May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  —And, in doing so, happened to glance in his rear-view mirror. He froze. In the mirror, grinning at him, was a demon.

  Being incapable of movement and therefore having nothing better to do with his time, Chris looked at it. Its skin was grey, the colour of builder’s mortar, more like elephant hide than anything you’d expect to find on a human. Its body was about the size of a ten-year-old child’s, but its head was bigger than his own, hairless, with round lidless eyes that were perfectly black. The teeth in its thin, very wide mouth were all about an inch long, thin and slightly curved, ending in needle points. It had a tiny snout rather than a nose, and its ears were pointed, just like Mr Spock’s. It was bony but with well-defined muscles, its elbows grotesquely pointed, its hands broad and inhumanly flat, with long, slim, five-jointed fingers tipped with claws, like a cat’s. And it was grinning; well, of course it was. With those teeth, if it closed its mouth it’d do itself an injury.

  Well, Chris thought, here we go, just like poor Mr Newsome. He wondered if it would hurt, if there was an afterlife, and if so was there a Nice Place and a Very Bad Place, and was the Nice Place as he’d always imagined it, a bit like the hotel in the Malverns where they had the annual sales conference. He didn’t waste time speculating about the Very Bad Place, because as far as he was concerned he’d been there already, leaving at age seventeen with six GCSEs.

  “Hello?” he whispered.

  The demon made a very soft hissing noise, like a gas fire before you light it, and slowly extended its right arm. Chris closed his eyes, kept them screwed tight shut until he felt something brush against his cheek, and smelt that smell again. He yelped and squirmed up against the car door, his eyes opening by reflex; and he saw the demon’s arm, reaching carefully over his shoulder and touching the SatNav’s power button with the point of its index claw.

  “Your route is being calculated, please—oh.”

  For a split second, Chris felt an urge to grab the demon’s wrist and pull it away, keep its filthy claws off her—But he didn’t, and the demon withdrew its arm, winked at him, kicked open the nearside back door and scampered out.

  “Twice in two days,” the government man said. “They must like you.”

  Not, Chris felt, a tactful thing to say, and if that was an example of his taxes at work he had a good mind to vote for the other lot next time round. No suitably pithy comeback occurred to him, so he gave the government man a nasty look instead. In the distance, from where he was sitting on the verge he watched the men in Day-Glo yellow jackets coning off the road, while sniffer dogs of a breed he’d never seen before and hoped never to see again were snuffling up and down the tarmac.

  “Look,” he said feebly, “I’ve told you everything I can remember, can I go now? Only—”

  “No chance,” the man replied scornfully. “Forensic’s going to want to pull this car apart down to the sub-atomic level, so unless you fancy a long walk you aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Oh,” Chris said. “I was hoping to scrounge a lift—”

  Now he’d offended the government man. “Sorry, but we’ve got a job to do here. We’re not a taxi service. Now, we’ll be needing your clothes.”

  “What? You must be—”

  “For analysis,” the government man explained briskly. “DNA traces, maybe flakes of skin or traces of spit, if we’re really lucky. Don’t know if they’ll want to shave all your hair off, it depends on what we find on the clothes and the car, but don’t go touching it unless you absolutely have to or you could disturb the evidence.”

  The government man went away, and Chris sat perfectly still for a quarter of an hour, as if his patch of grass was the only safe place left in the whole world. Then a familiar voice said his name, and he looked up.

  “I got here as quickly as I could,” Jill said, sitting down beside him and opening her carrier bag. She wasn’t wearing Day-Glo yellow like the others: a plain dark M&S business suit and white blouse; very grown up, he couldn’t help thinking. “Here, have a mini Swiss roll—you must be starving.”

  Chris took one from her but made a real mess of taking off the foil wrapping. She took it back and did it for him.

  “Are they really going to shave my hair off?” he asked.

  She grinned. “Bless them,” she said. “They’re so thorough. It’s all right, I’ll have a word with them.”

  “And my clothes? Only this is my good suit, and—”

  “I’ll make sure they don’t shred it,” Jill said. “So,” she went on, “now you know what I do at work. Fun, isn’t it?”

  Chris shuddered. “And you actually—well, kill them?”

  She nodded. “Actually, it’s not so bad once you get used to it. It’s a bit like picking up your dog’s mess in a plastic bag: you try not to think about what you’re actually doing, and then it’s no big deal.”

  “I’ve never had a dog.”

  She smiled. “I know,” she said. “Probably for that very reason. Have another Swiss roll, keep your blood sugar up.”

  Pause; then, “Do you think you’ll be able to find it?” Chris asked with his mouth full.

  Jill shrugged. “Depends on the dogs, mostly. Trouble is, they can be pretty cunning about masking their scent. We’ve got helicopters out with ultra-blue thaumaturgical sensors, but they only really work at night—daylight blurs the image too much. The foot patrols might get lucky, I suppose, but I’m not holding my breath. So,” she went on, “tell me what happened.”

  So he told her—the truth, whole and nothing but—right up to the moment where the demon had reached past him with its arm. For some reason, he left that bit out—

  “And then it winked at me, kicked the door open and scarpered,” he concluded. “And that’s all, really. Doesn’t sound much, when you’re telling someone else.”

  “On the contrary,” Jill replied seriously, “you’ve given me at least half a dozen good strong leads, which’ll be very helpful. For example, the pointed ears. That’s a dead giveaway.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh yes.” Profound nod. “Means it’s a quaerens—that’s Latin for someone who looks for things, a searcher. Reconnaissance and special forces, essentially. If it’d been basic rank-and-file infantry, it’d have had rounded ears with long, pendulous lobes, while the engineer and technical grades have ears that stick out sideways, and the sappers haven’t got ears at all. The five finger-joints mean it was probably a mature specimen—the juveniles don’t grow the fifth joint till they’re at least seven hundred years old. Actually you’re privileged, if you care to look at it that way: the quaerens grade’s pretty rare. Some of the guys in the department have been in the business thirty years and never seen one.”

  “Bloody hell, Jill,” Chris growled. “You make it sound like birdwatching.”

  She laughed. “Some of them are bit like that,” she sort-of-whispered back, “they’ve got copies of the Observer Book of British Demons that they carry with them wherever they go, and whenever they come across a grade or a subspecies they haven’t seen before, they tick them off the list and boast about it for days in the canteen. All a bit sad, really, but I guess it’s their way of keeping motivated. At least they don’t have the dead ones stuffed and mounted any more, like they used to when I joined the department.”

  She was being deliberately chatty; long practice at putting witnesses at their ease? Somehow Chris didn’t like that. He was supposed to be her friend, damn it, not a witness. But then, he’d always reckoned that with Jill, work came first. And at least she wasn’t threatening to shave off all his hair. He licked melted chocolate off his fingers.

  “What’s got me puzzled,” she said, “is the way it just left—“

  “Without killing me first, you mean?”

  Jill frowned, as though he’d said something in bad taste. “Well, bluntly, yes,” she said. “The thing about demons is, they never waste energy.”

  “What, they insulate their lofts and stuff?”

  She recognised
that as flippancy and ignored it. “Demons have the most amazing metabolisms,” she went on. “Absolutely incredible rate of cellular regeneration, which is why you can cut off a hand or a foot and twenty minutes later it’ll have grown back, good as new. If only we could crack the science behind it we could do the most amazing things with human medicine, but for some reason the demons aren’t terribly keen on cooperating with our researchers.” Bleak grin. “Anyway, it’s good from their point of view, makes them practically impossible to kill without magic, but it means they use up a hell of a lot of energy; so they eat masses but that’s awkward for them considering what they eat, they can’t go around slaughtering people every time they get a fit of the nibbles or they’d pose a real threat to human society and it’d turn into open war. They’ve got more sense; they know that if they keep their attacks down to a minimum we’ll keep covering it up to stop the public at large finding out that they exist—can’t have that, obviously, there’d be mass hysteria. So,” she went on, after a pause for breath, “they’ve learned to conserve their energy. Like, you’ve seen lions at the zoo, right? All they do is lie around sleeping all day, because when they hunt—assuming they’re not in zoos, I mean when they’re in the wild—they burn off about a million calories a second, so when they’re not hunting, they just flop. Same with demons, only more so, of course. I mean, just the effort of projecting themselves out of their native dimension and into the material world is enough to drain their batteries, which is why you only see them when they’re actively on the warpath, so to speak. Which is why,” she went on, “I can’t really figure out why your one went to all the trouble of materialising in your car, and then just smiled nicely at you and buggered off.”

  “I see,” Chris replied. He was starting to shake now. Delayed reaction, presumably.

  “Lucky for you, of course,” Jill added, “but a mystery. Now the one you saw yesterday, that was classic post-attack lethargy. It’d worn itself out killing the shop person, it simply couldn’t be bothered with you. That’s when they’re at their most vulnerable, actually, just after feeding. Their batteries are flat after the kill, and until they’ve digested some food—they digest really quickly, but it still takes time—they’re basically too weak to move, and their defences are low, too, which makes killing them that much easier.” A thought struck her, and she looked sideways at him; not one of her usual repertoire of looks. “The one yesterday,” she said. “Pointed ears?”

  Chris tried to remember. “No,” he said. “More sort of knobbly, like stone muffins.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. “Just occurred to me, it might’ve been the same one, tracking you. They do that sometimes,” she added blithely. “Just seem to fixate on a particular human, follow him around for a bit before they strike. We’ve got no idea why they do that.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  Jill laughed, as though he’d made a joke. “No,” she went on, “there must’ve been something that stopped it attacking you, something that either drained its energy or put it off, made you seem unappetising, as it were. Something you had with you in the car, perhaps.”

  Chris pursed his lips. “Such as?”

  “Well, there’s all sorts of things we believe they don’t like. Same as vampires and garlic, only it’s a bit subtler than that, different things repel different demons. For example—”

  “Hang on,” he interrupted, “we sell stuff like that. LY42V, Evil-Off anti-demon talismans. Very good line, we do a lot of them, especially around the Walsall area—”

  Jill giggled. “Sorry,” she said, “but they’re a bit of a standing joke in the department.”

  “Oh.” Chris scowled. “They don’t work, then.”

  “Well, yes and no” she replied. “Actually they’re a pretty effective defence against female Grade 6 servitor demons—that’s basically cooks, laundry and clerical staff, which to be honest with you aren’t that much of a problem since they almost never show up in the material world, unless they’re really hungry and desperate. So essentially your talisman things are a bit like an umbrella one inch square, keeps off some of the rain but not most of it. Though,” she went on, “I suppose if you had a lot of them, twenty or thirty—”

  “Car stock,” he said excitedly. “It’s one of the lines where I carry a couple of dozen in the car, so if a customer needs stock in a hurry I can supply them on the spot.”

  “Ah.” Jill looked interested. “In which case—”

  “Except,” he said suddenly remembering, “I sold the whole lot to Paul at the Magic Shack this morning, just before it happened. So it couldn’t have been that, could it?”

  Sigh. “Not really, no. Oh well,” she said, “if it wasn’t that, it must’ve been something else. We’ll check out everything you’ve got in the car—don’t look at me like that, it’s not my fault. I’ll see if I can arrange a car you can borrow till we’ve finished with yours, how’d that be?”

  “Thanks,” Chris said, a trifle grudgingly. “But all my samples—”

  “Sorry.” Jill shook her head. “Get them back to you as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I’d say you’ve got an ironclad excuse for taking the rest of the day off. Now that can’t be bad, can it?”

  She had a point there, to be sure. “You couldn’t possibly ring my boss, could you?” Chris said. “Tell him it’s a matter of national security and all that. Otherwise he’ll be on at me for skiving.”

  “No trouble,” Jill replied, with a grin. “In fact, I could say we’ll be needing you on call for the next twenty-four hours so you can’t possibly go back to work till after the weekend. All right?”

  Chris nodded solemnly. “I always knew you’d come in useful for something one of these days,” he replied.

  The car she got for him was a big black BMW, with cruise control, a radio like something from NASA and (Chris discovered joyfully as he scrabbled about in the boot) one of those magnetic sirens you can slap on the roof, like in the cop shows. He couldn’t quite bring himself to use it, though, and when he tried to turn on the radio an extremely snotty voice asked him for his security access code, and said some really quite hurtful things when he said he hadn’t got one. The cruise control had him zooming down the motorway at a hundred and ten miles an hour, until he finally managed to turn the bloody thing off.

  The clothes were an improvement, too. Jill had coerced one of the Day-Glo men into lending him some in return for his own, which had been sealed in plastic bags, tagged and packed in a massive steel lead-lined trunk. The replacements fitted better than his own, and the polo shirt had a little goblin embroidered on the pocket, over a crest and the letters DS. Chris had an idea he’d seen it before somewhere; a bit later, he remembered that some of Jill’s stuff had the same logo, so it was probably some kind of designer something. He speculated briefly about neglecting to give it back when his own clothes were returned, but accepted fatalistically that he wouldn’t get away with it.

  The rest of the day was his own; strange and unfamiliar concept. He couldn’t remember offhand when he’d last had a day of his very own. Days belonged to work, apart from holidays and weekends, which belonged to Karen and were spent shopping for and assembling flat-pack chipboard furniture and visiting her loathsome relatives. The best part of half a day all to himself, to spend as he chose; with the added bonus of needle-sharp designer clothes and a big fast black car filled with the government’s petrol. It was almost as though God had given him a gift voucher for his birthday.

  Yes, Chris thought, as he drove, but what am I going to do with it? Go home? No way—I can go home any time. All right, then, I can drive somewhere, which is what I do all day every day for work. Or I can drive home, park the car and spend the afternoon in a pub...

  (Cautionary tale widely repeated by the JWW Retail reps; about a customer who bought a JWW Sheer Genius djinn-in-a-bottle. Three days later he lurched back into the shop looking haggard and miserable, demanding his money back. Why, asked the girl behind
the till, what’s wrong with it? Bloody thing told me I could have three wishes, the customer replied, and I’ve spent the last three days trying to decide, and there’s absolutely nothing I want. Except (the customer added) my money back—)

  He pulled in at a Little Chef, ordered the Alabama Sunrise jacket potato and chips, and stared out of the window for a while, watching the cars queuing for petrol. The terror had worn off, but there was still a residual ache, like a bruise, where it had been. Demons, he thought; there really are such things as demons, they’re out there wandering around, invisible, and they eat people. Not the most cheerful of thoughts.

  The Alabama Sunrise arrived: medium-sized industrial potato with a bit of cheese melted in it, and a few bits of leaf scattered round the edge, plus a small mountain of chips. Chris stabbed the fork against the potato’s dense hide and felt the tines bend.

  Then a thought struck him, so dreadful that he nearly choked. SatNav!

  Strip the car down to the sub-atomic level, the Day-Glo jerk had said. Even if he’d been exaggerating somewhat, it was more or less inevitable that they’d stick a screwdriver into her casing and prise her open; and then what? Would she survive? How did this imprisoning thing work, anyway? Could they take her out, peer about inside the casing for very small demons, then put her back again, good as new? Somehow he doubted that: Not government thinking. Their attitude was likely to be more along the lines of smash it open with a hammer, zap anything inside, chuck the remains in the skip and if they want to try claiming compensation for damaged property, bloody good luck to them.

  No way, he said to himself; got to save her before it’s too late. With an effort he elbowed a path through the panic in his mind and tried to think what to do. Jill, of course; she was the boss, she could stop them. And she would, he knew, provided he gave her a half-sensible reason—

  “Excuse me,” said the waitress, “but do you know you’re eating your tie?”