Dead Men's s Boots

It was an odd and unsettling experience. Normally any part of me touching any part of Juliet would have been so agonisingly arousing that I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else. After a few seconds I’d have been physically shaking. Now, though, it was as though something inside her had switched itself off: as though she was only a lifelike model of Juliet, and if I tapped her skin she’d ring hollow.

For the second half of the flight I dozed too – fitfully and intermittently, waking every so often to check the flight-progress screen on the back of the seat in front of me and discover that we’d inched forward another couple of hundred miles. Juliet didn’t stir, but her chest rose and fell arrhythmically. I let her be, figuring that she was probably better off asleep than awake. Even the changes in pressure as we started to descend didn’t wake her.

But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham her eyes snapped open.

Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.

16

The Birmingham in Alabama took its name and inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal into the heavy, humid, soupy, sledgehammer air I knew that comparison was going to turn out to be fanciful.

Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so that all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so from the airport entrance. For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like a frail octogenarian. I felt a little light-headed myself: it was mid-afternoon here, the hot air thick and heavy with the day’s freight of sweat and tears.

Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, her voice faint. ‘I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground. But – it’s taking me a while to get my strength back.’

‘You think it’s something to do with flying, then?’ I asked.

She nodded slowly. ‘It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then, your species only left the ground very recently. Perhaps – I’m the first of the powers to try it out.’

‘What about demons with big leathery bat wings?’

Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’ve ever seen. ‘They fly low,’ she muttered.

‘You want to find a motel and lie down for a while?’

That got a faint rise out of her, at least. ‘What a great idea. And you’d watchžl a over me while I slept?’

‘Like a mother hen.’

‘Just drive, Castor. I’ll be fine.’

Brokenshire is south-west of Birmingham, out towards Tuscaloosa. We found our way out of a maze of crisscrossing sliproads onto Interstate 59, and headed down through the heart of the city. The skyline of Birmingham’s financial district floated off my left shoulder on a haze of dawn mist, the inaccessible towers of a distant Camelot: nearer at hand we drove past derelict factories with eyeless windows and weeds growing taller than man-height across the endless deserted aprons of their parking lots. Most cities have at least two faces: I was seeing both the Magic City and the ashes from which it periodically gets to be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find out this time.

South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware of where the one ended and the other began. After a couple of hours’ driving, with Juliet awake but silent and unmoving beside me, we turned off the interstate and then off the state highway onto the back roads, rapidly exchanging cityscape for something a lot more rural and homespun. The houses we were passing now were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two storeys with burnished banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun: others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function as garages do in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets either used or thrown away. In a yard, a huge black dog tethered to a post barked at us and ran around in crazy circles as we passed. A man who looked like the male half of Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple stood with a pair of secateurs in his hands and – although he had a lot more self-possession than the dog – he too kept us in sight until he faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

Tiny townships alternated with vast stretches of open farmland and the occasional patch of forest. There was a lot less traffic on the roads here, so I was able to give the Cobalt her head. I was also able to positively identify the car that was following us.