Dark Urban Rising Box Set

8. A Long Hard Kiss

8A Long Hard KissIt took a while for Billy to get the processor rigged and booted, so Tazia curled up on the leather sofa under a fleece throw he’d removed from the bed—and from Tracey—to grab a nap. At the same time, he woke the sleeping woman to suggest she go home, “Time to bugger-off, love.” Tazia vaguely heard the exchange and watched through one semi-closed eye as a flounce of blonde locks made its way past her and out the door, then she fell asleep once more.

A little later, the sounds of raised voices infiltrated her dreams and the image of mangled limbs protruding from a cascade of rocks faded sufficiently for her to become aware of her location on Billy's sofa again.

“What the f**k do you mean? You told Dr. Mackenzie that I wanted to shag…” Billy’s voice became muffled for a moment then he continued more clearly, “I knew he was looking at me funny the other night. Bloody hell, Josh!”

Tazia sat up to find Billy glaring at the computer screen in front of him. On it, was the face of a young man no more than seventeen years old. The computer’s sound was turned up, and he was laughing loudly, but the picture showed only little repetitive expressions as the code that drove the image looped through. His chin-length dirty blond hair was vaguely parted in the center in an eighties skater style, and an array of piercings littered his face from his ears, eyebrow, nose, and chin.

“You should have read the message he sent you—it even mentioned the cops, dude. I wouldn’t open your door to strangers anytime soon.” Joshua cracked up again.

Tazia crossed to the desk and put a hand on Billy’s shoulder. He absently covered it with his own, still looking daggers at the screen. “Hey, love. Come sit. Let me introduce you to this little wanker. Josh, meet Taz.” He readjusted the camera on top of the screen so that it was facing both of them.

The boy peeked at her from between half-closed lids giving a good approximation of a shy expression. “Hi, Taz.”

“Hey, Josh, how are you today?” Tazia looked in fascination at the kid. She knew that he didn’t really look like this. He was just a picture from a magazine Billy had scanned into the computer. A face for him to talk to. The real necromancer was at this point without a body, merely a soul sparking in the midst of computer circuitry.

Over a thousand years old, it had escaped death by jumping bodies whenever the one it was currently occupying got old or was about to die. As part of a work contract the year before, Billy had intercepted the soul while in transit and trapped it in the computer. He’d manufactured a voice, spliced together from words he’d recorded from an American student he’d paid to get something fairly realistic (if an impression of Theodore “Ted” Logan would be deemed realistic.) The result was a Californian accent with a fair degree of East London phrasing and vocabulary.

“What was that you were talking about? Doctors?” Tazia was intrigued by the bits of the conversation she’d overheard.

“Nothing!” Billy glared at Joshua.

The kid dropped his shyness for a second and smirked. “I’ll keep quiet, Billy, if you do something for me. I wanna stay in the Mac, get out of this dinosaur. I could have some fun. Maybe edit all that video you got—you know the stuff. I liked Tiffany, she did that thing with the—”

“I’ll mute you!” Billy cut in. “He’s been messing with my email, Taz. That’s all. Sending notes out pretending to be me. Little shit.”

“Dissing me won’t make me help you, bro.”

Billy bounced in his seat and was about to speak again, but Tazia squeezed his shoulder to silence him.

“It’s all right, Josh, he insults everyone. You tell me all about it later, okay?” She winked conspiratorially, making the young man grin. “Any chance you know anything that could help me with my problem? Like how I get my soul back?”

“Billy’s filled me in. Advocates are tricky and if this really is the High Advocate—really bloody sneaky! I bet there’s more going on than you’ll know.” Josh looked away from her for a second. He was thinking. The code made him look pensive with little movements to the mouth and eyebrows, and slight furrows appearing between his eyes. Tazia was impressed, it wasn’t gaming standard, but Billy had done a pretty good job.

Josh looked back and said, “The ink on your back just binds your soul—it’s not lost. It's not like we have to summon it back from somewhere, it's always stayed with you. We just need to release it.”

“Have you tried removing the tattoos?” Billy asked, moving over in his seat to make room for Tazia to share.

“Yep, doesn’t work—tried in the past. Laser machine broke down. Tried covering them with another tattoo—needles broke. Even poured a bit of acid on the top one. Hurt like hell on the surrounding skin, but didn’t even touch the tattoo itself. I think this magic is very clever—”

“Or the shaman that worked it was.” Joshua finished for her.

Tazia’s stomach tightened at the memory. The magic men had seared her flesh with fire and ink, drumming and chanting so loud they drowned out her screams and, the very worst thing, the helplessness she’d felt. A living nightmare.

“We need to figure out what type of shaman it was.” Joshua continued. “Besides true necromancers like me, they're the magic workers who know the most about souls. They all have different ways of working, different ways of breaking the spells once they’ve been cast.”

He glitched slightly into a sneakier look. “That’s if I decide to help at all—you know, it’s a lot of work—I may get bored.” He glanced back at Billy. “Course, the other, quicker option is that I summon Taz’s dad so you can talk direct to the bloke. Find out exactly how to break the spell. You’d need to let me out for that though.”

“You can do that?” Tazia’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Seriously, Josh? If I let you out of there, how likely are you to come back? How stupid do you think I am?” Billy rolled his eyes.

From the screen, Joshua just blinked. Billy hadn’t programmed in a glare.

“Please, Billy.” Tazia turned to him. “It’s the quickest option.”

“No. He won’t come back! Remember the hell it was to get him in there? All the havoc he was causing?”

There was a long silence before Tazia spoke again. This time, she put her hands on his and looked deep into his eyes. “Please.”

When he still hesitated. She bent forward and gave him a long hard kiss. It was below the belt, cheating every ground rule they’d established.

Billy pulled away. “f**k!” He hesitated, faced the screen once more, his fingers poised over the keyboard. “How do we do this, Josh?”

Joshua explained he would fetch the essence of the Abbot from Hell itself. It would be just a fleeting image of the man he used to be, and they’d only have a short time before he would be pulled back, so they’d have to work quickly. All Billy needed to do was break the code that was holding Joshua’s soul captive.

Still grumbling objections, Billy started to type, faster and faster, until Joshua’s picture was beginning to fade. As one pixel at a time disappeared from the screen, a pinprick of light appeared a couple of feet above the desk. Soon, a large luminous ball had gathered, and the image was completely gone. The floating light pulsed a little, as though building up energy, and then raced in-between their heads, zipped into an unused electrical outlet on the wall, and disappeared.

Billy keyed in a few more lines of code, checked that the network session remained open, and then abruptly got up. Without a word, he took Tazia’s hand, led her out onto the large terrace that ran the length of his penthouse, and pulled her down onto the teak bench to sit beside him. After lighting two cigarettes, he passed her one and then they sat, still silent, watching London come to life, smoke gathering around their shoulders.

For a big city in spring, there was still relatively little smog around, just a slight yellow mist that hung above the Thames in the middle distance. The lights in the tower blocks were starting to go out as the sun came up, and the sighs of ghost-like people trudging weary routes to work floated on the air.

After his last drag, Billy stubbed out the remains on a heavy silver ashtray sitting on the arm of the bench in the shape of an upturned taloned hand—a gift from Tazia—and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He looked sideways at her. “He won’t come back, love. And now we’ve got nothing to help us figure this whole soul stuff out. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

“Did I screw up?” She wasn’t sure whether she was addressing the kiss or letting Joshua go. Probably both. She threw her own stub on the floor and squashed it with her toe, then continued scuffing the ground with one foot like a five-year-old.

Billy picked up the stub and deposited it in the ashtray alongside his own. “You got carried away. With everything!”

She had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I just wanted you to do what I needed, so found a way to make you.”

“At least you’re honest.” He gave her a half-smile though he was still shaking his head at her.

“So, what now?”

“We wait. See if he comes back, I guess.” He lit a couple more cigarettes and handed her one. “You hungry?”

“Nope. Why?”

“I was going to offer you Tracey. She’s really getting on my t**s. I can call her back?” His joke broke the slight tension that remained.

Tazia grinned, and he smacked a quick kiss on her lips. “Sometimes, I forget you f**k up. I know you’re more than a hundred-odd, but I’m the grown-up here. I should know that by now. As usual, Miss Dune, I forgive your failures.”

She stood and mock-bowed her thanks. “Are you tired?”

“Yep.”

“Bed?”

“Yep.”

She offered her hand and pulled him up from his seat. They were halfway into the bedroom when Tazia spoke again, “Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Jegudiel leaned back from the mirror and shook away the concentration. She smiled, pleased with progress; a few more pieces had just clicked into place. When she’d appeared to Anastasia at the fountain, she wasn’t totally sure how that meeting would play out, but progress was good.

She stretched herself, elongating each long limb, feeling the pulse of energy flowing just beneath the translucent skin. A bright yellowish light shone from her, collecting in layers like a second covering, and as she moved, a subtle amber trail was left behind.

With a blink of her large oval eyes, she summoned a glass jar. It flew to her hand, and she peered inside. There was a little light, there. A dim glow like a weak lantern shining in thick fog. There were sighs, too, vague and pathetic, the sounds of someone long past caring.

With her free hand, the angel slowly scraped her long fingernails down the edge of the jar, creating the noise of a blade on glass. The glow strengthened for a moment and the light moved rapidly away from the side where she played. The sound of a female voice filled the air. A single note, a scream, and then it gradually died away.

Jegudiel smiled again, and the jar disappeared.