Dead Men's s Boots

’

‘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. ‘Nothing,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘I was remembering things that happened before you were born. Let’s just say that his kin are cats, and mine are dogs. Or vice versa. Where the succubi and incubi settle and build their houses, the shedim can’t live.

He’d love to hurt me, if he thought he could. But what is he doing on Reth Adoma?’

‘You know,’ I groused, ‘if you keep doing this I’m going to ask for a simultaneous translation. What is he doing where?’

‘On Earth. Among the living. There’s nothing he can eat here. He’ll starve if he stays too long.’

‘He looked like he was halfway there already,’ I agreed. ‘At least – that’s how he looked when I first met him, a few days ago.

Today he looked a fair bit sleeker. And he was strong enough to make this loup-garou run for cover.’

Juliet frowned, her eyes slightly unfocused as she followed a train of thought she didn’t bother to voice. To be honest, I didn’t want her to: it’s hard to think of Hell as a place, and even harder to think of her walking there. It has a whiff of bad Bible stories and undigested metaphors.

‘This is bigger than we thought,’ she said, looking at me again.