Dead Men's s Boots

she’d already sustained: the loup-garou 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 agonising static. I used those precious seconds to shift my balance and slam both 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 it was suddenly heading my way again as though I’d never landed a finger on it. I knew the punch wouldn’t do much damage, but I’d had better hopes for my makeshift ward. I guess 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.

The loup-garou, claws raised to rend and tear, 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 would probably 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 once more. Really hard: this time it was seeing stars, and it was a few seconds 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 backwards 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 wish 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 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 you know 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 present, breathing and conscious: it was the man whose nose I’d broken.

‘So who have we been fighting?’ she asked.

I walked over to the guy, straddled him, bent down, 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 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 decided 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 leaned down and gave the guy I was still standing over 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 an even worse way 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 her 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 tell-tale 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 got when I’d looked at her on the plane was even stronger now: she looked like a watercolour picture of herself that had been rained on. She wasn’t strong enough yet to take what she’d just done in her stride.

‘Shall we move on?’ she murmured.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious, and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trouser pocket, threw it down on the ground and stamped it into shards.

‘It would be easier just to kill him,’ Juliet said, at my shoulder.

‘Why bother if there’s no need?’ I countered. ‘He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s Satanists are a lot more forgiving than the home-grown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.’

I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before. But either Juliet bought my reasoning or she couldn’t be bothered to have an argument about it. She appeared at my elbow a moment later and walked on past me at a fast clip.

‘You’re too sentimental,’ she snapped back over her shoulder.

‘I know. I’m all about puppy dogs and scented letters.’

We got back into our spavined car and I turned it around with difficulty. It was hard to control with two tyres out, and the grinding noise I was hearing was probably the front axle doing something it shouldn’t. But it stayed on the road, just about; and what the hell, it was all covered on the insurance.

We bumped and ground our way to the tiny hamlet of Caldwell, and out of it again on a road that made the previous dirt track look like a superhighway.

‘Someone told those guys we were coming,’ I said to Juliet.

‘I know.’

‘The same someone who put a tinkler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here: back in England.’

She nodded without answering. She was looking out of the window at the rolling fields, her expression distant and cold.