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Never would I have imagined my lowly station would permit—’

Juliet’s ringing smack knocked him back on his heels, his head thrown sideways by the force of the blow. ‘You should have stayed in your lowly station,’ she snarled, her gaze skewering him. ‘It’s grotesque to see you crawling on the face of the Earth. One word, Moloch. One word more will use up all that’s left of my slender fucking patience.’

A demon’s face isn’t that much harder to read than a human one. I could see in his narrowed eyes and tight smile that he’d already thought of a cool comeback – and that he didn’t quite have the balls to try to deliver it.

‘Are we good?’ I asked, breaking the tense silence. They both nodded unconvincingly.

‘Then let’s go commit some atrocities.’

24

When you’re climbing a mountain, the first thing you do is set up a base camp. In our case it was the building site at the bottom of Ropery Street, right next door to the crematorium and facing it across a no man’s land of churned mud. Okay, there was also a tall fence separating us from the landscaped grounds, but our line of sight was clear.

Clear enough to see the car headlights coming up the curve of the drive in their twos and threes, the lights slowing and stopping and then winking out as the drivers headed into the building. The inscription had begun, or else it would begin soon. Either way, we had all our enemies, living and dead, in the same spot. Lucky us.

We stood close to the top of the tower of scaffolding that surrounded the shell of a building yet to be.

Moloch and Juliet stared intently into the darkness, which held no secrets from them. For my part I couldn’t see a blind fucking thing: it was dark of the moon, and in any case the sky above us was a curdled mass of black on black – this high up, the wind was a constant barrage of sucker punches. But the storm was holding off for the moment, maybe waiting for a more dramatic moment.

‘There are armed men,’ Juliet said. ‘A lot of them. Some of them at the gate, some in front of the doors.

More of them are taking up positions in the grounds. They seem to know what they’re doing. Two or three men in a group, each group in line of sight of at least two others.’

‘Hired security,’ I said. ‘Probably black-market, if they’re carrying guns.’

‘They’re carrying rifles,’ Moloch murmured. ‘They have handguns in their belts. Also grenades.’

I shrugged, as nonchalantly as I could. ‘It makes sense,’ I said.