Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (2 page)

Now she turned and poked him in the chest gently, making him sway back on the crates. A flickering rush of thrills ran through
him as her ultrasound frequencies penetrated his clothing and skin to the energy centres beneath making him gasp and fall
backwards. He caught himself in time. She snickered.

‘C’mon,’ he said, opening his arms and giving her a smouldering stare. ‘My nuts are rusted. I need an oil change.’

He could see her eyes, their faery-enchanted human irises glowing with lilac as they narrowed. In a flash she was on him,
the tatters of the summer minidress flaring up in a non-existent breeze as the pile of crates wobbled precariously. There
was a distinct cracking and splitting noise from the wood as they swayed. Zal got a hand out to the wall behind him but it
was a long way away. Lila’s knees gripped the outside of his thighs as she went for the pinning move and then he felt her
fingers tug the lace knots of his jerkin. She got fed up after a second and he felt them part under a blade. Then her hands
were inside his shirt, emitting faint pulses of deep low-frequency sound as she ran them across his chest and shoulders. The
crates leaned and he had to keep his hand on the wall or crash to the floor as his body arched in pleasure involuntarily.

‘That demon was a good teacher,’ he muttered through closed jaws as she bent close to him and he felt her lips on his neck.
He meant Teazle, their pureblood demon husband, who had been with her in her fall through Faery and after. ‘Fifty year—’

‘It was
weeks
,’ she hissed and he heard the ache and anger in her voice. Between hot kisses that ran up to his ears she breathed, ‘It was
only weeks and we waited for you and we didn’t know if you were alive or dead and we had no idea what to do,
no idea at all
.’ Her hands flared with hot and cold pulses, with bursts of specific vibrations tuned to the channels of aether that ran
in him and he lost control of his aether body. Black spilled out in clouds around both of them, swallowing the pathetic remains
of the light. With his free hand he found her waist, tiny and taut with power not far above his own. As he touched the dress
he felt it slither away from his grasp with an eel-like shiver, cotton turning to satin the better to slip away from him,
even though threads of it curled lasciviously around his fingers as it did so. It parted, unstitching itself, sliding away
from her so that she
made a sound of surprise as the faery thing escaped and his hand found her naked skin. He let it rest for a moment, feeling
the texture of her, cool on the surface, hot underneath, soft and silky, dry enough for him to slide his palms on her with
the same skimming ease she used on him.

He remembered his other hands, without regrets, their thick, three-fingered gloves that were overstuffed with the remnants
from the weaving of the three fey sisters. For fifty years they’d left him able to feel almost nothing, were so clumsy he
couldn’t have picked up a spoon to feed himself; not that there had been a need for food, or anything else in that time-lost
place. His hungers now were savage in retaliation.

With anger he pushed the unwanted image away, feeling his rage direct itself at the skirts of the dress, now trailing themselves
like waterweeds around his wrist and elbow, teasing him in their own inscrutable way. He had brought this dress to Lila, armour
as it was then. He didn’t know what he’d done in that gesture. He hadn’t known what it was. He couldn’t tell if its complicity
in getting Lila to jump the fifty-year penalty of his ‘death’ was a blessing or a curse, he didn’t know if it meant her harm
or good or if, like any faery, it would change its intentions with limitless caprice. He didn’t want its strange flirtation
now. He focused his shadow body on it and
pulled
.

With the speed of lightning a charge of aether shocked through him with such enormous force that he thought he’d killed himself.
For the split second of its possession of him it interpenetrated every part of his being in a way he hadn’t felt since the
day that the three weird sisters had pulled him from the cloth. It was not simple, inert charge. With it he felt the faery
herself – a feral intelligence, as peculiar as anything he had ever encountered – searching him. Then she was gone and only
the energy he had sucked out of her remained with him. He felt her understand that he only wanted her out of the way to be
alone with Lila and in that moment the tendrils of soft fabric around his arm became suddenly a thick rope wound there, binding
him, then in a second instant he felt the slide of silk sateen as a python’s coils slipped around him, letting him go. There
was a hiss of heavy rich fabric falling to the floor off to their right, as if an entire theatre-curtain’s worth had gone
sashaying to the ground.

‘What the hell . . .?’ Lila was saying, finding herself suddenly naked and touched not by one but by many hands of Zal.

But Zal was the darkness, his aether given form and mass in
Tatterdemalion’s wake as some of her faery nature lingered in his aura; a strange gift or theft he understood intuitively
with a shock as great as the result of his bad-tempered attack. Now Lila’s hands gripped and held onto his body beneath her
as he was able to repay her kindness with his own new touch. His many hands, many more fingers, long and articulate, delicate
as feathers, powerful, tentacular, slippery as oil, flowed across her. He was able to caress her everywhere at once as the
dress’s metamorphic patterns cascaded through his
andalune
body. It was a fantasy he thought could never happen because she was human – they couldn’t even make the common interface
of one aether body to another like elves would together. But now he could play with her breasts and feel their soft reactivity
to the teasing of his fingers and the lick of his tongue, at the same time as he played sweeping scales along her back and
over her buttocks. His senses were filled with the roundness, the soft weight of her, the sound of her gasping moan in his
ears. Meanwhile his hand on the wall held them from disaster and the one at her waist gripped hard enough on her to anchor
him and stop him falling into delirium and giving in, coming like a kid before he was ready or the gift was wasted. Before
that happened he wanted to pour everything he felt for Lila into the way he touched her. Centuries of practice with musical
instruments of every kind and with his own breath for voice rose through him, guiding his actions and his reactions. A sensitivity
greater than any he’d had as an ordinary elf flooded back into him and he was able to attune himself to her as keenly as she
was able to play him.

He felt her hands slipping down from his shoulders as she grounded and balanced herself on her knees. She leaned forward and
he felt his breath, then her lips against his neck. The tough cotton of his trousers that had been hard-stretched against
his hips in that position, suddenly loosened and separated as she precision-dissected them, leaving them in tatters around
the top of his thighs. He shifted precariously into a better position, crates juddering. He was as hungry to join her fully
as she was for him. In the complete darkness of his shroud body the touch sensation was so heightened he had to bite his lips
as she mounted him.

The metal elementals bound into her form acted as conduits for his shadow energy. There was traffic both ways; a subtle vibration
ran through his aether body as she found a way to touch him back through the same circuit. Her charge, metabolised by the
elementals,
was very strong. The absolute dark of his covering,
andalune
about them, began to glow very faintly red like a smouldering ember. He noticed it and felt the change but he was too far
gone to care what it was or what it meant. It wasn’t until she screamed and then sighed with delight on him and he did the
same that he opened his eyes to a hot yellow-white flare so bright he was nearly blinded. Without his concentration his
andalune
reverted to its ambient energy form and she grabbed and held him as the crates gave way at that moment and they fell to the
concrete floor amid the smoking, splintering wreckage. He landed on his ass with a painful jolt that ran up his spine and
he got a lungful of nasty smoke. Lila was laughing. He heard her quick footsteps and then the hiss of a foam fire extinguisher
being used. Something wet splattered around his feet and ankles as he stood up.

Now that he had lost contact with her the brilliant glare died away rapidly, through all the colours to red and then crimson
before his ordinary shadow body was all that was left, giving him a sunglasses-view of a mess of wooden planks and singed
tarps. In the midst of it Lila stood naked, holding the extinguisher in front of her. The nozzle was pointed at him.

He read the look on her face as he pulled a splinter out of his hand and raised an eyebrow, daring her.

Cold, wet froth covered his face and chest, then his naked crotch. He heard her laughing – the carefree, mischievous laugh
of the pixies – and leapt forward at the same moment. She was hard to catch off guard but he did wrest the canister away from
her and dance off with it far enough to give a good blast on her butt as she darted away, shrieking and dancing over bits
of engine without treading on a single one.

When the foam ran out they were in the midst of a wobbling white hillock, splattering each other with huge handfuls of soapy
film, using great, cartoonish knockdown throws that gave the softest kiss to wherever it landed. Zal’s trousers had become
sodden legwarmers around his boots.

As he looked down at himself, Lila got a double handful and dumped it on his head, mashing it well into his hair and ears.
Cold trickles of run-off showered out across his face as he looked up at her.

He raised his fist and shook it at her threateningly.

She scooped up some ammunition but he made a dive for her legs instead, caught her around the hips and they both slipped and
went down hard into the mound of foam. He heard the breath shoot out of
her but both of them were too tough to care about a thump onto some dirty concrete. They wrestled, limbs slip-sliding against
each other. It was a struggle but eventually she got the best of him and he found himself on his back with his arms pinned
by a single hand of hers above his head. A triumphant look made her face radiant. In her free hand she held a mountain of
white.

‘Give me one reason not to.’

‘Uhh . . .’ He stared at her breasts, dripping with suds. ‘You like me too much?’

‘Right,’ she said, sitting down on his pelvis and letting up on his hands a little before smushing the lot right into his
face.

He spat the horrible taste out, blowing, after she let up. ‘Okay, okay! You win.’

‘Say it again?’

‘You win.’

In a flash she was gone, standing over him. He ignored the hand she held down to him and got up, spitting and shaking his
head.

‘For now,’ he added. ‘Come here.’

‘The winner doesn’t come here.’

‘She does,’ he said more firmly and grabbed her.

The foam cut out conduction between them. They were just bodies this time and they took longer about it. The garage had an
old, pitiful shower stall and toilet in one corner of its office and they used that to clean up in, though there was only
a trickle of icy water until Lila siphoned it through her arm to make a warm jet. Zal threw his trouser legs in her rag bucket
and tipped water out of his boots. His shirt was the only thing left and it was soaking. He wrung it out hard and put it back
on. Then he felt cold. The scrapes on his knees and elbows stung. He went out and found Lila wriggling into a lilac spaghetti-strapped
evening gown that clung to her figure as if it was designer cut. For the first time he forgave the faery for her position,
though it was a temporary arrangement. She was still on parole as far as he was concerned. He held up his arms.

‘Great, you can go eat at the finest restaurants now and I can sell myself for fifteen bucks on the strip.’

She shook her head. ‘Twenty at least, have you no pride?’ But she paused and retrieved the trousers, stitching them up roughly
and quickly. Needles flashed in and out of her fingers, thread spooled spiderlike from their trailing ends. They were still
wet but they were wearable. ‘That’ll work until you get home.’

He dragged his boots back on and pushed his dripping hair out of his face. He didn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘You’re not
coming with me?’

She hesitated. ‘Let’s get coffee. Talk where it’s warmer.’ Her eyes were looking at him with affection. He agreed and they
wheeled the Agency’s state of the art black bike outside. He sat on the seat as she locked up the garage and set some security
device on the door, checking it over.

‘Expecting someone?’ he asked as she pulled the dress skirt up and set herself behind him.

‘I sometimes get rogue attacks,’ she said as if it were an everyday matter. ‘I like some warning as to when they’re coming
so that I don’t have to monitor the situation myself all the time.’

Zal paused. ‘You do?’ The rogues were those who had survived Otopia’s cyborg project, as she had, except they had felt no
loyalty to the Agency once created. Those who wouldn’t guarantee loyalty to the state were hunted down. The project was concluded
now and there were very few left, he knew, and none who could cause her trouble, she claimed. But he felt less sure of that
suddenly.

‘You know how it is with machines,’ she said lightly. ‘A hacker war. If they feel they need to get close enough for a direct
connection well . . . then we fight.’ She nudged him to start driving but he was too disconcerted.

‘I thought they were all taken care of?’

‘It’s fine, Zal. Don’t worry about it. Ride.’

After a moment of failing to muster any real objection he put his hands back on the bars. Nothing happened. ‘How do you start
this thing anyway?’

‘Like this.’ She leaned forward around him and showed him, then wrapped her arms around his waist. He found it touching she
would let him drive though he’d never say so. He
carefully
teased the bike out onto the narrow streets until he figured he’d got the measure of it, waiting for her to say something
about it though she didn’t. She just snuggled against his back. On the highway he opened it up slowly. He saw what she meant
about it then. He could drive it as hard as he liked, it was full of compensatory mechanisms that made the ride perfect and
secure. He could have had more thrill from a hairdryer.