Dead Men's Boots (55 page)

“Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.”

I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions. “Revenge?” I ventured.

She seemed genuinely surprised. “For Coldwood?”

“Yeah.”

A long pause.

“I don’t think so,” said Juliet. “This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care when
we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.”

I let out a long breath. “Well, okay… I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my
end, it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them, and they’re not going to let it drop.”
I hesitated. “As for you, what you stand to gain, obviously, is—from a global perspective—when all’s said and done—”

“You get to stay with me,” said Susan from the doorway.

We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.

“Sue,” Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. “Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.”

Susan came in, closed the door behind her, and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen
there before. She cast one nervous glance at the bound figure on the bed, then she directed her full attention at Juliet.

“You brought an escaped murderer into my house, Jules,” she said in a tone that had something of a taut string about it. “And
I let you do it because I thought you wouldn’t have done it unless you had to. But if it’s just because she’s a woman who
kills men and that used to be your—your
thing,
too, then that’s not good enough. And Felix is right about one thing. If you don’t fix this, you’ll have to go away. I’ll
lose you. I’m not going to lose you because of something like this.”

Juliet couldn’t have been more nonplussed if a cavalcade of tap-dancing mice had sung the words at her. She blinked, visibly
thinking her way around the situation. “If I have to leave,” she said, “I’ll come back to you. They can’t keep me away.”

The taut string snapped.

“They can send you home!” Susan shouted, advancing with her hands clenched into fists as though she were going to hit Juliet.
She was crying again, but she didn’t wipe away the tears on her cheeks or even seem to notice them; she was incandescent enough
that I was surprised they didn’t evaporate. “They can trap you and send you back down to hell, no matter how strong you are.
You’d be down there in the dark, and you’d have to wait until someone called you back up again. Except that they’d call you
as a slave, the way you were before. Or else I’d have to find a way to summon you up myself, and then what? Then you’d be
my
slave! We’d—we wouldn’t be us anymore. We’d be a stupid, sick joke. It’s got to stop, Jules. You’ve got to stop it, and then
you’ve got to explain and say you’re sorry.”

From about halfway through this speech, she’d been screaming the words rather than yelling them. Her fists were trembling
like tuning forks. Juliet caught them in her hands, pushed them down to Susan’s sides, and then embraced her. Susan slumped
in her arms, all the fight abruptly gone from her.

“You’ve got to,” she mumbled almost inaudibly, her head pressed to Juliet’s breast. “Please. For me.”

Juliet stared at me over Susan’s head. She looked unhappy. No, more than that. She looked afraid—and it wasn’t of the Mount
Grace ghosts.

“Is that the plan, then?” she demanded, her face a somber deadpan. “We go to the crematorium. We break in. And I keep the
three of us alive long enough for you to play your tune and for Moloch to feast?”

I was a bit taken aback by how quickly the tide had turned. I realized, much to my own surprise, that I hadn’t been expecting
to win this one. “There’s a little more to it than that,” I said lamely, “but yeah, that’s the basic scheme.”

“It’s absurd. We don’t know their strength or their numbers.”

Juliet kissed Susan gently on the cheek, held on to her for a moment longer, and then set her to one side very firmly. Susan
took all this with great stoicism.

I delved into my pocket and brought out my ace in the hole. It was the torn fragment of notepaper that I’d found in John Gittings’s
pocket watch. When you looked at it, he really had gone out of his way to make sure I’d have everything I needed. In fact,
he’d been shrewder when his brain was disintegrating than he’d been at any time in his life before.

“John was there before us,” I said.

“Isn’t that why he died?”

“Yeah, but he left us some notes. It’s pretty vague on their strengths, but it drops some succulent hints about their weaknesses.”

“And you,” Juliet said, giving me a cold, hard stare. “You said this tune was hard to play—that it drains you. Do you think
you’ve got the energy to play it again tonight? Please don’t take this personally, but you look as though you’d have a hard
time blowing up a child’s balloon.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, but since I didn’t see any other choice, I shrugged the question off. “I’ll be fine,” I
said. “I always am on the night.”

Juliet’s expression didn’t change. “If you can’t do it,” she said, “you’d better tell me now. There’s no point in going into
a fight with a plan that can’t work.”

“All right,” I admitted. “Right now I don’t think I could do it. But it’s going to take us at least an hour to get over there.
I’m hoping that’ll give me the time I need to get match-fit again.”

She nodded. “We’ll see,” she said with grim promise.

I left the two of them alone for a minute or two to say their goodbyes. When Juliet came down from the bedroom, I shot her
a look of inquiry. She walked right past me, her face unreadable but her shoulders hunched in a tension I’d never seen in
her. Juliet normally uses her body language to draw people in; it’s second nature to her, because it’s part of the way she
feeds. For her to lose control of it, even around the edges, was a surprising and, in some ways, disturbing thing to see.

Moloch smiled as he saw us coming and gave Juliet an ironic bow. “The sister of Baphomet,” he grated. “I’m honored above all
of my kindred. Never would I have imagined my lowly station would permit—”

Juliet’s ringing smack knocked him back on his heels, his head thrown sideways by the force of the blow. “You should have
stayed in your lowly station,” she snarled, her gaze skewering him. “It’s grotesque to see you crawling on the face of the
earth. One word, Moloch. One word more will use up all that’s left of my slender fucking patience.”

A demon’s face isn’t that much harder to read than a human one. I could see in his narrowed eyes and tight smile that he’d
already thought of a cool comeback—and that he didn’t quite have the balls to try to deliver it.

“Are we good?” I asked, breaking the tense silence.

They both nodded unconvincingly.

“Then let’s go commit some atrocities.”

    
Twenty-four

W
HEN YOU’RE CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN, THE FIRST THING you do is set up a base camp. In our case, it was the building site at the
bottom of Ropery Street, right next door to the crematorium and facing it across a no-man’s-land of churned mud. Okay, there
was also a tall fence separating us from the landscaped grounds, but our line of sight was clear. Clear enough to see the
car headlights coming up the curve of the drive in twos and threes, the lights slowing and stopping and then winking out as
the drivers headed into the building. The inscription had begun, or else it would begin soon. Either way, we had all our enemies,
living and dead, in the same spot. Lucky us.

We stood close to the top of the tower of scaffolding that surrounded the shell of a building yet to be. Moloch and Juliet
stared intently into the darkness, which held no secrets from them. For my part, I couldn’t see a blind fucking thing. It
was dark of the moon, and the sky above us was a curdled mass of black on black. This high up, the wind was a constant barrage
of sucker punches. But the storm was holding off, maybe waiting for a more dramatic moment.

“There are armed men,” Juliet said. “A lot of them. Some of them at the gate, some in front of the doors. More of them are
taking up positions on the grounds. They seem to know what they’re doing. Two or three men in a group, each group in line
of sight of at least two others.”

“Hired security,” I said. “Probably black market, if they’re carrying guns.”

“They’re carrying rifles,” Moloch murmured. “They have guns in their belts. Also grenades.”

I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “It makes sense,” I said. “This is when our dead-guy mafia are at their weakest—individually
and as a group.”

“In what way?” Juliet demanded.

“They all need to tie up and gag their inner hostages again, so I’d guess at least some of their strength has to be taken
up in keeping a tight hold on the bodies they’re wearing. After the ritual, they’re okay for the next month. They’re also
vulnerable because they’re all here together. They know damn well that if anyone wants to take them out, this is the best
time to do it. Hence the paranoid security. We should be encouraged by it, really. It shows that they’re scared.”

“It also shows that they’re neither stupid nor blind,” Juliet pointed out. “We’d have a lot more chance of success if they
were both.”

I didn’t answer. I was looking down at the wooden planks of the scaffolding beneath my feet, which had shifted in the wind.
This was where Doug Hunter’s life had taken a turn for the worse, I now knew. I’d called Jan to check the hypothesis, but
I’d already known what her answer would be. This was the last place he’d worked, and on the day he sprained his ankle, he’d
walked next door to the crematorium to see if he could beg, borrow, or requisition a first-aid kit. And that was the last
thing he’d done as himself.

It felt like a bad omen to be launching our own attack from a place with a history like that. I wanted to get out of here
and make a start, because the sooner we made a start, the sooner the whole thing would be over.

But as I took a step toward the ladder, Juliet put out a hand and clamped it down on my shoulder, stopping me in my tracks.

“Castor,” she said. “There’s something you still need to do up here. You”—this was to Moloch—“go down and wait for us at the
bottom. We’ll join you in about five minutes.”

Moloch bared his teeth. “There shouldn’t be any secrets between allies,” he said. “Whatever you’ve got to say, we should all
hear.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Juliet told him. “As far as that goes, I’m sure your ears are keen enough to pick up everything
that goes on up here. But you don’t get to watch.”

Moloch said nothing. With visible reluctance, he put his feet on the ladder and started to descend.

I stared at Juliet. She stared back. The elevator in my stomach slipped its cables and plunged precipitately to the bottom
of its shaft.

“You’re still weak,” Juliet said.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice sounding slightly strangled and strained in my own ears. “I’ve been better.”

“You may not know this, Castor, but I can give as well as take.”

I just kept staring. I was rummaging in my head for words. There were no words left. “You can—”

“When I feed, I take the strength, the life, and the soul from the men I fuck. I started to do it to you once, so I’m sure
you remember.”

I nodded. Waking in the dark, sweat cold on my face and chest, heart hammering an overclocked suburban mambo, I remembered
most nights.

“I’m not going to make love with you. It would hurt Susan if she knew, and I prefer not to lie to her. But I
am
going to lend you some strength to work with. It might make the difference between you living and dying tonight.”

Two steps brought her up close to me, and her eyes were staring directly into mine. Point-blank. Point-singularity, her pupils
two black holes that dragged me in not against my will but using my will to fuel their own local gravity.

She put one hand on the back of my neck, drawing me close. Our lips met.

At least I assume they met. If hypnotherapy were guaranteed to help me to remember, I’d sign up for a course today and happily
pay whatever it cost up to and including my right arm. But while I can summon up without even trying every agonizing detail
of the night when Juliet tried to rape and devour me, the only thing I remember about that kiss is a sensation like the whole
of my body being melted, rendered like tallow, blasted into steam, and then falling like molten rain back into the same place
I’d been standing. I don’t even know how long it took; it wasn’t the sort of thing that had a time signature on it. It was
there, it was everywhere, and then it was over. Juliet was stepping away from me toward the ladder, and I was standing there
alone, each cell of my body separately and searingly aware of the cold night air touching it.

“That should be enough,” said Juliet’s voice from some unfathomable distance. “Use it wisely.”

With enormous reluctance, coming down from a height that was already fading out of my mind and leaving no traces, I turned
to follow her. A brittle heat filled me, and it was as dry as the air in a furnace. Otherwise, I might have cried.