by John Meaney
And screeching and yowling—
What's she trying to do?
—the Vixen pulled to a halt, its nose just inches away from a wall of dark polished granite.
Give me a heart attack?
Then Laura gave him a sideways look.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I forgot, you're just an ordinary—Never mind.”
Perhaps that dismissal—of Donal as ordinary—was the most devastating thing that had happened in a confused and disturbing night.
A black baggage cart pulled up beside the car, and Laura popped the trunk before stepping out. By the time Donal had walked back to the rear, all of his battered boxes were already in place on the cart's flatbed, held in place by four fat, pulsing arms.
At the cart's front end, two large yellow eyes turned to look at Donal and gave a long, slow blink. Then the cart rolled into motion.
Donal began to follow, but Laura said, “The people elevator is this way.”
“Uh. . . okay.”
He watched the cart make its way past a gigantic Nebula limousine to what looked like a blank concrete wall. An opening drew apart and the cart rolled forward into a darkened, empty shaft. It hung in midair as the wall clamped shut behind it.
Where the Hades am I?
Laura was heading for a buttress of the same shining granite-and-quartz rock, in which a silver elevator door was set. Over it was a dial, its needle currently indicating the 227th floor.
A flare of blue light traveled down the door at Laura's approach. The needle began to swing, indicating the elevator's descent.
Soon the doors were sliding open to reveal a steel-floored elevator car with walls that curved inward to a point overhead. As Donal stepped forward, metallic thorns slid like cat's claws from the walls, but then Laura touched Donal's arm. The thorns retracted.
Security system.
At least Laura had identified him as a friend. Donal wondered just what the building would have done otherwise.
Sealing itself up, the elevator rose fast, its floor pressing against Donal's feet. It hurtled upward with relentless speed, then began to brake. The ascent slowed, they bumped to a halt, and the doors slid open.
They were in a twenty-foot-high lobby with only one doorway: massive black steel double doors, which swung inward as Laura walked toward them. Donal hung back.
Beyond was a huge reception area decorated in steel-gray and matte-black metal. On twisted helical stands, metal cups bore dancing blue flames whose motion matched the near-subliminal music of Illurian harps seeping through the obsidian floor.
A pale ethereal hand at the end of an insubstantial arm headed toward Donal, its fingers lengthening as it drew close, reaching for Donal's Magnus in its concealed shoulder holster. At a tutting sound from Laura, the hand froze, then withdrew back toward the wall, sank inside, and was gone.
“This is just like my old neighborhood.” Donal looked around the chamber. “They try to steal your weapons there too.”
Laura half-smiled. “Don't worry. I'll look after you.”
“Yeah . . . you're not doing a bad job so far.”
“You're welcome. The apartment's through there.” She inclined her head toward the solid-looking wall, its surface decorated by a twelve-foot-high steel mask: a man's face, hook-nosed, eyes shut.
“The apartment? So what's this place?”
“Kind of a hallway, I suppose. A . . . what, antechamber?”
“Antechamber,” murmured Donal.
The mask's eyes opened and stared at Donal for a moment, then it opened its mouth, wider and wider like gaping jaws, splitting apart to form an entranceway into a large room with a dark-blue floor that looked like solid glass. Laura led the way; Donal caught up with her, glancing back as the steel mask folded and slid into place.
Here, the air was chill.
“Sorry,” said Laura. “I wasn't expecting—Well. You know.”
“What are you sorry for?”
“I meant, it's cold, isn't it? That's all.”
At her words, shafts of orange flame slid up the walls from controlled vents at floor level. Waves of warmth washed over Donal as he wheeled around, checking out the huge room: bigger than his old apartment, almost as big as the entire apartment building.
“You're rich,” he said. “I mean really rich.”
Laura shrugged. “Are you asking why I'm a police officer?”
“No, but . . . why are you on the force? I take it you don't need to earn a living.”
“A living . . .” Laura shook her head, an odd look in her eyes. “That's one way to put it, I guess.”
She led him across the forbidding high lounge to the dark twenty-foot windows that reared upward, looking out onto the night-bound city towers. In the distance, a lone smartbat sailed against the background of a moon-illuminated cloud.
“Tristopolis,” she said. “Is it worth it, do you think? Should we even try to save it from itself?”
Donal shook his head.
“I don't even know what you're talking about.”
“Excuse me?”
“A city might be a thing in its own right, like a living being, but it ain't the city we're here to protect, y'know? It's your average man or woman struggling through life, who doesn't deserve to become a victim as well—that's who we're here to help.”
Donal could not stop himself scanning the high room, the black iron-and-quartz chandeliers, the tall twisted sculpture of what looked like a melting warrior standing in one corner.
“You've got a problem,” said Laura, “because of my wealth. Because I'm so well off, is that it?”
“No.” Donal blew out a breath. “I don't figure you for a career politician. Not if you're running a task force that's investigating federal senators—unless you're really figuring to make a name for yourself as a moral crusader.”
“Thanatos, me, a crusader. I've enough trouble just—Well.” Laura crossed her arms. “If I let you stay here until you sort yourself out, we're not going to have a problem with each other, are we?”
“You run the task force. You're the boss. Although if I'm stuck here until my life's sorted out”—Donal couldn't help grinning—“we're going to be putting up with each other for a long time.”
“Ha.” Laura uncrossed her arms. “Come on. I'll show you around.”
The place was huge, and apartment seemed such a tiny word for the wide Gothic dwelling that Laura kept. She owned the whole 227th floor of the building, Darksan Tower, which was the uppermost residential level; the higher, narrower levels housed maintenance rooms and the huge motors and drums of the seven elevators that serviced the building.
The rooms were cold, simultaneously grim yet palatial, and Donal's breath steamed as he stood in a huge bedroom with a clean, polished obsidian floor and a four-poster bed. The bed's coverings were silver fabric interwoven with dark-purple runes of a kind he had never seen before.
Black vaselike constructs, dotted around here and there on low tables, sprouted dancing pale-blue flames when Laura snapped her fingers near each one in turn.
“Not flamewraiths.” Donal frowned. “I'm not sensing . . . There are no boundwraiths here, are there? Of any kind.”
“You think there should be? That I should have spirits enslaved inside my household appliances?”
Donal thought about the moans echoing through the subterranean avenues of reactor piles, spill-off from necroflux waves passing inside the bones of the dead.
Do you feel the—
No, not anymore.
“Maybe it's no worse,” Donal murmured, “than whatever's waiting for the rest of us.”
The expression in Laura's eyes was unreadable.
“I should show you the kitchen,” she said after a moment. “You'll be able to fix yourself some supper. This here is your room, and there's a bathroom through there.”
She pointed at a wall decorated in vertical ten-foot-wide panels of alternating gray and black. “Third panel's the bathroom door.”
/> Donal's four cardboard boxes of belongings were already stacked in one corner. The cart—which was a wraith container—must have used an alternate route, perhaps through some kind of maintenance shaft, to reach the room. There was no sign of the cart now.
Perhaps it belonged to the building management rather than to Laura.
He followed Laura into the ice-cold kitchen. Cupboards opened at Laura's command, revealing a stasis pantry full of food cartons and chinaware stacked away as though it had not been used for ages.
“I'd forgotten about the cartons,” Laura said. “Help yourself. I'll see you in the morning.”
“Um. . . okay. Thank you.”
Donal felt let down, knowing it was an unreasonable reaction.
Do you—
Never.
After all Laura had done for him, sharing supper was too much to expect. She would be going out to dine with her rich friends, moving in strata that would be alien to any normal working cop.
“I appreciate this,” he added, as she left the kitchen.
“You're welcome.”
The door—simply ensorcelled, not requiring a wraith—swung shut of its own accord as Laura's heels clicked along the hallway floor, fading from Donal's awareness.
“Well,” he murmured to himself. “Let's see what's for supper.”
In fact, Donal no longer felt hungry, but he had a brief memory of Sister Felice back at the hospital, telling him to eat or his recovery would take longer. He supposed that still applied.
Donal found a waxed-paper-wrapped brick of Alcadian pink cheese and a cardboard carton of blacksprout broth. Some black crackers from the pantry. And that was it. He searched for a saucepan.
There were none that he could find.
“Bleeding Thanatos.”
In the end he settled for drinking the soup cold, straight from the container, standing at the counter. The cheese and black crackers tasted . . . interesting.
The wrapper on the cracker box bore a date: Sextember 22, 6604. At least they were all right to eat: the stasis pantry looked top-of-the-line, guaranteed against decay.
But what kind of luxury apartment was this, where the rooms were kept icy cold and there was no fresh food, only three-year-old crackers and frozen cheese?
Donal ate slowly, cleaned up the crumbs he had spilled, and stacked the dishes in the sink—which coughed up rust-colored water, as though unused to working, before the water flowed through long enough to clear. Then the sink swilled the dishes, small extruded arms washing and polishing the plates before setting them to one side to dry.
Donal walked back through the echoing hallway to the tall, dark bedroom. He stared at the four-poster bed for a long time before stripping down to his skivvies, finding the right cardboard box, and retrieving a battered book with the covers torn off. It was the copy of Human: the Revenge that he'd started before the job with the diva.
Do—
No.
He took the book into bed with him.
Donal sat propped up against silk-covered pillows with a mercury sheen, reading by the light of flickering pale-blue flames, finding some comfort in the words of an imaginary story. Real life and the actual world had slipped far away from logic and ordinary purpose.
And at some point he closed his eyes to rest, laying the book on his lap. He drifted into a warm, blank, orange dream.
Donal woke thirsty. Still in his skivvies, he went back out to the kitchen . . .
And stopped.
Do you feel—
Oh, my Death, yes.
Laura was in the hallway, totally nude. Behind her, tall windows stood open to the icy night. Quicksilver rain fell almost horizontally through the powerful wind.
And Laura's perfect, pale skin was silvery. If Donal didn't know better, he'd think she'd been outside.
“You're so warm,” she whispered. Her eyelids fluttered. “I didn't mean to—”
Part of Donal's mind cried out a warning, but most of him thrummed with a resounding affirmation as he took a step toward her.
“So close to the living. All day, at work . . .”
“You're perfect.” Donal's voice was rough.
Feel the song?
Something, some powerful force, washed through Donal's being.
I don't know.
Perhaps he struggled against that tidal attraction for a moment, or perhaps he imagined that, and he gave himself up immediately to what was happening.
His hand cupped one cold breast. Her nipple was erect and frozen, like steel.
“Thanatos.”
And they were embracing, desperate to cling to each other, and the time for thought was past as they stumbled toward her bedroom.
Laura straddled him, pale and strong, laughing as he came inside her, a novaburst of white joy as he cupped her small breasts. He rolled sideways, bringing her down to lie on the bed, and kissed her icy nipples as he hooked his fingertip inside her, and in a moment she screamed aloud, shuddered, then laughed once more.
Do you—
Not now.
Donal kissed her soft skin, so cold against his lips, his body. In minutes Laura was aroused again, arching back as Donal used his tongue, and then he was inside her once more, climbing to that pinnacle of explosion, which this time occurred simultaneously for both of them.
“Oh, Death . . .”
“You're wonderful,” he told her, suddenly able to speak.
“And you, lover.”
They snuggled close, holding each other.
“Shit.” A cramp seized his ribs. “Sorry.”
He rolled away from her.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.” Donal stretched, even though it hurt. “You wait 'til I get my full strength back.”
He rolled back over and kissed her cool lips.
“Yes. You should sleep, dear Donal. Or you'll be no good to me in the morning.”
Did she mean at work or in bed? Smiling, he meant to ask her, but he was lying in a bed more comfortable than he had ever known, exhausted from ongoing trauma and recent lovemaking.
Do—
Dunno. Can't remember. Who cares?
Donal slipped into a state that might have been sleep or might have been trance but was in any case disconnected from the ordinary world. It was bliss, and nobody experiences that often in their life.
Donal drifted.
When he woke, the room had grown chill once more. It remained dark, lit only by one pale-blue flickering flame. Laura was not in the bed.
What have we done?
Desire had overwhelmed them. But how had that happened?
“Laura?” Donal blinked and pulled himself half upright on the bed. “Are you—”
She was there.
Oh, black Thanatos.
Still nude, Laura sat cross-legged on the floor. A narrow black cable, hanging in a catenary curve, connected her to a power valve in the wall. The cable pulsed with necrotonic power. But on her left breast—
No. I didn't realize.
—a large flap of pale skin hung back, a triangle of that perfect skin he had kissed and run his tongue and fingers over—
Or did I? Did I know?
—revealing the hollow in her chest and the slick black wetness that pumped and beat in a regular, never-changing rhythm, recharged for another night and day.
A repressed memory rose up.
“The ward shield keeps out only living beings.” That was Laura, back in the cabin with the troopers who had burst in.
Now Laura's eyes were shielded by shadow as she watched him watching her.
Then, “What's the matter?” she asked, her voice harsh. “Haven't you ever fucked a zombie before?”
Donal tried to speak. Something clutched his throat, and it was exactly like being strangled. He tried to tell Laura that it didn't matter, but it was impossible as she stood up, pulled the power cord from her beating black heart, flicked the cord aside, and sealed up her thoracic cavity. She pulled her breast skin back in
to place.
The edges joined up and faded so that her skin was whole once more.
“I—”
“Don't worry yourself, Donal.”
Laura walked nude from the room, her perfect convex buttocks clenching and relaxing in rhythm. Then she was gone and Donal was cursing himself.
“Ah, Death.”
He swung his legs off the bed and came to his feet in one fast motion.
She regrets it. It just came over her too, that desire—
Donal was used to moving athletically, but not in his current state. Blood drained from his head. Donal swayed, tottered, and then the bedsheet seemed to rise to meet his face—Hades, I'm fainting—and he was falling forward but could not stop himself as everything went.
Black.
In the main lounge, Laura stood shivering, but not from the chilled air. How could a dead thing feel the cold? She stared back at the hallway and the bedroom door—her own bedroom, where Donal lay.
The room she had not used since . . . since it happened.
There were six guest bedrooms, but the seventh bedroom was her own: though she had not consciously planned to make love to Donal, some part of her must have known all along that it was going to happen.
Thanatos. Balls.
Giving Donal a moment longer to follow her and apologize—Death, he was so warm—she gave up—but I'm his commander—turned to the massive open windows, and climbed out onto the sill.
So I found myself a real man at last.
Laura was 227 stories above street level. The night was blacker than ever; even the moon was shrouded behind impenetrable cloud, the only hint of its presence a silver outline to the cloud mass.
Too bad I'm not a real woman.
She grabbed hold of a skeletal head carved in the wall and pulled herself upward. Using other carvings—here of a Zurinese komodo, there a Balkran carnivulcan next to a ghouleagle—she climbed steadily, naked in the night.
Great stone demonic heads, part of Darksan Tower's massive superstructure, stared at her with dark-green eyes bigger than automobiles. They followed Laura's ascent to the next, narrower level.
Finally she reached the roof that ringed the final, tall spire rearing up to the sky.
Laura sat down, her buttocks pressed against the root of one of the four great demons' necks. She stared, seeing nothing beyond the depths of her own stupidity.
