The Neon Court (43 page)

“Why do you care, you hate her, you hate her and you want to kill her!” Tears were building in JG’s eyes, but she kept on staring as if daring anyone to point it out. We realised we were still clinging on to her shoulders and let go, drawing back.

“You are … you are Jabuile Ajaja,” I breathed. “Your older brother, Kayle, tried to … he tried to use you to fuel his own magics and … and Oda found you and killed him … how are you still alive, Jabuile?”

“That’s not my name any more.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not my name it’s not my fucking name!”

“Listen to me!” Blue fired flashed in front of our eyes and for a moment, JG was afraid, afraid of us. I closed my eyes, drew in a shuddering breath. “Listen to me,” I said again, softer. “Please … just listen.” I eased myself off the bed, knelt in front of her, holding her clammy hands in mine. “All you need to do is listen. Oda … your sister … has been hurt. And when she was hurt something moved inside her, tried to possess her. It took her eyes, it took her blood, and it’s taken a lot of lives too. When any of us – me, Penny, anyone – looks in your sister’s eyes, we go blind, and then we die. But when you looked into her eyes, you didn’t. I think even now she’s trying to protect you, keep you safe. I think … whatever part of her is still Oda, not the thing wearing Oda’s flesh, you are our very best chance of talking to it. How did you survive?”

“I … why are you telling me this? What kind of freak are you, telling me this?”

“Name any way of proving it that I haven’t already done, and I’ll do it. Yo u saw, JG, Jabuile, you saw Oda. Is she still your sister?”

“I … I don’t … I didn’t …” Her fists were unclenching. Even Penny’s face was breaking out into something nearing pity.

“Tell me – please, just tell me. What happened to you? With Kayle, with Oda, with everything? What happened?”

“I … he hurt me. He was … was like you” – her lip curled with contempt as she spat the words – “sorcerer, he said, a sorcerer, and you’re a sorcerer …”

“Yeah, and if Matthew is running on blood magics, then it’s really bad PR for the business,” added Penny helpfully, but for all we scowled, it seemed to be enough to push JG on.

“They took me to the hospital,” JG went on, voice wandering through some distant place as she spoke. “When Kayle … he didn’t … he couldn’t do it, couldn’t … do everything he had to do, he hurt me so bad and then … then he stopped and they came and took me to the hospital and the priest was there and he …”

“Priest?” My voice was hard, sharp, she shrank away from it. “What priest?”

“The priest at the hospital. He told me when I woke up that my brother was dead, and my sister killed him. He said the police were
after me, that I was in big big trouble and … I was so scared, he said that nowhere was safe for me and I had to go into protection. He said he’d look after me, keep me safe, but that I mustn’t tell anybody. He got me a new home, looked after me … sort of. I don’t think he liked me. Not ever. All those years and he just said ‘I’ll keep you safe’ and he got me clothes and shit and gave me cash and didn’t care what I did with my friends – I mean, parents are supposed to care, right, they’re supposed to get all mad and he was like a priest, he could have got mad with like bells on – but he didn’t and I guess that was cool but he never … liked me. Saved me and all, but never … They said I couldn’t see her again. Oda. That there were people looking for her, people who …” Her voice trailed off, eyes darting to mine, then to Penny’s. “Who are you? I mean like more than fucking Matthew and fucking Penny, I mean … what’s your beef? What’s in it for you? Are you like the police?”

“No, not really. Hell, it’s not like we’re even big on the goodness and light business, are we Penny? But we’re the guys left awake when everyone else has fallen asleep, so I guess that means we’re the good guys by default.”

“You talk a lot of shit, man.”

Despite ourself, we grinned. “That’s what people tell us. Go on, please. Who was this priest?”

“He said he was a friend of Oda’s. He knew about me and the tower, and stuff, he knew that I like, liked to hang out there. He seemed cool with it. Then one day Oda turned up there, I mean … she just turned up and she was so much older, I mean like, old inside too, but she was still my sister and she said she was going to look after me, look after me for ever and ever and never leave me and she cried, my big sister cried and … and then there was the fire … and men came looking … and I remember running and there was this … this crack in the floor and I was so scared, so scared and then it just … what happened to her?”

“She was hurt,” I replied. “In the fire; she got hurt. JG? This priest … the man who took you from the hospital, took you away … what was his name?”

JG gave a little shrug, small and dismissive. “Father Anton. Why?”

I felt my fingers uncurl, my breath unravel. I stood up slowly, forced
myself to take a breath, then another. “Father … Anton Chaigneau?” I suggested. “White hair, dark skin, big voice?”

JG nodded.

“He took you from the hospital?”

Nodded.

“Knew you’d be in that tower block?”

Hesitation; nod.

We felt like we ought to laugh. It seemed like too much effort.

I fumbled for the door. “Be back in two ticks,” I muttered, opening it and staggering onto the stairwell outside. I made it downstairs by touch and instinct, Penny following a few seconds behind, reached the dining room, the Aldermen all rising as I entered, found a table to prop myself against and sat down with my head in my hands. “Get me,” I growled between the slits in my fingers, “caffeine, aspirin and the psychotic head of a magician-hating institution called the Order.” The Aldermen hesitated. I looked up through my parted fingers. “Guys. I really, really do mean it.”

Penny was at the foot of the stairs. “Anton Chaigneau?” she demanded. “The weird religious-nut guy who told us in a pub by Euston that Oda was doing the dark-power business? He’s … involved?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” I groaned. “I think it’s all starting to make sense. The Order, the Tribe, the Court, the chosen one, Oda … yeah. I think I’m close to cracking this one.”

“Matthew?”

It wasn’t Penny who’d spoken. Bakker was there, standing by the trolley of leftovers, face drawn in tight concern. “What?” I snapped, and then flinched as all eyes turned to me in curiosity. “Caffeine,” I repeated. “Aspirin. Psychotic nut-job. Any time, please.”

“Matthew,” repeated Bakker, voice darker, deeper. “We have to leave this place.”

“All right, wow me!” I scowled. “Why do we have to leave this perfectly civilised place, right, right now?”

“Uh, boss?” mumbled Penny. “You’re kinda talking to yourself now.”

I flapped her into silence. She fumed.

“We’re being observed,” replied Bakker. “At this exact moment, everything that happens here is being watched.”

“I don’t feel it,” I said. “No scrying, nothing.”

Wordlessly, Bakker raised his hand, and pointed at a pile of magazines on the bar. Something inside my chest tried to head for my knees. I got up, walked to the bar, picked up the first magazine on the top of the pile.

Its front-cover headline read:

Eternal Youth – 10 Top Tips!

More cover lines added:

Men – how to keep them hot!!!

5 great romantic get-away ideas, for the budget traveller!

Exclusive interview with the Queen of the Night!!

There was a picture of a woman beneath this title. Her face was lightly obscured with a thin white veil, but that didn’t prevent you seeing beneath it the pale, silk skin, the laughing mouth, the twinkling lilac eyes. I looked at Lady Neon on the front cover of the magazine, and she, indefinably and inescapably, looked back.

I threw it down, marched over to Penny, grabbed her by the sleeve, hissed, “Get JG, we’re going, right
now
.”

“But we …”

“Right now!”

She took the stairs two at a time, slamming the door to JG’s room behind her. I grabbed the nearest Alderman, an Indian-looking woman on a mobile phone, said, “The Neon Court’s coming. We have to go.”

She had the good sense to look afraid, and nodded. “I’ll call the car.”

“Don’t say I can’t be useful, Matthew,” said Bakker easily as I pressed my nose up to the steamy glass of the window.

“Yeah, so far you’ve been a right pleasure,” I growled. “Thanks for the ride.”

Penny reappeared with JG and her token Alderman protector in tow. JG looked mute now, a bundled-up child that had given up trying to pretend to be an adult. Another Alderman opened the restaurant door, ushering us out. We scrambled outside. Rain. The same thick relentless rain that had been falling in Sidcup, that seemed to have been falling for ever. It fell on crumpled cardboard boxes, on stray rotting cabbage leaves and bones that even the rats were too tired now to gnaw on. It dripped off the red arches that closed off either end of Gerrard Street, the hub of Chinatown; ran off the lintels of Georgian houses converted into restaurants, herbalists’, acupuncturists’ and flats
for dozens. The Aldermen wore big black hats and carried umbrellas, shielding JG from the rain like guards around a visiting minister. There was a car, black, engine running, windows tinted, waiting by the fire station, whose banner declared in Cantonese and English the importance of smoke detectors. One Alderman asked another, hushed but not enough, “How does he know that …”

“Magazine,” I snapped, marching towards the waiting car. “Lady Neon was on it, in it. The Neon Court can watch you from any picture bearing their features. You know the phrase ‘its eyes followed me round the room’. That thing.”

We reached the car, yanked the door open. The driver was a professional chauffeur, from his peaked hat down to the tips of his white soft gloves. His eyes were open, his mouth hanging down, drool pooling in one corner. He stared at nothing, fingers gripping the wheel, and did not move. We smelt magic on him, not the thick smothering stuff of Blackout, but something lighter, brighter, and infinitely more persuasive. The bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue shone down on empty sleeping streets, from the roofs above theatre doors and the windows of the cinemas. They shone on double-decker buses that had lost the will to move, on diners in restaurants whose heads had tipped forward into their soup, on overflowing dustbins and the frozen silent faces of Bollywood movie stars pinned to the darkened windows of the video store. The falling lights scampered across the shutters drawn shut over a bureau de change. On the shutters someone had written, in bright green paint:

TOXIK WOZ ERE

The paint was still dribbling downhill, fresh and wet, mingling and thinning in the rain.

They shone on a group of stretch limos, five, hogging the middle of the road and reaching almost round the corner. Most were black. One in the middle was white. The one at the very front was pink. As I watched, the door opened. A girl got out. She had blond hair done in pigtails, and wore not much more than two straps of blue fabric, across those parts the police considered it polite to cover. She looked straight at us and giggled, her left hand held to her mouth, like she was locked in a perpetual battle to not chew her nails. She said, “Mr Mayor? My lady isn’t very happy with you.”

I shuffled back to Penny and JG. More doors opened. Limos, it turned out, could hold surprisingly large numbers of people. They were armed. None of them looked pleased. “You two?” I murmured.

“Yeah?”

“When you run, and yes, we’re going to have to run, don’t go into Soho, don’t go into Leicester Square. They’ll gobble you up like biscuits to a puppy if you do.”

“Who are they?” asked JG.

“Neon Court,” I replied. “They think you’re a chosen one.”

“Uh – what the fuck? Chosen for what?”

“Oh, ending a war, starting a war, being a war, Christ knows. You’re not, if it’s any comfort. Although,” we grinned, a sickly tired grin washed in the stench of humanity, “in an ironic way, you are. Dig that philosophy.”

The white door to the white limo opened.

A white shoe stepped out, half hidden by a white silk hem. Then the rest of the white body. Lady Neon’s veil twisted in the breeze. There were dozens of them, thralls and even a number of daimyos, necks bound in silver, watching us. I eased in front of JG, took a step towards the crowd, smiling my most charming dentist’s smile.

To our surprise, Lady Neon walked towards us, alone. We moved towards her, until just the two of us stood on the tarmac between Aldermen and Court. I felt the water in the pipes below, smelt electricity in the cables overhead, the taste of glass and heat of gas ready to ignite.

We stopped just short of arm’s length apart.

Nothing happened.

Not a pigeon, not a rat.

I licked my lips. “Theydon’s dead.”

Her head inclined a little to one side, like someone trying to recall the name Theydon. If she made the connection, she didn’t care.

“You’re being used,” I added. “This whole chosen one business – you’re being used. There is no chosen one. There never was. It was made up to lead you into a war with the Tribe. You’ve been manipulated. And you’ve walked right into the trap. Hurrah. But I imagine you don’t really care about that, do you?”

She was silent. Then she reached up, and lifted the veil.

The spell hit us hard enough to hurt, got its fingers into our belly and twisted like it was squeezing juice from a lemon. It made our eyes water, filled our ears with the sound of blood, made the veins ache in our head. It said,
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
…

and much more than that, so much beauty that it could do no ill, that nothing other than perfection could come from this face, beauty that bypassed all senses and went straight down to that unknown spark in the soul that talked without using words. It slipped its hooks into our skin, tangled itself in our hair, dripped one nectar drop at a time onto the tip of our tongue. I spoke, and it took every breath I had, every inch of air in my lungs, one word at a time. “Don’t … play silly … buggers,” I wheezed.

She smiled, and the sheer force of the expression, the sheer innocent, joyful playfulness of it, the invitation and the offer, nearly knocked us flat. “Don’t!” we snarled. “We are not … we are not just flesh … not just flesh not just …” Her smile widened. Laughing. Sapphire rage flickered in front of our eyes. “Try and spin one more spell,” we hissed, “try and work one more magic into our skin, and we will teach your blood to burn like oil.”