Selling Out (36 page)

Much later, in another agony in another region of Demonia, he remembered becoming demon, his wings unfolding and setting his clothes on fire. Everything hurt a lot in those days. He cried like a little kid most nights, but that was his secret. And one day he was walking down the street, a full and respected member of demon society, imp free, and heard Sorcha singing. He joined in and started to follow her.

All day he followed her, harmonising on her tunes until she finally couldn’t keep up her cold indifference trick and turned around.

“Are you like my shadow or something?” she snapped, melodious even in that.

“I’m your brother,” he sang, as though in an opera, more sure he was right about this than he had been about anything.

She laughed instantly, enormously, enough to double over and nearly fall on the floor. The demons with her looked at him with suspicion and nervousness and envy. Sorcha wiped tears of flame from her eyes and straightened up, sashayed across to him, and stared him in the face, opening her big, full, red lips.

She looked. And then she sang back, “You are, you are, you are!” on a rising major chord. And continued singing in light operatic verse,“How very dear peculiar, I wish you were my junior,

but sadly this effluvia of flame dictates a ru-li-er . . .

of matters rather magical and terrible and tragical,

I must admit you’re logical and right and true and ad-mra-ble . . .”

She paused for breath and stood back, looking him up and down.

“Your visage most inimical, your nature but a principle,

you’re sadly near-invincible, your ears are truly wince-able,

but you’re contemptible and sensible and all that you should be.

As brother dear I’ll take you then, though sad my heart to know that

when

I want to slake a thirst for elf I’ll be hunting them all by myself.”

They stood facing each other, the entire street staring at them. A light jalopy fell out of the sky as its drivers forgot to keep windtalking in astonishment.

Sorcha grabbed hold of him and kissed him passionately on the mouth with a huge, audible-from-Mars kind of “Mwa!” at the end. She turned to the audience and sang, “Be glad it’s only me that has to suffer with the sibling curse, for I can tell you all at once that at kissing he is not the worst!”

Then she added,“Sons of the trees were once my favourite toys,

but now I charge each one of you to look out for Pinocchio-boy.

And if you listen not to me the fire of unrequited love shall burn

each and every one of you till you’re done to a turn!”

She made the flourishing sign of a live curse with one red-taloned hand and the mark flared in the air before her. Then she turned to Suha and spoke normally, “So, bro, what’s you called at home?”

“Zal,” Zal said.

“Dinner’s at six. Get lost, I need to hang with my girls and call everyone in existence to tell them I was forced to sing a fucking improvised aria by a hippie tree-hugger.” She pointed. “House is that way. They’ll be expecting you by the time you find it.”

He remembered standing in the dark room at Solomon’s Folly, full of a wretched desire to annoy the new bodyguard, to warn them that he wouldn’t be followed, to push them out of the danger zone as the people who wanted him dead closed in. He remembered singing “Blame It On the Sun,” channelling Stevie Wonder’s voice and then laying eyes for the first time on Lila Amanda Black as she came into his room, surrounded by huge magnetic fields that weren’t all to do with her machinery. He remembered stopping dead, his throat shut, able to see her before she noticed him. She was close enough to reach out and touch and he wanted to kiss her so much that if she had only come one step closer, he would have.

Of course, she would have killed him. But it would have been okay.

It was a fitting final moment, Zal thought as he lost even the sense of Mr. Head’s hand. He fervently wished Lila would be okay.

And then he heard a woman’s voice singing, clear and true and light.

I saw three ships come sailing in . . .

“Heave to, my lads!” called a boy’s voice from above him in the vast grey. “Look there, lubbers in the water! Fetch the grapples and nets and make haste! Turnabout turnabout, man overboard!”

A ship’s bell clanged, mournful and true.

He heard the wash of the sea and felt the rise and fall of waves.

“What have we here?” said the woman’s voice and he was suddenly being hauled up the side of a vast ironclad vessel that was as real and solid as true material but cold and weightless too. A ghost ship.

He landed on its deck shivering, his
andalune
half frozen by its gelid aether.

“What have we here?” echoed the boy, a coffee-coloured ten-year-old dressed in an outsize adult’s navy uniform, adjusting his tricorne admiral’s hat. His bare feet poked out beneath tattered blue trousers and a sword was fixed askew to his waist by a white leather belt wrapped around three times. It threatened to trip him up but he kept a firm grip on the hilt.

“Oh this is Half,” said the woman’s voice, moving closer through the thick fog that shrouded them all. “But who is his companion?”

Zal looked up into the unknowable face of Abida Ereba and said, “This is my research assistant, Mr. Head.” He gave what he hoped was a winning smile.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

L
ila felt a sharp pain in her ear and then the scratch of claws puncturing the skin of her shoulder.

“Ta Daaa!” Thingamajig declared, standing in showman stance with a huge grin on his face.

Max sat down on the sand, not entirely at her own will, mouth open. Buster and Rusty leapt up, barking furiously.

Thingamajig kept his grin going, though it froze slightly. “Not too late, am I? Am I?”

Keeping me for later in the show?
Tath asked drily.

Lila didn’t reply. She stood her weapons down and allowed the skin on her arms to remake itself. It did so slowly, like warm plastic melting together. The discarded sections withered in the sun. She hadn’t even known it could do that. She dressed again.

The dogs circled anxiously around Max and whined. Max just stared and her T-shirt blew against her bony body like an old flag on a fallen pole. Buster whined and panted. Rusty cocked his head at Lila, ears going up and down in indecision.

“Begone,” Lila commanded Thingamajig.

“But I . . .”

“Now.” She was going to cry in a moment and she knew it wasn’t for her. She didn’t deserve it.

The imp prattled, “I can really help you out here. I am a trained counsellor and interlocutor for all kinds of disputation and debate. Family reunions are a speciality.”

Tath did something Lila didn’t understand but she felt his energy leap up through her shoulder and into the demon’s tiny body like lightning. The imp squealed and snapped back to his stone form. Tath’s whirling assumed a pleased pattern and his smugness filled Lila’s empty stomach.

It also gave her the energy necessary not to cry. She brushed at her skirt for a moment.

Max’s mouth worked. Lila could tell it was all the snappy one-liners that Max was thinking of but not saying. Smart, sassy Max who always had something to say about anything. Lila silently willed her to get it together. She hadn’t wanted to reduce Max to a silent parody. She’d just wanted to get the horrible deed over with, to show the truth because somehow she couldn’t bring herself to tell it.

“I . . . uh . . .” Max began. “I didn’t know you could get that on Medicaid.” The words ran out of her mouth on automatic, like she hardly knew they were coming. She looked up at Lila’s silver eyes without changing expression and babbled. “Isn’t it great what they can do these days? For a minute there I thought you’d turned into some kind of lethal weapon. That’s the cool version, right? Maybe they forgot to do the one with the whisks and the dough hook accessory and the can opener. Nothing really useful for the home on there . . .” She trailed off and her mouth finished on open. She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, dug her hands into the sand.

The dogs sat down together, starting to bore now the excitement was passed.

“Wh-what does it . . . I mean . . .” Lila stammered. “What does it look like? Is it really bad?” She needed Max to tell her how it was. She needed to know and only a sister who’d always known about everything would know. Max would tell her what to do about it. Like always.

Max paused and covered up the smouldering stub of her cigarette with a little heap of sand. “You know, I think you’re on your own with this one,” she said after a while, then she looked back at Lila’s face, trying to meet her gaze, holding onto it as best she could. “It looks like way outta my league is what. Some accident, huh?”

“Max,” Lila said, tight as a drum. “I think Mum and Dad are dead ’cos of me. This.”

Max continued piling sand for a few moments. She watched her work. “Pyramids weren’t built in a day, Liles. Think this is gonna take longer to get through than just some talk on the beach, isn’t it?”

Lila just nodded, waiting to see what Max’s plan was but so grateful that Max clearly had one. Her sister’s face had gone hard but determined. Lila had no idea sometimes where she yanked up her strength from. She always looked like she was about to wither away but just when the chips were down, Max would pull out a big hunk of grit from her soul and start wearing away at the problems with it; tough cookie.

Max sighed. “Was that a demon on your shoulder?”

“Kind of.”

“Anything else in the inventory?”

“An elf. Two. One dead. One not here. A faery. The one in the car. A demon. Bigger. Not here.”

“And that woman with the death-ray hair?”

“My boss.”

“I didn’t like her.”

“Me neither.”

“She’s got victim eyes,” Max said. “People like that . . .” But she didn’t have to go on. People with victim eyes were dangerous. Mom had always said so. Lila wondered how she’d overlooked it for so long.

With a groan of exhaustion Max pulled herself from the sand and dusted her pants off. The dogs got up slowly and circled her, waiting for the homeward turn.

“Julie’s getting married,” Max announced to nobody in particular and stretched, looking out over the water of the Bay towards the far point where the glamorous districts of the city glittered with the obscene extravagance of casino lights and hotel billboards.

“I know,” Lila said. “I heard about it.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t hear who to,” Max said, letting her twiggy arms fall and slouching over to Lila to drape one of them around her sister’s shoulders. “Sorry, kid. Had to come from someone. Roberto’s the lucky guy.”

Lila felt herself go frozen with surprise for a moment. She remembered, as if it were another world, that she and Roberto had still been dating at the time of her assignment to Alfheim. She hadn’t thought about him in ages. She supposed she ought to feel something but she didn’t know what it was. Suddenly her head was filled with Zal. “Good for them,” she said vaguely.

Max looked into Lila’s eyes, from one to the other. “Wish I knew what that meant. Time was I could see it.”

“Meant good for them,” Lila said.

“You’re thinking ’bout someone else.”

“See, who needs eyes when you’ve got a sister?” Lila sighed, glad that Max was there. She leaned her head forward until their foreheads touched for a long moment and Max didn’t move away.

“And where’s he?” Max said, moving first and starting them walking back in the direction of the house.

“I don’t know,” Lila said.

“Uh-huh. I guess it’s time to cook spaghetti and chocolate cake then.”

Lila smiled, a small, tired smile. “Yeah.”

“Right.” Max squeezed her hand on Lila’s shoulder then let her arm drop so she could do that free striding walk that needed a good arm swing to help it along. They both dragged their feet.

“Did it hurt a lot?” Max asked quietly as they reached the end of the sand and began to cross the dunes towards the road.

“Yeah,” Lila said and it was good to say it at last. She felt better.

The dogs hustled along ten paces in front, eager to be heading back, waiting for them to catch up every few strides. By the time they were in sight of the cars both of them were walking so slowly it was hard to keep going at all.