Chasing the Dragon (22 page)

Hell.

She looked at the clock.

Nine eighteen.

Where the fuck was Teazle?

Then she knew it was trouble. He wasn't late. Something had happened and she couldn't stop now, no, couldn't, because every second
Zal might die. Still, if there was one place you could go to get magical things for cash or trade it was Bathshebat, capital of Demonia, and
if there was one place elementals liked to congregate, it was Demonia.
Teazle, how did he go? Teleport.

Useless! Think of something! The old portal used to be inside a
military base outside the city, but they shut it down in the Hunter's
Wild and now the only route into Demonia was through some bunker she didn't know the location of. Demons came in at will, who could
stop them? But getting out, that was still embargoed.

"Is something wrong?"

Lila spun around, the corset making it more of a stiff jump than it
should have been. Greer was standing there looking over a teetering
heap of grimoires at her.

She put down the summoning manuscript she'd been reading from
and turned off the burner under a failed alchemical experiment that
some or other authority had suggested was good for concocting primal
fire without burning the house down. "Where is your portal? The goanywhere, do-anything portal. You must have one. Where is it?"

"Where did you want to go?"

"I need elemental fire," she hesitated. "Zoomenon."

"Can't go there," he said. "Small matter of disintegration. Never
found a containment field that could sustain itself here and there. Not
a place for nonaethereals. No deal."

"Demonia then."

"That could easily be a one-way ticket."

"It's the only place."

"I'll send one of our demon pals. Fire elementals, you say?"

Lila felt herself outmanoeuvred. "I want to go...."

"If you go and don't kill Teazle then you don't come back." He
shrugged. "I did a deal there. I don't want it broken by you. It's more
important than you. Don't take it personal."

She didn't understand him at all.

"Besides, you should be here. If that's who I think it is. You should
be here. I don't think he came to sign my albums."

Finally she gave a nod. Behind it her head was churning with what
ifs. He hadn't said no to the portal, though, so there must be one and
it had to be around here somewhere. She bet Bentley knew where.
"Well there's nothing here."

Greer looked around him at the steaming jungle of the laboratory, the dozens of used bottles, fume cupboards, delicate concoctions of
glass set up on every surface, many of them still giving off smoke or
steam. "So I see."

The dress had allowed itself to become just a few rags hanging off
the corset by now. She was able to walk around the equipment without
causing any accidents. "I'll get back there then. Wait for whoever."

"Good idea. By the way, I nearly forgot to mention it. While you
were working here there was a call for you."

"A call?" She was so wrong-footed that for a few seconds she wasn't
even sure she'd heard him right.

He nodded, drawing a circle on the tiles with the toe of one worn
shoe where she'd spilled water. "Yeah. Said she'd call back later and
that you shouldn't get home too late."

"Oh." She wasn't sure if this was a test, wondered briefly if that
brownie was having some unfaerylike attack of conscience or whether
the rogues had discovered a way to find her again. Quickly she gathered up the few articles of elven clothing that her exhaustive search
had uncovered. Greer kept working on his sketch as though there was
nothing more interesting. Abruptly she was reminded of Teazle again.
"Well, who was it?"

"Max," he said, looking up with a smile. "Your sister. Max."

ila stopped and looked at Temple Greer properly for the first time
(that day. He was gazing at her thoughtfully from beneath his thick
brows, his chin tucked down close to his chest, hands in pockets, just
watching her, though the look was knowing and they shared a few seconds in which they both waited.

"Hoax caller?" Lila dared.

"On this number?" Greer made the slightest movement of his nose
towards the com station that Sarasilien had kept next to the door, high
on the wall out of the way of all his magical materials.

"Rogue impersonation?"

He nodded slowly. "Thought of that. Call came from your house.
Sent a couple of boys over to check it out. No machines present. Asked
the other converts here. They said there was no signature in the signal.
Means if it was a fake it wasn't faked by a machine of that kind."

"Aethereal fake?"

"Must be, huh?"

She hesitated, confused by his suggestive tone. She felt queasy, furious
at the same time. She wanted to scream, but she said, "Mustn't it?"

"I don't know," he said, finally straightening up to his full height.
He pretended to inspect one of the alembics, tapped his finger on the glass, looked at the distillation apparatus, the little heap of useless red
slag lying in the dish at the end of the line. "Voice pattern matches."

"You store ... ?"

"Everyone's voice, retina, iris, fingerprints. Yeah. All stored since just
after the bomb and updated at three-year intervals over the course of a
lifetime. Teeth too I guess. Verbal choice patterns. Anything that can be
measured without undue intrusion. Never very useful actually, except
when the dead come calling. Or when you have to rebuild someone."

Lila didn't know what to say. She didn't know what to think. She
remembered writing the card, the flowers, dropping them on the
memorial, swearing at the maintenance guy. Filthy coffee flavours
haunted her tongue. Her guts, already knotted with tension, twisted
up on themselves, giving her a spasm of pain. "And do they?"

Greer fiddled with a tiny glass tap and leaned around to look at the
cloudy mixture in a vial. "Human beings make bad, weak necromancers," he began.

"Cut to the crap."

"I've seen a couple. Don't wanna see them again."

She felt her mouth hanging open, her body frozen with the need to
rush and see Zal, to find elementals, to stay here and listen instead.

"It was in the Hunter's Wake," he said. "At least, we figured that
his activities made it easier for humans and the half-fey to cross the
brink and back. He had a lotta power. Lotta. It made the world
unstable, kinda permeable to magic for the duration. Some nice things
came out of it and a lot of bad. I'll keep it sweet-there were two incidents of human wannabe necros and wizards getting together enough
mojo to move into and summon stuff out of Thanatopia. Both ended
badly. The dead people in question passed every test, including all the
ones you'd expect a living person to pass. They were just themselves in
every single star. But they had this habit of suddenly not being themselves at all. And stuff happened around them: hallucinations, chills,
arguments, violence, suicides.... My point is they weren't who they looked like, even though clearly they kinda were-they loved who
they loved and they liked prawn crackers and all that stuff. And they
didn't die easy. Lost forty agents. Three of 'em cyborg. Still don't really
understand what those things were. The demon agents said they were
things related to devils, but purer, like an elemental form."

"Evil," Lila said. She snorted, a laugh that wasn't allowed to be.
"The evil dead. Isn't that what they say to schoolchildren to stop them
fooling with Ouija boards?"

"Yeah. I can't say that officially of course, because we understand
evil as a philosophical construction that's part of free will and a matter
of individual choice related to one's identity as a spiritual being, or not,
under the rule of reason, and not an actual external entity of any kind."
He poked at some of the powders lying on their measuring saucers and
watched his finger tip the balance of the grain scales. "That would be
animism and externalising of internal conflict and completely ideologically and phenomenologically unsound. Even in today's world of
supernatural creations and magical powers there's still no place for
externalised forces of intent." He paused to draw breath and sighed,
putting some weights on the scale, watching them tip. "So, although
it has to be some kind of unliving entity from a dimension outside
immediate human perception yet existing in spaces perhaps interpenetrating with our own on a genuinely material level, albeit an undetectable one, I understand there might be lots of similar kinds of
things there. They're classed as not living because they don't have
material forms or anything we'd consider living characteristics except
a kind of agency, and a kind of intent. But for the sake of an easy life
between you and me we'll call it evil and say we're talking demon if
anyone calls us on it. I have heard that there are things out there that
aren't evil, but where's the fun in believing all that relativistic realistic
shit? The bottom line is that they aren't returners." He stopped
playing around and looked directly at her. "You want me to call the
duty necromancer? I mean, the duty World Five Technician."

She didn't know. "Is it possible that it isn't ... one of these things?"

He shrugged and smiled, utterly insincere. "Sure, I guess."

"Obviously call them. Let's find out."

"I might send some guys around to your house, just undercover,
very discreet, keep an eye on things. You know."

"Okay." She felt numb. She remembered the grey boatman's
warning and the way the words the pen wrote had twisted like live eels
in his hand, like they were fighting to be free. She thought of Max,
talking to her, what she longed to say, needed to hear. All the nights
she had talked to the darkness and Teazle's insensible beating heart.
She found her hands so tight on the elf clothes that they were about to
tear and made herself let go a little. She was looking at the floor, anything but at Greer with his mocking, know-it-all stance that was
always one step ahead of her, like it or not.

"Don't ... I mean, just be careful. If it is. Her. I know it isn't. But
just."

Greer was looking at her, just looking now.

"What?" She pushed past the last desk, passed him, and started to
walk out.

"Don't you ever get rattled, Black? You drag a lost love out of a ghost
sea, your partner goes AWOL, your spouse under sentence, you murder a
rogue agent, your sister comes back from the dead, and your clothes
don't even like you, what? Nothing? When are you gonna crack?"

"Tomorrow," she said. Ordinary feeling was a gulf to fall into, or
something to twist around and around until it all stuck together and
became a cable of something like steel. Anger at him gave her the will
to twist it.

He kept up with her in the corridor, but he had to add a trot step
every few strides. "Things sure have been interesting since you got
back, wouldn't you say? One day into the new job and it's like the
world exploded."

"Are you blaming me?" she keyed the lift. It was slow. She accessed the computer, deleted the call chain on the car, and moved it into
express mode. When the doors opened several wild-eyed admin staff
were jabbing at the panel, talking about dying. As they saw Greer jerk
his thumb at them they got out pronto. Lila stepped in and the doors
snapped shut, almost catching Greer's heel.

"No." He paused, wincing. "I think I've pulled a muscle in my leg."

"Drop back if you can't take the pace."

"I like the tough girl act, personally."

"I'm grateful. Really." Lila applied the brakes. The car decelerated,
hydraulics groaning. Greer fell over nursing a mild spinal compression,
and then she looked down at him. "It seems like I have some personal
matters I need to attend to before I can start the job. If you don't want
me to use your stuff, just say the word. I can be gone in an instant."

"This practice of you putting me on the ground all the time has to
stop. I'm starting to think you like me. Also, Mrs. Greer elbowed me
out of our health insurance policy so now she gets to go to spas twice
a week and have her head shrunk by some woman in an office the size
of Maui while I just got the ice pack and a can of Faery Dark." He got
to his feet with some difficulty and adjusted his suit.

Lila leaned close to him and looked him in the eye. She could see
him doing the usual thing of searching for her pupils and finding only
himself reflected. It was pleasing. "We may work together when it
suits us, but you are not and never will be the boss of me." She poked
a finger at his top pocket where his ID badge was clipped, prominently
displaying the insignia of the Otopian Security Force. "You and your
big dog too. You people had your money's worth from my ass. I agreed
to nothing. And that's all. Get me some damned elemental fire and a
demon to work it or get out of my face." She did like him. Curse it.

She turned and found Bentley next to her, apparently waiting for
some kind of command. Bentley held up a small plastic tag, "Your
ticket, for the-"