More reluctantly than I ever had before, I reached for my Aspect.
Just a twitch, I only wanted a touch of it.
And felt it settle over my shoulders like a too-friendly hug from someone you can’t rebuff, and
ahhh, at last,
I heard that too. Or felt it, rather, deep in my bones, because of course my Aspect had no actual voice of its own. Hell, it had no actual existence of its own: no life, no opinions, no feelings. This was just another sign that I’d overdone it yesterday, relied on the thing too much for too long. Maybe it was like alcohol or caffeine, any drug; maybe you could chart the course of it from hangover to need to addiction. Maybe I needed therapy. Oops.
Right now, I needed what it had to offer, more than I needed to worry about what that was doing to me long-term. I blanked out my wilder fancies, and let my awareness stretch above, either side, below me as I zoomed along.
It’s a neat trick if you can do it: not quite like radar and not quite like that sense we all get when someone’s watching us, but somewhere between the two. If someone’s watching me then I can find them, so long as I think to look. To check, rather. I shouldn’t call it looking, when it doesn’t use my eyes. When it can reach down as well as up, into the earth as far as into the air.
No one was watching me, unless they were better at this than I was. Of course, someone would be. Inevitably, someone would know how to use their Aspect or their Power to hide themselves even while they kept tabs on me. There was nothing I could do about that. It was endlessly recursive, and I would lose on every turn. So: pretend it couldn’t happen and carry on as though it didn’t, as though nobody really was there.
And be stubborn with your Aspect, don’t let it rule your life. I shrugged it off, more or less, though that took more of an effort than I liked. I held on only to that whisper I’d originally reached for, enough to keep my legs from tiring as I skated on and on; enough to keep a tendril’s reach trailing into the sky, in anticipation of any passing bird. I could make like a jellyfish, sting the damn thing if I distrusted it.
Otherwise, I just buckled down. No more playing with pedestrians, no more stoking an artificial temper. I was in the road now, swooping along with steady strides, faster than any car could go in London traffic. Careful at junctions and heedless of lights, just going when I could: cutting it as fine as I cared to, speed and angle of attack, hurtling under the nose of a passing truck or tailgating around a corner when a tail presented itself, grabbing a tow from any useful bus and then zooming on by at the next stop.
It’s one thing about an Aspect, about being adopted into the Overworld and gifted strengths you’d never even dreamed of. Of course it changes you, but mostly what bubbles up is what was there already, lying dormant. It’s a chance to express yourself, the truth of you; a chance to open doors you never dared before.
Fay was quiet, girly, shy before she met Jacey. Privately, though, she always did think bike messengers and skateboarders were cool. Not the cocky, confident, look-at-me boys; she looked for girls, and seldom saw them. It was the life, the speed, the skill she envied. Body-consciousness, strength and judgement and control.
Then, well. Fay dated Jacey, and that in itself was a process of discovery, and yes, very much about the body. And then Fay became Desi, and oh, yes. Strength and judgement and control beyond measure, beyond anything human. Turned out that Desi liked machines – and that came from Fay too, a little secret buried part of her that had always wanted a motorbike of her own, however much she loved riding pillion behind her boy – but underneath the kick and roar of an engine was always this, the kick and surge of effort, of speed earned, deserved, achieved.
It’s easy just to live in the moment, in your muscles, in the work. It’s another kind of displacement activity,
I’m going for a walk
or
a ride
or
a drive
, movement without purpose – but not for me, not that day. I did have to go somewhere, after all; I couldn’t just be not-with-Jacey. That was Jordan’s thing, to run for the sake of running, just to get away.
And besides, I did have somewhere to go. It was only a question of how to get there, which way was best.
By train, I thought, was probably best. Quickest and safest both.
Get out from under the sky,
I thought, and
cover the ground
, that too. Expand my love of the DLR, learn to love the real thing. But all the big mainline stations were too close, too easy to watch, birds flapping in and out of those high Victorian arches. And I’d be there too soon: before my legs had had a real work-out, before my mind had sunk into the mindlessness of exercise. I wanted to be Zen, and I wasn’t even in the zone. So far all I’d managed was exhibitionism. Which went well with my Aspect, but not so much with being discreet.
So. One of the suburban stations, then, somewhere on the margins of the city. A good long stretch, and I’d let my Aspect go before I got there, wear myself out thoroughly and then spend hours changing trains in unexpected places where nobody would think to look for me.
Undetectable, progressing. Getting there.
CHAPTER TEN
B
EING HERE, FOR
now. Being in the moment, in the movement, in the stride and drive and flow of it: all smooth power and supple strength, stretch and balance, confidence and devil-may-care. The kind of girl that Fay had always yearned to be. There was a satisfaction in that.
Except that Fay was nicer, and didn’t drag a broken heart in the dust behind her until the end there, when she really had no choice. Me, I seemed to make a practice of it. Three broken hearts, maybe; three damaged lives, at least. Sometimes I thought I’d sooner be Fay again. She was so... uncomplicated. Desi tried to be brisk and brutal with the world, to skate over it hard and fast, but everything always tangled up around me. Too many dogs on leads, I guess, and you can’t jump them all.
Never mind. I was out of the city’s heart now, the worst of the traffic was behind me, I couldn’t find anything spying; birds were just birds, as far as I could tell. I could put my head down and bull along. Reel in my Aspect, that too, do the work myself. Work up an honest sweat, like a real mortal girl...
S
OMETIMES, A DOORWAY
takes you by surprise.
People have done studies, how you can walk into a room and abruptly forget why you came there. It’s all in the doorway, in the process of passing through, it’s like you reboot your mind. Like there are magnets in the frame, to wipe your short-term memory.
Or a doorway makes itself a metaphor, however solid and substantial and really in the world it is. You step through, and your life will never be the same.
Or never mind the metaphors and never mind the brainshift, it’s just a physical actual doorway and you go from here to there, one place to another, and things are different.
Whichever: you can be ready for any of that, if you only see the doorway coming. If you know it’s there. If you
choose
. If it lets you make the choice, in or out, this side or that.
Sometimes you’re just bulling along, head down, working up a sweat, and someone sticks a doorway right in front of you, and everything changes.
H
EAT IS WORK
and work is heat. Not a metaphor, that’s a rule.
Basically, Fay always wanted to be hot. Okay, that’s a metaphor.
Desi? Likes it both ways. Metaphorical and otherwise. It’s hot to be cool, but regular heat is also good. Sunshine or sauna, fresh air or pheromones, dance-time or double-time, it’s always good to be getting sweaty.
The sun beat down on the back of my neck and even the air tasted hot in my mouth, even the road beneath my wheels had stored up enough heat to be radiating back at me.
It felt gritty too, that road, like I was rolling over hot, hard, gravelly sand rather than laid tarmac. I hadn’t really looked for a while, I’d been zoning out, automating; but I looked now, and –
Oh.
Hot hard gravelly sand, oh, yes.
I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.
A
CTUALLY,
K
ANSAS MIGHT
be more like this than London ever was. I lifted my head and saw open plain, with a promise of distant mountains. The sky was... not the right colour. Not the right sky. There was dust in the air, lifted by that hot wind even before my wheels stirred it up from the red, red road.
There were green things growing by the roadside, but I didn’t want to call them crops. I didn’t think they’d been
planted
.
Self-sowing suddenly acquired a whole new meaning.
Never mind.
There was something else that mattered a whole lot more, that I was already trying to avoid.
Some
one
else.
I didn’t stop skating, not immediately. That made no difference. He kept pace without effort, and without skates. I wasn’t certain sure that he was even walking. He was just... there. This was his kingdom; of course he was there. I was his guest, and of course he’d come to make me welcome.
To open the door for me.
Soon enough, I slewed to an elegant halt and turned to face him directly.
We stood about on a level, me on my skates and him just standing in the road there. He might have been barefoot; I didn’t look down to see. He might have been wearing a suit like yesterday, or something anciently appropriate, or nothing at all; I wasn’t really paying attention to his dress, any more than he was to mine.
I said, “Hell of a place to waylay a girl.” Just to get the groundrules clear:
I know where I am
and
I’m not afraid of you.
At least one of those was a lie.
He just smiled. He knew.
I said, “How did you find me?”
“Please,” he said, with a little shrug. “This is my home. I know where everyone is, here.”
In Hell, sure – but in London? How did you find me there?
There was probably no point pursuing it, if he wasn’t interested in telling me. It was just a thing he could do, that was all. He couldn’t find his son without my help, but he could sure as hell find me.
I said, “Does Jordan?” I wasn’t going to be suddenly looking around for him – was
not
– but it would be useful information. Might be. If he was still looking around for me.
He said, “My son is... a law unto himself. He’s with his mother now.”
Relax
, he was saying,
you’re safe. For now. Here, with me.
That was a little odd, perhaps, but I believed him. I thought he was still grateful, in so far as he understood that he ought to be.
I said, “Well, then...?”
Why did you bring me here, what do you want?
One does not simply interrogate the Lord of Hell. But one can come perilously close to it. When one is in a hurry, say, with a message to deliver, a warning for an old friend; and has been hijacked, hoicked out of time and place at some immortal’s whim.
I assumed he was being whimsical. What else? What manner of use could a mortal be to him?
He said, “My wife and I wanted to offer you an apology, over the way yesterday’s events ended for you. Our son’s reaction was not unexpected, perhaps, or should not have been; but it was unfortunate, and you deserved better of us all.”
My wife... our son... his mother.
He seemed to avoid names, when he could. To him it was all about relationships. I felt a mad urge to do the other thing, to resist him, to call him by his name – but which one? Dis, Pluto...?
Or none of the above. I still didn’t understand what he was doing here, or what I was. What he wanted. Lord of the Underworld, he was a Power of the Overworld by definition: why in any world or all of them should he feel the need to apologise to me? I’d been no more than a messenger. A servant. What he’d expect, from the mortal world.
Unless...
Oh, wait.
Oh, hell.
The way he’d taken me aside, in his own way, somewhere we could be private together; the way he was talking to me, a little formal, a little conspiratorial;
for him it’s all about relationships,
and two nights ago I’d been sharing a bed with his son. Suddenly he reminded me of nothing so much as an awkward father-in-law, trying to act as go-between in a family row.
No. Just... no.
If he could find me this easily – could he have found me last night? In bed with another of the golden boys, in defiance of whatever he was hoping for?
Probably, yes.
Had he found me then, like that? And held off, waited until I was alone, when he could maybe obscurely urge the interests of his own boy?
Maybe. No way to tell. If he had, at least he hadn’t blasted us both in fury at our betrayal. That was something. I supposed.
If not, could he read my mind right now? Or my blushing, giveaway body?