The Naming of the Beasts Read Online Free PDF Page A

party down in Surrey where they were meant to be doing a summoning. Only it turned out it was just a bunch of ponced-up ovates who couldn’t find their arses with a map and a photofit picture.’
    She stopped, registering my shocked expression. ‘What?’ she asked defensively.
    I was both impressed with her grasp of the lingo and appalled at what she’d been doing. Only exorcists apply the term ‘user’ primarily to people who summon demons rather than people who ingest chemicals to get happy. The two-finger clubs, in the same trade-specific argot, are satanist dives - so called because the satanists like to draw their pentagrams with two arms pointing upwards and three down - symbolically rejecting the Holy Trinity. An ovate is the lowest rank in the Druidic Gorsedd, but when applied to the satanist churches it also means a wanker who can’t draw a magic circle without making it look like an Easter egg - which if you’re a demon-worshipper sends entirely the wrong kind of message.
    ‘You don’t want to mess with those people,’ I told Pen, meaning it. ‘In among the harmless tosspots there are some real nasty pieces of work. People who’ve hung around with Hell-kin long enough to go native.’
    ‘Those were the ones I was hoping to meet,’ Pen answered impatiently. ‘Don’t baby me, Fix. I know what I’m doing.’ She took a sip of her brandy and scowled at the glass as if it had done her some mortal hurt. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘it didn’t work. I didn’t get to meet any of the big operators. Oh, there are rumours everywhere. The infernal messiah has been born at last, and he’s incubating inside the Centrepoint tower. Someone’s drawing a socking great magic circle around the whole of London by joining up the white lines on the M25. The bishops of all the satanist churches are meeting over in Kensington Palace for the biggest summoning ever seen. But you could tell when you tried to pin them down to specifics that it was all bollocks. Most of the people I was talking to knew less about what was really going on than I did.’
    ‘What is going on?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve been out of the loop for a few days.’
    Pen snorted derisively. ‘Try two weeks,’ she suggested. ‘Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, doesn’t it?’
    I wouldn’t describe the mill I’d just been through - was still going through - as ‘enjoying myself’, but I didn’t bother to argue. ‘Are the police looking for Rafi too?’ I asked, calling a spade a spade.
    Pen shrugged. ‘They must be,’ she said bleakly. ‘His fingerprints were all over Imelda’s house. Mostly in other people’s blood.’ Her face crumpled momentarily, and tears welled up in her eyes. I moved forward to hug her, but she warded me off with one hand, not ready or willing to take comfort from me. ‘I don’t know how this can end now,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He killed her, Fix. He killed Imelda.’
    ‘Asmodeus killed Imelda,’ I amended.
    ‘And Rafi did too. It was his hands that Asmodeus used. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t want to do it. When they catch him, they’ll lock him away for life.’ She wiped away the tears with furious energy before they could fall.
    I couldn’t think of anything consoling to say. Everything she’d said was true, and she hadn’t said the worst of it. Even if London’s finest dropped the ball, and Rafi somehow got away without being had up for murder, being welded to Asmodeus was a life sentence in itself.
     
    Back when I first met Rafael Ditko, at college in Oxford, I really didn’t know what the hell to make of him: he was a bum, essentially, but a bum with his own inimitable style. A mature student from the Czech Republic, he was older than the rest of our little circle by three years and some small change, and he had a spectacular impact on all of us: on Pen more than anyone, because she’d fallen in love with him more or less at first sight, and then had to watch