Dead Men's Boots (39 page)

Claws raised to rend and tear, the loup-garou 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 probably would 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 again. Really hard. This
time it was seeing stars, and a few seconds passed 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 backward 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 wished 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 down 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 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
both breathing and conscious. It was the man whose nose I’d broken.

“So who have we been fighting?” Juliet asked.

I walked over to the guy, knelt astride his chest, 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’d 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 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 gave the guy I was sitting on 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 a worse way even 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 Juliet 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 telltale 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 gotten when I looked at her on the plane was even stronger now. She looked like a watercolor picture of herself that had
gotten rained on. She hadn’t been strong enough yet to take in stride what she’d just done.

“Shall we move on?” she murmured.

“Sure,” I said. “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 trousers, threw it down on the ground, and stamped it into
shards.

“It would be easier 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 homegrown 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 tires 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 tickler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here, back in England.”

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

The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle
of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun-bleached sacking protruded like
a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time. But catching a glimpse of the farmhouse through a gap in the foliage,
I wrestled the uncooperative car off the road and parked it a few yards away from an iron cattle gate whose white paint was
two thirds flaked away.

“This must be the place,” I said. “At least there’s sod all else out here. Want to go take a look?”

Juliet glanced at me, her expression suggesting that wasn’t a question in need of an answer. We got out and approached the
gate. The heavy chain and rusting padlock made it clear that the gate wasn’t in daily use. Juliet climbed over without preamble,
and I followed more slowly, leaning out past the overgrown hedge to get a better look at the house.

It was in as bad a state of repair as the gate, the wood of the boards warped and dry, the shingled roof settled into a lazy
concave bowl. An old mattress lay flopped over the porch rail like a heaving drunk, next to a wooden swing that looked as
though it had seen better centuries. Hard to believe that anyone still lived here.

It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds. Somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet
was already striding ahead, so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea, in theory, but Juliet
seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly
narrow for a grown woman. I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch, I was torn and disheveled and
in a fairly uneven temper.

There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned 360 degrees, surveying the devastation.
From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky, along with the farmhouse, into the
merry, merry land of Oz.

I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality
that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left and turned.

It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come
into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost
as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed
through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots. Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that
one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and
she had a frown deeply etched into her face.

“Who are you people?” she said. Her voice had the broadest southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet
that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.

“Miss Seaforth?” I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could. I held out my hand. “My name is Felix Castor,
and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about
your sister.”

I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down abruptly on the porch swing, making it shudder and
creak.

“Oh Lord,” she said, staring at me as though I were a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. “Oh…” Words
seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.

Juliet went and sat down next to her. “We didn’t mean to startle you,” she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and
I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave
her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her eyes off me. “We’ve come from London,” Juliet
said. “A man was murdered there, in the way your sister, Myriam, used to murder people. That’s why we’ve come.”

Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s
gentle assistance, got to her feet again. She blinked three or four times. Probably not blinking away tears, but that was
what it looked like.

“I haven’t seen my sister since she died,” she said. In other circumstances, it might have seemed an odd thing to announce,
but as it was, I was grateful to have that clarified.

“We have,” Juliet said. “We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.” She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and
it was just as well, because at that point Ruth buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders
to support her until the moment passed.

“You saw her?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “We did. She—looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her all the
same.”

Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence, she said, “Would you like some
cookies and lemonade?”

The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged, an odd combination that, along with the fact that
there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting
the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy. The floorboards were warped and shrunken,
as they were out on the porch, but a peach-colored rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the
room, where it didn’t stretch. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite
and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was
an old framed photograph of a family—presumably the Seaforths—posed awkwardly for a cameraman they clearly didn’t know and
who had done nothing to put them at their ease.