But Juliet was winding her window down with as little haste as if she just wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as it reeled itself back into the holder. ‘Keep driving,’ she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at ninety-five miles an hour.
I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: the van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull-bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen. Instead she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatter-proof glass as though she were delivering an oversized baby.
She dumped him under the wheels of the van and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line: he died without ever knowing what had hit him. The van started to veer left, losing speed now that there was no one to lean on the gas, but still with a terrific amount of momentum to burn off and nowhere to spend it.
There was a thunder-crack sound that was repeated two more times: Juliet pivoted on one arm as someone moved inside the van, gun raised to fire again. If she’d been hit, she didn’t show any sign of being hurt. The van’s side ground against the thick trunk of a mature tree and the vehicle ricocheted away again across the narrow track, slewing more violently now and starting to lean over sideways at a steeper and steeper angle. Juliet swarmed up onto the roof, rode the movement with unconscious grace and was already jumping off as the van’s side smacked down into the dirt and it bounced, end over end.
I hit my own brakes, aware that I should have been watching the road ahead of me instead of what was coming up behind. There were no other cars in sight, but I took a broad bend way too fast and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road with a handbrake turn that would have been elegant and accomplished if I hadn’t blown out both of the driver-side tyres in the process.
It had all happened so fast that the echoes of the van’s crashing fall were still dying away as I leaped out of the car. The trees hid it from my sight for a couple of seconds, though, and by the time I rounded the bend the action had moved on a little.
Juliet was down in the road, and the surviving occupants of the van were crawling out as best they could through doors and windows. One of them – judging by the gun in his hand, he must have been the guy who’d been blazing away at Juliet from inside the van – raised his arm to shoot her at point-blank range. She ducked under the bullet and pirouetted so fast she was a blur: the roundhouse kick that caught him high up in the chest must have staved in half his ribs. He folded up, fell and didn’t move again after that.
That left three: two men and a woman, who I saw now for the first time. She was a petite, washed-out little thing dressed in shades of beige, streaked with vivid red here and there because she’d just struggled through a shattered window and hauled herself to her feet in time to watch Juliet dispatching her colleague only a few feet away. Incongruously, she was barefoot: maybe that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.
The two guys were dressed in finest mafioso chic, but the black suits and wraparound shades looked less menacing given how the situation had spun out of their control. One of them was down on hands and knees, crawling away from the van towards the undergrowth in desperate, indefatigable slo-mo. The other stood facing Juliet irresolutely, fists clenched but not knowing what to do. She took a step towards him, opening her arms as if to embrace him. He staggered back, groping belatedly at his waist for some weapon he carried there.
That was when the woman struck. She was only waiting for Juliet to be broadside on to her: now she moved in a staccato blur, slamming the heel of one hand into Juliet’s left temple and then, as Juliet turned to acknowledge her, following up with a raking slash from the other hand. Juliet’s head snapped to the side, and blood sprayed up into the still, sun-speckled air.
The woman was already changing: had already changed, more like a stiletto blade snicking out of its sheath than like the slow, camera-friendly metamorphoses of horror movies. She seemed to stand up taller as her torso narrowed and elongated: at the same time her elbows and her knees bent and locked into a new configuration that a human being wouldn’t have been able to achieve without ripping a dozen bones out of their sockets. Hairs as thick as porcupine spines bristled on her flesh, like a cat’s hairs standing up when it’s making a squalling, spitting last stand.
Juliet struck out at the loup-garou but she was blinded by her own blood and the sleek, monstrous thing leaped over the wildly hazarded punch to land on Juliet’s shoulders. Its hands, long and slender now and ending in two bristling thickets of unfeasibly long claws, flashed in and out, raking at Juliet’s face. Another jump and it was away before her opponent could get a proper grip on it. Juliet staggered like a drunk as the loup-garou landed four-square in the dust and turned for another pass.
By now I was racing hell for leather towards them. There was no time to think it through. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a handful of something from the bushes to my left and tore it free as I ran. ‘Benedicite, domine meus,’ I panted under my breath, ‘hunc florem, et noli oblivisci –’ Coming from me it was bullshit, but it would have to do.
The loup-garou went low this time, diving under Juliet’s flailing guard and laying open her stomach with a scything kick from one backward-slashing foot. But I was almost there now, and all I had to do was to lay my loaded foliage on the creature before she turned and saw me coming.
The surviving guy still on his feet, whose existence I’d completely forgotten, tackled me from the side and sent me sprawling, coming down on top of me. The force of the impact knocked a lot of the wind out of me, and before I could get it back I felt his fingers closing on my windpipe. His flushed, sweating face glared down into mine, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth. I couldn’t get my right hand up to prise his fingers loose: the injury to my shoulder had left the entire arm too weak and too stiff to give me any purchase. But my left hand – the one that was full of greenery – was still in full working order, and since he obligingly came in so close, I threw it around his neck, hugged him closer still and butted him in the face with nose-flattening force. He sagged and I rolled so he was under me, kneeing him in the balls en passant to make sure he didn’t get up any time soon. I scrambled free and managed to get upright again, leaving him wrapped around his pain.
Juliet was down on one knee, her face a mask of blood but her guard still up despite the terrible damage she’d already sustained: the loup-garou was dancing around her, looking for an opening. It danced right into my open arms and I nailed it with the flowering branch right in the kisser.
‘Hoc fugere,’ I snarled.
The beast jackknifed like a sideswiped truck, its head snapping back, its eyes wide but unseeing. A ripple of pain passed through it and its feet found no purchase for a second or two as its shorted-out nerve endings popped and fizzed with agonising static. I used those precious seconds to shift my balance and slam both my fists into its throat.
For all its wiry strength it didn’t weigh all that much, and the effect was gratifying. It hit the ground hard at an oblique angle, tumbling and rolling in a cloud of dust across the full width of the dirt track.