Drake (11 page)

“You just wait a minute,” Ally started.

Trixie smiled. “I don't think so.” She took a drag on her cigarette and dropped it to the concrete. Ally, Meg and Tess stared at her as though they had forgotten me altogether. Trixie ground the cigarette out under her foot and took a two-handed grip on her sword. The long silver blade burst into roaring flame. “Come and dance.”

Tess sprang like a leopard, her knives flashing in the air. Trixie sidestepped and brought her burning blade up and around almost too fast to follow, leaving a glowing afterimage of fire in the air behind it. Tess howled and spun away, both her knives gone and smouldering blackened cuts across her arms and eyes. Meg charged in after her as Ally cracked her whip savagely at Trixie's face.

Trixie's sword struck again and sliced cleanly through Ally's whip. Meg was in midair by then with a flying kick hurtling towards Trixie's head. Somehow Trixie twisted away at the last instant, the movement so lithe and graceful she appeared almost boneless. She spun her sword into a reverse grip and drove the point between Meg's shoulderblades.

Meg howled like a banshee and disintegrated. Her whole body crumbled to charred and broken pieces as Trixie's burning blade exploded out of her chest. Trixie turned on one heel and brought the sword back up into a guard position in front of her, her eyes flashing arctic blue in the gloom. Tess was crawling helplessly on her hands and knees, burned and blinded.

Ally stood with her hands on her hips and faced Trixie down. She had discarded the end of the severed whip, but there was no hint of fear on her face. I had a nasty feeling that she was by far the most dangerous of the three.

I really do need to be more careful who I go out with in future
, I thought.

“I never liked you,” Ally said. “You do know that, don't you?”

Trixie snorted laughter. “You're not supposed to
like
me, dear. This is what I'm for.”

“Fuck what you're for,” Ally snapped. “I'm not having it. He's ours.”

She held her hands up in front of her face, and those long red nails that I was so intimately acquainted with began to grow. Ally grinned. Her nails extended, the nail varnish sloughing off as they became steel claws a good two feet long. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of the talonwraith, but so much worse. I had been to bed with her, after all.

“You're not the only one who can play with swords,” Ally said as she slashed the air in front of her.

“Oh, I don't play,” Trixie said.

She hadn't moved a muscle, I realized. Her flaming blade was still held perfectly upright in both hands in front of her, making her look like some medieval illumination of a knight of the Round Table or something. Now I know absolutely fuck all about sword fighting, but I've seen bare-knuckle prizefights. The blokes who jump around and punch the air and beat their chests are all well and good, but it's the coldeyed bugger who just stands there and waits to kill the other one that you want to bet on. Trixie was like that, right then.

Ally dropped into a crouch and started to circle, snarling as she whipped her claws back and forth through the air. Trixie held her sword steady, just moving her feet when she had to in order to keep Ally in front of her. I hardly dared breathe.

“You deluded bitch,” Ally spat. “Do you really think you can make good now?”

Trixie ignored her. Her sword didn't move.

“It's too late by far,” Ally snarled.

She struck high with her right hand, claws slicing towards Trixie's head. Trixie turned her wrists and her sword knocked Ally's talons away, the hilt moving maybe three inches in total from its position in front of her sternum. Ally hissed and took a step backwards, and I realized I had the privilege of watching a master swordswoman at work.

“Be quiet,” Trixie said.

“I won't,” Ally said. “Why the fuck should I?”

Trixie said nothing, tracking Ally with her cold blue eyes.

“You're pathetic, you know that?” Ally went on. “Ridiculous. You're not fooling anyone except yourself and maybe this idiot here, and I'm not even sure about him.”

Still Trixie didn't speak, but I could see a hard line of irritation along her jaw. Something caught my eye, moving. I glanced quickly sideways and saw Tess crawling towards one of her knives.

“Tess is still alive!” I yelled.

Trixie's attention flickered for a split second, and Ally sprang at her with both hands extended. The flaming sword cut high then low as Trixie stepped back and pivoted on her right heel, slashing through the claws then turning into Ally's leap and sweeping the blade across her exposed side in a long downwards cut. Ally screamed and rolled, slamming into the side of the van, her torso opened and on fire. Trixie kept moving, her other foot stepping out behind her, turning the move into a graceful figure of eight with her sword now extended at waist height. It took Tess in the side of the neck as she was rising with her knife in hand. Her head spun away into the darkness, trailing char and ashes. Trixie came back to her guard position with her blazing sword held upright before her, facing Ally once more. The whole sequence of movement had taken perhaps half a second.

“Fucking hell!” I gasped.

“Shhhhh now,” Trixie said.

I watched in horror as Ally slowly got up. The whole left side of her body was sliced open, but instead of blood, slow drops of molten gold flame dripped from the hideous wound. The claws on her left hand had been sheared off by Trixie's burning sword, leaving twisted stumps of semi-molten metal. She raised the blades of her right hand in front of her face in a form of salute, and bowed from the waist.

“Next time, bitch,” she said.

I
have
no idea what happened after that.

The next thing I knew I was waking up in my own bed, somehow still alive. My wounds had closed and my bruises healed, and from what I could see of myself when I peeked under the sheets, I had no more than some faint white scars to show for any of it. If the Burned Man had healed me that thoroughly I'd have been pretty much in a coma, I knew, but I felt fine. Well, I say that but
fine
might be stretching it a bit. I was shitscared for one thing, and my head was again full of more questions than answers. Who the hell Ally and her sadistic sisters really were, for one thing. And then there was Trixie. The whole question of Trixie was another thing altogether.

I have to confess, I had pretty much already admitted defeat when I called her. I hadn't been remotely sure that she would come at all, or whether she would even be on my side if she did. As it turned out she had been, but I was left with even more questions about who and what the hell she was. Magic knights with burning swords don't cross your path every day, after all, and that was without all her other various weird quirks.

“Well that was fun,” I muttered as I dragged myself out of bed.

According to my bedside alarm it was ten o'clock in the morning. I made myself take a shower, then slipped on a dressing gown and went to speak to the Burned Man.

It listened quietly while I told it the story, I suppose I have to give it that much credit. It waited until I'd finished until it started to all but cry with laughter.

“Ally, Meg and Tess? Are you fucking kidding me?” it snorted. “Just how stupid are you?”

I sighed. I knew that look it had on its face, like I was some schoolboy who was the only one in the class who hadn't read the homework before the test.

“Enlighten me,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I believe it was Virgil who first recorded their names,” it said. “Aleto the Unresting, Megaera the Jealous and Tisiphone the Avenger. The three Furies. Ally, Meg and Tess. Ring any bells, you thick twat?”

I stared at it. The
Furies?
Seriously?

“You're having me on,” I said.

It shrugged. “It's no skin off my cock if you believe me or not,” it said. “Can you perhaps think of anything you might have done recently to bring the Furies down on you?”

I saw his face again, and grimaced.
That little boy. That poor child.

“Shit,” I said.

“Shit, you say,” said the Burned Man, “but that's not the half of it, is it?”

“Isn't it?”

“At least the Furies won't kill you,” it said. “They never do. Oh sure, they'll torment you relentlessly and persecute you until they drive you to madness and suicide, but they never actually kill a victim themselves.”

“That's a huge fucking consolation,” I said.

“Well cling to it then, and look at what you could have won,” the Burned Man said, “because you've probably made it a shitload worse now, haven't you?”

“Have I?”

“You un-bound Blondie,” it said. “You begged her for help, and what's even worse than that is she actually came and helped you. And we still don't even know what the
fuck
she is!”

“She saved me from those three bitches,” I said. “That'll do for me.”

“Oh will it now?” the Burned Man scoffed. “You don't think there's even the tiniest chance she might want something in return?”

“Oh,” I said. I coughed. “I, um, I suppose she might. What, though?”

“How the fuck do I know?” it snapped at me. “But listen, she comes to you out of the blue for no apparent reason, she sees me but doesn't run a mile, she puts up with being banished, accepts being un-banished again when you feel like it because you need her help, she turns out to be hard enough to get rid of the Furies for you and then heals you of a kicking that I'd have had to put you under for a week to sort out… Whatever she wants, it's not going to be to borrow a fucking fiver is it, you understand me?”

I groaned, and put my head in my hands. “I was desperate,” I said. “I wasn't thinking straight. I mean, seriously, what the hell else could I have done?”

“Been a man?” it suggested. “Put up with it? Had enough of a fucking clue to realize who they were, and enough education to know that they weren't going to kill you? I've invested a
lot
of time in you, Drake, and right now I'm seriously starting to wonder why.”

“Oh shut up,” I snapped at it. “I was hurt and scared, OK? You can't expect me to remember my Greek myths when I'm being bullwhipped, for pity's sake.”

“I expect a fucking lot more than I'm getting at the moment, I know that much,” the Burned Man grumbled. “Come here and feed me if nothing else, you useless cunt.”

I sighed and knelt in front of it, opening my dressing gown to bare my chest. It sank its teeth savagely into the meat beside my left nipple and started to suckle. I winced. I ought to be used to it by now, I knew I should, but it still hurt like hell.

“You know your problem, Drake?” it asked me when it had drunk its fill.

“No, but I dare say you're going to tell me,” I said.

“You've got no ambition, you know that? No vision.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. For fuck's sake, I put the power of Hell at your fingertips and what do you do with it? You rent it out to cheap scum like Gold Steevie.”

“He pays well,” I said.

He
paid
well, anyway. I didn't do that anymore, whatever the Burned Man might think.
I was ready to do it for Wormwood though,
a little voice said in the back of my head.
What's the real difference at the end of the day?

“He's pathetic,” the Burned Man snapped. “A nasty, cheap little local gangster is all he is. You could
own
him, Drake, if you put your mind to it. Him and all his ridiculous little friends and enemies.”

“Jesus, are you mental?” I said. “They've got
guns
. Not to mention blowtorches and bolt cutters and who-the-fuck-knows-what-else that they like to use on people. I'm not getting on the wrong side of them.”

“Pitiful,” it said. “You're just pitiful, you really are. Guns? You've got
demons!
Queer Steevie, that other twat – the Russian one – that greasy Albanian cunt, fuck the lot of them. If you only put your mind to it you could
own
London, don't you realize that?”

“I'm not a gangster,” I said. “I don't want that.”

No, I'm not a gangster,
I thought.
I'm a hired killer,
because that's such a whole lot better. What's the bloody difference?

I knew I was right though, I
didn't
want that. I hated Steevie and the Russian and all of them, but I worked for them just the same. Sure there were the other gents too, the ones I'd always suspected were something to do with the government, but they didn't come around that often. Anyway, I was hardly likely to get one of them to admit who they were, or to land myself a regular job with GCHQ or MI6 whoever the hell they were. So what
did
I want? Me and Debbie all cosy in a little cottage in the country somewhere with roses around the door? It was a bit late for that, if so.

The Burned Man looked at me like I was something it had just stepped in.

“The time's coming, Drake, when I'm going to lose patience with you,” it said.

I met its stare, but inside I started to feel cold. As I think I said, on my own I'm really not that great at magic. The Burned Man was pretty much all I had.

“Don't be like that,” I said. “We'll sort it out, we always do.”

“Mmmm,” it said. “Don't we, though. We sort it out one minor emergency to another, but nothing ever moves forward with you, does it? We're still here in this shitty little flat in shitty South London, working for the sort of arsewipes who ought to be kissing your handmade shoes in Monte Carlo by now. You are, on balance, probably the shittiest waste of space I've ever belonged to.”

“Oh do fucking tell,” I shouted at it. “I suppose you ruled the world in 9,000 BC or something, so high and mighty you got yourself chained to a fucking piece of wood!”

It growled at me.

It growled, and the sound filled the room like there was a whole herd of rabid grizzly bears in there with me. It had never done that before. Now I'm sorry, I know it's only nine inches tall and chained up as well, but that growl frightened the fucking life out of me. It was the fastest way to remind me that the Burned Man was only the fetish of the demon it represented. Right then I could feel the full malice of the real thing blazing behind its tiny eyes, and honest to God I almost wet myself.
That,
if you hadn't quite got the idea yet, is what the Burned Man was really like.

“Sorry,” I said. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.”

“You listen to me, you dogsucking little puke,” the Burned Man said. “You are going to make a fucking choice, and you are going to make it very soon. You're going to man up and make something of yourself and make me proud, or you and I are going to part company.”

N
ow
, perhaps I ought to explain something. I haven't always owned the Burned Man, obviously, and I haven't always been this much of a shit either. It doesn't take a genius to work out that maybe there's a connection there. It started liked this.

Debbie and I were at university together. She was reading chemistry and I was sort of drifting between various arts courses, not really doing a whole hell of a lot. We were dating but it wasn't anything meaningful, just the usual sort of student relationship that you take terribly seriously at the time but always know deep down isn't going to last past graduation. Anyway this was in the late Eighties, about the time the third Indiana Jones film came out, and me and my mate Jim and a handful of other academic layabouts went to the flicks and then naturally got all enthusiastic about taking an archaeology course. That's when I first met Professor Davidson, and that was when everything in my life suddenly started to get very weird.

To my intense disappointment, and that of my fellow layabouts, Professor Davidson was not Indiana Jones. He was a proper professor, right down to the tweed three-piece suit and half moon glasses. That and he was about a hundred years old, to our undergraduate eyes. Jim was the first one to drop out, two days in. Three weeks later I was the only one of our little crowd still on the course.

I don't know if it was Debbie urging me to take something seriously and stick with it for more than half a term for once, or if it was Davidson himself, but something kept me turning up lecture after lecture. Now these were the late Eighties as I said, those hazy student years of Jack Daniels and Guns N' Roses, of Thatcher and Reagan and the Lockerbie bombing and the end of the Cold War. The world was changing all around us and like everyone else in my circle of friends I was looking for a way to make sense of it all.

Sense for Debbie came from the ordered relationship between agent and reagent, in atomic weights and the periodic table. For me, it was provided by occultists like Crowley and Gardner, by Israel Regardie and Franz Bardon and Austin Osman Spare. The university library had a surprisingly well stocked selection of what they liked to call “esoteric” books, and I devoured them all. I locked myself away in my student digs and studied like I had never studied for an actual course subject before. I was learning magic, real proper magic, and I discovered I was good at it. I mean OK, nothing ever really
happened,
as such, but all the same I felt I was making real progress. I was in touch with my Will, and I trained myself to see auras. Debbie scoffed, of course, until I dug out a couple of volumes on medieval alchemy and showed them to her. She was fascinated from that moment on, and we grew even closer.

It was about then that the professor's class size really began to dwindle and I found I got more tutorial time with him than I had ever had before. He might have been a fossil himself but he struck me as a genuinely nice guy, and we got on fairly well. If I'm honest about it, I suppose I was still looking for some sort of father figure in those days. My own dad had been a total shitbag of an alcoholic who had battered my poor old mum black and blue on a regular basis. The only good thing he had ever done for our family was to die of a heart attack when I was ten years old. Life had got a bit more tolerable after he was gone.

It wasn't long before our one-to-one time in Davidson's office turned into me going to the pub with him and chatting over a pint instead. It was about then that I discovered just how bad his drinking problem was.

We had gone for a quick lunchtime pint one day in lieu of my scheduled half hour tutorial, but that was three hours ago and it was now the middle of the afternoon. He had been supposed to be taking a freshman class at one o'clock, but he assured me his researcher could handle it without him.

“I'm fucking the librarian,” he announced, very loudly. He had one of those overly educated accents which somehow made him sound even more dissolute, like some awful cross between Brian Blessed and Uncle Monty, if you've ever seen that film. Still, he seemed harmless enough. He wasn't the same sort of drunk as my dad had been, that was something. “Sandra, Sheila, whatever her name is.”

“Are you, sir?” I asked politely.

I was still sipping the end of my second bottle of lager. He'd had six pints of bitter and at least five whiskies and about fifteen cigarettes by then, and I was starting to feel a bit scared of him. I knew it was just bad childhood memories, though. I still had a lot of them, in those days. Davidson was OK.

“Anyway, doesn't matter,” he said, leaning unsteadily across the table between us. “Point is, she's worried about you, Drake. Asked me to have a word, and all that.”