down below us ...'
'It's a defensive emplacement. The French got serious about that in the early '60s, before the treaty arrangements got nailed down. You're standing on a discordance node, one of a belt of sixteen big ones designed to protect the east coast of Saint Martin against necromantic incursions. If you swim through it, any thaumaturgic bugs they've planted on you will be wiped — it's a huge occult degaussing rig. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here.'
'But if it's a defensive emplacement, how come the zombies up at — ' I bite my tongue.
'Exactly.' She looks grave. 'That's part of what's wrong here, which is the other thing I want to check out. About four months ago one of our routine geomantic surveillance flights noticed that the defensive belt was — not broken, exactly, but showed signs of tampering. One of Billington's subsidiaries, a construction company, landed the contract to maintain the concrete ballast units. Do I need to draw you a diagram'
Here we are surrounded by ocean, and my mouth is dry as a bone. 'No. You think somebody's running a little import/export business, right'
'Yes.'
I take a deep breath. 'Anything else'
'I wanted to get you alone, with no bugs.'
'Hey, you only had to ask!' I grin, my heart pounding inappropriately.
'Don't take this the wrong way.' She smiles ruefully. 'You know what would happen if — '
'Only kidding,' I say, abruptly nervous. The conversation is veering dangerously close to territory I'm uncomfortable with. I look at her — correction: I force my eyes to track about thirty degrees up until I'm looking at her face. She's watching me right back, and I find I can't help wondering what it would be like to ... well. Sure she's attached to a level three glamour so tight you'd need a scalpel to peel it off her, but I can probably cope with whatever's underneath it, I think.
Her daemon is something else again, but there are things we could do, without intercourse ... but what about Mo? My conscience finally catches up with my freewheeling speculation.
Well, what indeed? But the thought drags me back down to Earth after a fashion. I manage to get my worst instincts under control then ask: 'Okay, so why did you really bring me out here'
First, I need to know: Why the fuck did you go rushing off to Anse Marcel '
The question hits me like a bucket of cold water in the face. 'I, I, I wanted to check something out,' I stutter. It sounds lame. 'Last night, I was inside Marc's head. He was going to — ' I trail off.
'You were inside his head'
'Yes, and it wasn't a nice place to be,' I snap 'You were inside — ' She blinks rapidly. 'Tell me what you picked up'
'But I thought you knew — '
'No,' she says tightly. 'I didn't know it went that far.
This is as new to me as it is to you. What did you learn?' I lick my lips. 'Marc had an arrangement. Every couple of weeks he'd pick up a single female who wouldn't be missed and he'd — let's not go into that. Afterwards he'd drop a geas on her, a control ring he'd learned from the customer, and he'd drive her up to Anse Marcel where a couple of guys would come in on a boat to pick the victim up. They paid in coke, plus extras.'
'Ri-ight.' Rarnona pauses. 'That makes sense.' I can feel it snapping into place in her mind, another part of a lethal booby-trapped jigsaw puzzle she's trying to solve. I realize in the silence between heartbeats that we've stopped pretending.
It feels as if some huge external force is pushing us together, squeezing us towards intimacy. She gave me an opening to pretend that I wasn't involved, and I didn't take it. But why?
I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing; maybe the tropical clime's addled me.
'What part of the picture does it fit?' I meet her gaze. I have the most peculiar feeling that I'm watching myself watching her through two pairs of eyes.
'Billington's diversified into a variety of fields. You shouldn't think of him as simply a computer industry mogul.
He's got his tentacles into a lot more pies than Silicon Valley.'
'But kidnapping? That's ridiculous! It can't possibly be cost-effective, even if he's selling them off for spare parts.' I swallow and shut up: she's broadcasting a horrible sense of claustrophobic dread, fear rising off her like a heat haze. I shuffle, grounding my feet against the concrete defense platform, and for a moment her skin acquires a silvery sheen.
'What is it? Is he — '
'You know better than to say it aloud, Bob.'
'I was afraid that was what you were trying to tell me.' I look away, towards the breakers foaming across the reef and the open seas beyond. And it's not just her sense of dread anymore.
Some types of invocation need blood, and some require entire bodies. Whatever lives in the back of Ramona's head is a trivial, weak example; the creature I ran across in Santa Cruz and Amsterdam three years ago was a much more powerful one. Ramona is afraid that we're dealing with a life-eating horror that lives off the entropy burst that comes from draining a human soul: I'm pretty sure she's right. Which means the next question to ask is, who on Earth would summon such a thing, and why? And as I'm pretty sure we know the answer to who ...
'What's Billington trying to do? What is he summoning up'
'We don't know.'
'Any guesses?' I ask sarcastically. 'The Deep Ones, maybe'
Ramona shakes her head angrily. 'Not them! Never them.' The sense of dread is choking, oppressive: she feels it personally, I realize.
I stare at her. That flash of silver again, the water lapping around her chest, drawing my eyes back towards those amazingly perfect breasts — I fight to filter out the distraction.
This isn't me, is it? It's hard work, fighting the glamour. I want to see her as she really is. Taking a deep breath I force myself back to the matter in hand: 'What makes you so sure the Deep Ones aren't behind him? You're holding out on me.
Why'
'Because they don't think that way. And yes, I am fucking holding out on you.' She glares at me, and I can feel her wounded pride and defensive anger fighting against something else: Concern? Worry? 'This is all going wrong. I brought you out here so I could tell you why you're being kept in the dark, not to pick a fight — '
'And here I was thinking you wanted me for my body.' I hold my hands up before she has time to swear at me: 'I'm sorry, but have you got any idea just how bloody distracting that glamour is?' It's amazing and frightening and beautiful, and it makes it a real bitch to try to concentrate on a conversation about subterfuge and lies without wondering what horrors she's concealing from me.
Ramona stares at me, until I can feel her inside my head, watching herself through my glamour-ensnared eyes. 'Okay, monkey-boy: you want it, you got it.' Her voice is flat and hard. 'Just remember, you asked for it.'
She lets go of the anchor of the glamour she's been clinging on to. The constant repulsive force emanating from the concrete countermeasure emplacement we're standing on blows it away, like a hat in a hurricane — and I see Ramona as she truly is. Which gives me two very big surprises.
I gasp. I can't help myself. 'You're one of them!' I meet her clear emerald gaze. And, quietly: 'Wow.'
Ramona says nothing, but one perfect nostril flares minutely. Her skin has a faint silvery iridescent sheen to it, like the scales of a fish; her hair is long and green as glass, framing a face with higher cheekbones and a wider mouth, rising from an inhumanly perfect long neck, the skin broken by two rows of slits above her clavicle. Her breasts are smaller, not much larger than her nipples, and two tinier ones adorn her rib cage beneath them. She raises her right hand and spreads her fingers, revealing the delicate tracery of webbing. 'So what do you think of me now, monkey-boy'
I swallow. She's like a sculpture in quicksilver, created by inhuman sea-dwelling aliens who have taken the essence of human female beauty and customized it to meet their need for an artificial go-between who can walk among the lumpen savages of the arid continental surfaces. 'I've met half — sorry, the sea-born — before. At Dunwich. But not like, uh, you.
