Pandaemonium (32 page)

Far too tired to figure out if that was right or not.

F
INDING YOUR WAY’S
not so hard in daylight when there’s no fog. Jacey brought us down onto a road, which might or might not have been the same road he’d found us on when he was fog-hunting. Then he opened up the throttle, the bike grunted in response, and suddenly the world was unreeling on either side of us.

If we’d had more room, I honestly don’t know if I’d have leaned forward onto Jacey’s shoulder or backward onto Jordan’s. As it was, not a problem; I didn’t have space to lean either way. Instead, I just closed my eyes against the dizzy and waited out the time.

Unkind people might say I fell asleep, or passed out. If the boys were that unkind, at least they did it silently, telepathically. At least, that’s what I’m claiming. I was alert all the way, say I, and they didn’t say a word.

When I opened my eyes, though, I did find Jordan’s arms reached around me to grip Jacey’s jacket, making bars on either side of me to stop me toppling sideways. Like a little, little kid in a crib.

I hadn’t noticed him do that. Last I’d been aware, he was holding on behind him and touching me as little as he could manage.

It wasn’t him that roused me, though, it was the bike’s engine slowing to a tickover, dying altogether. We were there, I guessed. If I wanted to know where there was, I did have to open my eyes.

So I did that, and never mind how heavy my eyelids felt, or how hard it was to focus.

Took me a second, even then; but this irresistible bubble rose like gas in my throat, and I almost choked on it before it broke into a hard, painful giggle.

“Seriously, guys?”

“It’s this or keep driving,” Jordan said in my ear, dry and cool and not trying to hide his own amusement. “No real hotel for fifty miles, at a guess. And it’ll probably be better than it looks, unless it’s a hell of a lot worse. Trust me, I’ve stayed in a lot of these. One way or the other, it’ll be something to remember.”

Jacey didn’t say anything, but his body did. His body said he wanted to keep driving, another fifty miles, another hundred, however far it took. And that he wasn’t going to say so, because it was my call and he wasn’t sure I was up for it, so.

He was right, too. I was absolutely not up for another fifty, or another five. Five yards looked a long way, from the kerb to the door. I hugged him for his courage, remembering the last place I’d seen him sleep, his dad’s suite in the Savoy; and then I totally failed to self-sacrifice, because I really couldn’t do it.

I half-squeezed, half-oozed out from between them, stumbled up the crazy paving between the straggly roses and the pond with the fishing gnome, and rang the bell before either one of them could change their snarky superior minds.

W
HICH IS HOW
we came to be staying at the Jollie Roger guest house, which was about as far a cry as you could get from the Savoy and still be on the same planet, never mind in the same country.

“Roger was my husband, dearie. Such a merry man he was. So I thought, when I had to take paying guests after he was taken, I’d name the business after him; and then, well, things just took off from there. You know how people are...”

“I do, Mrs Jolliffe.” People give you things. If you give them half an excuse, the vaguest imaginable hint, that dooms you for every Christmas, every birthday yet to come. Animals are easy, of course: if you collect elephants or hedgehogs or cats, you never need to buy a single elephant, hedgehog or cat, once people know it. Or teapots, or thimbles, or...

Or you give your guest house the least hint of a theme, and there you have it. Or you will do, in a slow accumulation. If I’d known more, I might have known that every rose in the garden had a piratical name; if I’d been paying the least attention anyway, knowing nothing, I should still have noticed that the gnome by the pond had an eye-patch. And a skull-and-crossbones hanging from his fishing rod.

Once inside, even I couldn’t miss it, even in my current state. Another Jolly Roger hung over the hallway mirror; the stairway was decorated with fishing nets and glass floats; scrimshaw work was everywhere.

I’d asked for two rooms: “One for me and one for the boys. No, no luggage, this was all... unexpected, we’ve been up all night and no one’s fit to drive...”

She didn’t bat an eyelid, our buccaneering widow. Perhaps she should have done. I got the Edward Teach room, and the boys got Henry Morgan – and after a minute they were tapping plaintively at my door, “Desi? Will you swap? You’ve got the twin beds, and we got the double...”

She must have misunderstood the way I said “boys.” But by then I was halfway out of my clothes, halfway into one of those charming twin beds. “Go away,” I said. “The other one’s for Thom, if he wants it.” If I let him out. “You’ll just have to share.”

M
Y SUSPICION IS
that they just didn’t go to bed, then or later. I didn’t care. Golden boys aren’t like us mere mortals. Besides, they hadn’t been fog-bound and adrift. Me, I shed my clothes where I stood, thought briefly – very briefly – about a shower, had second thoughts and crawled into bed.

Wondered if I ought to release Thom, if only to ask him whether he’d rather stay in flame form or try the other bed – or join the boys, whatever they were up to – but he’d keep, I thought. Or else he’d find his own way out. He was a free spirit; brass lids do not a prison make, nor cotton wicks a cage.

Last thing, I remembered – just – to shrug my Aspect off. Otherwise it’s like waking up with your contact lenses in, if you still have the old-fashioned kind, the way Fay used to: briefly confusing and abidingly uncomfortable and you really wouldn’t want to do it on a daily basis. Better not to do it at all.

Also it’s like having a cat in your bed, which is like paying Danegeld. Let it happen once, and that’s that: Aspect expects.

So. Off with the Aspect, let it puddle on the floor where it’ll be handy, not that I’ll need it. I’m going to sleep. If I dream, I’ll fix my dreams without it; dreams give you superpowers without benefit of actual, y’know, superpowers. If Oz sends the Corbies to tap at my window, or another fog-feller to ooze beneath the door – well. They can do as they like, slay me in my sleep, I won’t care. I’ll be asleep.

S
OMETIMES
I
LOVE
sleep for the company, for the way you doze and rouse and nuzzle in and feel them wake and doze again and never forget that you’re not alone tonight, skin against your skin and breath in your hair, someone else’s heat and smell and presence. The weight of their body, the weight of their gaze, the weight of their voice as they talk in their sleep.

Sometimes I love it for the dreaming, that sense of stepping through a curtain and finding adventure. Old friends in new places, haunts and discoveries, surreal shifts that never clash with your knowledge of the dreaming world. When you’re a daemon, your sense of the surreal can be challenging – I have seen men turn to stone, birds turn to men, worse things – and even so. Dreaming never lets you down.

Sometimes, though? Sometimes I love it just for the thing itself, for the being asleep. Being somewhere else, downtime. Switched off. Gone.

S
OMEONE SWITCHED ME
off. Time passed. I didn’t notice.

Y
OU SLEEP ON
trickle-charge, and sooner or later you have power enough to autostart.

Almost always, it’s too soon. Which is odd, because you haven’t noticed the time passing, you’ve no idea how long it was, you’ve been off and now you’re on again, that’s all. It’s a flicker of unexperience, a discontinuity, you can’t measure it. Even so. Chances are, you want more off. You want to go back to that nothingness, you want to be gone again.

I woke, warm and settled, and even rolling over was too much effort, so I didn’t. For a while I just lay there in this heavy slack envelope that was my body. Maybe I breathed, come to think of it. Once in a while.

Eventually I opened my eyes, if only for the anticipated pleasure of closing them again and sleeping more. I puzzled for a little while over the strangeness of the room, before I remembered where I was. Where we were.
Who
‘we’ were, given that I was alone in a single bed and the other one was empty.

Jacey, Jordan, Thom. Old boyfriend, old boyfriend and, um, well. Someone else I used to sleep with. Call him a boyfriend and have done, let’s keep things simple.

If it’s not complicated, it’s not worth it.
Who said that? Never mind. They’re an idiot, whoever.

Oz was out there somewhere, wanting me dead and Thom too. Probably all of us, by now. That was a complication, unless it actually made things easier. For sure it took priority. So long as we were fighting to stay alive, perhaps we wouldn’t need to fight each other.

If I just stayed in bed, maybe I wouldn’t need to fight anyone.

I hadn’t bothered with drawing the curtains – no mere daylight was going to disturb me – and the sunbeams nosing in looked almost as lazy as I was, dust-heavy and angled low, almost ready to lie flat and give up altogether. Shadows were already gathering in the corners of the room, which meant I’d slept all day, which meant...

Oh, hell. I hadn’t slept enough, but even so. It really was time to be up and doing, or at least to check on what the boys were up to. If I left them longer, who knew what trouble they’d have got me into?

So I did it, I dragged myself out of bed, one weary leg at a time. A short stagger to the en-suite and a quick – a very quick – cold shower, which wasn’t as effective as advertised but did at least hurry me up.

Then I scrambled damply and reluctantly into the same old clothes and made my way down to the guest lounge.

Where, blessedly, I found the boys sharing a sofa, hunched over a smartphone. That must be Jordan’s: another new toy, much more swish than what he’d used before.

“We were just arguing the toss,” Jacey said, “which one of us came up to wake you.”

“Yeah? Who lost?”

“He did,” Jordan said. “That’s why we were arguing.”

I curled my lip at him in a silent snarl, and slumped into a chair. Of course the seafaring trend saturated the room, from the books on the shelf –
Treasure Island
and
Moby-Dick
and Hornblower and O’Brian and
My Granny Is A Pirate
– to the prints on the wall to the knick-knacks on every spare surface.

The prints were repro etchings, sailing ships in their prime; the knick-knacks were everything, sea-shells and lighthouses and crab claws all in pottery or glass, each one on its own individual crochet mat. My room was just the same. I’d noticed finally, after I showered, how even the spare toilet-roll lived under a woollen cosy. It would all be insufferably twee, if there wasn’t that piratical theme running through the house; my loo-roll cosy was in the shape of a barrel of rum.

“Yo ho,” I said cheerlessly. “So what are we going to do?”

They eyed me sideways, as if they’d both been depending on me to tell them. Perhaps they had.

“Um,” Jacey said, “we thought we’d find a pub, get something to eat.”

“Good plan,” I said, “I’m starving. Just so long as you’re not expecting me to come up with something brilliant over the scampi and chips, because I’m telling you, I’ve got nothing. Talking of which, I don’t suppose either of you thought to bring a change of clothes?”

Two mute shakes of the head, glances that were even more sideways than before.

“Not for me,” I said, with an excess of patience, “for Thom. Never mind. If you haven’t, you haven’t. He’ll just have to sit the night out in the Zippo.”

“You could ask Mrs J if she’s still got any of her husband’s things,” Jacey said. Malevolently, I thought.

I scowled at him and said, “Did you find a pub, then?”

“Down the road, yes. Walking distance. If you’re up for walking?” He was suddenly doubtful, looking at the state of me.

“If the alternative is that one of us – one of you – has to drive, and then moan all night because he can’t be drinking, sure. I’m up for a walk.”

The boys looked at each other, as if waiting for the other to volunteer – but they were doing the telepathy thing again, and they weren’t thinking about driving. I picked up the backscatter, just enough to understand them. And sat up straight, and would have thumped myself in the head for effect except that it was just too much effort, and said instead, “I’m sorry. I’m being a bitch, aren’t I?”

“No, no,” Jacey said hastily, unconvincingly, meaning
yes, yes,
“you’re just logie, that’s all. You’ve had a bloody awful time of it, even before we started tossing you to Hell and back, and you need food. Food and beer. We’ll take you. I’ll drive if you like, I don’t mind driving. And I promise not to moan.”

“I’ll drive,” Jordan said. “And drink. It’s not a worry.” I was just about to say tartly that he might be immune to the police but it would worry me, and no way was I riding pillion behind him if he’d been on the beer because I knew what a lightweight he was when it came to alcohol – but then he went on, “It can’t get near my bloodstream. I don’t have blood any more, remember? I don’t even know if I can get drunk.”