Dead Men's s Boots

Examining myself with queasy fascination in the bathroom mirror, I could understand her reaction: it looked as though some huge bird of prey had scrabbled at my right shoulder, trying to pick me up, and then – judging from the bruising all over my torso – had given up the effort and dropped me from a great height onto some rocks.

‘You met one of the were,’ Juliet said – an observation, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘You remember Scrub?’

She frowned, consulting her memory. ‘The rat-man that worked for Lucasz Damjohn,’ she said, with no obvious emotion – although she had hated Damjohn enough to linger over his death and add a number of artistic flourishes to it.

‘I spiked him at Chelsea Harbour,’ I corrected her. ‘Hit him with a chord sequence hard enough to push him out of the flesh he was hiding in. But you know how it is with the were-kin. They’re old souls, mostly, and they’re tough as hell. Most of them are used to migrating to a new host when the old one dies.

‘Are you saying this was Scrub?’ Juliet demanded.

I shrugged – and gritted my teeth because shrugging seemed to draw the disinfectant deeper into the wounds. ‘I don’t know. For a second, it kind of looked like Scrub. Then it looked like someone else. But Scrub was the only loup-garou I ever met who was a colony. I mean, he made his body out of rats, not out of a rat. And this thing I met tonight was made out of cats in the same way.

I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half-disgust and half-fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ flat; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone. I would have bet the farm that there was a cat lurking under the left-luggage lockers at Victoria, too: that it had heard my conversation with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. ‘If one were can make that transition – from monad to gestalt – then presumably others can too.’

‘Presumably. Most of them – ow! – most of them don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.