by Tim Lebbon
There’s something about her.
“No more,” the woman whispered. “I know Vince.”
Angela looked around to see if anyone had seen the exchange. A mother urged her two toddlers away. A group of teenagers sitting on the marble wall around a fountain laughed and nudged each other.
“Angela!” the woman said loudly, and the faux delight in her voice elicited an unconscious smile. It couldn’t be helped, not if they wanted to deflect attention. When the woman threw her arms around her, pulling her tight, she couldn’t help but hug back.
“My name’s Lilou,” the woman whispered into her ear. “I’m a friend. I can keep you safe, and if you want to save him, you’ll come with me.”
A flush of emotions—fear, doubt, confusion—vied for supremacy within Angela, but it was grief that burst through. Feeling irrationally safe, she hugged Lilou even tighter.
“Not here. Not now.” Lilou pried her arms away.
“You followed me?” the man asked.
“Dean, this isn’t something for you,” Lilou said.
“Of course it is!”
Lilou grasped Angela’s hand and walked away, pulling her back toward the mall entrance.
“Wait!” Dean shouted. He came after them, towing his suitcase. It made a grinding noise as the wheels ground across the knobbled concrete paving at the entrance. “She knows something—you can’t take her away, I’ve only just found her!”
“She found you,” Lilou said quietly.
Angela went with her. The woman felt like control, while Dean, the old man, seemed chaotic. It was control that she craved. She’d had enough of chaos.
With Dean shouting and rushing to catch up, they arrived at the entrance. A big security guard who looked like a fatter and older Idris Elba stepped through the automatic doors, appraising the situation. He saw two attractive women approaching and an agitated old street guy hurrying after them.
“Is this gentleman bothering you ladies?” Idris said.
Angela glanced at Lilou. The woman said nothing. She only smiled.
Idris’s eyes went wide, then he ushered the woman into the mall and stood across the doorway, almost blocking it.
“I’m afraid I can’t let you in, sir,” he said.
“What was that?” Angela asked. “What’s happening? When you smiled something…” Something happened, she wanted to say, but she realised how odd that would sound.
“We’ve caused a stir,” Lilou said. “We need to get away from here. It’s far too open.”
“Who are you? What’s happening? Where’s Vince?”
“Come on. I’ll talk while we walk.”
18
Whenever he closed his eyes, Vince saw Daley stumbling back from his kick, falling, consumed by the animal roar and blinding light of the Underground train. The big man’s scream had combined with the train’s and echoed along the tunnel, lasting far, far longer than the man himself. Vince had felt something splash his face. Later, he found blood caked there, but he wasn’t sure it was Daley’s.
It might have come from the second person he had murdered.
Because after Daley was pulped by the train, Celine had come for him, screaming like a banshee, silvery hair seeming to capture the weak light from Daley’s dropped flashlight.
He hadn’t even had a chance to stand. Still dizzied from the blow to the head, stunned by what had happened, Vince rolled and reached for the knife Daley had dropped.
He’d had only seconds. Nowhere near long enough to save himself—no chance at all. And yet in that subterranean darkness already smelling of blood and death, his splayed fingers had curled around the blade’s handle as if fate itself was guiding his hand.
Celine had leapt at him, he’d rolled back with the knife held out before him, and she fell on it, unable to stop herself. A cold pain flared in his elbow. He felt the knife pop through her clothing and skin, a gush of warmth, her frantic writhing as she tried to lift herself away. It was horrible. He’d been able to smell her fear and pain. Her hair swept across his face and stung his eyes. He closed them, and then she butted him hard in the face.
A light flared, and then darkness.
The next thing he remembered was being in the room with Lilou, and the rescued had become the rescuer.
* * *
Vince opened his eyes to the dancing of shadows, and Ballus shrieked something incomprehensible. He was still in the chair, still being dragged, but now they were deeper. He felt the weight of the world around him, the heavy staleness of the air, the stink of old times and older shit.
He’d passed out, perhaps only for a few seconds. Maybe he’d lost too much blood. He hadn’t drunk anything since Ballus had taken him. How long ago that was, he wasn’t sure. Several hours? A day? Maybe more. His perception of time was stilted, confused by periods of sleep, waking, and unconsciousness brought on by the beatings to which he’d been subjected.
Perhaps he had broken bones.
He felt sick. Lost. Incredibly alone.
“Bastard,” he croaked, dry throat rasping.
All movement ceased. The halt was so sudden, the stillness so intense, that Vince caught his breath and froze. He thought for a moment that he might have blacked out again, just long enough for Ballus to prop him here amongst the slime and shit.
Then he heard breathing, and a heavy shadow closed over him as Ballus leaned down into view from behind the chair, his face upside down.
“I thought you were asleep,” the satyr said, shattering the silence with another of his mad shrieks. It echoed through tunnels, breaking the darkness.
Vince bit his tongue to avoid crying out in shock and fear. He closed his eyes, making it only a little darker. The flashlight Ballus carried wasn’t very powerful, and he dreaded the idea that its batteries might run out.
“I’ll tell you where they are,” Vince said. The words fell from his mouth unbidden, surprising him, and he had to question whether he really would tell. After holding out for so long, enduring such torture, it seemed as if his subconscious was ready to give up anything, just to escape this horror.
The chair tilted back again, feet dragging across the ground.
“Too late,” Ballus said. “I don’t need to know anymore.”
“Let me go and I’ll—”
“Have you met my new friends?” the satyr asked. “They know it all down here. They dance with me. Did I tell you I could dance? Did I show you?”
Vince said nothing, didn’t want to encourage him, but Ballus was already whispering words he couldn’t make out, a strange sing-song that might have been a poem in a lost language. Moments later, the first of the squealing and scampering began. The whisper of hundreds of claws on damp stone. The echoing tones of many small voices.
He tried to find sense in the sound, terrified that he would, and then the first shapes edged into the flashlight’s weak influence. Dozens of them, following obediently, noses twitching, naked tails slipping across the ground behind them.
“You’re friends with rats,” Vince said, and he managed a laugh. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Not only rats,” Ballus said, and he continued that strange, unknown song.
Beyond the rats, larger shadows appeared. The flashlight beam seemed to veer away from them, unable to penetrate shape or form. There might have been doorways or hollows in the walls, home to a deeper darkness, but Vince knew they had passed none. The tunnel was old and relatively smooth. Vaulted brick ceilings echoed slithering, wet sounds.
Wet sounds that whispered eagerly of fresh meat.
“Meet my true friends,” Ballus said. “I call them dregs.”
* * *
Being in the shopping mall made Angela feel guilty. She was somewhere safe, protected, and so familiar that Vince’s predicament seemed a world away. She was more and more certain that wherever he might be, he was in terrible danger. This strange woman, Lilou, had said as much.
Strange she was, for sure. Moving quietly together t
hrough the crowds felt natural, because such discussions couldn’t occur in a place like this. Too many ears, too many eyes. Angela felt her attention drawn again and again to Lilou. In fact she could hardly look away, and several times she had to apologise as she bumped into other people when she didn’t watch where she was going.
She could only think of how beautiful Lilou was. It wasn’t a classical beauty, and it went far deeper than her appearance. She exuded magnetism in every movement, every look, the way she repeatedly flicked an errant strand of hair from her eyes, the arch of one eyebrow, her perky pointed nose and the glacial green of her eyes. She bore a natural grace.
She flows like nature, Angela thought, the idea odd and yet entirely apt.
As they passed through the mall’s wide central area, she realised she wasn’t the only person affected that way. Heads were turning, men mostly, but a few women, too. And with every moment that passed, Lilou was becoming more agitated.
“What is it?” Angela asked.
“Don’t like places like this. Got to get out of here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Too many humans.”
Angela laughed, waiting for Lilou to look at her and smile, but the woman stared ahead. They took a wide corridor lined with small independent stores and leading away from the main shopping area. Lilou was breathing fast.
“Are you okay?” Angela asked, when a thousand other more impossible questions pressed at her.
“I will be,” Lilou said. “There, that’ll do.” She headed for a door marked Private, pushed through, and Angela went with her. She expected alarms to sound and people to come running, but nothing happened.
Beyond was a narrow corridor, walls flaking with old paint, and several doors led to other rooms. Lilou ignored them all and marched along to a metal door at the corridor’s end. It was bolted and padlocked, but the padlocks hung loose on their hooks. She drew back the bolts and hauled it open.
Once again, Angela stepped out into the secret back of things. The service area was large and well used. A dozen wheeled refuse carts stood lined against the shopping mall’s wall, and across the yard a few more were fixed to the heavy metal fence. A set of gates stood open, and several small trucks were parked in delivery bays to their left. One had its engine still running, and a man and woman stood chatting beside the cab. They glanced across at Lilou and Angela but seemed disinterested.
“What’s happening?” Angela asked. The question encompassed so much, and she felt a rush of desperation and panic at every possibility the answer might present.
“I’m getting control,” Lilou said. She breathed deeply. In the light of day, she seemed not to glow quite so much.
“You said you know where Vince is,” Angela said, stopping. “I need to know. I’ve lost him, and everything’s gone so strange.” That panic again, a building pressure and heat behind her eyes—but her anger was growing, too. It was time someone told her what the hell was going on.
“We need to keep walking,” Lilou said. “Find somewhere quiet to talk. And I need to find a fox.”
A fox? Angela thought. I followed a fox. Didn’t I?
“Mary Rock’s people might be following me,” she said.
“Not anymore.”
“You’re sure?”
Lilou glanced at her as if she was stupid. “Yes.”
“A fox helped me lose them.” It sounded ridiculous, and she waited for Lilou to mock her. But she merely grunted and led them from the yard.
They crossed a huge open-air parking lot, threading between cars and heading for a main road beyond. Once over a bridge spanning the road they came to a canal, and it was there that Lilou started to slow and relax. She paused and looked around, hands on her hips, as if searching for something or someone. Then she nodded and her shoulders slumped.
“What the fuck is going on?” Angela asked. “Where’s Vince? How do you know him?” It came out like an accusation.
“Vince saved my life,” Lilou said, then she pointed. “Over here. There’s a bench, and she’ll be here soon.”
“Who?”
Lilou didn’t reply. Angela felt like grabbing her, shaking the truth from her, but at the thought of doing so, she felt suddenly afraid. As if she didn’t know what reaction such an act might cause.
They sat on a bench overlooking the canal. The bank was overgrown with brambles and wild flowers, empty cans were crushed and torn underfoot, smashed glass crunched beneath their shoes. Three used condoms were laid carefully over one of the bench’s arms. The corpse of a shopping cart protruded from the water’s scummed surface. Lilou seemed to see none of this.
“So tell me,” Angela said.
“Vince saved my life,” she said again. “He put himself in danger, and killed two people who were going to kill me.”
“He… killed?” The idea was so alien that it wouldn’t settle properly.
“Threw one in front of a train. Stabbed the other. He got stabbed in the arm and took a good wound to the head. It knocked him out, so I took him to the safe place and tended him until he was well again.”
“Where was this? When?”
“Recently, but he escaped, probably because he was worried for you.”
“I thought I saw him on my street, I’m sure it was him, but then I saw…”
“You saw Sandri May, murdered in cold blood.”
“I saw something.”
Suddenly Lilou started to cry. Her shoulders shook once, then she wiped angrily at her eyes.
“Are you…?” Angela asked, but she could not complete the sentence. Human? Even after what she had seen, what she had persuaded herself to believe, actually saying it seemed foolish.
“You’re in danger,” Lilou said. “I can protect you.”
“You said Vince is in danger. I can look after myself.”
Lilou actually smiled. “Yeah, you already lost them once.”
“Claudette and Harry asked me where Vince was.”
“It was Claudette’s brother he killed. Daley. And Celine, the woman he stabbed, there are rumors she was Mary Rock’s lover.”
“Why were they trying to kill you?”
Lilou frowned, half smiling at the same time.
“I don’t know how much you know.”
“Assume I know everything.”
The woman laughed, and it was as if she let something slip, a veil or shield that separated her from the world. Angela wanted to lean across and touch the curve of her throat, and she felt a strange tingling in her chest, like a yearning for something long-lost.
“No one knows everything,” Lilou said, sighing sadly. “No one has a mind large enough.” She glanced to their left, startled. Angela saw nothing, but Lilou seemed to be listening, their surroundings going silent with her, like holding a breath. Vehicle engines seemed farther away. Plane trails crossed the sky, engine sounds absent.
Vince has killed someone, she thought, and at that she accepted the fact without question. She hated it, it made her feel sick, but she didn’t doubt. She did not believe that the woman with her would lie, and perhaps she could not lie. There was a purity to her that felt almost too large to understand.
My lover, my Vince, a killer.
“Why were they trying to kill you?” she asked again, and at that moment the answer was the most important thing in the world. Because though Vince was a killer, perhaps she could still love him. Maybe she could even love him more.
“They wanted to cut me up,” Lilou said. “Slice me to pieces. Use me for all manner of things.”
“He dealt in the relics of old dead things.”
“To start with, yes, but then he learnt the truth—that some of us Kin still live—and Mary Rock got her claws into him.”
Some of us kin, Angela thought. There it is. There’s the truth about her, and perhaps soon I’ll ask what she is. Instead she said, “But the people he killed were working for her?”
“The profit involved in fresh relics is unimaginable,” Lilou sa
id bitterly. “She uses our parts to make potions and medicines for various clients. There are rich people who like to collect certain parts… fingers, eyes, breasts, wings, or claws. Mary Rock’s speciality is a dining club.”
“A fairy has to eat,” Angela said.
“Not that sort of—” Lilou said, then she froze and stared at Angela. For the first time the full impact of her stare, her presence, her alienness hit home, and Angela shoved herself back along the seat, her insides fluid and warm and as scared of this woman as she had ever been of anyone or anything.
“What did you say?” Lilou asked.
“A fairy has to eat. Mary Rock said it to me after she showed me.”
“Showed you…?”
“Her fairy.” Angela frowned, because little of what Mary Rock had told her now made sense. “The one she said she was protecting from people like Vince.”
“She is still alive,” Lilou said, eyes going wide. “She lives?”
“In a room. Locked away. Protected.”
“Not protected. A prisoner. She’s still alive.” She stood and laughed. “She can’t be killed. Of course she can’t. She’s still alive!”
“But… scarred. Wounded.”
Lilou looked at her, blinking quickly, the smile still on her face.
“Look, I need to know where Vince is,” Angela said. Lilou looked around, then crouched down and opened her arms wide, a welcoming gesture.
A streak of auburn flitted from the bushes, and a fox leapt into her arms.
“Lilou,” Angela said. “Please. Lilou!”
But the woman was already talking to the fox.
Angela could only sit and watch. She heard Lilou’s voice, low and quiet, and behind that were occasional strange growls and whimpers from the fox. It was a fascinating, disturbing scene, and she wondered what Lilou and the animal would do if someone came along and saw them.
Someone else. Because Angela was bearing witness, and neither of them seemed concerned. Perhaps some of the weird conversation was about her.
The strangest sound came from the animal. And then it seemed to cry, hunkered down at Lilou’s feet where she crouched. She reached out and scratched the animal behind the ears.