May Contain Traces of Magic (34 page)

This time he managed to grab a cushion to use as a shield. ‘Was I?' he said. ‘I don't—'

‘Yes, you bloody well do,' Karen barked at him. ‘ I saw you, you bastard. Oh, and while we're on the subject.' She raised her hand, taking careful aim, and he tightened his grip on the corner of the cushion. ‘Just who exactly is Angela?'

 

 

I
t was one of those meltdown moments. Karen was scowling furiously; their relationship was in the crusher, waiting for the big steel ram to drop; unless Chris found exactly the right form of words, delivered in precisely the right tone of voice, it'd all be over apart from arguing about whose aunt had given them the round white formica-topped table in the kitchen. He blinked, took a deep breath, and noticed something.

‘Are those new earrings?' he said.

At least he had the satisfaction of stopping her dead in her tracks. ‘What?'

‘Those earrings,' he said. ‘I don't think I've seen you wearing them before.'

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out; it was as though someone had pressed the mute button, followed by pause.

‘They're nice,' Chris said. ‘I like them.'

Three, maybe four seconds before she answered. ‘I got them in Debenhams,' she said.

It was the way she said it. A hundred and eighty degrees from her previous tone.
Defensive
. Which was all to the good, in the short-term tactical sense, but that was no longer the most important issue. He needed to know—

‘Recently?' he asked.

‘About three weeks ago,' Karen replied; then she rallied (but it was more desperation than aggression) and repeated, ‘Who's Angela?'

‘Oh, her,' he replied, with a sad grimace. ‘Girl at work. She got killed.'

‘Killed?'

Chris nodded. ‘Rather a nasty accident, apparently. I was having a nightmare about it, actually, don't know why. Freud would know.'

‘You never told me—'

His chance for a big, nasty smile. ‘Well, you're never here to tell, are you? Oh, I know,' he went on, pushing his luck like a bobsleigh crew trying for a fast launch, ‘you're so busy at work these days, it's all very important and you've got your career to think about. And I understand, I do really. It's just . . .' He couldn't think of anything suitably sensitive to say, so he sensibly left it at three wistfully trailing dots.

‘It's just while we've got this big promotion on,' she said, double-defensive - nice to see someone else fighting a losing battle on two fronts for a change, Chris thought smugly. I'd have done it better, but I've had so much more practice. ‘As soon as it's finished, I promise, we'll have loads more time—'

‘Yes, well.' A turn of phrase and tone of voice cribbed directly from Karen, but she didn't seem to have noticed. She was more concerned with trying to claw her hair unobtrusively over her ears, to hide the earrings. Which reminded him; he had more important things on his mind than point-scoring. ‘Kingfishers, aren't they?'

‘What?'

Chris smiled. ‘Your earrings.'

‘What? Oh, yes, right. I bought them to go with the blue top I got in Monsoon, but they're not quite right, which is why I haven't worn them before. Still, if you like them—'

Liar, he thought, and had to make an effort not to grin. Not kingfishers. Similar, but not. ‘Very much,' he said. ‘They remind me of something, but I can't quite remember—'

‘God, is that the time? Got to go.' Karen leaned forward, darted a peck at him, and fled, slamming the front door behind her. Chris sat down, his chin in his hands, and thought; just when I was sure it couldn't get any weirder.

Because, yes, now he came to think of it, the girl in the dream, the nice demon who'd tried to kiss him,
had
been Angela, in a sort of a way. And Karen's earrings hadn't been kingfishers. They'd been hummingbirds.

First things first. Chris phoned the office, explained that he was dying of cholera, foot and mouth disease and bubonic plague, and therefore wouldn't be able to make his rounds today, so could someone please ring round and reschedule. How long was he planning on being dead for, they asked. Permanently, he replied; but he'd undoubtedly be reincarnated as a sales rep either tomorrow or the day after, so he'd be able to catch up early next week . . .

Next. He made himself a cup of ultra-strong black coffee, sat down in the armchair, and tried to think.

He thought: the one who is to come. Annoying phrase, needlessly mystical; but he was going to have to deal with it sooner or later, if he didn't want this shambles to continue indefinitely.

He thought about Jill; and yes, she'd have done quite well, because she
did
feed off other people's emotions, she'd done it as long as he'd known her. Or Angela: assigned to him for no genuinely good reason, and the fuss had only started when she came on the scene; and how about the way she'd transformed herself from silent, miserable adolescent to bouncy charm-dispenser, thereby stirring up a whole shopping-trolley of emotions right across the Midlands?

Jill had even admitted it—

Just suppose, Chris said to himself, that they're both lying. Just suppose, for instance, that it was the real Angela, not a demonically crafted replica, who'd lured him to the Ettingate Retail Park, in her own personal Suzuki jeep, in whose seat belt the marks of his fingernails were still visible shortly thereafter? Which was more or less what the nice demon had confessed, half an hour ago in this very room. In which case, she was one of the demons hunting the one who is to come; but were they the baddies, as SatNav had told him, or what they themselves claimed to be, the enlightened liberal reformed tendency?

And who'd suborned Honest John to flush him down the toilet?

Jill as an undercover one-who-is-to-come hunter made a degree of sense, too. What better way to do her job than to infiltrate the humans' demon-hunting agency at the highest level? But the evidence for her being a demon at all turned on her emotional-vampire status; which surely argued that she was a dissident, rather than a fundamentalist (if he believed SatNav's version rather than the demons' own).

Weymouth, now; quite possibly his closest shave yet, though there wasn't a lot in it. He'd assumed, of course, that the demon he'd seen there had been disguised as Karen, the same way the Ettingate attacker had been disguised as Angela. That, however, wasn't a rock-solid analogy any more, because if the Ettingate Angela had been the real thing, then what reason did he have to believe that Weymouth Karen was a replica; or that demons could actually do the shape-shifting thing at all—?

Oh, come on, Chris thought. They can't
all
be demons, can they?

Don't answer that, he thought. Instead, let's go back to the time between Ettingate and Honest John's. At Ettingate he'd told the demon that he hadn't a clue about the one who is to come, and
she'd believed him
. Fine. There, logic demanded, the matter should've rested. So why, shortly afterwards, should demonkind have made another attempt to snatch him, presumably to ask him the same question all over again?

Chris made a genuine effort to think about that one, but the thought of Honest John's attempt to pitch him down the toilet kept diverting him onto the subject of hummingbirds, which was somewhere he simply didn't have the energy to go. He was just starting to feel the onset of a really nasty caffeine migraine when a flash of light dazzled his mind's eye, and—

Gandhi; now he came to think of it, blindingly obvious. Non-violent resistance, a turning of the back on the vicious cycle of bloodshed and reprisal; the martyr hounded and persecuted for the noble cause; Gandhi was just the
Book
's infuriatingly allusive way of drawing his attention to the one who is to come. Well, fine. Glad to have got that out of the way, but really no further forward at all, and about par for the course as far as the
Book
's usefulness was concerned.

Which left him with probably the biggest and most inscrutable weirdness of the lot, namely SatNav,
soi-disant
princess of the Fey; completely and utterly reliable if you wanted to get from Stirchley to Walsall without getting bunged up in the rush-hour traffic, but not necessarily to be trusted implicitly on other subjects. True, he had reason to doubt what Jill had told him, but he had other, more reliable witnesses who said the same as she did, and all that stuff about the Fey and dreams and music—

I'm missing the point, Chris told himself. There's something else I'm not even considering, and it's the key to everything. Something
simple
—

‘It shouldn't have to be me,' he said aloud. ‘Sod it, what did
I
do?'

He made an effort to pull himself together. Come along now, he said to himself, you've taken a day off work to get all this stuff sorted out, you'd better get a move on. Now, where to start?

It was like those join-the-dots puzzles, when he was a kid; people gave him books full of them, because children really enjoyed them, it challenged their young minds and meant they'd grow up to be astrophysicists. He'd hated them, of course. His was a mind that hated challenges of any kind - which socks shall I wear today, which channel shall I watch? - and he contemplated the vast, sprawling nature of the problem and despaired. Never was any good at unravelling bits of tangled string, either.

Fine, he thought.

There are two ways of solving a mystery. Either you start off by examining all the evidence, evaluating it carefully, winnowing the fallacies from the things that were capable of being scientifically proved, then sorting the facts into a rational hypothesis which you then test by experiment and dialectic enquiry to arrive at the truth; or, you ask somebody.

Chris picked up the phone, dialled, waited, gave a name, waited some more, and then said: ‘Jill? What the
fuck
is going on?'

 

There were ducks, of course. There had to be. Probably wouldn't be valid without ducks. Ask John le Carré or one of those people.

Jill, who'd obviously done this sort of thing loads of times before, had brought stale bread to feed them with. She tore a finger-and-thumb pinch out of the heart of the loaf and threw it into the water, which immediately churned and frothed into a seething, duck-crammed maelstrom.

‘I told you,' she said. ‘You're absolutely right. It's me.'

Chris looked at the ducks, not at her. ‘You wouldn't lie to me, would you?'

‘No, never. For crying out loud, Chris, we've known each other since we were tiny tots. And when have I ever—?'

‘Loads of times,' he snapped.

‘Balls. Name one time I've lied to you.'

‘Right.' He took a deep breath. ‘There was the time I really fancied Amanda Mizzen, and I asked you if you thought she liked me, and you said—'

‘I was trying to be nice.'

‘You lied, though,' he said. ‘You said yeah, go for it. And look what happened. She poured warm custard in the pocket of my blazer.'

Jill nodded. ‘True. But strictly speaking, I didn't lie to you, I gave you advice. Bad advice,' she added quickly, ‘I grant you that. But I never actually said yes, she fancies you rotten, she told me so herself. Now did I?'

Chris frowned. ‘All right, then,' he said. ‘What about the time when—?'

‘Let me rephrase that,' Jill interrupted briskly. ‘When have I ever lied to you about something not utterly trivial and unimportant? '

He thought for a moment, then said: ‘Fair enough. But there's always a first time.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning,' he said, with a sudden spurt of anger, ‘you might have bloody well told me.'

‘Told you what?'

‘That you're a—' He didn't want to say it; it'd sound
silly
. ‘That you're not strictly human.'

‘That.' She shrugged. ‘You never asked.'

‘Jill—'

‘All right, all right.' She raised a defensive hand. ‘Well, for one thing, you'd never have believed me. Now would you?'

‘Maybe I would've,' Chris lied defiantly. ‘If you'd, I don't know, proved it somehow.'

‘Yeah, sure.' She gave him a little frown. ‘Besides, I think you ought to consider it from my point of view. I've never been - well, comfortable about it. There's some things you don't tell anybody, even your very best friends. Aren't there?'

‘No.'

‘Really?' Jill grinned suddenly. ‘Like, you never told me about Pongo.'

‘No, of course—Hold on,' he said angrily, ‘how the hell do you know about that?'

Her grin broadened. ‘Pongo was your cuddly stuffed rhino,' she said. ‘He slept on your pillow till you were fourteen, and you couldn't go to sleep unless he was there. Bless,' she added vindictively.

‘That's different,' he said. ‘That was, well, private.'

‘And being a non-human with carnivorous tendencies wasn't?' The grin turned into a smile, but there were still loads of teeth in it. ‘Just a hint of double standards creeping in here, don't you think?'

‘Pongo wasn't important,' Chris replied sullenly. ‘I mean, he wasn't going to suddenly jump up and start savaging people with his razor-sharp fangs, was he? And you haven't answered my question. How did you know?'

Jill shrugged. ‘Saw him in your eyes,' she replied. ‘It's a knack we've got. Sometimes, if you look closely, you can see a reflection there. Anyhow, that's beside the point. I never told you because it was private. And, naturally, I was afraid it'd spoil everything. With you lot. My friends. Well, it would've done, wouldn't it?'