Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

Susan closed the door behind her and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen there before. She cast one nervous glance at the bound figure on the bed, then she directed her full attention towards Juliet.

‘You brought an escaped murderer into my house, Jules,’ she said, in a tone that had something of a taut string about it. ‘And I let you do it, because I thought you wouldn’t have done it unless you had to. But if it’s just because she’s a woman who kills men and that used to be your – your thing , too, then that’s not good enough. And Felix is right about one thing. If you don’t fix this you’ll have to go away. I’ll lose you. I’m not going to lose you because of something like this.’

Juliet couldn’t have been more nonplussed if a cavalcade of tap-dancing mice had sung the words at her. She blinked, visibly thinking her way around the situation. ‘If I have to leave,’ she said, ‘I’ll come back to you. They can’t keep me away.’

The taut string snapped.

‘They can send you home!’ Susan shouted, advancing on Juliet with her hands clenched into fists as though she was going to hit her. She was crying again, but she didn’t wipe away the tears on her cheeks or even seem to notice them. She was incandescent enough that I was surprised they didn’t evaporate. ‘They can trap you and send you back down to Hell, no matter how strong you are. You’d be down there, in the dark, and you’d have to wait until someone called you back up again. Except that they’d call you as a slave, the way you were before. Or else I’d have to find a way to summon you up myself, and then what? Then you’d be my slave! We’d – we wouldn’t be us any more. We’d be a stupid, sick joke. It’s got to stop, Jules. You’ve got to stop it, and then you’ve got to explain and say you’re sorry.’

From about halfway through this speech, she’d been screaming the words rather than just yelling them. Her fists were trembling like tuning forks. Juliet caught them in her hands, pushed them down to Susan’s sides and then embraced her. Susan slumped in her arms, all the fight suddenly gone from her.

‘You’ve got to,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly, her head pressed to Juliet’s breast. ‘Please. For me.’

Juliet stared at me over Susan’s head. She looked unhappy. No, more than that: she looked afraid – and not of the Mount Grace ghosts.

‘Is that the plan, then?’ she demanded, her face a sombre deadpan. ‘We go to the crematorium. We break in. And I keep the three of us alive long enough for you to play your tune and for Moloch to feast?’

I was a bit taken aback by how quickly the tide had turned. I realised, much to my own surprise, that I hadn’t been expecting to win this one. ‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ I said lamely. ‘But yeah, that’s the basic scheme.’

‘It’s absurd. We don’t know their strength or their numbers.’

Juliet kissed Susan gently on the cheek, held on to her for a moment longer and then set her to one side very firmly. Susan took all this with great stoicism.

I delved into my pocket, and brought out my ace in the hole. It was the torn fragment of notepaper that I’d found in John Gittings’s pocket watch: when you looked at it, he really had gone out of his way to make sure that I’d have everything I needed. In fact, he’d been shrewder when his brain was disintegrating than he’d been at any time in his life before.

‘John was there before us,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that why he died?’

‘Yeah, but he left us some notes. This is pretty vague on their strengths, but it drops some succulent hints about their weaknesses.’

‘And you,’ Juliet said, giving me a cold, hard stare. ‘You said this tune was hard to play – that it drains you. Do you think you’ve got the energy to play it again tonight? Please don’t take this personally, but you look as though you’d have a hard time blowing up a child’s balloon.’

I’d been thinking the same thing, but since I didn’t see any other choice I just shrugged the question off. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I always am on the night.’

Juliet’s expression didn’t change. ‘If you can’t do it,’ she said, ‘you’d better tell me now. There’s no point in going into a fight with a plan that can’t work.’

‘All right,’ I admitted. ‘Right now, I don’t think I could do it. But it’s going to take us at least an hour to get over there. I’m hoping that’ll give me the time I need to get match-fit again.’

She nodded. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, with grim promise.

I left her and Susan alone for a minute or two to say their goodbyes. When Juliet came down from the bedroom I shot her a look of inquiry: she walked right past me, her face unreadable but her shoulders hunched in a tension I’d never seen in her before. Juliet normally uses her body language to draw you in: it’s second nature to her because it’s part of the way she feeds. For her to lose control of it, even around the edges, was a surprising and in some ways a disturbing thing to see.

Moloch smiled as he saw us coming, and gave Juliet an ironic bow. ‘The sister of Baphomet,’ he grated. ‘I’m honoured above all of my kindred. Never would I have imagined my lowly station would permit—’

Juliet’s ringing smack knocked him back on his heels, his head thrown sideways by the force of the blow. ‘You should have stayed in your lowly station,’ she snarled, her gaze skewering him. ‘It’s grotesque to see you crawling on the face of the Earth. One word, Moloch. One word more will use up all that’s left of my slender fucking patience.’

A demon’s face isn’t that much harder to read than a human one. I could see in his narrowed eyes and tight smile that he’d already thought of a cool comeback – and that he didn’t quite have the balls to try to deliver it.

‘Are we good?’ I asked, breaking the tense silence. They both nodded unconvincingly.

‘Then let’s go commit some atrocities.’

When you’re climbing a mountain, the first thing you do is set up a base camp. In our case it was the building site at the bottom of Ropery Street, right next door to the crematorium and facing it across a no man’s land of churned mud. Okay, there was also a tall fence separating us from the landscaped grounds, but our line of sight was clear. Clear enough to see the car headlights coming up the curve of the drive in their twos and threes, the lights slowing and stopping and then winking out as the drivers headed into the building. The inscription had begun, or else it would begin soon. Either way, we had all our enemies, living and dead, in the same spot. Lucky us.

We stood close to the top of the tower of scaffolding that surrounded the shell of a building yet to be. Moloch and Juliet stared intently into the darkness, which held no secrets from them. For my part I couldn’t see a blind fucking thing: it was dark of the moon, and in any case the sky above us was a curdled mass of black on black – this high up, the wind was a constant barrage of sucker punches. But the storm was holding off for the moment, maybe waiting for a more dramatic moment.

‘There are armed men,’ Juliet said. ‘A lot of them. Some of them at the gate, some in front of the doors. More of them are taking up positions in the grounds. They seem to know what they’re doing. Two or three men in a group, each group in line of sight of at least two others.’

‘Hired security,’ I said. ‘Probably black-market, if they’re carrying guns.’

‘They’re carrying rifles,’ Moloch murmured. ‘They have handguns in their belts. Also grenades.’

I shrugged, as nonchalantly as I could. ‘It makes sense,’ I said. ‘This is when our dead-guy mafia are at their weakest – individually and as a group.’