However, in spite of her quick thinking the diner door was open now and attackers were shouldering their way inside, ignoring
the bellowing of those who had been downed, and spurred on by a sense of thwarted righteousness. Torches had been flung onto
the roof. This above all convinced Lila that Deadkill were a bunch of amateur hate-suckers. The roof was tiled and, like all
city buildings, it would take a
lot more than a piece of burning wood to set it alight. She wasn’t justified in killing even one of them on grounds of stupidity
alone.
She blasted the outside crowd with a burst of infrasound that sent most of them grabbing for their pants as their bowels dropped
everything without warning and then ran for the door.
She didn’t trust herself to punch anyone without dealing a killing blow so she kept the violence down to some light slaps
that cannoned skulls together in pairs with enough force to yield temporary unconsciousness and mild concussion. As they slumped
in the gangways she bent to collect their weapons and destroyed them with a few casual wrenches of her hands before dropping
them on the bodies. She sniffed the air. Something was burning.
In the kitchen a couple of meat patties and a bacon strip had become char. Lila turned off the burners and looked through
to the store-room door. It was shut. A terrified silence like a held breath made the room feel as though it might burst. She
wondered where Zal had gone but her answer was soon discovered as she steeled herself and walked out through the emergency
exit.
A pall of intense gloom hung over the open door and its steps. It didn’t block out the sight of the dead girls. Pooling blood
from their fallen bodies dripped down the open iron slats of the stairs onto the hardtop. Zal was crouched on the handrail
above them like a great black crow.
Behind him, in the walls, a string of bullet holes peppered an uninterrupted line telling her that they’d already shot him.
Beyond the darkness that he was maintaining she heard confused talk, complaints and angry voices as people blundered around.
It became clear to her that they weren’t only lost in the murk he’d created, they were weak and sleepy too. She heard them
fall over each other, mumbling as though drugged.
On the rail Zal was utterly still with concentration. She recognised the vampiric embrace of a shadowkin at work very late,
with surprise at her own horror. The golden boy she’d first met had shown no sign of this. Zal the vampire was something that
just didn’t want to compute and she couldn’t help drawing back. It was a microscopic movement, halted before it got underway,
but it was still there.
Her dress didn’t feel the same way about his activity however. It swirled richly, panels lifting through the twilight miasma,
their threads unravelling to reach the air that sweltered with the energy that Zal was drawing out of the living bodies. They
also, she was
disgusted to see, eagerly reached down into the coagulating mass of blood from the slaughtered girls.
Her hem reddened, darkened. Confused embarrassment at her own moment of flinching from Zal and now from this fresh minor horror
caught her off guard. Words died in her throat. She turned away and went back through the building. Tables and chairs got
in her way. She threw them aside, hearing them smash and break against the walls, halting only once she reached the open door.
The forecourt was a mess of furious, humiliated people but their focus was gone, their purpose lost. At the sound of distant
police sirens gravel kicked and dust rose in clouds as vehicles swerved onto the road and away.
Lila crossed to where Deadkill’s local leader lay, conscious and moaning with pain, in a heap of his own faeces. The bloody
hems of the skirt panels around her ankles tapped him like the fingers of naughty children trying to annoy. She looked down
at his spit-flecked face and saw pure hatred staring back at her. She knew she looked the same.
‘They’re not different to you,’ she said. ‘They came back and they didn’t even want to. It’s not up to you to destroy them.’
She didn’t know if she believed her own line.
‘Fuck you,’ he growled. ‘Dead stays dead. What fuckin’ human thinks otherwise? Even the demons want them gone. Bible says—’
But she put her bloody, gravel-crusted boot on his mouth. ‘You aren’t fit to say the words. You aren’t the law.’
With an effort that must have cost a lot of pain he wrenched free, twisting to the side and spat. His mouth and cheek was
smeared with red. ‘You ain’t either.’
She glanced down at her crusader’s garb and its new crimson hem. ‘I’m
a
law,’ she said. ‘And if I see you again, you’re a dead man.’
Police cars wheeled into the lot with silent grace, their blue and starred sides sliding back to allow armoured officers to
jump out. She went forward to complete formalities with them. A strange coldness, a kind of emptiness filled her with only
one thing standing in its vast space: Max. She felt the pain of that loss again, sharp and cruel, and then on top of it the
longing and the fear, the hope and the hopelessness engendered by the messages she could not bring herself to delete:
come see me, I’m here, I’m home again
. . .
The officers’ amusement at her roundup washed over her in a tide that felt completely out of synch with the day. She cross-referenced
with their networks, was discharged, picked up the ton of summonses from Greer, her boss, that she’d also been avoiding,
and slowly made her way back to the diner’s emergency exit on autopilot.
Zal was standing in the shade at the end of the building, almost invisible. He ignored and was ignored by the bustle of the
diner’s staff and customers as they restored themselves after the scare and emerged to watch the last of their assailants
cuffed and driven away in blind-sided vans. Some of them were already talking into their lapel phones as the trial lawyers
got underway. By the time the vans reached the courthouses there would be a case waiting and a judge to hear it. This burst
of efficiency soothed Lila a little, though the sight of Zal, standing so still as he leaned on the diner wall, arms crossed,
slouched and withdrawn, did not.
She made her way up to him and pulled off her crusader’s mask, tucking it under her arm. The cool air felt like water as it
washed through her sweaty hair and over her face. ‘You okay?’
His gaze slid from whatever infinite it had been contemplating and focused on her face. ‘Not so much,’ he said finally, his
ears flicking with irritated discomfort. As he stood straight he rolled his shoulders and eased his neck. She saw that his
hair, so muddy recently, was bright silver and gold. The black aura of his
andalune
body lingered here and there but as he became more alert it submerged into the suddenly photoreal colour of his physical
body. She realised that he was heavier. He had more mass. They shared a look for a few moments.
‘Not hungry any more?’ she asked, as if she were a woman asking a man if he’d had enough dinner and nothing more.
He shook his head slowly. His expression was grim, making him look dangerous. The tan of his skin shone in the sun, sheened
with health. She wanted to touch him but she didn’t even dare reach out with the ultrasound.
‘Think you can ride it back home?’ She jerked her head in the direction of the bike.
He gave her a filthy look.
‘I have something I have to do,’ she informed him. ‘I’ll see you there later.’
His gaze flickered down over her clothes to the hem and his face contorted slightly. Finally he just smiled, a tired smile
and leaned down and kissed the top of her head. ‘Don’t be late.’
‘Okay,’ she nodded and smiled in return with a reassurance she
didn’t feel, then made herself go back to where the bodies of the two girls were being zipped into plastic bags by the medical
team.
They delayed for her to take a look, holding the bags open so she could see the bullet holes. The bodies were quite normal,
utterly human, the killing wounds exactly what you would expect from close–range, high-power firearms. They were also quite
dead. Lila looked up at the paramedic across the gurney from her. ‘They were Returners.’
The woman nodded and slowly closed the bag up over the blonde girl’s unmarked head. ‘Yeah, we see a lot of these lately. Don’t
worry, they won’t be back again. Corpse is what you see. That’s what you got.’ Unhappiness made her frown lines deepen and
she looked back up at Lila when Lila didn’t go. ‘Something else?’
But there was no data Lila needed she couldn’t get just by reading the records. What she wanted to ask was impossible for
this woman to answer.
‘No.’ DNA samples, research papers, tests rushed through her mind in a second. There was nothing abnormal about a Returner,
except for the fact that they reappeared fully formed, between one moment and the next. Otherwise they were the same as everyone
else. She let them wheel the bodies away and watched as their small white vehicle slowly purred across the road and turned
for downtown. Its onboard instructional log rerouted it towards the Agency’s morgue. She wondered if there would be funerals
this time but then all her delays were used up. With a gritting of her teeth she turned around and began to walk. It was at
least six miles home and she needed time to think, to clear her head, to keep on waiting and not arriving . . .
Beyond the lines of hills and rooftops in front of her she could see the faint glitter and wispy blue colour of the sea.
Walking, admiring the built-up scenery and whispering traffic, was a pleasure that lasted only a few minutes. Then Lila found
herself on the phone to Malachi, hoping he’d gotten back. Bentley answered and explained that Sarasilien had made himself
known to everyone, but the tone of her voice didn’t give away a lot. Lila shelved that problem into the official back-burner
zone of her mind and as soon as Malachi had been located and connected – faeries didn’t carry all the human technogubbins
as routine – she blurted what had been simmering away all day.
‘I need to see Tath. Talk to Tath. Whatever. But I don’t want to have to get flatlined to do it. What’s another way?’
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, then Malachi said, ‘I’m not sure there is a way,’ in a tone that promised
it was carrying a lot more information than he was prepared to part with over a long-distance connection. That or he was being
overheard by someone. ‘Why don’t we meet up? There’s a lot to talk about.’
‘You mean Sarasilien?’
‘And the rest of it. Plus I’ve been gone longer than you think and I have quite a lot of downloading for you.’
He spoke gently, as if he hadn’t a care in the world; he was curiosity’s favourite cat and the cat had the cream. She knew
it for an old trick, mastered early on during the development of his human glamour. He could pass for a smooth talking, laid
back cool guy as easily as crossing the street, and it wasn’t exactly a lie, but she knew he wouldn’t practise it on her unless
he was telling her that he was covering something significant.
‘Meet me at the old house,’ she said and speeded up her march.
The afternoon turned balmy as she made the middle two miles, and they took her right through everything she never wanted to
know
about the Otopian methods of dealing with things they didn’t like, top of that list being the Returners.
Although they didn’t exist in sufficient numbers to be any kind of minority they cropped up with disarming irregularity. It
took serious processing power to compute their statistics, but a few notable features had dropped out, features that were
not so far in general knowledge. The first was that they always appeared when either the grave or the home of the Returner
were very close to places where there was a dimensional weakness; from natural causes or the interference generated by more
conscious activities. The second feature was the one that chilled her however. All the Returners had living relatives or friends
who said, in some form or other, that they could not bear to say goodbye, that there was a connection they didn’t want to
break and couldn’t accept was broken.
To top it off there was the non human undead rubbish that Xaviendra had left behind when she decided to hold Lila to ransom,
and for which crime she was now sleeping soundly in the Agency jail. They kept her to hunt down and tidy the mess she’d made,
or such was the excuse. Vampires and other necrosprites had become a little statistic on the bottom of the crime pages all
over the Bay Area. Xavi was on special privileges (allowed out with Lila) to track and contain these things, when there was
time. They should have been on it today, but today had gone awry. In any case, although Lila had taken her twice on ‘missions’
neither time had given her confidence in the activity. For one thing she had to trust Xaviendra’s choice of victims and for
a second she knew that every second spent outside Sarasilien’s magic-proofed cell was a second in which Xavi could be performing
any number of magical activities that Lila had no hope of detecting. She used any excuse herself to keep Xavi incarcerated,
even conducting what briefings they had within its walls. The fact was that because the Otopian authorities felt unable to
execute or repatriate her, she was better off dumped where she was. At first Lila had felt sorry for her. Later however, that
sympathy had waned as she realised the extent of Xavi’s prior treachery to her own kin. This niggled at her. She felt there
was more to uncover, and if only she had Friday she would have been able to see what it was. But Friday was not to be had.
Finally, among her extensive inbox, there were the urgent-flags of a detective in the Serious Crimes Unit operating out of
Bay Central. They were all hunter cases – fae gone bad and half fae even badder – a string of murders awaited her perusal
in gut-churning detail. All over
town and beyond people wanted to be rid of the supernatural. It was a million miles away from the heady, optimistic times
she remembered, before she even heard of the Agency, when elves and demons were rare, their worlds exciting new frontiers,
their explanations of matter and energy fresh and exotic, rich with promise.
Lila must be behind the times because she still felt that way about them, even knowing the worst of their nature, but it seemed
like nobody else in Otopia did. Aside from a few romances and soap operas featuring hot humans dressed up to thrill there
wasn’t much positive media about the other worlds. But negative stuff, especially at the conspiracy-theory end, of that there
was enough to choke on. Deadkill were only the pitiful tip of a big, ugly iceberg. It didn’t take genius to understand the
pressure that Temple Greer and the Agency were under to get it out of sight.
With a final turn Lila reached the familiar streets of her home accompanied by a sense of déjà vu, not for the place, but
for the fact she was always coming back only to run away again at the first opportunity. She didn’t like the run away element,
though it wasn’t because she wanted to stay. She wished she could walk out with the feeling of a clean break and things made
even, concluded, debts paid. Instead here she was looking at the changes in the neighbourhood and feeling guilt and shame
grow inside her, twin poisons that sapped her will so that it was difficult not to march right past the end of the driveway.
Instead she didn’t even pause. The drive was cracked. Weeds choked its edges. The grass was long and turning brown. The trees,
small when she was a child, had either been cut to stumps or were huge, covering the small front yard in late-afternoon shade.
To either side the houses were much neater. She could just imagine the kind of thoughts the people there must harbour about
her old home, but she couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to know what they thought about the person inside it. She didn’t know
herself.
Without pause for thought she knocked at the door. Standing on the step was an odd feeling. She knew the place, and didn’t
know it. So much time had gone by here without her, she wasn’t even sure it recognised her as one of its own. She was glad
about it.
Footsteps sounded in the hall. The door opened onto a gloomy interior and in the instant before she saw the person standing
there she smelled the warm waft of cinnamon and pastry and the sharper bite of lemon. Then her eyes adjusted perfectly and
she had to force
herself to be still and maintain the mask of pleasant enquiry that she had made of her face.
Max looked back at her with the same instant of incomprehension turning to recognition. Lila’s shock was the greater, she
guessed.
Max wasn’t an old woman, nor even particularly mature looking. This was Max as Lila always remembered her, young, late twenties,
her short hair in a raffish pixie cut, her more-like-dad-than-mine face rosy-cheeked from bending over hot stoves or running
along the beach. Her greenish grey eyes sparkled and the left one quirked slightly, because they’d once fallen in love with
the superior eyebrow of a film star and spent weeks practising the look. Ever after Max couldn’t stop doing it and the quirk
had become part of her stand-back-and-let-’em-have-it attitude.
Lila expected to see a ghost, a lost person, a desperate person, someone she didn’t want her sister to have become, not just
. . . Max. And certainly not the real thing. This should have been a pale shadow, a mockery, a monster.
‘Lila!’ Max stood back with a huge theatrical stride and swung the old door open wide. ‘Come on in! I thought you’d never
make it!’
There was genuine delight in her voice. Lila almost ran.
She stepped forward into the dark hall, always inconveniently narrow, and as she passed Max said, ‘Jesus, what are you wearing?
Is it costume-party day at work or have you converted to one of those weird kinds of catholic? I know your job must be intense
but I thought you’d turn drunk before religious.’
There was no odour of death or decay, nothing to show that Max was anything but real and normal even though she had been twenty-five
already once, long ago. Lila found it impossible to keep her mind from jumping with joy. Max was here! Something if not everything
was going to be all right.
Lila walked on to the kitchen, the idea of being trapped in the hallway, perhaps in a hug, making her move forward in an awkward
kind of dance that nearly stumbled as she crossed the threshold.
For a moment it was like she’d stepped back in time. She saw the kitchen of her early years, the old paint, the cupboards,
the loose-handled drawer, the pinboard with its festoons of abandoned to-do lists and cat cards, the toppling slippery piles
of special-offer mail that never got thrown out in case it held the winning ticket to some faraway dream. In her mind she
heard her mother’s voice objecting,
‘But you have to keep it in case they come with your number. What if you hadn’t got it? You could miss out on the best win
of your life.’
The faeries had my number all along,
Lila thought, but she was moving on already.
On the wall over the little dining table there was the picture of the poker-playing dogs seated at their green casino table.
Chips and drinks and cards covered it. And one dog, a happy hound with an almost berserk smile, had won an enormous pile of
cash and thrown all his cards in the air where they turned in the smoke and gloom of the dark bar – four aces, two kings.
Aces
High!
said the caption in small italics above the cheap gold frame. It wasn’t until college Lila had learned that ‘aces high’ was
a phrase about fighter pilots and not about cards.
Now for the first time ever she noticed the picture hanging on the bar wall behind the losing Chihuahua with his paws over
his head – two spitfires, guns blazing against a cloudless blue sky. Seeing it now made a special pain turn in her heart and
tears suddenly blotted out the vision entirely, making her dash her wrist across her eyes before Max could see her. She’d
spent all her young life hating the cheap, nasty tackiness of that picture with its low-rent glorification of drinking and
gambling and the stupid ambition of hopeless people with their contemptible crass humour and their short-sighted focus on
pleasure. The feelings engendered by this image had instantly and always shamed her, baring as it did her own embarrassment
and aspirations, her contempt of her family’s failure to exert any real effort to pull themselves out of the mire. Her own
secret treachery was thrown in her face every day by this damned picture.
She’d tried once to throw it out by stuffing it down the side of the bins in the backyard and in doing so cracked the frame
only to find her mother later that day restoring it lovingly but ineptly with craft glue that left an ugly line across it.
The line was still there, the glue yellowed and ancient. Remembering her own arrogance and spite hurt like knives in her chest
now. She closed her eyes to block it out and there in her mind’s eye saw her mother’s smile. She heard her mother’s voice
that would never say anything again, saying lovingly to her, to Lila, the daughter who couldn’t save her, ‘Aces high!’ Well
wishing her. At the time it had made her feel sick. And she’d known about the picture and who’d broken it and never said anything.
Two spitfires, four aces. It meant love. It meant luck. It meant the
good times were and always had been right here, in this kitchen. If she had seen them.
Suddenly Lila was bent almost double. A howling noise was coming from her mouth, though it seemed not to be her making it.
The caving hole inside her chest was making it, trying to breathe, trying to hold together when she could feel herself literally
breaking up, falling apart. Her body went rigid, attempting to survive by any means, frozen in terror of extinction and feeling
it was already too late.
She felt hands and arms on her shoulders, moving her to sit down, patting her, hugging her. The faint thought that she should
brush them off and get away was too faint to survive. Her own arms were clutched around herself, holding her guts in.
From a great distance she heard Max say, ‘Li!’ and then, ‘Oh Lila,’ with such sympathy and this made her howl all the more.
Her system cued up the procedures and drugs that could return her to normal but she offlined them ruthlessly.
All she wanted was what had been before the machine, before the job, before the college, before growing up. She wanted to
be lost in an ancient time when in her innocence and naivety the picture amused her, delighted her, when she had no idea about
the way things really were in the world, when it felt like everything was safe and going right.
‘What is it?’ she heard Max say, when she got too tired to continue and was paused, eyes closed, rocking on her seat.
‘I want to go home,’ she said, sniffing. As she said it she felt tired, a million years tired, and found the table in front
of her. She put her arms down on it and her head on her arms. The soft sleeves of her shirt soaked up the wetness from her
cheeks. She hated to be weak, but weakness had overtaken her. Everything she had shored up behind the dam of being competent
and strong, had found this crack in the frame and spilled out and she couldn’t get it back. Her heart hurt with a cold, aching,
unrequited longing so intense she couldn’t breathe unless she focused all her attention on that and nothing else.
Max sat down beside her and kept a hand on her back between her shoulders. ‘Is that why you called me?’
The words processed slowly through Lila’s mind, empty now that its efforts had failed. ‘Yes.’ She felt Max’s hand rubbing
her gently through the tough faery cloth with a warm and steady beat.