Dead Men's s Boots

The sound was like a gunshot – sharp and clear and very, very loud.

Nothing else was clear, though. Suddenly, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.

Then, equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me, one-handed, up close to her own lithe, unyielding body.

It was somewhere I often fantasised about being, but the agonising pain in my back and shoulders and the vice-like grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.

‘You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.’

This time the silence all around us was real: everyone frozen in unnatural, off balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement.

I struggled to speak and managed to choke out a few words.

‘We – going Dutch – this time?’

With a wince of disgust she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. Then, after a few seconds more of just enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and picked myself up.

For a second I thought I was going to black out: the wound in my shoulder, given to me by the loup-garou at the Nexus lab, felt as though it had been torn open when I fell, and the whole of my right side was on fire.

Nobody approached me: they just watched, expectantly, with the rapt anticipation of people ³tioe owho’ve just called the cops and are keen to see what happens when they arrive. I threw down a couple of twenties for the meal, nodded my thanks to the waitress and limped out of the door.

The Cobalt made it all the way back to Birmingham, raising sparks from the asphalt for the last ten miles or so: I was amazed not to be pulled over on the way, but by the time I climbed out of the car in the airport car park I’d realised why that was. Juliet sucks in people’s gazes and holds them so completely that nobody in the Golden Coffee House had registered me at all.