The bathrooms at Pete's Grill were big, which was good because getting out of the robes was a space- and time-consuming exercise. Also, they refused to be got out of in the way Lila had hoped. The waistbands and shirts tightened up on her, the cuffs closed, and the collar threatened to choke. When she tried to pull the masks and veil off, they tangled on her hands. After a few minutes of this pointless fight she gave up with a furious roar and sat on the can in a stoney silence, acres of unsuitable ancient material, richly tapestried, bunched around her waist. The glyphs and inscriptions glinted cheaply in the economy lighting. An ancient ward against unseen evils rested against a graffitied tile bearing instructions that Angela would fuck for free, and a badly drawn illustration of the same.
“I can't believe you're doing this to me!” Lila hissed to Tatterdemalion, although she could believe it only too well and there was nothing left to do but roll her eyes and grit her teeth. She heard the door open and ordinary women in ordinary clothing come in, talking and starting to fix their makeup in the mirror.
At least Pete's Grill was unpretentious. Celebrities didn't go there, it wasn't noted in Best of Bay City. It existed halfway between the interstate and the suburbs in a part of town that was mostly made up of strip malls and light industrial units in the middle of a district known as Moths—the last bastion of otherworld-friendly locales. It served old-style Otopian cookery and outworld specials, had no menus other than what the waitresses could remember at any given moment, and was run by Pete himself, a ruggedly handsome cowboy type of man, rail-thin and unshaven, who couldn't have looked more out of place anywhere other than in an apron in front of a pristine barbecue range.
Lila and Zal liked it because Pete hated everyone with simple unmitigated contempt for all beings. He relished his hate as he lavished it verbally upon them through the kitchen screens. He hated them so much and loathed them so dearly that he loved them all in a deep, philanthropic, unshakeable manner, primal in its absolute nature, and they felt welcomed. Because of this it didn't attract many people who couldn't at least grasp this basic fact of grill existence, but even among the enlightened Lila didn't fancy being stared at and talked about. Not that this wouldn't happen because of Zal anyway. In fact, the case was hopeless. She was just thinking she had to give up even trying to have anything resembling a normal life, even for five minutes, when the chatter outside the cubicle caught her attention.
“…being dead isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
“Tell me about it. First they're happy to see you, then they're scared shitless of you, and after that pretty much everyone doesn't know what to do with you.”
“Yeah, I can tell they kind of wish I was dead again, you know? And I can't help it that bits of their stuff goes missing. I mean, it's not like I'm taking it, you know? But as soon as anything happens it's like—oh, let's search Alice, she's probably evil.”
“I know. And they're always watching you, like they think you're gonna freak out or something and nobody knows what to say. It's the shits. And they're always asking—”
“Yeah, like, what's it like, being dead, and you say you don't know because you're not and you don't remember, there's this gap and they're so pissed because you can't tell them anything. I mean. They totally got this priest out the other day to exorcise me. And they're all like—no offence, Alice, it's just that we heard a lot of stuff about you dead people not really being you and all. Can you believe that? I mean, we can't be dead can we, because we're like—here.”
“Did it work?”
“Hell, no. Nothing happened. He made them all guilty like it was their fault I was here and went off with six hundred bucks on his card. The fucker.”
“Totally.” There was a pause and then the sound of the emergency door being pushed open and leant on as the two of them went outside for a smoke. Faery weed and 'bacco.
“D'you know what's the worst?” Alice said after they'd been quiet a minute. “I feel like a total disappointment. I can't work, can't do anything, have to carry this stupid tag around everywhere to show I'm supposed to be dead. Sometimes I wonder if I am evil. I mean, you wouldn't know, you'd just carry it, like a disease, like a cloud. Nothing's good since I came back whether it's true or not. I'd kinda like to die just so I could fix things, but I'm too angry and…I don't know how.”
“Yeah,” sighed the friend. “Tell me about it.”
“When we get to the interstate we can get a ride. They won't know.”
“Yeah, you think north?”
“Yeah, north or wherever. You know?”
“Mmn hmm.”
Lila stood up and flushed, shook out the robes, and exited the stall. The room wasn't big enough for them not to turn and see her. Against the brilliant light of the late-afternoon sun they were just slightly transparent at the edges. They stood and stared at her, two teenagers in dated clothes with too much blusher on so that their faces looked like dolls' faces. They recoiled slightly, but when she did nothing they turned back to their smokey huddle.
Lila washed her hands and checked herself in the mirror as if she looked like this every day. Then she learned that her hat was nunlike, a kind of gothic wimple with drapes. The mask was warriorish around the eyes, fierce, with gold flecks for exaggerated lashes. For all she said about it being ridiculous it looked imposing. If you were going to invigilate the end of the world, it's what you'd probably hope to wear.
She dried her hands in the airblaster and watched her sleeves billow. Then, unable to prevent herself, she turned around and saw the dead girls again. There was an intensity, a focus to them that was unnerving. They held the cheap smoke as if it was precious oxygen and watched her, bold and strangely submissive at the same time, waiting for her to make her move. Since she'd already earwigged their conversation and intruded more than anyone had a right to, she felt bad, and because of Max she felt double bad, and the nun outfit, which was another lie felt worse yet, but as the seconds passed she found nothing to say other than a choked, “Bless you.”
And with that pathetic line she made her getaway.
Zal had ordered for both of them by the time she reached the table and for once she didn't care. She slid into the booth next to him, so shocked by the banality and horror of the conversation she'd just witnessed that she didn't know what to say.
For the first time she really considered the question—why were they here at all? They hadn't appeared until Xaviendra's intervention. Xaviendra had made and resurrected the dead as a temporary army in Otopia. Certainly she was involved. But Lila's written message to Max was equally powerful, she thought. All her thoughts about causes led her consistently to one place: Under. But she dared not speak openly about Under, or even covertly, not anywhere where there might be people capable of overhearing.
“It isn't your fault, Lila,” Zal said as the waitress arrived with water and a jug of Faery Lite. She placed frozen mugs in front of them, a plate of beernuts, a plate of some elf things Lila didn't know the name of but which looked not unlike a fruit salad, and a bowl of potato chips. She didn't give Lila a second glance.
Lila looked at each of the dishes, reached out, and filled her mug with clear golden ale from the pitcher, gave the pitcher to Zal, and said, “Why does it feel like it is, then?”
He paused and took a long drink. “You know what's interesting? I don't need to name anything specific and you just assume it's your fault. I don't even need to question that there will be something that fits the concept of ‘your fault,’ whether it's the crap that passes for motorbikes these days or the change in the weather or the existence of some weird-ass wormhole where my old house used to be. Or all of those.”
“Still feels like it is though,” she said quietly and defiantly.
Zal shrugged. “There are a billion people out there, of one kind and another, and about a million of them reckon themselves players in whatever's going down. Most of them are wrong. Everyone is a player, but few players ever have the trick hand, and when they do have it, most likely they don't know and never will know they had it.”
He paused and she noted that he wasn't able to name Xaviendra, or was unwilling. “I got all this from Mal by the way. And what happened to you makes it seem like you're the middle of things, and you are. You're the middle of your things, your life, your stuff. But you're not The Middle. There are about a million other fuckers out there fucking up everything regardless of what you do. So relax.” He was frowning as he pushed the plates away, pulling the beer and the pitcher towards himself with slow reluctance.
“Are you okay?” She pushed the dishes to the other side of the table, trying to look into his face to calm a sudden feeling of alarm. His hair hanging down made it hard.
“Can't eat,” he muttered, anger a bad note in his voice. “I feel like I want to but…” he tried again, picked up the fork, brought it close, sniffed the fruit, opened his mouth. He threw it down suddenly with a clatter that turned the faces of the closest diners towards them for a brief moment.
Lila realised she hadn't seen him eat anything since their reunion. Drink yes. And she'd assumed he'd been feeding himself—their schedules hadn't exactly crossed much. “Can't eat because you're ill or—”
“No,” he bit out, filling his glass to the brim and watching a few faery suds roll over and down the side of the mug, their iridescent bubbles showing tiny images of clouds that blew into the shape of dragons and then away. “Fucking dragons,” he muttered. “But it's not their fault. Jack's doing. Curse him to the seven hells.” He picked up the mug and took a long draught, but she could see it was a struggle to swallow it, as though it were mud and not beer, solid and not liquid, ten times heavier than its weight. When he was done, he was snarling and his hand on the mug handle was a fist.
She put her hand out to his, to touch his skin and make deeper contact. His fingers felt as they always had—bony and strong, but now that she realised it, too light. Zal was solid enough. He had flesh, he was as real as the waitress or the table or the food, but there was an insubstantial quality to him that couldn't be measured in kilograms or density. It was like he was made of something different altogether, something that was pretending to be a solid body very successfully, but wasn't good on the details. As there was no obvious data to confirm this notion with what she could consider factual evidence, it had gone straight under the mental rug where she swept everything she couldn't confirm. There was a lot under that rug.
She folded his hand into hers and felt him squeeze her gently, even though he kept staring straight ahead at the fascinating pink naugahyde of the seat on the other side of the booth.
She tried prompting, “When we left the void ships you had to go back with Tath, through Under. This is why?”
His face was grim, a rare expression for him, and his voice was barely controlled, though quiet. “When the second sister lifted me from Under, she didn't take my body with her. It's gone now, buried in Winter. Then the sisters made me a body out of cloth, but when Glinda took me to the Fleet, I lost that too. If I went to Demonia with you and Teazle directly I'd have been a ghost or a shadow. Any bloody necromancer could have eaten me for lunch. But Glinda told me there was a way for me to get a new body that would survive here. A dragon told me the same thing. I sat at Ilya's fireside and the longer I stayed in his firelight, the more solid I became. The element filled me up. But it's not the same as the old one. It wears away.”
“It's too light,” she said.
“Yes. It's made of light. I'm not what I used to be. I'm more like an illusion or a faery glamour. Good enough to drink certain things, if they're magical enough. Good enough to fight and fuck. But not good enough to eat it seems. I can't even put it in my mouth. It's like I'm blocked.”
Lila felt the distance between them increase. “Who's Glinda?”
At that moment the waitress reappeared with the rest of their order and Lila had to lean back as the table was filled with steak, ribs, potato salad, and bread. Dishes of hot pie and ice cream filled the gaps. The smell rising from it all was thick and sweet.
Nostrils wide, inhaling deeply, Zal said, “Glinda is my death. Atropos, the last Valkyr, necessity, destiny, What Must and Shall Be—whatever you like to call her. Sister Number Three. Doesn't matter. I'm still hungry.” He drained the mug on the second draught and gave a short, unhappy sigh.
Now that food was present and glorious, Lila found that she was starving. It seemed wrong to eat when he couldn't. She stared at the food. “Destiny. And you're not moved by her personal interference in your life? That doesn't make you important?”
Zal picked up a rib and licked it forlornly. “It makes me important to her for reasons best known to herself. That's all. I didn't ask her about it. Seemed—what's that word you humans like to use—inappropriate. You had a dragon hanging around your bra for weeks. Did you ask it questions? No. Quite rightly. Because you know damn well that whatever you want to believe about yourself it wasn't your instrument, you were just some legs and arms it wanted to use for a while. Now eat for fucksakes.”
“Playthings of the gods?” Lila said. She picked up a rib dripping in barbecue sauce and a cold, unkind pleasure rolled over her as she imagined what that was going to do to the faery dress.
“Not gods. Just bigger and badder than you in the scheme of things.” Zal dropped the rib onto his plate and picked up the steak in both hands, running his tongue over the dripping, peppered edge. He licked his lips then tossed the whole thing onto her plate and wiped his hands meticulously on her immaculate sleeve. “Fuck 'em all to hell.”
After that most of her hunger deserted her. She picked at everything and then asked for it to be bagged up. “We can take it back for Sassy. If she's still there.”
“Yeah,” Zal said, although now his voice was quite different. Wondering anger marked it so strongly it made her look up with a jolt. “If we make it out of here alive.”
Lila followed his gaze. He was looking across the diner and out of the misted, greasy windows into the parking lot where a cluster of semis screened off most of the highway. She didn't see the trouble until a few seconds later, which was still earlier than most.
A large group of cars and trucks had pulled up on the outer edge of the lot and now the passengers were getting out. They shared a slow, deliberate style of action, which confirmed in Lila's mind and heart that they were bad news. They were wearing shirts and armbands with the same logo, a skull and crossbones in red. She counted thirty, until a group of bikers rode up bearing the same sign on their jackets—hastily applied in most cases, over older colours. Her data lookup was working perfectly. She heard Bentley replying in her mind's ear before she was even aware of asking the question, “That's Deadkill. They're one of the vigilante groups I told you about. They kill Returners and anyone who tries to stop them. Very organised. They will wait until they find undead before they start shooting, but after that I'd say all bets are off.”
Lila replied silently, digitally. “There are demons with them, I see two. And maybe a kind of fae.” Guns had begun to appear, methodically pulled from vehicles and handed out. Ammunition was loaded, checked. It hadn't occurred to her before that the Returners were as killable as any other human being, but it must be so. She didn't see any special weapons.
“Yes. The demons are part of a set that hunt around looking for violent crime most likely. There are a few in the City area. And Deadkill have Hunter Children as members according to the last seized records but they organise by blip at the last minute and keep their plans off the networks. This must have been cued in the last twenty minutes—yeah, uh-huh, I see the phone nets passed out a list bleep forty-two minutes ago so that will be the signal, not that you can tell what it is until it breaks. Just unlucky you're there. Or lucky. Depending.”
Lila took a bigger scan of the area and the net. “I don't see any cops.”
Bentley hummed. “Ah, the emergency call record…they've been scammed. All the ones in your area have been pulled on fake calls, at least, I bet they're fakes. Just far enough to be away.”
“Can you get backup?”
“Not sooner than fifteen minutes. On their way but…”
Now the other people in the diner had noticed what was going on outside. Disbelief and uncertainty meant they were still seated for the most part and apart from a few raised voices there was still nothing amiss inside.
Lila turned to Zal. “Demons, one fae, lots of guns. Fifty. At least. Maybe more on the way.” She turned back, alert, systems running, lifting, speeding. Her blood seemed to freeze though it was accelerating. “Gasoline cans. Flame throwers. Shock prods.” And there were other things in the arsenals that didn't fit with the story of simple killing either; ropes and shackles, and chains.
The waitress came to their table, her attention on the windows. She dumped a large brown paper sack full of food containers in front of them and said, mostly to herself, “Now what the heck is that? Some kinda convention?”
Lila stood up and pushed out beside her—no easy feat in the mass of the robes. The woman looked at Lila's hands on her arms and opened her pink-lipsticked mouth to object.
“Exit,” Lila said, firmly but quietly. “Is there a back way out?” She had no faith that the lynch mob wouldn't have thought of this first but she had to know.
“Through the kitchen but—”
“Do you have a cold store?”
“Yeah but—”
“You need to get everyone and move inside it, lock yourselves in. Right now.” Cold stores had at least some reinforcements in their structures, mostly, she thought. Better than being in the open anyway. Anything would be better than that.
She ran her eyes over the customers. They were moving now, standing, grabbing their stuff, dropping their cutlery…There were kids, teenagers, all kinds of people. She couldn't tell just by looking at them if any of them were Returners but there were certainly fae there in their “slob” glamour forms, disguised as ordinary people, so unspecial your eye would slide over them twice without noticing. And Zal. And her.
The outside mob showed no signs of hurrying their marshalling. They were forming up facing the door and windows, weapons hefted openly. They didn't shout too much. Another bad sign, she thought, pushing at the waitress's slack response. “Move! For your life! Get into the store room!” People heard her now and reacted to the voice of authority she'd pulled from her repertoire, but they were still slow and then the sluggish, dumb air and its steady flub of old country music was pierced by a howling scream from the dim corner where the sign for the ladies' blinked in broken neon.
Then everyone ran as Lila stood still, knowing what it meant, momentarily paralysed by the horror she felt, the surge of dry, deathly fear. The girls on the fire-exit steps had taken too long over their last smoke. They were caught.
She felt Zal push past her as he jumped over the table, from there over the heads of the panicking customers, onto another counter, onto the bar, over to the windows. Shadow flooded out from him, a cloud of unnatural, impenetrable darkness. His speed and the recognition that he could buy them a few seconds by hiding them and confusing the enemy galvanised her.
A staccato burst of fire from a machine gun broke through the screams that filled the room now, driving the panic. She registered its meaning—it came from the back—as if it were old news. The dead girls were dead again.
Now she had to struggle to fight through the bodies rushing past her. She heard glass break at the front and registered the presence of petrol in the air. Too heavy to properly ignite it coated a table in weak yellow flame. Fury and loathing filled her. She reached the door, crossing the zone of black that Zal had trailed. Beside her she felt his presence, stronger, brighter, and realised he ate the light—he ate the light—it was so important in its impossibility, but it wasn't important now, there was no time for it. Instead her hand was opening the door and her foot was kicking it aside on its pathetic hinges that gave just like the calculations told her they would so the whole thing burst free and went flying, low and whirling, a missile, into the front lines of the band standing below the steps. They scattered like bowling pins.
She held up the palm of her hand, displaying the lit Agency emblem, and amplified her voice, almost to the point of pain.
“Your gathering and assault is illegal and you will disperse or be arrested. Lay down your arms. Surrender the shooters. They are under arrest. Any obstruction to my authority will be considered an act of assault.” Which covered her, not that she expected it to work.
The faces looking at her were a real picture with their comic mixture of disbelief, bloodthirst, hate, and incredulity. They really weren't in any shape for thinking straight. She longed to kill them.
Around her the robes shifted, tightening, drawing in, threads moving of their own accord, making new designs, new words. Across her chest a red cross appeared, tangled in a spiral of red like a spider's web, a white flower at its apex as the faery declared its colours.
And is this what it had come to at last, she thought as she surveyed the crowd, wondering which one was going to shoot first, or if they'd shout first and gather their nerves, wait for the ones at the back to signal they were in position. For surely they didn't look uncertain, no, they had decided there would be no prisoners, no innocents here. Lila against the humans, not human anymore, a monster worthy of hate? She despised her own drama even as she felt it catch and flame inside. But she stood and stared at them, judging their willing greed for blood and suffering, their righteous, ugly determination. She saw the promise of being crushed in the narrow vices of their eyes, she heard once more the burst of the machine guns in her mind and heard the silence of the despairing undead who had got what they wanted here on this luckless, lucky day, and she hated them more still.
Then a slow drawl interrupted her moment. “Well now, who the fuck are you dressed as?”
Their leader, a worked-out man, handsome, in construction-worker overalls and holding a shotgun, gestured at her with the double finger of the barrels. It was a contemptuous, lingering kind of move, the sort that men make in sleazy nightclubs when they're sizing up the girls on the poles. It gave the crowd confidence and their stunned moment of immobility departed in a ripple of sneers and laughter. They moved forward until his languid arm movement stopped them. The fact that she'd kicked an entire door into their front line seemed to have slipped their notice as they slid together into a pack.
Lila's attention sharpened to a point. She heard the group around the back talking, saying something about sending news round to the front, there was a brief argument, then a messenger came running around the side. The people in front of her stopped for a gawk when they saw the situation, then trotted forward to whisper in the leader's ear. Meanwhile Lila could see Zal inside the diner, clear on infrared despite his cloak of shadow. He was shepherding people into the kitchen area. They were almost all inside. She waited until the messenger had delivered his news, a whisper she heard clearly, and then said, “You're all under arrest. Put down your weapons.”
In reply the construction guy primed his shotgun with the flashy one-arm style of a movie star and pointed the business end at her. “People who get in our way get killed. We came for the undead abominations. Stand aside.”
“What's the petrol for then?” Lila asked, making her final calculations as she mapped the location of all the people and weapons.
“Tainted ground,” he said, grinning. “Has to be cleansed. And places like this that harbour the filth, have to be razed.”
“There are innocent people and kids in there,” Lila said, stalling, though she sensed a fresh urgency as some of the mob checked the time and realised they were going to run into police trouble soon. She read them the full records, her conviction absolute. “And I don't take assurances from people who already made three similar raids in the last month all over the southern-states area. Fifty-six casualties. Twenty-one dead. Fifteen of them ordinary human citizens, four teenagers, one child of seven. You are under arrest for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause civil disturbance, riot, incitement to hate, incitement to riot, causing a disturbance of the peace, destruction of property, arson, illegal possession of weapons, membership of an illegal organisation, resisting arrest, and obstructing the path of justice.”
Her litany had the desired mesmerising effect on the front rows even as some members were cautiously peeling themselves off the back of the crowd and sidling away. She wasn't done with the last word before she was already moving.
She saw the leader's finger on the trigger pulling steadily, but she was on him before they'd moved more than a few millimetres. Even his blink of surprise was a slow, clumsy piece of shutterwork to her as she took the gun away from him, popped out the shells, and manacled his wrists together with the twisted barrels. It was a tight fit. She broke a bone in his wrist doing it and then she broke a few more as she pressed the figure eight all the way closed. They snapped like twigs and she felt every pop as a bubble of cold glee. As she stepped back, moving into human time, the plastic shell cases fell at her feet. Most of the bystanders were too surprised by her speed to do anything but stand and stare, but some, the hardcore who had come wired and been frothing during the conversation period, were liberated by the burst of action. Their minds weren't on realism and whatever odd danger Lila represented, they were focused on violence.
Their liberation was hers too. She picked up the closest agitator, crushing his hand around the grip of his stun gun where it was trying to shock her into jelly, and lifted him off his feet. With a short spin and a burst of energy robbed from the gun that was meant to incapacitate her, she flung him across ten heads into the chest of a middle-aged grizzler brandishing a minigun. The stun gun, clamped by broken fingers, was still fizzing at maximum battery power. It connected with the other man as they both went down onto the tarmac, scattering several others and pushing their part of the crowd back. As they jolted around together, Lila was already airborne in a leap that took her in the other direction to where a woman was lighting up the pilot on her flamethrower—a homemade but serious object that reeked of leaking kerosene and was almost as much danger to the holder as anyone else.
With her fingers edging into blades, Lila cut the tank off its old rucksack-strap moorings on the woman's denimed shoulders and swung it around hard. The woman, still holding the gun end firmly, was yanked off balance as the hoses dragged on her arms, then she let go in surprise and got a spray of paraffin into her eyes as the loose end of the hose whipped around, sprinkling everyone in range. Tatterdemalion took her share, Lila could smell it, but she wasn't bothered by such small irritations as fire. She twisted and crushed the crude metal kerosene tank and flung it in a low arc across the thin strip of ground between the diner and the crowd, then directed her own burst of intense narrow-band microwave heat from the palm of her hand at the flying metal.
Liquid sprayed wildly out through the splits in the tank as it expanded, dousing the ground. The steel tank itself sparked violently, contorting as it tumbled to a halt. Mobmen scattered instinctively around it, most backing off. The pilot light, dying but still going, finally landed near enough to ignite the vapour and with a burst of hot yellow and a wave of fresh heat the entire left side of the building had been cut off from the assault by a low wall of flame. It wouldn't deter maniacs but it was bad enough that anyone with doubts wasn't going that way.
However, in spite of her quick thinking the diner door was open now and attackers were shouldering their way inside, ignoring the bellowing of those who had been downed, and spurred on by a sense of thwarted righteousness. Torches had been flung onto the roof. This above all convinced Lila that Deadkill were a bunch of amateur hate-suckers. The roof was tiled and, like all city buildings, it would take a lot more than a piece of burning wood to set it alight. She wasn't justified in killing even one of them on grounds of stupidity alone.
She blasted the outside crowd with a burst of infrasound that sent most of them grabbing for their pants as their bowels dropped everything without warning and then ran for the door.
She didn't trust herself to punch anyone without dealing a killing blow so she kept the violence down to some light slaps that cannoned skulls together in pairs with enough force to yield temporary unconsciousness and mild concussion. As they slumped in the gangways she bent to collect their weapons and destroyed them with a few casual wrenches of her hands before dropping them on the bodies. She sniffed the air. Something was burning.
In the kitchen a couple of meat patties and a bacon strip had become char. Lila turned off the burners and looked through to the store-room door. It was shut. A terrified silence like a held breath made the room feel as though it might burst. She wondered where Zal had gone, but her answer was soon discovered as she steeled herself and walked out through the emergency exit.
A pall of intense gloom hung over the open door and its steps. It didn't block out the sight of the dead girls. Pooling blood from their fallen bodies dripped down the open iron slats of the stairs onto the hardtop. Zal was crouched on the handrail above them like a great black crow.
Behind him, in the walls, a string of bullet holes peppered an uninterrupted line telling her that they'd already shot him. Beyond the darkness that he was maintaining she heard confused talk, complaints, and angry voices as people blundered around. It became clear to her that they weren't only lost in the murk he'd created, they were weak and sleepy too. She heard them fall over each other, mumbling as though drugged.
On the rail Zal was utterly still with concentration. She recognised the vampiric embrace of a shadowkin at work very late, with surprise at her own horror. The golden boy she'd first met had shown no sign of this. Zal the vampire was something that just didn't want to compute and she couldn't help drawing back. It was a microscopic movement, halted before it got under way, but it was still there.
Her dress didn't feel the same way about his activity however. It swirled richly, panels lifting through the twilight miasma, their threads unravelling to reach the air that sweltered with the energy that Zal was drawing out of the living bodies. They also, she was disgusted to see, eagerly reached down into the coagulating mass of blood from the slaughtered girls.
Her hem reddened, darkened. Confused embarrassment at her own moment of flinching from Zal and now from this fresh minor horror caught her off guard. Words died in her throat. She turned away and went back through the building. Tables and chairs got in her way. She threw them aside, hearing them smash and break against the walls, halting only once she reached the open door.
The forecourt was a mess of furious, humiliated people but their focus was gone, their purpose lost. At the sound of distant police sirens gravel kicked and dust rose in clouds as vehicles swerved onto the road and away.
Lila crossed to where Deadkill's local leader lay, conscious and moaning with pain, in a heap of his own feces. The bloody hems of the skirt panels around her ankles tapped him like the fingers of naughty children trying to annoy. She looked down at his spit-flecked face and saw pure hatred staring back at her. She knew she looked the same.
“They're not different to you,” she said. “They came back and they didn't even want to. It's not up to you to destroy them.” She didn't know if she believed her own line.
“Fuck you,” he growled. “Dead stays dead. What fuckin' human thinks otherwise? Even the demons want them gone. Bible says—”
But she put her bloody, gravel-crusted boot on his mouth. “You aren't fit to say the words. You aren't the law.”
With an effort that must have cost a lot of pain he wrenched free, twisting to the side, and spat. His mouth and cheek were smeared with red. “You ain't either.”
She glanced down at her crusader's garb and its new crimson hem. “I'm a law,” she said. “And if I see you again, you're a dead man.”
Police cars wheeled into the lot with silent grace, their blue and starred sides sliding back to allow armoured officers to jump out. She went forward to complete formalities with them. A strange coldness, a kind of emptiness filled her with only one thing standing in its vast space: Max. She felt the pain of that loss again, sharp and cruel, and then on top of it the longing and the fear, the hope and the hopelessness engendered by the messages she could not bring herself to delete: come see me, I'm here, I'm home again…
The officers' amusement at her roundup washed over her in a tide that felt completely out of synch with the day. She cross-referenced with their networks, was discharged, picked up the ton of summonses from Greer, her boss, that she'd also been avoiding, and slowly made her way back to the diner's emergency exit on autopilot.
Zal was standing in the shade at the end of the building, almost invisible. He ignored and was ignored by the bustle of the diner's staff and customers as they restored themselves after the scare and emerged to watch the last of their assailants cuffed and driven away in blindsided vans. Some of them were already talking into their lapel phones as the trial lawyers got under way. By the time the vans reached the courthouses there would be a case waiting and a judge to hear it. This burst of efficiency soothed Lila a little, though the sight of Zal, standing so still as he leaned on the diner wall, arms crossed, slouched and withdrawn, did not.
She made her way up to him and pulled off her crusader's mask, tucking it under her arm. The cool air felt like water as it washed through her sweaty hair and over her face. “You okay?”
His gaze slid from whatever infinite it had been contemplating and focused on her face. “Not so much,” he said finally, his ears flicking with irritated discomfort. As he stood straight he rolled his shoulders and eased his neck. She saw that his hair, so muddy recently, was bright silver and gold. The black aura of his andalune body lingered here and there, but as he became more alert it submerged into the suddenly photoreal colour of his physical body. She realised that he was heavier. He had more mass. They shared a look for a few moments.
“Not hungry anymore?” she asked, as if she were a woman asking a man if he'd had enough dinner and nothing more.
He shook his head slowly. His expression was grim, making him look dangerous. The tan of his skin shone in the sun, sheened with health. She wanted to touch him but she didn't even dare reach out with the ultrasound.
“Think you can ride it back home?” She jerked her head in the direction of the bike.
He gave her a filthy look.
“I have something I have to do,” she informed him. “I'll see you there later.”
His gaze flickered down over her clothes to the hem and his face contorted slightly. Finally he just smiled, a tired smile, and leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Don't be late.”
“Okay,” she nodded and smiled in return with a reassurance she didn't feel, then made herself go back to where the bodies of the two girls were being zipped into plastic bags by the medical team.
They delayed for her to take a look, holding the bags open so she could see the bullet holes. The bodies were quite normal, utterly human, the killing wounds exactly what you would expect from close-range, high-power firearms. They were also quite dead. Lila looked up at the paramedic across the gurney from her. “They were Returners.”
The woman nodded and slowly closed the bag up over the blonde girl's unmarked head. “Yeah, we see a lot of these lately. Don't worry, they won't be back again. Corpse is what you see. That's what you got.” Unhappiness made her frown lines deepen and she looked back up at Lila when Lila didn't go. “Something else?”
But there was no data Lila needed she couldn't get just by reading the records. What she wanted to ask was impossible for this woman to answer.
“No.” DNA samples, research papers, tests rushed through her mind in a second. There was nothing abnormal about a Returner, except for the fact that they reappeared fully formed, between one moment and the next. Otherwise they were the same as everyone else. She let them wheel the bodies away and watched as their small white vehicle slowly purred across the road and turned for downtown. Its onboard instructional log rerouted it towards the Agency's morgue. She wondered if there would be funerals this time but then all her delays were used up. With a gritting of her teeth, she turned around and began to walk. It was at least six miles home and she needed time to think, to clear her head, to keep on waiting and not arriving….
Beyond the lines of hills and rooftops in front of her she could see the faint glitter and wispy blue colour of the sea.