Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Read online

  She gave up on the wild tangles in his hair and pulled it into three roughly equal parts, beginning to wrap it into a rough braid. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, does it, because everything has gone wild and become its own thing now, hasn’t it?’

  ‘The Law of Flesh and Blood,’ Zal said, coming to the point where his neck couldn’t go any further and the lilac dress was stretched taut, blocking the way anyway. ‘Once real, then free.’

  ‘But freedom doesn’t necessarily mean happy, or even able.’

  He nosed his way between the sharp metal teeth of the jacket and kissed the warm body underneath. ‘Did you think it did?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She tied off the braid and let it fall against his back.

  ‘Ah, Lila,’ he said sadly and hugged her close, webbing them both in a sheen of darkness.

  The sound of the water endlessly washing the shore surrounded them. The mist thickened, tinging at first rosy, then orange as the sun struggled to break through.

  ‘I don’t want to live by the sea,’ she said suddenly. ‘Not this close.’

  Zal bent low and kissed her over her heart. ‘Doesn’t matter to me,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know how to go on,’ she said, her hands tight on his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what to do. Or why.’

  He kissed his way back up to her neck and then went back for the zipper to pull it up again.

  ‘Welcome to the club,’ he said. ‘I find if you just keep breathing and deal with one minute at a time, that’s usually enough.’ He poked her in the ribs. ‘You’re not breathing.’

  She forced herself to exhale. ‘I don’t actually have to breathe.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You do. It’s important. Only machines and the un-dead don’t breathe and look what happens to them.’

  ‘What happens to them?’

  ‘Nobody asks them to parties,’ Zal said, lifting her up and helping her to turn back around on the saddle. He put his hands on her waist and saw the dress was looking at him with embroidered flower eyes. They were frowning, but they weren’t mean. He stuck his tongue out at them and they unstitched themselves into ordinary pansies.

  ‘Now are we going to look at some houses or not?’

  She grabbed a portfolio of rentals off the local hub and displayed them on the upper back of her jacket so that he could see them.

  As she pushed them off the stand and spun back onto the road she wondered who was going to sign off real estate to her at six in the morning outside of town.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As it turned out Lila need not have worried about real estate agents. The process was handled entirely by the city network, without the need for human intervention. In spite of, or more likely because of, its reputation as the hub of otherworldly activities, Bay City and the surrounding country had a high transient population and properties that were empty and ready to let were few. Those fitting Lila’s requirements were even fewer, so it didn’t take them long to pick a couple from the fast-dwindling list and ride out into the forested hills of Lakewood.

  Lakewood sat to the north of the island swarms and coastal inlets where the true grit of the continent finally got its act together and heaved itself out of the lagoons to form dry, regular hills. Rivers disciplined by broad swathes of emergent rock ran in wide beds and between them grassy glades and large patches of dense forest had sprung up. Needle and broadleaf trees mingled on the lower slopes but it was higher up, where the land was rockier and the forest an older, pinewood type, that Lila preferred. Beyond the reach of the shopping malls and estate houses that circled like wagons around manmade lakes, in a region where the roads petered out into tracks, sat the house she had mentally ringed in red.

  The bike crunched across the scattered gravel that made up the approach and halted. Before them sat a red wooden ranch house, single storeyed and set on pylons that supported it so that it didn’t topple down the steep slope. A broad deck all around it was set with deep green canvas chairs and awnings, all furled closed and tied down against the weather. The whole thing backed onto a thick rise of dense evergreens and sheer rock. Above and beyond those was a scrappy grey-stoned cliff and beyond that the sullen, misty glower of the sky.

  Lila sat and looked and listened to the forest sounds, waiting for Zal to speak.

  Finally he said, ‘I can’t see the moose head. There must be one somewhere.’ She felt him swing himself off the saddle and then his sigh as he stretched and turned. ‘But it is a long way from the beach.’

  She swung her leg over the handlebars and moved to his side. The clearing and the angles were as she had hoped. You could see across Lakewood’s green clusters down all the way to the city’s blue and grey clutter and then beyond that to the fog that hid the ocean. The smell of resin and damp mulch filled her nostrils. She liked the rock at her back. And beyond this house there were no paths into the forest for wandering hikers to stumble over her. The house was alone up here, half hiding, half poised to rush down and embrace the town.

  She looked to Zal, waiting for his verdict on the energy, the subtleties of the location. She kept expecting to see him changed when she did this, as though Otopia would gradually erode his strangeness and make him the blonde, tanned conformist elf of his earlier days. Now he was dipped in a sheen of permanent ink and he looked downright alarming. In the dull daylight his shadows were too intense, his colours unreal. When he looked at her, grinning, his eyes were so dark brown they looked black. Their enlarged pupils seemed to bleed darkness. Lila couldn’t prevent a quick blink.

  He saw it and that pleased him even more.

  ‘I see I am too glamorous to be allowed any closer to the lure of cultured pursuits,’ he indicated the city with a glance, adding, ‘although I don’t really feel like partying much myself.’ He dropped the pose and turned back to the building. ‘It’s a good effort, Liles. Okay, if you want it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see inside?’ She didn’t. She couldn’t have cared less if it was bare boards but it seemed the thing to say.

  Zal shook his head. ‘It’s a bolthole, a treehouse, a retreat. It’s what you need.’

  She felt humbled by his understanding, shy in an odd way, as though she were overexposed. She turned and saw that even from their spot at the edge of the driveway you couldn’t see directly into any of the windows. The angle was too steep. ‘It might be impossible in the winter,’ she said, in a token gesture at thinking things through.

  ‘You wish,’ he said.

  She wasn’t sure how to say the next thing so she just said it. ‘Are you sure? I mean, that you want to be here all the time. With me?’ The ease of Teazle’s divorce and easy departure kept running through her mind.

  One of his eyebrows quirked. ‘Is this a chink in the Iron Maiden’s armour? Are you saying, Lila Black, that you want me to stay here all the time with you, hmm?’ His eyes were fiendish. ‘Are you actually asking me for something that matters to your cold steel heart?’

  For a moment she bristled but then she remembered two could play. ‘What poncery is this, elf? Games?’ She looked around but there was no sign of the citrus fizz that signalled their old game was active. It had gone.

  For some reason this chilled her. She couldn’t remember either of them reaching a victory condition – a state of abject humiliation in which they were begging the other one for sex. It would have been sufficiently nauseating or alternatively so deliriously sweet it would have stuck in her mind. Other things stuck in her mind all too clearly: the dead bodies of Poppy and Viridia for two, rolling in the black, ice-clogged tide of Jack Giantkiller’s lake. That had been their penalty for cheating a deal with the Hoodoo. The Hoodoo governed all magical games and forfeits. It never missed. It always collected. So where was it? Even a slight rise in baiting each other should have caused the old bargain to flicker into existence, but she felt nothing, smelled nothing. When had the surrender condition been validated? She looked at Zal but he was apparently oblivious.

  ‘Poncery,’ h
e repeated, wonderingly but not without pleasure. ‘Haven’t heard that in a long time.’

  ‘Now you have,’ she said, deciding not to speak of the game. It felt like it would be a terrible mistake, calling it to account almost. She stuck to the facts. ‘It’s two thousand standard dollars a month.’

  ‘Poncery,’ Zal said, flicking his ears like a horse dislodging a fly. ‘I probably should mention that I have a strange feeling about this place though, despite the crusty, rustic urban cowboy styling.’

  Lila looked over the building again, then back at Zal. She reread the lease notes: there was no mention of anything strange, although the place had been let three times in six months. ‘What sort of feeling?’ she asked, ignoring the sensation of sinking that was going on in her shinbones.

  ‘The sort of feeling that suggests inhabitants.’

  She tried not to be disappointed, almost managed it. She offered her last signal-flag of defiance to fate. ‘It’s billed as empty. You mean squatters?’

  ‘I mean her,’ he pointed up to the windows of the woods-facing side. Their angle and the sun meant she couldn’t see anything at first, but then she thought she might have noticed a movement.

  ‘Her? You saw someone?’

  Lila reprocessed her image memory but was unable to find more than a movement of shadow, which no amount of fiddling could resolve into a meaningful shape.

  ‘I felt her,’ he said. ‘We shadow elves have a built-in detector for living things, you know. Something to do with our unliving ancestors and their hunger for vital energy. Quite good at shorter ranges. Specially if things are powerful.’

  ‘Not human then,’ Lila frowned. She felt cross, her discovery spoiled, the house almost as good as lost.

  By unliving ancestors she knew Zal meant the spirits of the dead planes, things about which the human race knew very little and had even less language for. ‘Spirit’ wasn’t a good term, but it was the only one they had. Even the grimoires of the demon necromancers had few facts amid their screed of speculations and graphic accounts of the results of encounters with these beings.

  An image of her parents’ house flared into her mind’s eye, a shape like a sister behind the screen door, opening it up. . . She pushed it aside.

  ‘Or not exactly human?’

  ‘Not entirely, that’s for sure,’ Zal replied. He wasn’t perturbed, only mildly interested, and he looked to her for a cue. ‘Want me to take a closer look?’

  His heavy blonde hair, slicked with its jet sheen, framed his face and large eyes like a ghoul mane. The eyes themselves slanted more than they used to, she noticed, as they glittered with vague amusement.

  She wiggled her fingers. ‘Want me to pick the locks?’

  He smiled and held out his arm, gentleman-style. ‘Sure.’

  They moved around to where a set of steps led onto the verandah and climbed them side by side. The sun was shining weakly through the low cloud and lit up the security lock – a touch pad.

  ‘If I were alone, this would be a window job,’ Zal said, looking at the metal with disapproval. His elven skills were actively earthed out or repulsed by iron and its alloys.

  ‘You’re not alone,’ Lila grinned. ‘Although,’ she added, as she accessed the system via the estate agent’s portal, masking herself as a routine tax-office audit, ‘this means that whoever is in there isn’t using the door either.’

  ‘Back door,’ Zal said.

  ‘Don’t think so, they’re both active and unopened.’ She smiled, the job done, and gave the touchpad a brief press of her fingers.

  They heard the locks clicking back and the door slid open. A smell of furniture wax and deodorisers met them. The interior was dim, but a few of the storm shutters had been loosened and pried up from the windows, so not as dim as it might have been.

  They stepped inside.

  ‘Hello?’ Lila called.

  ‘Genius,’ Zal murmured.

  ‘Well, it’s not like they don’t know we’re here.’

  ‘And now they know we know they’re here,’ he sighed but in spite of his light tone of reproach his attention was elsewhere.

  Lila could see his aura, strong with the room’s shadows, flitting out and away from him like a cloud of black dust until it thinned into the general atmosphere. She let him work while she reviewed the furnishings. The hunting-lodge theme was firmly established – heavy wooden sofas and chairs surrounded a log table, which in turn was set before one side of a double open fireplace, the stone chimney acting to support the roof in this room and the next one, which looked to have some kind of dining set up.

  She wandered towards the kitchen, alert but more interested in seeing appliances than squatters. She’d never really lived away from home, if you excused a month at an anonymous apartment block, and it was kind of exciting, in a small way, to consider that she could have her own stuff again, even if someone else with a taste for white with gingham-and-red-roses accessories had chosen it.

  She was just nosing inside a cupboard, looking at a nice set of red-stemmed wineglasses and a clearly never-used fondue set, when she heard Zal’s hiss and then the almost inaudible patter of his run across the boards. She was out of the door in an instant, following his back as he ran around the chimney’s heavy shape.

  There was a brief scuffle and then Zal fell into the light coming from the window that he’d pointed out from below. He landed on his feet, catlike, his hands held out in a protective stance in front of him. His shadow aura was completely reabsorbed and in the sunlight he looked remarkably solid, almost human in tone.

  He had flushed out a small girl, who was in the corner. She was screened by a big tartan beanbag – one of several that made up an obvious nest in this, the least overlooked part of the house. She was possibly nine, or even twelve, Lila thought, coming to a slow halt behind Zal. Her hair was tied up in a scarf and from beneath its azure line her large eyes stared at both of them, wide and unblinking. Her skin was as dark as the old oak floor, and there was a faint sheen on it that Lila recognised as faery bloom, a touch of pearly lilac that showed only in the light.

  ‘I’m not gonna hurt you,’ Zal said, lowering his hands and backing up into Lila’s shins.

  ‘No, I know,’ the girl replied. The beanbag muffled her tone a bit but not the resentful contempt it contained. ‘It’s obvious. You don’t need to shout about it.’ Her eyes narrowed and she briefly scrubbed her face with the beanbag cover as though she was rubbing away tears or exhaustion. ‘Are you an elf?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well you look like a demon and you smell like a vampire.’

  Lila had to admit that, in spite of the cornering and the bag, the girl didn’t seem terribly frightened. She saw Zal’s right ear twitch, which was a sign he was suppressing a laugh. ‘It’s a long story,’ he said.

  The girl’s gaze flicked to Lila and she pressed back against the two walls. ‘You’re iron. Sort of. Living. Kind of. Elemental. Freaky.’ She sniffed and her eyes rolled up briefly into her head in a disconcerting manner, a flash of white.

  ‘I’m human,’ Lila said.

  ‘Hell you are!’ the girl replied. She really did have a talent for vocally flipping the V sign, Lila thought.

  ‘She’s just a cyborg kind of thing,’ Zal said casually. ‘She’s harmless. We only came to look at the house. She wants to rent it.’

  Lila kneed him in the back for the harmless remark and said, ‘Speaking of which, why are you here?’

  ‘Is that a faery dress?’ the girl said, staring at Lila with frank and open disbelief.

  ‘What, this old thing?’ Lila plucked at a ruffle of her over-the-leathers miniskirt and felt the cloth twitch of its own accord.

  The girl stared at her, at the dress, at Zal. Finally she shook her head and said with feeling, ‘I never seen anything like you two.’ She frowned. ‘Never thought anyone’d catch me so easy.’ She was completely disgusted with herself. Then, ‘Are you going to send me away?’

  ‘Where t
o?’ Lila asked. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘’Cos I can leave fine on my own,’ the girl added firmly. ‘Got here by myself, can leave by myself, find another place, no worries. I don’t hurt anyone. I don’t do nothing.’

  Lila reviewed the details on the house’s previous occupants. Both listed an early departure because they ‘just didn’t like it as much as we thought’ and ‘too rustic, rather be closer to town’. Their personal logs mentioned other things however; bad feelings, sudden chills, a sense of being watched, a presence . . .

  ‘You haunt people,’ Lila said. ‘You made them go.’

  The scowl came back, full force. ‘I didn’t hurt them. I just wanted them to go. That’s all. I didn’t do anything to them. I swear. I didn’t take their stuff.’

  . . . I bought enough for sandwiches but then it was gone and . . .

  ‘You ate their food.’

  The girl’s mouth dropped open, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. ‘What are you, like, some kind of detective?’

  ‘Some kind,’ Zal said amiably. ‘But that doesn’t matter. We want to live here so we want to know if you’re going to haunt us too.’

  She was skinny, Lila thought, starving maybe. ‘How did you survive since the last people left?’

  A glare fixed on her in reply. ‘They left their food.’ She grinned to herself, ‘They left in a rush. I hid it before the cleaner came. Under the floor.’

  ‘It must have run out by now.’

  The glare didn’t falter. ‘You got any?’

  Zal shook his head.

  ‘I can get some,’ Lila said almost at the same time.

  ‘I forget she has a constant link to everything she wants,’ Zal apologised. ‘Delivery take-out. There must be one round here.’

  ‘Pizza,’ Lila confirmed. ‘And pasta. With desserts.’

  The glare continued, rather more thoughtfully. ‘They were loud,’ she said at last, with grudging resignation. ‘Their heads were full of crap and it went on all the time, man, I mean they like never shut up unless they were asleep. It’s the same down there,’ her eyes flicked briefly in the direction of the city and she shook her head, finished, not just with what she was saying but with everyone.