Chasing the Dragon Read Free

seen and now tried not to remember.
Unlike him, she didn't flinch at visions of apocalyptic slaughter.
    She blinked as she closed the file. The chip seemed to have vanished, he had no idea where to. "He's been gone three months," she
said, referring to the demon responsible for what she had just seenTeazle.
    "You know who that is in the picture?" It was the best way to say
it. Who it was would have been more accurate. He hadn't been able to
identify it himself. An Al had done that, after it had spent some time
putting the pieces together.
    "Madame Des Loupes," Lila said, and for the first time in months
Malachi saw her composure falter. "Why would he kill her?"
    Malachi shrugged. Demon politics didn't interest him. All he
knew about Madame was that she was the most powerful clairvoyant
of any age. The only person she feared wasn't Teazle Sikarza either, it
was Sarasilien.
    Three months and two weeks previously Sarasilien the elf had been
steadily working in his long-term office of diplomatic liaison to the
Otopian Secret Service. One minute to the second after Malachi and Lila
had rematerialised in Bay City he'd dropped everything and left.
Nobody had seen him since. He'd been a surrogate father to Lila, and
Mal hadn't known how to tell Lila he was gone, so he just didn't tell her
at all. Fortunately there was enough to deal with that he needn't worry
about that yet, or so he'd thought. As it was, besides that coincidence
which was clearly no coincidence, there was nothing to connect
Sarasilien to Madame's death and plenty of evidence that pointed at
Teazle. It was curiously easier to tell Lila that Teazle was the suspected
killer, though he was her husband, than it was to tell her about the elf.
Even Malachi didn't understand what the reason behind it would be.

    Motive wasn't the question that bothered Mal. There were perhaps
a dozen reasons Teazle might kill anyone, not least of which was
because he felt like it, but as a result of their immersion in Under, they
had all changed: Lila, Teazle, Zal, and himself. Thinking of this
Malachi licked self-consciously around his too-big canine teeth and for
the thousandth time considered having them filed down. He'd do it, if
he didn't think it might have horrible repercussions somehow, in parts
of him that he had forgotten but which might be important.
    "How would he kill her?" Lila rephrased, jolting Malachi out of his
dental fantasy. A frown made the rain suddenly dash down her nose and
drip off the end. "I mean, she had clear sight, she'd see it coming, surely."
Then she met Malachi's gaze with a curious one, a sad one of her own.
    She couldn't resist mentioning him, even though she'd promised
herself not to. No talking about Zal. No brooding. He wasn't dead.
"Why doesn't he come back?"
    Malachi shrugged. He didn't mention he was gladder that the
demon was absent. Teazle made him deeply uneasy, never more so than
since he had returned from Faery a changed being. Always lethal and
ready to slay in his true form, he seemed to have disconcertingly
acquired a form that was made of light, rendering him negligibly
material. He could teleport before, and now? Malachi had no idea what
he was capable of in that sense, but it added up to a scary prospect if
it got coupled with ambition, and this murder did seem to smell of
that on first sniff.
    The rain was getting him down. "Do you think we could go somewhere more civilized?"
    "Hm?" she glanced around them at the sheeting deluge, as though
only just becoming conscious of it. "Oh. Yes."
    "My car's on the lot," he gestured back the way they'd come. She
nodded and fell into step with him. He watched her. She was pensive
all the way up to the car door and then she stopped with her hand on
it and looked across the roof at him.

    "It's faked."
    She was referring to the crime in the images. He could tell by the
seriously switched on look in her blue-violet eyes and because other
agents had said the