Thicker Than Water

‘Last night was very bad,’ the little man, Speigh³tlehint, was saying in a cultured voice with a slight Welsh lilt to it. ‘There were fights, last night.’ He pointed. ‘The police were called, but the fight spread to the walkways. A lot of people got hurt, some of them very badly. Even the ambulance crews, when they tried to treat the injured, were attacked.’

‘Tonight’s an improvement, then,’ I said, looking up at the hulking, menacing shapes of the towers: dark giants with asymmetrical eyes.

Speight looked at me, as if he suspected me of trying to make a joke.

‘No,’ he said, lingering on the syllable. ‘Tonight is worse.’

Gwillam was waiting for us at the foot of Weston Block, with a Bible in his hands and another small gaggle of multi-purpose zealots clustered around him. He watched us come, and Speight said nothing more: obviously it was the boss’s prerogative to fill me in on the rest of the big picture.

Gwillam nodded to me, and I nodded back. There didn’t seem to be much point in small talk, given that I’d laid his face open the last time we’d met.

He seemed to have recovered from that, although I couldn’t help wondering if he’d bounced back so easily from the more spiritual pummelling that Juliet had laid on him.

‘It’s a demon,’ he said flatly.

I shrugged. Presumably he hadn’t dragged me all this way to tell me what I already knew.

‘It seems to have an affinity for wounds, as you said,’ Gwillam went on. ‘And its presence twists people’s perceptions - subtly, at first, but with more and more pervasive effect.

I’ve got my people on two-hour shifts, rotating. But we’re barely containing it.’

‘You seem to be doing a good job,’ I said. I gestured at the stillness all around us. ‘No riots. No things going bump in the night.’

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t trying,’ said a woman standing to Gwillam’s right. She was tall and well built, attractive in a Junoesque way. I registered that first: then the ponytail, and then the cat’s cradle of string that was wound around her hands.

It was only then that I realised I already knew her. When I’d seen her standing out on the walkway it had been dark, and before that, when she’d been with Gwillam, I’d mistaken the tightly looped string on her hands for bandages. In fact it must be the way she focused her power. She was an exorcist, like me, and like Gwillam. So I turned to her, if only for a fresh perspective and an excuse not to look at Gwillam’s sour face any more.

‘Go on,’ I said.