It was then a matter of a few easy seconds to wake up and direct the taxi, blotting it from the majority of the tracking subnets
with regular police protocols. They sat inside, reclined on the two sofas, and watched the dreary smalltown stubble of buildings
begin to roll past the windows as it slowly took over from the trees. Podunk Flats gave way imperceptibly to another, larger
suburb with more crowded housing. Zal looked at it despondently. He wasn’t happy in cities and suburban areas even less so.
The filtered light showed lines on his face. Lila moved across to him, keying the windows to blank themselves, and pushed
her way into his arms. They held one another and
in the still calm of his embrace she felt the seconds ticking away. She filled her nose with the smell of him and pressed
her tongue to the exposed skin at the neck of his shirt, held him closely and listened to the steady beat of his heart, immersed
until a note sounded and she felt the brakes bring them to a smooth halt.
The car had stopped short of its destination. Lila unpacked herself from Zal and stood up. She opened the door and stepped
out into the sudden burn of sunlight as it cut between two high rises. There was a roadblock ahead. To save herself trouble
she started downloading hubdata, allowing her AI to surface sufficiently that she meshed with it in real time, her mind getting
access to all its resources.
Between one step and the next she had armed herself in semi plate under the leather harness and let her arms and legs revert
to their machine mode, weapons forming and loads priming inside her forearms. She stood in line with Zal as he got out, shielding
him from most of the unseen guns who were overlooking them from the shady balconies of the two closest high-rise blocks, and
from the curious stare of the police officer looking their way from the city’s side of a substantial barricade. On the gang
side a cohort, including several demons and changelings, moved restlessly. It was a temporary standoff, one of several each
week. This one however was a lockdown from the inside and the officers here were standing around bored as their leaders talked
with gangmasters on private lines.
Lila let the taxi go, keeping Zal behind her shoulder. By the time she reached the barricade’s gateway she’d burst enough
comms lines to know that the gang known as Motley had called the freeze on migration. Cedars obstructed the free flow of traffic
from downtown to the strip – the major route in the city. Closing it caused a headache of big enough proportions that the
city wanted to reopen desperately but Motley were holding out for information and what they wanted to know was where one of
their gang members had gone. The city would know, even if they’d left the limits and headed out towards another hub. The city
didn’t have the information – she found an Agency trace on the deletions – and Motley didn’t believe them. The blockade was
into its second day and tempers were short. It didn’t take much to figure out that Sassy was the missing person in question.
Once the police had satisfied themselves that she was who she said she was they let her through, eyeing Zal with a mixture
of curiosity and distrust that was almost palpable, though Lila got the impression he was enjoying it. For someone who couldn’t
move without being
mobbed it must have been strange. For her part she could have done without the hostility – it felt so much worse than the
past, when demons were still mostly features of lurid stories rather than actual beings on the street and when faeries were
one-way tickets to the champagne lifestyles of the celebrities.
The police closed their side of the cordon and the Motley gave her and Zal the long, assessing stares that she knew from gang
members everywhere, including the one she’d run with in secondary school. She saw a savage-looking dog who was clearly a demon
in his natural form, spiked all over with bony spars, teeth as big as knives, ears flat close to his red head. Beside him
two other demons, one draconid, another a humanoid with natural bone armour and a scowl that could have curdled milk at a
hundred miles, went through the lip-curling business of sensing and then having to double-take Zal’s own demon nature as well
as his elf body. Then they stared even harder at her, able to feel traces of aether but not able to pick the source. The human
among them, a young man with a ferocious set of brightly coloured tattoos covering his face and hands, his hair bound in black
rags, was the only one to break silence.
‘Yeah?’
Lila showed her badge on the flat of her hand, letting it shine out of her skin and fade away as he recognised or at least
acknowledged it.
‘Feds?’ he said uncertain and incorrect but cowed, his glance at Zal frankly disbelieving. ‘What you want?’
‘Respect,’ said the bone demon angrily, glaring at his gangmate with contempt. ‘This not any cop. This Friendslayer and this
with her is the rolling rock itself, ain’t it? Ahrimani scum. We thought you dead and gone. You look like you returning but
don’t smell dead. Where you been all this time?’
His companions glanced at him. ‘Ahrimani?’ the dog muttered, shaking its massive head as though at a mistake. Lila ignored
it. Any demon running gangs in Bay City was either rolling for the fun of it or was too weak to claw a place of any power
back home. Zal’s old adoptive family had been a power to reckon with fifty years past in Demonia, second only to Teazle’s
rapacious broodclan, but their star had fallen when Zal was lost. He commanded a share of Teazle’s recent reign of blood and
terror, but only by marriage. Legally he was also dead in Demonia, which meant, should he do the prodigal thing, that he would
have to start again to prove his worth. The Ahrimani name had been brutal enough to be legend in its own lifetime
however, and this couldn’t be discounted. Here he was, elf, dead, alive, Ahrimani and standing cool, tall and elegant in
their neglected gardens, a strange dark flower blooming out of season. He barely awarded them a glance.
‘You must be older than you look,’ Lila said, shifting into the gap and taking up a relaxed stance, carefree as if she were
at a party. ‘We want the answer to the fey murders taking place on your patch and then we want a portal to Bathshebat.’
‘Yeah, well I want a condo with a boat and a car and six chained naked chicks in every room,’ the human said, stepping into
her path. ‘What you got?’
Lila made a laissez faire gesture with one hand. ‘Life and death.’
He blinked at her stupidly and groped around visibly in his head for her meaning. ‘Cops don’t kill on sight.’
‘I’m not a cop. Now, do you know anything about . . .’ She read the details, keeping her eyes in contact with his. She was
going through the motions but if they worked she didn’t care. ‘. . . the murder of Janie Six? Fullblood human.’
‘Shit no, but if she was one of those undead freaks then who gives a fuck?’
‘She was a dancer from the strip. Attack looks werewolf,’ Lila said.
The guy looked at her with uneasy distaste, picking up things from the demons’ body language that kept him from outright attacking,
but he was jittery. The dog growled.
‘Well, I’m not here to interfere with the law-abiding ignorant,’ Lila said pleasantly. ‘I will take your silence as a no.
Let’s go.’ She saw Zal give the nod to the demons, meaning he wanted to talk to them alone and without a word all four of
them began to walk away. She turned to follow them, leaving the human gang member watching her with sudden misgiving.
‘Police been here about that before,’ he hissed at her as she passed him. ‘Nobody’s goddamn business what prying whores get
their dues. Stay out of . . .’
Lila ignored him and what he wanted to say about territory although every word about the dead woman filed away in her mind,
burning slow trails towards her gut. She could smell drugs on him, enough to convict, and perhaps something that might have
been a doglike odour but she didn’t think he had enough fey blood to have a nightmare let alone be one. She heard him follow
them a few metres later but just kept after Zal as they were led across a small open sandy
area that had once been a kids’ playground and was now the local cat toilet as far as she could make out.
The police called her and she answered them with some platitudes until they shut up and let her alone. Meanwhile the demons
led them across the tree-shaded gardens, cluttered with rubbish, and across the highway, full of gang cars and bikes circling
and playing chicken with each other in the growing heat of the afternoon. It smelled of petrol; she heard old engines out
there half a mile further up, and sniffed the air, trying to catch a trace more before they turned into a door and then a
hall.
Lila expected the demons to try and jump them before they reached the stairwell but when it happened she was disappointed.
For Zal, because they weren’t scared enough of him to do him the honour of running away and for herself for trusting them
even for a split second not to be as stupid and petty ugly as they were. But as they launched themselves and revealed their
blade weapons, claws, teeth and guns she felt delight in retaliation, a sudden cool collected calm in her head in place of
all the chatter.
The dog was first. It was nearly the size of a horse but it barrelled in on Zal with dead weight, aiming to pin him to the
filthy wall while the other two shot him. The draconid flung a flechette. The bone demon raised and took a shot with a handgun,
which missed and ricocheted off the wall with a shrieking noise. It missed because Zal wasn’t at the wall, he was in midair
in a crouched position, feet tucked under him, chest to knees, arms wide as he jumped the dog’s high back. The flechette blade
jabbed into the concrete wall where his head might have been and exploded in a burst of purple poison that splattered the
graffiti and began to smoke.
Lila put an explosive shell into the bone demon’s chest that blasted it into a mist of bloody shrapnel. She felt splinters
cut her cheeks and forehead and saw a larger bit jammed into the draconid’s arm, making it look down for a second. Meanwhile
Zal landed at the dog demon’s side, shoving it against the wall where he was supposed to be with a violent jolt. He drove
his fingers through the thick, greasy fur of its neck and Lila saw darkness well out of the spot. The dog stopped moving and
slid down the blockwork to its side where it lay still. Lila took off the draconid’s long head with the flick of a chained
blade from beneath her wrist and snapped it back into place inside her forearm. Her AI sampled and checked the residues as
it cleaned up.
Meanwhile the human gangster hadn’t expected the demons to
attack. He was slower than they were to react, hesitant with a moment of troubled disbelief that they were about to murder
an officer, not understanding enough demon politics to realise this was an internal affair as far as they were concerned,
more important than any Otopian law. Lila had to wait with her hand behind her back for a good three seconds before he pulled
his gun on her and she could finally shoot out his legs above the knee with ordinary rounds.
By the time she stood over him, listening to his whimpering shrieks the crime was already processed and the file closed. She
bent down and injected him with a brief burst of painkillers, just enough so that he could get a hold of himself. ‘Who is
looking for this gang member that’s missing? Where is the Portal?’
In between inarticulate swearing he managed to tell her that the missing girl was the property of one of the Motley’s leaders,
Shivaud. There was some challenge for top spot going on and the gang was dividing. Shivaud was the one with the issue and
he had a portal too.
She left him lying there and went up to Zal, who was looking down at the dead demons, wiping blood, flesh and bone off his
face and out of his hair. ‘I forgot how welcoming they could be,’ he said, shaking off his hand with an audible splatter onto
the wet tile floor. He spat to clear his lips of demon blood and sighed a short, shoulder-drop sigh of resignation. ‘Where
now?’
‘Up,’ Lila pointed at the row of elevator doors, their bronze panels glinting with crudely carved fey symbols. ‘Boss always
lives at the top.’
Zal glanced at the call panels. None of the lights were lit. ‘Looks like they didn’t pay their bills.’
Lila waved her hand. ‘I got it.’ She pulled off the panel face of the first set of doors, plugged into the system and powered
it up, accelerating her tokamak to provide enough juice to get the thing active and at speed. The blocks were high and even
if they had no idea how it was happening someone would hear the lift moving and figure it out before they got to the top.
The car was already in the basement, where the machinery had left it. She had some dread of the doors opening but when they
did there was nothing special to see except the mould on the old carpeting. She reached around to the car’s own panel to switch
her connection and Zal stepped in after her. There was a screeching creak of rusty cables and a juddering sensation as the
winch took hold. She monitored the resistances but it was perfectly
safe, just dry and rusted, so she piled on the power and they shot upwards. Zal groaned.
‘Ugh, this is how heavy humans must feel all the time.’
‘Three point one gs,’ Lila informed him. ‘Only the very fat ones.’
And they were there, the twenty-fourth floor, having moved from the selves that had come here, all talk, to the selves that
stood here, sombre with action, in the space of a few breaths. Lila left the doors open, the car fixed, as she stepped out.
A panting, slightly wild-eyed greeting party had formed into a loose semicircle in the apartment’s foyer. They were all male,
young, human or human enough, and armed with a variety of automatic weapons and belts of the enchanted bullets known as ‘demon
cutters’. Lila could tell by the clean streaks on the handsome marquetry floor that nobody had walked in this way for a very
long time. Other than the wear upon it however the apartment was a glorious vision of cleanliness and good taste, lit by solar
feeds from the roof above them and powered, she assumed, by panels up there too. They wouldn’t be enough to haul an elevator
car, but enough to run any tech that was needed.