Pandaemonium (5 page)

Tybalt nudged my leg. I stopped daydreaming, stopped wallowing in nostalgia at least for long enough to bend down and scoop him up. He was almost the only thing that Jacey ever let me pay for, and I only managed that by
fait accompli,
sneaking out while he slept and coming home with a kitten. My contribution to the household; every home should have a cat.

This particular cat was a heavy double-armful now, a fully mature Maine Coon, the weight of a well-grown toddler. I said “Oof!” at him, and asked how much he’d been eating. He settled two enormous paws on my shoulder, licked my ear thoughtfully and purred at me like a chainsaw digging into a telegraph pole.

Only one of us was sincere, and that only if you can trust a cat. Me, I was lying with every bone in my dissembling body. Looking oh-so-relaxed, girl cuddling cat and watching scenery, waiting for boy to manifest. In honesty I was wound up so tight inside – watching the scenery, waiting for the boy – that I could feel my Aspect actually trying to muscle in on me, as if it had a mind and a purpose of its own, as if it sensed my distress and wanted to protect me.

It’s really not like that, and I told it so. Gave it a good talking-to, internally: reminded it that it was just a function on a hair-trigger that my subconscious was snatching at, and really not an independent lifeform, so would it please stop nudging me, thanks very much? I was in no danger here, not from Jay and not from –

A
CROW CAME
flapping into view, to make an ungainly landing on the black tarred arm of the jib.

M
Y
A
SPECT SLAMMED
into me so hard it was like a body-check from the inside out. I suppose I must have reached for it, touched the hair-trigger, seen the need and made the choice, but it didn’t seem like that: instinctive, better than instant, the thing right there before I knew I needed it. That’s how it felt, at least, to me. Lord only knows what Tybalt felt, but he squawled and was gone, leaping wildly from my arms onto the sofa-back and away.

Bird stared at me; I stared at the bird, through window-glass that was suddenly frail as clingfilm, soap-bubble thin. I swear, I thought it was going to fly straight in. A shatter and a squawk, and a room abruptly full of black scavenger. I’d fought the Corbies off easily enough before, when they were two together – but somehow birds are always worse indoors, more threatening, something to be afraid of.

This one didn’t come in, didn’t try. It sat on the jib and cocked its head and looked at me, and I couldn’t even tell if it was one Corbie alone or just a common crow. Nothing to worry about, either way – but I didn’t like the way its eye glittered, and I really didn’t want it spying on me. Nor on Jacey; I was tired of bringing trouble to other people, especially –

N
O, NOT THAT.
Nobody was special, or more deserving. Nobody deserved this. Me. I was sick of myself in virus mode, infecting whoever I touched. Even when I did it deliberately, and with the best of intentions.

Whether that was an innocent crow or a single spy, I went to shut it out. Floor-to-ceiling windows demand floor-to-ceiling curtains, unless you choose to make a drama of your life and act it out for river traffic to observe. Jacey wouldn’t do that; nor would I. I’d sewn the curtains, just to show him that I could. He’d fixed up the mechanism that opened and closed them, just to show me that he wasn’t an entirely useless, spoiled rich kid with no practical application. So I called him a geek instead, spoiled rich kid playing with electric motors because he had no people-skills worth mentioning. I don’t know what he would have called me next, because that was the point where I’d pressed the button that closed the curtains, and kissed him quiet, and offered to teach him all the people-skills he’d ever need, right then and right there, on the carpet.

It was a joke, of course. He knew far more already than a simple human girl could ever learn, about bodies and how to handle them. Even so. It was a joke that took his breath away. He might have immortal confidence when it came to sex, but he knew no more about love than I did. We were discovering it together the way you do, the way you have to, hand in hand and hopeful.

And then – well. Everything came down, as it can when sex and love go sour in the worst way. And now I had to try to rebuild something from the wreckage, and I really didn’t want that damn bird watching me. Us. Whatever.

So I jabbed my finger down on Jacey’s precious button, wondering if he’d fixed the whine in the motor yet that always slightly spoiled the swish of the curtains as they crossed the glass, and –

Um.

Oops.

Aspect. Full-on. I hadn’t exactly forgotten, but I’d been in and out of it, on and off all day, and when it’s on I have to go more gently with the world around me, and – yeah. That’s the bit that I forgot.

I can push my fingers into solid brick if I need to. Stabbing down on a switch, all hurried and heedless – well.

Jacey? I fixed that whine for you...

One thing for sure, the mechanism was never going to whine again.

Never going to do anything again.

I extracted my finger from the junction-box with a lot more care than I’d shown on the way in. Behind me, I heard Jacey coming back. As I turned around, I was already constructing my excuses:
it’s not my fault, I didn’t reach for my Aspect, it kind of thrust itself upon me; no blame to me for letting that slip my mind...

No. That was pathetic. I wasn’t a kid any more, and grown-ups take responsibility. For their own strength, among other things, and how they handle it.

“Um,” I said. “I’m sorry, I just broke your clever curtain thingie.”

He shrugged, because it really didn’t matter; and came down the length of the room in jeans and T-shirt and barefoot, his absolute definition of dressing in a hurry. But he’d taken time for a shower first, his hair was still spiky with it. Quick and cold, I judged, from the tight skin on his cheeks and the mildly manic alertness in his eyes.

No blame to him for that. I was envious, almost; or I would be, once I’d shrugged the Aspect off again.

Not yet.
It was easier, just to keep all my defences up. And besides...

He still couldn’t look at me; his eyes shifted to the window, to the daylight. “Why were you messing with the curtains, anyway?”

Oh, just something to do. Occupy my hands. Play with an old favourite toy. You know...

No. Still no. I had the habit of honesty on me; I said, “That damn bird.”

I watched him find the crow, still perched on the jib there. He frowned. “What about it?”

“I’m being silly. Probably. But on my way here, the Twa Corbies came for me. From your parents, I presume.”

That frown only deepened. “I told them to lay off you. Of course I did, first thing.”

“Well. The message may not have filtered down. It’s going to take time, you know? And – well, it’s not a worry, the Corbies can’t hurt me, but –”

“What do you mean, the Corbies can’t hurt you? I mean, yeah, daemon, Aspect, all of that, I get that – but, hell, the Corbies could hurt me. They’d lose in the end, but I’d go a long way out of my way not to give them a chance to prove it. What makes you immune?”

“Nothing, but they’re overrated. They tried to muscle in on me while I was running, and I just knocked them away. No bother. I had the Aspect, sure, but I’m not sure I even needed that.”

“Wait, what? The
Corbies?
Fay –”

“Desi.”

“– Desi, whatever, you don’t just...”

His arm waved vaguely at the impossibility of saying what it was that you didn’t just, where the Corbies were concerned. I was all set to point out how wrong he was, because here I was and I
did
just; and to elaborate on my new theory about the conservation of mass, which I thought should interest him deeply and might help to see us both over this early difficult bumpy time. Only I didn’t quite get the chance to do it, because we were both still looking at that bird.

So we both got to see when it spread its wings out like a cormorant drying in the sun, flapped them
in situ
like a fledgling trying out its feathers, not ready yet to fly.

I was sure then that it was a Corbie, rather than a coincidence. I still wasn’t worried.

Only then there was a smudge in the sky above the river, a charcoal sketch of cloud that moved against the wind. And frayed and clumped and came with purpose, came down low and intent and proved to be – of course! – a flock of birds.

Big birds, black birds. Crows.

See a whole lot of crows together, they’re rooks
. But I didn’t think so. Not this time.

“How many Corbies make Twa?”

It’s always been a question, and never one you want to hear asked. Not in that tone of voice, at least, and not from someone who ought to be a power in the land. Is a power in the landscape of your own mind, someone to run from. Someone to run to.

I drew a shaky breath, and that was almost a first in itself, that something could still shake me even through the solid grip of Aspect. “Well,” I said, “half the songs actually say three, but as far as we know there have only ever been two; and whether they started the songs or whether the songs started them, we don’t know. Which came first, the Corbies or the legend? Or the eggs? Were they born, or were they hatched? It’s all questions, really. But...”

But I was just talking, it was only bravado, and I never do that. Not with my Aspect on. I never need to.

But I didn’t think I was humiliating myself, except in my own eyes. I didn’t think Jacey was hearing me at all. He certainly wasn’t even pretending to listen.

But there are questions and questions, and they mean nothing in the face of what’s true, even if it’s never an answer.

How many Corbies make Twa? It didn’t matter, it hasn’t ever mattered. There was only one outside, except that there was a flock swooping and swirling over the water, and neither of us knew whether that counted one or many or at all. Except that then a solitary crow peeled away from the flock and came flapping in to land beside the Corbie on the jib; and now what we didn’t know was whether that was the other Corbie reporting for duty or bringing reinforcements, or just a random bird being territorial – his harem, his perch, his patch, his river – or...

His day to disappear. We had neither of us been looking for that, whatever else we expected, but – though we had both been looking – there was still only one bird on the jib there. Looking at us.

“Um...”

Here came another, banking, rising, stalling in an awkward flurry just above the jib, above the perching one.

Dropping down to join it.

One bird.

“What are they...?”

Another bird, and another.

Jacey said, “How many crows make one?”

Now they came thick and fast, forming a queue in the air, shifting and liquid in the wind but binding together and holding like a rope to its one fixed point, that place outside the window where one by one they came to join the one that held still there. On the jib, looking back at us, absorbing every bird that came.

“Jacey...”

It wasn’t getting any bigger, just more solid. More weighty, more powerful – just
more
. It was the conservation of mass again, only working the other way. I might need a new theory.

We might not have time to discuss it.

Ordinarily I don’t like being hustled, grabbed, shoved around.

Ordinarily, with my Aspect on? You couldn’t do it. I’m unshovable, rooted, balanced precisely on that gravitic line that runs from me to the earth’s core. And you wouldn’t want to grab, you really wouldn’t.

Jacey? Grabbed my elbow, tugged me away from the window, shoved me towards the door, hustled me right out of there.

I’ve never been more glad to be moving.

One glance back, through the doorway; one last glimpse of what was happening out there. One last line of crows, spiralling in – but not a bird now that they fell into like a gravity-well, like a black hole. Big black-clad man, a Corbie in his other guise: standing easily on the eight-inch span of the beam of the jib, where it jutted out above the river. Standing, looking. Watching us go.

We went.

Down the stairs, pell-mell. Before we reached the bottom, we heard shatter-sounds above and behind us, as it might be the sounds of a large man stepping through the glass of a picture window.

Just stepping, through triple-glazed and armoured glass. It was a big window, a little vulnerable; Jacey always did go high-spec, and was happy to deal in redundancy.
I want to keep you safe,
he’d said to Fay.

The man who could step through that glass? Was not the kind of man a girl could knock flying, just with a blow. Even with her Aspect on.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
T THE FOOT
of the stairs, Jacey turned automatically to the inner door, through to his garage and his precious motors. My turn to grab, to shove, to hustle.