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’

Imelda went and got some chalk while Rafi, Trudie and

I moved the furniture and rolled the carpets back. Bic roused a little when we rolled the couch to the wall, staring at us with slightly more focused eyes.

‘The red sea,’ he said, more or less distinctly. ‘Blood is salt water. That’s all.’

‘Lisa is asleep upstairs,’ Imelda reminded us as she came back in with the chalk. ‘Let’s do this quietly.’

‘We can do the invocation quietly,’ Trudie said. ‘But we can’t be sure that we can control everything the demon does once he rises.

’

Imelda closed the door, firmly. ‘Thank you for the reminder,’ she said, shooting me a look that would have knocked me back ten feet or so if I hadn’t already been up against the wall. The room was feeling a little crowded now, since we couldn’t walk in the cleared space at the centre where Trudie was about to draw the circle, and the margins of the room were full of displaced furniture.

‘I’m going to use the Baphomet sigil, inscribed with the ordinals of Leviathan,’ Trudie told us as she started to sketch in the first line.

‘Stanislas de Guaita, not LaVey’s Hell’s Kitchen Baphomet. Mister Ditko, you’d better be inside the circle before I close it.’

‘What about Bic?’ I asked her. She looked at me, thinking it through.

‘Outside,’ she said at last. ‘If we frame the conjuration right, Asmodeus won’t need to cross the circle to touch the boy on the psychic level. And this way there are four of us in total, which is a strong number. Should I perform the conjuration, Mister Castor, or would you prefer to do that yourself? You know this demon better than I do.

’

‘I’d like to see you work,’ I said, which fell squarely into the ‘truth as far as it goes’ category. I was curious as to how she’d approach this - and I also wanted to keep my own powder dry in case Asmodeus cut up rough somewhere down the line. My chest was still weak from my injuries, and this was going to be the kind of balancing act I wouldn’t normally attempt even when I was at full strength.

If I’d had a single other option left in the world, I wouldn’t have been trying it.

We placed Bic at the southernmost point of the pentacle"

"- Trudie complaining once again that I’d made her come without her kit so she couldn’t check the alignment with a compass - and took our own places more or less at the other three cardinal points, with Trudie as east because this was a Satanic rite and the east is Satan’s appointed sphere.