Dead Men's Boots (31 page)

No dice. I managed to lever my upper body a few inches up off the ground, but then the claws tightened, sending bolts of agony
into my captive flesh, and hot stinking breath played over my face like a flameless blowtorch. I threw my head back, heedless
of concussion, and the jaws clashed above me close enough for me to hear the sound. Something warm and wet showered over my
face, but at least it wasn’t bits of me.

Out of options, running on pure instinct, I rammed my stick into the place where that mouth had to be and was rewarded with
another shuddering impact. No bellow of rage this time. It’s hard to make primal screams with a five-pound toothpick lodged
in your gullet. I kicked and flailed and pulled myself out from under, pulling myself off those clutching claws and trying
not to think how much of my own precious skin I was leaving there.

It wouldn’t stay down; I knew damn well it wouldn’t. I’d hurt it, and I’d given it something to think about besides me, but
this wasn’t a fight I could win—not without my whistle and a fair bit more lead time than the couple of seconds I probably
had.

My eyes were starting to adjust to the dark, at least a little, and I could see the crazy diagonal of the unhinged door up
ahead of me. I half ran, half staggered toward it. At the very least, if this bastard followed me, I’d be leading him away
from Smeet and giving her a fighting chance.

I made it out onto the landing, but my head was still reeling from the whack it had taken earlier, and I almost fell down
the stairwell before I could skid to a halt and orient myself. Down or up? No contest. If I went up, I’d be cornered as soon
as I ran out of stairs. At the bottom, there was the street and a slim but measurable chance of getting out of this.

What happened next was kind of a mixed blessing. The loup-garou came cannoning out of the door right behind me and hit me
squarely in the back with its full weight, sending me tumbling down the stairwell. I got to where I wanted to go a whole lot
faster. Unfortunately, it also meant that I reached the bottom in a sprawling heap, one arm twisted painfully under me. All
breath had been slammed out of my lungs on the second or third bounce, so all I could do was lie there, sucking in air in
a shuddering, drawn-out gasp.

By a happy chance, I fetched up on my back, looking the way I’d come, so I got to see the thing that was about to kill me
in the light from the street outside. Despite its impressive size, the loup-garou padded down the stairs with an incongruous
daintiness, slow at first but accelerating because the stairs were steep and built for two legs rather than four. It was sleek
and black—or maybe some dark shade that looked black in the inadequate light—and it had the basic shape of a panther: more
mass in the shoulders and forelegs than in the back, claws as long as the blades of Swiss army knives, and with a tendency
to carry its weight close to the ground. The head was more eclectic, though: The mouth was too wide, and studded with too
many different kinds of teeth, to be convincingly catlike. And the forehead was high, like a human forehead, like the dim
memory of a human face stirring behind the bestial shape.

For a second, in the near-dark, it reminded me of a face I’d seen before.

When it got halfway down the flight of stairs, it launched itself into the air in a graceful, almost lazy leap that would
land it right on top of me. Unable to muster enough strength to move, I tensed, balling my fists uselessly for a fight that
wasn’t going to happen. If the impact didn’t kill me, those claws would, and either way, I wouldn’t get to express an opinion
about it.

But the loup-garou’s leap ended prematurely as something came streaking in out of the night, jumped, and met it in midair.

The new something was a whole lot smaller. The loup-garou massed around four hundred pounds, and it had gravity on its side.
Logically, it should have kept on going, the interloper smacking uselessly into it and being brought down by its superior
weight and momentum.

Instead, the two of them seemed to hang impossibly in space, all that downward energy canceled out by some arcane counterforce;
then they both crashed together through the delicate balcony rails and came to the ground in a spitting, snarling heap five
yards away from me.

The newcomer was a man: long-limbed, lean, cadaverous, and dressed in a full-length coat that had looked 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. 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 tomcat. 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, 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.

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, agonizing
rasp I’d heard when I 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 have had otherwise.
“Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.” He walked across to me, looking
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 agonizingly bruised—and limp 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 collectible. 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 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 she changed her mind and shut it again. She 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 knew 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 were still a little alien to her. Some concepts were 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 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. I 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 hard enough chord sequence 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, then 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.”

I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half disgust and half fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed
before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ house; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home
from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone.
I would have bet the farm there was a cat lurking under the left luggage lockers at Victoria, too—that it had heard my conversation
with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first. I’d sentenced Chesney to death by calling him.