Pandaemonium (33 page)

“Asher used to have a good try at it,” I said. And then hated myself, of course, for picking at a wound so fresh.

Jordan didn’t blink. Maybe he didn’t need to any more, maybe closing his eyes had become something voluntary, something he should learn to do for society’s sake. He said, “Yes, but did he ever get there?”

“Fair point,” I said, stubbornly not backing off in the face of that stare. If I’d put one foot in it, I might as well add the other. “Maybe he was just drunk on company, having a good time without benefit of alcohol. Drinking for the hell of it, because he liked the taste or couldn’t dump the habit. I don’t know. Let’s go and find out, shall we? Let’s walk,” I added, up on my feet to give a good example. “Walking’s good, when you feel this crappy.” You don’t actually have to look at each other, when you’re walking along together. Sometimes that makes it easier to talk.

“Gets the blood moving,” Jacey agreed. “Those of us who still have any,” with a glance at Jordan: half to goad him, I thought, half to see if he’d giggle.

He didn’t react at all, except to say, “I’ll ask Mrs J for a front-door key,” and quietly disappear.

In his absence, I said, “Jay” – which was totally taking advantage, and I don’t apologise for it; I had to use whatever tiny advantage I could scrape up, caught between these two – “how’s he doing? Seriously? What’s he been like?” He’d seen his brother die and his girl betray him; he’d been bled dry by his parents and reborn as something close to a god, after clinging frantically for so long to his determined humanity; no blame to him if he’d turned suddenly psychotic, though he didn’t seem to have done that. Instead he’d come racing north on a rescue mission, for me. Which was the opposite of betrayal, and I really didn’t understand it.

Jacey shrugged. “I don’t know what he was like before. He’s been avoiding us, remember? For longer than I like to think about. He’s not much like his brother, he’s very quiet; but you would be, wouldn’t you? After all of that?”

Brother, girl, parents. Hell. Oh, yes. Even I’d be quiet for a while.

I was going to say, “So how about you, then, how are you doing?” Because he was being fairly quiet himself and he had his own shocks to process, even if they weren’t quite as traumatic – only then Jordan came back into the room.

Giggling in a kind of frantic silence, doubling over, hugging himself, almost gagging himself in a desperate effort to contain the noise that was trying to overflow him.

I guess we both just stared at him for a moment there. He looked like a teenager, utterly swept up, out of all control. Then I remembered that he actually was a teenager, in a complicated kind of way; and then I came over all grown-up and responsible. Mostly because Jacey was just standing there staring uselessly, starting to giggle himself just at the unexpectedness of it all.

I grabbed Jordan’s shoulders – he was warm under his T-shirt, almost hot, almost Thom-hot: just like Asher used to be, of course – and steered him to the sofa, pushed him down into it, said, “Do I have to hold your head between your knees?” in my best growly voice.

He shook his head, mutely, piteously; and then grabbed a cushion and buried his face in it to muffle the laughter that was so obviously going to come regardless.

Which was at least slightly more grown-up than the other thing, the laddish thing, which would be to sprawl on his back and bellow regardless. I gazed down on him with a kind of exasperated affection – and then surprised myself, at least, by dropping to my knees and putting my arm back around his shoulders, cradling him as best I could in that mutual awkwardness, murmuring private nonsense at him until dry gulping laughter ebbed into snorts and gasps, until finally he lifted his face from the cushion and I could be stern again, just what he needed.

“What in the world was that about, Jay?” Fair dos, one each. I owed him that.

I wasn’t going to get back into the habit of it, though, no. Not with either of them. I was going to stand resolutely outside the habit. Old habits die hard, maybe, but this one was doomed.

His eyes were always his best feature, or at least first among equals. The lazy way is to call them hazel, because sometimes they’re the golden-brown of a hazelnut and sometimes the green of the leaves of the hazel; they vary with the light or with his mood or with the moment. Just then, this unexpectedly close, I could see both green and brown, and a kind of smoky heat that perhaps I was imagining or just carrying over from memories of Hell, and a bright fierce spark of delight that was new and better to see than the fear he used to carry. Never mind that it was inhuman. A mortal human’s eyes would have been wet from all that extremity of laughter, but not his. Not now.

Either he knew that something was missing, or else it was the other thing: his new superior Overworld self didn’t at all understand what had just happened, how he could seem so weak. Either way, there was a twist of bewilderment to his face, just for a moment. Until he opened his mouth to explain, and was suddenly whooping; and stopped, and swallowed drily, and tried again.

“Johnny Depp,” he said, in a kind of strangulated voicelessness, the best he could yet manage.

Our turn to look bewildered. “Try slapping him,” Jacey suggested. “It won’t make any difference to him, but you’ll feel so much better.”

I grinned, and lifted my hand threateningly. His came up to catch my wrist, breathtakingly fast and rock-solid. Even with my Aspect on I couldn’t have shifted a millimetre against that grip, even before the extra finger curled deliberately into place alongside his more regular ones. That finger had been special even when he seemed not to be at all special himself, when he was trying so hard to be and stay a normal boy, that one crucial day short of his eighteenth. Now it was like his hair, worn blatantly, a badge of difference and more, a mark of strength. It was like limestone shifting into granite; I couldn’t have moved before, but I couldn’t imagine anyone, anything moving against this.

Those eyes sparked brighter, and he managed a smile that was nothing to do with hysterics.

I wanted to patronise him absolutely in response, call him a good clever boy and ruffle his soft velvet head.

Actually, this close again, I
really
wanted to ruffle his soft velvet head. But wiser counsels prevailed; if he thought I was patronising him, he might just crush my wrist because he could. If he thought something else – well, I had no clue what he might do, but I didn’t think it would end well for me or any of us.

Better not to let him think anything at all. I said again, “What, then? Jordan?”

“Johnny Depp,” he said again, seeming cold stone sober, eye to eye. And then, “She’s got a, a, shop window dummy, a mannequin, in the corner of her sitting-room. An Auton. Only I think she must have got it from a cinema, from a
Pirates of the Caribbean
display. It’s Johnny Depp got up as Jack Sparrow. The whole damn thing. Costume, wig, the lot. Oh, God...”

And he was off again, releasing me because he needed to wave his hand in a wordless apology as the laughter stole him away.

Jacey and I looked at each other, pointedly. He said, “Maybe we should drive after all? We could keep him pinned between us, hold him up...”
The way we did you
went unmentioned, implicitly there.

I shook my head. “The walk will do him good. He’ll be all right once we get him moving. Briskly. You take one arm, I’ll take the other. Frogmarch him if we have to. Let’s just get him out of here before Mrs J comes to see what’s up.”

Inwardly, I was kind of glad, twice over. If Jordan could still fold up like this, then maybe the boy I’d known wasn’t lost entirely; and conversely, the boy I’d known would never have dared let himself fold up like this. If the new Jordan could be this free, that was nothing but advance.

Either way, it had to be a good thing.

Didn’t it?

I
WOULDN’T HAVE
thought, but Jacey checked that Jordan had the front-door key that we’d sent him for; and promptly took charge of it himself, not trusting this cackling idiot to look after anything so crucial. Then we took an elbow each and steered him out, swiftly and silently, like rescuing a drunk kid from a party before the grown-ups got wind.

Quick-march in the fresh air, and sure enough, Jordan sobered quickly. I wasn’t quite sorry. Not quite.

“Seriously,” he said. “When we get back – or, no, leave it till the morning, but you both need to find an excuse. When we’re handing the room-keys back, just get in there. You need to see it. Johnny Depp in the corner of the room. Really, she ought to have a parrot. I don’t know why she doesn’t have a parrot...”

“I don’t know why you don’t shut up,” Jacey grumbled. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about than one old girl’s obsession.”

“Well, not so much,” I said. “One really old guy’s obsession, that’s not so different.”

“Except that one of them will kill us all, and the other one will only kill one of us from laughing at it, except that actually I might just kill him anyway even if he stops laughing, just for the instant gratification and the retrospective justice of it.”

“You might try.” Jordan’s eyes glimmered in the dusk. The boy I’d known had spent his life running from that inheritance, that power: not afraid, just not wanting it, rejecting it and all that it implied. The boy he’d become, this boy seemed to revel in it. As his brother had, as Jacey did. It would be hard, I suppose, not to do that, one way or another. Jacey took it for granted, his birthright, he’d never known anything else and never seen the world another way. Jordan was – of course! – more complicated, and more abrupt. However much you didn’t want a thing, I guess it’s hard not to welcome it when strength comes surging through your body and the future opens up, limitless and free, while you’re still young.

Before the boys could get into something laddish that would either exclude me altogether or else leave me feeling even more morose, I said, “You know, I haven’t the first idea where we are.”

That’s what comes of keeping your eyes closed while someone else does the driving. They spoke in unison to tell me, but I wasn’t much better off: a village that I’d never heard of, on the fringes of a town I barely had. Okay.

I cast a glance up at the glooming sky. “What do you reckon the odds are that Oz knows, though? Where we are?”

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Jacey said. Jordan didn’t have the betting habit, or not yet; he just grunted agreement.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought, too. If he can follow Horse, I’m sure he could follow fog-feller, or his spies could.” I cast a suspicious eye at pigeons on a roof-ridge, starlings on a wire, the sudden shadow of a seagull dropping onto a street-lamp. I didn’t trust that one at all. I might not know where we were, but I had a vague sense how far the sea should be. And my head was full of pirates: were-pirates, now. Of course they’d transform into seabirds. Maybe it wasn’t a seagull at all, maybe it was an albatross. How would I know?

I shivered and reached out before I thought, tucked an arm through a boy’s each side of me. Which I couldn’t have done if they hadn’t already been walking that way. I don’t know if it was consciously protective or arrogant or accident or what, but in that unthinking moment I was nothing but grateful. My body was still heavy and laggard, and the last thing I wanted was a fight, because the next-to-last thing I wanted was to reach out for my Aspect. I wanted food and beer and maybe a bit of future planning. If that came with some awkward talking and a bit of attitude-adjustment, so be it. Awkward I could deal with, even if my notion of dealing came down to
Please, can we not talk about that now?

I reached, I tucked; both boys reacted. A moment’s stiffness that I felt beneath my fingers like a sort of choreographed mutual stumble, a glance at each other – which would’ve been over my head except that Jordan’s shorter than I am, so he had to peer around me, so I knew – and then they locked step and fixed bayonets and marched steadily towards the sound of gunfire.

Well, no, but they both stared straight ahead and walked forward and I swear they both grew hotter under my hands as all the blood rushed to their skins. Well, all of Jacey’s, and whatever it is that Jordan has instead of blood these days and never mind that he was hot already, I still say he got hotter. The same way that he was quiet already and grew quieter. Apparently someone who isn’t saying anything can still lapse into silence, deeper and more private than before.

I sighed internally, and kept a stubborn grip of both their arms, though I felt suddenly like a magnet with its poles the wrong way round, being repelled from both sides equally.
Please
, their bodies were saying,
can we not do this now?

Too bad. I had them both and I wasn’t letting go. Apart from anything else, I might just grind to a halt in the middle of the street there. Equipoised between pub and bed, sans oomph to make it either way.

I thought about it for another dozen steps and then decided to say so, more or less, since the telepathy obviously wasn’t working any more, me-to-them.

“Another time,” I said, “I’ll send the two of you off together on your own, and you can do the male bonding thing over the pool table or whatever, and eat crisps and talk about me as much as you want to, and I don’t even care where that leads. Right now, I’m sorry but you have to carry me along with you. I need this.
This
.” With a little tug at each elbow, to be sure that they understood. “I need you, the pair of you. Are we clear?”