Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “That would have been my second guess,” he said. “But of course, if I’d met you in the field, I wouldn’t have lived long enough for a second guess. So—it’s lucky for me I didn’t, isn’t it? Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  Juliet and I headed for the door, but as we were about to leave I remembered something he’d said that I wanted to follow up on. I turned on the threshold, Columbo-style, and looked back at him. He was already back at his keyboard, but he paused with his fingers poised and waited for me to speak.

  “Mr. Mallisham,” I said, “when you mentioned Paul Sumner just now, you talked about speaking ill of the dead. How long ago did he pass on?”

  “Couple of years back,” Mallisham said, “to the best of my recollection. Why? Were you hoping to look him up while you were here?”

  “It was a possibility,” I said. “Now it isn’t.”

  Which was true as far as it went, but it was a different impossibility that I was thinking of. Jan Hunter had said Sumner called her up in January, under two months ago, and that conversation was what had started her off on asking questions about Myriam Kale—had made her approach me and enlist me in this bizarre search.

  One more open grave to go with all the rest? Or something else?

  As Juliet and I walked back out into the sunshine and the heavy air, I imagined puppet strings dangling down out of the clouds, attached to my arms and legs. If I found out who was pulling on those strings, I was going to wrap them around his throat in a lover’s knot and pull it tight.

  Seventeen

  THE SEAFORTH FARM WAS SEVENTEEN MILES OUT OF town, but they were country miles, and I was tired. Jouncing around on the dirt tracks, our progress punctuated by potholes and thick roots, I brooded on what Mallisham had told us. On the one hand, if Myriam Kale was a psychotic serial killer rather than a paid enforcer who carried out bespoke murders for a living, that might explain the terrible strength of purpose that would be needed to keep her from sailing on down the river of eternity—to bring her back out of the grave forty years after she died so that she could carry on her interrupted killing spree. But on the other hand, it seemed to weaken Kale’s connection to the Chicago Mob, and therefore to make her even more of a pickle in John Gittings’s fruit salad.

  “I’m not figuring this,” I confessed to Juliet, who hadn’t said a word all this time. “There’s something we’re still missing, and it has to be something big.”

  “More deaths,” she mused.

  “Say what?”

  “More deaths,” she repeated. “Myriam Kale’s father. Her brothers. Paul Sumner. Everyone who knew her firsthand and could have told us anything about her.”

  “Not everyone,” I pointed out. “There’s still Ruth.”

  Juliet nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” she allowed. “There’s still Ruth. Perhaps we ought to be asking why—”

  Whatever the next word was going to be, it was lost as something rammed us hard from behind. The Cobalt bucked and bounced like a startled horse, and metal ground loudly against metal.

  “Shit!” I exploded, fighting the car back under control as the back end tried to slew off the road. My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. The gray van filled it, which meant it was already accelerating toward us for a second pass. There was no room on this narrow track to swerve aside, and no way we’d hold together if we left the road and tried our luck among the trees—too many rope-thick roots, too many leaf-camouflaged pits and troughs.

  I did the only thing I could do, flooring the accelerator and jumping away from the van as we put on speed. But they were already closing the distance again, and there wasn’t a scratch on those black bull bars from where they’d rammed us the first time. Mass and momentum and position were all on their side; they could run us off the road and not feel it. The tinted windows didn’t allow me to see who was driving, but whoever he was, I cursed his name and his Ray-Bans.

  Juliet was looking over her shoulder, too. “We should stop and deal with them,” she said with an amazing degree of calm.

  “Great,” I growled, weaving from side to side on the road in the hope of presenting a slightly less easy target. “The only problem with that idea is that if we stop now, they’ll ram us into the side of a tree, and we’ll fold like a concertina.”

  Juliet gave me a slightly puzzled look. “Like a what?” she said.

  “A concertina. Musical instrument. Makes sound by drawing air in through a bellows and then pumping it out through a— Shit, can I explain later?”

  “Yes,” said Juliet, just as the van caught up with us again. There was another shuddering impact, and our back end actually left the road for a couple of moments, then smacked down again hard enough to rattle my teeth inside my skull. I rode it out, slightly better this time because I’d seen it coming, but a stench of burning rubber reached my nostrils. I had no idea what that meant. My best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tires had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably blow at least one of them.

  But Juliet was putting down her window with as little haste as if she wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as the belt reeled itself back into the holder. “Keep driving,” she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at 130 miles an hour.

  I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: The van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen. Instead, she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatterproof glass as though she were delivering an oversize baby.

  She dumped him under the wheels of the van, and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line. He died without ever knowing what had hit him. The van started to veer left, losing speed now that there was no one to lean on the gas, but still with a terrific amount of momentum to burn off and nowhere to spend it.

  There was a thunder-crack sound that was repeated two more times. Juliet pivoted on one arm as someone moved inside the van, gun raised to fire again. If Juliet had been hit, she didn’t show any sign of being hurt. The van’s side ground against the thick trunk of a mature tree and ricocheted away across the narrow track, slewing more violently and starting to lean over sideways at a steeper and steeper angle. Juliet swarmed up onto the roof, rode the movement with unconscious grace, and was already jumping off as the van’s side smacked down into the dirt and it bounced end over end.

  I hit my own brakes, aware that I should have been watching the road ahead of me instead of what was coming up behind. There were no other cars in sight, but I took a broad bend way too fast and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road with a hand-brake turn that would have been elegant and accomplished if I hadn’t blown out both of the driver-side tires in the process.

  It had all happened so fast that the echoes of the van’s crashing fall were still dying away as I leaped out of the car. The trees hid it from my sight for a couple of seconds, though, and by the time I rounded the bend, the action had moved on a little.

  Juliet was down in the road, and the surviving occupants of the van were crawling out as best they could through doors and windows. One of them—judging by the gun in his hand, he must have been the guy who’d been blazing away at Juliet from inside the van—raised his arm to shoot her at point-blank range. She ducked under the bullet and pirouetted so fast she was a blur. The roundhouse kick that caught him high up in the chest must have staved in half his ribs. He folded up, fell, and didn’t move again af
ter that.

  That left three: two men and the woman, whom I saw now for the first time. She was a petite, washed-out little thing dressed in shades of beige, streaked with vivid red here and there because she’d just struggled through a shattered window and hauled herself to her feet in time to watch Juliet dispatching her colleague only a few feet away. Incongruously, she was barefoot. Maybe that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.

  The two guys were dressed in finest mafioso chic, but the black suits and wraparound shades looked less menacing given how the situation had spun out of their control. One of them was down on his hands and knees, crawling away from the van toward the undergrowth in desperate, indefatigable slo-mo. The other stood facing Juliet irresolutely, fists clenched but not knowing what to do. She took a step toward him, opening her arms as if to embrace him. He staggered back, groping belatedly at his waist for some weapon he carried there.

  That was when the woman struck. She was only waiting for Juliet to be broadside on to her. Now she moved in a staccato blur, slamming the heel of one hand into Juliet’s left temple and then, as Juliet turned to acknowledge her, following up with a raking slash from the other hand. Juliet’s head snapped to the side, and blood sprayed up into the still, sun-speckled air.

  The woman was already changing, had already changed, more like a stiletto blade snicking out of its sheath than like the slow, camera-friendly metamorphoses of horror movies. She seemed to stand up taller as her torso narrowed and elongated. At the same time, her elbows and her knees bent and locked into a new configuration that a human being wouldn’t have been able to achieve without ripping a dozen bones out of their sockets. Hairs as thick as porcupine spines bristled on her flesh, like a cat’s hairs standing up when it’s making a squalling, spitting last stand.

  Juliet struck out at the loup-garou, but she was blinded by her own blood, and the sleek, monstrous thing leaped over the wildly hazarded punch to land on Juliet’s shoulders. Its hands, long and slender now and ending in two bristling thickets of unfeasibly long claws, flashed in and out, raking at Juliet’s face. Another jump and it was away before her opponent could get a proper grip on it. Juliet staggered like a drunk as the loup-garou landed foursquare in the dust and turned for another pass.

  By now I was racing hell for leather toward them. There was no time to think it through. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a handful of something from the bushes to my left, and tore it free as I ran. “Benedic, domine meus,” I panted under my breath, “hunc florem, et noli oblivisci—” Coming from me, it was bullshit, but it would have to do.

  The loup-garou went low this time, diving under Juliet’s flailing guard and laying open her stomach with a scything kick from one backward-slashing foot. I was almost there, and all I had to do was to lay my loaded foliage on the loup-garou before it turned and saw me coming.

  The surviving guy, whose existence I’d completely forgotten, tackled me from the side and sent me sprawling, coming down on top of me. The force of the impact knocked a lot of the wind out of me, and before I could get it back, I felt his fingers closing on my windpipe. His flushed, sweating face glared down into mine, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth. I couldn’t get my right hand up to prize his fingers loose; the injury to my shoulder had left the entire arm too weak and stiff to give me any purchase. But my left hand—the one that was full of greenery—was in full working order, and since he’d obligingly come in so close, I threw it around his neck, hugged him closer still, and butted him in the face with nose-flattening force. He sagged, and I rolled again so he was under me. I kneed him in the balls en passant to make sure he didn’t get up anytime soon. I scrambled free and managed to get upright again, leaving him wrapped around his pain.

  Juliet was down on one knee, her face a mask of blood but her guard still up despite the terrible damage she’d already sustained. The loupgarou was dancing around her, looking for an opening. It danced right into my open arms, and I nailed it with the flowering branch right in the kisser.

  “Hoc fugere,” I snarled.

  The beast jackknifed like a sideswiped truck, its head snapping back, its eyes wide but unseeing. A ripple of pain passed through it, and its feet found no purchase for a second or two as its shorted-out nerve endings popped and fizzed with agonizing static. I used those precious seconds to shift my balance and slam both of my fists into its throat.

  For all its wiry strength, it didn’t weigh all that much, and the effect was gratifying. It hit the ground hard at an oblique angle, tumbling and rolling in a cloud of dust across the full width of the dirt track.

  My sense of triumph was short-lived, though, because it touched down on all four feet like a cat and was suddenly heading my way again as though I’d never landed a finger on it. I’d known the punch wouldn’t do much damage, but I’d had better hopes for my makeshift ward. I guessed its lack of efficacy had something to do with my lack of faith. A Christian blessing spoken by an atheist isn’t likely to hit as hard as one spoken by the archbishop of wherever the fuck.

  Claws raised to rend and tear, the loup-garou launched itself into the air with a miawling scream that rooted me to the spot. If it had landed where it was aiming for, it probably would have excavated half my internal organs in a single blood-boltered moment. But Juliet plucked it out of the air and used its own momentum to slam it hard into the dirt again. Really hard. This time it was seeing stars, and a few seconds passed before it moved again. By that time, Juliet was kneeling beside it. She took the loup-garou in a tight embrace as it scrambled up and slowly, almost lovingly, bent it backward until its spine broke. It slid to the ground, its head twitching feebly, its body terribly still. Juliet raised one stilettoed foot, and I looked away. I just wished I’d thought to slam my hands over my ears, too, because the sound of a skull giving way under pressure is one that’s kind of hard to forget once you’ve heard it.

  “Bitch took me by surprise,” Juliet growled, wiping blood away from her eyes—actually from her eye, because the other socket was empty. There was blood bubbling at her lips, too, and pretty much everywhere else. Her right shoulder was laid open to the bone. She walked across to the edge of the track and lowered herself carefully down onto a stump. “That was a neat trick with the stay-not,” she muttered.

  I looked at the ragged clump of greenery I was still clutching in my left hand. I opened my fingers and let it fall. “I got lucky,” I said. “General rule is that anything that’s flowering will do the job, but some herbs work better than others. I never did get the hang of sympathetic magic.”

  Hand clasped to her empty eye socket, Juliet flicked a meaningful glance at the only one of our erstwhile opponents who was both breathing and conscious. It was the man whose nose I’d broken.

  “So who have we been fighting?” Juliet asked.

  I walked over to the guy, knelt astride his chest, got a double handful of his lapels, and hauled him up onto his knees. He was in a lot of pain, and his eyes took a few seconds to get focused on me.

  “Two words,” I spat. “Who? Why? And make it convincing, or I’ll feed you to the succubus.”

  “S-Sate—” he gurgled. “Sate—”

  “Not getting it. Try harder.”

  “Satanist Church—of the—of the Amer—”

  “Fuck!” I let him fall, and he hit the dirt again. “You’re putting me on! Juliet, these guys are—”

  “I heard.” Her voice sounded strained. “Don’t look around, Castor. I’m changing.”

  Once she’d said that, I had to fight the urge to sneak a sly peek. The van’s side mirror had popped out when it went over and was lying in the roadway at my feet. All I had to do was lean forward and look down. But the indelible sound of that splintering skull was still reverberating inside my head. I didn’t want an indelible sight to go with it.

  The Satanist Church of the Americas. So these guys were nothing to do with Myriam Kale or our current fact-finding mission. They were Anton Fanke’s boys and girls, another contingent of
the same bunch of arseholes I’d rumbled with in West London the year before, when I was looking for the ghost of Abbie Torrington. They must have been following us all the way from the airport. But before that?

  I gave the guy I was sitting on another shake. “You put a trace on my passport?” I demanded. “That’s how you knew I was coming?”

  He gave a twitch that looked as though it might have started out as an attempt to shake his head. “Told us,” he slurred. His eyes were rolling on different orbits. He was probably in a worse way even than he looked.

  “Who told you?”

  “Friend. Friendly interest. Told us when. Where.”

  “Give me a name,” I demanded.

  “Don’t—have—”

  “Give me a name or I’ll throw you to the succubus and let her finish you off.”

  He whimpered brokenly. “A-Ash! Said his name—was Ash!”

  “Someone you’ve used before?”

  Shake.

  “Just a call out of the blue? Word to the wise?”

  Nod.

  “You can turn around now,” Juliet said quietly from right behind me. I let the guy drop again, and he twisted away in terror just from the sound of her voice, but he was too weak to move very far.

  I stood and looked Juliet up and down. She shot me a look as if challenging me to say something, so I bit back whatever profanity had come to my lips.

  She’d done a good job, but it clearly hadn’t come easy. Her eye was back in place in its socket, and through her ripped shirt, I could see that her shoulder was whole again: no telltale glint of bare bone. But she held herself stiffly, suggesting that she was still in pain, and she hadn’t healed the rents in her clothes or removed the bloodstains. And that sense of fading I’d gotten when I looked at her on the plane was even stronger now. She looked like a watercolor picture of herself that had gotten rained on. She hadn’t been strong enough yet to take in stride what she’d just done.