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And when I suggested that she might want to come along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in sombre wonder.

‘Fight alongside the demon?’ she demanded.

‘Essentially, yeah,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘If you’ve got a rodent problem you need a terrier. Best estimate, there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?’

‘No. The ones in flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts . . . I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.

’

‘Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight and it was like taking a beating from a bunch of blokes with baseball bats. And the chances are that it wouldn’t be enough anyway: not by itself. These guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane.

They’d still be around, and they’d still be dangerous – they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds-on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialised predator. He’d be there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—’

‘Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.’

I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions.

‘Revenge?’ I ventured.

She seemed genuinely surprised.

‘For Coldwood?’

‘Yeah.’ A long pause.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Juliet. ‘This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care, when we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Well, okay . . . I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my end it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them and they’re not going to let it drop.’ I hesitated. ‘As for you, wÛ6;And hat you stand to gain, obviously, is – from a global perspective – when all’s said and done—’

‘You get to stay with me,’ said Susan, from the doorway.

We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.

‘Sue,’ Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. ‘Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.’

Susan closed the door behind her and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen there before.