Dead Men's s Boots

Normally any part of me touching any part of Juliet would have been so agonisingly arousing that I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else. After a few seconds I’d have been physically shaking. Now, though, it was as though something inside her had switched itself off: as though she was only a lifelike model of Juliet, and if I tapped her skin she’d ring hollow.

For the second half of the flight I dozed too – fitfully and intermittently, waking every so often to check the flight-progress screen on the back of the seat in front of me and discover that we’d inched forward another couple of hundred miles.

Juliet didn’t stir, but her chest rose and fell arrhythmically. I let her be, figuring that she was probably better off asleep than awake. Even the changes in pressure as we started to descend didn’t wake her.

But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham her eyes snapped open.

Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.

16

The Birmingham in Alabama took its name and inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal into the heavy, humid, soupy, sledgehammer air I knew that comparison was going to turn out to be fanciful.

Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so that all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so from the airport entrance.

For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like a frail octogenarian. I felt a little light-headed myself: it was mid-afternoon here, the hot air thick and heavy with the day’s freight of sweat and tears.

Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, her voice faint. ‘I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground.

But – it’s taking me a while to get my strength back.’

‘You think it’s something to do with flying, then?’ I asked.

She nodded slowly. ‘It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then, your species only left the ground very recently. Perhaps – I’m the first of the powers to try it out.’

‘What about demons with big leathery bat wings?’

Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’ve ever seen. ‘They fly low,’ she muttered.