Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  By a happy chance, I fetched up on my back, looking the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four. It was sleek and black—or maybe some dark shade that looked black in the inadequate light—and it had the basic shape of a panther: more mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss army knives, and with a tendency to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: The mouth was too wide, and studded with too many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly catlike. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

  For a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

  When it got halfway down the flight of stairs, it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move, I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that wasn’t going to happen. If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would, and either way, I wouldn’t get to express an opinion about it.

  But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped, and met it in midair.

  The new something was a whole lot smaller. The loup-garou massed around four hundred pounds, and it had gravity on its side. Logically, it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior weight and momentum.

  Instead, the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space, all that downward energy canceled out by some arcane counterforce; then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five yards away from me.

  The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked momentarily like wings as he made his jump. The loup-garou’s claws raked him, shredding his clothes and laying bare white flesh, red meat, but he paid them no heed. His own blows fell sledgehammer-hard, sledgehammer-heavy, so that I could hear the impact, and the were-thing spat and snarled as it struggled under him.

  Yeah, I said under him. He’d managed to come down on top somehow, and he was taking full advantage of the position. A scything claw opened up his throat, but he still laughed, a liquid, musical gurgle, as blood fountained from the wound. His fists kept rising and falling like pistons, threshing the flesh of the loup-garou, smacking and splintering, breaking and entering.

  Under that relentless rain, something grotesque and unexpected happened. The loup-garou started to fracture and fall apart, its flesh sagging and separating, its human form melting away. Its head rolled free from its shoulders, sprouted legs, and fled away, miraculously transformed into a huge black tomcat. Cats clawed their way free from its huge shoulders, its splayed legs, its broken back, and they scattered in all directions. Once again, I felt the shiver of déjà vu.

  The skeletal man caught some of the cats as they ran, twisted them in his hands with malicious glee until they broke and bled. He held them over his head so that the blood rained down into his mouth. He was still laughing, his head tilted back in manic joy. Most of the cats got away, but half a dozen or so ended their lives in pieces in those slender-fingered, impossibly strong hands.

  Suddenly, it was over. The man tossed the last dead animal to the ground, staring down at it with something like regret, and bared long brown teeth in a skull-like grimace.

  It was the tramp—or rather, it was the man I’d met as a tramp outside Maynard Todd’s office and then in a somewhat more respectable guise at the Mount Grace crematorium. He didn’t look like a tramp now. His coat was shiny black leather, and his thin face was austere and patrician, dominated by a rudder nose and a fleshy, pouting mouth that made him look like an out-of-work Shakespearean actor. His clothes and his flesh hung in tatters here and there where the loup-garou’s blows had landed, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

  “Fuck!” I exclaimed weakly.

  He glanced around at me as though only then remembering that I was there. “We’ll talk,” he said, his voice the same dry, agonizing rasp I’d heard when I first encountered him—when he sang his crazy song about heaven and hell. “But not yet. Not until you know what I’m talking about. I don’t like wasting my time.”

  “Wh-who—?” I slurred inarticulately, trying to sit up and not getting very far. A lance of white-hot pain went through my back from shoulder to coccyx, stopping me in my tracks. Shit, my spine could even be broken.

  “A friend,” the thin man said with a leering snigger that robbed the word of any warm connotations it might have had otherwise. “Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.” He walked across to me, looking down at me with a cold and clinical interest. “You’ve got some of it,” he murmured. “You must have, because you’re not a fool. And only a fool would refuse to see the obvious because it happens to be impossible. But you have to go to the source. Otherwise they’ll kill you before you’re in a position to kill them.” He paused, frowning. “Sequence. Cadence. Rhythm,” he said. “Let’s get this right. My name is Moloch, and you may pass on my best wishes—with an ironic inflection—to Baphomet’s sister.”

  “To—”

  “Your ally. The lady. We have… history.”

  He stepped over me and back out into the dark, and I was in no position to stop him.

  In fact, it was all I could do to crawl to my feet—back not broken after all, just agonizingly bruised—and limp out of there before the sirens started to sound in the distance. I cast a longing look back up the stairs to where the rest of Chesney’s notes and trinkets might still be lying, no doubt with his own blood added to the patina of ancient violence that made them so collectible. No good to me now, no good at all, because even if they were still there—even if they weren’t what the loup-garou had been sent here to fetch, and I was nearly sure they were—I couldn’t afford to hang around long enough to find them. Even with Gary Coldwood’s grudging patronage, this was one crime scene I wasn’t going to be reading for the Met if I could possibly help it.

  Susan Book’s doorbell played the first four bars of “Jerusalem.” For some reason that made me laugh, even though laughing hurt right then.

  Juliet opened the door and stood there staring at me in silence, taking in all the details—the bruising on my face, the split lip, and the blood on my shirt. She nodded slowly as if acknowledging that I probably had a valid excuse. All the same…

  “You’re an hour and a half late, Castor,” she said sternly.

  “I know,” I answered. “And I’m sorry. I got held up.”

  “At gunpoint?”

  “At clawpoint. Can I come in before I fall down?”

  She considered for a moment longer. “Yes,” she said. “All right. But we ate without you.”

  She held the door open for me, and I lurched in out of the night. Susan Book bustled out of the kitchen wearing a Portmeirion apron—PASSION FLOWER, it said and showed—and opened her mouth to speak, but then she changed her mind and shut it again. She stared at me instead, blinking a few times as if to clear her vision.

  “I’m really sorry, Sue,” I said. “I hope I didn’t spoil your evening. I was on my way here when something came up.”

  “Would you like a drink?” asked Juliet, who knew me pretty well. I nodded. “Then come on through into the living room,” she said. She pronounced the phrase with careful emphasis, as though it were still a little alien to her. Some concepts were harder for her to get her head around than others.

  “I think,” Susan said hastily, “that we should probably take Felix into the bathroom first.”

  Juliet stared at her, momentarily puzzled. Susan pointed at the crusted blood on my
shoulder, where the loup-garou’s claws had pierced the cloth of my greatcoat and dug deeply into the flesh beneath.

  “Oh,” said Juliet. Wounds are something else she has to be reminded about, mainly because her own flesh (if that’s what it is) flows like water to heal itself on the rare occasions when she sustains any damage. “Yes. Of course. Do we have any disinfectant and bandages?”

  It turned out they had both, and Susan did a good job of cleaning my wounds, although she drew in her breath slightly when she first saw them, her eyes widening. Examining myself with queasy fascination in the bathroom mirror, I could understand her reaction. I looked as though some huge bird of prey had scrabbled at my right shoulder, trying to pick me up, and then—judging from the bruising all over my torso—had given up the effort and dropped me from a great height onto some rocks.

  “You met one of the were,” Juliet said. An observation, not a question.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “You remember Scrub?”

  She frowned, consulting her memory. “The rat-man that worked for Lucasz Damjohn,” she said with no obvious emotion, although she had hated Damjohn enough to linger over his death and add a number of artistic flourishes to it. “You killed him at Chelsea Harbour.”

  “I spiked him at Chelsea Harbour,” I corrected her. “Hit him with a hard enough chord sequence to push him out of the flesh he was hiding in. But you know how it is with the were-kin. They’re old souls, mostly, and they’re tough as hell. Most of them are used to migrating to a new host when the old one dies.” I winced as Susan applied TCP too enthusiastically to a tender area of torn flesh.

  “Are you saying this was Scrub?” Juliet demanded.

  I shrugged, then gritted my teeth because shrugging seemed to draw the disinfectant deeper into the wounds. “I don’t know. For a second it kind of looked like Scrub. Then it looked like someone else. But Scrub was the only loup-garou I ever met who was a colony. I mean, he made his body out of rats, not out of a rat. And this thing I met tonight was made out of cats in the same way.”

  I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half disgust and half fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ house; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone. I would have bet the farm there was a cat lurking under the left luggage lockers at Victoria, too—that it had heard my conversation with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first. I’d sentenced Chesney to death by calling him.

  Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “If one were can make that transition—from monad to gestalt—then presumably others can, too.”

  “Presumably. Most of them—ow!—don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub, I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,” Susan said, looking up from her work. “But they’re nasty, ragged wounds. It would be really easy for them to get infected.”

  I nodded. I’d been there, and I wasn’t likely to forget. But at least my tetanus shots were up to date this time. “Go for it, Sue,” I muttered, trying hard to dismiss the specter of Larry Tallowhill from my thoughts.

  As Susan moved from cleaning the wounds to dressing them, I told them both about what had happened at Nexus. Susan was pale by the time I’d finished, but Juliet seemed moved in a different way.

  “Moloch,” she said. She spat, very precisely, onto the floor. Without a word, Susan Book took a piece of toilet tissue and wiped up the mess.

  “Yeah. He told me he knew you. Asked me to pass on his best wishes—with a broad hint that he didn’t really mean it.”

  “He doesn’t,” said Juliet, her teeth showing in a genteel snarl. She usually managed to rein herself in around Susan, who frightened easily, but clearly, the mention of Moloch’s name had touched Juliet at a level below the pretensions of civilization. “I left my mark on him once, a long time ago. But it goes further than that. His kind and mine—we were old enemies even before the great project.”

  “Before the what?”

  Juliet seemed to remember herself. “Nothing,” she said, a little too quickly. “I was remembering things that happened before you were born. Let’s just say that his kin are cats and mine are dogs. Or vice versa. Where the succubi and incubi settle and build their houses, the shedim can’t live. He’d love to hurt me if he thought he could. But what is he doing on Reth Adoma?”

  “You know,” I groused, “if you keep doing this, I’m going to ask for a simultaneous translation. What is he doing where?”

  “On earth. Among the living. There’s nothing he can eat here. He’ll starve if he stays too long.”

  “He looked like he was halfway there already,” I agreed. “At least that’s how he looked when I first met him a few days ago. Today he looked a fair bit sleeker. And he was strong enough to make this loupgarou run for cover.”

  Juliet frowned, her eyes slightly unfocused as she followed a train of thought she didn’t bother to voice. To be honest, I didn’t want her to. It was hard to think of hell as a place, and even harder to think of her walking there. It had a whiff of bad Bible stories and undigested metaphors.

  “This is bigger than we thought,” she said, looking at me again. “Something—something important, perhaps—is at stake here. Something has brought him up through the gates and made him stay long enough to weave a body for himself. I think—”

  The pause lengthened.

  “What?” I prompted. “What do you think?”

  She shrugged dismissively. “Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on—the one he kept saying was going to get him into the history books—had something to do with dead killers. And now we know that Kale was on his list.”

  Juliet thought about this. “And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,” she finished, voicing my own thoughts. “Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?”

  “None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.”

  Juliet nodded. “It’s possible,” she mused. “But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more questions than it answers.”

  “I meant it as a joke,” I said.

  “Then you should have smiled.”

  “I’ve finished,” Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. “But you should probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.”

  “I will,” I lied. “Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.” Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind. Life throws you some funny curves.

  “I saved you some ratatouille,” Susan said, embarrassed. “You can eat it on a tray, if you like.”

  Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of windblown trash. The room had changed a lot since I’d been there last. Then it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana. Now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung on white-painted walls. I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognize them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

  “So how’s work?” I asked her. “Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.” She’d been the verger at a church in West London when she’d met Juliet, but she’d bailed out when they started living together and gone back to her old career as a librarian. It was a principled decision based more on the fact that she was in a same-sex relationship than on her shacking up with a demon. The modern Anglican church regard
s hell as a state of mind and doesn’t officially believe in demons (unlike the Catholics, who hunt them with papally blessed flamethrowers), but it still has problems with church officers who are openly gay. As an atheist with issues, I have to say I love that shit.

  Susan smiled, genuinely pleased to be asked. “No, I’m fine, really,” she said. “I’m enjoying it. It’s a little hard sometimes, because I’m trying to do a lot of ambitious things on no money. But it’s lovely to be working with children. They’re so open-minded and spontaneous. And you’d be amazed how many children’s authors will do readings for the fun of it. We had Antony Johnston in last week. He wrote the graphic-novel version of Stormbreaker. And he was wonderful. Very funny and very… whatever the opposite of precious is. Very matter-of-fact about what he does. We got the biggest audience we’ve ever had.”

  “Stormbreaker being?” I prompted, feeling a little lost.

  “It’s one of the best-selling children’s books of the last decade, Felix,” Susan chided me schoolmarmishly.

  “Oh, that Stormbreaker,” I bluffed.

  “They made a movie of it.”

  “Not a patch on the book.”

  “You don’t need to work,” Juliet said to Susan, putting a broom handle through the spokes of my small talk.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “I like to work, Jules,” Susan said.

  Juliet met that statement with a cold deadpan. “Why?”

  Susan didn’t seem very happy with the question. Generally, anything that looked like an argument looming in the distance made her run for cover, but this time she stood her ground. “Because it’s part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you and warmed your bed, then—well, I’d be a very boring person. And then you’d want to see other people, and then you’d leave me. And then I’d kill myself.”

  Juliet considered. “Yes,” she said at last. “I can see the logic. I’ve never been romantically infatuated with anyone before, so it’s difficult right now to see how my feelings for you could change. But there’s plenty of evidence from human relationships, so you’re probably right. Go on.”