Dead Men's s Boots

‘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 «blourpat 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 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 you know 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 present, breathing and conscious: it was the man whose nose I’d broken.

‘So who have we been fighting?’ she asked.

I walked over to the guy, straddled him, bent down, 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 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 decided 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 leaned down and gave the guy I was still standing over another shake. ‘You put a trace on my passport?’ I demanded.