The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey

. . it got sorted.’
    To get a less convincing tone of voice, you’d have to go to the court recordings of Adolf Eichmann saying, ‘I was only following orders.’ Lying didn’t come easy to Sue. I suspected that very few things did. Timid, self-effacing, uncomplaining and with lower self-esteem than a readers’ wives centrefold, she’d spent most of her life being the sort of willing drudge that props up half the organisations in the UK, quietly holding the fort while their colleagues ascend the ziggurat. But then she’d met Juliet, and her life had veered off in a new and wondrous direction.
    ‘I’m fine,’ Sue said again, with even less conviction. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
    ‘Well that’s what friends are for,’ I pointed out. ‘Listen, it was a long walk over here, and I’m feeling permanently dehydrated right now because I spent most of the last three weeks pickling my internal organs in Johnnie Walker, so could I come in for a quick drink? Of water, I mean.’
    There was an awkward pause. ‘Well . . .’ Sue faltered. ‘I’m not dressed, and . . . I’m off sick, Felix. I . . . I haven’t been . . .’
    Enough with the bullshit. I put a hand on the door and pushed it gently, not forcing my way in but forcing the point. Sue gave a sound that was almost a whimper and stepped away, averting her face, as the door swung open.
    She was dressed in a slightly tatty blue silk dressing gown with a motif of ukiyo-e storks flying over the perfectly unruffled surface of a lake. She folded her arms across the front of it as if she was afraid it might fall open, even though it was tied with tassels at waist and hem.
    With her head turned away from me, the side of her neck was fully exposed. There was a mark like a bruise there, wide and dark: a blue core surrounded by an irregular yellow halo.
    ‘Sue . . .’ I said.
    Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her head and stared at me with wide, unhappy eyes.
    ‘She didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘She just . . . I said something stupid and she got angry.’
    The bruising continued up the left side of her face, an irregular archipelago of blue-black islets in malarial yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.
    ‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’
    ‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’
     
    Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her - using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent - and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.
    I know all this because I was one of her victims. Gabriel McClennan, a fellow exorcist and part-time necromancer in the pay of an eastern European master-pimp named Lucasz Damjohn, had raised the demon Ajulutsikael and set her on my tail, figuring that a lethally close encounter with a demon would look like an occupational hazard for someone in my line of work. But I survived, against the odds. I managed to talk the succubus out of finishing me off (an experience which bore the same relationship to normal coitus interruptus as an exploding supernova does to a Bic lighter), and then she talked herself into sticking around on Earth. She changed her name to Juliet Salazar, met a nice girl, got married and settled down. A happy ending for everyone except me: part of my soul still has a hard-on for her that doesn’t look like dying down any time soon.
    The phrase ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ gets bandied around a lot, with ‘drop-dead’ functioning as an over-intense intensifier. Juliet is drop-dead gorgeous in a very specific and literal sense. The bone-white skin, the black eyes that are almost entirely without whites - these things might seem too odd to be attractive if you met them anywhere else, but as soon as you see Juliet