Thicker Than Water

And just like before, the notes were driven into my brain like tent spikes into frozen ground. Harder this time, and further in, so that the pain made me gasp and stiffen.

And I saw what Asmodeus was doing just a second too late for it to make the slightest bit of difference.

‘No!’ I screamed.

‘Too late,’ the demon chided me. ‘I have to take your first answer.’

I took a step forward, my arm shooting out by some stupid, gobshite reflex. Trudie Pax tackled me hard from the side and pulled me back before I could step across the circle and into the demon’s hands.

‘No!’ I said again, shaking my head violently as I choked the word out. I was trying to remember: but Asmodeus was writing the new tune - the exorcism that would destroy the Salisbury demon - in the exact same space within my mind where he’d written the one that was his own: overwriting one sequence of notes with another. He’d given me the means to rip him out of Rafi root and branch: and then he’d taken it away again as easily as he’d given it.

‘You bastard,’ I moaned. ‘You cheating, conniving bastard!’

Asmodeus actually laughed. ‘I played by your rules, Castor,’ he said, shaking his head as he settled back on his haunches again. ‘It’s not my fault if you don’t think things through. Hey, be grateful you get out of this still sane. I could have filled your whole head with that fucking music and left you drooling.’

He licked his lips, savouring the last vestiges of his unholy meal. His gaze clouded.

‘But then you wouldn’t have got the joke,’ he said reflectively. ‘And that would have taken away a lot of the point.’

21

It was more than an hour and a half later when we got back to the Salisbury. It had taken a long time to play Asmodeus back down into Rafi’s hindbrain: he was disposed to be frisky, and I wasn’t exactly on top of the situation. My head was throbbing from having the demon’s ectoplasmic fingers poked into it, and I was shaking with anger that I couldn’t use and couldn’t swallow.

‘You should probably take a little holiday when all this is over, Castor,’ Asmodeus leered as I played. ‘Maybe shoot off to the Caribbean or somewhere. Get yourself drunk, get yourself laid, see if it improves your mood.’

I ignored the cheap jibes and kept banking up the music in front of him in a hot, futile rage, while Imelda sat cross-legged across from me, her head bowed, doing an interpretive dance of a refrigerator.