Keeping It Real Read online

  “Here I am,” he said and this time he did look at her with that wicked glance that glittered and was up for anything, the one no elf ever wore. He grinned at her hesitation. “You can’t bear to lose, can you?”

  “I’m in no danger of losing,” Lila said. “I was ordered to finish it.”

  “Oh, well, I think that Sorcha told you that’s no good. We’ll have to live with it, then, for the rest of our lives. I hope you’re not the jealous type. I don’t like being alone all the time.”

  “Can we get back to the woods for just a moment?” Lila insisted. “The elf agent shot you in the shoulder. Don’t you care?”

  “They’re out to get me.” The tip of one ear flicked dismissively.

  “And I can’t find you in the records.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You’re looking in the wrong place, Sherlock. You’re looking in Alfheim, and you’re looking in Otopia, but you aren’t reading the Demonia listings. I’m right there, next to Sorcha, under the family name, Ahriman.”

  “You’re an elf. A High Elf, by the looks of your face.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am that too. And you, pretty robot? What are you apart from a half a ton of metal and attitude?”

  Lila checked his claims on the records via Incon Tree and saw that it was true. Zal Ahriman. “But Zal isn’t your real name. Ahriman isn’t either. Not the first name.” The record did not show previous names, only the nickname.

  “Of course not. How stupid do I look? You think I’d survive ten minutes in Demonia under my real name? Elves are their favourite torment-toy.”

  “So, you weren’t born there?”

  “Well, duh.”

  “Is that how Sorcha woke you up from whatever Dar’s arrow did?”

  “It wasn’t the arrow. It was the elementals. And yes, that’s how. And no, I will not tell my name to you. And no, I don’t know what the arrowhead did. And yes, I do care, but I can’t do anything about it. And no, I will not stop the tour. And now I will not answer any more of your annoying questions because you can’t be bothered to do your homework.”

  Lila felt so angry she couldn’t speak. She mastered it with stillness.

  “Come on, Lila girl,” he said, in the same way that Sorcha spoke. “You’ve got a bit of the devil in you, you know it. Sometimes you should let her out, or else she’ll go bad on you when you least want her to.” His andalune body touched her suddenly, invisibly. She felt it like a feather against her face, where the scarlet stain met her ordinary skin. It ran under her clothing, down her arm, over flesh and metal. It had the most peculiar qualities; the lightness of strength, the coolness of intense desire.

  “Leave me alone!” she stood up, her head pounding suddenly. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, but she wanted to do something violent and powerful and physical.

  “Okay,” he said and the touch was gone. “But anyway. Were you shitting me about the drugs? I drank way too much last night.”

  “Oh yeah, why’s that?” Lila did have things that would work for Zal. Being an elf they weren’t the same things that a human would take for alcoholic poisoning. “Intravenous, or by mouth?” Lila thought of the elf agent’s face when Lila had injected her, the woman’s obvious disgust mingled with fear and loathing.

  Zal considered it, then held out his arm. “Spike me,” he said.

  Trust him to be cussed about it, Lila thought. She took hold of the offered hand, his left, the one that had been emptied out by the ghost and was now perfectly whole when it should be dead or missing, yanked into I-space. She tried not to notice the way his skin felt as she examined the inside of his elbow. She ran her finger over one of the green veins close to the surface. A spark travelled up from their point of contact into her chest and she felt something inside respond, as though a living thing jumped inside her ribcage and the space around it was a big empty cavern. Wild magic. The stupid Game.

  She found herself staring into Zal’s eyes.

  Instead of directing the medicine to her arm she directed it as if she was going to give it to herself, into her mouth. It was all the Game. She didn’t care.

  “Just nod if you can hear me,” she told him as he looked surprised when she let go of his arm and took hold of his jaw in her hand. Or maybe it was the Pink Floyd lyrics that surprised him. “Relax. I need some information first.”

  “Just the basic facts,” Zal replied, smiling with bemusement and leaning backwards until he was all but lying flat on the tideline of pillows that covered the bed.

  “It’s just a little pinprick,” Lila said. She bent down and kissed him. She expected all kinds of tricks. She didn’t expect him to kiss her back as tenderly as he did, nor to feel his hand against her face, which made her in turn let go of her medically effective hold on him and slide her hand along his neck where she felt the smooth action of the muscles there and the blood beating in the pulse below his ear as he opened his mouth to her.

  The medicine trickled out below her tongue, bitter and sweet, its synthetic macromolecules copying the fancy tricks of real Alfheim plantlife. Zal looked directly into Lila’s eyes as he tasted it and she felt both his hands on her head as he deepened his kiss.

  His transparent enjoyment and the depth of his immersion in the experience of the moment shocked Lila. She couldn’t escape the strongest feeling that what she’d meant to be a tease and a joke, a needle of a different kind, was an act equivalent to what she’d seen him do in Zoomenon—a sacred thing. Wild magic rippled in an electrical fizz along the conduits of her spine. She saw it in Zal’s eyes as he pulled away from her, lips wet, mouth open, pupils expanded into dark horizons bigger than any human eyes. He was panting and she was now completely immersed in his aetheric body—a full embrace of such sudden intimacy that it confused her utterly.

  Lila didn’t know any words now but she didn’t like the feeling inside. It was too much, too big, too strange and connected to the Game, connected to him and to the moments she’d been thrown back and poisoned by Dar, connected to Sarasilien’s cool hand on her forehead.

  She pushed away from him and stood up quickly. She was so hot, she had to get out. Stupid. She was stupid to do that and think it was anything but ordinary lust and human need reacting to simple High Elf glamour.

  “Comfortably numb,” Zal said softly, eyes glazed, his touch all gone from her. He lay still, spreadeagled in the sheets.

  “Is that what you do with the elementals?” she asked.

  “I’ll show you, next time,” he offered, and she had no doubt he meant it. There was a complete change in him. His attitude had gone, replaced by this terrifying sincerity and that Alfheim cool assurance she couldn’t stand and couldn’t stop wanting to watch.

  Lila brushed her hands across her mouth and swallowed the traces of the drugs. They made her feel heady and too energetic. She looked anywhere but at him.

  “Well,” he said after a moment, sitting up. “I hope that taught you not to go starting fires.”

  “I did not start the Game,” she snapped. She noticed that the main room had gone quiet and knew that Poppy at least must be earwigging for all she was worth.

  Zal raised one eyebrow. “I was talking to myself. I’m going to get up. Thanks. I’ll be sure and get drunk more often.” He waited, pointedly.

  “Oh right!” Lila said in exasperation and turned her back. She used sensors in her back to watch with instead and caught him smiling to himself, at her, in that annoying patrician way of someone who thinks they’re winning. She was going to try for a smart retort but found herself looking at the tattoo again as he turned his back. It burned incredibly brightly, a yellow that was almost white. “What is that supposed to be?”

  “I should have known you’d have eyes in the back of your head,” he said and walked back into the bathroom, closing the door.

  Poppy was waiting for Lila in the lounge.

  “If you say anything, I will kill you,” Lila told her before she had time to open her chrysoprase green lips.


  The faery smiled and crossed her legs in mid-air, floating easily as she rattled ice cubes in a tall glass, “Juice with your ice?”

  Lila shook her head and tapped her temple. “I have a call to make,” she said and went into her own room.

  She called Williams. When the woman answered she said with less awkwardness than she felt, “I want to talk to you about Dar and the mission in Alfheim.”

  “Okay,” the doctor replied calmly. “Go ahead.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We went into Alfheim as part of the diplomatic corps,” Lila began, when she was convinced that their secure link couldn’t be eavesdropped upon. “I was one of three agents for the NSA Otopia who went to the embassy in Lyrien. We did all the usual work there. I was never good at elvish really, so I didn’t do much contact—you know how sniffy they are if you get a consonant out of place. Well, I was in the offices and I used to deal with all the border control documentation. We’d look over it all very carefully, because there was a suspicion that someone in Alfheim was collecting big game magical artefacts and using couriers to bring them in.

  “I used to check all the records as closely as I could and then go and try to verify them by following up on some of the items that were listed, and some of the ones that we thought had come in without customs declarations. I’d pose as a courier for Otopia Postal Service and say that some box or other hadn’t been checked and that I wasn’t allowed out of Alfheim until I’d got proof of purchase or an invoice or some other piece of information, Sometimes I just asked for a picture of the object and took that with my camera. Anything to trace where the stuff was going. Plenty of it was perfectly legit of course.

  “Then Customs and Excise got a lead on one of these couriers when a packet of magicopharmaceuticals she was carrying internally burst and killed her. She actually gave herself up as she was dying. I saw her talk to them. She wasn’t making a lot of sense—it was a necromantic drug meant to let the users travel through Thanatopia without dying. Weird because you don’t get many elf necromancers obviously, what with their feelings about life and death, but she’d got far more than a single dose and she was walking two worlds and her body was packing up by the time I got there. Nothing could have saved her. She hadn’t known what she was carrying until the drug took her into Thanatopia. Well, she found out and met up with some other of her ex-associates in Death—they’d been murdered by their masters you see, after finishing their deliveries—she decided to go along with their wishes and tell the authorities what was going on, try and undo what was being done. But there was a spell on all of them which prevented them talking about it directly. So she wasn’t much help.

  “Before she died we managed to figure out that the stuff was being taken beyond Lyrien, into Sathanor. At that time there was a diplomatic mission going out to Sathanor on a rubber chicken visit to cement the trust that Alfheim wanted to show in Otopia now that the immigration acts had been sorted out at last. So I went as part of the cortege into Sathanor, as a PA to the Ambassador.

  “There was another agent with me, Vincent De Palma, another Otopian spy. We were under instructions to look for anything that looked like it might link up with what this woman had said. He was very keen.” Lila paused for breath, then carried on.

  “The thing about Sathanor is—it’s very beautiful, like you dream that nature intended, like Eden. Everything is more itself there, even than in the rest of Alfheim. When you go you can see how the elves and the elementals are related magically. Skies are bluer, trees more majestic and individual, stones are more solid, rivers wilder—everything has its own spirit that you can feel, like ultra-authentic We used to call it whiskey-country, you know? Because it was distilled from hundreds of gallons of ordinary things into this incredible, rich, sensual, spiritual stuff.

  “So, we were in whiskey-country and we were kind of drunk on it, and all the elves were a bit too, but they were used to it, so they’d laugh at us because we were all stoned the whole time and that made spying really hard. When you were there you realised that in Otopia, though the elves have aetherial bodies that you can sometimes feel if they want you to, they’re just disconnected there, but in Alfheim you realise that they’re not disconnected any more. The andalune is a part of them that’s connected to the land and the sky and the whole place, like my Al-self connects me to the Otopia Tree. Except in Sathanor it’s not an interface. In Sathanor the elves are part of Alfheim—there’s one big andalune, I suppose. I could see why it’s called the water bridge—andaiune’s meaning in Otopian. It flows between everything. It makes all relationships potentially very intimate in ways we humans don’t have at all.

  “Well, we were at this big party thing in one of the mountain halls—all so gorgeous, I can’t tell you—and Vincent overheard some elf princes talking about a necromancer that they’d heard of, operating deep in Sathanor, at some place very remote. They were jumpy about it, not paying attention to much else, and he thought this was a good lead, so we decided we’d pretend we were going out on a hiking trip for a few days whilst the rest of the talking was going on, and we set out and tried to find this place. We had an elf guide with us, an ordinary Alfheim agent, who’d agreed with our bosses in the regular NSA that we should make a joint trip to find out what was going on in secret. Harad, her name was. And we made a long journey into the big country but we didn’t get as far as the place we were going. Dar and the other Jayon Daga agents came after us.

  “I didn’t understand all the distinctions then. I couldn’t see why they weren’t exactly on the same side as Harad, though they clearly didn’t think themselves her allies. Sarasilien told me later that they’re a kind of law unto themselves, like a priest caste, the grey eminences behind a lot of the apparent Alfheim ruling classes. Anyway, they intercepted us in the mountains and ordered us to go back in no uncertain terms. We agreed of course, and Harad was very worried about them being there and knowing where we were but Vincent and I didn’t understand the situation and we thought it was such a good opportunity that we managed to persuade her… Well, we didn’t go back. We went on and then the Daga came after us again and…”

  Lila faltered. This was where she wasn’t sure of a solid narrative any more, only of isolated events.

  “They used magical weapons. I think there was some kind of struggle between Harad and the first of them. They captured her, and she was sent away with some of their number, I don’t know where to, I never saw her again. The rest of them, under Dar’s command, decided that they couldn’t let me or Vincent go and they discussed what they were going to do about it. While that was happening the one who had been set on to guard us fell asleep. Something came out of the trees and he just—it emptied him—he keeled over on the ground just like that. And then it got to Vincent, because he was closer, and it was some kind of... I think it was a ghost of some kind: an inhaler, not an exhaler… um… I didn’t really see it, just something greyish and our guard falling over. Vince and I had been tied up, hands and feet, and I managed to roll away, but he couldn’t do it in time because he had his back to it, and he just… I guess he must be dead. I don’t know. I was trying to get away and I didn’t want to shout because I thought they were going to kill us anyway, but then Dar saw me and he must have thought I’d done whatever it was to his soldier and to Vincent. He was furious.

  “They picked me up and ran with me. I don’t know where. Then they threw me down. Fire. Dar cast this spell and it hit me and it burned…

  “I see his face a lot in my dreams. I saw him then just a few times, different times. And there was this pain. And he was looking at me with that cold face. It must have been different times, because the backgrounds were different. He never did anything else. I heard him talking to the others and asking me questions but I couldn’t answer them. And then I don’t remember anything, except the hospital here.

  “But that’s not the worst. The thing I wanted to say was that what burned me was Dar’s andalune and it burned me with hate. I
felt it because it was everywhere and the spellcast came from it and it carried it into me. I could hear him in it. The way he despised humans, loathed demons, feared… he was afraid of a lot of things. He was afraid of the magic he used to stop me. He was revolted by what he saw happen to me. He made himself sick. Every time he looked at me afterwards I could see how much he wished I didn’t exist. He’d ask me questions about what we saw, and I’d say nothing because we didn’t see anything, and he’d be furious. I would have told him anything. If they hadn’t wanted to keep me alive to ask me questions, I’d have been dead. I’m sure of it. Dar kept me alive. As long as I was conscious he never stopped asking questions.”

  Lila stopped. She glanced around the hotel room. Next door she could hear music and voices. She looked at the time and saw an hour had passed.

  “Did he recognise you in the woods this time?” Dr Williams asked.

  “Yes,” Lila said, grateful for Williams’ calm, able to be calm in return. “And then he shot me. And I meant to say it was worse because Dar is very—handsome—but that sounds ridiculous. Why would that be worse? Only it is. When I looked at him, all I could see was how beautiful he was, and all he saw was how horrible I was. He could feel me, because the magic in his arrowshot carried the charge of his andalune, and he couldn’t stand it. It made him physically sick.” Lila bit out the last words and then clenched her jaws shut. She felt as though she had swallowed acid. At the time, in the thick of the action, she hadn’t even noticed it, she thought, but now that she had to say it aloud, her mind was only too keen to supply clear details.

  “Thank you, Lila,” Dr Williams said. “You should rest now. You must be very tired.” She had put her kind voice back on.

  “Yes, I will,” Lila said. She didn’t really suspect the doctor of hypnotism, but the suggestion seemed so welcome. She went and lay on the bed’s cover and then pulled the pillows into her arms and shut her eyes as she closed the phone link down. But this didn’t work. She didn’t feel better. She felt worse. She could hear Poppy laughing: no happier sounds than faery laughter, kind of crazy and twisted as it was, and Lila felt a smile turning up her own mouth against her will.