Well done, you.”
“I’m not his — ” Mal began wearily.
“Dear,” said the androgyne, all seriousness, “I’m Ometeotl. I know opposites, I know what complements what, and I know other halves. You’re his. I can tell at a glance.”
“No, really.”
“You’re everything he is not. He is everything you’re not. You define each other as sea defines land, and between you is the beautiful friction that can only come when equal and opposing forces meet, like the crash and tumble of surf on a shore. I’m so glad you’ve both volunteered to join the fight. It’s a sign — an encouraging one. Two humans who are oneness in duality. Couldn’t be more apt.”
Ometeotl let go of them and bustled onward to another table, where food awaited to be pounced on and devoured.
Mal couldn’t look Reston in the eye, and vice versa.
More of the gods entered, but these ones, unlike Ometeotl, were footsore and battle-weary. They filed past, giving Mal and Reston looks that ranged from curious to hostile. None spoke to them save Mictlantecuhtli, who leaned in close and intoned, “Quetzalcoatl has extended his protection to cover you both. That is the thing that is keeping you alive for this heartbeat, and this one, and this one” — he snapped his fingers in time — “and it is the only thing. Do not make me regret my consent to abide by the Plumed Serpent’s wishes and my suppression of the urge to slay you where you sit. By which I mean, do not let us down in the field of combat tomorrow and be the weak link that breaks the chain. Or then, truly, you will know the Dark One’s ire.”
From anyone else, threats of this order would have brought a sharp retort to Mal’s lips and possibly an invitation to step outside. But she had seen Mictlantecuhtli in action, and there was nothing in his face but hard, implacable menace. It radiated off him in invisible waves. He was an abyss, everything that was hopeless and pitiless in the world, everything that was despairing and brutal. She had seen eyes like his on stone-cold killers and also on their victims, but in neither case as chilling or as dead.
“Told you,” Reston said after Mictlantecuhtli had moved on. “Next to him, Xipe Totec’s a teddy bear.”
“I heard that!” the Flayed One called out through a mouthful of chilli pepper gruel. “Watch your tongue, human.”
Mal was feeling deeply uncomfortable and eager to leave. She’d never been in a room where she was so obviously unwelcome, not even as a Jaguar when raiding a suspect’s home or rousting a cell of heretics. Just as she was about to get up to go, however, in came Quetzalcoatl himself. A hunched, dwarfish little creature lolloped along at his side. Xolotl, she presumed.
With little preamble Quetzalcoatl launched into a speech.
He gave an assessment of how the siege had gone so far. “According to plan — but plans have a nasty habit of falling apart, with little warning.”
He congratulated his fellow gods on their martial prowess and on the vast differential in the casualty totals on either side. “Two of us have fallen, and that is two too many, and I mourn the sacrifice that Mixcoatl and Coyolxauhqui have made. But their loss is all the more reason to persist and prevail.”
He advised everyone to take advantage of this pause in their assault. “Rest, recuperate, and prepare yourselves for a resumption of hostilities at first light.”
Finally he drew attention to the two new additions to their ranks. “They represent the determination and forthrightness of this race that we have come to cherish. In siding with us, they prove their own worth and the worth of our cause. They are the best of their kind.”
“Which isn’t saying much,” griped Xipe Totec.
“And that makes them the equal of any of us,” Quetzalcoatl continued, staring hard at his heckler. “Their comparative physical shortcomings aside, they have heart, and heart is what counts.”
Ometeotl cheered and clapped loudly. No one else did.
“’Til tomorrow, then,” Quetzalcoatl concluded. “’Til the end.”
Mal and Reston were assigned separate but adjacent rooms for the night, featureless, bare-necessities spaces like belowdecks cabins on an oceangoing freighter. Mal settled down on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. She was beyond exhausted. It had been an extraordinary day as well as a long and arduous one. Was it only this morning that she had been woken by the phone call from Mixquiahuala Jaguar HQ? A few hours and a lifetime ago. Now Aaronson was dead and Reston was, against all odds, an ally and not an enemy any more. Her whole world had been turned upside down and inside out. Everything was wrong and yet somehow right. She felt as though she was a riddle she’d always believed she knew the solution to, only to discover that the true solution was something else altogether.
To cap it all, tomorrow she was going to be part of a brigade of gods — gods! — attacking the home of another god with a view to ending him and his Empire. The same Empire she’d served loyally and indefatigably for nigh on a decade.
Little wonder that, for all her numbing fatigue, she couldn’t sleep.
Eventually she got up.
She touched the door to her room and it vanished.
Keyed to my own bio-data. And it just pops out of existence. There’s another thing to keep the old brain awake and racing.
She padded barefoot down the corridor to the next room.
Hesitated a hundred times about knocking, then knocked.
Then that door vanished too, and there stood Reston, in just his underpants. A well muscled torso, with just the right amount of chest hair nestled between his pectorals.
Dammit.
“Can’t sleep,” she said.
“Me either. Should. Can’t.”
“Can I come in?”
“Shouldn’t. Can.”
She did.
They stood apart but facing, within reach of each other.
She put a hand on his forearm.
He moved the arm so that her hand fell into his.
“Ought we?” she said.
He nodded. “Ought. Will.”
She took a step towards him. “You’re still a smug dickhead, Reston. Know that.”
“Stuart,” he said.
“Mal.”
THIRTY-TWO
4 Flower 1 Movement 1 House
(Friday 21st December 2012)
Stuart lay stroking the hair of the maddening, mesmerising woman who lay snuggled against him. Her cheek was against his chest and she was snoring ever so slightly.
He cast his mind back to the previous night and smiled. Vaughn — Mal — had proved to be an energetic, enthusiastic lover. No surprises there. What had taken him aback was her overwhelming need, like the hunger of the starving. He had responded in kind, and there had been that sort of tough tenderness, that gentle greed, which typified the best lovemaking. The two of them had slotted together, fitted together, in a way Stuart had never experienced before. Not even with Sofia had he known the same mutual rightness or the same instinctive synchronisation. Barely speaking, communicating almost entirely through their bodies, he and Mal had brought each other to a climax that was gloriously gratifying. Mind-blowing, in fact. A moment of ecstasy that had erased all thought and ego, leaving no room inside him for anything other than itself. After that, sleep had come crashing over
