Chapter 38
The sky should have split, Maxwell thought, or the earth should have shaken. God knew it felt unstable enough beneath his feet. That was only his perception, though; in the outer world, the sun still shone, the birds started singing again, and Hazel stood watching him with no sign of unsteadiness.
He braced himself for backlash, whether that was the bindings tightening around him, Perthrux’s direct wrath, or some contingency spell that would turn him inside out.
Pain would hit soon. Maxwell had been sure of that each time he’d tested a boundary, but it had never been so dramatic, nor come with the rush of energy and the roaring in his ears that had arisen when Hazel asked his identity. He waited.
Nothing happened.
Hazel’s hair stirred in the wind. Shadows drew lines across her face, making one eye look very blue. Maxwell tested his mouth and found that it still worked. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you before.”
She flicked one hand sideways, dismissive. “I figured that out. What was the wine?”
“The—” The woman’s conversation occasionally had hairpin turns that would put the Grand Prix to shame, but Maxwell could understand why that would be her first question. “Peaches of—well, not immortality, sadly, not really, but a certain amount of fortification. Magical and physical.”
“Why would you bring me that?” Her gaze was sharp but not hostile, not even as combative as Maxwell had seen it when he’d first spoken with her as Ligat. This was Hazel as a professional, the woman he’d only briefly glimpsed in Chapman’s bedroom. “I can’t imagine it was on your master’s orders.”
“No, but I…I discovered I had a bit of leeway. Could interpret statements the way I wanted if it was unclear. It mentioned the ultimate result might be more dramatic if you held out longer, which gave me an opening.”
“Okay.” The word became a long exhalation.
“I can believe you weren’t any more thrilled about letting a bunch of demons into the world than I am.
I’m going to assume you weren’t actually trying to increase the pressure on me.
You’d deny it if you were, and you obviously can lie, so that’s a rabbit hole we don’t need to go down. ”
Bitterness put an edge on her tone for the first time in the conversation. Maxwell winced and couldn’t blame her. “I wasn’t just thinking of the world,” he said, “though I probably should’ve been, and I understand if you don’t believe that. Or don’t want to hear it.”
Hazel blinked, started to speak, and then caught herself. “No. I mean, yes, I believe you, though I’m not petty enough to get annoyed if you had been keeping the bigger picture in mind. And I’m sorry. You’ve been enslaved for, what, a hundred years—”
“I’m not completely free now,” he said, feeling cautiously at the spells that still lay on him. “It’s a long leash rather than a set of leg irons, but we should still be careful how we go.”
“How we go,” said Hazel, “is inside to have a drink and a bag of pretzels. We’ll both think much better after that.”
* * *
There was a kind of ritual in refreshments: putting so many cubes of ice in each glass, pouring the soda to just the right level so that it foamed and sank back without going over the top, even opening pretzels into a bowl.
Hazel’s mother had impressed that on her without meaning to, and she remembered it better than most of the lessons the woman had clearly hoped would stick.
It was calming, almost meditative, and just then it meant she didn’t have to look at Maxwell (or Ligat).
Hazel wasn’t angry at him. She almost wanted to be, because he was a single person with a face and a name for her to direct anger at, but rationality kept intervening.
Yes, Maxwell had lied to her. Yes, he could have probably done more to keep their relationship impersonal, and by not doing so he’d kind of set her up for humiliation and hurt feelings.
He’d also spent a century under the command of a demon, which Hazel guessed didn’t involve a lot of opportunities for human contact, and he’d helped her at no small personal risk.
If she was angry, it was at the entire situation—but, she realized, anger just made up a small and simple part of her emotions.
Embarrassment came in way in front. Not only had she gone to a lot of trouble to pretend she had a normal life around Maxwell, she’d told Ligat about most of her history with what turned out to be his alter ego.
He knew exactly what she’d left out, too, and probably why.
This never happened to Lois Lane.
She handed Maxwell his glass and, she hoped, managed not to blush like a sixth grader when their hands touched. “Thank you,” he said, and took the pretzels as well. “Where to?”
It should have been a simple question, but apparently Hazel just couldn’t have simplicity even in the basics. “Can the demon monitor what we’re doing?”
“No,” said Maxwell, “that’s why he sent me.”
He didn’t add uh duh, which Hazel appreciated. “Right, yeah. Living room, then.”
Hazel had gotten rid of the chair Chapman had sat in, replacing it with a couple cheap canvas folding chairs in an obnoxious shade of purple on the grounds that they’d be easy to part with if decaying bastards used them in the future.
Maxwell sat in one of them, making it look even cheaper by contrast, after disconcerting her further by waiting for her to sit down first.
“I don’t think chivalry should apply in this case,” she said.
It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“I stabbed you, I had my ally trap you, and you tried to kill me.” Hazel paused, pretzel in hand, remembering the fight in Chapman’s room. Maxwell had grabbed her shoulder eventually, and he’d been coming toward her again when he’d collided with the maggot. So she’d thought. “Or did you?”
He nodded, blank-faced. “As good as. I can’t defy a direct order, even now.”
The demon’s unfamiliar speech had been a command, then, as she’d thought. “That’s—not good to know, but a useful warning. And my point still stands. I think we’re a little past company manners.”
“Quite the opposite, I’d say.” Maxwell sipped his drink. “Besides, I like reminding myself of who I am. Or was.”
“Fair enough.” Hazel toyed with her pretzel, trying to figure out where to start. Practicality struck her as the safest option. “Do you know what your limits are now?”
“Not entirely. I doubt I could strike at my master directly. I might be able to fight its other servants if it wasn’t present. It rather enjoys a certain amount of conflict when there’s no opportunity for other amusement, and it almost certainly wants to keep us divided.”
“What are its other servants? The maggots? Chapman?”
“The larvae are most of the lot, though there are a few more. Shadow-forms, largely. None are human. Chapman—” Maxwell sighed. “He has more freedom than I do. Paying in other people’s blood helps with that. I’d call him an uneasy ally—among other names.”
Hazel smiled, an odd but welcome sensation under the circumstances. “No kidding.”
“Its—” Maxwell began, then froze, his mouth and throat working for a few stretched seconds while Hazel tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he shook his head in resignation. “I can’t tell you its name.”
“I hate it when they’re smart. Can you give me any information that might help free you more?”
He opened his mouth and froze, closed it and tried again with the same results, and finally gave up. “It seems otherwise. Damn.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Lord, don’t be,” said Maxwell, astonished. “I’m far better off now than I was half an hour ago, and that’s largely your doing. From the very start, I expect.”
Hazel blinked. “I’m going to need some more details.”
* * *
As concisely as he could, Maxwell described how Perthrux’s compulsions had gotten looser since he and Hazel had met and told her his theories about the cause.
“And you should count yourself lucky,” he finished, “that I’ve become much less willing to speculate at length about metaphysics.
There was a day I’d have gone on for hours. ”
That got another smile from her, a rare and delightful prize in the conversation. “Some other time,” she said, “I’d like to hear it. There aren’t many of us who know enough to speculate, not that it stops most people.”
“Some things haven’t changed with the years,” said Maxwell, sipping his soda. The taste was odd, not unpleasant but very different from what he remembered. He wasn’t sure how well he remembered it to begin with. “Not that I expected human nature to be one of them. I’d read history, after all.”
“Is that how you got involved in—” Hazel waved her hand around the room. “All of this?”
“No. Well, history, yes, but not the sort they teach in university. My family had a past, you see. I thought I might be the one to sort it out.”
Hazel gave him the kind of grave consideration he’d first seen when she’d asked if he was human. “I don’t want to pry,” she said. “You must know I’m curious, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to tell me. I don’t think it’ll help my situation.”
“I don’t mind, though I’ll give you the short version for the sake of our schedules.
” He’d clung to bits of the memory for a while, particularly when Perthrux’s service got particularly hard.
“The men in my line go mad after they sire their first child. Homicidal, generally. I went down a few odd paths, tracked down the source of the curse, and found I needed help to break it. My master offered that help.”
“Did you know what it was?”
Maxwell shook his head. “I knew it likely didn’t have my best intentions in mind, but I was young and I thought I was clever.” He laughed tersely at his past self. “People like me are probably how they do most of their work.”
“Your motive was better than most,” said Hazel. “For what that’s worth.”
They watched each other: not quite comfortable, not quite wary, two people sitting in an empty room with a card table between them. “I shouldn’t have stayed to chat,” Maxwell said. “Not when I was lying to you. It wasn’t fair.”
“Yeah. Well.” Hazel leaned back. Her chair wobbled a bit but remained standing. “Of all the unfair things that have happened to me, that’s pretty low on the list.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Apology accepted. You can redeem yourself by telling me why the dryad didn’t raise any alarm when you stepped into the yard. They’re supposed to grab any ethereal creatures unless I’m with them—and you were talking to me the first time we met, but not when you came by with the wine.”
“Easy enough. This form is physical.”
“Entirely?”
“I’d imagine it has traces of the ethereal, and of the transformation, but they’d be minute. To be vulgar, flesh makes excellent camouflage.”
“Oh, Lord, you’re like the ghost Terminator.” When Maxwell blinked at her, Hazel waved a hand. “Never mind. I’ll show you the movie one of these days.”
It was an offhand comment, the sort that didn’t acquire any greater meaning until both of them had a chance to realize what she’d offered and to whom. At that point, it just hung in the air like a badly made wind chime, awkward and impossible to ignore.
He tried anyway, moving on swiftly to more facts.
“I can’t stay like this for more than an hour or two, so it’s less convenient than I’d like, but it seemed the best way to intervene—though now that I think about it, a dark and sinister figure menacing him might have done that chap a world of good. ”
Hazel laughed, but almost immediately cut herself off. “I shouldn’t make fun. He’s dead—”
“So I noticed.”
“I should probably feel worse about that.”
“Not the way I see it,” said Maxwell. “Oh, I know, no man is an island and so on, but that philosophy doesn’t wear very well after fifty years or so on the other side. I’m just glad he was around to distract the creature. That might have saved your life—though I wouldn’t let Gordon know it.”
“You’ve met him, then?” Hazel asked, her forehead smoothing out as she abandoned her attempt at self-flagellation.
Maxwell grimaced. “I’ve had the displeasure, yes.
I’m afraid I was doing my lurking act earlier, while the police talked to you and your lawyer.
” He did his best to keep the last word neutral.
What more the man might or might not be was none of his business.
“I packed him off with a flea in his ear, though I can’t promise he’ll stay gone. ”
“Getting rid of him for a couple hours makes you an angel, or at least a saint.” Hazel set down her empty glass and rubbed her temples. She looked as tired as Maxwell had ever seen her, but the tension from earlier seemed to have ebbed away. “How angry is your master?”
“Inordinately,” said Maxwell, unable to suppress a smirk.
Her return smile made him think of coiled serpents. “Good.”