Then his eyes sprang open, and – well, no. Not worth very much after all, my daemon act.
His mouth opened and his great fat pale tongue slid out across his lips, just as mine did the exact same mirror thing. Except that only one of us was doing it deliberately; for the other it was purely instinctive, as she found herself suddenly dry-mouthed and trembling.
That was embarrassing, the trembling. I hated embarrassing myself in front of him; which was about all I had, that hatred, to stop me ducking my head and staring at the floor as so many unfortunates must have done before me. You could call it pride, you could call it self-contempt, but whatever it is it kept my chin up and my eyes fixed on his.
I didn’t have enough left – courage, breath, anything – actually to speak. I met his gaze, and that was as much as I could manage.
He ought to be gross and leprous, a kind of calcified Jabba the Hutt, but really he’s not. If he eats at all, I don’t know what he eats; I’m guessing he pretty much gets his nutrition by osmosis, from the waters that run constantly over his scalp and skin and the stony growth that encloses him. Minerals, salts, whatever. Whatever he needs, clearly, but not much in excess. His face is lean; the rest of him is hidden.
Lean and hungry, yes, that too. When he smiles, you can’t help but see his teeth. And think perhaps how good they must be, how strong, all that calcium; and wonder what he wants them for, how he uses them. Apart from the smiling, which he does deliberately often, just to be sure you’ve noticed.
He smiled. “Desdaemona. My prodigal child. You’ve been a long time gone.”
I nodded, and wondered what would happen if I hammered with both fists on his rocky crust, if I could break through to whatever there was left of flesh within. Somehow, I doubted it. My Aspect didn’t blink at brick walls, but this was different.
Besides, I’d have had trouble breaking a stick of spaghetti just then. Aspect or no Aspect. Oz can do that to you, just by looking.
Besides, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. I’d been kind of counting on surprise, just to give me a brief edge, buy me a little time to do something. Say something. Something.
He said, “I am disappointed in you, Desdaemona.”
I was disappointed in myself. I wanted to be kicking him to rubble; apparently I couldn’t move at all.
He said, “I showed you kindness, I gave you gifts; I asked that you do a thing in return, not a hard thing, and you cheated me. You took everything I offered, and did nothing to earn or deserve it. Worse, you lied. You deceived me.”
“Yes.” I did indeed, all of that; there was absolutely no point in denying it. And at least I’d managed that single simple word.
“Yes. And now you are back, and not I think to visit. Not in a kind way. Have you come to lie to me again?”
“No, Oz.” Confession is good for the soul, I guess; words came more easily, now that I’d got myself started. “I came to ask a favour.”
“Ah, more? Still more, that I should do for you?”
“Yes. You should leave me alone. Me and mine, the people that I care for. You should promise me that. Call off the dogs, the birds. Everyone.” And then I looked around and said, “Where
is
everyone?” and he giggled, and then I knew. “You were expecting me, weren’t you?”
“Of course. Did you think you could surprise me? I knew you were coming; I always know where you are. I have followed your progress with, ah, an
intimate
care.”
I thought his people had found me too easily, found me and found me. As though I carried a bug, a tracer; but Oz wouldn’t use technology that way. I said, “How?”
He said, “What I gifted you.” He didn’t mean the house, or the boat, or the bankload of cash. I hunched more deeply into my Aspect, and wanted to wrap my arms around it,
mine!
“What you carry,” he said, “even when you don’t wear it; I could not lose track of that.”
What, was it a trap as well as a weapon, as well as a defence? Yes, of course it was. I should have known. Today was a trap too, there were shadows moving in every tunnel mouth, Oz’s people coming out all around me, but that didn’t matter if I’d been betrayed already.
Just for information, because I like to know things, I said, “How not?” Probably I should have wondered more and sooner, how it was that Oz had Aspects in his gift; he wasn’t an immortal, he only strained that way.
He said, “You wear the soulskin of a demon. We harvested it particularly for you – and of course we kept the demon close. He always knows where his skin is.”
Oz has a repertoire of gestures that his face can make, all the movement that’s left to him. They are brief, and clear, and precise.
I already knew that he wasn’t speaking in metaphors, that’s not his way. When he nodded – to my right and behind me – of course I had to turn, I had to see what suffering I’d caused, was causing, right this minute as I hugged my Aspect to me.
Mine!
I
DON’T KNOW
exactly what a demon is, but Jordan must. They inhabit Hell, I think. They’re true immortals, I do know that. Oz must hate them, for that alone: a free and powerful creature that need not fear death, it’s everything he wants and cannot have.
This one... looked like a fish out of water, stranded, hurting. Gasping.
Worse, it really did look skinned. Raw. Revealed.
One of Oz’s thugs – some changeable creature currently in human form, shaped as a man – held it by the neck. He didn’t need to. His grip hurt it, I thought, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
Did I think that Oz looked hungry?
This thing was
starving
, and I was what it starved for. What I had, rather, wrapped all around me: its psyche-self, its soulskin. It should have been able to hurl that goon right across the room, tear Oz’s people all apart, rip him from his stony shell and gut him utterly to find precisely how far the petrification reached inside him. Instead it could do nothing but stare, stare at me and hunger.
Hunger hopelessly: even if I gave it up, I didn’t think the demon could inhabit its own skin again, any more than a cow could dress itself in cowhide.
Of course Oz had always known just where to find me. That stare would find me out if I was half a world away. Find me and hate me, hunger and despair.
I wanted to shrug the Aspect off, I wanted to give it back if I only could; but I seemed to be holding to it closer than ever, hugging it tighter and turning away from the demon’s agony, turning my back.
Turning back to Oz.
Saying, “So. Will you let me be? Me and mine, all of us? Just wipe the slate clean, leave us alone, forget you ever had anything to do with me?”
“The slate,” he said regretfully, “is very... busy. There is much written on it. Debts and promises and lies.” He probably remembered when slates were the tools of use in inns and eating-houses; he certainly must remember when they were the tools in school. I wondered if anyone had ever shown him a computer, or a mobile phone.
I said, “Nevertheless.”
He said, “Because you ask it? No reason else?”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly that. Because I ask it. Will you?”
He did seem to think about it for a moment, but I suppose he was only playing. Then he said, “No. No, I will not.” Then he made another of those expressive gestures, to bring a couple of his goons up where they could grab me. If they did, I supposed I’d have to fight them. If I could, if the Aspect would work for me in here, where I’d first received it, with its poor source looking on. Likely it wouldn’t. Oz was looking smug, as if he had a total handle on the day.
Before the thugs could reach me, though, I pulled the Zippo regretfully from my pocket and flipped the lid.
I really hadn’t wanted to do this. Oz saved my life, when I was young and needy; it was a hard favour to forget.
But now he wanted that life back, and more, and I wasn’t having that. He wasn’t getting it.
Thom danced into life on the lighter’s wick.
Oz’s eyes brightened, with more than the sudden reflected dazzle of Thom’s flame.
“Oh, you’ve brought him to me! You want to bargain, with what you should have given me before!”
“Well,” I said, “no, actually. What do you think I am?”
And I turned with all the grace that I could muster in my pilfered Aspect –
surprised you that time, Oz, didn’t I?
– and I tossed that good solid tossable lighter neatly towards the goon holding the demon who had given me so much and so unwillingly.
This was all I could give it in return: little enough, and briefly unkind, but I thought in the end – in the swift end – it might be grateful.
The goon was startled, but swift; he reached his free hand out to catch the lighter, the way you do when someone throws something in an easy lob.
Of course he wasn’t thinking. It was a lighter; it was alight.
He might have burned himself anyway, only it was alight with Thom, which is a whole different seething flammable kettle of fish-oil.
Perhaps the goon was smart enough to catch a flaring lighter and not burn his fingers doing it. For sure he thought he was, he didn’t snatch his hand back in all the time he had to think about it.
What he didn’t think, he didn’t think
that’s a living flame, that is: that makes its own choices, and it’s hotter than Hell...
Thom skipped from the lighter’s wick to the goon’s thumb, a moment before the man could make his catch.
And then ran in a course of flame all up one arm and across the shoulders and down the other arm, leaving everything burning as he went, hoodie and hair and flesh and all. And lighted on the demon, and engulfed him.
Whatever they are, I guess demons carry something of Hell in their DNA. For sure, they are more flammable than mortal flesh. It went up like a torch. Immortal creatures die too, eventually, not always too soon; this was there and gone and ashes in a moment, a kinder touch than ever I had hoped for.
And Thom still hadn’t stopped moving, though he didn’t go after any more of Oz’s people. They were panicking, anticipating, some of them running already, back into whatever damp cave they had come from.
I didn’t think that would help, in the long run. Immediately, though, Thom danced to the nearest wall, and folded himself small, and vanished into a crack too fine to see unless you had eyes of flame and a shifting sense of scale.
Then I turned back to Oz and told him the rest of it, in case he hadn’t worked it out yet. Or maybe I was really telling his people, those who were still hanging around, oozing out of shadow again now that the immediate threat had disappeared.
“Thom’s not pleased with you,” I said. “So now he’s doing what you asked him to before: he’s going down deep, to find fuel. Gas or oil if he can, but if not it doesn’t matter. This is coal country; he’ll find veins and veins of it, too fine for men to work. Not too fine for him, no. Not at all. D’you know, there are fields not far from here where the ground leaks smoke night and day, because the coal seam below is on fire? They can burn for decades, centuries maybe. Really, really slowly, because it’s wet and there’s not much air, they’re like fires banked up for the night, just keeping themselves in. Smouldering away.
“Thom needs a place to be,” I said, “and this will do him fine. Once he’s got it burning nicely. It’ll be too hot for all your friends, Oz, can you imagine? Smoky, too. This place will be like a chimney, drawing all the smoke together, puffing it out of your little doorway up top. Everyone’s going to leave you, Oz. Everyone but Thom.
“Can you imagine?
“I don’t actually know what’ll happen to you. I don’t know if Thom is flaming furious with you, or smoking, smoulderingly angry. Maybe he’ll use you as a wick, in a sort of not-at-all-spontaneous human combustion. Maybe he’ll burn you out of that shell and just leave the hollow shape of you behind, like those people at Pompeii.
“Or maybe not. Maybe he’ll leave you to sit there in the heat and the smoke of it. You could live a long, long time that way, Oz. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it...?”
Oz was showing his teeth again, but he wasn’t smiling now.
His eyes were frantic, darting about from wall to wall, from niche to shadowed niche, realising just how trapped he was. Trying perhaps to guess where Thom was, how deep down; where he might show himself when he rose again; what he might have done already. What he might choose to do next.
Still, Oz has always been about the detail. Even in his terror, he didn’t forget what was important.
That’s why the teeth, because he was snarling at his henchmen.
“Kill her,” he said, to whoever was left, whoever hadn’t run already.
I didn’t bother to look around, to see who it might be. I felt hands closing on me.
On Jordan’s jacket, rather, which I was wearing open, unzipped, the way he did, although it was cool down in the cave there and not cool at all to look so scruffy.
A thug grabbed for me, and I shrugged the jacket off and left it with him.
And shrugged my Aspect off and left that too, at last, a breath of sweet relief; and ran, like anyone with any sense was running.