‘No, it was just holding me. I think they wanted to use me as a hostage and take you.’
‘There’s obviously some conflict at Demon Headquarters. Who is Lord Semias? You recognised the name.’
‘Druid master of a Celestial city. Definitely not someone I expected to be working with demons.’
‘You can tell me more about it when we get home. It appears we have the advantage: he didn’t know how powerful I am. He’s in for an unpleasant lesson if he ever comes to face me himself.’
‘You shouldn’t have intimidated them like that. It might have been better to pretend to be weak and let them take you,’ I said.
‘I was going to, but they hurt you. And when that happens … what’s that English expression? All the bets are cancelled?’
‘All bets are off?’
‘That’s the one.’ He concentrated for a moment. ‘Simone and Leo are fine; the demons targeted you and me. Interesting.’
He pulled me in for a fierce hug, then released me and ran one hand down the side of my face. ‘If I did not have the Jade Emperor’s Edict hanging over me, I would take you home right now.’
I wrapped my arms around him and put my head on his chest. ‘You’re the Darkness That Swallows All, the Celestial Master of the Eight Mysteries. I’m safe while I’m with you.’
‘Nine Mysteries.’
‘Eight. You haven’t mastered Simone,’ I said as we went back to the car.
‘She still confuses the living hell out of me,’ he said.
‘She’s your daughter, that’s her job.’
Simone and Leo came running down the stairs when we walked into the entrance hall.
‘Is Leonard really dead?’ Simone said, distraught.
‘No, he’s alive,’ John said. ‘But the demons here are after us.’
He swayed slightly and put his hand on my shoulder to lean on me.
‘Are you okay, Daddy?’ Simone said. ‘You’re as pale as anything.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, and toppled, nearly pulling me down with him.
Leo caught him before he hit the floor. He held him prone and turned him face up. I put my hand on John’s forehead, then quickly pulled it away. It was freezing cold.
‘Can you take him upstairs without getting burnt?’ I asked Leo.
‘Burnt?’ Simone said.
‘He’s as cold as dry ice,’ Leo said. ‘If I move fast I’ll be okay.’
‘Go.’
Leo glanced at me. ‘Oh, well done, giving an Immortal an order. Now I can’t do it.’
‘Leo, take him upstairs,’ Simone said.
‘Good enough,’ Leo said, and he and John disappeared.
I slapped my forehead with my palm. ‘I keep forgetting.’
‘I never realised how much we relied on you to organise stuff,’ Simone said with humour. ‘I’ll have a serious talk with the Jade Emperor when we’re home. We need you to boss us around.’
‘You manage,’ I said as we went up the stairs to check on John.
Leo was pulling the covers over him when we arrived in the room. John was unconscious, and his skin was so cold that a mist of condensation rose off him.
‘Out cold,’ Leo said, standing back and studying him. ‘In more ways than one. Martin wants to know what happened to get him like this?’ He looked sideways at me. ‘Or do we want to know?’
‘Ew, Leo,’ Simone said.
‘We were attacked by a group of level eighties and he showed off,’ I said. I sat next to him and put my hand on his arm; I could still feel the cold through the blankets. ‘He’s never been this bad before, I hope he’ll be all right.’
‘Martin …’ Leo said, and trailed off, obviously listening. He nodded a few times. ‘Martin says he should be fine, just leave him. This is what exhaustion looks like.’
‘Why is he exhausted?’ Simone said, touching his face. She ran her hand down his cheek, obviously not bothered by the cold. ‘He hasn’t been overdoing it.’
‘In his current state,’ I said, ‘I think he has.’
‘What current state?’ Leo said sharply. ‘Those wounds are healing nicely.’
‘His Serpent’s half-dead.’
‘And this half is feeling it too?’
‘Don’t let it get around,’ I said. ‘Nobody needs to know how weak he is.’
‘Marvellous,’ Leo said. ‘Is he as weak now as he was back then?’
‘No, not nearly,’ Simone said. ‘Being able to take True Form makes a huge difference for him.’
‘Then why doesn’t he do it more often?’
‘Because when he does,’ I said, moving my hand away from the cold cloud over his blankets, ‘he feels exactly what the Serpent’s experiencing and has a powerful urge to go to it.’
‘That bad?’
‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘It’s in terrible pain, burning hot and suffering horribly.’
Simone made a small choking sound and went out.
The street market in Wan Chai was blacked out, all of the electric lights that usually made the stalls daytime-bright gone, and people were using torches and Mid-Autumn Festival lanterns to make their wares visible. The ground was slippery with a wash of blood, and the discarded leaves of vegetables and other rubbish added to the smell of putrefaction. I would need to rinse my scales off after slithering through this filth.
The stallholders were all demons; a collection of misshapen faces with bulging eyes followed my progress through the market. A butcher, his apron covered in blood, merrily used his gigantic cleaver to roughly chop a human arm into bite-sized segments. He scooped the meat into a plastic bag, handed it to a Snake Mother, then scraped his wooden chopping block clean with the chopper, adding to the already large depression in the blood-saturated wood.
I wandered through the stalls, looking for John and Simone and the baby. A mobile phone stall was brilliantly lit, its green and blue flashing lights reflecting eerily off the plastic rain-walls around it. I couldn’t use a mobile phone as a snake; I didn’t have any hands. But I needed to find them, and I needed to find the baby.
I felt the coldness in the air behind me: something really big was approaching. I turned and stopped. A massive dark form, roughly human-shaped, towered over me, at least as tall as the second-storey windows above with their rusting metal signs hanging over the road. I couldn’t move backwards as snake, so I turned and ran, but the dark coldness pursued me, passing through the overhanging signs as if they weren’t there. I rushed through the slippery streets, the dark cold following me.
I gasped in a huge gulp of air and saw the dark shape hovering over the couch I was lying on. I leaped and landed across the room from it in a defensive stance.
‘I’m sorry, I woke you,’ John said.
I relaxed and bent to breathe deeply, resting my hands on my knees. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me.’
He sat on the arm of the couch and fingered the blankets tossed on the cushions. ‘I woke up and you weren’t there. Why are you sleeping in here? Is something wrong?’
I crawled onto the couch and sat cross-legged next to him. ‘You overdid it with those Western demons and passed out. Your skin was so cold that it burned.’
He raised his hand in front of his face and studied it. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. I’m surprised the bed isn’t saturated from condensation.’
‘So that’s what that was. I woke and suddenly I was back to the time when Simone used to creep in with us and wet the bed.’
‘Us? She never crept in with …’ I understood what he was saying. ‘Michelle.’
‘Yes. Michelle was horrified and wanted to take her to a doctor. I tried to convince her that Simone would grow out of it, but she didn’t believe me. She never saw me proved right.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, a light touch. ‘The bed’s dry and warm now and I’m not cold any more.’ He brushed his hand down my arm. ‘Will you come back?’
I snuggled into him and he wrapped his arm around me. ‘Of course.
It’s very comforting waking up next to you when I have bad dreams like that.’
He went still. ‘Bad dreams like what?’
I made my tone light and careless. ‘Oh, the usual thing. Being pursued by demons, being chased.’
‘I didn’t know. I’m making you do too much.’
‘Those sorts of stress dreams are perfectly normal; even people who aren’t snakes dealing with demons have them. At least I don’t have to put up with “naked in public” dreams; in most of them I’m in snake form and it doesn’t matter.’
‘Human brains are very strange.’
‘Hey,’ I said, jabbing him with my finger, ‘I’m not the one who soaked the bedclothes. And Simone would kill you if she knew you told me that.’
He squeezed me. ‘Only if you tell her. Come back to bed. We have a long trip tomorrow.’
‘With pleasure.’
19
I was woken by scrabbling sounds in the ceiling. There was a thump and the light fitting above me rattled, sending a tiny trail of dust onto the bed. I rose, wrapped a robe around me, and trotted up the narrow ladder stairs to the attic. Paul was standing at the door watching as John worked his way through the boxes and suitcases stored there.
‘Here are the posters,’ John said with satisfaction. ‘Where are the …? Never mind, found them.’ He flipped a suitcase open and pulled out a pair of jeans. ‘I do believe I’m bigger in this form. These may not fit me.’
‘You cannot be serious!’ Simone said behind me.
John held the jeans up. ‘They’re still good.’
‘They’re like a metre wide at the bottom,’ she said, horrified. ‘What are they, a relic from the sixties or something?’
‘Early seventies,’ he said. He dropped them and rummaged in the case, then held up a purple and green tie-dyed T-shirt with a large peace symbol on the front. ‘How about this?’
‘What, you’re going to Wales in the guise of an ageing hippie?’ she said with scorn.
Paul looked from Simone to John, then leaned on the doorway, crossed his arms and grinned.
Simone glared at him. ‘What?’
‘Yes,’ John said, pulling out some more T-shirts and a brown suede jacket with fringing along the arms. He glanced up at Paul. ‘Where’s the van? You said it would be here.’
‘They promised it would be,’ Paul said. ‘I told them my job’s at stake if they don’t have it here today. I’ll go check on it.’ He went down the stairs.
‘Did I really wear anything this bright?’ John said, studying a T-shirt in shades of blue and green. ‘This looks like something the Dragon would like.’ He glanced down at the case. ‘Not a single black anything in here. Oh, I remember.’ He smiled up at me. ‘Black jeans weren’t invented yet; I had to make do with blue. I tried dyeing them myself but it just wrecked them. I suppose I can wear the black ones I have now with these T-shirts.’
‘Wait,’ Simone said, holding a hand out towards him. ‘Did you say yes?’
‘Yes, I’m going as an ageing hippie. The demons are looking for a Chinese Dark God of War, his black bodyguard, his half-Chinese daughter and his,’ he looked at me, ‘excuse the term, it’s what they see, not me — his plain-looking fiancée. They won’t be looking for a white ageing hippie, his white ex-boxer turned Buddhist friend, his half-Vietnamese teenage daughter and a gorgeous redhead, all of whom are in Wales to find a magical location for their folk music festival.’
He changed so that he was European, and for a moment his large eyes and big, protruding nose were so out of place that he looked deformed. Then my perception adjusted and he was John again, slightly different.
‘Leo will love being a gorgeous redhead,’ I said.
‘Not Leo, you …’ He saw my face. ‘Very funny.’
‘Can Leo change that much?’ Simone said.
‘He’s been practising with Ming’s help. He can hold it for hours at a time.’ John switched back to his Chinese self. ‘Would you like to try male form to add to the camouflage?’
Simone concentrated and changed into a feminine-looking male version of herself with short, full hair.
‘That absolutely will not work,’ I said. ‘You’ll have hordes of screaming teenage girls following us if you wander around looking like that.’
Simone laughed so hard she lost the shape. She leaned on the wall, unable to breathe, her hand over her eyes. ‘It was the first thing I thought of.’
Paul yelled from downstairs. ‘The kombi van is here, sir.’
‘Good,’ John said. ‘I suppose we should have something to eat and then go. We can work on the cover story as we travel.’ He let his long hair out and tied a tie-dyed bandana around his forehead, then held up a couple of the T-shirts. ‘Pink or purple, Emma? Aren’t the flowers great?’
Simone’s eyes widened. ‘A kombi?’
‘Ageing hippie,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder as he carried an armful of psychedelic T-shirts through the door.
John drove us himself. Leo couldn’t hold the Caucasian shape, stay out of the wheelchair and concentrate on driving all at the same time, so he sat in the back, stiff with tension and trying to distract himself with the newspaper. He’d deliberately made his Caucasian face as ugly as possible, flattening his already broken nose and thickening his features. He covered his speech impediment by removing half his front teeth to finish off the look.
‘The cover story is that we’re looking to set up a UK version of the Burning Man festival,’ John said. ‘We need a large field that’s on a ley line, magically positive, good fung shui, all of that. A stone circle would make it even better.’
‘What do you know about any of that?’ Simone said from the other front seat.
‘Fung shui?’ John glanced sideways at her. ‘You’re really asking me that?’
‘No. Ley lines. Stone circles. Burning Man. That’s Western stuff.’
‘When I was here doing my PhD in the seventies,’ he said, ‘I took a year off and studied the hippie lifestyle. I spent a few months in an ashram in Harrow, then moved to a commune in Dorset.’ He smiled slightly. ‘That was some of my best time here. I didn’t have to be something I’m not, and I learned a great deal about Western energy manipulation. It’s very different to the way we work; they only have four elements. I tried casting a Wiccan circle, and the other members of the commune could actually see it. Fortunately, they thought it was because of the funky smoke in the room. Didn’t try that again.’
‘Oh my god, you really are an ageing hippie,’ Simone said with quiet horror.
‘Tuned in, turned on and dropped out,’ he said with satisfaction. He lowered his voice, becoming serious. ‘There is something you should know.’
She heard his tone. ‘What?’
‘They filled you full of heroin in Angkor.’
She dropped her head. ‘It was horrible.’
He didn’t look away from the road. ‘Because of our nature, we can experiment and control our metabolisms. I’m less worried about you than I would be about an ordinary human.’
‘Are you sure you should be saying things like this?’ I said.
‘Yes. While I was living in the commune, people were experimenting with acid. You know what that is, Simone?’
‘LSD. Yes,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘I’m so powerful, I thought stuff like that shouldn’t have much effect on me. I was wrong.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were working as waiters in the revolving restaurant in the BT tower. One of the other commune members scored a hit of acid on the way there, and shared it with me in the men’s bathroom.’
She glanced sharply at him. ‘You tried acid?’
‘I’ve tried many things, Simone. I’m old and strange and sometimes … bored.’
‘I really don’t think —’ I began.
He interrupted me and continued. ‘When I took it, I saw things. I saw demons. I thought Jory was a demon and so I defended myself. I killed him and blew up half the t
ower.’
‘What?’ Simone said.
‘And I’ve never tried any mind-altering substances since,’ John said. ‘They’re not worth the risk. I suggest that you stay away from things like that as well, particularly after I return your yin. Your own safety isn’t at risk, but those around you could suffer.’
‘I wouldn’t anyway,’ she said, watching the road. ‘I saw things in Angkor as well, things I never want to see again.’
He took his hand off the gear stick and placed it over hers. She turned her hand over and squeezed his.
‘How many died?’ she said softly.
‘Just Jory, and I didn’t even need to cover it up. The police didn’t want to file a missing person report on a hippie who lived in a commune.’ He smiled slightly and shook his head. ‘The IRA claimed responsibility as soon as they heard about it. Everybody believed them; after all, it was a strategic target.’
‘Why were you working as a waiter in BT Tower?’ Leo said from behind the newspaper.
‘Jory told me a Middle Eastern prince with a bunch of gorgeous wives would be there, and I couldn’t miss the chance.’ John smiled, smug. ‘He had to pull his white furry ass up off his chair, kneel and salute a waiter in front of half a dozen of his most class-conscious wives. Shame I didn’t have the Polaroid with me at the time.’
Leo barked a short laugh, then his tone changed to concern. ‘A stone circle disappeared.’ He turned the newspaper around to show us a large photograph of a circle of holes in the ground. ‘This is the third one gone missing this year.’
I tapped the stone. ‘Did you hear that?’
The stone didn’t reply.
‘I swear next time that stone ignores us, I’ll freeze it and take it into orbit,’ John said. ‘It’s becoming more worthless every day.’
‘Cut it some slack, it’s old,’ I said.
‘So am I. I should give you Zara; she’s much more diligent.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Simone said fiercely.
‘I rely on this one,’ I said.
‘But after it dies —’
‘Shut up, Daddy! Jory died and now you say this. I do not believe you sometimes!’ Simone turned away and leaned her forehead on the passenger side window.