Dead Men's s Boots

She stared at me with big, startled eyes: she must have heard most of that last speech.

‘Umm – you want any coffee or dessert?’ she blurted. ‘Or should I just –?’ She mimed turning around and walking away.

‘I think we’re good,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Just the bill.’

The waitress fled, and Juliet stood, moving with a slight stiffness that suggested she still wasn’t fully recovered from her earlier evisceration.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But I take the point. Perhaps she isn’t happy. And perhaps that is my responsibility, at least partly, since I provided some of the evidence that Coldwood used to arrest her.

’

Jumping up myself, I caught her wrist. ‘Juliet, no,’ I said, appalled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what she needs at all. She’s trapped in a loop. She’s still getting revenge for things that were done to her half a century ago. You’re thinking of her as some kind of demon, but she’s not. She’s not like you. Alive or dead, she’s human, and for humans there’s a law that always applies – action and reaction.

What you do sticks to you, and becomes a pa³nd shert of you. The more she kills, the more lost and fucked up she’s going to get.’

‘Let go of my hand, Castor.’

‘Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.’

‘I’ll do what I think is best.’

Juliet was still staring at me. I did my best to lock onto those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.

‘I can’t let you,’ I said simply. ‘Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was – imprinted.

I heard you, as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died – and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.’

She didn’t answer. For a moment we just stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.

Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.

Actually, hard isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall – except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving I went pinwheeling backwards through the air.