May Contain Traces of Magic (44 page)

Being back at school. Quite.

Chris tried to figure it out, though he didn't dare write anything down or draw helpful diagrams, for fear of leaving written evidence lying about that might provoke further suspicion. So, he thought: if Ellie who got killed in the girls' toilets was really SatNav all along, then why did Jill want to kill her in the first place? Now, of course, he'd killed Jill instead, and as a result here he was, shacked up with Angela the trainee, now apparently not dead after all; cheating with her on Karen, let's not forget that small detail. Not only a demon, but a love rat into the bargain. It just keeps on getting better.

Forget that aspect just for a moment; concentrate on the mechanics of the thing. Jill came here to find the dissident ringleader, thought she'd found her and killed her, only to discover that she'd slaughtered the wrong victim. Well, fine; that checked out, since Ellie, or SatNav or whoever, wasn't a demon at all. Then he'd intervened, suckered into it by SatNav, who had a selfish desire not to get killed and stuck in a plastic box; Jill had died instead, but that wasn't all that'd happened. At some point during the encounter, Chris Popham (human) had turned into a demon . . .

The practicalities of it he could account for. Demons can piggyback onto humans, dig down inside their heads and bum a lift, like a hobo on a freight train. You didn't have to be a demonology postgraduate to figure out what must've happened. Just before the pantacopt sliced her in two, Jill's demon must've hopped out of her and into him.

Chris laughed out loud, but it wasn't a happy laugh. What are friends for? he asked himself; but there's a limit. Not quite the same as looking after someone's cat for the weekend, the commitment was just that bit deeper and further-reaching. Also, with Jill dead, there was no possibility of ever handing it back. A demon is for life, not just for Christmas.

And then there was Karen - he kept forgetting about her, and he felt really bad about that, but he couldn't seem to stop doing it. Karen, also a demon, and who'd just happened to be in the Toilet of Destiny at the time the key event took place. Something odd about that, he thought. We've got Jill, who's a demon, Ellie, who's a Fey, and Karen, also a demon, all in the same toilet at the same time. Coincidence, Chris told himself, but he was wasting his mental breath. Not a coincidence, it just couldn't be.

Jill was hunting a demon, the dissident ringleader, someone at the school. Karen was at the school. Karen was a demon.

Karen?

Yes, but think about it for a moment. Jill had told him that the dissident ringleader had started at the school not long before the unpleasantness in the girls' bogs. Karen - Christ, he thought, that's right, that's when she came, the start of the spring term, the same time as Ellie.

KH4CP, written on a cubicle wall in biro.

Did demons do that? Well, it counted as antisocial behaviour, according to the government, so it was wicked and bad and you weren't allowed to do it, but even so, Chris couldn't quite square KH4CP with what he'd learned about demonkind. A demon crosses the line - a demon with a mission, to preserve her race by changing their patterns of behaviour at the most fundamental level possible - and practically the first thing she does is develop a crush on a human boy. No, he thought, does not compute. And besides, Karen and Jill were best friends, and Jill was a top-notch demon assassin; if Karen really was the one who is to come, surely Jill would have noticed, at some point.

Coincidence, then. Yeah, right.

Not that Chris cared particularly; not about whether Karen's demon was the dissident ringleader, at any rate. That whole aspect of the business seemed to have gone away, which was just as well. He had plenty of other things to think about. For instance: Angela in the unbuggered-up timeline died, presumably killed by demons. On this side, she was still very much alive. So, he'd changed something. What? A big something, or was it one of those butterflies-in-the-rainforest connections, so apparently trivial you didn't notice it at the time. What exactly had he changed?

Well, he thought, I killed Jill.

That made him shiver. Had Jill killed Angela? Bloody melodrama, the thing he hated most in the whole world. If so, why? Jill wouldn't scrag an innocent bystander - well, not twice, at any rate - so Angela must've been involved. He remembered the marks of his nails, still visible on the canvas of her jeep's passenger seat belt twenty-four hours later. If the demon who kidnapped him and drove him to the Ettingate Retail Park hadn't been in disguise after all, if it really was Angela (demons can't change their shape; who was it who'd told him that?) then she must've been after the one who is to come, and Jill killed her because she was getting too close—

In that timeline, yes. In this one—In this one, she was in the next room, having tried and failed to lure him in there with her. No reason to suppose she wasn't a fundamentalist demon assassin in this timeline, same as in the other. In which case, there was probably a case to be made out for assuming that her interest in him probably wasn't true love.

In that case, he wondered, why was he still alive?

Answer: because she must reckon that he knew where to find the one who is to come, which in a sense he did - it had been Jill, by her own admission, who'd taken over the job when the real dissident ringleader had lost her nerve after the toilet massacre. But Jill was dead, of course; dead, and her demon plausibly located inside poor bloody Chris Popham. Yes, but at the time he'd killed Jill, she hadn't changed sides.

Ibuprofen, Chris thought, I need ibuprofen, to stop my head exploding. Don't suppose we've got any, since Karen always reckoned it made her throw up. He massaged his temples with his fingertips instead. Didn't do a blind bit of good.

So Angela's a demon assassin who thinks I might know, consciously or not, how to find the fugitive dissident ringleader. Because I'm still alive, I can probably infer that I'm not in immediate - as in at-some-point-in-the-next-ten-minutes - danger. Jill's dead, Karen's gone, SatNav got me into this mess but now she's out of it. Also, I'm in an alternative timeline where I don't know what's happened, I'm only assuming I'm a sales rep working for JWW Retail, and if I am, chances are I'm not in line for promotion to area sales manager any more. Oh sod, Chris thought, I was looking forward to that.

So: what to do? Run away; it was the obvious, sensible course of action, as it had been all along, and he hadn't done it. Now, though, there wouldn't be much point. The trouble with running away is that no matter where or how far you go, whether you flee to the remote mountains or the impenetrable rainforest (neither of which, incidentally, appealed to him terribly much), you always end up taking yourself with you, which in nine cases out of ten utterly defeats the object of the exercise. Wherever he went, probably even Switzerland, the demon would come too; in which case, he might as well stay home and spare himself the jabs and the cost of the ticket.

This is silly, Chris thought. I don't feel the slightest bit different. Surely, if I'm one of them now, I should be brimming over with evil, bloodthirsty impulses, and I'm not. Not that he was complaining; the last thing he needed in his hopelessly overcomplicated life was an insatiable craving for blood and terror. Even so, it was an inconsistency, and it nagged at him like a raspberry pip lodged between his teeth.

He was too stressed-out to stay still, so he stood up and walked round the room, trying to spot the differences. There weren't many: a few things missing, stuff Karen must've taken when she left; her stuff, therefore by definition not the kind of thing he'd be likely to miss. The drawer where she kept her CDs was empty, but in it was a packet of photos which she either hadn't wanted or had overlooked. Chris opened it, and sat down on the sofa.

Karen was a person of many talents, of which photography wasn't one. She had the knack of cutting off people's feet and the tops of their heads, and all the buildings in her pictures looked like they were slowly toppling backwards. Lack of ability had never inhibited her enthusiasm, however; whenever they went anywhere, day trips or the rare, begrudged holidays, she blazed away like a paparrazzo at a Hollywood wedding. Maybe that explained why she hadn't wanted the photos. They were mostly of him, standing in front of things, next to things, always looking grumpy, impatient and, of course, unnaturally abbreviated. Probably just as well they'd never had kids. Future generations turning the pages of the treasured family album would've gained the distinct impression that great-grandad was a miserable bugger with a flat-topped head who sort of faded away at the ankles.

Chris frowned. To a demon, of course, a packet like this was presumably as good as a Mars Bar, a compact feast of nostalgia, embarrassment and general guilt. He turned one over, remembering that Karen always wrote on the backs:
Chris & me in London
,
Chris & me in Birmingham
,
Chris & me summer holiday in Lanzarote
. The odd part of it was, she took pictures by the hundred, but he couldn't remember ever seeing her looking at them once they'd been developed and printed.

Well; he wasn't particularly interested in foreshortened images of himself. He started to put them back in the envelope, then paused.

Chris remembered that one. It had been their anniversary, or what she called their anniversary; he couldn't recall offhand what it was the anniversary of, but he always forgot it, except this once. On this occasion he'd managed to remember, and had booked a table for them both at the Indian restaurant just across the road. From a brownie-point perspective, one of the best things he ever did, though it was ultimately cancelled out when he forgot her birthday; still, for a short while, he'd been promoted from insensitive pig to closet romantic, and to commemorate the occasion, Karen had battened onto a harmless bystander in the street outside and made him take a picture of the two of them. Whoever he was, the stranger had been a better photographer than Karen. All four feet were in the frame with millimetres to spare, and neither of them looked like a boiled egg about to be invaded by toast soldiers. Chris was wearing his usual have-I-got-to expression. Karen was beaming, happiness shining out of her like light from a torch. He noticed that he was wearing a tie. Said it all, really.

Chris put the photos back in the drawer and closed it firmly. It was dawning on him that demonhood wasn't the only thing about Karen that he hadn't bothered to notice until it was too late. Also worth bearing in mind that you didn't have to be a demon to make a real mess of somebody's emotions. Humans can do it too.

He thought about that. A large part of it, he knew only too well, was that he'd never really believed that anybody who didn't have to could ever really love him. Sure, Karen had said she did, in so many words, but he'd always assumed that she must be exaggerating or trying to be nice, and that her reasons for choosing him were something like his own: rebound, compromise, making do so as to get the whole tiresome pairing-off business over and done with. He'd been wrong about that - natural enough mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless, and look at the damage it had done. Yes, he told himself, but she wasn't
human
, you can't beat yourself up over being a complete bastard to a malevolent transdimensional entity. They don't count.

Chris thought about that, too; he thought, demons feed on emotion, so what better habitat could they ask for than true love, the genuine article, accept no substitutes? No different from humans under those circumstances, no different from the way human lovers nourish each other, needing no external sources of supply. If you were a demon and someone loved you, there'd be no point in going hunting and scavenging, when there was someone whose greatest pleasure in life was feeding you. The perfect arrangement, in fact; he could see that now, it was painfully obvious (but so were gravity and the displacement of water, for a million years, until someone had the wit to notice them). It had to be that: the key discovery made by the demon dissident ringleader - he could picture the eureka moment, the sudden switching on of a blinding bright light - that for a healthy, balanced, organic, sustainable, additive-free, calorie-controlled diet, all you need is love.

The door opened. Angela was standing in the doorway, looking at him. She had the most extraordinary expression on her face.

‘It's you,' she said.

Chris looked round at her. ‘You what?'

‘It's
you
.' Wipe her voice on a microscope slide and analyse it scientifically, and you'd find substantial traces of shock, stunned bewilderment, anger and resentment, with just a hint of residual disbelief. ‘You're
it
. How the hell can you be
it
? That's just not possible.'

‘Angela? What the hell are you talking—?'

‘You're the one who is to come.' She stabbed the words at him. ‘Don't even think of denying it, I could smell it from in there, it stinks the place out. You're the one I was sent here to find. But that's crazy, it's
stupid
. You can't be, you just can't.'

Mixed signals, he couldn't help feeling. ‘Make your bloody mind up, can't you?' he said.

She looked at him again. ‘It's you,' she said. ‘Definitely.'

‘Bollocks.' Chris took a step back. ‘No, really, it can't be me, I'm not even a demon. Well, I wasn't one until very recently, and that's a very long story, but I promise you, I'm not. Honest.'

‘It's you,' Angela repeated, her voice as cold as ice. ‘Sorry about this, but I'm going to have to ask you to come with me.'

Another three steps back; and then the wall, with which he'd never had any quarrel, had to interfere and block him. ‘Angela, I swear to God, I'm not a real demon. It got into me in a toilet, but it's Jill's really, only you'll never have met her, of course, she died before you were born.' He was gabbling, but he couldn't stop, and she was getting closer. ‘What do you mean,' he said desperately, ‘you can smell it? I can't smell anything.'