Thicker Than Water

She was a formidable black woman, in her late fifties now but as imposing as she’d been at thirty, with a hard, beautiful face like sculpted ebony and arms like a pair of late-autumn hams. She was dressed in a midnight blue Ashoke-style dress that flowed like churning water when she walked. The Met office would issue a storm warning as soon as they caught sight of her.

‘Hello, Felix,’ she said, civilly enough. Then she turned to Pen and beamed all over her face. ‘Pamela! He’s been asking after you, honey. Doing nothing but.

And when he’s not asking after you he’s thinking after you. I can tell every time, because he gets a Pamela look on his face that I can’t mistake for anything else.’

Pen smiled weakly but gratefully. ‘Can I see him, Imelda?’ she asked, putting her hand on the older woman’s arm.

Imelda patted it reassuringly. ‘You mean private?’ she said. ‘Of course you can. Just as soon as me and Felix have gone in there and done the necessary.’ And then to me. ‘Felix, shall we make a start?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘But then I’m on again after Pen. I need to talk to Asmodeus.’

There was a moment when a pin dropping would have sounded like a steel band.

‘Now that wasn’t in the deal,’ Imelda said with dangerous mildness. ‘Not the way I remember it.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We won’t be talking about the weather, Imelda. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.’

The Ice-Maker wasn’t impressed. ‘I got a kid here,’ she said, waving a hand towards exhibit one. ‘You think I want to be summoning up demons in my own house?’

‘I’m not a kid, Mum,’ Lisa protested, scenting excitement.

‘I’m sixteen, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t use that kind of language!’ Imelda snapped.

‘I think the pair of us can handle him,’ I said. ‘And you know you can lock him away again when we’re done. He’d be within the wards and he’d be on the leash. The whole time.’

‘There isn’t a leash short enough for that kind.’

‘There are two of us and one of him.’

Imelda shook her head, not only unconvinced but angry.

‘We had an agreement,’ she said. ‘I said I’d let that sick man stay here, and I said I’d keep his fever down - but that’s all I swore to do. He stays in that room. I go in to him whenever he needs me. End of story. Now you’re asking me to raise the fever up instead, and that goes against the grain of me. The stink of a demon in my place - it will make everything I do harder. I’ll live with it for weeks, and I’ll feel like I’ve got the damn flu the whole time.