Vicious Circle (11 page)

Lashless black eyes blinked at me from behind those “I am serious” glasses.

“Mr. Castor?” the woman said, tentatively, as if the question might give offense.

“That’s me,” I said.

“I’m Susan Book, the verger. Umm . . . Miss Salazar is around the back, in the cemetery. She asked me to show you the way.”

Her voice had that rising inflection that turns statements into questions. Normally that irritates me a little, but Susan Book was so clearly anxious to please that resenting her, even in the privacy of your own mind, would have felt like taking a hot iron to a puppy. She held out her hand diffidently. I took it and shook it, holding on long enough to listen in on her feelings. They were dark and confused: something was clearly weighing on her mind. I let go, sharpish; I’d had enough of that for one day.

“I’m all yours,” I said, and I threw out my arm to indicate that she should lead the way. She started and spun around as though I were pointing to something behind her. Then she recovered, blushed, and darted me a quick, flustered glance.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m really nervous today. All of this—” She shrugged and made a face. Not knowing what she was talking about, all I could do was nod sympathetically. She turned on her heel and walked back the way she’d come. I fell in alongside her.

“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” she said wistfully.

“Juliet?”

“Yes, Jul—Miss Salazar. She’s so strong. I don’t mean physically strong, I mean spiritually. The strength of faith. You can tell just by looking at her that nothing can shake her, or make her doubt herself.” There was something in her voice that sounded like yearning. “I really admire that.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Well, up to a point. Self-doubt can be useful, too, though.”

“Can it?”

“Definitely. Prevents you from jumping straight off a cliff because you think you can fly, for example.”

She laughed uncertainly, as though she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I was joking. “The canon says that doubts are like workouts,” she said. “If he’s right, I ought to be benching two hundred and fifty pounds by now. I seem to get doubts all the time. But this—maybe the—maybe I’ll get stronger by dealing with all of this. Good comes out of evil. That’s His way.”

I caught the capital “H” on “His,” which my brother Matthew uses, too, but there was an almost equally weighted emphasis on “all of this,” and I was tempted to ask her what the hell it was that had happened here. But I assumed there was some reason why Juliet hadn’t briefed me in advance, so I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say a word about Juliet herself, either, although I wondered what Susan would think if she knew what Miss Salazar’s real name was, or where she hailed from. Best to leave her with her illusions intact.

The church stood in its own very narrow grounds on Du Cane Road, almost directly opposite the soul-dampening pile of Wormwood Scrubs—which is angry red chased with white, like bone showing through an open wound. To the left of the church itself, where Susan Book led me, there was a lych-gate, on the far side of which I could see a trim little graveyard like the stage set for a musical of Gray’s “Elegy.” This gate was locked, too, with a padlock on a chain. Susan took out a small ring of keys from her pocket, sorted through them, and found the right one. It turned in the padlock after a certain amount of fidgeting and ratcheting, and she slid the chain free so that the gate swung open, stepping aside to let me through.

“I’ll unlock the vestry door for you,” she said. “It’s by the west transept, over there. Miss Salazar is—” She pointed, but I’d already seen Juliet. The cemetery was on a slight slope and she was sitting cross-legged on top of a marble monument of some kind, outlined against the sky. A colossal oak that had to be a couple of hundred years old held up half the sky behind her.

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll join you in a couple of minutes.”

Susan Book stood for a moment staring up the hill at Juliet’s silhouetted form. Then she bustled away, casting a wide-eyed look at me over her shoulder as if I’d caught her out in a moment of self-doubt. I waved, reassuringly I hoped, and walked up the hill to join Juliet. She had her head bowed and she didn’t look up as I approached. She didn’t seem to notice me, although I knew damn well that she’d heard the key rattle in the lock of the lych-gate, smelled my aftershave on the air as I stepped through, and sieved my pheromones by taste to find out what kind of a day I’d had. As soon as she was close enough so that I didn’t have to raise my voice to speak to her, I voiced what was uppermost in my mind.

“Why a church? Did you get religion?”

Her head snapped up and she frowned at me, eyes narrowing to slits. I threw up my hands, palms out, in a meant-no-harm pantomime. Sometimes I go too far. She infallibly lets me know when that happens.

As usual, once I’d started looking at her, the tricky thing was stopping. Juliet is absurdly, unfeasibly beautiful. Her skin is melanin-free, alabaster smooth, as white as any cliché you care to dredge up. If you go for the default option, snow, then think of her eyes as two deep fishing holes, as black as midnight. But if anyone’s fishing, it’s from the inside of those holes, and you won’t feel the hook until it’s way, way down in the back of your throat. Her hair is black, too: a waterfall of black that falls almost to the small of her back, texturelessly sheer. Her body . . . I won’t try to cover that. You could get lost there. People have: stronger people than you, and most of them never came back.

Because the point—and I know I’ve said this already—is that Juliet isn’t human. She’s a demon: of the family of the succubi, whose preferred method of feeding depends on arousing you to the point where your nervous system starts to fuse into slag and then sucking your soul out through your flesh. Even tonight, dressed coyly in black slacks, boots, and a loose white shirt with a red rose embroidered up the left-hand side, you could never mistake her for anything other than what she was. The confidence, the strength that Susan Book had seen in her—that came from being the top carnivore in a food chain that no man or woman alive could even imagine. Except that “carnivore” wasn’t quite the right term: you needed something like “noumovore,” or “animovore.” And even more than that, you needed not to go there.

Thank God she’s on our side, that’s all. And I’m saying that as an atheist.

And taking another step, I came within range of her scent. It hit me in two waves, as it always does. With the first breath, you’re gulping in the rank foulness of fox, cloying and earthy; with the second, which you draw shallowly because of the sharpness of that first impression, you inhale a mélange of perfumes so achingly sweet and sensual your body goes on instant all-points alert. I’m used to it and I was braced for it, but even so I felt a wave of dizziness as all the blood in my head rushed down to my crotch in case it was needed there to bulk out my sudden, painful erection. Men limp around Juliet: limp, and go partially blind because taking your eyes off her suddenly seems like a waste of valuable time.

Which is why it’s important never to forget what she is. That way, you can maintain a level of good, old-fashioned, pants-wetting terror as a bulwark against the desire. I’ve found that to be a healthy balance to keep, because obviously if I ever actually had sex with Juliet, my immortal soul would be the cigarette afterward; but still, it’s not easy to think logically when she’s right there in front of you. It’s not easy to think at all.

She unfolded her legs and stepped down off the chunk of marble with unconscious grace. I realized that it was the cover of a family vault: Joseph and Caroline Rybandt, and a bunch of subsidiary Rybandts listed in a smaller font. Death is no more democratic than life is. I also realized that Juliet was carrying a gray plastic bowl half-full of water. It had been resting in her lap, and when I first saw her she must have been peering down into it.

“So how’s tricks?” I asked her.

“Good,” she said, neutrally. “On the whole.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“It’s fine if I don’t think about the hunger. It’s been a year now since I actually fed. Fed fully on a human being, body and soul. It’s hard sometimes to keep the flavor, and the joy of it, out of my mind.”

I groped around for a response, but nothing came. “Yeah,” I said after slightly too long a pause, “I thought you were looking slim. Think of it as a detox diet.”

Juliet frowned, not getting the reference. Now didn’t seem like a good time to explain it.

“So you’ve got a spook?” I said, to move things along. “A graveyard cling-on?” It was one of the commonest scenarios we came across in our profession: ghosts clinging to the place where their mortal remains still rested, anchored in their own flesh and unable to move on. Some of them got the hang of the wiring and rose again as zombies; most just stayed where they were, getting fainter and more wretched as the years went by.

Juliet looked at me severely. “In this graveyard? There hasn’t been a burial here in centuries, Castor—look at the dates.”

I did. Joseph had bitten the dust in 1782, and Caroline three years later. More to the point, all the stones were leaning at picturesque angles and most were green with moss. Some had even started to sink into the ground so that the lower parts of their eroded messages of grief and pious hope were hidden in the long grass.

“There are no ghosts here,” Juliet said, stating the obvious.

“What then?” I said, feeling a little embarrassed and annoyed to have been called on such a basic point by my own apprentice. Few ghosts hung around for more than a decade or so—almost none past fifty or sixty years. There was only one case on record of a soul surviving through more than a century, and she was currently residing a few miles east of us. Her name was Rosie, and she was sort of a friend of mine.

“Something bigger,” said Juliet.

“Then holy water is probably just going to piss it off,” I said, nodding toward the bowl. She gave me a meaningful look and thrust the bowl into my hands. I took it by reflex, and to stop the contents slopping over my coat.

“I never said it was holy,” said Juliet.

“So you were washing your hair? You know, human women tend to do that in the privacy of—”

“Turn around.” She pointed toward the church.

“Widdershins or deasil?”

“Just turn around.” She put her hands on my shoulders and did it for me, swiveling me 180 degrees without any effort at all. The touch sent a jarring, sensual charge through me and reminded me yet again, as if I needed it, that Juliet had physical strength in spades, as well as the spiritual kind that Susan Book had been talking about. I stared up at the looming bulk of St. Michael’s, which now blocked off the setting sun so that it was just a monolithic slab of ink-black shadow.

“My kind have a gift for camouflage,” murmured Juliet, her throaty voice suddenly sinister rather than arousing. “We use it when we hunt. We make a false faces for ourselves, pretty or harmless seemings, and we flash them in the eyes of those who look at us.” She tapped the rim of the bowl and a ripple shot from edge to center of the water within, then from center back to edge in choppy, broken circles. “So the best way to see us is not to look at us at all.”

I stared into the bowl as the ripples subsided. I was seeing the inverted image of St. Michael’s Church. It didn’t look any better upside down. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse: black smoke or steam was roiling off it in waves, downward into the inverted sky. It looked as though it was on fire—on fire without flames.

Startled, I raised my eyes to the building itself. It stood silent and somber. No smoke, no fireworks.

But back down in the bowl, when I looked again, the black steam rolled and eddied off the church’s reflection. St. Michael’s was the heart of a shadow inferno.

I stared at Juliet, and she shrugged.

“Anyone you know?” I asked, aiming for a flip, casual tone and missing it by about the length of an airport runway.

“That’s a good question,” she acknowledged. “But for later. Come inside. You need to get the whole picture.”

I felt like that was the last thing I needed, but I stayed with her as she set off down the small hill toward the church, taking the same direction in which Susan Book had gone.

The verger was waiting for us at the door of the vestry, a much smaller stone doghouse attached to the wall of the church at the back. She’d already opened the door, but she hadn’t gone inside. She looked more nervous and unhappy than ever—and she looked to Juliet for instructions with the same sad hunger that I’d noticed before.

“You can wait here,” Juliet told her, sounding almost gentle. “We’ll be five minutes. I just think it will be better if Castor sees for himself.”

Susan shook her head. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “In case you’ve got any questions. The canon told me to give you any help I could.” She visibly steeled herself, and stepped inside first. Juliet nodded me forward, so I went next in line, with her bringing up the rear.

The vestry was about the size of a large toilet, and it was empty apart from a cupboard for ecclesiastical vestments and half a dozen hooks screwed into the wall. We went on through, via a second, wide open door, into the west transept of the church, a low-roofed side tunnel looking toward the majestic main corridor of the nave. It was completely unlit, apart from the last red rays spilling through the stained-glass windows behind us. It made for a fairly forbidding prospect: it was hard to imagine anyone being inspired to devotion by it. Mind you, I wouldn’t say a paternoster if you put a gun to my head, so I’m probably not an unbiased witness there.

I felt it before I’d taken three steps: the chill. It was more like December than May, and more like the High Andes than East Acton. It ate into the bone. No wonder I’d felt cold when I was trying the door outside: the chill must have been radiating out through the stone. I suppressed a shudder and moved on.

But another few steps brought an even bigger surprise. I turned and shot a glance at Juliet, who looked keenly back at me. “Tell me what you’re feeling now,” she said.

I wanted to confirm it first. I walked left, then right, then forward.