Dead Men's s Boots

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 just shook her head when the stewardess asked her if she wanted a drink: she didn’t even look up. Was she nauseous? Could demons get travel sickness?

I waited a while 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›siot b a rigid mask of suppressed suffering. Juliet isn’t capable of going pale, because she’s 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 usual cheeky, chirpy self. What’s the matter?’

She shook her head, but only 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 defends 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 over sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost rested against my shoulder. Then as I watched it tilted the rest of the way, smoothly and inexorably.

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 odour.

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 which 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 USA 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 that 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: give her immune system a little boost and help her to fight back against whatever was happening to her.

She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came round with our meals, I ate one-handed so as not to disturb Juliet.