Dead Men's Boots (46 page)

He was sitting in the swivel chair, a seventies relic that was Ropey’s most prized possession, after his music collection.
Moloch was looking well: There was a ruddier tinge to his skin, and he’d even gained a little weight. His dress sense had
improved, too. In place of the rags he’d been wearing when I first saw him outside the offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay,
he was dressed in black trousers, calf-length black boots, and a black granddad shirt with red jeweled studs at the neck and
cuffs. He would have looked like some eighteenth-century priest playing a game of “my benefice is bigger than yours” if it
weren’t for the full-length leather coat. As it was, he looked like someone who’d taken
The Matrix
a little too seriously. The fingers of his two hands were cat’s cradled around something small that gleamed white. He turned
it slightly every now and then, the only move he made. When he saw that my gaze had turned to it, he opened his fingers and
let me see what it was: a tiny skull, about the size of a human baby’s but longer in the jaw, picked clean of flesh. I was
willing to bet that it was a cat’s skull.

“First things first,” Moloch said briskly. “We don’t want to be interrupted, so let’s draw the curtains around our tent. Keep
out the riffraff.”

He spread his fingers with a flourish, letting the skull tumble off his palm. It made it most of the way to the floor, then
it stopped in the air, six inches or so above the shag pile.

“Normal service will be resumed,” Moloch murmured. “Eventually. Until then the walls will have no ears, and nobody can drop
in on us unannounced.”

Unable to take my eyes off the weirdly suspended skull, I sat at the farthest edge of the sofa, putting as much distance between
me and the demon as I could—and keeping the whistle firmly gripped in my left hand, ready for use.

Moloch noticed and affected to be hurt. “I saved your life the other night,” he reminded me reproachfully. “We’re fighting
the same fight, Felix.”

“Are we?” I asked bluntly.

He gave me a slow, emphatic nod. “Oh, yes. Trust me on this.”

“And who are we fighting
against
, exactly?”

“The immortals. The killers who found the exit door on the far side of hell. You remember I spoke to you about rhythm. Sequence.
Cadence. I know the end of the story, and you know its start. Shall we embrace like brothers and share?”

“No,” I suggested. “Let’s not. Tell me what you want out of me and what you can give me, with no bullshit, and I’ll tell you
if I’m interested.”

The demon pursed his lips. “I confess,” he said, “I prefer a certain degree of commitment at the outset. A promise, at least.
It doesn’t need to be sealed in blood. If I tell you what I know, you’ll use it to further my interests as well as your own.
Just swear on something you care about. The formalities aren’t important.”

I stared him out.

“Felix.” He made a sound like the desiccated, risen-from-the-tomb-unnaturally-alive mummy of a sigh. “We have to roll a boulder
up a very large hill together. Without some basis of trust between us, it’s going to be hard work.”

I shrugged. “I don’t even know what the boulder is,” I pointed out. “I’m not likely to get my shoulder under it anytime soon—not
on blind faith, anyway.”

“Faith?” The demon made a terse, faintly obscene gesture. “No. I wouldn’t advise you to deal with me on that basis. Did you
mention me to the lady at all?”

“To Juliet? Yeah, I did.”

“And how did she respond?”

I thought back. “She spat on the ground,” I said.

He nodded with a certain satisfaction. “Immediately after she spoke my name, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll notice I haven’t spoken hers. Only that of her brother, who is dead. These are useful precautions among our kind.
Our names aren’t given or chosen at random. They have unique properties, and to speak them casually, without due attention
to”—he hesitated, visibly selecting the right word—“
prophylaxis
can lead to very serious consequences. And she has good reason both to hate and to fear me.”

“I’ll bet,” I said, unimpressed. “And you know, I appreciate your frankness. I’d say it was a breath of fresh air except that
the air stinks of rotten meat. This isn’t getting us much further, is it?”

“No,” Moloch agreed. “It isn’t.” He smiled nastily. “You’re very amusing, Felix, do you know that? Your instinctive mistrust.
The way you look for angles, for advantages, even when there aren’t any. You see yourself as the finger in the dike, don’t
you? And me as the rising tide. But I promise you, very solemnly, in the bigger scheme of things, you’re”—he touched the tips
of his fingers together, opened them again, consigning me to oblivion—“insignificant.”

“Can you have a rising tide of shit?” I asked politely. “I suppose technically, the answer’s yes, but it’s a disturbing image.
I’d go for a different metaphor if I were you. Something more in a David and Goliath flavor. And you know, I’m like Avis rent-a-car:
Because I’m insignificant, I try harder.”

I was hoping to shake the aura of smugness he was putting out, but his smile just broadened. “Do you even know, Castor, why
the dead are rising? Why the order of things has reversed itself so that graves gape and give birth?”

In spite of myself, a tremor went through me. The demon must have seen it, because he smiled in modest gratification. “I think
the answer is no,” he murmured. “Poor little Dutch boy, laboring in the dark as the water rises around his ankles, then his
knees, then—”

“Well, everyone’s got a theory,” I said, cutting across his chalk-on-blackboard eloquence. “Take a number and join the line.”

Moloch shook his head. “I
don’t
have a theory,” he said, baring his teeth in what looked more like contempt than amusement. “I was there, human. I saw the
damage done. The great project. Oh, yes. The
shedim
knew it for what it was.”

The great project. Juliet had mentioned that, too, and then had pulled back from explaining what she meant. I felt a sudden
brief wave of vertigo break over me, as though I’d been about to jump over a low wall but then discovered at the last moment
that the far side gave onto a sheer drop.

“Whose project was it, then?” I asked, still in the same doubting Thomas voice. “Yours or someone else’s?” What did it say
about me that a scant couple of hours after hearing about Gary Coldwood’s brush with the Reaper, I was shoving it to the back
of my mind to play twenty questions with a demon? That I was so hungry for what he was about to tell me, I even put Mount
Grace momentarily on the back burner of my mind?

Moloch stood up, his joints cracking alarmingly.

“Go on,” I said.

The demon turned his eyes on me, and something happened in the air between us. It seemed to ripple and thicken, as though
sour milk had been dropped into it and made it curdle. Suddenly, Moloch was gone from in front of me, and his hand clamped
down on my left shoulder from behind. It took all my self-control not to dive off the sofa, hit the ground, and roll.

Twisting my head around, I met his unblinking eyes. As a show of strength, it did the job. My heart was racing and my throat
was dry.

“I prefer not to,” he growled. “I was only…reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. But they’re gone now. The time is
past when I could sit upon a chair made from my enemies’ intestines and feast on your woeful kindred. That summer will not
come again.”

“It’s a fucker,” I agreed, trying to keep my voice level. “Where are the guts of yesteryear?”

“The lady,” Moloch resumed, walking away from me again toward the window. “You know what she eats and how. Sexual desire is
like a digestive enzyme for her—it lets her take spirit and flesh together. She inflames, and then she feeds. She can do it
as well here as in the realms below, since all desire is ultimately in the mind.”

He stared out into the night, ran his clawed fingertips absently down the pane. “My case isn’t so fortunate. My meat is the
souls of men who have killed other men, and women likewise. But the souls only, not the flesh. And even the souls I can only
take, and feed on, and be nourished by, in certain very specific circumstances. The
shedim
are highly evolved, highly specialized. We have no mechanism for straining the life, the spirit, the
selfness
out of torn meat.

“So when hell changed—when the borders shifted—we began to starve. And there was no easy remedy. In the subtle realms we make…”
He gestured vaguely. “I don’t know the word… like small creatures that make traps and then wait for their prey to come to
them instead of hunting. Traps that they weave out of their own bodies’ mass.”

“Webs,” I suggested, my voice coming out cracked and strained because my throat was still painfully dry. “Spiderwebs.”

“Exactly. In hell we make webs. But now the webs stood empty year after year. We became desperate, and we fought. Against
the succubi. Against the bone-singers. Against each other. And the weaker we became, the more frenzied were these struggles.
Like rats in a sack, we tore at each other and devoured each other’s substance, even though it couldn’t nourish us.” Still
staring out the window, he lapsed into silence.

“So you jumped ship?” I suggested, trying to keep him talking.

Moloch held up his hands in front of his own face, examining them with intense disfavor. “A chance conjuration allowed me
to rise to Reth Adoma,” he said. “Some necromancer who couldn’t even frame a summoning, so that I rose out of the ground in
a family burial plot in the middle of Essex. I looked for him—for the one who’d had the effrontery to summon me—but I never
found him. A pity. I’d have liked to show my feelings on that score. Anyway, I wove myself a physical body so that I could
stay here. Truly physical, I mean—not like the simulation of flesh that the lady wears. This body is real, and solid, and
I live inside it as a hermit crab lives inside a borrowed shell. It took me many years to make out of pieces of flesh gleaned
here and there. The alternative was to go home again and die.”

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned his head to look at me again. “It was despair more than hope that kept me here,”
he said, the fires in his eyes flickering like distant beacons on the hills of another country. “My needs are not great, but
as I said, they’re very specialized. The nourishment I need lies in the souls of those of your kind who have killed many and
taken pleasure in the killing. And whereas the succubus—your lady—is a hunter, I am a trapper. Traps for the soul are hard
to build in the stunted, solid realms of Reth Adoma, squashed down by the hideous fist of gravity.”

“Killers can’t be that hard to find,” I said with forced flippancy.

“No,” the demon agreed. “They’re not. I’ve found and eaten many, but it’s like eating the dream of a meal and waking to find
yourself still hungry. In hell”—his voice quivered with longing—“we used to let the souls lie for years on our terraces. Let
them rot, and mature, and render down into their final form. And then, oh, then we feasted.”

He laughed fondly at the memory. It was the kind of sound you really, really need to forget but know you never will. “Old
souls, separated from flesh in a way that leaves no bruise on the tender spirit,” he murmured. “That’s what I hunger for.
But here, in your thin, drab world, a meal like that is a great rarity.

“I’ve scraped up enough to survive through the decades. Barely. And you led me to two snacks that gave me some small nourishment.
The were-thing that built its body out of cats… I closed with it twice, the first time when it was following you from the
law office, the second when it tried to kill you at the laboratory. Both times I managed to ingest some of its essence while
the soul was in transit and loosened from the flesh. Not perfect, but I was able to keep it down. It’s made me stronger than
I’ve been in many decades.

“But it’s the mother lode I’m after, Castor. I want you to take me to the water hole where the great, ever-living killers
come to drink, and drink again, of life and youth and strength. Take me there and turn me loose, and I’ll eat them for you.
After you’ve dressed and prepared the feast for me with your music.”

He fell silent again, and the spell of his words was so strong that it was a few seconds before I realized that he was waiting
for an answer. To be honest, it was an effort to focus my thoughts on what should have been the key issue: the born-again
killers with their dead-men’s-boots system of reincarnation. I wanted to grill this bastard about what he meant when he said
that hell’s borders had shifted, and what the great project had been.

But Moloch’s expectant gaze was still fixed on me. With an effort, I stifled the questions jostling for position in my throat.
He wanted me to give him an answer to his little proposition, but in true Castor style, I ducked. I was uncomfortably aware
that he’d asked me for a promise. I didn’t want to say anything to this creature that he might be able to hold me to later.

“By the mother lode,” I said carefully, “you mean Mount Grace?”

“Of course.”

“In that case, two further questions. Why do I need you? And why do you need me?”

Moloch’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I’ve explained my position,” he said, the ragged edges in his voice grinding against each
other. “And so you’re only asking these questions because you want to hold me at arm’s length a little longer. There are two
hundred souls behind the crematorium’s walls. Souls that have learned the trick of invading living flesh. Could you exorcise
them all before they took you down? I doubt it. They’d take you and possess you, and you’d be no more than another suit for
them to wear. You need someone like me—someone who sits above them in the same food chain. Someone who was born and bred to
prey on them.”

I mulled that over, couldn’t see any holes in it. But I didn’t get to be as old as I was without reading the small print before
signing. “There were two parts to the question,” I reminded him, my tone and my face pure, cold deadpan.