Read Online Dead Men's Boots by Mike Carey - Free Book Online

I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price—letting
     Asmodeus loose on earth—had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen
     understood. Actually, I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.
    Pen—Pamela Elisa Bruckner—is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex- a whole lot of other things, one way and another.
     And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together.
     The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months before in
     which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now he’d formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane
     to get rid of him, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead,
     where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges
     that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie—replete with
     ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire—didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and
     I had to work together to clog Jenna-Jane’s works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.
    Meanwhile, the war—if it was a war—was still in the “cold” phase. Maybe that’s only to be expected when the enemy is the dead.

    I’d had more than enough of the legal profession to last me for one day, but a promise is a promise, even if your arm is halfway
     up your back while you’re giving it. I could have called, but I needed to pick up some silver amalgam from a dental supplier
     in Manor House, so Stoke Newington was almost on my way.
    The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay turned out to be in a converted Victorian court built in chocolate-colored brick, on
     the corner of a slightly drab row of terraces from a later era. There were window boxes on either side of the door, painted
     bright blue, but they contained nothing except bare soil. No flowers at this time of year.
    The front door was pretty bare, too—no wards, no sigils, no come-nots or stay-nots. Maybe the evil dead avoided lawyers out
     of professional courtesy, like sharks are supposed to do. I walked in off the street and found myself in a small reception
     area that, judging from its modest dimensions, must originally have been the front hall of a house. A wide, elbowed staircase
     took up a good half of the available space, and what was left was dominated by a large, venerable-looking photocopier. The
     inspection covers had been removed from the machine and were stacked up against the wall. An enormously fat, enormously pale
     bald man was on his knees in front of it, one hand thrust into its innards up to the elbow, looking like a vet trying to assist
     with a difficult birth. He glanced up at me as I entered, and then he kept on staring as if trying to place the face. He had
     a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and his half-open mouth hung down at the corners like a melting clock in a painting by Salvador
     Dalí. A young brunette sitting at the reception desk under the stairs watched him work with more attention than a busted photocopier
     seemed to merit. Maybe it was a slow day.
    “I’m here to speak to Mr. Todd,” I said to the brunette, as she pulled her attention away from the exhibition of mechanical
     midwifery. “I called earlier. Felix Castor.”
    She ran her finger down the very full columns of a double-width appointment book. “Felix Castor,” she confirmed. “Yes. Please
     take a seat.”
    There were several, so I took the one farthest away from Mr. Fix-it, picked up yesterday’s
Times
, and started to flick through it as the receptionist called upstairs. I glanced across at