The Administration Series (55 page)

Toreth backed away. "No, thanks."

"He hasn't got fleas or anything like that."

"I believe you. They wouldn't be able to stand the smell. Where the hell did it come from?"

"He was waiting by the door when I got home from work on Monday. I've asked around the building and no one knows who he belongs to. Apparently he's been hanging around for ages, poor thing. I think he must have wandered away from home and got lost."

"Or its owners moved to get away from it."

"Don't be so horrible. I think he's lovely."

"I think you're completely fucking insane. It's repulsive. What's it called?"

"Dunno. I haven't chosen anything yet. Come on, stroke him. Say hello."

Dubiously, Toreth reached out in the general direction of the thing's head, hoping that a quick pat would be sufficient to satisfy her. Ears flattening, the cat lashed out and opened a set of four neat parallel cuts from his wrist to his knuckles. By the time they started to bleed, the cat was back in its original position in Sara's arms, yellow eyes fixed on him. The purring revved up a gear.

"Fucking
hell
! You fucking evil
bastard
!"

"Oh, dear." Sara hugged the cat. "You must've frightened him."

He licked his hand and the blood welled up again at once. The scratches were surprisingly painful. "Does it
look
frightened?"

"He's never done that to me."

"So now it's
my
fucking fault that it's psychotic?"

And, from her expression, it was. But all she said was, "You should go and wash that."

"Really? I thought I'd just stand here until I died of blood poisoning."

Sara put the cat down. "Go on. I'll get dressed; we don't want to miss the start of the play."

Put that way, being maimed by the cat didn't seem so bad.

In the bathroom, Toreth ran water over his hand, watching the faint wisps of blood vanish away into the drain. A couple of minutes later Sara appeared, wearing a rather eyecatching red dress and carrying a bottle of disinfectant and a large drink.

"I'm sorry," she said. "He just needs some love and proper attention, that's all."

"It needs putting down. Ouch! Watch what you're doing with that stuff."

Sara slopped more disinfectant over his hand. "Then stop saying things like that. I tell you what, you can choose a name for him."

"What?"

"To make up for the scratches. You can choose his name."

He sipped the whiskey while he thought it over. Since she was feeling guilty, it would be a shame to waste the opportunity by choosing Fluffy, or whatever the fuck people called their cats.

"Got it," he said eventually. "You Fucking Evil Bastard."

"No!" Sara looked gratifyingly appalled. "I can't call him that."

"You said I could choose. So I'm choosing." Toreth downed the remains of the drink. "You Fucking Evil Bastard. Might as well let people know what's coming. You can call it Bastard for short."

The play was better than Toreth had expected. He didn't pay attention to the plot. Instead he watched the actors. He liked masks. It was entertaining trying to read the casts' real feelings towards each other underneath their assumed emotions. About three-quarters of an hour in, he could feel Sara shifting next to him, bored. He leaned down and whispered, "The lead's fucking the woman in the purple dress. What do you think?"

After a couple of minutes he heard her giggle. "Yeah. And the guy in blue isn't happy about it."

Toreth hadn't noticed that, but a few minutes' observation convinced him she was right. Sara was good at spotting that sort of thing. He'd told her a few times that she should apply for a late entry into the investigator training programme. She said she was happy doing what she did, which was fair enough. But in all honesty she was wasted there, however much easier she made his life. Warrick had said the same thing after he'd met her, although he wouldn't —

Toreth realised where the thought had ended up and squelched it. He checked his watch. Only five minutes until the interval.

The bar and foyer were crowded. By making a rapid exit, Toreth managed to get a drink for himself and Sara before the horde descended, but they finished them quickly and he wished he'd bought two each. Perhaps Sara would agree to skip the second half and they could move to a more usual birthday venue.

Looking round the room, Toreth assessed the crowd. Mostly middle-aged and solidly respectable citizens. Here and there were groups of corporate types on an evening out. Plenty of money around, anyway.

He wondered which one of Sara's friends had bought tickets and been able to afford to give them away. He thought back to the last office event but the only details he could summon for her escort that evening were that he had sandy hair and an annoyingly nasal voice. Rich, though, or at least rich enough to keep Sara's semi-exclusive interest. He ought to ask her if he was the one who'd funded this evening.

Then he saw Warrick.

Toreth was slightly surprised by how easily he picked him out of the crowd, even with his back towards them. He stood with a group of people Toreth thought might be from SimTech. One arm rested casually around the shoulders of a dark-haired woman standing next to him and he had his face half-turned towards her, listening. His arm rested comfortably, familiarly, over her shoulder and Toreth felt a twist of something tight and angry in his gut.

"Who are you looking at?" Sara asked, then followed his eyes. "Oh, hey."

"Don't —" Toreth said, too late.

"Hey! Warrick!" Sara followed up with a whistle, which attracted the attention of Warrick and a fair proportion of the rest of the immediate area. Solidly respectable lips thinned in disapproval.

Warrick looked round, lifted a hand in acknowledgement, said something to the group, and then turned towards them. Toreth glared at Sara and made dire silent threats about her next performance assessment.

"Well, this is a surprise," Warrick said as he walked up.

Toreth wasn't quite sure what to say, but Sara, naturally, had no such qualms.

"Hello, Warrick," she said brightly. "You're looking good."

Warrick bent to kiss Sara's cheek. At the last moment she turned her head to catch it full on the mouth. She developed the kiss into something rather more than was socially required before Warrick broke it off.

"Very nice to see you again, too. You look beautiful. I should call —"

He looked over his shoulder, but the woman he'd been with was already approaching. Seeing her properly now, Toreth felt his mouth drop open slightly.

"Ah! You're here." Warrick stepped aside a little to make room for her. "Come and meet the inestimable Sara, who may or may not possess a last name. And this is Val Toreth."

The woman returned Toreth's's gaze with frank interest, while Toreth tried to slam his brain back into gear. "Delighted to meet you," she said. "Both of you."

Warrick gave the situation a moment to develop before finishing the introduction. "And this is Dillian Avens. My sister."

Of course, Toreth thought. She couldn't possibly have been anyone else.

Sara chuckled. Warrick raised an eyebrow.

"You're very alike," Sara said, which Toreth knew full well wasn't the reason she'd laughed.

Dillian smiled politely. "So we've been told."

Looking between them, the resemblance was startling in detail, but oddly less compelling in overall effect. They had the same dark eyes and thick dark hair, the same sharp cheekbones and chiselled mouth. The main difference was in their noses. Dillian's was a petite tip-tilt, which he was ninety-five percent sure owed more to a skilful surgeon than a lucky divergence of genes. They were also much of a height, Dillian being only a couple of centimetres shorter, and her voice was low for a woman's, dark and rich. Yet, all features taken together, he was undoubtedly masculine, and she feminine. It was an odd effect, which Toreth found triggered some arresting and hard-to-ignore images.

Too fast to be censored, the questions flickered through his mind. Would she taste like Warrick? Smell like him? Would her hair feel like his? Would she scream like he did when she came? All the things he hadn't been thinking about jostled for his attention, escaping into consciousness now that this excuse had presented itself.

Toreth realised he had been staring at them for the best part of a couple of minutes. Warrick was occupied in talking to Sara, but Dillian was looking back at him with a sharp, assessing intelligence which also reminded him of Warrick. When she caught his eye, she smiled, and it was exactly Warrick's cool smile. She held his gaze until Warrick touched her shoulder.

"Would you like a drink, Dilly? The crowd's thinned out a bit."

"Please."

"I'll get one, too," Sara said. "Toreth?"

"What? Oh, yes."

The two of them headed over to the area where the wooden front of the bar made a sinuous curve across the plushly carpeted room, leaving Toreth and Dillian alone.

"So," Dillian said, after a slightly awkward pause, "Keir told me you met during the business at the Centre?"

For a moment the familiar name threw him, then he nodded. "I was in charge of the investigation, yes."

She shuddered delicately. "A horrible thing to happen. Awful for Keir."

As understatements went it was fairly comprehensive, so he changed the topic. "What do you do?"

"I'm a structural engineer, specialising in low-gravity, sealed environments." She laughed at his expression. "I've never understood why that should come as such a surprise to people, but it does."

He smiled in response. "It's because structural engineers aren't usually so . . . prepossessing."

Warrick and Sara joined one of the queues for the bar. She looked back across the room. As she'd expected, Toreth looked hypnotised by Dillian. She could appreciate the fascination. Knowing Warrick only slightly, as Sara did, his sister was still a fairly interesting sight.

"How are you enjoying the play?" Warrick asked.

She looked round. "Boring as fuck," she said candidly.

Slight smile. "Then you're doing it wrong, because the play is very tedious."

She laughed. "Boring as not fucking, then."

"Mm. I'm sorry I spoiled your evening, but Dilly wanted to see it."

"And Dilly always gets what she wants?"

The question came out with more of an edge than she had intended, but Warrick didn't seem to mind, or didn't even notice. "Probably more than is good for her. However, in this case I felt like indulging her. We don't get to see each other very often — she's only on Earth for a few months this time, then she's off to Europa to build something else. Besides, this was the best venue I could think of. The most plausible, if not the most entertaining, I'm afraid."

Sara waved the apology away. "I don't mind. As long as it puts
him
in a better mood."

"Better mood?"

"Christ, yes. He's been in a strop for days, which I expect is all your fault."

Warrick smiled ruefully. "Possibly."

"Yeah, well, you should think about other people for a change. He's being an utter bastard at work."

"Oh? I thought that was his job."

"Being one to me isn't, no."

"Mm."

That seemed to mark the topic closed. Sara began to wonder exactly what Warrick was hoping to get out of the evening. This had seemed like such a promising plan when Warrick had proposed it, the objective being, she'd thought, to get them back in bed together and consequently make her life better.

She realised that she wasn't even sure why they needed getting back together at all. Warrick had said . . . no, actually, she'd
assumed
that they'd had some kind of row which had interrupted their exotic round of simming and fucking. He hadn't said anything specific at all.

There was something going on that she didn't understand properly, and it worried her.

She looked back across the room. Toreth's attitude had shifted from mesmerised to prowling. Dillian watched, smiling broadly, as Toreth related some story that required extravagant gestures with both hands. Then she shook her head and laughed.

Sara nudged Warrick with her elbow. "You ought to be keeping an eye on your sister."

He studied the scene and seemed to find it amusing more than anything else. "Dillian can recognise trouble when she sees it."

"She looks to be having fun to me."

"Oh, no doubt. She's working her way round to asking the two of you to join us for dinner after the play."

"She's in on it, too?"

"Well, I wouldn't say 'in on it', but it occurred to me on the way here that she would be much better at persuading him than I would. If he doesn't agree, the whole exercise will have been a waste of time."

"Why the hell didn't you just call him?"

"I did, if you recall, and he declined to speak to me."

"You could've called him at home." She decided to plumb his motives with a little strategic gossip. "Not that he's there much."

"No?"

"No. As far as I can tell he's been spending all his spare time fucking his way round the city. I get the latest scorecard at morning coffee. The only wonder is that he can still walk."

Warrick merely smiled again. "I shall be sure to bring it up in conversation."

"Don't you dare."

She looked at him closely, wondering if it was worth saying anything more. Almost everything she knew about him came from the case, or from Toreth's colourful accounts of screwing him. Seeing him standing there, cool and self-possessed, most of what she'd heard seemed, to put it mildly, unlikely.

All she knew about him personally was that he'd always been polite when he'd spoken to her at I&I, which said something because not everyone thought it was worth being civil to admins. She'd met him once or twice away from work when he was with Toreth and they'd seemed, well, happy enough, for two people in a relationship comprised entirely of semi-competitive sex.

And, of course, he had gone to the trouble of setting up this silly excuse to see Toreth, including buying the tickets and offering to pay for dinner. Corporate or not, that was a significant investment. There must be something there.