The Spook and the Spirit in the Stone

by Jilly Paddock

  "About three days ago. I guess I could eat something, provided it was bland enough."

  We pick up some bagels, with egg mayo for me and garlic cheese for Lamont, then head for her office. It goes by the name of the Pit, a windowless cube in the basement, just along the hall from the morgue. It's not as obsessively tidy as the room I shared with Jake, but I can live with the comfortable mess. There isn't space for two desks, but I get a terminal and my tek-equipment has been carefully stacked on the shelves beside it. There's a message-flag on screen and when I call it up, it's the Forensics preliminary report.

  "Want a print-out?" The station is allegedly paperless, but Jake always demanded a hard copy.

  Afton leans over me to read the screen, steadying herself with a hand on my shoulder. I twitch at the feel of it; most people don't care to touch me, don't even dare to invade my personal space when they've seen my natural array of muscles.

  "Don't waste the paper. There's nothing there." She retreats to her chair and consoles herself with lunch.

  The story's new to me, so I scan it through. Sophie Crispianou is en route to school, safe in a limo with chauffeur and bodyguard, when someone puts a small explosive bullet through one of the car's tyres. When it stops, the men are hit by a pair of trank-darts, the child is snatched and the gang vanish like smoke. The darts are standard items, commonly used by vets for sedating fierce patients, and farmers for treating their stock.

  "It was foolish of both of them to leave the car," I say, reaching the end of the report.

  "The bodyguard didn't, but Sophie opened a window before he could stop her. When I talked to him he was distraught, burning up with guilt at his lapse. That child had the best protection money could buy, a combat-veteran from Dhanzoar." Her eyes narrow suspiciously. "Looked a bit like you really, except he was shorter and had the physique of two prize bulls."

  "Don't we have any witnesses?" I ask, ignoring the implied question.

  "A dozen or so, who saw the car pull into the kerb and someone in dark clothing take the little girl out of the back. Nothing seemed to be wrong, so nobody paid much attention."

  "Gas-propelled bullet and darts? The sound of traffic would cover that." I shut my eyes and try to visualise the crime. "We're talking major-league professionals, three or four of the best, probably in the pay of a terrorist group. I'm surprised that Terra's content to let us second-string gumshoes handle such a vital case."

  "They aren't." Lamont scowls into her coffee. "We're waiting for some quality help to arrive from the Mother-world and steer us onto the right path."

  "Who gets to liaise with them?"

  "The Captain's keeping that choice piece of data very close to his chest."

  "Could be us."

  "I hope you aren't psychic, Jerome." This time I earn the scowl. "Rumour has it that our Terran helpmate is."

  "They're sending us an agent from the Eye?" I've heard all the half-truths about Earth's crack intelligence section – who hasn't? Some of their agents are supposedly too fast and too smart to be wholly human, and it's whispered that they use artificial psi-powers. I've never met one, of course, and neither has anyone I know, but everyone has a friend of a friend who swears that it's true. Urban mythology at its best.

  "So the grapevine says." Afton's expression says that she'll only believe it when her eyes deliver the input. "Now, you can make yourself useful. Pull me the files on every terrorist organisation known to be operating on planet at present."

  "That'll take all afternoon...”

  “So?”

  I don't know anyone else who could put so much threat into one tiny syllable. "No problem, Inspector. I'll get on it.”

  I'm still a little delicate the next morning, riding the twin demons of too much coffee and too little sleep, so I bowl into the Pit without knocking and nearly fall over Captain Vincenzo.

  "Glad you could make it in," he says, only ten percent sarcastic. "Jerome, I'd like you to meet Giselle. She's on loan to us from a specialist branch of Terrapol, for the duration of this kidnapping case."

  I have to look a long way down to meet two misty-lilac gems of eyes set in a porcelain-pale face. She's as dainty and perfect as a doll, with a tip-tilted nose, a pair of small, pouting lips and a cascade of fine, ash-blonde hair that lies in a plait from her nape to the base of her spine.

  "Hullo, Jerome." She has a voice like a silken noose and a handshake that almost dents bone. Sweet Goddess, a man could live and die for such a woman! Even I'm not immune, and long buried desires blink into wakefulness in the depths of my guts. The whole package almost wins me over for a second and I smile down at her, then the ghostly wisp of a sensation I'd hoped never to experience again tickles across my forebrain. I recoil from her and my defences snap up before she can steal my thoughts.

  Afton and the Captain see the smile wither on my face and see me release Giselle's hand as if it's given me an electric shock, but only the telepath knows the reason behind my behaviour.

  "Where did you learn to do that?" she asks, very quietly, concealing the threat behind her smile, behind the sudden diamond-hardness in her eyes.

  "A bad place." I know enough about real mind-reading to guess she can scan emotion as well, so I let a whole iceberg of old pain and fear fall from the glacier. She shares it, but she's tough and her only reaction is a slight twitch at the corner of her mouth.

  “Where?"

  Life and death hang in balance on that question. Everyone may have a friend who's met one of the Eye's psi-assassins – well, now so have I. She could kill me in an instant in any one of a thousand ways, with a touch or just a thought and that isn't a guess, it's stark, chilling certainty. Afton and 'Cenzo are watching in confusion, blind to the undercurrent of menace, unable to help me. How much do I value secrecy now – more than my own survival?

  "D'zuluch." It's an ugly word, one I haven't spoken in years, and it rasps in my throat.

  "The Closed world, a desert planet in the heart of the Cluster?" Giselle asks, as if the data has dropped into her head from an outside source. "A fortress world, seldom visited by humankind. Legend names it as the home of the Dragonmen, a humanoid race who have tails, scaly skin and forked tongues."

  "So did I, before reconstruction." I curl my implanted tongue back, stick out the original and hiss at her. "Some parts I kept."

  Giselle glances at my colleagues, kicked by the shockwaves of their disbelief and horror. "I seem to have stirred up a hornets' nest here – stupid of me. I know an apology won't be enough to repair any of the damage, but it's all I can offer you. I'm sorry, it's just that I...”

  "You thought I was the enemy?"

  She nods, biting her lower lip, looking disquietingly like a naughty child. "I was wrong. Sorry. Captain Vincenzo, can we finish the tour now?"

  "By all means." 'Cenzo steers her out of the office and I can breath again. I turn slowly and face my partner.

  "Please explain to me exactly what happened there," Afton requests, slumping down to sit on the edge of the desk.

  "I blocked her from spying into my mind, using a technique supposedly invented by her own people. If I hadn't given her a damn good reason for knowing it, she would have killed me."

  "She wasn't carrying any weapons."

  "Her sort don't need them."

  "I hate bloody spooks!" Afton shakes her head. "So, you're half-man, half-snake?"

  "Not exactly. We aren’t reptiles or lizards or dinosaurs. My race is warm-blooded, mammalian and very nearly human, apart from a few rudimentary scales and a tail," I wonder if the trust that might have developed between us has died stillborn. "Do you have a problem with that?"

  "Me?" she grins. "No, I like snakes. The double tongue thing worries me a bit. Do you have two of anything else I should know about?"

  I risk a smile. "Nothing you'll discover at our present level of intimacy."

  "Cute. That earns you another personal question. Rumour at the station has it that you ain't got no balls. Is that true?"


  "Are we talking bravery or anatomy here?"

  "The latter."

  "Internal genitalia, tucked safely away into a pouch," I don't tell her about the sheets of muscle I have to protect my tender parts, enough to make any blow to my groin superfluous. "Makes more sense on a hot planet, you see."

  "Do you have any more terrible secrets, dragonman, or can we get on with some work?"

  "You know the worst. Everything else is just icing on the cake."

  "Vincenzo knew already, didn't he?"

  "Of course, but he was the only one at the station who did."

  “You've got no worries on that account. I won't tell another soul. Not that it would matter if all of the staff knew. They'd be more sympathetic towards you if they did."

  "Who needs sympathy?"

  "Everyone does, Jerome, sometimes. Even me." She stabs a finger in my direction. "And if you tell anyone else I said that, I swear I'll nail your balls to the door, whether they're accessible or not!"

  We spend three days searching the city for Sophie Crispianou. On the first day they find us a helicopter, which gives Giselle a better vantage point to scan for the child, Afton a headache and a temper like a wounded bear, and yours truly a queasy stomach. Dear Goddess, I hate to fly inside an atmosphere!

  After that, working on the theory that it might be better to attract less attention, we’re demoted to a car. We work over the city in a grid pattern, twice, Afton at the wheel, me slouched in the seat beside her and Giselle in back. The telepath sits like a statue, eyes pinched shut, her china-doll face as pale and still as fallen snow. Who can say how she sifts through the mess of minds around her, how she seeks out one ear of corn in all that chaff? Perhaps she's looking for that special vivid shade of fear only felt by a child, that unique taste of innocent pain. I watch her and marvel at the complex curves of her profile, so beautiful and so deadly, as a tiger is, or a sword crafted by a master. By the end of the day she's angry, frustrated by our failure. Nothing shows in her face, yet I feel the fire in her, like hot pepper and battery acid.

  We get back to find that a ransom demand has still not been made. Madame Celia is closeted with Vincenzo, her hysteria loud enough to carry to all corners of the station.

  "That won't help to get her daughter back," Afton frowns. "Nothing will, I'm afraid. The child's probably dead by now."

  "We find that seventy percent of all kidnap victims are killed by their captors, whether the ransom demands are satisfied or not," I add.

  "Sophie isn't dead." Giselle looks as surprised as we are by those three little words. "That's pure gut reaction. She isn't dead and I believe we'll find her alive."

  "Is that precognition?" Afton asks. "Or just a dumb guess?"

  "Whichever you're comfortable with." Giselle sighs, arching her back. I see the knots of tension in her neck, feel an echo of them in my own. "I'm starving! Care to lend me some company over dinner, Jerome?"

  "I've some data to go over," I shrug and smile like an idiot. "Maybe tomorrow, huh?"

  "Maybe I'll hold you to that." She walks away, swinging her hips like a dancer and calling back over her shoulder. "Ciao, guys! See you in the morning."

  Afton waits until she's out of the building. "Doesn't take a spook to see that she's taken a shine to you, big guy. I think she was offering you dinner, dessert and a whole lot more besides. Why'd you turn her down?"

  "It's too soon." First lie. Now for a second "And I’m not interested."

  You have to be a great actor to fool Lamont and a Guinness I'm not. "She scares you, doesn't she?"

  "Absolutely. You don't know much about telepaths, do you?"

  “I don't believe they exist."

  “Well, if you ever see fit to change that view, take my advice – never sleep with one. Sex is complex enough in its sweaty, absurd physical incarnation without stirring in a helping of mind-games as well!"

  She lets that one go by, her smile laced with sympathy. "Most people are fooled by this business-as-usual act of yours, but I'm not. Go home and get some sleep, if you can."

  Her unexpected kindness almost sinks me and my mood swings back towards the ever-present darkness that snaps at my heels. Afton takes a seat outside 'Cenzo's office, waiting for the shouting to die away so she can report our non-progress. I scuttle off to our basement office to check for messages, mainly so the excuse I gave Giselle isn't technically a lie. It's a mistake to think about our lovely spook; I'm so distracted that I collide with a warm, mobile body outside the door to the morgue.

  "Mind where you're going, you bloody great oaf!" She wriggles out of my grip and thumps me on the sternum hard enough to hurt.

  "Sorry," I look down into a pair of sloe-black eyes flashing with anger, set in a coffee brown face and framed by a mane of crazy black curls. "My fault. Entirely."

  She tilts her head on one side, annoyance transmuting to curiosity. "You're Lamont's new partner, aren't you?"

  "That's right. I'm Jerome."

  "Beka McGee." She shakes my hand, breaking into a grin as sudden and devastating as a supernova. "I'm the station's underpaid and overworked med-tek. Seeing as we're neighbours now, drop into the morgue for coffee sometime."

  I know I'm shooting at the moon, but what the hell? "How about now?"

  "Okay." She still has hold of my hand, so she leads me like a child. "Are you squeamish?"

  Some things make me queasy; tapioca, huge black slugs with orange backs and sugary, badly-rhymed love poetry. "I'm okay with blood and bodies and stuff, but I'm a little uneasy about the pink, squishy inside bits."

  That makes her laugh, a rich, fruity giggle. "It's okay. We don't have any guests."

  We drink coffee in her office, little more than a closet with attitude. She lets me have the chair, perching on the edge of her tiny desk. I talk on auto-pilot, harmless social nonsense, trying not to make it too obvious that she fascinates me. Fashion would never label her beautiful; her hips are too wide and her breasts too high and small, but her legs go on forever. Her face is too full of character to be pretty, with sorrow hidden in the dark mirrors of her eyes and hints of distant pain betrayed by the creases around them. I sense in her a kindred spirit, another tortured soul who knows what it is to be in exile from a terrible past, living with a burden of secrets too dangerous to confess.

  We talk for half an hour, I finish my coffee and stumble out into the evening. I don't remember a single word of what we said, except that I have an open invitation to come back whenever I want. I hope I've just made a new friend.

  On the seventh day of the investigation, we give up on the inflexible logic of our search pattern and cover the city in great, curving spirals, sweeping from the edge to the centre, then out again. Afton drives, I watch the people weaving through the hot, dusty streets and Giselle does whatever she does, as silent as a meditating monk.

  In the long-time-ago, when this world was first seeded, the city had been called Prosperity. Thirty years down the line, at the first generation make-or-break point, with so many of its inhabitants starving or sick, that had seemed like a bad joke, and for several decades it was unofficially known as Pestilence or Promise-break City. The colony hadn't sunk, of course, and had hauled itself back to viability, through austerity and sacrifice, eventually climbing to the dizzy heights of the rich cultural success it enjoys today. Although this was the site of the first settlement, it's no longer the capital of Siobhos; that honour went to Ascension when the spaceport was constructed there. Prosperity City is a far from pretty place and it has no grand and noble history, just the grime and scars of two centuries of hard work and hope. I dream sometimes of living in a city rooted in antiquity; Rome, Paris or London, perhaps, or dark Huldathor, the ancient fortress in the secret heart of the Cluster, or the ethereal City-of-a-Million-Lights, the arachnoid capital on Gemmdis. It's just a dream though. I'd be even more of an alien on those worlds than I am here.

  Prosperity City is built on a dead-square grid, with the old town snaking up into the hi
lls, clinging to the sides of three canyons, Copperdrift, Silverlode and Goldangel, and the newest suburbs mirroring that shape, spreading out like a trefoil across the plains. At the end of our second sweep Afton halts the car in the shade of a stand of ironwood trees on the approach to Silverlode Canyon and we sip luke-warm soda in the noon-day heat.

  "What's up there?" Giselle asks, nodding towards the road less travelled, winding up through the tempting cool shadows of blue cedars and deep bottle-green ironwoods.

  "The oldest part of the city. The First Families built their homes in the safety of the mountains. Some of them still live up there."

  "There are some pretty fancy mansions in the canyons," Afton adds, with a pinch of envy. "Gated communities, secure behind their walls."

  "We ought to take a look up there." Her mist-lilac eyes unfocus for a moment and I feel the icy edge of her ghostly search, like a spectral sword. "It would be a good place to hide the child."

  Afton looks grim. "If Sophie's imprisoned in one of those elegant fortresses, it'll take an army to get her out."

  We drive up through Silverlode, past tall stone walls and impressive iron gates, catching odd glimpses of hidden homes. I see one with white marble columns, as grand as Scarlet's Tara, and another with round, conical-hatted towers like a French chateau. Afton turns round in the gravel car-park of the view-point at the top of the hill and we meander down again.

  "That's weird," Giselle mutters, wrinkling her nose.

  "What's wrong?" I ask. We're passing the chateau for the second time and Afton slows the car.

  “It isn't the child." Our pet spook is still frowning. "There's an odd aura around that house, a source of psychic energy. Do you know anything of its history? I'm thinking of a murder or a tragic death, something that gives rise to ghosts or other supernatural manifestations?"

  "It's Diamondeye Keep, home of the Treebones," Afton says. "As far as I know, nobody ever died there of anything other than natural causes. We've collected a thick file of complaints about the place over the years – strange lights, eerie music and suspect rituals – but nothing we've followed up on has any substance."