Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

‘From behind,’ she said.

The physical body that the demon had abandoned in order to feed raised its head abruptly and stood.

‘And shall I tell you how I’m going to kill you?’ he asked.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, its perfect line spoiled by a piece of human tissue plastered to her forehead with human blood. ‘Shedim ere’fa minur,’ she said. ‘Ehad iniru, ke rekol ha dith gerainou.’

Both Molochs – the blimp and the one that looked like a man – roared in response. Both went for Juliet at the same time.

Juliet met the ‘man’ head-on and stopped him dead in his tracks. They both moved so fast that there was almost no sense of movement: they seemed to flick between static postures like a slide show. Moloch was trying the shock-and-awe tactics he’d used against the loup-garou, throwing punches and kicks like confetti at a wedding. Juliet blocked every one, and even got in a couple of her own so that suddenly Moloch was giving ground, parrying rather than hitting out.

But then the tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted through her head and shoulders and chest. She froze in place for a fraction of a heartbeat: Moloch saw the window and he was there, his right hand raised above his head, clawed fingers spread. The smack of impact came a second later. Juliet flew backwards through the air and hit the wall with a bag-of-wet-cement thud.

‘Oh, those are just stories,’ Moloch snarled. ‘I’m not even sure I could get it up with a raddled piece of meat like you.’

Juliet gathered herself and stood, with a visible effort. Three livid wounds marred her face, running diagonally in parallel from her left temple. Blood was already welling up from them in vigorous arterial gouts. But it wasn’t the wound that was giving her trouble, nor the blood: it was the puppet strings dangling down from the blimp monster, attaching themselves in thicker and thicker profusion to her forehead, her arms, her back and chest. She took a step forward, gathering herself to spring, but she was too slow by some huge, wasteful portion of a second. Moloch’s foot slammed into her stomach and she folded: then he swivelled like a dervish dancing, and his second kick, rising into her downturned face, lifted her off her feet. This time she hit the wall hard enough to leave a skull-shaped indent inãhaping one of the wooden panels.

I fitted the whistle to my lips again, sick horror making my movements clumsy, my mind empty and unresponsive. Moloch didn’t even look at me: he just gestured. One of the trailing tentacles of the blimp-thing drifted lazily across my throat, which constricted in sudden agony. I made a grunting wheeze of protest – the only sound that I could force out of my mouth. Another tendril rippled through my chest and my legs buckled under me, sending me crashing down onto my knees.

‘A hundred years,’ Moloch remarked conversationally. ‘That’s a long time to go between meals. No doubt it was good for my figure, but still. Not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.’ Levering herself up on hands and knees, Juliet reached blindly for his ankle, maybe intending to trip him. He stepped on her wrist, twisting as he brought his weight down. There was an audible crack.

‘The great project,’ he snarled, standing over her. ‘The shedim will piss on the rubble of your great project, and bury your children in the wastelands where it stood.’

He lifted her one-handed and looked into her face almost tenderly.

‘And the woman you live with,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep her as a pet, for a little while. Until she starts to bore me. Then I’ll eat her, over some long and leisurely period of time. Meiden agon, sister of Baphomet: all things in moderation.’

Moloch raised Juliet above his head, held her there for a second, and then brought her down so that her back broke across his raised knee. Juliet gave a grunt of pain. It was so unexpected, and so wrong, that my system flooded with adrenalin. Nothing could hurt Juliet: nothing could shake her poise. That was part of what made her what she was.

My brain kicking sluggishly back into gear, I started to beat out a tattoo with my palms on the cold stones of the floor. The sound was faint, and it hardly carried above the butcher-shop noises of what Moloch was doing to Juliet. But it was a rhythm – and a rhythm, as John Gittings had taught me, is the skeleton of a song.

Moloch didn’t notice at first. He was still delivering his gloating monologue, drawing out the pain and the humiliation of Juliet’s death so that it would measure up to the happy fantasies he’d been living on for the last century. He was working on her face with both hands, talking in a low intimate murmur now so that his words didn’t reach me. The blimp was above and behind him, its tentacles stretching down through his chest and into hers. Of course: if murderers had a patron saint, it would be Juliet. This must be the best part of the meal.