Neverwhere(93)

“Of course I like you,” he heard his voice saying. “You’re very nice.”

“And you aren’t using all your heat, are you?” she pointed out, reasonably.

“I suppose not . . . “

“And you said you’d pay me for being your guide. And it’s what I want, as my payment. Warmth. Can I have some?”

Anything she wanted. Anything. The honeysuckle and the lily of the valley wrapped around him, and his eyes saw nothing but her pale skin and her dark plum-bloom lips, and her jet black hair. He nodded. Somewhere inside him something was screaming; but whatever it was, it could wait. She reached up her hands to his face and pulled it gently down toward her. Then she kissed him, long and languorously. There was a moment of initial shock at the chill of her lips, and the cold of her tongue, and then he succumbed to her kiss entirely.

After some time, she pulled back.

He could feel the ice on his lips. He stumbled back against the wall. He tried to blink, but his eyes felt as if they were frozen open. She looked up at him and smiled delightedly, her skin flushed and pink and her lips, scarlet; her breath steamed in the cold air. She licked her red lips with a warm crimson tongue. His world began to go dark. He thought he saw a black shape at the edge of his vision.

“More,” she said. And she reached out to him.



He watched the Velvet pull Richard to her for the first kiss, watched the rime and the frost spread over Richard’s skin. He watched her pull back, happily. And then he walked up behind her, and, as she moved in to finish what she had begun, he reached out and seized her, hard, by the neck, and lifted her off the ground.

“Give it back,” he rasped in her ear. “Give him back his life.” The Velvet reacted like a kitten who had just been dropped into a bathtub, wriggling and hissing and spitting and scratching. It did her no good: she was held tight by the throat.

“You can’t make me,” she said, in decidedly unmusical tones.

He increased the pressure. “Give him his life back,” he told her, hoarsely and honestly, “or I’ll break your neck.” She winced. He pushed her toward Richard, frozen and crumpled against the rock wall.

She took Richard’s hand, and breathed into his nose and mouth. Vapor came from her mouth, and trickled into his. The ice on his skin began to thaw, the rime on his hair to vanish. He squeezed her neck again. “All of it, Lamia.” She hissed, then, extremely grudgingly, and opened her mouth once more. A final puff of steam drifted from her mouth to his, and vanished inside him. Richard blinked. The ice on his eyes had melted to tears, and they were running down his cheeks. “What did you do to me?” he asked.

“She was drinking your life,” said the marquis de Carabas, in a hoarse whisper. “Taking your warmth. Turning you into a cold thing like her.”

Lamia’s face twisted, like a tiny child deprived of a favorite toy. Her foxglove eyes flashed. “I need it more than he does,” she wailed.

“I thought you liked me,” said Richard, stupidly.

The marquis picked Lamia up, one-handed, and brought her face close to his. “Go near him again, you or any of the Velvet Children, and I’ll come by day to your cavern, while you sleep, and I’ll burn it to the ground. Understand?”

Lamia nodded. He let go of her, and she dropped to the floor. Then she pulled herself up to her full size, which was not terribly tall, threw back her head, and spat, hard, into the marquis’s face. She picked up the front of her black velvet dress and ran up the slope, and away, her footsteps echoing through the winding rock path of Down Street, while her ice-cold spittle ran down the marquis’s cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

“She was going to kill me,” stammered Richard.

“Not immediately,” said the marquis, dismissively. “You would have died eventually, though, when she finished eating your life.”

Richard stared at the marquis. His skin was filthy, and he seemed ashen beneath the dark of his skin. His coat was gone: instead, he wore an old blanket wrapped about his shoulders, like a poncho, with something bulky—Richard could not tell what— strapped beneath it. He was barefoot, and, in what Richard took to be some kind of bizarre fashion affectation, there was a discolored cloth wrapped all the way around his throat.

“We were looking for you,” said Richard.

“And now you’ve found me,” croaked the marquis, drily.

“We were expecting to see you at the market.”

“Yes. Well. Some people thought I was dead. I was forced to keep a low profile.”

“Why . . . why did some people think you were dead?”