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 a hold 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 gs,’ 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-thefucks’ 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 flick
er 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 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.
Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five Page 23