Dead Men's s Boots

There was no fumbling or feeling my way into it this time: partly because the music was still fresh in my mind from when I’d wielded it like a scalpel to slice spirit from flesh back in Maynard Todd’s office; but mainly because whatever juice Juliet had charged me up with when we kissed was fizzing and burning through my blood. It didn’t feel like a current running through me: it was more visceral than that. It was as though I was a current, running through the world.

Another crash, and as we rounded the long curve of the driveway I saw the earth-mover breaking cover a hundred yards ahead.

Juliet’s driving skills hadn’t improved, but a bulldozer’s a simple enough thing to control so long as you don’t care what you hit. The first avalanche of sound – the one that had distracted the guards at the gate – had been when she’d rammed the fence and broken through from the building site into the crematorium ground. Now she was cutting diagonally across the path ahead of us, leaving in her wake a ruin of desecrated urns and mangled fence posts. Running men took pot-shots at her, while trying to keep from falling under the massive caterpillar treads that bore her onwards. She ignored the shots – both the ones that missed and the occasional ones that found their mark.

And she drew the pursuit away from us, into and through the decorative hedge of privet on the far side of the drive, bending now before her in a wind that was one notch down from a hurricane – and still there hadn’t been a single drop of rain.

We walked on, more or less unmolested, and the doors of the building loomed ahead of us.

The doors weren’t going to be fun, though. The black-uniformed men stationed on the steps had seen us coming, and they were already kneeling to take aim. Moloch took off towards them at a run and I veã a he ered off the path into the trees, not even missing a note, part of my mind working out the likely trajectories of any bullets that might miss him and find their way to me.

I circled wide, hearing the impact of flesh on flesh and the choked-off screams of the men on the steps as the demon landed among them, undeterred by their bullets and so eager for the feast still to come that even sadism had temporarily lost its charm.

By the time I came out of the stand of trees he was already turning to look for me, rigid with impatience, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. Men lay around him like fallen leaves, unconscious or dead.