Drake (3 page)

“Drake,” Wormwood said with a nod. “Don't mean to be rude but I ain't got long. What have you brought me?”

I cleared my throat. I could feel Big Dave's bacon roll turning over in my stomach as though it was suddenly crawling with maggots. I knew this wasn't going to go well. I'd been trying to work out what I was going to say all the way over here, but my thoughts had kept wandering back to the blonde woman. I still had absolutely no idea what to tell him. I cleared my throat again.

“Oh dear,” said Wormwood, his eyes narrowing until he looked like some sort of large oily weasel. “You've brought me fuck-all, haven't you?”

“I, um,” I said. “Um.”

“For fuck's sake,” Wormwood snapped. “Hurt him, Connie.”

I don't know how something that big could possibly move that fast, but it did. The minder's massive fist went into my guts like a freight train, and then somehow I was on my hands and knees six feet away from where I'd been standing, choking for breath. My bacon roll made an explosive return to the world all over Wormwood's carpet.

“Nasty,” said the minder, whose name seemed to be Connie of all things.

He wasn't kidding. I wiped snot and vomit from my mouth with the back of my hand and gagged again.

“Look, Wormwood,” I gasped. “Gimme a few days and I'll find a way to…”

“No,” said Wormwood, “you won't. Will he, Connie?”

“I doubt it, Mr Wormwood,” said Connie.

“What you
will
do,” Wormwood went on, “is exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand me, Drake?”

I nodded, still trying to catch my breath. I didn't, not really, but that was hardly the point. One thing I did understand very clearly indeed was that I didn't want Connie to hit me again.

“Good boy,” said Wormwood. “Now, we both know you ain't got a fucking chance of paying what you owe me, so you're going to work the debt off instead. That sound fair?”

Kneeling in front of him in a puddle of my own puke wasn't exactly a strong negotiating position, so I just nodded again.

“Get him up,” Wormwood said.

The huge minder picked me up by the scruff of the neck, one handed, and plonked me down in the armchair opposite Wormwood. I groaned.

“Thanks, Connie,” I muttered.

“It's Constantinos, actually,” he said, “but don't worry about it. Connie's fine.”

“Now then,” said Wormwood, “I've got a situation. You're going to sort it for me.”

“What sort of a situation?” I asked him.

“The sort you handle best,” Wormwood said. “I need some people removing.”

“People?” I repeated.

“Yeah, actual human people,” he said. “I mean, if this was my own type of folk I'd sort it myself, but my boys are a bit…”

He gestured wordlessly at Connie, who was looming beside his armchair with his horns almost brushing the ceiling of the club.

“Conspicuous?” I suggested.

“Yeah,
conspicuous
. That's a good word for it,” he said. “They're conspicuous, and you ain't. So you're gonna sort it for me. Summon and send something, or go shoot them in the fucking head for all I care. I don't care how you do it, but you
are
going to do it, Drake. You owe me.”

“Who are we talking about, exactly?” I asked him.

Then he told me, and I started feeling ill all over again.

“
H
e's had
you good and proper, hasn't he?” the Burned Man said. “I reckon he knew all along you weren't good for that skull.”

I sighed. It was right, of course. I'd figured that much out for myself on the long, miserable trudge home from Wormwood's club. I'd never actually played cards with Wormwood himself before last night, but I went to his club often enough. He knew who I was, where I lived, who I usually played cards with and how much the stakes were, and far too much else for him to ever have thought I had any money. The only thing of value I had left was the Burned Man itself, and I knew damn well Wormwood didn't know I had that. No one did, and it was staying that way.

I mean yeah, I made money, really
good
money – when I had a job. Even in South London though, even these days, there are only so many people who might want a demon set on someone. Jobs didn't come round often, and money doesn't last forever. Let's just say I've always been better at playing Fates than I have at budgeting, and I'm shit at Fates. No doubt about it, Wormwood had set me up to fail. I'd
thought
the little bastard was cheating last night.

“Yeah,” I said. “There's not much I can do about it though, unless I want Connie rearranging my internal organs.”

The Burned Man snorted. “If you welch on Wormwood, Connie will be the least of your problems.”

“Yeah,” I said again. “So we're going to have to do it, aren't we?”

“Looks that way,” said the Burned Man. “Who is it, anyway?”

“Vincent and Danny,” I said.

“Shit,” it said. “That's going to be tricky. Can't he just buy them off instead?”

“Why didn't he just hire me to do the job?” I countered. “Wormwood didn't get that rich by
spending
his money.”

“Fair point,” it said. “Bad luck, mate.”

Bad luck
was an understatement. Vincent and Danny McRoth were known to every serious magician in the country, and not in a good way. They were the only people I knew of who had enough clout to even think about trying to muscle in on one of Wormwood's business interests, and recently they'd been doing a lot more than just think about it. They were based out of Edinburgh, where, if anything, the Veils are even thinner than they are in South London. It's a spooky old city is Edinburgh. The two of them had a nice little interest going in imported artefacts of power – pebbles from the shore of the Astral Sea, jewellery made of hellfire obsidian, holy relics, warpstones, various demonic body parts and fluids, all that good stuff. All the things magicians like me could use in our work. Wormwood had been cornering that market for years, and he wasn't at all pleased to suddenly find he had new business rivals on the scene.

“Their place will have wards on it a mile wide,” I said. “I don't think
tricky
really covers it.”

“Have faith, you miserable git,” the Burned Man said. “Where there's a will there's a way, and all that. You
have
made a will, haven't you?”

“Oh piss off,” I said, “this is serious.”

“Yeah it is,” the Burned Man agreed. “That Vincent's a nasty piece of work, we'll have to hit him fast and hard, floor him before he can get his shit together. Screamers, I think. I don't know his missus so well.”

“Danny's nastier, if anything,” I said. “From what I hear, she practises necromancy in her spare time. For fun.”

“Oh joy,” it said.

In a funny sort of way Wormwood was probably doing the world a favour by having those two bumped off, even if he
was
doing it for all the wrong reasons. I just wished he hadn't dragged me into it.

“So?” I asked it. “Any bright ideas?”

“Oh you know me, I'm full of bright ideas,” it said. “You'll need to run out and get me some bits and pieces though.”

“What do we need this time?”

“Two pounds of iron filings,” it said, and I nodded. “Three pints of goat's blood, one vial of tincture of mercury, two live toads, and a quarter ounce of powdered manticore spines.”

“Oh for fuck's sake!” I shouted at it. “Manticore spines?”

“Do you want this done properly or not?” it said. “Manticore spines, or you take your chances with something that ain't up to the job. Do you want Vicious Vincent and Danny-a-Necromancer-for-Fun living long enough to come looking for you?”

“Fine, fine,” I grumbled.

“Say hi to Debbie for me,” it smirked as I left the room.

Yeah, that's going to go well
, I thought. Debbie, as I think I mentioned, was my sort of girlfriend. Sometimes, anyway. She was also one of the best alchemists in London, and the only one even remotely likely to let me have anything on credit. You don't need an alchemist to get hold of iron filings of course, and I had plenty of those already, a big sack of them in the bottom of my wardrobe, and goat's blood and toads are cheap. To be fair, you don't strictly need an alchemist for either of those either, but you'd be a long while waiting to catch any toads or a wild goat on Peckham High Street, know what I mean? The alternative, to head out into the bloody awful countryside with a big net or whatever the hell you'd need, didn't exactly appeal to me. The tincture of mercury wasn't going to break the bank either, but manticore spines were another matter. Even a quarter of an ounce was a quarter of an ounce more than I could afford right then.

I supposed I'd just have to hope the old Don Drake charm worked a bit better on Debbie than it had on Selina.

I
t didn't
.

“You've got a bloody nerve,” Debbie said, glaring at me through a haze of purple smoke. “Why should I?”

She was crushing something unidentifiable with a big stone pestle and mortar. All around her, mysterious things bubbled through what looked like several miles of strangely curved glass tubing and condensers and retorts and other things I didn't even know the names for, before dripping into a variety of flasks and beakers and bottles. There were Bunsen burners hissing away underneath some of the apparatus, and purple and green smoke escaping from various seemingly random valves and gaskets along the way. I had no idea what any of it was for, but the whole affair looked like some sort of mad chemistry teacher's wet dream. This was in her living room – the rest of the flat was much worse. I knew she kept the toads in the bathroom, for one thing, and the kitchen didn't even bear thinking about. The last time I'd seen the inside of her bedroom there had been a live goat in there.

“Old times' sake?” I suggested, hopefully.

“Get stuffed, Don,” she said. “I don't know why I even let you in.”

“Because…” I started, about to say something glib and cute, but the look on her face made me think better of it. I gave honesty a try instead. “Because you know I need your help.”

“You should have thought of that the last time you stood me up to go and play cards, or because you were drunk, or out with some tart or whatever the hell you were doing,” she muttered, putting the pestle down to fiddle with some of her glass tubes.

“I'm sorry Debs,” I said. “Really. And I'm in deep shit if you don't help me.”

“Tough,” she said, and looked at me. “Who with this time?”

“Wormwood,” I confessed.

She winced. “Ouch,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “it's pretty bad.”

“Not that you pillock, I burned myself.” She came out from behind her workbench and gave me a stern look. “I'll be back in a minute – don't touch anything.”

She disappeared into the bathroom, sucking on a scalded finger. I sighed and looked around the room. Most of two walls were covered floor to ceiling with shelves full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of glass bottles, vials and jars, each one with a carefully handwritten label. She had pennyroyal oil and graveyard dirt for the hoodoos, holy water for people who liked that sort of thing, bloods and tinctures and ground this and powdered that and distilled the other in a bewildering array. She'd have some manticore spines somewhere, I knew she would. She certainly had a lot of pickled dead things in jars, most of them with far too many tentacles for my liking. At least I really hoped they were dead.

Debbie came back a minute or two later with a damp cloth wrapped around her hand and a slightly less pissed-off look on her face. She had a smudge of soot on one freckled cheek, I noticed now, and bits of some sort of dried plant caught in her auburn ponytail. I smiled at her, and she laughed and shook her head.

“You really are a bloody idiot, Don, you do know that don't you?” she said.

“Yeah,” I admitted. Next to her I certainly was – Debbie was a hell of a lot cleverer than I'll ever be, I knew that much. She was also, bless her, a bit of a soft touch. “Come here, you've got a bit of something…”

I wiped the soot off her cheek with my thumb, and leaned forwards to kiss her. That, as it turned out, was exactly the wrong thing to do.

“No, I don't think so,” she said. She stepped back, away from me. “I don't think that's going to happen, Don. Not anymore.”

Ouch indeed.
“Look,” I said, feeling a bit awkward, “that last time… well, I wasn't with a woman, OK?”

“Just drunk and gambling then? Well that makes it all OK, I'm sure,” she said, a bit snippily I thought. “No, I'm sorry, it's your life, you do what you want with it. Just, well, you just do it on your own from now on, OK?”

I sighed. Charm obviously wasn't my strong suit today either. I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed again.

“Look, Debs,” I started, but she cut me off.

“You can have your bits and pieces,” she said. “We're still… whatever we were all those years ago, before I was ever stupid enough to start going to bed with you. Friends, I suppose. Whatever you want to call it. I wouldn't want to see Wormwood eat you, OK?”

At least that was something we could agree on.

“Thanks Debs,” I said. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me thirty-four, by my count,” she said.

In all honesty it was probably more than that, but it didn't seem like a good idea to say so just then. I stood there while she packaged up what I needed, feeling like some naughty schoolboy being told off in the headmistress's office. At least she let me have it all on tick.

“Here,” she said at last as she thrust an old supermarket carrier bag into my hands. “It's all there.”

I peeked into the top of the bag. It
was
all there as well, even the manticore spines.

“You're a sweetheart,” I said.

“I'm an idiot,” she muttered as she turned away. “Now go on, piss off before I change my mind.”

I wanted to say something but I honestly couldn't think what, and now she had her back to me as she fiddled with her tubes and things. Her shoulders were trembling, I noticed. I chickened out and left.

It wasn't that far back to my place, but the whole time I kept the bag clutched tight in my hand and a wary eye on the people around me. There'd be no replacing this stuff if it got nicked now. The bag was wriggling horribly on account of the toads, which I supposed reduced the chances of anyone actually wanting to pinch it, but all the same. In that neighbourhood you never knew.

The Burned Man was waiting impatiently when I got back.

“Well?” it said. “Did you blag it with her?”

“Shut up,” I muttered as I emptied the bag onto my workroom floor. “It's all here.”

“Good ol' Debs,” it sniggered.

“Shut up,” I said again. “Just leave her out of it, OK?”

“Touchy,” it said, and smirked. “Go on then, get us set up.”

Getting us set up took most of the rest of the day. Summoning and sending is
hard
. By the time I had the circle laid out exactly right, it was dark outside. I stood back and admired my handiwork. It had taken an age to mix the iron filings with the goat's blood and mercury until the consistency was just right, but now the end result was piped perfectly onto the outline of the grand summoning circle that was inscribed on the floor. I had used the powdered manticore spines to draw the correct glyphs inside each point of the pentacle, and done what was necessary with the toads. I put the knife down and stretched my back until it cracked, and looked at the Burned Man.

“Ready?” I asked it.

I could see the hunger in its eyes.

“Ready,” it said.

Of course, it was a fucking disaster.