May Contain Traces of Magic (38 page)

Normal, Chris thought. Normality, where my girlfriend and my best friend are demons who live by sucking pain and angst out of people's heads; and they're the
nice
ones. ‘You can do that, can you?' he said. ‘Get rid of them, just like that.'

Jill nodded. ‘We can. Now that we know what they want, we can design a containment and protection strategy, and you can live happily ever after. All right?'

Containment and protection strategy; he didn't like the sound of that. He suspected that it had been put together out of the same box of verbal Lego as
new government initiative
and
independent inquiry
, the sort of thing They say when they want you to shut up and go away. Was Jill really just Them? If so, maybe he ought to start eating runny cheese and checking out yodelling classes for beginners. ‘Such as?' he insisted.

Sigh. ‘Such as,' she said, ‘trapping the demons who're after you and killing them. Will that do? Or would you rather we declared war?'

‘Oh,' Chris said. ‘Why didn't you say that in the first place?'

Jill grinned. ‘Force of habit,' she replied. ‘The K word tends to make people nervous. Mind you, so do demons, so I take your point. Anyway, you don't have to worry about it any more. We'll take care of it. OK?'

Put like that - ‘Fine,' he said. ‘I'll leave it to you then.'

‘Good.'

Simple as that? Apparently. So why was he so completely, overwhelmingly unconvinced? ‘And what about you?' he asked.

‘Me? Oh, I'll just carry on carrying on. It's a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, except it's with blood rather than non-drip gloss.'

And that's me told. But Chris persisted: ‘So how'll you go about it? Hunting them down, I mean.'

Jill put on a business face. ‘We've got a number of different approaches. We can bait traps, or there's stuff like probability wells and consequence mines, better mousetraps, phase-variance triggers. Gadgets, basically. But they work. And we'll keep a tag on you at all times, so the moment one of them tries to come through at you we'll be down on them like a ton of bricks. That'll put them off in no time. Demons don't have a concept of acceptable losses. There aren't enough of us for that.'

All very reassuring, but if anything Chris was even more on edge than before. ‘That, um, SatNav thing of mine,' he said, as casually as he could manage. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to it?'

Jill pulled a different kind of face. ‘Got clean away, as far as we can make out. Bloody annoying - it's made us look like complete idiots. Must've been a defective containment charm; they may have to recall all of that model. It'll be us that get yelled at, of course, it always is. I never did like the idea, there's no such thing as one-hundred-per-cent-secure containment. Trouble is, the companies hire these high-powered lawyers for the compliance-committee hearings, they've got their own pet scientists, what can you do? Personally, I'd ban the bloody things, but nobody listens to us, they just leave us to clear up the mess.'

Chris took a deep breath, to tell her with. A moment later he let it go again. Stupid, he thought as he did so, how can you expect her to protect you if you don't tell her all the facts? ‘Do you think,' he said instead, ‘that she had anything to do with it?'

‘Sorry, I was miles away. Anything to do with what?'

‘Doesn't matter,' he replied. ‘Do you think she'll come back after me?'

Jill shook her head. ‘Highly unlikely,' she said. ‘If we can't find it, it almost certainly means it managed to get back where it came from, so hopefully that's the last we'll see of it. The dryad authorities'll give us a really hard time for letting one of their convicted criminals escape, but that's all.'

Dryad? Chris remembered: some kind of elf that lives in trees. But she wasn't. At least, she'd told him she wasn't. Free, she'd said; thank you. So, fine. What did it matter what she'd really been, if she wasn't coming back any more. Except—

‘That Ellie,' he said nervously. ‘The girl in the—'

‘The girl I killed, you mean.'

‘Yes.'

Jill clicked her tongue. ‘For your birthday, I'm going to buy you
Tact For Dummies
. Promise me you'll read it.'

‘That girl,' he said firmly. ‘You're absolutely sure she was a demon?'

She looked at him as though he'd just hit her. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘She couldn't have been something else. A what-you-just-said, dryad, for instance.' Slight hesitation; then, ‘Or a Fey.'

Jill frowned. ‘No, of course not. And who's been telling you about the Fey?'

‘Just something I read somewhere.'

Sigh. ‘You know what,' she said. ‘You're like a hypochondriac with a medical dictionary. You read about all the really rare, once-in-a-lifetime stuff and you start thinking it's everywhere. We aren't even sure the Fey actually exist. The chances of ever running into one are - well, forget it, basically.'

‘Oh. As rare as that.'

She grinned. ‘Let's put it this way. You come down one morning and something's ripped open your dustbin bags. Now it could be a yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, but most likely it's just cats or urban foxes. The Fey are - what's the word I'm looking for - mostly theoretical. Like, there are stars nobody's ever seen with a telescope, but they figure out that they exist by doing all sorts of complicated maths. Tripping over one in a Morrisons car park isn't something you should lose sleep over.'

‘Ah.' Chris nodded. ‘But wasn't there one of them working for JWW a few years back? I think I heard something—'

Jill shook her head. ‘Commercial folklore,' she said. ‘You know the kind of wild stories you get in the trade.'

Yes, but they're mostly true. ‘Oh, right,' he said. ‘Only, assuming there are such things as the Fey, where would they live?'

Shrug. ‘We don't actually know,' she said. ‘Some researchers think they've got a dimension of their very own, others reckon they share the same plane as the demons, though I really doubt that. After all, I come from there and I certainly don't remember seeing any of them hanging about. But of course it's not as simple as that. If you really want me to explain, we'll have to find a month when we're both free and hire a cottage somewhere quiet.'

‘Right,' Chris said. ‘Only - last one, I promise. If I were to run into one, how'd I recognise it?'

Jill was looking at him very oddly, but he pretended that he hadn't noticed. ‘Actually,' she said, ‘that's quite simple. At least, according to the scientists, and don't ask me how they think they know.'

‘Well?'

‘Why are you so interested in the Fey all of a sudden? Is there something you haven't told me, because if there is—'

‘
Well?
'

‘All you need is a mirror,' Jill said.

‘Oh, I see. Like vampires, you mean. They don't show up.'

Jill grinned at him. ‘Oh, quite the reverse,' she said.

‘They show up, all right. But, like I say, it's entirely hypothetical, so I don't see any point in discussing it. Unless there's something that you're keeping from me, and you say there isn't. And,' she said, looking straight at him, ‘I believe you, so that's that.'

The conversation pretty much died after that. Jill went back to her office -

(‘Don't worry,' she said, as they parted in the car park. ‘Really. We'll take care of it.'

‘Fine.'

‘So promise me you won't do anything stupid.'

Grin. ‘You wouldn't want me to make promises I can't keep.'

‘All right. Promise me you won't do anything stupid about
this.
') - And he went back to the flat, where he found an envelope on the kitchen table. It had
Chris
written on it in Karen's distinctive spider-with-rickets handwriting. Of course, she left notes for him all the time. But she didn't waste envelopes.

Oh, Chris thought. He put the letter back in the envelope, and put it away in the drawer where bills and stuff went to hibernate. Then he spent ten minutes looking for the bottle of ouzo they'd brought back from Corfu, until he remembered that Karen had chucked it out six months ago. So he made himself a cup of tea instead.

Well, he thought. After all, she was a demon, for crying out loud; lucky escape you had there. Blood runs cold when I think of it. But that wasn't true, and he didn't feel particularly lucky; in fact he didn't feel anything very much, just a sense of emotional anaesthesia, as though pain was going on somewhere but he couldn't actually feel it. Mostly, he just felt empty. If there'd been a deposit on him, he'd have taken himself back to the shop.

She can't just have upped and left, Chris thought; there should have been rows and scenes and tears and slammed doors and long, grim silences, any or all of which would've been better than this solid, uncompromising absence, this lack of her that filled the whole flat. Funny, that; most of the time lately she hadn't been here, and he'd hardly noticed. Now that it was official, though, in writing, like a contract or a bill of sale, her absence was omnipresent, and wherever he looked, there she wasn't.

He let his tea go cold, then poured it down the sink, washed and dried the cup and put it away. Karen hated him leaving dirty cups and plates lying around the place; he wasn't too keen on mess either, but at some point it had become a political issue between them. No point now, though. He wiped down all the work surfaces and sorted the cutlery drawer. It was something to do.

Well, he thought. Jill's taken care of the demons, Karen's left me, I guess the rest of my life's my own. I can do whatever I want. I can chuck in my job. I can go to Switzerland. I'm free, just like someone else I could mention. He looked round at the kitchen - familiar, mundane, all the things he'd been so vaguely dissatisfied with for so long, but something had changed; it was home and not home, the same place but in a different dimension, with one of the governing constants removed. Of course, he thought, it'll have to be sold, I can't afford to buy out her share and pay the mortgage all by myself. Silly, really, that loss of people usually entails loss of places as well. You'd have thought we'd have got ourselves better organised as a species by now.

Chris went back into the living room, sat down and tried to think about something else: demons, the Fey, interdimensional conduits, all the stuff he'd learned today, so relevant to the desperate, life-threatening nightmare he'd found himself trapped in. But he couldn't make himself concentrate on any of those things. It all seemed remote, improbable,
silly
. So she was a demon; so what? And all that business about the one who was to come and civil war among demonkind; it was all a bit like politics in Chile, his business insofar as no man is an island, but something about which he knew little and cared less.

He'd have welcomed a demon attack, because it'd have taken his mind off things, but nothing happened. Around half past one in the morning he fell asleep in his chair. No dreams. Nothing.

 

Chris called the office before setting out the next morning.

‘Oh,' Julie said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be at death's door.'

‘I was,' he replied. ‘I got better. The doctor said it was the most amazing thing he'd seen in forty years in the profession. He's going to write it up for the
British Medical Journal
.'

Julie sighed. ‘Well, I rearranged all your calls, like you told me to, so there's nobody expecting you today.'

‘Not to worry,' he replied. ‘I'll go round same as usual, and if they say anything I'll tell them you got hold of completely the wrong end of the stick and it's all your fault. You don't mind, do you? For the good of the firm.'

‘You sound odd this morning. You sure you're not still feeling ill?'

‘Never better.'

‘I assume you got a sick note from the doctor.'

‘Drat.' Chris smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, loud enough so she could hear. ‘Knew I'd forgotten something. Never mind. You'll just have to take my word for it. After all, when have I ever lied to you?'

He put the phone down on her reply and went to Shrewsbury, where he sold Sorcery Source nine dozen BB27Ks without even realising, not to mention a full container-load of desiccated water—

‘While we're on the subject,' he asked, ‘you wouldn't happen to know what people use it for, do you?'

The young man behind the desk shook his head. ‘Not a clue,' he replied.