Dead Men's s Boots

Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet and the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because – law or no law – you had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi for most of the time. The tunes I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a bit more wriggle room.

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"Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. Answering a panicked phone call from Rafi’s girlfriend, Ginny, I’d found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.

And then a few months ago, when I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price – letting Asmodeus loose on Earth – had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen understood: actually I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.

Pen – Pamela Elisa Bruckner – is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex a whole lot of other things, one way and another.

And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together. The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months earlier in which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now Webb had formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane to get rid of Rafi, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead, where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie – replete with ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire – didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and I had to work together to clog her works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.