Dead Men's s Boots

’

‘Would you like a drink?’ asked Juliet, who knows 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 was still a little alien to her. Some concepts are 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 up on the rare occasions when she sustains any damage. ‘Yes. Of course. Do we have any disinfectant and bandages?R“d b fl17;

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: it 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 chord sequence hard enough 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 – and 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’ flat; 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 that 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 him to death just by calling him.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. ‘If one were can make that transition – from monad to gestalt – then presumably others can too.’

‘Presumably. Most of them – ow! – most of them don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,’ Susan said, looking up from her work. ‘But they’re nasty, ragged wounds. It would be really easy for them to get infected.’

I nodded. I’d been there and I wasn’t likely to forget. But at least my tetanus shots were up to date this time. ‘Go for it, Sue,’ I muttered, trying hard to dismiss the spectre of Larry Tallowhill from my thoughts.

As Susan moved from cleaning the wounds to dressing them, I told them both about what had happened at Nexus. Susan was pale by the time I’d finished, but Juliet seemed moved in a different way.

‘“h=""t hMoloch,’ she said. And she spat, very precisely, onto the floor. Without a word, Susan Book took a piece of toilet tissue and wiped up the mess.

‘Yeah. He told me he knew you. Asked me to pass on his best wishes – with a broad hint that he didn’t really mean it.’

‘He doesn’t,’ said Juliet, her teeth showing in a genteel snarl: she usually manages to rein herself in around Susan, who frightens easily, but clearly the mention of Moloch’s name had touched her at a level below the pretensions of civilisation. ‘I left my mark on him once, a long time ago. But it goes further than that. His kind and mine – we were old enemies, even before the great project.’

‘Before the what?’

Juliet seemed to remember herself.