answering a panicked
phone call from his girlfriend, Ginny, I found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but
this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that
Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.
And then a few months ago, when
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