by Mike Carey
What caused that communal swallowing of tonsils was the fact that Juliet was naked—and if that conjures up an image in your mind, forget it. She wasn’t naked like that. Oh, I suppose it was no more sensational a body than Helen of Troy’s, say. On a ship-launching scale, maybe a straight thousand, give or take. But with the raw stench of her pheromones supersaturating the air, she looked like every woman you ever loved or dreamed about loving, miraculously combined, miraculously open and willing, like a solid sign of God’s mercy.
Damjohn’s muscle boys were staring at her slack-jawed. Weasel-Face had a spreading puddle on the floor at his feet. The man to the left of me groaned in despair or spontaneous orgasm, and Rosa made a muffled, balking sound. But they had one advantage over me—Juliet wasn’t looking at them.
Her stare held me like a vice—the kind of vice you give way to in the dark behind a locked door, your hot blood ashamed and quickening. She advanced on me with the unhurried grace of a panther. Just for a minute, that predator’s stalk let me see through the veil of her scent and recognize her for what she was—the top carnivore in an ecosystem that offered no challenge to her, her long legs shaped for the chase, her exquisite curves only adaptive camouflage. There was a very faint music that I’d heard before, like wind chimes.
“Do him slowly,” said McClennan’s voice, strained but clear. “He’s fucking earned it.”
The men on either side of me stepped back in a hurry, and without their support, I crashed down instantly, agonizingly, to my knees. My head swiveled as I fell to keep my eyes locked on hers. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t even blink. Her terrible perfection flooded my mind, shattered any thoughts except fear and desire into random shards.
“Mortal man,” she growled deep in her throat. “You made me run. Made me bleed. I’ll make this good for you—make you so happy in your agony that your soul will never be free of me.”
Not like wind chimes. Like church bells, incongruously and ridiculously, like church bells ringing at the limit of hearing in an octave so high they must be rimed with permafrost. And now I thought I recognized it.
I closed my eyes. Both of them. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, like shoving two trucks backward up a ramp. My mind screamed in protest, the animal hindbrain wanting only to feast on the sight of Juliet until she’d done sucking out my marrow. With my eyes closed, a fraction of that mesmeric power was shut off. I listened to the sound, and I turned my head fractionally downward, toward it.
Juliet’s hand closed on my shoulder, her nails puncturing the skin. She squeezed, and I howled in pain—without, of course, making the slightest sound. My eyes snapped open again. I was staring at her left ankle, which was still encircled by the silver chain.
She was trying to haul me to my feet, her claws hooked into my shoulder right next to my throat. I fought back not against her strength—I couldn’t have resisted that for a second—but against the weakest link, which happened to be me. The flesh of my shoulder strained and then tore, and I screamed again—with the volume turned down to zero, but I’m sure it was music to Damjohn’s ears all the same. My right hand, which isn’t my strongest, groped and scrabbled on the floor for a moment or two, finding nothing except the sad remains of my flute. Then something cold and hard touched the heel of my hand, and my fingers closed around it. The handle of the bolt cutters.
Juliet bent from the waist and took hold again, her hands this time closing on either side of my head. Pinpricks of pain at temple, cheek, chin told me where her claws were embedded. I shut it out, shut her out, although ghost images of her still danced obscene tangos in my brain.
It was almost impossible to aim, to focus. My hand was a balloon sculpture, nerveless and fragile; it wouldn’t do what it was told. It wavered and wobbled, the lower jaw of the cutters finally catching on something at least, but I didn’t know what, and now she was pulling me upright again. If I struggled against her this time, my whole face would come off. In my head I uttered a prayer that didn’t even have words, and I squeezed the cutters closed. There was a slight but audible clack as the blades met.
Then I was lifted, Juliet raising me without effort to her own shoulder height, her hands cupping my head like a goalie about to punt the ball past the centerline. My feet flailed but found no purchase as she drew me close, her mouth open, her hypnotic pupils so wide she had no irises.
But her lips didn’t close over mine. She just held me there, dangling uselessly, an inch from my death and damnation and so much in her thrall now that I even felt slightly aggrieved that it had been postponed.
She was looking down, staring fixedly at the ground. No, at her own left foot. She was holding my head completely immobile, and my eyes couldn’t traverse that far, but I could see Damjohn and Gabe. They were also looking down, and a kind of sick horror spread in slow motion across their faces. Gabe’s first, because he had the summoning spell down word-perfect, and he knew exactly what he was looking at.
Juliet let me go, and by some supreme effort of will, I got my balance as I fell so that I only staggered back and slammed against the wall instead of taking yet another pratfall.
For a moment, the cabin was a frozen tableau. Damjohn, Gabe, Weasel-Face, the two anonymous heavies, even Rosa with her one good eye all were looking at Juliet, hushed, expectant, as if she was about to propose a toast. Her shoulders slightly bowed, Juliet flexed her ankle experimentally. The broken chain slid off and tinkled to the floor.
“H-hagios ischirus Paraclitus,” Gabe quavered without much conviction. “Alpha et omega, initium et finis . . .” Juliet swiveled from the hip, without undue haste but still moving almost too quickly to see, and kicked him in the stomach. He folded in on himself with a sound like water going down a partially blocked drain. From the floor, in a defensive crouch, I could hear him trying again to frame a word, without any breath left to force it out. Juliet stamped down on his neck, and it snapped audibly. It had all happened inside three seconds.
Both feet back on the ground, Juliet drew in a deep, lingering breath. For a moment, she closed those exquisite eyes; her face wore the sensual calm of someone who was about to enjoy themselves on a very deep, very visceral level. Then her eyes opened wide again; she flexed her long, elegant fingers once, twice, and turned to face Damjohn.
“Do as you’re told,” Damjohn snapped, pointing across at me. “Finish him off.” He knew damn well that this was a kite that wouldn’t fly, of course, but his whole life had consisted of outraging the natural order in various indefensible ways. You lose nothing by spinning the wheel. Except that this time he did. There was a sound like silk tearing, and he lost his look of contemptuous superiority, a surprising amount of blood, and what looked like a loop of his entrails. Again, Juliet didn’t even seem to have moved. She licked a trickle of blood from the heel of her hand and laughed a throaty, appreciative laugh as Damjohn fell heavily back onto the couch with a grunt of unhappy surprise.
There was a clattering of booted feet on planking as Weasel-Face Arnold tried to run. The other two guys drew a knife and a gun respectively, but Juliet walked through them with her arms flicking to left and right, and blood blossomed as they fell. Arnold was lucky enough to be looking the other way when she got to him. He was trying so hard to get the door open that he didn’t see her come, and his death as she smashed his face forward—into and through the bulkhead wall—must have been mercifully quick.
Then she turned back to stare at Damjohn. The expression on her face told me everything I needed to know. She hadn’t left him alive by carelessness or accident or whimsy, she was going to take her time with him. She even smiled in unholy anticipation.
With what little volition was left to me, I staggered over to Rosa, stumbled across her, and shielded her with my own body. I kept my own eyes firmly shut. It was one thing to be caught up in Juliet’s feeding and mating ritual, quite another to have to watch it. Damjohn’s whimpers and sobs went on for a very long time, until eventually they faded, Juliet’s sighs of satisfaction dro
wning them out.
When everything was silent again, I straightened up. Rosa’s one eye was staring up into mine, imploring, terrified. Slowly, without turning to look at Juliet, I started to untie Rosa’s gag. It wasn’t easy. Someone had gone to town on the knots, and I couldn’t get my fingertips between them. It didn’t help that I was so rigid with tension that I could barely make my hands move at all—or that the wound in my shoulder was sending irregular pulses of agony down my left arm, making my fingers spasm every few seconds.
The skin on my back was crawling, anticipating Juliet’s touch. I was expecting every second for her to take hold of me and turn me around, and since her tastes were catholic with a small “c” and polymorphously perverse, I was hoping to leave Rosa in a position to run while I was being devoured.
No such luck.
“Face me,” Juliet murmured.
With huge reluctance, I turned. She was standing exactly where Damjohn had been sprawled. The bodies of Gabe, Arnold, and the other two bully boys still lay where they’d fallen, but of Damjohn himself there was no sign.
“You set me free,” she said, her tone glacially cold.
I gestured toward the sigil on my chest, shrugged in mimed apology. My heart was tripping and stammering like a telegraph machine. She stared at the daubed pentagram as if she’d forgotten it until that moment. Then she drew her hand across in front of me—a single horizontal slash in the air—and McClennan’s chains of compulsion fell from me as if they’d never existed. I knew that at once, because suddenly I could hear my own harsh breathing.
“To bind and to loose,” Juliet said, and her face twisted now in almost physical disgust, “these are games that men play. And you dare to play them with me.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. All I could do was shrug again. Her power over me was undiminished, and it was still hard to think around the searing fact of her nakedness. She turned her attention to Rosa, who was staring at her in hypnotized terror. The gag was still in her mouth; I was only about halfway through untying it. She made an urgent sound around it, pleading with me or with Juliet or with God.
“What’s your purpose with this woman?” Juliet asked after a heavy silence.
I forced myself to speak. My voice came out as an unlovely croak. “I was going to untie her and then take her to visit her sister.”
Juliet considered this, her face a hard mask.
“The other bound one? Under the ground?”
“Yeah, her,” I agreed. “I wanted them to see each other again. Maybe say good-bye to each other. I was thinking that that would probably—”
Juliet’s snarl cut across my words. “I said that binding and loosing are men’s games. I didn’t say I was ignorant as to the rules of them. Do you think I’m a child, mortal man? Flesh puppet, would you patronize me?”
She was walking toward me as she spoke, one slow step at a time. Now she was right in front of me, and I was a rabbit in the headlight stare of her eyes. I bowed my head; just like before, I had to force myself. On one level, all I wanted to do was to look at her until I died of thirst or exhaustion or an overlabored heart.
Juliet leaned forward, brought her face up close to mine. “My mark is on you,” she growled in her throat. “I can whistle for your body or for your soul, and you’ll bring them to me and beg me to take them. You wear my chain, which can’t be broken.”
Without looking up, without meeting her gaze, I nodded. I stayed like that for a long time: three or four minutes, at least. The silence was unbroken, and her perfume was dissipating. When I couldn’t smell it anymore, when the last hint of it had faded from my lungs, I allowed myself a quick glance from under lowered lids. She was gone.
I exhaled shakily, only then realizing how long it had been since I’d drawn a proper breath. Finding that I could move again despite the extensive damage reports coming in from my neck, my back, my shoulder, my face, I turned to Rosa and made a second attempt at removing her gag.
It took another five minutes. When it was off at last and she was able to spit out the saliva-drenched wad of cloth that had been in her mouth, she let loose with what I’d guess was every swear word she knew. Fortunately for my modesty, I don’t speak a word of Russian. She might just as well have been saying her prayers.
I released her hands, which had been tied behind her back with blue nylon washing-line string, and her legs, which were attached to the front legs of the chair by about a hundred turns of duct tape. Her body was so racked with cramps that she could only stand with my help. Slowly, patiently, I walked her back and forth across the cabin as her circulation returned. Every few seconds, she let out a moan or a sob or another curse, and after a while, she had to sit down and rest her protesting muscles. I watched her in silence. I didn’t have a clue what to say to her. But after a while, she looked up at me with a frown that was frankly suspicious.
“Why she didn’t kill you?” Rosa demanded in a sullen murmur.
Fair question, but not one I felt in any mood to answer. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I think—if this makes any sense—it was because she felt something for you. You and Snezhna.” She started at the sound of her sister’s name, and her one good eye flared wide open, but she said nothing. “Maybe it was because she was in the same position you were in. You know how you were tied to that chair with rope and tape? And Snezhna was trapped in that room after she died by fear and unhappiness and worry about you? Well, the chain Juliet wore around her ankle was the same kind of deal. I think she might actually have killed me for setting her free—that was an insult almost as great as binding her in the first place. But she saw me trying to untie you. And she saw that I wanted to untie Snezhna, too. So she thought what the fuck—she could always come back and kill me another time.”
I was saying this for my own benefit as much as Rosa’s, thinking it through as I spoke. It made as much sense as anything would. You can’t try to explain demons by reference to human emotions or human motives.
Rosa picked herself up, and since she was walking more or less normally, apart from a residual limp, we went out onto the deck. The cool night air hit us like a kiss on the cheek from God. I made her wait there while I went back inside and, picking my way around the corpses, collected everything from the cabin that I’d brought with me or that might have my fingerprints on it.
She seemed relieved when I rejoined her, although I’d only been inside for a minute at most. We both had to take the companionway stairs slowly, like two old codgers coming down from the top deck of a swaying bus.
When we were back on the terra-comparatively-firma of the wooden walkway, I turned to her.
“She wants to see you,” I said as gently as I could manage with my still-hoarse voice. “She wants to know that you’re okay. That’s why she’s still there. In that room. That’s what she’s waiting for.”
It took a second or two for Rosa to get her head around what I was saying. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said.
“Are you ready?”
No hesitation this time. “Yes.”
I led the way.
Twenty-three
IT WAS WAY AFTER TWO A.M. BY THIS TIME, AND Eversholt Street was as silent as a necropolis. Even the night buses, rolling empty out of Euston with all their lights on, looked like catafalques bound for some funeral of princes.
Rosa flinched visibly when she saw that door, but she stood her ground. I took care of the locks using Rich’s keys, and we stepped into the upper room of the archive’s secret annex. Rosa looked around her, shook her head, and laughed without any trace of humor. I stopped still to listen, gestured to Rosa to do likewise. There was no sound from the room below.
“You’d better wait here,” I said, aware that her nerves probably couldn’t take too many more surprises tonight, and Rich would probably be a surprise of the nastiest kind.
I unlocked the door to the stairs, turned on the light, and went down. Rich was still there, but the atmosphere down in the basement did
n’t seem to have agreed with him all that much. He was slumped on the floor, staring slackly at his drawn-up knees. He didn’t respond when I called his name, and his eyes didn’t move by any visible fraction when I waved my hand in front of them. The lights were on, but it was clear that, for the moment at least, nobody was home. I surmised that Snezhna had visited him again while I was gone and that she hadn’t been restful company. Well, if a guy gets what he’s been begging for, you don’t waste tears.
I went back upstairs and beckoned Rosa over to me. I explained briefly about Rich and what he was doing there. Her eyes narrowed, and her lower lip jutted out.
“I’ll kill him,” she hissed.
“To be honest,” I said, aware that I was echoing what Cheryl had said to me a week before about the ghost herself, “I think you’d be doing him a favor. But there’s been enough killing done tonight, and it’s a fucking rotten spectator sport at the best of times, so here’s the deal. You promise not to kill him, and we’ll go and see Snezhna, all merry and bright. Okay?”
But I realized as I said it that it had just become moot in any case. A familiar feeling was stealing over me, coming in on whatever extra sense I have that’s perpetually tuned in to Death FM.
I led the way down the stairs, and Rosa followed. She bared her teeth in a snarl of hatred when she saw Rich. He stared back at her, slack and invertebrate and without any sign of recognition.
I turned to look down at the stained, spavined mattress. Nothing to be seen there, but that was where she was—that was where it was coming from.
I pointed, and Rosa followed with her eyes.
“There,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”
To do her justice, she wasn’t. Snezhna’s faceless ghost emerged from the floor like Venus from the waves, the red fringes of her ruined face waving like a silk scarf in a wind we couldn’t feel. But Rosa stood her ground, her eyes filling with tears.
When Snezhna got to ground level—or a few inches above it—she stopped, and the two women faced each other across a gap of about ten feet. The tears were rolling freely down Rosa’s face now. She said something in Russian. Snezhna nodded, then answered. Rosa shook her head in wonder.