Chapter 278 - 269 — Alice Comes Home II

Chapter 278: Chapter 269 — Alice Comes Home II

Nyra hit him in the hall.

She came out of the sitting room at a speed that would have registered on a Tower scanner and had both arms around his ribs before the door was fully open, and her horn, pearl-dark, spiralling up out of her hairline, clipped his chin on the way in.

"You were on for *six hours*—"

"I know."

"Six *hours*, and there was a bit where the ground went red and the picture went sideways and Mum turned the sound off—"

"I know. I’m grand. Look." He held both arms out.

She checked anyway. Face first, then the sides of his ribs, then a fistful of his coat where the tear was, and only when she had confirmed that the fabric was ruined and the person inside it was not did she start to let go.

Then she noticed the doorway was still occupied.

Nyra stopped.

Alice, standing on the step with the rain behind her and her wings nowhere in evidence, stopped as well.

They looked at each other.

A young girl in a green jumper with a horn coming out of her head and two black wings loose down her back, holding on to James’s sleeve.

And a woman in the door with her hands folded, looking like nothing at all, watching the child hold him.

Nyra’s eyes went wide. They went to James. They went back to Alice.

"You’re the lady from the—" She stopped and started again. "You’re *her*."

"Nyra—"

"You were on the telly. You were on the telly *this afternoon*." She was not frightened. She was leaning slightly forward. "You threw the king person."

"He was a prince," Alice said.

"You *threw* him."

Then James’s mother came out of the kitchen with a tea towel in her hands.

She saw her son, alive, in one piece, and something went out of her shoulders that had probably been in them since noon.

Then she saw who was standing behind him in the rain.

She stopped in the middle of the hall carpet. The tea towel stopped moving. James watched his mother look at Alice, and then at him, and then back at Alice, and arrive, with total accuracy and no assistance, at the correct summary of the situation.

"James," she said. "What have you brought into my house."

—

He gave them the short version, standing in the hall with his coat still on.

That this was Alice. The same Alice. That he had reanimated her after Floor 20, which was a thing he could do and had not told anybody about, and that she had been conscious the whole time. That she had fought beside them today and it was the reason they were all alive.

And that during the fight he had made an agreement with her, in front of everybody, and the agreement was that she would not be stored anymore.

"So she’s staying out," he finished. "Manifested. That’s the deal, and I’m keeping it."

"You will notice," Alice said pleasantly, "that he says it as though it were his to give."

James turned his head.

She met his eyes without any particular hostility. It was not an attack. It was a correction, made in front of his family, deliberately, to see what he did with it.

"...Fair," he said. "She’s staying. Not because I’m allowing it. Because that’s what was agreed."

"Better," said Alice.

His mother looked between the two of them for a long moment and then draped the tea towel over her shoulder in a way James recognised as the beginning of a decision.

"Right," she said. "Everyone out of the hall. There’s food."

---

Nyra had not stopped staring at Alice’s back.

"Where are they?"

"Where are what?" James said.

"Her *wings*." She said it with enormous indignation, as though somebody had hidden them from her on purpose. "She had wings, they were massive, they were bigger than the whole—"

"She can hide them. Like you."

Nyra’s entire attention snapped round.

"Like me?"

"Like you."

She turned back to Alice and looked her up and down with an expression of pure professional interest, and then, without being asked, planted her feet on the hall carpet, screwed her face into the specific scowl of a person lifting something above their weight, and shut her eyes.

The horn sank down into her hairline. The wings drew in, and in, and vanished.

She opened one eye to check she was being watched.

"That’s how I do it," she announced.

Alice studied her for a moment. Not the concealment — the process. The braced feet, the closed eyes, the shoulders.

Then, without any preamble whatsoever, Alice put hers back.

Two black wings unfolded off her back in the narrow hallway, and the ceiling was suddenly not high enough, and they had to turn sideways in the door of the sitting room. The broken halo formed behind her head, dark and cracked. The tail came out last and settled on the carpet.

She did it while walking. She did not stop, or brace, or close her eyes.

Nyra’s mouth opened.

"How did you do that."

"I have been doing it," Alice said, "for considerably longer than you have been alive."

"That’s not an *answer*."

"It is entirely an answer. You simply dislike it."

Nyra made a noise of deep offence and stomped off down the hall toward the kitchen.

She got four steps.

Then the horn came back up through her hair, and both wings came out with it, and one of them clipped the coat hooks on the way past and put somebody’s jacket on the floor.

She did not stop walking. She did not appear to notice it had happened at all.

James picked the jacket up and hung it back.

Alice was watching the doorway Nyra had gone through with something that was not amusement and was not nothing either.

"She loses it when she is annoyed," she said.

"She loses it when she’s anything."

In the kitchen, Nyra dropped into her chair with her wings still spilling over both sides of it, and one of them was directly in the path between the table and the cooker, and James’s mother stepped over it on her way to the hob without looking down and without breaking off what she was saying.

Nobody mentioned it. Nobody moved anything. The wing stayed where it was and the house went on around it.

Alice stood in the doorway for a second and a half.

Then she came in, and sat down, and did not put hers away.

James noticed. He did not say anything about it.

---

His mother set another place.

That was all. She took a plate down out of the press, and a knife and fork out of the drawer, and put them on the table in front of the empty chair beside Nyra without any comment at all, and went back to the hob.

Alice looked at the plate.

She looked at it for slightly too long. Nobody had asked whether an undead Fallen Divinity required food. There was a place set because there was another person at the table.

She sat down.

Dinner was shepherd’s pie kept warm since nine o’clock, and the kitchen smelled of it, and of the tea his mother had put on the second she got in the door, and faintly of the radiator under the window that knocked twice before it warmed up.

Alice examined her plate with the seriousness of a woman defusing something.

"What is it?"

"Mince," Nyra said. "And potato on top. It’s the best one."

"That is not an ingredient list."

"It’s *mince*."

Alice tried it.

She did not react. She put the fork down, and picked it up again, and had a second one immediately, and did not react to that either, and continued not reacting for approximately four more forkfuls at a rate that was noticeably faster than anybody else at the table.

James looked at her.

Alice looked up and caught him looking at her.

Neither of them said anything, and she slowed down about ten percent out of pure spite.

---

The small television on the counter was still on, muted, and it was still Floor 25.

They were running the clips. Baldwin going down. The scythe. And then the long one — the shot from behind, after the kill, with James standing over a dead prince and Alice standing beside him, wings out, looking directly into the camera.

Alice watched herself on a nine-inch screen on a kitchen counter in Ballymun, and then looked around the actual kitchen she was actually sitting in, at the tea towel and the calendar and the child with the wings and the woman at the hob.

Whatever went through her face while she did that, James could not read a bit of it.

Nyra was not watching Alice at all. Nyra had gone very quiet, and she was leaning toward the screen with her fork forgotten.

"James."

"Mm."

"Pause it — Mum, can you—" She pointed. "*There*."

The image sat frozen: James, mid-turn, the broken ring of black light shaking behind his head, the half-formed wing frames shedding ash off his back.

And the horn. Coming out above his left temple, spiralling black, unmistakable.

Nyra looked at the screen.

Then she looked at James’s forehead.

James’s hand went up before he could stop it, fingers touching the skin above his temple where there was nothing, and had never been anything, and had definitely been something four hours ago.

"Does it hurt?" Nyra asked.

"I didn’t know it was there."

Across the table, Alice had stopped eating.

She was not looking at the television. She was looking at the place on James’s head where his fingers were, and her face had become extremely difficult to read — not shocked, not curious, but closed in a specific way, like a door pulled to rather than shut.

James saw it.

She noticed him seeing it, and picked her fork back up, and said nothing whatsoever.

---

He set the house rules over the last of the tea, because somebody had to and because he was too tired to be clever about it.

"Right. Three things. You don’t go into Nyra’s room without asking her."

"Acceptable."

"You don’t frighten my mother for entertainment."

"That would be beneath me."

"You don’t use Authority on anyone in this house. Ever. That one’s not negotiable—"

"And that one," Alice said, setting down her cup, "is that a request, or is it the contract talking?"

The kitchen went quiet.

James stopped with his mouth open, because the honest answer was that he had not decided, and she had heard it in his voice before he had heard it in his own head.

"...House rule," he said. "It’s a house rule. Same as the shoes off in the hall and nobody using the good scissors on cardboard. If you did it, I’d be having this conversation again, louder. I wouldn’t be reaching for the other thing."

Alice considered that.

"Then it is acceptable," she said.

Ten minutes later she picked up the last slice of soda bread off the plate in the middle of the table, held it, and looked directly at James while she did it.

"That’s Nyra’s."

"Is it?"

"That’s — she’s been eyeing that for the whole meal, that’s an established—"

"IT IS," Nyra said.

"It was on a communal plate," Alice said.

"There’s a *system*," James said. "There’s an actual system and everyone in this house knows the system—"

"Then it is a poor system."

"It has worked for a *year*—"

He was arguing with her. Properly arguing, the way he argued with Cillian about biscuits, voices up, entirely without effect, and it did not once cross his mind to reach for the thing in the corner of his vision that would have ended it in one word.

Alice sat back with the bread still in her hand and looked something close to content.

Nyra, who had been vibrating in her seat, chose that moment to insert herself with enormous authority.

"Also you can’t have it because you didn’t say anything when Mum put it out, and if you don’t say anything you’re not in for it, that’s the *rule*—"

"Where is this rule written?"

"IT’S A RULE—"

"The three of you," James’s mother said, from the sink, without turning round, "will stop making a holy show of yourselves at my table."

And all three of them stopped.

Alice’s fork paused halfway to the plate.

She had been included in that. Not addressed, not managed, not accommodated. Lumped in, at the end of a long day, with two other people being a nuisance.

She put the soda bread back on the plate.

Nyra took it instantly.