Lila gave Zal the nod, saying to the girl, “We need to talk, in private.”
The girl bowed her head a fraction. “Then you'd better go at least two miles out.”
Zal went back for his coat and then joined Lila on the deck where they both paused to look out over the forest down to the first houses and then, much farther away, the city. The air was cool and crisp even though down by the shore and in midtown it would already be warming up to humid.
Lila let her gaze rove across the skyscrapers and distinctive shapes of the skyline that was so new, noticing without caring when some important place went under her scan—the International Bank of Otopia, the Art Museum, the Magisterium, the University—and then she passed those and moved to the dull blocky shapes of apartments and low-rises that spanned the gap called Bonville before the last of the major roads vanished into a flurry of little bridges, walkways, and snakethrough passes that wound into the massed rises of Cedars like veins into a tumour. She didn't remember it like that. It had been so pretty.
But now Cedars wasn't ugly enough, considering what lay inside it, she thought. It had namesake trees in large numbers, breaking up the gaps and shading the goings on, smothering the worst of the neighbourhood in a year-round coverage of deceptively rich green. Cedars was a community park, made in what had been one of the more philanthropic moments of Bay City's history. It had been opened while she was still a teenager. The mayor had snipped the ribbons across the gaily painted Chinese gates and a hundred paper dragons had taken to the air, dropping an electronic shower of gift vouchers wherever the wind bore them across the city. She and Max had got on their bikes and ridden hell for leather chasing them down. Never got close enough to grab one though.
Her memory of Cedars itself was much hazier. It had been an enclosed place, meant to be self-sufficient, a place of respite and peace within the shambling heart of the city for families who couldn't have afforded the luxury in ordinary circumstances. It was close enough to midtown for work but far enough out that it wasn't competing with any substantially prime real estate. Max had an apartment there for a while when she first moved out of home, but soon left it for a place that went with her job at one of the north-end casinos. Even at this time in the morning the flashing lights of the strip by the shore were blazing. Bay City was a good-time paradise, thick with fey and demon interests from the cheapest motel on the strip right down Eighth Avenue to the International Bank. And in the middle of the line that joined those buildings Cedars festered, its aspiring young families long gone.
It reminded her of Solomon's Folly, an ugly junction of malicious forces.
“Where's the bike?” Zal asked.
“At the Agency,” she said, realising how stupidly she'd behaved again thanks to her anger the day before.
“Come on then.” He turned and walked down the steps to the dirt driveway. He didn't take the route towards the road but stepped off the property directly into the woods. Lila followed him, trusting his instincts on both directions and the forest implicitly. They walked for a few hundred metres, jumping a couple of shallow drainage ditches and crossing a forgotten access road that was overgrown with grass and young shrubs. Beyond this the woods became more dense and progressively wilder. It was clear to her that they were not in line for the Agency.
Zal hiked steadily for another kilometre, then two, then three. They came to a minor clearing where a few trees had keeled over in last winter's blowhard gales, and he sat down on the deadfall, waiting for her to join him. She sat beside him, carefully testing the logs before she let them take her weight. They had moved quite quickly, but neither of them was out of breath. It had been good to do nothing but walk and breathe the air.
“Lila,” Zal said in the slow way that meant he was coming to say something important. “Where's Tatters?”
“We've parted company,” Lila said, less confident of her decision now that he seemed to be questioning it. “Last night I had a bit of a session.” He was quiet and she felt more anxious. “What's the matter?”
“I got the feeling you want to buy into this Long Game.”
“I don't know that I entirely buy her story—”
“No, but all the same. But I'm sick of those things. I had enough before I left Alfheim—they were the reason that I left. I haven't been too good at leaving them behind. They follow me and pick me up it seems. But I'm not interested in being a player. I'm done. Even if the world is at stake. Particularly if that's the stake.”
“God, you're such a liar,” Lila said. “You primed entire Otopian generations—”
“I did,” he said, cutting her off firmly but gently. “But it wasn't part of a master plan. It was me, doing what I do, which is pretty plotless and I intend for it to stay that way. I don't care if someone thinks I'd make a good whatever. I'll do what I like for my own reasons and screw the rest. But you, you're not like that.”
“I'm getting more like it.”
“Even so.”
She frowned, not sure where this was going but sure she wasn't liking it. It smelled of separation, divided ways. It felt like a version of “it's not you, it's me.” As the prospect of Zal going one way and her another grew more palpable, a jolt of anguish shot through her, and in its wake everything that had been occupying her for the last few days faded into a grey desolation.
“And then again,” he said, looking at the wall of forest in front of them, “You're involved with the Agency and your own issues, and Teazle's fucked off without a word, which makes me assume he's got more interesting people to kill. Malachi, well, he's more your friend than anything to do with me. My friends are all dead or gone. I have nothing to do and nowhere to go. I feel the need to do something useful, worthwhile, of purpose since I've been back here. Never thought I'd say that, but I need to make their deaths worth something more than another few years of me living on.”
“Zal, I—”
“Hear me out. I don't want a pity party. I want something to do so I don't have to think about what I lost twenty-four-seven forever because then I'll be a morose sonofabitch and drink, drug, or fuck myself into oblivion, which looks like a waste even from this end. Going into Alfheim is like a fucking godsend. But you going to find Ilya—I don't like that, and Sassy's story doesn't quite add up. You can throw in with her if you want to, but I'm out. I don't care if Sarasilien is playing the best hand in history across all of time and space and if I serve his purposes or not. Fuck him. I should probably thank him, because without him there'd be no you right now, but fuck him anyway.” He sighed. “I guess you have to go satisfy yourself you know what's going on before you gut him.”
Lila pulled at the rotting bark next to her leg, “Every time I think I know what I want to do I stop myself. Every time I do something, the consequences…” She shrugged. “You know what? If there are players in this Long Game, and everything that happened with me is part of some scheme, I think I get where Sassy's coming from. You get used enough, you want in. I want to dish out some of what I've been getting. And then I want out, and the way I see it, the only way out is to get rid of all the bastards in my way. There may be an endless supply of bastards, is the thing that worries me. In Demonia I can't move ten steps before I have to gun someone down.”
“No,” Zal said. “Of that I am sure. The stronger you get, the less you can be played. That's why I am the strongest thing that there is. I slipped up with Sorcha and paid Jack for it. I don't do that again.”
She looked quizzically at him.
“I am,” he said. “That's why I don't play.”
She thought it over. “I'm so angry,” she said, ripping bark free and throwing it down in the grass where their feet had crushed it flat.
“Yeah,” he said and put his arm around her shoulders. “That's why I love you.”
“So you're going to do what Sarasilien wants?”
“No. I'm going to Alfheim, take a look around, see what's happening. You can tell him it's what he wants if you like.”
She thought it over. “I will.”
“And you?”
“I'm going to find Ilya and talk to him. Don't know how I'll get to Ilya short of standing in front of a freight train and praying, but I'll find a way. I feel like I owe something to Greer, don't ask me why.”
“It's the anecdotes,” Zal said without hesitation.
She ripped another piece of bark free and scrutinised it, trying not to smile. It was covered in grey-green lichens, just a few of millions on that hillside. They took hundreds of years to grow, didn't go anywhere, didn't even look like anything special. “You'll need gear.”
“I'll pick it up in Demonia.”
“I'll come with you.”
“Any excuse for a fight.”
“You read my mind.”
Neither of them moved to get up. Lila put out her hand and Zal took it. They interlaced their fingers and closed them.
“I liked our little house and our rebellious teenage daughter,” Lila said. She didn't look at him; she looked at her feet and the crushed grass under them.
“Yes, me too. I was looking forward to the pony rides in the forest.”
“Christmas, with everything.”
“Throwing unsuitable boyfriends off the deck.”
“Shopping for clothes.”
“Being shunned at the school gate.”
“Graduation day. Oh, the prom!”
“Walking through Alfheim, for the first time.”
“Dinner at home.”
“It would never work.”
“No, not in a million years.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yes. Yesterday it did. Ten years in one minute.”
“We aren't going back there.”
“I will,” Lila said. “Let her think I'm taking her offer.”
“You're going to play?”
She took a deep breath and sighed it out through her nostrils. “You know, I never even played cards with Mom? Wouldn't. Not once.”
“Why not? She must have known all the games.”
“Sure. Every rule, every variation, every cheat. She couldn't lose.”
“You didn't want to lose either.”
“No no, it wasn't that. You forget that you're not a blackbelt in codependency, sensei. I was worried that one day I might win and break her stride. Poker's a confidence game. What if I beat her at something, anything, and she lost a bit of her faith? She got the stuffing kicked out of her three or four times a year anyway. I didn't want to be the person who did that. Not even a little bit. Even though if I had played with her at least we would have had one thing in common, 'stead of nothing.”
“But you're going to play now?”
“Hardball,” Lila said, closing her free hand into a fist until the black leather of her fingers creaked and it felt like a solid mace at the end of her arm. She turned it, admiring its flat knuckles, the gleam of the daylight cold and grey on the curving planes of her thumb.
Zal put up his own fist in response, larger and bonier than hers. He touched knuckles with her, and they pressed against each other for a moment. “This is where I'm supposed to warn you off the dark side of the force,” he said, and opened his hand out then, shaking it as if he'd already punched someone and hit bone.
“Feel free.”
“I would, but this way seems more fun.”
Now they turned to face each other and touched foreheads, tilting slightly to the side so that their noses didn't clash and they could press the flat bones together like small bulls, staring wall-eyed.
“Don't get killed, Blackout,” Zal said.
“Aces high, is what you're s'posed to say,” she told him, grinning to match his grin.
“Why?”
“That's the code,” she said. “That's what you say.”
“Aces high, then.”
“And to you.”
It took only a slight movement to change the headbutt into a kiss.
Lila let it evolve of its own accord. To really kiss Zal was a pleasure she could afford and he never disappointed her. He put all of him self into it, and she could feel it and it made her dizzy and shy and gratified and strange with delight.
At last she murmured, “So, do you think she heard us?”
“Definitely,” he said. “I guess she figures we're safe bets—I can't be arsed to lie and you…are you.”
Lila frowned. She didn't like to be thought of as solid and predictable. “That's just my poker face.”
He grinned at her, a fiendish, wolfish expression that agreed, but he wasn't going to say it aloud. This made her feel that what she had boldly said to lift her spirits might actually have potential as a truth. She kissed him again and stood up, brushing bark off her trousers.
“How about a little trip into Cedars? I'm pretty sure there'll be a portal there.”
He cocked his head to the side, “And check a few small stories while we're there?”
“You see, telepathic again. I think you must be magical.”
He made a slight kind of shrug, and for an instant she saw his shadow body emerge, flickering; black flames dancing across his skin. “Must be.”
They walked a wide circle around the house, maintaining their nominal safe distance, until they reached Podunk Flats. The ground was low and swampy, being at the end of the mountains and at the edge of the vast, watery delta that ran over Bay City's rocky outcrops and along its faultlines to the sea. The sound of insects was loud, the grey morning muggy as they stepped out of the trees and onto the hardtop of the road. Lila had called a taxi, and it was waiting for them at her coordinates a few metres from their position, in hibernation, lights off, signalling systems offline.
One thing that had changed about Bay City in the last fifty years was something that had affected the entire human population. In Lila's earlier life citizens had been freer to move around. After the Hunter's Reign and the influx of new blood, the citizen registry had changed and now everyone was tracked, not only by their spending patterns and their phonecalls, but every device that contained an OS was enabled to collect data and match it to the national database, either online or merely as a precautionary memory of where someone had been and what they had done. It was possible to get around a lot of types of tracking device, but when almost every working machine could sniff your genome in seconds, it didn't do much good. Thus, although Lila had shut herself off from the other cyborgs, and from the network except for times of her choosing, she couldn't vanish entirely from the vast infopool that was the Bay City Memhub. At least she was more or less invisible thanks to her Agency markers, depending on the day. Zal had no entry at all, which made him an Unknown Entity, identifiable perhaps as an elf but nothing else. This would create a security alert that would instantly call attention and also prevent them from using the car, so to preempt that eventuality she signed herself on to one of the pending Cedars murder investigations and arrested him.
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 small-town 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 them selves, 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 hub-data, 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 ahold 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 g's,” 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.
Behind the first row of ready regulars and the oddly angled one-eyed menaces of their black, stubby guns, a few handy-looking types of men and a couple of women had dashed in from other directions, darted glances to the elevators, and hurried deeper into the apartment's recesses through veils of door-hangings made out of plastic tape and beads. A smell of various half-cut drugs spiralled lazily in their wakes, the luxurious perfume of indulgence rather than addiction. Lila placed five illegal narcotics, amphetamines, and the curious taint of mescaline, and listened to the conversations going on across the rooms.
Meanwhile she held up her hands like a fainting southern belle waylaid by bandits. “I just want to talk to Shivaud.” Trickles of blood ran down her arms and dripped off her elbows. “And if maybe one of you has a wet wipe, that would be nice.”
Zal stood behind her at point position, face impassive under its pinto decoration of red from the dog and purplish blue from the bone demon. Neither of them looked armed. A couple of the men blinked and squinted, confused by the haze of darkness around Zal.
“Who the hell are you?” one in the middle said finally as they nerved themselves, waiting for someone with a clue to turn up and tell them what to do.
“I just want a portal and some conversation,” Lila said, lowering her hands slowly and giving herself a little shake. Blood pattered onto the marquetry floor. “You really should look for the wipes. That's going to stain horribly if you leave it.”
There was a briefly hissed but very audible passing of “what-the-fucks” along the line, but mercifully a woman in a tailored suit with fetish boots and immaculately waxed black hair appeared from the plastic veils and strode forward with businesslike predation in her expression, one hand tucking the tips of its fingers into the impossibly tiny pocket of her fitted tweed jacket. She moved like a catwalk model and was as tall and thin as a pole. The precise line of her lipstick left no room for compromises.
“Phitti, Dedalon,” she addressed the semicircle of guards with easy authority. “Cover the back.” And there she stood, waiting for them to slouch past her to their new, less interesting posts. None of them gave her a second look, which to Lila meant only one thing.
“Shivaud, I presume.”
The barest flicker of a wintry smile crossed the woman's whitened face. She was beautiful at a short distance, the paint making her more so, a kind of geisha but with a sadist's mouth. “Most people assume I will be a man. I can usually put up my second in my place while I play hostess in the background. Then again, most agents are men.” She flicked a glance at Zal and lingered on him for a moment. “And human.” When her gaze came back to Lila, she put her head to one side and offered the merest of social smiles. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Lila showed her Agency credentials, and this time Shivaud paused long enough to read them before standing back.
“So?”
“We've come to clear the road,” Lila said.
Shivaud's black lensed eyes narrowed slightly, but she inclined her head with the grace of a lady and gestured behind her. “Come in then, and we can talk.”
On the other side of the bead curtains was a room filled with sofas and entertainment tech. They passed through it, trailed at a distance by first one and then another of the more handy types Lila had seen before. Then they came into a red and gold silk room with views over the strip towards the bay; clearly a demon's lair. If the opulence and grandeur of the furnishings hadn't given it away—piling style on style and packing in pirate chests full of concealed weapons—the people it contained would have.
It was a large room, separated into semicircular areas by lush waterfalls of satin in dark colours, offering multiple sightline issues. Within the outer zones waterpipes and incense bowls simmered with the mixtures Lila had identified earlier—everything from trip mixes to poisons. Bodies in various states of undress and consciousness lay around; the retinue of the favoured passing the boring daylight hours of afternoon in their comas of choice. Demons were among them, of several lesser kinds, but all this paled into insignificance as Lila and Zal were invited to the central area and its bordello of inflated pillows and pasha rugs, animal hides liberally strewn around.
In the midst of this lay a succubus wearing a leather harness of narrow straps and about a thousand buckles, a chain choke collar around her neck that was tied to a violet ribbon with a chewed end. Her face was uncommonly pretty and innocent looking, her hair blonde and fluffy, simmering with pale tawny fire that made Zal suck his breath in. Her skin was the colour of wholewheat toast and oiled to a lustrous shine that emphasised all of her humanly impossible curves and the scorpion tip of her tail. This was red with blood, and her victim lay in front of her—a naked man, not more than twenty-five, nearly as pretty as she was with his long brown hair scattered around. His waxed chest and abdomen were striped with whip marks turning purple and his neck was punctured in several places with the full stops of the scorpion stinger, though he still breathed and his glassy eyes were open.
The succubus was trimming a red apple with a tiny silver knife and had laid the peelings out around his half-erect penis in a kind of pattern. She looked up from this as Shivaud led Lila and Zal into the room and, in a matter of fact kind of way, stuck out her foot-long pointed tongue and licked the length of it. The man stirred and moaned—an ecstatic sound that contained a painful pitch in it.
Lila could pick up venom traces from the air. It was everywhere. She analysed it and discovered not only the enhancing factors for pushed nervous systems but magical coils whose purpose she could only guess at. The boy on the floor wasn't giving anything much away.
Shivaud strode to her place atop the only chair in the room—a straightbacked wooden Shaker style—and sat down primly, indicating that Zal and Lila could try pleasing themselves. The succubus turned her eyes to Zal and smouldered openly at him, her lips visibly swelling and reddening as she let them part in a pout and batted her eyelashes.
Shivaud all but ignored her entirely although she made introductions. “This is Roxa. Roxa get a grip, these aren't the usual pieces of shit.” She dug one sharp stiletto heel into the succubus's perfectly circular buttock, and the demon lashed her tail, jetting a fine mist of venom in an arc away from them while she turned her attention to Lila and smiled sweetly with her corrupted schoolgirl's face.
Lila ignored her and said to Shivaud, “Your missing person is of interest to me.”
“She's of interest to me,” Shivaud said, and the succubus stiffened slightly at the words although she relaxed almost immediately after. “Give her back and you can drive free as the birds.”
“Interesting choice of words,” Lila said, and then carried on seamlessly as she dismissed all possible seating areas. “I want to know who and what she is to you that's worth incurring such enormous civil fines. By now you must be on your third mortgage.” They both knew the city didn't have the balls to collect damages out of Cedars lest there be a retaliatory explosion of violence that would ruin the tourist trade on the shore, but equally the gang law knew that everything had a price. Shivaud was daring a great deal.
In the meantime Zal had come forward and was standing with the naked man's head at his feet, looking down on the succubus as she preened up at him from her belly-down position, lifting herself high to show off her breasts and arching her back. Her tail curled and quivered delicately, almost in his eyeline. He admired her with his expression and she gave a long, strange quiver that ran the length of her entire body like a belly dancer's shimmy. Lila watched with one eye while keeping the leader as her main focus. Demon standoffs were strange to see, especially when the demons concerned were so different in character.
She felt mildly threatened by Roxa, whose charms were blindingly obvious, but was also contemptuous because this upstart wasn't a patch on Sorcha, Zal's demon sister. Then again Sorcha had had class; the burning diva wouldn't stoop to seduction as a weapon, for her it had been a given and would have lacked sport. But at the same time Lila felt mildly aroused by the scene and knew it would be double if she looked at Zal, and that would confuse her as much as Shivaud no doubt intended. The humans of the Western world had developed a great deal, but their culture was medieval in its attitudes to sex, hence the mighty industry of the Bay coast and the success of this sort of tactic. Though it probably would have been successful regardless since the succy's venom was laced with pheromones strong enough to interest rocks. Lila had a hard time finding a way to get the stuff out of her system. She wondered what Shivaud used and then, on examining the woman's immaculate burlesque façade from cool stare to steel-boned corset, thought perhaps she had adapted to it. Zal must also be thinking of Sorcha, and it was hard to see how that might go. It didn't seem as though this Roxa recognised him at all, so that was one card in his favour.
Finally Shivaud said, “The Motley is not only a business, it is a refuge for many, adults and children. They are my flock. In return for their feeding and care, protection, I ask only loyalty and, if they are able to help me, for their favours.”
“So the one who is missing was able to do big favours?”
“Society detests powerful changelings. I welcome all.”
Lila looked down at the naked, semi-comatose man. The wounds in his neck had swollen shut and around them a network of purple stains had spread under the skin. “Interesting welcome.”
Shivaud's icy smile appeared, her voice doelike with serenity. “This is a much-prized reward, not a punishment, though maybe it is a punishment that is its own reward.”
Roxa pouted prettily and put out her tongue. It was really obscenely long, like a flattened snake, and towards the back Lila saw tiny barbs at its sides. The forepart was lusciously pink with a strawberry pattern of receptors shining as the demon gave another lick to her prize—a curiously loving and tender gesture that reminded Lila of the way she'd seen a leopard once adoringly lick the exposed bone of half an eviscerated antelope that it had dragged up into a tree. The succubus kept her hypnotising stare on Zal, and in return Zal folded his arms across his chest and looked down on her from his great height, stonefaced, although other parts of his body were responding quite differently. Roxa smiled with angelic slowness and a faint rosy blush spread over both sets of her cheeks. Her tail tip swayed slowly back and forth, the length of it making lazy S shapes above her. Zal's hair changed colour from muddy-blond to corn-yellow as all traces of his shadow body sank beneath his skin. Roxa blinked with pleasure. Lila could not tell if Zal had won or lost that point.
She decided to get to her own point without delay. “I spoke to your seer. She doesn't intend to come back. Nobody has any business forcing her where she doesn't want to go.”
“She is not a citizen on the hub,” Shivaud said. “I think that Otopia Security will be more than content to force her to be registered or else deported.”
“If we do that, then it will be the last you'll see of her.”
“Perhaps. You forget that people have families of blood or of kindness, and families must be looked after.” The dark stare of her made-up eyes was arrow-straight now and speared Lila's slight flinch. “Is that all you came to say?”
“I want her name,” Lila said. “And a portal to Demonia.”
“She calls herself Oubliette,” Shivaud said. “Of course it isn't her real name. I don't know what that is.” Her mouth had gone tight with anger, creating sudden fine lines in her taut mask. Her gaze flickered over the blood on Lila and the gore on Zal as he slowly shed his coat behind him and began to unbutton his shirt. That got her full attention.
Zal pulled the shirttails out of his trousers and dropped the whole thing with two fluid moves. The tide line at his collar where the drying film of blood marked a perfect V against his skin was almost comical. Lila, Shivaud, and Roxa all let out exactly the same small sigh at the same moment, and Lila had to fight a quiver in her lips lest she start laughing.
There was a sound like dispersed gasoline catching fire, and Lila saw the demon flare brighten across Zal's back a moment before his shoulders erupted in seething yellow flame.
“Mind the drapery, darling,” Shivaud murmured, lifting one hand to adjust the immaculate line of her fringe over her eyebrows.
The flames' initial surge towards winghood fell back and quickly spread along his exposed skin, including his face. Where the small tongues of fire licked, they burnt the filth off him, becoming green for a moment, then red, then bright, near white though he was clearly unharmed. They died back to a soft ripple of low light burn, but they did not go out. His hair lightened, bleached into sunshine and then into near whiteness beneath the flames' caress.
One of Roxa's eyebrows moved up a single notch.
“I suppose you will not tell me where you met her? And you want to use my portal for free,” Shivaud asked, though it was more of a statement.
Lila didn't know if she were a better judge of a demon fight or not, but she felt that Shivaud was either conducting a plot for their massacre by invisible means—not unreasonable given the number of telepaths reported in Cedars—or else she figured herself outgunned.
At their feet Roxa slowly levered herself up to her hands and knees. With coy catlike moves she came forward to Zal, over the body of the lucky reward guy, until her face was inches from his thighs, at which point she sat back on her heels and gave him the full benefit of her frontal aspect, tilting her head back to bare her throat completely, head to one side, eyes half closed, hands softly relaxed and resting palm up on her thighs. Her tail swept across the body behind her, conforming to its shapes as it slid along. The man behind her made a soft moaning sound and a tear came from one eye, though otherwise he didn't or couldn't move.
“Unless you have anything to say about Janie Six.” Lila felt left out of things. It was too bad, but she wasn't sure she wanted to see how this struggle was going to end if she left it unchecked.
“Finishing a little police business? How nice for you. But what would I get for my kindness?” Shivaud said, folding her hands on her lap and adjusting her posture so that she could tuck her feet under the chair.
Lila watched the succubus place her long fingers on either side of Zal's hips. At this range the beautifully painted nails were obviously claws, several studded along their central ridge with diamonds and tiny seed pearls. The claw tips grazed his skin above his waistband, testing it. When she didn't start burning, she purred. Zal, mesmerised, was reaching with one hand towards her face as if to caress it.
Lila turned back to Shivaud, her own hands folded in front of her, straight as a librarian. “You get to live and so does your associate here. That's generous of me, very generous indeed, considering that she is now on my territory and I am not known as a gentle punisher back at the Sikarza house.”
The demon took a sudden inbreath, and her languor became the poised anxiety of a squirrel in a second. Shivaud's face fell with surprise and both of the women looked at Lila with fresh appraisal. Lila smiled at them both. “Isn't it interesting how everyone always thinks the man is in charge?”
“I am from Tantalor,” the demon said quickly, recoiling from Zal with dancer's grace but lightning speed. “I did not recognise you. We are far from the capital and the great society. Forgive me.” She bowed, her face pushed into the pillows and her bottom down, tail curling quickly around her legs until it wrapped her all around. When she came up, she kept her face down.
Zal sighed heavily and bent down to pick up his soggy clothing. The flames died back to their normal position in a wing-shape tattoo on his back as he straightened up and dressed. His disgust at his shirt and coat was only marginally less than Shivaud's expression as she kicked the demon with the toe of her shoe.
“Roxa!”
“It is no use,” the succubus said, crawling back slowly to crouch over the unconscious body behind her. She seemed to gain some strength from it and sat up again. “Tell them and let them go.”
Shivaud stared at her in disbelief. Lila could see that Roxa had always delivered in the past and was the undefeated champion of these parts. Suddenly Roxa hissed at Shivaud and came up into a pounce-ready crouch, her tail quivering.
“Do as they say and get them out of here!”
Shivaud's expression became stony. She turned to Lila. “Janie Six was killed by one of the Viperblood, from Cedars West, a guy called Haddon, half demon. He's the Viperblood second. You touch him, you got a war with them. The portal is that way,” she indicated her left with a wave. “Roxa will take you there.”
The demon looked vengeful at this rebuke to her status, but she stood up obediently nonetheless.
Lila and Zal stepped over the prone man to follow her.
“You aren't going to demand I clear the roads?” Shivaud asked sweetly.
“I don't care about the road,” Lila said and let that sink into the silence that followed as she trailed the succubus along a hall to a room at the far end of the building.