Neverwhere

"Mm."

"Just edge forward, Richard. A bit at a time. Come on . . . " Her caramel fingers stroked his white-knuckled hand, clasping the plank. "Come on."

He took a deep breath, and inched forward. And froze again. "You're doing fine," said Hunter. "That's good. Come on." And, inch by inch, creep by crawl, she talked Richard along the plank, and then, at the end of the plank, she simply picked him up, her hands beneath his arms, and placed him on solid ground.

"Thank you," he said. He could not think of anything else to say to Hunter that would be big enough to cover what she had just done for him. He said it again. "Thank you." And then he said, to all of them, "I'm sorry."

Door looked up at him. "It's okay," she said. "You're safe now." Richard looked at the winding spiral road beneath the world, going down, and down; and he looked at Hunter and Door and Lamia; and he laughed until he wept.

"What," Door demanded, when, at length, he had stopped laughing, "is so fu

"Safe,"

he said, simply. Door stared at him, and then she, too, smiled. "So where do we go now?"

Richard asked.

"Down," said Lamia. They began to walk down Down Street. Hunter was in the lead, with Door beside her. Richard walked next to Lamia, breathing in the lily-of-the-valley-honeysuckle scent of her, and enjoying her company.

"I really appreciate you coming with us," he told her. "Being a guide. I hope it's not going to be bad luck for you or anything."

She fixed him with her foxglove-colored eyes. "Why should it be bad luck?"

"Do you know who the rat-speakers are?"

"Of course."

"There was a rat-speaker girl named Anaesthesia. She. Well, we got to be sort of friends, and she was guiding me somewhere. And then she got stolen. On Night's Bridge. I keep wondering what happened to her."

She smiled at him sympathetically. "My people have stories about that. Some of them may even be true."

"You'll have to tell me about them," he said. It was cold. His breath was steaming in the chilly air.

"One day," she said. Her breath did not steam. "It's very good of you, taking me with you."

"Least we could do."

Door and Hunter went around the curve in front of them, and went out of sight. "You know," said Richard, "the other two are getting a bit ahead of us. We might want to hurry."

"Let them go," she said, gently. "We'll catch up." It was, thought Richard, peculiarly like going to a movie with a girl as a teenager. Or rather, like walking home afterwards: stopping at bus shelters, or beside walls, to snatch a kiss, a hasty fumble of skin and a tangle of tongues, then hurrying on to catch up with your friends . . .

Lamia ran a cold finger down his cheek. "You're so warm," she said, admiringly. -"It must be wonderful to have so much warmth."

Richard tried to look modest. "It's not something I think about much, really," he admitted. He heard, distantly, from above, the metallic slam of the elevator door.

Lamia looked up at him, pleadingly, sweetly. "Would you give me some of your heat, Richard?" she asked. "I'm so cold."

Richard wondered if he should kiss her. "What? I . . . "

She looked disappointed. "Don't you like me?" she asked. He hoped, desperately, that he had not hurt her feelings.

"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 ru

"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?"