Pandaemonium (31 page)

Sometimes it’s good to be prince.

I guess.

They were looking good on it, anyway, both of them: the wind of the journey still in their eyes, in their heads. Tangled in Jacey’s hair. Not in Jordan’s: that bare white frosting on his scalp wasn’t enough to hold anything, though it was plenty enough to declare him to those who knew. What he was, where he came from, what he meant.

I supposed he’d grow it out now, wear it in some kind of aggressive declarative quiff:
Here I am!
I regretted that, as much as I regretted everything lost in him, the boy he’d been: shy and avoidant and the opposite of cocky, putting himself down, never recognising his own bright quality.

No longer that, but still. Looking good, oh, yes. He’d always been pretty, delicate, almost dainty for a boy; he used to make me feel protective and clumsy both at once, like some hulking bodyguard with sausage fingers and a musclebound frame. Which is a neat trick if you can do it, and he could.

No longer that, either. The scar on his throat might snare the eye, but something else would hold it: he looked powerful suddenly, a lion in his kingdom, a prince come into his own. He was cocky now, but there was more than that; he was cocky with a reason.

Also I thought maybe he was strutting a little for my benefit, bantam cock showing all his feathers.

I did hope that wasn’t why he’d... done what he’d done to the fog-feller, to impress me with how much he had changed. Or to repay me, perhaps, for all those times I’d been so emphatically Desi.

I did rather fear that it was, one or the other or a complicated mixture of the two – but a girl could still hope.

I looked him in the eye and said, “Well, then. At least this time it worked.”

His turn to be telepathic, like the old women of the Graiae sharing their one eye between them, which is not a thing you want to see if you can avoid it. Really not.

He said, “Yes, this time.” Just that. His voice still held that new huskiness; I supposed it always would. For a moment there his eyes were all old Jordan, the boy I knew, who had seen his brother die in a place just like this, in a manoeuvre just the same. The Green Man had been no fog-feller, to be felled so brutally fast; he’d fought back the only way he could, and fast enough to save his life. For that day, at least. Now of course he was hunted more aggressively even than I had been, and would be until they caught him.

This new Jordan, I thought, might join the hunt.

Might lead the hunt, rather. He was probably still not much of a joiner. But there would be no one more anxious to see Asher’s death avenged, and no one better able to achieve it. A burning hunger and a cold rage together had to be good for something.

I didn’t think they’d be good for him, but that was another matter, and I had no right to raise it. Not any more. Circumstances change so fast; it takes nimble footwork just to keep up, and your heart lags behind even in the best of times, which these most emphatically were not.

Still. There were four of us here, me and three men who mattered to me, one way or another – or all the same way, if you wanted to be crudely reductionist, which I didn’t, thanks all the same – and we were all of us still alive and likely to stay that way, I thought. For a while, at least. At least none of us was trying to kill any of the others any more.

I thought, I hoped.

I thought I’d better check.

I said, “Thanks, Jordan. Truly.”

He shrugged – a little bitterly, perhaps? – and said, “You used to call me Jay.”

Which was exactly the reaction I was hoping for, working for, that pang of regret in him, the sense of something lost. Whether he was old Jordan reviving or new Jordan reconsidering, this boy had left his blazing anger behind him. Or slaked it, maybe, with the slaughter of the fog-feller, but I thought he’d moved on. Gracelessly, perhaps, but none the less. He might have gone from the hunted to the hunter; at least he wasn’t hunting me.

I ignored all the subtexts he was slapping in my face, and just said, “Yes,” and glanced at Jacey.
I used to call him Jay too, so let’s not get ourselves confused, shall we?

The telepathy was still running hot in both of them. They twitched in unison, which let me feel a little bit smug, as well as a little bit heartsore; and then – because even Desi can be kind, while Fay was always soft all through – I turned my back on them both, and went to Thom.

Who was just picking himself up, a little warily, still a little uncertain of his shape. Well, I could help there. I took the lighter from my pocket and flicked it open.

“You want to?”

“Yes,” he said, meaning
Yes!
– “but I ought to, you know, thank the guys.”

“They enjoyed it,” I said, hoping that that really wasn’t true; I wanted them to have been too anxious to enjoy the wild testosterone-stoked run up here – some chance! – and especially not to have enjoyed the encounter with the fog-feller, whose fallout was all about us. However well that fell out for us, it was really quite important that in retrospect they didn’t feel good about it. Jordan especially.

But they were allowed to pretend for a little longer, and they were certainly allowed to be appreciated. So I let Thom go and left them strictly alone for a minute to do their male thing together, harsh laughs and shoulder-slapping and jokes about Thom’s nakedness, which he might have managed to overlook, but they couldn’t possibly, oh, no.

I just waited, patient as a monument, the lighter in my hand; and when he’d done the polite for long enough, Thom came back to me. He shifted form in a moment, balancing briefly, gratefully, bright and burning on the Zippo’s wick before I snapped it shut.

And held it – him – in my hand, hot and reassuring as I turned back to the boys where they stood waiting. Maybe I’d think of them as willing patient rescuers, maybe I could do that; it would surely be easier than anything else, everything else that they were.

Had been.

Were.

I said, “Guys, I love you both, and I’m really grateful because we really needed you and you came, and we’d be dead if you hadn’t” – which was all obvious but needed saying none the less, willing patient rescuers need to hear these things – “only we’re not done yet.” Obviously we weren’t done. Oz was still in his lair and still in a killing temper, and now there were four of us he’d be coming for; which actually wasn’t what I meant at all. “Or rather I am, I’m done for a bit.” Even my Aspect was barely holding me up against the lingering feel of fog in my bones, the chill of it in my blood that all the heat of Hell couldn’t quite bake out, the woozy unbalance in my head. I couldn’t fold myself into a flame and tuck myself away in a handy brass case and slurp petrol till I felt better, but, “I need somewhere to lie down” –
alone for once
– “and something to eat when I get up again, and there are three ways I can think to make that happen, but they all start the same way, us getting out of here and back to the bike.”

Jacey looked at Jordan; Jordan looked at me. And nodded, and didn’t noticeably do anything else, but there was a queasy kind of jolt in the world around us and we were back on the moor and the bike was right there and I did manage not to throw up but that was absolutely as much as I could manage.

Jacey did better, shaking his head, bringing his hand up to his nose, saying, “Brother, you really need to practise that. Alone. I think I’m bleeding.”

Jordan’s lips quirked, but he didn’t say anything. Didn’t look away from me.

I said thanks, and then I said, “Okay. One bike, three of us. Three ways to go. One, I just take the bike and leave the two of you to sort yourselves.”
And don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t want to. I love you both, and I’m helluva grateful, and right now I’d be delighted to drive off and leave the pair of you in the middle of this suddenly sunlit moor.
They didn’t react, so I smiled for them, a little dizzily, and went on. “Only I don’t think that’s a very good idea, because I’m really not feeling on top of things right now, or I would probably have done it by now. So two, Jacey drives me” –
me and Thom
, but let’s not complicate anything more than it is complicated already – “and Jordan makes his own way.”
Jordan can go to Hell
, in other words, and I was fairly sure he’d have ways to get around when he was there. If nothing else, he could always call his dad. And like Jacey said, he could use the practice, going to and fro. Which I very carefully didn’t say. I just held his eye and didn’t stop talking. “Or three, we all three of us” –
all four of us
– “squash onto that lovely big bike, which I’m fairly sure is all manner of illegal as well as uncomfortable as well as unsafe, and whichever of you is the better driver” –
that would be Jacey,
but I didn’t say that either – “takes us slowly and carefully and I don’t care where, just so long as it is somewhere else than here and there is a bed. Because that’s what I need, and I need it now.”

Be patient, be willing. Rescue me again. Please?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

S
OMETIMES, BOYS CAN
still surprise me.

Looking back, actually thinking it through, I could hardly have said anything worse: anything better designed to stir up old memories and new rivalries, challenge their young-men’s egos and set them at each other’s throats.

And yet, and yet. Sometimes, even when everything else is going spectacularly badly, when the whole clumsy edifice of your life is crashing down around you and all your worst mistakes are rising up right there in your face to damn you – even then, something can just go right.

It was right that I went to Jacey when I needed him, and right that I called him when I did. It was right that he went to Jordan, that the two of them came up like the cavalry to rescue me. Afterwards I could have just gone off, me and Thom, it was terribly tempting, but I was right not to do that. The boys could have fought over me like dogs for a bone; it was absolutely right that they didn’t.

Patiently, willingly, they steered me towards the bike. If they spoke aloud at all, I don’t remember it. I don’t usually like being manhandled – without a positive invitation, at least – but right then I was grateful. I just wanted to give myself over to someone else for a change, to be rescued, yes: and they’d been elected, and they rose admirably to the task.

Jacey picked up the crash-hat and clamped it firmly over my head. It was still warm. It probably smelled of Jordan, or at least of whatever costly body-wash he’d used that morning – princes of Hell don’t sweat, but they do absolutely pamper themselves – only the dust and the heat and the fog and the aftershock and the exhaustion were all coming between me and my regular awareness of the world. I could hardly stand, I was just a puppet tied to my Aspect’s apron-strings; I couldn’t smell a thing.

I missed it, but only in that distant, distancing way: how you’re aware that things are missing when you’re almost utterly gone yourself. Jacey swung his leg over the bike and settled in with no discussion. I looked at Jordan, not knowing what came next, right out of the loop telepathy-wise; they must’ve switched to a different frequency, no girls allowed.

He cocked his head on one side, said “You’re not going to manage by yourself, are you?” – and lifted me astride the bike, casual and easy, as if I were a little kid.

Time was – until just a couple of days ago, actually – I could’ve taken Jordan with one hand tied behind my back and no Aspect anywhere in reach. I still had to look down to find him, I still outweighed him in a purely mortal way, the physical matter of us. Everything else had changed radically. He’d passed a landmark, and come into his own; we were standing in his place of power. And to be fair, I couldn’t have resisted a strand of wet spaghetti just then; and to be fair, it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference if I’d been revving as hard and hot as that bike, he could still have picked me up and done whatever he liked with me.

That felt weird, or would have done if I’d been up to feeling anything. As it was, I stored it away to feel weird about later. For now I just let it happen, the way sleeping people let the world carry on without them.

Jordan almost had to settle my arms around Jacey's waist for me, almost. Did say “Hold on tight,” as if I were an even littler kid than before.

I still didn’t know what was happening, if we were leaving Jordan or not; only then he swung aboard behind me, and reached over to slap Jacey’s shoulder in that traditional off-you-go gesture. Well, I guess it was his bike; he was still captain, Jacey was just the pilot.

Jordan’s a scrawny little thing, and even so three of us was a squash. I was the meat in a male sandwich, squeezed between one boy and another, and I didn’t mind a bit. Given that one had hunted me for years and the other had threatened to kill me such a little time before, I felt bizarrely safe. Even once we started bumping slowly over moorland in search of a road that might lead anywhere, even then. They felt rock-solid, pillars of reassurance, just absolutely right.

Thom was a warm spot still clenched in my hand, and that was right too.

I didn’t really need my Aspect any more, but I kept it on anyway, if only because I was too tired to be bothered to do the other thing.