Going Under (24 page)

Behind her Malachi gently cleared his throat. "I'll be taking my own ride. We'll gather at your house?"

"Yeah." She swung up at last and pushed the card into the security panel, hearing the truck's V8 start easily and the whir of its system boot. Behind her Teazle made a sound like a kettle, his head beside the air grille that led between the cab and the pickup back, and then sighed before whispering gently, "I'll be your dog." It's what he said the first time he flirted with her. What he always said.

"You'll get yourself into a decent shape by the time we arrive," she replied, mastering the alcohol in her blood with Al control. "My sister isn't ready for you yet. We need a real big bottle of tequila before that happens. And some kind of bunker when she discovers I got married and she wasn't invited."

He made a long whining sound, in perfect imitation of a real dog. Human form was taxing for him and he was, she had no doubt, very very tired after all the day's fighting. "I will stay here," he said wearily, far from the perky creature he had pretended to be in the atrium. Covering his wounds up with glamour had taken all he had left and Otopia was no place for him to make a speedy recovery. A twinge of concern passed through her chest. She wondered if she ought to take another look at him before anything else happened. But not here. She reckoned he was tough enough to last half an hour's drive.

She followed Malachi's ancient '65 Cadillac Eldorado out into the dawn where traffic was already starting to build on the southbound Bay City freeway. Faint mists of grey dust plumed here and there, swirling against the windscreen. At the exit ramp there was a huge poster of Sorcha, advertising Demonesse perfume. Her expression bubbled with seductive temptation and laughter. Lila sighed. It was going to be harder than hard to get past this.

She pulled up in the driveway behind Malachi, completely blocking Max's old Ford in, and killed the lights. The porch was covered in little carved pumpkins and red Chinese lanterns flickering with candlelight that was just visible in the beginning of sunrisegod, she'd entirely forgotten about things like Halloween. For a second she was frozen with surprise. Indoors she could hear the muffled barking of the dogs.

While Malachi put the hood up on his car she jumped into the back to take a look at Teazle. He had not changed shape and lay panting on his side. In the cold morning air his breath was condensing and dripping down on him from the cover.

"Are you okay?"

"I am poisoned," he said, allowing her to examine him where she had applied treatments back in Demonia. In fact he had been poisoned, stabbed, and almost gutted. His hind leg was fractured and there was something aetherically wrong with him that she couldn't detect except as a bad frequency trembling in his muscles. How he'd managed to walk from the portal to the truck was beyond her.

Her stitching and glueing seemed to be holding up but she was keenly aware that he needed more than human doctoring. "I'll ask Mal if he knows a healer. Can you walk inside?"

"Hnn, rather not," he said to her surprise. "House is full of fey. Pull all my feathers out. Leave me here."

"It's cold," she said, while wondering what he was talking about.

"Go," he snarled, losing part of his control. His head jerked up and hit the floor again with a bang.

Fighting back his demon nature, which wanted to kill her, she knew, for being strong here when he was so weak. At least they were alone, which mitigated the drive somewhat. She rested her hand on a patch of unharmed hide and was careful not to let any sympathy leak into her voice. "I'll be back soon." His aggression at least gave her confidence that he wasn't going under just yet.

He didn't answer. She got down, secured the covered section after hauling her bag out, and met Malachi who had come around the side of the house to the front door. She was about to open it with her key when it opened for her and an ethereal, wispy, teenage kind of faery girl stood looking at them, blue eyes huge in her lilac face.

"'Tis most late," she said in a childish, whispery voice. "The Mistress doesn't like late callers."

"I live here," Lila retorted, sounding like a bull moose in comparison.

The fey floated forwards, feet barely touching the wood panelling. She blinked at Lila and then at Malachi, to whom she simpered and then giggled behind her hand, "King cat!" before leaving the door open and wafting backwards. "Naughty naughty pussycat," she admonished as they passed her. "So many sleepy moths and hardly a dream left to scatter. What will we be eating after winter if things go on as they are?"

Lila ignored this as so much nonsense, leaving it to Malachi to extract any meaningful information, and pushed on with growing disbelief. She had to step carefully, as almost every bit of floor space was taken up with sleeping fey. As her eyes grew used to the dim light she discerned smaller ones heaped on top of larger ones, and tiny ones on the radiator and the shelves and on top of the coat hooks. "What the fuck?"

The lilac faery appeared in front of her, levitating, a cross expression on her pointed features. "No talk before the sun! Naughty! Miss Max won't thank you big galumphing boot stamper for waking up good brothers and sisters."

Lila scowled and pushed past her. "Where is Max?"

"She sleeps without a dream upon her bed indeed," the faery scolded. "No room for big clumsy girls ..."

Lila turned in midstride and gave Malachi a look. "Tell her."

He made a sign to the faery and she glared at him but scooted off into the open doorway that led to the living room. Lila put her head around it and saw more bodies, some awake and in little huddles playing cards by candlelight. Teazle was right. Her house was full of damned faeries. On the staircase another one stood, poised dramatically. She was half human size, dove grey, willowy, and pretty with big round breasts and a round bottom barely clad in black silk that seemed to stick to her by static rather than any normal clothing convention. Her arms and legs were covered in silk stockings and bound with purple crisscross ribbons. The stockings were quite holey and her heels and toes showed through. She had silver grey hair, tipped with black, that floated around in its own way, curling gently against her skin to reveal and then hide a black dragon tattoo on her upper right shoulder. She had oddly light orange eyes and the pretty pretty face of a nymph.

"You must be Lila," she whispered. "I'm Nixas. Poppy's friend."

Figured, Lila thought dourly, getting used to the extreme glamour that faeries liked to flaunt in Otopia. Then she was taken aback as Nixas literally flickered and became a perfect small male specimen, wiry of body and taut of muscle, before shifting into his/her female shape again. She smiled a small, shy smile and leaned against the banister where Lila had used to hang her coat. "Max lets us stay here. Things aren't so easy for faeries now. A lot of us lost our jobs."

Lila rolled her eyes. She knew that things since the Mothkin arrived had turned against the other races, but not how badly, nor had she expected to walk into a refugee camp. She wished she felt compassionately warm but in fact she simply felt annoyed that her plans for a quick heart to heart with Max followed by some naked rest with Zal were all ruined. Behind her Malachi murmured greetings to various people and then to Nixas. They seemed to know one another vaguely.

"Ah," Nixas said in response when Malachi asked about healers. "I know something about that, probably as much as anyone here. Shall I take a look while we wait for Miss Max to wake up?"

The Miss Max stuff was starting to irk Lila. She got the feeling that the faeries would all pounce on her if she tried to go upstairs or make any kind of noise. The dogs, who had barked at her arrival, were now quiet in the kitchen. Through the glass of the door she could see little lights glowing on in there. She bit back her anger. "We need to rest and eat here," she said.

"We?" Nixas said as the lilac faery floated by and gave them all a finger wagging.

Malachi explained it.

"Demons?!" Nixas said. A rustle of agitation suddenly went along the lines of assembled sleepers.

"Outside," Lila said, not adding-for now-as she thought it might make things worse. She didn't understand why these fey wouldn't like demons as Malachi had never had any problems. He came up close to her and murmured an explanation: "Demons have a history of capturing faeries for pets and doing various unpleasant things to them to extract their magic. We are the most powerful of the aetheric races, whatever the others like to think. On the other hand, the faeries know what parts of demons have the most use ... It is an old war."

Lila nodded, sick and tired of all the interracial fighting and its results. She manoeuvred her bag carefully around herself to avoid whacking two hand-size creatures off the occasional table and nodded up. "I want to go to my room."

Nixas meekly let her past and had some kind of talk with Malachi as she went up. Lila stepped over a fat-bellied man with a strange crooked hat who had wrapped himself up in the hall rug and opened her door. Several pairs of luminous eyes blinked up at her from the plain futon mats she used as a bed and a mass of fabric shifted in the chair by the window. "I'll be back later," Lila promised, "and then I want my space back, whatever Max said." She put her bag by the wardrobe and went back downstairs, steps creaking under her, until she caught up with Malachi and Nixas at the kitchen door.

"Nixas says she'll take a look at Teazle," Malachi said, "but she's afraid. So if he does anything, she's not helping."

"And where are you going?" Lila glanced down at Malachi's hand on the doorknob.

"Breakfast," he said and rubbed his stomach with a poor-me expression on his face. "Nearly five o'clock and I've been running on beer and nothing since this time yesterday. One of these guys is a pandygust and Max lets him use the kitchen, so ... if you'll excuse me ..." and he went in without waiting to see if she did. To her total astonishment once the kitchen door opened a wave of warmth, voices, and incredible cooking smells came out, not to mention bright cheerful light. As he closed it after him the hall returned to its predawn darkness and the glass showed only a few glimmers. There was near silence.

Lila glanced down at Nixas, who smiled nervously. "I will look," she said, with a clear steeling of her nerve.

"He's not ..." Lila was going to say dangerous, then realised that it was such a whopping lie not even she could fall for it. "I'll make sure he behaves."

Nixas looked at her dubiously and then said bravely, "Yes, if you say so. Show me."

Lila led the way back to the truck. "So," she said, trying for some conversation to ease the mood as she dropped the tailgate, "what was your job here?" She figured something in the hotelinos but Nixas just smiled enigmatically and said, "You can look me up on the World Tree."

Lila did the surf as she held out her hand and helped the small fey up onto the truckbed, unsnapping the cover slowly to give Teazle time to wake up and react. Then she saw what Nixas did.

"Holy shit."

The faery coloured a delicate rose across all her cheeks. "I like human men," she said, with just a hint of defensiveness. "They're so stupid. It's kind of sweet."

Lila closed the images that had spilled across the back of her mind's eye. "Is that a triple X category?"

"NC-17 mostly," Nixas said, hanging back. She looked up. The dawn was glowing more brightly now, turning the sky and her skin a soft greeny blue.

Up and down the street the lights of early risers were going on. Lila hurried. She didn't want to be explaining the presence of fey here to the oh-so-conservative element. Under the cover shadow made it too dark to see.

"You first," the faery whispered, shivering, her flimsy bits of cloth flapping about her in an otherwise intangible breeze.

Lila got the impression that the shiver wasn't because it was cold. She nodded and crawled into the narrow space, able to see Teazle easily when she switched on her heat vision. He tried to lift his head up but finally decided to slide and turn it on his long neck the better to see her. She explained the situation and he grudgingly agreed to let himself be seen though he didn't care for the idea of it much judging by the angle of his ears. Lila had to get out for Nixas to get in then, so she only heard Teazle's sudden inhalation and rasping chuckle. "A water nymph. Ha. That's funny. What did you say to her? That you could help me? Don't waste my time. Get out before I get hungry."

The scrape of big claws against steel. Nixas shot back against Lila's leg.

Lila stuck her head under. "Stop fooling around. You need healing. She offered."

Teazle snarled at her. His sweat smelt ill even to Lila. She wasn't sure that he was entirely in control of his mind.

"I'll hold him," Lila said to Nixas, afraid the faery would give up.

She slid into the crawl height space and pawed her way across Teazle's body. He was still growling but he didn't try to stop her. His gaze was baleful and flickered on the edge of self-control. She didn't bother with any niceties like she would with anyone else. She just engaged some power and moved him around until he was in a position where her two arms and one leg could pin him and still let the little fey have enough room to see what she was doing.

"It's okay now," she said to Nixas. The faery hesitated, then fluttered forwards, shrinking herself in size to fit better into the cramped space that was now almost entirely filled up with awkwardly placed bits of bodies. A lovely scent filled the heavy air and then, like a raincloud, gently burst, leaving clean fresh air in its place. Nixas dusted the last of some powder off her hands and briefly touched Teazle's quills and feathers.

She giggled, "No wonder you don't want to be inside, demon." She spread her hands out and moved them close to his body. "Now let's see what's wrong with you."

Teazle never let up his growl except to suck another breath in between his T rex teeth. His body vibrated in Lila's grip, muscles continually testing against her hold so that the two of them seemed to twitch in unison. Nixas trembled but kept on moving her hands above him until she had swept as much of him as she could reach without actually crawling on him. She sat back on her heels.