Dead Men's s Boots

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. And 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 tom cat. 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 and 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.

And 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, agonising rasp I’d heard when I’d 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 otherwise have had. ‘Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.’

He walked across to me and looked 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 agonisingly bruised – and limp off 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 collectable. 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 for a moment 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 changed her mind and shut it again. She just 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 knows 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 was still a little alien to her. Some concepts are 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 up 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: it 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 chord sequence hard enough 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 – and 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.’