Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

She clasped Matt in her unbreakable grip and he slumped against her, moaning unintelligible syllables.

‘I think you’ve made your point,’ she said to me in a calm, detached tone.

‘Is this how all demons are made?’ I asked her, my mouth too dry to swallow. ‘Is this what you are?’

‘It’s none of your business what I am, Castor. If you pry into that subject again, I won’t take it kindly.’

‘I can’t believe I never saw it,’ I continued, because the words kept spilling out of me whether I wanted them to or not. It was as though none of this had been real until I said it, or until she confirmed it. Now I had to live with this knowledge and I didn’t think I could. We have met the enemy and he is us. The newest monster in town was my fucking nephew. ‘I mean, it ought to have been obvious. Zombies are people. Werewolves are people. Why shouldn’t demons be people too? It’s Occam’s fucking razor: it’s the one common factor that makes sense out of everything. But how can it be so big, Juliet? How can it be so fucking big and so fucking powerful if it’s -’ the word had a sour, almost obscene taste to it as I shaped my mouth around it ‘- newborn?’

Juliet stared at me for long enough that I was sure she wasn’t going to answer. But then she made a gesture that conveyed very succinctly the impression that in talking to me about this she was trying to pour a major ocean into a pint pot. ‘Many of us start out . . . large and diffuse,’ she said. ‘Bodiless emotion. Pure power, but not concentrated. Like a vapour that fills any space it finds itself in. We condense gradually, over a long time. We find our form.’

‘But you come from souls?’ This from Matt, who was staring at her in utter horror. ‘From human souls?’

Juliet made another gesture: something close to a shrug.

‘Dear God!’ Matt whispered. ‘Oh dear God!’

‘Tell me if I’m missing something,’ Coldwood growled, ‘but fascinating as all this is from a religious standpoint, is it not also totally fucking irrelevant? Either you can sort this out or you can’t, Fix. Which is it?’

‘The first ghost I ever exorcised was my own sister, Gary,’ I answered, shaking my head with ferocious emphasis. ‘I’m not going back there. Today it’s Matt’s turn.’

‘Mine?’ Matt’s voice trembled as he raised his red, tear-stained face to stare at me.

‘I think it’s our only chance,’ I said. ‘He’s kin to you and he’ll feel the connection. He may listen to you where he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. Most ghosts - they hang around because they can’t get it into their heads that their life is over. They’re tied to all the stuff they didn’t do, or wish they hadn’t done. You have to tell him it’s okay. Make your peace with him. You have to ask him to leave, of his own free will. It’s the only way.’"

"At least, I added mentally, it’s the only way that doesn’t involve me doing an encore for my biggest sin. For Katie. And I marvelled again at how big a bastard Asmodeus was: how nearly perfectly he’d led me to this massacre of the innocents. Because that’s what Mark was, however deadly his infatuation with wounds had become. His real father literally didn’t know he was alive, his stepfather was a vicious sadist and his mother was probably already broken before he was born. His cards had been well and truly marked. And then when he did finally break out of the ghetto, by metamorphosing into something big and powerful and scary, along came Uncle Felix with his magic equaliser.

No. Sorry. We are not at home to Mister Kin-slayer. Not today, at any rate.

‘They’ve never met,’ Juliet pointed out. ‘There’s no reason why the demon should recognise Matthew as its father.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘That could be just wishful thinking on my part. But it’s the only shot we’ve got left in the locker, because I’m telling you I can’t do this. I’m empty.’

Matt got himself under some kind of control and climbed to his feet. Amazingly, Juliet’s embrace didn’t seem to have left him aroused at all: maybe it was because of the welter of other emotions running through him - or maybe she put out different pheromones when she was being maternal.

‘I’ll do it,’ Matt said, bleakly but calmly. ‘I—Obviously. Yes. I have to do it. I can see why it has to be me.’

He looked at me, trying to keep the fear out of his face. Fear of going up against a demon, or fear of meeting his son for the first time in these less than auspicious circumstances? Maybe it was a little of both. ‘So what happens?’ he asked. ‘You play your whistle and I . . . call his name?’

‘The whistle’s the last thing we need,’ I said. ‘I play that tune, it’s like I put his arm up behind his back and jam his face into a wall. And he’s had a lot of that tonight already. No, I think we need a different approach.’

I went through into the other bedroom.