Dead Men's s Boots

‘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.

A naked rhythm is slyer and more slippery than a whistled tune. It’s like the narrow blade of a shank, slipped in between your ribs, that doesn’t even hurt until it moves and starts to make a broader incision. I let it go in deep, deeper, deeper still.

My hoarse, hissing breath was a part of the pattern now, and the sounds my wrists made against the cuffs of my shirt, and the creak of my shoes as I shifted my weight, coming up on one knee. All of it, all the negligible, tiny, repeated, inscaped sounds were converging into something impossibly subtle, impossibly slender and sharp. The effort of keeping it so tightly focused was like a physical ache in my guts. I held it as long as I could.