Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

I walked right on past her. I wanted to offer her some kind of solace but what could I have said? Bad friend Felix was on the prowl again: good news wasn’t on the agenda.

The main bedroom was dead ahead. Juliet was sitting on the windowsill, legs hugged to her chest, both feet off the ground. In a way it was a curiously little-girlish pose. Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested himself – or herself, arguably – against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.

I stopped in the doorway. ‘Permission to approach,’ I said.

Juliet gave me what in a human woman would have been an old-fashioned look. ‘You can come in, Castor,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right; or at least, not to that extent.’

I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the street lamp opposite, a dark form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient: waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.

‘So how’d you get home?’ I asked her, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth. ‘Transatlantic cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?’

‘The scenic route,’ she said. ‘It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Right, right.’ I was too tired to rise to the bait. ‘I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one from the old neighbourhood.’ I nodded out of the window, but she didn’t bother to look.

‘I smelled him,’ she said. ‘You should be more careful around demons, Castor. It’s only safe so long as they need you.’

‘Now you tell me.’ I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips towards me in a suggestive mime. ‘So how’s Myriam?’

‘She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back again after the last time, but they did anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her to control the urges.’

‘They being –?’

Juliet shrugged and shook her head. ‘She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks about Les, mainly. Les Lathwell. And to him, some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about something called inscription a lot, too: she doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.’

‘Back in the remand wing,’ I said, ‘they had Doug on anti-psychotics. A mild prescription to keep him stabilised. I don’t suppose you brought any out with you?’ Juliet just looked at me. ‘No. I know. Not the way your mind works. And I never thought to mention it to you when you were flinging me around the diner. Pity. It would actually have been a better line than “I’ll hunt you down and kill you like a dog.” That seemed to upset you.’

‘Can we get some more of the medicine from a doctor?’

‘Not without taking Doug to see a doctor. And if we do that, we’re all ending up in Pentonville.’

‘I’m not going home,’ Myriam Kale said from the bed, speaking out of Doug Hunter’s throat as though from the bottom of a deep pit. Her voice sounded hoarse and agonised. ‘You can’t make me go home. He’ll come and get me. He’ll take me out of there. He’s my home now. I walked in the quiet night on the side of the road and I came back and it was all still there. The blood on the seats. It still smells of it.’

‘Then what?’ Juliet said. ‘I thought of calling Coldwood, but I don’t want to get Susan into trouble. If Hunter is found in her house . . .’

‘It’s not just Susan,’ I pointed out, fighting the urge to look at my watch. Time was against us. We had to move. But Juliet could only be invited, not coerced. ‘It’s you, too. You busted Hunter out of jail. You never walked in front of a camera, but there aren’t that many people around who could have done what you did. The only thing that’s saved you so far is that Gary Coldwood is in the hospital and he’s the one who knows where you live.’

She seemed surprised at this news. ‘In hospital? What happened to him?’

‘I set him onto this thing after someone tried to kill me. I thought maybe he could shake the tree better than I could, but they just trashed his career and broke his legs instead. Juliet, we have to sort this. Not just Myriam Kale but all of it. Mount Grace, the reincarnation racket, the whole thing.’

‘Let me go,’ Myriam Kale suggested from the bed, staring at me with wide, insane eyes. ‘I’ll blow you, mister. I’ll blow you and I’ll swallow. Best you’ve ever had.’

Juliet frowned. ‘Mount Grace? The crematorium? How is any of this connected to Mount Grace?’

I brought her up to speed, as quickly as I could, starting with John’s funeral and covering all the main fixtures since. When I got to Moloch’s part in recent events she drew back her lips in a snarl. And when I suggested that she might want to come along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in sombre wonder.

‘Fight alongside the demon?’ she demanded.

‘Essentially, yeah,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘If you’ve got a rodent problem you need a terrier. Best estimate, there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?’

‘No. The ones in flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts . . . I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.’

‘Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight and it was like taking a beating from a bunch of blokes with baseball bats. And the chances are that it wouldn’t be enough anyway: not by itself. These guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane. They’d still be around, and they’d still be dangerous – they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds-on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialised predator. He’d be there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—’

‘Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.’

I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions.

‘Revenge?’ I ventured.

She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘For Coldwood?’

‘Yeah.’ A long pause.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Juliet. ‘This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care, when we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Well, okay . . . I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my end it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them and they’re not going to let it drop.’ I hesitated. ‘As for you, what you stand to gain, obviously, is – from a global perspective – when all’s said and done—’

‘You get to stay with me,’ said Susan, from the doorway.

We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.

‘Sue,’ Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. ‘Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.’