"You are a species under siege," he said, as if it was old-hat. "Such is what you do."
"Wasn't Faeryever invaded?"
"Not after the first few attempts," he said. "The demons and elves skirmish with one another in times of great tedium. Incursions into Faery are constant, but usually where people want to get a specific thing or see a specific person."
"I guess you all defend yourselves with magic."
"We do. And don't forget, no faery would last long in Alfheim, not awake. And no elf would enjoy a stay in Faery. The demons ... well, you know them. It's best for all of us if we stay close to home."
"And what do we got? Nothing?"
His silence went on a touch too long. "You are sadly a very fit prey and marketplace for all of us. In the old times you were protected by your position-you were a dimensional remove from us and very hard to connect with in any material way. The Bomb Event finished that, and the Hunter's Reign proved to anyone who wanted it proved that aetheric beings could flourish here without erosion, even if there was nothing here of any useful power or interest." He cleared his throat and took a ramp with rather abrupt speed. They started to cross the Andalune Bridge's perfect span across the water to South Bay.
Lila sat up, "Hey, where are we going?"
"You'll see."
She frowned and sat back in the uncomfortable genuine upholstery of the seat. "So what is this ghost emergence? Are they just slow to find us?"
"I think you'll get some answers where we're going."
She watched the city fall back in the rearview mirror. "So how many other people have dead relatives phoning them?"
Malachi's hands tightened and then released the wheel. "Some," he said. "Apparitions and hearing voices are up to twenty reports a day, and that doesn't include the mentally disturbed. But they're ghosts. I sent some people down there last night to your house. You don't have that. In your office you got-"
"A zombie." She peered at him. "I got two zombies?"
"Looks maybe."
"Ugh!" She closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of her hair being whipped by the wind coming over the shield. "It's because of that damn pen."
"Yeah I'd have thought so."
"Shit." They came off the bridge and Malachi took the coast road. "The ships are the same?" she asked.
"I think so," he said.
"Then, are they really, I mean ..."
"Just wait, Lila!"
She shut up and listened to the engine. At least this car had one. "You need to get the timing sorted out."
"Yeah, I will."
"Okay." She waited for a few more turns and then looked at him with disbelief as they braked and pulled left into the darkness of overhanging trees. "The Folly?"
"You wanted to see her. You get your wish."
"This is Azevedo's house? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because you wouldn't have let her alone yesterday."
"What? I was the one who wanted to stay because she was upset."
"But she said to go. She didn't want you around. When she doesn't want you, best not to stay, not if you want her help in the future. She doesn't belong to us, Lila."
Lila fished around in the turmoil of her feelings, trying to find any that would sit still long enough to form a reaction. The car wallowed through the twists and turns of the driveway. Under the trees she saw the faces of elementals forming and dissipating. "Since when am I the bad guy?"
"Are you?"
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Why are you on my case suddenly?"
Malachi thumped the steering wheel and they veered towards a ditch. He got it back and turned them to face the brooding slump of the house, then hit the brakes and pulled them up sharply. The engine grumbled under the hood. "I wish you'd back off. Slow down. You've killed two people in two days and you act like it was nothing. Where is that coming from? Where inside you is not bothered by this anymore? Because I'm bothered by it."
She felt her nostrils flare, "Gee, I don't know, maybe I was traumatised by seeing my file with the words `Unpredictable OutcomesTerminate' written on it, or perhaps my morals got flushed down the river of blood I had to endure in Demonia while I was doing the good works of the day. Or maybe when homicidal lunatics come threatening me I don't take it as well as I ought to. I mean, not like anyone tried to kill me recently. How should I be taking it, Malachi? Tell me. Because you were the one bitching at me to toughen up and fly right, and now you're saying slow down and what? What am I supposed to slow down for? So some bastard can catch me and blow me to bits? Because every son of a bitch in at least one world wants to, probably with good reason. And let's not forget the interference of your friendly powers." She plucked at the cape. "But no, let's forget that and pretend it's another day at the agency and we have all the time in the world."
He was gripping the wheel so hard he thought he was going to break it. His claws had emerged and were cutting into the skin of his palms. "I am out of my depth," he said after a moment had passed. "No. I'm afraid. That's what." He made himself let go and massaged his palms in an effort to get the tendons to relax so the claws would recede. He showed her his hands, ugly and beastlike as they were. "I don't like to be this. The planes seem to be tilting towards older times, chaos. I liked order, and neatness and small stuff. I liked feeling in charge and on the top of things. And you-you were easy to get along with, you asked me for advice, you listened. I was something. I had a purpose. I felt like I was in the right place. I didn't think it would end so soon and become this ... war."
Lila rubbed her face. "It's not a war."
"Feels like one."
"It's not a war, but you don't get to boss me," she said. She reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. "But you do get to tell me when I'm going over the top."
"You're not," he said, mollified. He took out one of his handker chiefs and dabbed a spot of blood off his hand. "I want to lock you in a vault and keep you out of trouble because your trouble is so big and I don't want to lose you. Sorry."
"Hey." She leaned across and gave him a hug. It was awkward with the gearshift between them but she made it. Tears threatened and she had to fight to keep them down. The warmth and tenderness of the moment felt like they were enough to undo all her efforts at selfcontrol. She had to pull back long before she wanted to. "It'll be all right," she said with a confidence she didn't feel.
"Yeah," he said, released the brake, and let them roll up the last hundred metres to the house. They parked and in the silence following the engine's last note they listened to the sound of the gulls circling.
Malachi got out first and led the way. He didn't have to knock. The door opened as he reached it, though it was hard to see inside because the interior was unlit and the hall had no windows except a single skylight.
"Come in," said a woman's voice with a strong Latin accent.
Malachi thanked her quietly and moved forwards. Lila hesitated. She remembered this door in a better state, just months ago in her experience, when Zal had rented the house. Demon bodyguards had stood outside it and his manager, the effervescent (not) Jolene, had answered it. She could still see the woman striding over the black-andwhite marble floor, heels clacking, suit perfect, anxiety visible in every tough and competent little movement she made as she pretended she was fine with a massive demon drop-in party, catering for hundreds, playing servant to the Queen of Pop, Sorcha the Scorcher, Zal's sister. Where was Jolene? Was she even alive? Lila shivered. What would Jolene have made of Zal's sudden disappearance? Lila didn't even know what the papers had said in those days. She wasn't about to look now.
In those days Lila had thought Zal was just a jumped-up elf egoist, Sorcha was ditto from the other side, and that her job as rock star's minder would be mercifully soon over. She'd go back to the agency, learn to live with some prosthetics, and keep an eye on her family from afar whilst doing good works probably somewhere not too far above traffic duty for a year or two.
The hell with memories,
she thought, and moved forwards into the sepulchral gloom and damp of the hall. The building's familiar sense of presence enveloped her. It seemed to have sunk farther into the ground since she was last here, but the dirt on the skylights, the growth of grass and weeds on the flat roofs, and the general dilapidation probably weren't helping. As she passed the threshold Lila looked for their owner, curious to see who and what she'd noticed the day before. She found herself face-to-face with a ghost.
No, she thought, a split second later as the woman's transparency suddenly vanished to nothing, then flickered and was equally suddenly whole and firmly three dimensional. Not a ghost. Something else. Something she had no idea what, though her senses and Al had an explanation at hand. Sancha Azevedo was phasing in and out of reality at randomised intervals and incomplete sequences. She was occupying their linear time sporadically. The only good part was that the intervals were so brief it was almost as if she were completely present. Looking at her was like seeing a character in a rough animated cartoon book being flicked through by a clumsy thumb.
When she was present enough to see, Azevedo was a short, thin Latino woman of about forty-five with long black hair tied in a single braid. She wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a long flowing over-robe in a fashionable ethnic print. She had beautiful handmade cowboy boots on and surprisingly pale blue eyes. Those two things stuck in Lila's attention as she recovered from the initial shock of the meeting.
"Ms. Azevedo, this is Agent Black," Malachi said.
"I was expecting you. Call me Sancha," said the woman.
Lila was about to reply when a movement caught her eye. She looked and saw, crossing the corridor, a thinner, more transparent version of Sancha Azevedo walking with a steaming drink in her hand. It moved silently into a side room. She paused with her mouth open, greeting forgotten, her hand reaching for the other's hand to shake it. She felt fingers close on her fingers and give a squeeze.
"Don't mind me," the half-fey said with evident pleasure at being able to make the statement. "You'll see a lot of me. But this is the one that does the talking right here."
"You're a walker," Lila said. "Like Jones."
"A strandloper, yes." The blue eyes sparkled with amusement at Lila's discomfiture. "But not like Calliope. Now isn't that a strange name to call a girl?"
"She was one of the Muses," Lila said, glad to find something to say. "From the old Greek. Orpheus was her son."
"Is that right?" Sancha Azevedo looked pleased. "I thought it was something to do with fairground music, you know, but at least that's better." She closed the door after them and an automatic set of locks bolted home, making a thudding noise like something heavy falling down stairs.
"Expecting someone?" Malachi asked.
Azevedo made the kind of noncommittal shrug that said she was and she wasn't. "This is an odd place full of odd things. I don't need too much of that."
"But why did you come here?" Lila blurted, caught short in the act of following the woman by another apparition of her which, seeing none of them, moved quickly through and out the solid door.
"That was yesterday." She pointed down the long corridor that led to most of the rest of the house directly from the front door. "Terribly careless feng shui right here. If you don't come in, it'll be like downtown traffic lights at five-thirty." As if to prove her point there she was again, more solid this time, but very sporadic. She appeared at a sequence of points with pauses, in the hall, along the corridor, turning into a room, her head bent over a book.
Lila followed Malachi quickly along the halls. Most doors were open onto various rooms: a library, a sunroom, a computer suite, a playroom, a fitness room, a kitchen, several lounges, a dining room. In and out of all of these came various figures of Sancha, reading, carrying, walking, preoccupied, flickering about odds and ends of domestic life in various changes of clothes. Sometimes there were more than one of her in a place, even on the same seat. Here they interfered with each other, alternately phasing in and out, fuzzing, flickering. It wasn't just spatial dimensions, Lila realised. It was time. The woman was time-lapsed.
Then they came to the room she remembered best-the ocean view-and her bewildered awe at such an existence, her wondering, came to a halt. She looked down through the plate glass, across the terrazzo, through the gardens to the ocean, and it felt to her like Zal was here only yesterday, might be in the garden, or in his room upstairs. But then the details eroded the pain of the nostalgia. The pool was covered, the furniture there different. The garden had changed. And on the shore the fully wrecked ugliness of the Ghost Hunter's Void ship was beached, its gleam nearly gone, being pawed at by the sea.
"She came to you," Lila said, thinking aloud carelessly. She turned around to the flickering shape and then it struck her, what had been nagging her. "You look like ..
"Don't say it." Azevedo held up her hand. "I know. Princess Leia's Artoo message. It's been noted. And yes. She did. But that's not your business right this minute, is it?" She gestured gracefully. "Please, sit down. Let's get through this as quickly as we can. I am pleased to help you, but I don't have long before you must go."
Lila sat with Malachi on a beautiful leather sofa, only then noticing the gracious loveliness of the room, the sunlight's warmth. It was probably the only decent room in the entire place. Opposite them Sancha Azevedo sat and gripped the arm of her own settee as if to anchor herself. She obviously liked this room. There were at least six other versions of her there, jumping in and out of existence, in and out of time and space.
"Are you crossing?" Lila couldn't help but ask, looking at them all.
"I can be in more than one place at a time, yes."
Lila looked at her. "That must be hellish."
"You're here about your zombies," Azevedo said, a tautness entering her smile. "It's a struggle for me to be so still, so please, keep it to the point. Once I run out of concentration I will break up and that will be it for a few days."
"Yesterday two showed up," Malachi said. "One at the office. One at home."
Lila explained the circumstances. The fey watched her closely all the while. When they'd finished she paused a moment. "We have something in common then. I know your story from the Hunter, though he forgot to mention your eyes. They're absolutely terrifying. Anyway, we both have a break in transmission, let's say, though I have a few more. Look, here's how it works. Zombies and ghosts are created in the same way. Out in the Void there is plenty of free energy in various protoforms. When a magus comes along-a magus is anyone with a powerfully focused mind, let me say-they act as an attractor. The energy gathers and, under their influence, takes form. Ghosts are forms created either by one or many minds, either slowly over aeons or immediately by a great piercing focus. They spring from the living. Zombies are clones. Material and spiritual clones of an individual, usually recently dead, but possibly alive in other circumstances. Where people are weak they may become zombies if they are taken under control by a master, but you didn't have this sort." She flickered, guttering like flames in a draft, and her voice broke up, returning in a stutter over a period of a couple of minutes to complete the speech. "Ghosts and zombies are like elementals in this respect, both forms. They share the soul of the original, are part of it, because souls are always and everywhere, not locked to time or space. Souls are like the Void. You see? Everywhere and always, even in the most material worlds."
She paused, much weakened by the effort of talking for so long. Lila didn't even move to interrupt her. The woman gave her a grateful glance and said, "What you had at the office really was your husband, but not the only one of him, not the greater part, not what you would call the original, not that it matters very much. But it was made of ghost stuff, fresh out of the Void. It wasn't stable in this plane. It wouldn't have lasted. It was a weak copy. The other one is different. The other one is a strong copy, almost entirely primaterial in nature. It is not your sister. But it is." She paused, took a breath, waved off Malachi who was about to speak, and leaned for
ward with a sense of great urgency. "No. No time for me. Listen. The important feature of these things is who has made them and what they willed. It is easy, very easy, for beings from other planes to hitch rides in zombies in a desire to become material and inhabit the other worlds. Easy to use the weak the same way. That is why zombie use and the training of weaklings to magical knowledge is taboo among magi, including necromancers. Nobody'd be that stupid. There are few minds in existence across any time who have the strength to notice and resist the kinds of beings that can cross over from the hidden places. Certainly they are almost impossible to manage. They have no natural material form of their own. They are entirely thoughtform and will, nothing else. Beside their abilities most sentient material creatures are no more troublesome to them than amoeba." She paused and winked out completely.
They waited, and waited.
"I ... ," Lila began but then Sancha was back. She looked weary and spoke now rapidly, in bursts, as if she was ill and out of breath.
"The last question you have is who made your zombies. The sister. That was you. You made it. You called it up and it came to you. Because of the instrument you have. Very foolish. Very careless. You must find a necromancer to ask more detail if you want to know what it truly is and if it is ridden. The spirit decays, you see. Soul's eternal but spirits decay. Important to know difference. And the other. The husband. That one was not you. And it was not the weapon. Someone else sent it."
She blinked out. Returned. "It was ridden. It was open. So dangerous. I think it was ... good it failed ..." She began to judder, and fury crossed her face as she began to lose her struggle to cohere and be linear. "Come back in a few days. I ..." She stood up and they saw her start talking to someone who wasn't there, looking in a direction that wasn't at anything in their room. She became thin, transparent, and then, after a series of violent flickers, vanished. Around them she moved, without seeing them, pale, ghostly, multiple.
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