Dead Men's Boots (35 page)

“I don’t have the faintest idea. But the battery’s flat, in any case.”

“Fine.” Nicky gave it up, getting to his feet and shoving away the untouched wine away with a disgruntled air. “So you get
yourself a stack of dimes and call me. I know you don’t travel much, so I probably ought to make it clear that dimes are what
Americans use for currency. Have a nice flight, the both of you. I’ll see you when I see you.” He was about to walk away but
then turned and held out his hand, palm up. I almost shook it, misinterpreting the gesture, but he clicked his tongue impatiently.
“The bullet casing. You go through the metal detector with that in your pocket, there could be all kinds of humorous misunderstandings.”

I gave it back to him. “Thanks for everything, Nicky.”

“You’re more than welcome.” There was something in his tone, in his face, that I couldn’t read. “You want to pay me back,
then keep me in the loop. I want to see how this comes out. By the way, someone else knows you’re coming.” He threw that out
with carefully measured casualness, playing for the double take.

“What? What do you mean, Nicky?”

“When I got your names off the airport data system, there was a nice little trip wire set up there. I saw it because I was
coming in on a machine code level.”

“A trip wire?”

“Yeah. Like, a relay. So if your name comes up on any flight, someone gets told.”

“My name? Or Juliet’s?”

“Just yours, Castor. Anyone wants to know a demon’s whereabouts, they only have to stick their nose into the wind.”

He walked away without waiting for an answer. “I hurt his feelings?” Juliet asked. She wasn’t contrite; she was asking for
the sake of information. Something to add to her database of human foibles.

“You shoved his face in his own mortality,” I said. “Nobody likes that much.”

“He’s already dead.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier to live with.”

A few moments later, the tannoy told us that our flight was ready to board at gate 17. I just about had time to finish my
whiskey. When we left, Nicky’s wine remained on the table behind us, untouched.

In the departure lounge, Juliet stood at the window and watched the planes taking off. She seemed fascinated, and it made
her oblivious to the covetous stares she was collecting from the male passengers sitting around her. I hadn’t thought about
it much, but this was her first flight.

Joining her at the window, I told her about some of the side effects she could expect to encounter. She wasn’t troubled about
the changes in pressure and what they might do to her ears. “I’ll adjust” was all she said. She seemed to be looking forward
to the experience.

We boarded at the tail end of the line because Juliet preferred not to join the crush until the last moment. Our seats were
forward of the toilets at the very back of the cabin, in what once would have been the smoking seats. Explaining the concept
of smoking seats to Juliet took us all the way through the safety lecture. She was amused at the fences and barricades that
humans had built around their pleasures, but then she was amused at the whole notion of deferred gratification. Demons, she
said, tended to work more in terms of reaching out and grabbing.

Well, anytime you feel the urge, I gallantly didn’t say.

She took an almost childlike interest in the takeoff, swapping seats with me so she could look out the window, and remaining
thoroughly engrossed right up until we were in the air.

But after that her mood changed. She seemed to withdraw into herself somehow, her expression becoming cold and remote. I checked
out the in-flight movies, none of which looked particularly exciting, and then looked around again. Juliet had her head bowed
and her eyes closed, and her hands were clasped—very tightly, it looked to me—in her lap.

“You okay?” I murmured.

“I’ll be fine,” Juliet answered tersely.

I left her to it while the cabin staff came around with complimentary beverages. I opted for coffee, bearing in mind the risks
of deep vein thrombosis, but hedged my bets to the extent of asking for a brandy to spike it with. Juliet shook her head when
the stewardess asked if she wanted a drink; she didn’t even look up. Was she nauseated? Could demons get travel sickness?

I waited awhile to see if she’d come out of it by herself. I didn’t want to irritate her by seeming too solicitous. But when
we’d been in the air for half an hour, her expression had become a rigid mask of suppressed suffering. Juliet wasn’t capable
of going pale, because she was already pale enough to make most albinos look ruddily healthy, but something had happened to
her complexion, too. It was as though the radiant white of her skin was losing some of its intensity, some of its definition.

As tactfully and neutrally as I could, I showed her the sick bag and explained its function.

“I’m not sick,” she said, her voice low and harsh.

“Okay,” I allowed. “But you’re not your cheeky, chirpy self. What’s the matter?”

She shook her head, but only a half an inch in either direction, so the movement was barely visible. “I don’t know.”

I wasn’t going to press it any further, bearing in mind how fiercely Juliet defended her privacy, but she spoke again after
a pause of almost a minute. “I feel—stretched,” she muttered. “Strained. As though—part of me is still down there. On the
ground.”

I could hear the tension in her voice and see it in the set of her shoulders. The whole of her body was clenched tight, like
a fist. The nails of her latticed fingers were digging into the backs of her hands.

“Maybe it’s a kind of travel sickness that only demons get,” I suggested tentatively. “If it is, you’ll probably get over
it soon. It’s just your body adjusting to the weird input—the cabin pressure and the motion of the plane.”

“Yes,” Juliet growled. “Most likely.”

But she didn’t get better. She got worse. Two hours out, I saw a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I could hear her breathing.
Both were alarming signs, because for all her scary sexiness, Juliet wears human flesh at a jaunty angle. She’s not human,
so a human body is only ever a disguise for her, or a craftily designed lure, like an anglerfish’s light. She doesn’t have
to breathe or sweat if she doesn’t want to. There are, of course, times when she wants to do both, but this seemed to be involuntary.

A little while later, when I looked at her again out of the corner of my eye, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she’d
either fallen asleep or passed out. At any rate, she’d slumped sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost
rested against my shoulder. She didn’t respond when I whispered her name.

And her sharp, sweet scent—the smell that, more than anything else, defined her in my mind—was gone. She smelled of nothing
except a faint, inorganic sourness, an almost chemical odor.

What was going on here? I turned over some possibilities in my mind. Maybe it was because demons were chthonic powers, linked
in some way to the earth itself—as though, in addition to the biosphere everyone knows about, there’s another meta-biosphere
that includes the fauna of hell. Maybe demons were like the children of Gaea in Greek mythology, who were invincible as long
as they were standing on terra firma, but weak as kittens if you could manage to lever their feet off the ground.

Or maybe this was something completely different: an anti-demonic casting that we were flying into, like the wards and stay-nots
that people put up over their doors to stop the dead from crossing the threshold. Maybe the whole of the U.S.A. had wards
on it, and they were already operating even this far out and this far up.

Either way, there might be something I could do about it. I started to whistle under my breath, so faintly it was barely voiced
and wouldn’t carry beyond the row of seats we were in. The tune was Juliet, the sequence of notes and cadences that represented
her in my mind. No summoning, no binding, and certainly no banishing, just the bare description. Perhaps it might work as
a kind of anti-exorcism, to give her immune system a boost and help her fight against whatever was happening to her.

She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came around with our meals, I ate one-handed so as not to disturb
Juliet. It was an odd and unsettling experience. Normally, any part of me touching any part of Juliet would have been so agonizingly
arousing that I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else. After a few seconds, I’d have been physically shaking.
Now, though, it was as if something inside her had switched itself off, as if she were only a lifelike model of Juliet, and
if I tapped her skin, she’d ring hollow.

For the second half of the flight, I dozed, too—fitfully and intermittently, waking every so often to check the flight progress
screen on the back of the seat in front of me and discovering that we’d inched forward another couple of hundred miles. Juliet
didn’t stir, but her chest rose and fell arrhythmically. I let her be, figuring she was better off asleep than awake. Even
the changes in pressure as we started to descend didn’t wake her.

But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham, her eyes snapped open.

Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.

    
Sixteen

T
HE BIRMINGHAM IN ALABAMA TOOK ITS NAME AND inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal
into the heavy, humid, soupy sledgehammer air, I knew that comparison would turn out to be fanciful.

Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave
my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so
from the airport entrance. For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like
a frail octogenarian. I felt light-headed myself. It was midafternoon here, the air hot and heavy with the day’s freight of
sweat and tears.

Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“No,” she said, her voice faint. “I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground. But—it’s taking me a while
to get my strength back.”

“You think it’s something to do with flying, then?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then—your species left the ground only very recently.
Perhaps—I’m the first of the powers to try it out.”

“What about demons with big, leathery bat wings?”

Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’d ever seen. “They fly low,” she muttered.

“You want to find a motel and lie down for a while?”

That got a faint rise out of her, at least. “What a great idea. And you’d watch over me while I slept?”

“Like a mother hen.”

“Just drive, Castor. I’ll be fine.”

Brokenshire is southwest of Birmingham, out toward Tuscaloosa. We found our way out of a maze of crisscrossing sliproads onto
Interstate 59 and headed down through the heart of the city. The skyline of Birmingham’s financial district floated off my
left shoulder on a haze of dawn mist, the inaccessible towers of a distant Camelot. Nearer at hand, we drove past derelict
factories with eyeless windows and weeds growing taller than man height across the endless, deserted aprons of their parking
lots. Most cities have at least two faces. I was seeing both the Magic City and the ashes from which it periodically got to
be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find this time out.

South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware where the one ended and the other began. After a couple of hours’
driving, with Juliet awake but silent and unmoving beside me, we turned off the interstate and then off the state highway
onto the back roads, rapidly exchanging cityscape for something a lot more rural and homespun. The houses we were passing
were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two stories with burnished
banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun; others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function
as garages in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets used or thrown away. In one yard, a huge black
dog tethered to a post barked at us and ran around in crazy circles as we passed. A man who looked like the male half of Grant
Wood’s
American Gothic
couple stood with a pair of secateurs in his hands and—although he had a lot more self-possession than the dog—he, too, kept
us in sight until he faded into the distance in the rearview mirror.