Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

When I got to Moloch’s part in recent events she drew back her lips in a snarl. And when I suggested that she might want to come along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in sombre wonder.

‘Fight alongside the demon?’ she demanded.

‘Essentially, yeah,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘If you’ve got a rodent problem you need a terrier. Best estimate, there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?’

‘No. The ones in flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts . . . I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.’

‘Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight and it was like taking a beating from a bunch of blokes with baseball bats. And the chances are that it wouldn’t be enough anyway: not by itself. These guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane. They’d still be around, and they’d still be dangerous – they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds-on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialised predator. He’d be there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—’

‘Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.’

I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions.

‘Revenge?’ I ventured.

She seemed genuinely surprised. ‘For Coldwood?’

‘Yeah.’ A long pause.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Juliet. ‘This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care, when we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Well, okay . . . I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my end it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them and they’re not going to let it drop.’ I hesitated. ‘As for you, wÛ6;And hat you stand to gain, obviously, is – from a global perspective – when all’s said and done—’

‘You get to stay with me,’ said Susan, from the doorway.

We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.

‘Sue,’ Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. ‘Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.’

Susan closed the door behind her and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen there before. She cast one nervous glance at the bound figure on the bed, then she directed her full attention towards Juliet.

‘You brought an escaped murderer into my house, Jules,’ she said, in a tone that had something of a taut string about it. ‘And I let you do it, because I thought you wouldn’t have done it unless you had to. But if it’s just because she’s a woman who kills men and that used to be your – your thing, too, then that’s not good enough. And Felix is right about one thing. If you don’t fix this you’ll have to go away. I’ll lose you. I’m not going to lose you because of something like this.’

Juliet couldn’t have been more nonplussed if a cavalcade of tap-dancing mice had sung the words at her. She blinked, visibly thinking her way around the situation. ‘If I have to leave,’ she said, ‘I’ll come back to you. They can’t keep me away.’

The taut string snapped.

‘They can send you home!’ Susan shouted, advancing on Juliet with her hands clenched into fists as though she was going to hit her. She was crying again, but she didn’t wipe away the tears on her cheeks or even seem to notice them. She was incandescent enough that I was surprised they didn’t evaporate. ‘They can trap you and send you back down to Hell, no matter how strong you are. You’d be down there, in the dark, and you’d have to wait until someone called you back up again. Except that they’d call you as a slave, the way you were before. Or else I’d have to find a way to summon you up myself, and then what? Then you’d be my slave! We’d – we wouldn’t be us any more. We’d be a stupid, sick joke. It’s got to stop, Jules. You’ve got to stop it, and then you’ve got to explain and say you’re sorry.’

From about halfway through this speech, she’d been screaming the words rather than just yelling them. Her fists were trembling like tuning forks. Juliet caught them in her hands, pushed them down to Susan’s sides and then embraced her. Susan slumped in her arms, all the fight suddenly gone from her.

‘You’ve got to,’ she mumbled almost inaudibly, her head pressed to Juliet’s breast. ‘Please. For me.’

Juliet stared at me over Susan’s head. She looked unhappy. No, more than that: she looked afraid – and not of the Mount Grace ghosts.