Drake (9 page)

“Um,” I said. “I'm, um…”

Something didn't feel right. I mean, she was
this
pleased to see me, really? After our previous encounter, and what we had done to each other? I was having a hard time believing that, to be perfectly honest with you.

“Don't worry about it,” Debbie said. “Really, it's fine. We're just friends, after all. You go and have fun. It's fine, honestly.”

I gave Debs a stricken look as Ally almost pulled me out of my chair, but she was staring down at her menu again and refusing to meet my eyes. I remembered my last night with Ally in painful detail, but suddenly all thoughts of saying no went straight out of my mind. I was getting that weird feeling again, the same feeling of not being quite in my right mind that I'd had last time I was with her.

“I've been
so
looking forward to seeing you again,” Ally gushed at me. Her silver ouroboros bracelet flashed in the restaurant's lights as she waved towards the door. “Come on, let's get out of this dump and go get some drinks!”

Fucking hell but she's gorgeous,
I thought
.

I was vaguely aware that I might be losing my powers of reasoning, but too vaguely to really be able to do anything about it at the time.

“Where, um, where have you been hiding then?” I asked as she all but dragged me out of the restaurant and into the cold night air. “I thought you didn't want to see me again.”

“Oh babes no, nothing like that,” she giggled. “I want to see you again and again!”

Foggy in the head I might have been but all the same I found that a tiny bit hard to believe. Now to be fair I'm a bloke, and blokes tend to think with their dicks at the best of times, but even so I was starting to get a bit of a bad feeling about this. Something definitely didn't feel right – I mean, I'm not exactly what most women would regard as a catch. I looked back over my shoulder through the window of the restaurant. Debbie was talking to the waiter, her back turned towards the street.
Ordering her prawn biryani
, I thought with a fondness that I must admit surprised me a bit. Stood up at the last minute or not, Debs wouldn't miss out on her curry for anyone.

“So, um,” I said as Ally pulled me down the pavement. “Where are you taking me then?”

“Your place,” she said, and grinned at me. “Drinks and bed. Drinks
in
bed. It's party time, Don!”

God that sounded good.
I'm not thinking straight,
I told myself, but by then it was far too late.

D
rinks there certainly were – well
, there was booze anyway. I don't think two litres of cheap Latvian vodka from the late shop can really be dignified with the term “drinks”. There was bed, too. Oh dear me yes, there was definitely that. At some point, and I can't be certain but I'm pretty sure we were well into the second bottle by then, Ally convinced me to let her tie me up. That, looking back on it, was fucking stupid of me.

You might remember what a mess she'd made of my back last time. With me stark naked and tied spread-eagled to the bed and her straddling my waist, I'll just let you imagine what she did to my chest. The worst of it was she hadn't even taken any of her clothes off yet. This wasn't exactly sex this time, at least not the way I know it. I was struggling to see where the fun in this was supposed to be, but then I've never been all that fond of the sight of my own blood. Ally certainly seemed to enjoy herself though.

“I've missed you, Don,” she sighed as she ground herself back and forth on top of me, her nails gouging my chest and shoulders with each roll of her fully-dressed hips. “I'm so glad you got rid of your little friend.”

“My what?” I mumbled.

Thinking about it, I'd probably drunk most of the vodka myself. Ally had kept on filling my glass up but I couldn't remember her actually drinking that much at all. I winced as she twisted my nipples between her fingers, her hips moving faster on me as I gasped in pain.

“Your friend,” she said. “The mean one.”

“That doesn't narrow it down,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “I've got a lot of mean friends.”

She smiled. “I'm sure you have,” she said.

“I'm starting to wonder if you're one of them,” I said. I was starting to wonder if she was ever going to take her knickers off, actually, but that's not really the kind of thing you can say out loud on a second date.

“Now don't be like that,” she said, and slapped my face. Hard.

I blinked with shock, more surprised than hurt. “Debs didn't mind me going off with you,” I said, although I knew for a fact that wasn't true. She
had
minded, for all that she didn't have any real right to. “We're just friends, she said so herself.”

Ally laughed and raked her nails from my shoulders to my belly button, leaving long red welts behind them and re-opening the half-healed wound the Burned Man had left me with when I last fed it.

“That sad little thing in the restaurant?” she said. “No, not her.
She
could never keep me away from you, Don.”

“Fuck me, that hurts!” I gasped.

“It's supposed to hurt,” she said, “and I'm not fucking you. Not again. Once was enough, sweetie. Once is all I need.”

She gave me another slap across the face that made me gasp, then grinned and hopped off me without warning, leaving me standing to attention like the last private on parade.

“Where are you going?” I demanded. “We've got unfinished business here!”

Maybe I'm slow on the uptake but I was still assuming that at
some
point we were going to have some semblance of sex. You know, like normal people. How silly of me.

“Two ticks,” she said.

She bent over her handbag, giving me a view of her behind that ensured she held my full attention. She pulled something out of the bag, and kept on pulling. When she turned back to face me with six feet of rapidly uncoiling bullwhip in her hand I think the awful truth finally sank in. I have to confess I actually started to whimper. No doubt there are people who'd pay good money for this sort of thing but I assure you I'm not one of them. The fingernails had been more than kinky enough for me, ta very much.

“Oi, leave it out!” I said, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice.

I've never gone in for stuff like this, and now suddenly the whole being tied up business was rapidly losing whatever scant appeal it might have had in the first place. Ally cracked her whip in the air over my prone and helpless body, her eyes gleaming with obvious excitement.

“You've been a bad boy, haven't you Don,” she said. “A very bad boy
indeed
.”

“I fucking mean it,” I said, twisting against the knots that held me. “I don't want to do this, Ally. Seriously, I don't.”

That was the end of the last private on parade, let me tell you. He was asleep on duty in double-quick time.

“Oh you spoilsport,” Ally said. “You rotten spoilsport, I was really hoping to give that a good lick of the whip.”

She flicked me with it anyway and I twisted away just in time. All the same, she laid a long red stripe down the outside of my right thigh. I howled.

“Jesus!” I shouted. “Jesus fucking Christ you bitch!”

“Potty mouth,” Ally giggled, and cracked the whip again.

She was so fast I barely saw it coming, but just managed to jerk my head out of the way so that it only laid open the side of my cheek. If I hadn't moved quickly enough I seriously think she might have taken an eye out.

“I don't want to!” I yelled at her, struggling violently against the woolly winter scarves and old belts she'd used to tie me up with.

I worked my left hand free at last and flailed wildly in the air with it, trying to keep the whip away from me. Ally giggled and snapped the length of oiled leather back into her hand.

“Oh you're no fun tonight,” she giggled. “You're regretting telling your little friend to get lost now, I bet.”

I was regretting all sorts of things by then, to be honest. Letting Ally tie me up was pretty much top of the list, but leaving Debs in the restaurant was running a very close second. Blokes, I told you – we think with our dicks. I fumbled lefthanded at the belt wrapped around my right wrist until it came loose, all the while watching Ally standing there laughing at me.

“What's wrong with you?” I demanded. “Why the hell can't we just sleep together like normal people.”

Ally laughed. “I'm not normal people, and neither are you,” she said. “Besides, I don't sleep much.”

I was still untying my ankles by the time she'd finished coiling her whip back into her bag. She blew me a kiss and slipped out of the door. For some mad reason I half thought about going after her and dragging her back to bed, but I shook my head and told myself just how daft that would be. What the hell was wrong with me?

The cuts on my leg and face were really starting to hurt now. I flopped back on the sweaty sheets and groaned. It was about then that I realized I'd been so busy looking at
Ally
that I hadn't realized what I
wasn't
seeing when I looked at her. She had no aura, none at all.

Now, everything that's alive has an aura, and by something that's alive, I mean everything with any sort of conscious energy at all, demons, monsters and animals included. If it moves, if it thinks, it has an aura of some sort. The only way Ally could possibly appear
not
to have one was if she was savvy enough to know how to hide it, and therefore how to hide what she was. That meant she was either a pretty sharp witch, or something else altogether. That, now that I thought about it, might go a way towards explaining a few things. That feeling of unreality I seemed to get around her, for one.

You're regretting telling your little friend to get lost
, she had said. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't seen Ally since the first time Trixie had visited me, and almost as soon as I banished Trixie there was Ally again. Coincidence? Maybe, but no magician worth his salt is a great believer in coincidence. I frowned. It was a worrying thought, but I soon lost track of it as the pain started to really clamour for attention over the haze of vodka and sexual frustration. Ally had torn my chest up pretty good with her nails, but that was fast fading into insignificance as the searing whip cuts on my leg and face began to burn like a mad bastard.

“Dear God,” I whimpered, and forced myself up into a sitting position on the bed. “Why the hell didn't I force down a vindaloo and go home with Debs?”

I sat there waiting for the pain to subside, but it just didn't. Eventually I swallowed my pride and dragged myself in front of the Burned Man. It gawped at me for a minute, then began to laugh.

“Oh cock me silly,” it snorted, “did you try to fuck a bear or something?”

“Or something,” I said. “God knows what, though. Do me a favour, will you?”

“I take it this wasn't our blonde friend's doing?” it asked me.

I shook my head. Somehow I couldn't imagine Trixie really went in for sex, sexy though she might be. I just couldn't see it.

“Nah,” I said. “Just a girl without an aura.”

The Burned Man frowned at me. “Never a good sign,” it said. “She's got something to hide, that once has, and the brains to know how to hide it. Come here then, you thick twat.”

I winced and knelt down in front of it, feeling the long cut on my thigh pulling open again as I did so. I bowed my head. The Burned Man reached forwards, its chains rattling, and put a tiny blackened hand on my forehead like some awful parody of a priest giving the benediction.

“Bugger me, how much have you had to drink?” it complained. “Even your aura's ninety percent proof!”

“Just fix me,” I said. “Please mate.”

“Mate, he says, when he's shagging arse and I'm not,” the Burned Man muttered.

I shuddered as it did its thing, feeling the long wet cuts on my thigh and face and chest slowly close up and heal over. The Burned Man wasn't just a Summoning machine, after all.

“Thanks,” I said when it was done.

“You'll have bruises like you did ten rounds with a pro,” it warned me, “and I'm leaving you the hangover for the morning. You earned that, you can bloody well keep it.”

I nodded. I felt like shit already and I knew it was only going to get worse. The Burned Man can do some clever stuff, but only gods can create energy from nothing and it's not a god. The healing energy it used had to come from somewhere, and I'm afraid its not the charitable sort. My knees sagged and I fell forwards onto my hands, feeling utterly drained. Even my heart felt like it was beating much too slowly in my chest.

“Go to bed while you can still get there,” the Burned Man said.

I nodded and crawled pathetically out of the room on my hands and knees, struggling to keep my eyelids open. By the time I dragged myself back into the bedroom my eyes were all the way closed and I was going by feel alone. I think hauling myself up off the floor and into my sweaty, bloody, crumpled bed was possibly one of the hardest things I had ever done. I fell backwards onto the pillows and passed out.

I
'd rather not dwell
on the next morning. I was so pitifully hungover from all that godawful cheap vodka that it was all I could do to kneel on the bathroom floor hugging the toilet and whimpering until it was over. I finally got back on my feet and had a look at myself in the mirror over the sink. I really wasn't a pretty sight, even by my standards. The side of my face sported a yellow-edged purple bruise from temple to jaw where the Burned Man had healed Ally's whip cut, and my chest and the side of my leg were much the same. I groaned and leaned over the sink to bathe my face in cold water, wincing as my fingers touched the puffy skin of the bruise. Explaining this to Debs was going to take a truly masterful work of bullshit, I thought.

It didn't though. She just shook her head disgustedly when she opened the door to me a couple of hours later, and ushered me inside.

“I got mugged,” I muttered.

“What a shame,” she said. “Those mandrake roots still need grinding, the ones you were going to do before you left yesterday.”

“Right, OK,” I said.

So, it's like that then.
I supposed that's what I got for introducing her as
my friend
, although what the hell else I was supposed to have said I really didn't know.
My girlfriend?
Well, not according to her she wasn't, so I was buggered if I knew.

“What was your curry like?” I asked as I set to with the pestle and mortar.

“Lonely,” she said.

Oh for fuck's sake!

“Look, I'm sorry OK?” I said. “I thought… well, and you did say…”

“Yes,” Debs said. “I did.”

I sighed and gave it up as a bad job. If she wanted to be pissed off that was fine with me. Whatever, yeah? At least she'd let me in, and conveniently it was cold enough in her flat to give me a reason to keep my coat on. I had the Burned Man's shopping list in the back of my mind, and I just needed the chance to grab what I needed and get out of there. I looked at her, leaning over one of her enormous handwritten recipe books with her beautiful auburn hair hanging in her eyes just so, and sighed again. If she just hadn't been so damn cute, if she hadn't made me feel so… I don't know. So much of a
shit
all the time, I supposed. The hell with it, it wasn't me who'd called things off.

Handily enough she already had me powdering mandrake so it was easy enough to swipe a pinch or two of that, and I spotted the graveyard dirt on a shelf nearby in a neat little row of half-ounce vials. Two of those sneaked into my coat pocket while Debbie had her back turned for a moment. That only left one more thing I needed.

“How're the toads?” I asked after a while, breaking the chilly silence.

“What?” Debs said, giving me the sort of look you might give a puppy that had just crapped on the carpet. “How do you think they are? Warty, croaky, ugly and living in my bath, same as always.”

I nodded. It was a good job the bathroom in Debbie's flat had a separate shower cubicle, that's all I can say. The bathtub hadn't been usable on account of toads for as long as I'd known her.

“Sure,” I said. “Just wondering.”

“Don,” she said, and pushed the hair back from her eyes with an irritated sweep of her hand, “if the health of my toads is your idea of smalltalk while we work then I think I'd rather you just kept quiet, if it's all the same to you.”

I flushed. “Whatever,” I said.

I had to admit, now that I'd thought it through with a clear head, that there was a tiny flaw in my plan. The grand scheme had originally been to swipe what I needed from Debbie's place this morning while she was on the bog having a discussion with last night's curry. Of course, I had expected to be spending the night there at that point. As things had sadly worked out I'd turned up so late this morning that ship had already sailed. The other fundamental problem with my plan, now that I thought about it, was that the toads and the toilet were in the same room.

“Bugger,” I muttered to myself.

“What?” Debbie snapped.

“Um,” I said, thinking fast. “Nothing. I just, um, caught my thumb with the pestle.”

“Well don't,” she said. “No one wants your thumbnail in their mandrake.”

“No, no, I suppose they wouldn't,” I said. “I'm just going to the bathroom to give it a wash, OK?”

Debbie shrugged in a way that said she didn't give a rat's arse what I did. I slipped past her and down the short corridor that led to her bedroom, one hand stuffed in my coat pocket to stop the vials of graveyard dirt clinking together. The bathroom door was on the left, and I closed and hastily bolted it behind me. I looked into the bath, and the toads looked back at me. One of them croaked reproachfully.

“Shhhhh,” I told it.

T
he phone was ringing
when I got home. I was in a bit of a rush so I let the machine pick it up.

“You bastard!” Debbie's voice shrieked out of the speaker. “Pick up! You must be home by now, fucking pick up the fucking phone!”

I wasn't in the mood. It wasn't that long a walk home from her place, but any walk is basically too long when you've got a pair of live toads stuffed under your coat and they really don't want to be there. I finally dumped them in the sink and tossed my coat on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe I'd just burn it, later.

“You went out my fucking bathroom window, didn't you?” Debbie shouted out of my answer machine.

I pulled my soggy shirt off as well and dropped it on top of the coat. Toads aren't entirely pleasant, all things considered. I went back through to the office to take my bollocking like a man.

“I had.. to kick… the
fucking
door in!”

I had to smile despite myself. Debbie always started getting short of breath when she'd really got her yelling head on.

“You stole… my fucking…
toads!
”

Damn.
I'd been holding out some sort of half-hearted hope that she wouldn't realize she was short two toads, but needless to say she had. Sooner or later she'd notice a couple of vials of graveyard dirt had walked too, not that it really mattered now. There was only one thing I could possibly want with live toads, and she knew damn well what it was.

“If I
ever
see your lying, thieving, ugly fucking face again I'll…”

I reached across the desk and hit the mute button. I didn't want to hear it any more.
That's that, then,
I thought. I sank onto the sofa and sighed. Debbie knew I was going back into business, even after what had happened last time. After everything I'd said to her, and all the promises I had made. She was never going to speak to me again and that was that.

“Damn you, Wormwood,” I whispered.

“Oi,” the Burned Man shouted from the workroom. “Is that toads I can hear now the screaming has stopped?”

“Yeah.”

I heard it cackle. “The boy done good,” it said.

“No,” I said. “No, he really didn't.”

I sighed again, and leaned forward to bury my head in my hands. The amulet I had made swung from its leather cord around my neck. It felt heavy as a millstone, weighed down with my guilt. For a moment I half considered taking it off and letting Trixie come back but I wasn't sure that was really the answer. I still didn't even know what she was, for one thing, and while she might have been full of advice, I hadn't understood half of it. Not only that, but while I was prepared to admit it was technically possible that she really had been keeping Ally away from me somehow, I was still far from sure that she had my best interests at heart herself.
Oh what the bloody hell am I going to do?

“Oi,” the Burned Man called again. “Are we doing this or not?”

We were doing it. It's not like I had any choice, is it? I'd burnt my last bridge with Debbie for good and all now, whether I did it or not. If I didn't I'd have Wormwood to face. And Connie, of course. Let us not forget dear, sweet Connie and his fists like cannonballs.

“Yeah, we're doing it,” I said.

I got up and went to weigh out the iron filings and round up the toads. This job was nowhere near as complicated as the last one had been, and we were good to go by about six o'clock. I squatted on my heels in the circle and fixed the Burned Man with a hard stare.

“This time,” I said, “there aren't going to be any screwups, OK? I'm going in with it, and I'm riding it all the way.”

“You don't really want to do that, do you?” the Burned Man said.

“I want to do that a
hell
of a lot more than I want a repeat of what happened last time,” I told it. “We've got one mark, that's who we've got to kill, and it's damn well going to be the
only
person we kill this time.”

The Burned Man shrugged.

“Suit yourself,” it said. “I don't suppose you want to use a vorehound then.”

I grimaced. “Not if I can help it,” I said. “I hate wearing quadrupeds, I keep getting my legs in a muddle.”

“Well you can't have a screamer, not with just graveyard dirt and mandrake,” it said. “I did the shopping list for a vorehound. Throw in the last of that goat's blood and I could probably rustle up a talonwraith, I suppose.”

“Oh that'll be a barrel of fun,” I muttered.

“For fuck's sake, it's a talonwraith or four-legged Fido, mate,” the Burned Man snapped. “There are limits, you know.”

“Yeah OK, OK,” I said, “a talonwraith it is then.”

I had to admit the goat's blood was a bit past its best by then, congealed and clotted into rancid lumps, but I did my best to work it into the mix. Fuck it, it would just have to do. I got myself set up with the scrying glass while the Burned Man did its thing.

“Ready?” it asked me after a while. “One grumpy talonwraith, on its way.”

I focused my Will on the glass, gazing into it until the smooth black surface resolved into an image of an empty hallway seen through the wraith's eyes. There was a thick, plush carpet on the floor, and a few widely-spaced doors with little brass numbers on them.

Flat 702
, I reminded myself.

The image in the glass moved slowly as the talonwraith took a step forwards, pulling itself out of the wall opposite the doors. I plunged my Will through the glass and into the wraith's mind before it had a chance to orientate itself.

I may have mentioned this before, but inside the mind of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. Doubly so, if the demon in question is a talonwraith. Now a vorehound is basically just a nasty demonic animal, and at the other end of the spectrum a screamer is something like a rabid, psychotic axe murderer hopped up on PCP. Neither of them are anything you can have a conversation with, to put it mildly. A talonwraith though, now those are different. They might not be as savage as screamers, but talonwraiths
think
.

I shuddered as I settled into the wraith's head.

You don't need to come and watch, little diabolist
, it hissed in its mind.
I have my instructions.

I'm not here to watch
, I told it.
I'll be driving.

Oh will you now?

It tried to throw me out there and then, but I'd been expecting that. I dug my Will into its horrible black little brain and squeezed. Hard.

Yes
, I told it.
Yes I will.

It called up a stream of images in our newly shared mind, scenes of horror and madness. I wrestled with it as it dragged me through its treasured memories of murder and rape and torture, concentration camps and famine and plague. I opened the dark door in my own memory and brought forth the child's face, the horror where his eyes had been, and threw it back at the wraith. Whatever atrocities it might have seen and done, they weren't anything to do with me. The child was. That was personal, and that made it so much worse than anything the wraith showed me could ever possibly be.

I'm not impressed,
I snarled at it.
Now pipe down, you fucker.

I felt a furious rush of malice and hatred, but I thought I had it under control now. The emotional charge that image carried for me had been enough to break the wraith's concentration. I lifted one of its hands into view in front of its face. Talonwraiths are invisible to the human eye, but of course now I was seeing through its own eyes and it could see itself perfectly well. It stood at least seven feet tall, and its skeletally thin hand was enormous. Flaky grey skin was stretched taut over the prominent bones, and each of its three fingers was tipped with a filthy two foot long claw. When I lowered its hands back to its sides, the tips of those terrible claws brushed the carpet underfoot.

Stop masturbating and get on with it, you pitiful sack of meat,
the talonwraith sneered at me.
Your jealousy disgusts me.

I snorted and walked it through the front door of 702. The wraith passed through the wood-veneered steel door as though it wasn't there, and stepped smoothly into a spacious entrance hall. I could hear music playing from somewhere, something classical that I didn't know. I followed the sound.

You get off on this, don't you?
the wraith thought.
Have you ever summoned a succubus just to fuck her? I bet you have. You're that sort, aren't you? You're all about the control you can't get any other way.

Shut up
, I told it.

You have, haven't you? I thought so.

I told you to shut up.

I slipped through another door and the music got louder. The room was starkly white and enormous and virtually empty, one of those minimalist places that very rich people seem to like so much. It's almost like he was saying
I don't need all this space because I don't actually like stuff, but I can afford to have it anyway so fuck you
. The far wall was all glass, commanding a magnificent seventh-floor view of the City of London. It was dark outside now, and the thousands of lights glittered like stars.