On Friday afternoon a grey Activa followed Alex from tuition to his house, and it did a very bad job.
The rider wore a helmet with the glass down and stopped every time Alex stopped. When Alex went into the medical shop to buy toothpaste, the Activa waited across the road with the engine running, and the man pretended to read a newspaper. A newspaper. While wearing a helmet.
Alex paid for the toothpaste and sighed.
Alex- " Your Grace, please hire better people. "
He didn't lose the man. He let him follow all the way to his lane, watched him note down the house number on his phone, and then went inside and locked the door. Through the window he saw the man take a photo of the gate and ride away.
Fine. Let them have the address. A house was just a house. In Zaroth, his palace had been attacked more times than he could count. What mattered was what the man would say in his report, and that was something Alex planned to decide himself.
He had skipped college for it. John would scold him tomorrow. But first, Serena.
He had two hours, and the house looked like a bachelor's house, because it was one. He stuffed last night's torn jacket deep in the cupboard behind his school blazer. He washed the Maggi pan. He picked up four socks from four different rooms, and found a fifth one on top of the fridge, which he could not explain. He sprayed room freshener until he started coughing, then opened all the windows because now the house smelled like a hotel washroom.
Then he stood in the middle of the hall and looked around and thought, in Zaroth I had maids for this.
Any one of them would have finished the whole house in four minutes and then scolded him for the fifth sock.
She came at four, straight from her college, still in her formal white kurta with a file under her arm and her car keys hanging from one finger. She took one look at him and frowned.
Serena- " What happened to your arm? "
He had forgotten about the crawler's scratches. They had mostly healed, but there were still faint red lines from wrist to elbow.
Alex- " Cat. "
Serena- " You don't have a cat. "
Alex- " Neighbour's cat. "
Serena- " Alex. "
She put the file down and took his arm in both hands and looked at it the way she looked at her exam papers, very carefully, looking for mistakes. Her fingers were cold from the car's AC.
Serena- " These look like… I don't know. Like something with lots of small legs. "
Alex said nothing. Sometimes she was too sharp for his own good.
She let go and sat on the sofa and pulled her legs up under her. For a while they talked about normal things. Her professor who couldn't pronounce her surname. His relay race tomorrow, which made her laugh for a full minute because she knew he had never run a race voluntarily in his life. Then she went quiet and looked at the turned-off TV.
Serena- " Papa asked again yesterday. Where I go on Fridays. "
Alex- " What did you say? "
Serena- " Group study. "
Alex- " With who? "
Serena- " With you. He doesn't know you're a group of one. "
She said it lightly, but she was rubbing her thumb along the edge of the cushion, back and forth, the way she did when she was nervous.
Serena- " He's become very strict this year. Very religious also. Every Sunday prayers, then some meeting after, then he comes home and he's quiet for hours. Mummy says it's good for him. I don't know. He looks at me like he's checking something. "
Alex had seen her father exactly once, from across the road outside their house in Alipore. Mr. Richard D'Costa. A tall man with silver hair and a cream safari suit, getting out of a Mercedes while two servants ran to open the gate. He owned an export company near the docks and half a floor of an office building on Park Street. Serena had introduced Alex that day as a friend from tuition. Her father had looked at Alex's old Activa, then at Alex, and gone inside without a word.
Alex- " Checking what? "
Serena- " If I knew, I'd tell you. "
She shook her head as if to throw the thought out.
Serena- " Forget it. I came here to forget my house, not to talk about it. "
Serena- " Can I tell you something weird? "
Alex- " Everyone wants to tell me weird things this week. "
Serena- " Shut up and listen. "
She played with a loose thread on her dupatta.
Serena- " For the past few weeks, I keep dreaming the same thing. I'm standing somewhere high. Like on top of a castle. And I have… wings. Black ones. Big, heavy. And you're there, but you're not you. You're wearing something long and dark, and everyone below us is kneeling. And I'm not scared. That's the weird part. I feel like that's where I'm supposed to be. "
She laughed at herself.
Serena- " Too much anime, I know. You've infected me. "
Alex looked at her for a long time.
Black wings. A Fallen Angel standing beside the Demon God's throne. He had told nobody about that, on this side. Nobody.
Alex- " Serena. "
Serena- " Hm? "
He opened his mouth. The words were right there. I have lots of things to tell you. The other world. The throne. You. But then he thought of the photo on the table at the guest house, and the old man's soft voice saying his name, his house, his family, and he closed his mouth again.
Not yet. Not while those people were still watching.
Alex- " …It's not too much anime. Maybe it's a good dream. "
She smiled and threw a cushion at him, and the moment passed.
At six her mother called and she had to go. He walked her to her red i20 and stood at the gate while she reversed out of the lane. She waved through the window. He waved back.
Then he saw the grey Activa again, parked at the corner near the tea stall. The same helmet. And when Serena's car turned onto the main road, the Activa started its engine and turned too.
It wasn't following him anymore.
Alex didn't run. He walked back inside, closed the door, and teleported.
He appeared on the back seat of the Activa, behind the rider, at forty kilometres per hour.
The wind hit him in the face, full of dust and diesel. They were on the main road now, in the middle of evening traffic, buses on one side and an auto with six school kids hanging out of it on the other. Two cars ahead, he could see the back of Serena's i20, the little Ganesha sticker she had put on the rear glass. She was singing along to something. He could see her head moving.
The rider had his phone fixed on the handle in a plastic holder. On the screen was a map, and a blue dot moving, and a pinned location at the end of the route. Alex didn't need to read the address. He knew that road. He had dropped her near the end of it a hundred times, always one lane early, so her father wouldn't see.
The man felt the weight and turned his head, and the bike wobbled. Alex put two fingers on the back of his helmet and spoke one word in the old language of Zaroth. Hypnosis was a Tier 3 skill. On a normal human it was like turning off a fan.
Alex- " Slow down. Pull over near that tree. "
The Activa slowed and pulled over. The man sat there with his hands on the handles and his eyes empty behind the glass. Ahead of them, Serena's red car disappeared into the evening traffic, safe, not knowing anything.
Alex got off and stood in front of him.
Alex- " Who sent you? "
Man- " Brother Ansel. "
Alex- " Why are you following the girl in the car? "
Man- " To know where she goes. Who the boy loves. In case we need something to hold. "
Alex's jaw locked. Hold. Like a cup. Like a leash.
For a second, the air around him went heavy. The leaves on the tree above them stopped moving. On the other side of the road, a tea stall man pouring chai from one glass to another froze with the stream in mid-air and then spilled it all over his own hand, and he didn't even notice, because he was staring in their direction without knowing why. A pigeon on the wire dropped off and flew away in a panic.
Alex breathed in. Breathed out. Let it go.
Not here. Not on a main road at six in the evening with a hundred people around and some army sensor maybe sitting on a pole somewhere, waiting for exactly this kind of thing.
In Zaroth, the last man who had talked about holding someone he loved had stopped talking about anything at all. That was a different world. Here he had to be smarter than that. Here, a man who disappeared left a missing person report, a crying wife, a WhatsApp forward.
And a bishop who would know, immediately, that his little spy had found something real.
So instead of crushing the helmet, Alex lowered his hand and spoke very softly.
Alex- " Listen carefully. When you go back, you'll report that the boy is an ordinary college student. Lives alone. Plays video games all night. Weak. Nothing special. And you lost the girl's car in traffic. Understood? "
Man- " Understood. "
Alex- " Good. "
He was about to snap his fingers and send the man on his way when the man spoke again on his own, in the same flat voice. Hypnotised people did that sometimes. They answered the question you were thinking about.
Man- " But we didn't need to follow her. Not really. We already know her house. "
Alex went still.
Alex- " How? "
Man- " Her father. He sits in the front row every Sunday. He gave the money for the new chapel. "
The man's empty eyes looked straight through Alex.
Man- " Her father belongs to the Choir. "