Vicious Circle by Mike Carey Page B

roused too early and in a foul mood. But God forbid I should jump to any conclusions. I gave it a rest, filed some long-dead paperwork to get my mind back into neutral.
    Half an hour later I tried again, building from first principles. I started with the doll just like before, bracing myself as I prepared to dip first my toe, and then the rest of me, into that cold ocean of unhappiness—but the tide was out. This time when I held the unlovely toy in my hands there was nothing there: no emotional trace at all. Amazed and disconcerted, I picked up a teddy bear, a pair of trainers, a book. Finally I buried my hands in the sprawl of teenage treasure trove, fingers spread wide, touching as many different things at once as I could manage. They were all cold and inert.
    And now it was the conclusions that were jumping on me.
    That just couldn’t happen. The residual emotions we leave in the things we touch aren’t like fingerprints; they can be overlaid with stronger, later impressions, but they can’t be wiped clean. Or at least, that’s what I’d always assumed. But somebody had just done it: killed the psychic trail, pulled the rug out from under me and left me sitting on my arse in the middle of nowhere. And once again I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have any idea how that could be done.
    Kidnapping ghosts. Blindsiding the hunt. I was dealing with someone who was better than me at my own game. My professional pride was piqued, and slightly punctured. I had to see if I could reflate it.
    Yeah, that shallow.
    On bad days, I have to admit that I deserve everything I get.

Four

    T HE FRONT DOOR OF ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH WAS MASSIVE: bivalved, with a lock on each side. Old wood four inches thick, set tight in a slightly narrow, low-arched narthex, and I could tell by the look of it that it had fossilized hard with age. It moved less than half an inch under my hand, and I gave it up as a bad job. I could pick the locks with nothing more than brute force and bloody-mindedness, but there wouldn’t be any point. From the feel of it, the doors were anchored at the bottom, too: there was a bolt on the inside.
    There are churches that people will travel a thousand miles out of their way to see. St. Michael’s wasn’t one of those. Don’t get me wrong—it was old, and impressive enough in its way. Early Gothic, very early, taking its shape from Abbé Suger’s original prescription, which meant that it was straight up and down and plain as a pike. A colossal ecclesiastical doghouse on which the Holy Spirit could sleep like Snoopy until the day of judgment.
    Some people would argue that he’d overslept.
    This was where Juliet had told me to meet her, but she was nowhere in sight. All I could do was wait—and while I did, I became aware of a very faint presence somewhere close by. It was something immaterial and shifting, so faint that just the act of focusing my attention on it made it roll back out of reach as though my mind were a searchlight. Whatever it was it had strongly negative overtones for me—like the psychic equivalent of some bitter medicine I’d taken long ago and never forgotten.
    Curious, I laid my hands on the church door again, closed my eyes and listened with my extra sense.
    Nothing at first—except for the discomfort of the cold wood against the palms of my hands. Maybe I’d been mistaken in the first place, and all I was feeling was the remains of that psychic hangover I’d had the day before. I considered taking out my whistle and seeing if I could refine the search a little, but just then a woman’s footsteps stirred a recursive symphony of echoes on the flags behind me. I turned with a witty and slightly obscene quip ready to launch, but it died before I could even open my mouth, because this wasn’t Juliet walking toward me. It was a young woman with bookish spectacles and shoulder-length white-blond hair. She was slight and petite, pale-complexioned, and she walked with her shoulders