Pandaemonium Read Online Free PDF Page A

– and shed my own clothes as I went, equalise things that way, meet him at the same disadvantage. Which in his bedroom would be no disadvantage at all: there would be all his broad bed to roll around on, the four corners of the room to rediscover if we needed to, my human strength to pit and lose against his immortal, irresistible body. There was my Aspect to tap into if I needed it, new to him and all but irresistible itself to any boy, let alone one primed as he was. The lure of it would pull him in, the power of it would let me meet him on near-equal terms; and still lose in the end but I could make a glorious fight of it and lose gloriously, which would be good for both of us and better after, and...
     
     
    A ND NO. I did find myself suddenly and unexpectedly on my feet, spilling cat heedlessly as I rose – but Tybalt’s squawl of protest was enough, just barely. It held me together just long enough. It was like a call across time, reminding me of the kitten he used to be and the girl I used to be, the girl that Jacey might yet be willing to roll across his duvet with, who was so emphatically not me or anything like me.
    I couldn’t do it then. I had the ability, the Aspect, sure; and it would make everything easier; and he was suddenly the vulnerable one, and no. I couldn’t do that to him. That wasn’t why I’d come.
    So. I took a breath, deep and steady; I turned my back on the room and the memories both, on any temptation to draw once more on my Aspect. Or to follow Jacey. Instead I went to the window and looked out at what used to be such a familiar view, the balcony and the dark running Thames below.
    Jacey’s flat was – well, very Jacey. His family would have put him in a penthouse, high over the city in a building they owned and controlled themselves: uniformed guards and a private lift, housekeeping and meals provided, CCTV and valet parking.
    Instead he’d found this place for himself, bought it for himself, done it out for himself.
    Himself and me. 329 had always been the doorcode.
    The building started life as a wharfside warehouse, put up by a Chinese merchant family in the seventeen-hundreds. Two storeys, brick-built, meant to last. Its wooden neighbours were torn down by the Victorians and replaced with grandiose constructions, four and five storeys high. Overshadowed from either side, bullied for its lunch money, our stunted little hero still hung on. Businesses came and went; this one stayed. It survived one war, and then another. Lucky and plucky, sheltered by the high walls of its looming neighbours, it ducked the bombs that obliterated most of the East End, and the fires never found it.
    Post-war redevelopment left it untouched; so did the concrete brutality of the ’sixties. In the ’eighties it got new neighbours, all steel and glass, financial corporations and yuppie millionaires. The Fengs just kept on doing what they did, the old respectable kind of market trader.
    Except that their trade no longer came up the river. It must have made less and less sense to keep the building and their business here. Finally, along came Jacey, with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Maybe his surname had something to do with that, but I always wanted to think not. I didn’t like to think that modern Fengs would buckle to bullying, any more than their ancestors did.
    However that went down, money or muscle or what, Jacey got what he wanted. He usually did. In this case it was vacant possession of both floors: one big open space below, with access to road and river; upstairs already subdivided, storage space and offices and a high wide loading-door with its own wooden jib-crane jutting out over the water like a gallows-beam, ready to hoist up bales of silk and boxes of tea, direct from the decks of the ships that used to dock below.
    Jacey’s contractors moved in, and for the next few months he pretty much lived in a hard hat, when he wasn’t combing product into his hair and chasing after me. Then