The girl replaced the popsicle for a minute and continued to stare thoughtfully. Then she removed it to say, ‘I wish I could
see into the spirit world, but I can’t.’
‘I wish I could stay in my own room without being woken up by staring people,’ Lila said. She noted the angle of the light
and considered the time and day. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in school?’
The girl rolled her eyes as if this was the most stupid question ever asked a being. Lila closed hers in response.
‘You know they’re not human, right?’
This question made Lila open her eyes again and now she was properly awake and resenting every instant of it. ‘Oh?’
‘The dead. Undead. Whatever you want to call them.’ Sassy leaned on the doorframe at an exaggerated angle of insouciance.
‘But you probably want to think they are.’ She shifted her weight, unable to keep her attitude stable.
‘Can this possibly wait until you go out and I get up and get dressed?’ Lila asked hopefully.
‘Most people don’t want to know,’ the girl said with a shrug. ‘I guess you’re the same.’
‘She’s not the same,’ Zal’s voice rose from behind Lila’s head, hoarse but distinct.
Sassy rolled her eyes again, suddenly choosing this moment to feel embarrassment, and pushed off from the doorframe and away.
Lila heard the sounds of cupboards being opened and the rustle of a bag. She forgot it for a while, kissing Zal, then as they
were lying with their heads close he said, ‘I don’t know all her story but she’s from one of those downtown slums that have
become no-go areas for the average human.’
‘I don’t find any missing person report,’ Lila said. ‘But she’s under age. Interesting demographic down there. No wonder she
wanted to leave.’
The place he mentioned was Cedars, a parkland development of social housing that had once been the height of the city’s civic
pride, but that was back in Lila’s heyday. Now it was like the Diner, a gathering hotspot for outsiders and anyone who wanted
to retreat to gangland safety from the twitchy arm of the law. Bay City’s murder capital, it was covered in the red dots of
assaults and the black dots of deceased victims on the cop map. They suspected at least one Hunter killer to live in the dens
there, but nobody short of a swat team was going to go find out, and there were no swat teams not occupied elsewhere in the
country with the combination of Returners and the Hunter’s other rogue children. Cedars was one of the items high on the list
of triple exclamation-point alert notes that the police commander
had wanted to talk to her about. With the AI dealing with everything it could the only items left in her Inbox were those
that couldn’t be dealt with except through her personal intervention and this wasn’t one of those. If Sassy was on the run
from Cedars, Lila wasn’t about to rush to hand her over to the police or the gangs. It took a special kind of guts and guile
to get out of a place like that, and maybe a special kind of reason.
‘I hate that she always knows what’s on my mind.’
Zal didn’t budge, kept his eyes closed. ‘I don’t. Just wish I knew what was bothering her.’
Lila sat up and rubbed sleep out of her face. ‘How many elves you know of here?’
‘None,’ he said. ‘Teazle mentioned they’d caught a few in Demonia but I haven’t seen him since you have. Then again, I’m going
on what you told me from memory and I haven’t been anywhere without you so it’s not worth asking.’
She unpicked the sense of his statement after a minute. ‘There are some on the immigration and city tracking nets, thirteen
to be exact, including Arie. Plus the mad one in the Agency basement. And you.’
He stretched and resettled himself, waking up like she was, slowly and with reluctance. ‘Just cut to the chase; I don’t need
to verify your reasoning and the longer you take the more sure I get that the news is bad.’
‘Alfheim’s gone dark,’ she said, aware that the sounds of teenage exploration in the kitchen had stopped. ‘Sarasilien says
that only an elf would be able to go back and find out what’s happening, although he’s lying-by-omission-his-ass-off and knows
perfectly well what’s going down if you ask me, and he’s playing for time.’
Zal opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a few moments. ‘I thought you were assigned to undead duty.’ His tone was
disapproving and she felt the bite of his disappointment. He thought she’d enough for the humans, and with the Diner incident
no doubt more than enough.
‘Triage,’ Lila said. ‘Sarasilien and his droid think this is global-catastrophe duty, and that outweighs undead issues since
they aren’t world threatening. The worst part about it is, I kinda agree, while at the same time the desire to smash his face
in with the nearest blunt object is almost overwhelming. And I feel like I’m towing you for the ride. And then he springs
this and says he wants you to go. And I just got you back. I totally fucking hate the idea. I hate it all. But if the
only way it’ll go away and leave us in peace is to deal with it, then I’m going to deal.’
She was able to place Sassy just around the corner from the open door quite easily. On his back beside her Zal continued his
stare at the ceiling. ‘Zal?’
‘Why me?’
‘Good question, I—’
‘No, I mean, why doesn’t he go? Why does he ask for me?’
‘Because you’re demon in part and he thinks that will make you immune to whatever it is that he apparently doesn’t know anything
about.’
‘So he’s probably right about that.’
‘I guess there’s a good chance.’ Lila hesitated; the girl was a wild card in her mind, allegiances unknown.
‘You could come with me.’
‘I don’t trust him,’ she said, almost at the same moment so they spoke over each other. She was the one to continue. ‘If I
go with you then there won’t be any contact with him here, and I wouldn’t be here to keep Xavi under wraps. He could do anything.’
‘There is the whole of the Otopian Agency—’
‘Not capable of dealing. Malachi is their only powerful aetheric operative still on active duty and I wouldn’t give him ten
seconds against Sar. Besides which, he has his own problems and crossing Sar wouldn’t be on his list. Plus I pissed him off
yesterday and we aren’t talking. Bentley’s good and the other cyborgs are fine but they’re all human mechanoid, not an ounce
of aether between them. And I don’t like the idea of leaving Xavi off radar either, even if she is doing a faultless line
in helpful repentance. She’s got to be nearly as old as Sar is and executing her revenger’s tragedy took several hundred lifetimes’
worth of hard intent. Giving it up on the turn of one little psychological screw doesn’t strike me as all that plausible.’
‘So, what were you going to do?’ Zal was amused. He rolled onto his side and propped his head on one hand, putting the other
one on her knee.
‘I’m going to see Ilya. I was going to anyway, but Malachi said something about him having changed. Plus, now that we’re not
talking I don’t know how I’m going to see him.’
‘Ah, so I go to Alfheim and single-handedly save it, and you go across the threshold of the spirit world and figure out the
dead problem and then we’re home free?’
She frowned and aimed a play punch at his arm. ‘Why d’you put it like that? Makes it sound like I’m an idiot.’
‘I know the way your mind works, is all,’ he said, making his index and middle finger work out a few tango steps on the inside
of her knee. ‘Mine used to work like that.’
‘You’re saying it doesn’t now?’
‘Now it doesn’t work at all, which is a merciful release.’
Lila began to reply but then a fresh awareness of Sassy sneaking around outside the door broke in on her again and she hesitated.
Part of her wanted to damn the situation and to hell with any consequences, she was sick and tired of sharing every moment
with Zal with some other person as well, no matter how passively. Another part of her said that they had no idea what Sassy’s
agenda was, if she had one, and it would be wiser to keep her mouth shut. And then, having turned this way, her thoughts trotted
down the path that suggested Sassy might have run here lost and lonely and was in need of help herself. She felt some empathy,
but then again, she felt like screaming too.
Zal grinned and picked his fingers up, tracing circles around on the inside of her knee like a lazy ice dancer. ‘But . . .’
His white teeth shone clearly against the dark of his skin, taken down many shades by both the low light and his aetherial
body’s emergence.
‘But . . .’ she said and let it hang there. ‘If I don’t do this, who will? I’m the only cyborg with a hotline to the dead.’
Zal’s hand slid all the way up her leg. Lila rolled her eyes vividly in the direction of the door. He grabbed hold of the
sheet and cover and pulled them up over both their heads. ‘We can hide in here.’ He moved in close, warm and delicious, and
kissed her. She slid next to him until they were pressed against each other as closely as they could be. The strength of his
aetheric body around her made her nerves tingle with a faint, just detectable resonance that spread comfort and pleasure through
every part of her. She bathed in him and felt him hum with delight. She traced his face and the long lines and narrow, ragged
edge of his ears.
‘Contrary to popular belief, the ears are not the best erotic organ on an elf,’ he murmured.
‘Really?’ she altered the structure of her palms and fingertips and began to emit ultrasound, tuning the frequencies by his
reactions. She travelled over pressure points and along energy channels. When,
a moment later, she touched the two points of his ears with an exact vibration and depth, he was wordless.
It was an old technique, one she learned by accident when she’d been forced into performing emergency surgery on Dar and accidentally
triggered an energetic total body response in him that had swept both of them into an intimate melding that was as much pleasure
as surprise. There was also the enormous gratification of using sound to play Zal, rock star, elf and demon, like a musical
instrument.
Their relationship had been stupidly brief but the honeymoon long enough to experiment with sonics a great deal and she knew
what she was doing now. She understood exactly why Zal had got such an enormous kick out of rock music – it hit him on a mental,
emotional, aetheric and physical level. By tuning her own body and creating points of transmission she could create ecstasy
in him. It delighted her, more than any other toy she’d ever known and it made her shy and careful with him because it was
so powerful and he was putty in her hands when she used it.
When she woke up for the second time her mind snapped to attention. She looked around and found that Zal was already gone,
the bedsheets tangled in his wake and the sun shining in at a late-morning slant through a crack in the shutters. The door
was closed and beyond it she heard his voice and the girl’s talking in the kitchen. Music radio played in the background.
Lila stretched her legs and toes out. The novelty of this, the novelty of making love with a full body again, was not lost
for a second and she wanted to stretch them out, aware that her chances of feeling so good again soon were very short. Surely,
surely now she ought to glory in her abilities but in spite of all the positives in the changes her feelings were slow to
catch up. Before she even reached the shower she was already engaged in a fantasy of seizing Zal, leaving town, finding a
place outside Otopia, away from Alfheim, far from Demonia’s mad cities. It was a bland and impossible dream, safe to indulge
because it wouldn’t happen.
Lila turned her soaped face up into the streaming water. What did that song Zal wrote years ago say?
End of the line and no way out. Run in circles, scream and shout.
Other poets had put it better, but none of them had his basslines.
Because she was used to it and didn’t know what else to do she armed herself with her black leathers, boots to vest, and tried
not to watch the change. It felt warm and comfortable, nothing more.
Zal was standing in the kitchen, half dancing to the radio and eating from a bowl. Small packets of opened cereal were scattered
everywhere around on the worktops, mostly full, showing they had been tried and found wanting.
Sassy was crouched on a high stool at one end of the breakfast bar, a cup of tea in her hands. They made quite an odd sight
against the kitchen’s clean lines and design. Zal’s clothes were still bloodstained and dusty and Sassy looked as though she’d
dragged herself out of a dumpster, wadded in several layers of ill-fitting clothes that bore the marks of sleeping rough in
the forest. She hunched over her mug as if it was the last tea on earth and gave Lila a cautious once-over, flicking her eyebrow
as if she was the one in the odd costume. Lila was pretty used to this so she ignored it and started peering to see if Zal
had left any of his cereal.
‘Your habit of mixing everything hasn’t been lost then,’ she remarked.
‘I pride myself that only the worst of me made it through,’ he said, moving with faultless rhythm as he sidled out of her
way. ‘Couldn’t find the cocaine though. Do they still have cocaine?’
‘At the store?’ Sassy said with a rising tone at the end that suggested he was being wantonly stupid. ‘But everyone does Voraxin
these days.’
‘Is that at the store?’ Zal asked between spoonfuls, eyes half closed as he paid most of his attention to the music.
‘No,’ she sighed and put her head to one side before spelling it out. ‘It’s street only. Why do you think Cedars is so rich?
Got their own police force.’
‘You’re not on it though,’ Lila said, finding a box of Rice Pops and starting to hunt down a bowl.
‘I’m not stupid,’ the girl said with contempt, implying that this was true of only one person in the room.
‘No,’ Lila agreed, opening drawers. ‘So why are you here?’
‘Like I said, found it,’ came the reply. ‘You want me to go?’
‘You said I was in trouble and left it hanging.’ She located the spoons after Zal tapped the right place with his hand, still
lost in his tunes, only half there.