There must be some law of the conservation of mass, that I don’t know about. I do know that a fifteen-stone man makes a huge werewolf, way heavier than nature makes a dog; I guess all that weight has to go somewhere.
But the Twa Corbies? They’re birds at heart. Hollow-boned, light-bodied even in their native form. Stretched to man size, they were hollow all through, no weight to them at all; those bodies were half illusion and all shadow. It felt like overkill, to use my Aspect against them. A baseball bat against a feather ball.
They did shed feathers suddenly, as they fell. One went into the river, overwhelmed, washed away; the other was crumpled, doubled over, hurled across a hedge.
I didn’t follow. I didn’t even pause, not even to wonder how they’d acquired their reputation if they were such featherweights. Hell, Jay could have dealt with those two even before this morning’s change, before his inheritance caught up with him. He’d made a scrawny teenager, and even so.
They must just have relied on threat and bluster, the Twa Corbies. And the names of their employers. Gangsters don’t always need to be physically strong...
No matter. I shrugged them off, brushed a glossy black feather from my arm, went running on. More urgently now, more Aspect in my legs and lungs. The Cathars wouldn’t stop, any more than Jay would. Not till Jacey stopped them, at any rate. Till then, I needed to get safe; and there was only one way to do that, that I could think of.
Head down, legs pumping. I ran.
CHAPTER THREE
S
OME PEOPLE LEAVE
their key-codes unchanged, and it’s just complacency.
Some leave them unchanged, and it’s a trap.
Some do it for a hopeless romantic gesture.
329 spells Fay; it always has. I punched in the numbers, and the door unlocked itself. No surprise.
N
O SWEAT, BUT
I did still feel grubby. Fifty hard miles will do that to a girl. Multiply distance by fear – which an Aspect can’t touch – and I felt grubby on the inside too. I wanted to shuck my skin along with my clothes, scrub down to my bones.
But. This had only ever been my home for a little, a very little while, and I hadn’t called ahead. I might find anything up there. Anyone. I might have run from Scylla to Charybdis; I might have been mad to come here.
An Aspect can’t touch fear, but it can kind of bolster courage. If you feel strong, it’s easier to be brave. I cranked it up full force, stepped over the threshold and started up the stairs.
I may be light-footed by nature and by training; when I’m really trying, when I’ve got everything full-on, my tread won’t raise a whisper. Even in boots. I climbed that staircase with no more noise than a drifting zephyr might leave behind in falling dust: a sort of mental tiptoe, an attitude of sidling through sunbeams.
And came up onto the landing, and crossed to the living-room door. It was only open six inches; I nudged it wider with a finger’s tip, took a breath, slipped through. Might as well know the worst, all at once. If trouble waited, here was where it would lurk.
I
T DOESN’T MATTER
how silent you are, coming in; someone is always going to hear you. I stood there in the doorway, exposed and helpless; trouble opened his eyes.
I shrieked.
“T
YBALT
!”
He lifted his chin in that they-call-me-Mr-Tybs way that he’d had even as a kitten. That was all the acknowledgement I got for all my years away; it was all the invitation I needed. I was across that room in a heartbeat, less, and down on my knees to scritch him dutifully. Soon enough I was sitting on the floor with my back against his chair and my legs stretched out before me and him sprawled in that makeshift lap, a purring dribbling molten lump of shaggy bliss, and my clothes were all over cat-hair and I seemed to be crying again.
When I looked up at last, Jacey was in the doorway.
H
E SAID,
“F
AY.
”
I said, “Don’t.”
I said, “Call me Desdaemona. Desi. Please?”
He said, “I’ll try.”
Then he didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did I.
Eventually, we fell back on what was obvious and easy. “You were in bed, I guess,” I said. “I’m sorry, I should’ve buzzed up, given you some warning...”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and he was right, it didn’t. He had no clothes on, but that was weirdly irrelevant. I knew his body intimately, better than anyone’s, or at least I used to; neither one of us was going to be shy with the other. Not about that.
Besides, if he’d been muffled up in sealskin furs with only his nose showing, I would still have felt exactly the same jolt of swift desire. It was nothing to do with his paraded beauty, or at least not much; like it was nothing or not much to do with our history together, or our longer history apart. Thought and memory were a part of it, of course – Odin’s ravens again, black birds of ill omen! – and muscle-memory particularly, the way we fitted together, he and I. My own body ached with a hot, familiar longing: that supple skin, those subtle hands, their strength and greed and generosity.
But it wasn’t old feelings rewoken, not really. That was just disguise, something in me working to make me feel better about this abrupt surge of lust. It was tacky, inappropriate... and all-consuming. I could feel my own skin flush, hear how my breath was shortening.
It’s the Aspect, of course. Or a side-effect, an after-effect. You become so much more aware of your body, of being a physical creature in a physical world; if you flush that awareness through every living cell you own and then just as suddenly drain it away, it’s no surprise if something lingers.
For me at least, what lingers is desire. I’m horny as hell, afterwards. And no, it’s nothing like wanting a cigarette after sex; nothing ever is like anything else. But I’d run here from Henley tapping Aspect all the way, I’d tangled with the Twa Corbies for that extra adrenalin spurt, I’d come up the stairs wrapped tight in everything I had, then I’d let it all go when I saw Tybs. I was in an absolute definition of ‘afterwards.’ First sight of Jacey and, well. Yes. A hot flush and a dry mouth, a yearning that ran bone-deep and set my skin all shivering.
He’d know it, too. He had his own burden of memory, and one thing was sure: he knew what I looked like, needy. When we were younger, we used to do this to each other all the time, without benefit of Aspect. Just because we were younger and discovering passion, caught in it, betrayed by it. We used to think we’d be like that for ever: vulnerable, innocently hungry, utterly exposed to each other.
Perhaps we were right. I guess some eternal truths do turn out true after all. We were not so young now and far from innocent, but the rest of it seemed to hold good for me at least. Vulnerable, hungry, utterly exposed.
He was the naked one, but even so. I knew what he was seeing.
He went very suddenly from couldn’t-take-his-eyes-off-me to couldn’t-look-at-me-at-all. He stood staring at his feet, and I knew that he’d be flushed too, sudden and responsive. Then he made a gesture with his hand that I was clearly meant to interpret as
oh, look, I’ve got no clothes on, I’d better go and do something about that,
and was gone.
I wanted nothing, nothing on this planet more than to follow him to his bedroom – unseen, achingly familiar – and shed my own clothes as I went, equalise things that way, meet him at the same disadvantage. Which in his bedroom would be no disadvantage at all: there would be all his broad bed to roll around on, the four corners of the room to rediscover if we needed to, my human strength to pit and lose against his immortal, irresistible body. There was my Aspect to tap into if I needed it, new to him and all but irresistible itself to any boy, let alone one primed as he was. The lure of it would pull him in, the power of it would let me meet him on near-equal terms; and still lose in the end but I could make a glorious fight of it and lose gloriously, which would be good for both of us and better after, and...
A
ND NO.
I did find myself suddenly and unexpectedly on my feet, spilling cat heedlessly as I rose – but Tybalt’s squawl of protest was enough, just barely. It held me together just long enough. It was like a call across time, reminding me of the kitten he used to be and the girl I used to be, the girl that Jacey might yet be willing to roll across his duvet with, who was so emphatically not me or anything like me.
I couldn’t do it then. I had the ability, the Aspect, sure; and it would make everything easier; and he was suddenly the vulnerable one, and no. I couldn’t do that to him. That wasn’t why I’d come.
So. I took a breath, deep and steady; I turned my back on the room and the memories both, on any temptation to draw once more on my Aspect. Or to follow Jacey. Instead I went to the window and looked out at what used to be such a familiar view, the balcony and the dark running Thames below.
Jacey’s flat was – well, very Jacey. His family would have put him in a penthouse, high over the city in a building they owned and controlled themselves: uniformed guards and a private lift, housekeeping and meals provided, CCTV and valet parking.
Instead he’d found this place for himself, bought it for himself, done it out for himself.
Himself and me. 329 had always been the doorcode.
The building started life as a wharfside warehouse, put up by a Chinese merchant family in the seventeen-hundreds. Two storeys, brick-built, meant to last. Its wooden neighbours were torn down by the Victorians and replaced with grandiose constructions, four and five storeys high. Overshadowed from either side, bullied for its lunch money, our stunted little hero still hung on. Businesses came and went; this one stayed. It survived one war, and then another. Lucky and plucky, sheltered by the high walls of its looming neighbours, it ducked the bombs that obliterated most of the East End, and the fires never found it.
Post-war redevelopment left it untouched; so did the concrete brutality of the ’sixties. In the ’eighties it got new neighbours, all steel and glass, financial corporations and yuppie millionaires. The Fengs just kept on doing what they did, the old respectable kind of market trader.
Except that their trade no longer came up the river. It must have made less and less sense to keep the building and their business here. Finally, along came Jacey, with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Maybe his surname had something to do with that, but I always wanted to think not. I didn’t like to think that modern Fengs would buckle to bullying, any more than their ancestors did.
However that went down, money or muscle or what, Jacey got what he wanted. He usually did. In this case it was vacant possession of both floors: one big open space below, with access to road and river; upstairs already subdivided, storage space and offices and a high wide loading-door with its own wooden jib-crane jutting out over the water like a gallows-beam, ready to hoist up bales of silk and boxes of tea, direct from the decks of the ships that used to dock below.
Jacey’s contractors moved in, and for the next few months he pretty much lived in a hard hat, when he wasn’t combing product into his hair and chasing after me. Then they moved out and he moved in. We did. Suddenly I was living with him, which was a whole different kettle of pretty fish, for us and for his family. They scared me stupid, even before I did the stupid thing and had to run away. Jacey was worth it, though; and his house, his home was another kind of compensation. It’s hard to feel scared even when you know you should be, where at the same time you feel safe and warm and protected.
I’d been living in one room in a house-share, working in a florist’s to boost my student loan. Now I had more space than I could ever fill, even with the ground floor converted into a garage for Jacey’s poor-little-rich-kid cliché collection of petrolhead cars and bikes. Our bedroom was the size of a swimming-pool; hell, our
bed
was the size of a swimming-pool. Made to measure, built to fit. The kitchen was a travesty: professional stainless steel and cool black granite, when my culinary expertise barely reached beyond the can-opener and the microwave, and Jacey simply always ordered in, those few nights that he was in at all.
The wetroom was a joy and a revelation; the living-room was big enough to need a map; and the loading-door had disappeared altogether, replaced by floor-to-ceiling sliding glass with a cantilevered balcony beyond.
It was our home, and slowly I learned to live in it. Loving it took no effort, needed no lessons; I never did learn to take it for granted. No wonder I’d picked my own house as I did, a little cottage not so very far away, with its own balcony and the same river though it was younger there, not so big, not so busy. That hadn’t been deliberate, maybe – for sure it hadn’t been a conscious decision,
why don’t I get a place that will always remind me of Jacey?
– but it wasn’t a coincidence either. You can hide but you can’t really run, you really can’t. Whatever you’ve lost or left behind, you always take it with you when you go.
Downstairs had always smelled like tea to me, despite the new floor and all the renovations, despite the Ferrari and the Mini, the jeep, the array of bikes. I thought two hundred years and more had soaked into the brickwork. Sometimes at night I thought a hidden panel would swing aside and light spill out to show a silhouette, Fu Manchu returned at last, a Limehouse King Arthur only not so well-intentioned, the once and future yellow peril...