May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  Just as well I’m not her, then; I’d do it because I’m a coward, just go to my liver and follow the yellow brick road. Whatever else she may be, Jill’s no coward. And besides, if she thought I had to be got rid of, she’d have done it then and there, the way she always did her homework the moment she got in from school, rather than leaving it till the last minute like the rest of us. I’d never have left the flat alive.

  Now what, Chris thought as he walked slowly back to the car. So, I solved the mystery, all by myself; dead clever, but you don’t get a prize or even a Blue Peter badge. Instead, you lose your best friend, and the consolation prize you get to keep and take home with you is— well, the truth: the sinning, all-transcending, most-important-thing-there-is bloody truth; men have fought for it, gone to the scaffold and the rack for it, laid waste whole continents for it, but when you actually think about it rationally, what fucking use is the truth anyhow? Can’t spend it. Can’t invest it in high-yield capital-growth bonds. Can’t even have it mounted in a silver frame and hang it on the wall. So; all very well in its place, the ideal gift for the man who has everything, but on balance he’d far rather have his friend and his life back, thank you so terribly much all the same.

  He drove home; and as he waited at some traffic lights, he thought yes, but how did I figure it out? Got the right answer, true enough, but it’s like maths, you’ve got to show your working or you don’t get the marks. There was something else, some little thing I noticed and then I knew, but I don’t seem to be able to account for what it was.

  The lights changed, and as he pulled away a movement at eye level caught his attention. The plastic hummingbird was back, swaying on its string from his mirror.

  Karen was—huge megasurprise—working late. Nothing in fridge or freezer; so he rang the Indian takeaway across the street and ordered Set Menu A for one. If nobody else was going to reward him for solving the mystery, he’d have to do it himself.

  Highly spiced food doesn’t sit well on a delicate stomach already fairly comprehensively knotted up with stress. At some point in the early hours, Chris woke up with a savage pain in his tummy. He rolled out of bed, being very careful not to disturb Karen, and scuttled for the toilet.

  Heroism, he thought. A bit of gut-ache’s enough to make me whimper like a baby. Chances of holding out under torture by razor-tusked fiends precisely nil.

  Not a hope in hell of getting back to sleep. Chris slouched into the living room and sat on the sofa in the dark. What sort of measures, he couldn’t help wondering, would Jill take to protect him, now that her life depended on it? Round-the-clock armed guards were out of the question, Karen wouldn’t allow it: Day-Glo men in polo shirts cluttering up the furniture and making the rooms look untidy. He didn’t pretend to know anything about anti-demon security, but of course, he didn’t have to. Jill did, and he could rely on her—

  The thought dropped into his mind like the apple clonking down on Newton’s head. Right, it said. If Jill’s the one who is to come, Angela couldn’t have been. But she was a demon, the sunglasses proved that. So who the hell was she, and what—?

  He squeaked, out loud. A demon; a murderous, inhuman killer, like the one that scragged poor Mr Newsome. And he’d been sharing his car with the bugger for days. Why? Three guesses. She’d been assigned to stay with him, waiting for him to let slip some clue that’d lead them to the one who was to come; and once he’d done that—

  Chris’s stomach lurched, and this time it had nothing to do with ghee and chilli powder. Presumably, then, it hadn’t been an accident at all. Presumably, Jill’s people had killed her.

  Which was no bad thing, naturally, the only good demon and so forth; but even so. He thought of her wearing the InstaGlamour cream, annoying him half to death with her incessant bloody prattling, her eyes shining with excitement because she’d just shifted an outer of BB27Ks. Jill must’ve had her killed; he could pass that thought through his mind, make it sound like a chess move, white queen takes black knight, but he couldn’t bring himself to face what it actually meant: that someone he knew was dead because someone else he knew had taken a conscious, cold-blooded decision. Switzerland, Chris thought.

  Or he could pretend it hadn’t happened and go to work tomorrow and sell stuff to people in shops until it was time to come home. Both of them methods of running away, the latter having the merit of being cheaper and more convenient. Trouble was, he wasn’t the running-away sort. Not because it was his duty to stand fast and see it through, whatever the hell it was, but because running away takes energy and causes disruption and fuss. He sighed. Pathetic.

  Maybe I should just leave, though, he mused. Karen and me—

  He thought about that, and about love, and the flat. There’s no love here, he thought, just force of habit. We live here because we need somewhere to eat and sleep after a hard day’s work; either one of us’d be pushed to cover the mortgage payments, but together we can more or less manage. That’s about it, really. I think that maybe she did love me once; at school, probably, and a while after that, when I was still vaguely hoping that something might happen with Jill and me; and then Jill told me I was wasting my time—now we know why—and there I was, rebounding about like a pool ball, and Karen— But that was a long time ago. No kids, thank God, we’re not even married, so no divorce; just sell the flat, pay off the mortgage and move on. Geneva, here I come.

  No, all right, then. (Chris glanced at his watch; the glowing green dots told him it was three a.m. He could have guessed.

  Wasn’t three in the morning when most suicides happen?) Won’t do that. But if you’re not prepared to sort out the mess, at least stop whining about it.

  All this and demons too. What a life.

  Chris turned a few things over in his mind, and then thought yes, that more or less covers everything, except for the hummingbird. What the hell is all that about, and where did it come from? Whatever it was, it did appear to be on his side; like SatNav.

  SatNav: hadn’t thought about her for a while. It’d been Jill who’d warned him off her, and now Jill was revealed as an unreliable witness, powered by her own agenda. In which case, SatNav was in the clear and he could trust her, as he so very much wanted to do. Except it hadn’t been Jill, not to begin with. They’d warned all the reps about them at the sales conference, and then Ben Jarrow had told him what happened if you let them get under your skin; so it wasn’t just Jill, and besides, he had no reason to believe that she’d lied to him about everything. On the other hand: princess of the Fey, piggybacking into his head on a piece of music, like a computer worm in an e-mail—

  Chris sat up. SatNav had told him she was fighting for the one who was to come; helping her, on her team. So if that was true then presumably SatNav and Jill at least knew each other. Jill, on the other hand, had told him SatNav was a rogue, deranged, out to get him; she’d had SatNav taken away and locked up in a secure place, she’d been really stressed out when SatNav had escaped. Was all that an act, and if so, why? And SatNav hadn’t been exactly positive about Jill, either. A blind, to keep him from guessing the truth?

  He could feel a headache coming on. All too difficult, he told himself. Also, none of my business, not any more. His friendship with Jill was effectively over, SatNav was now just an empty box, Angela was dead, it was finished, so why drive himself crazy worrying about it? Pretend it never happened and carry on with his life. Simple as that.

  Chris swung his feet up onto the sofa, dragged a cushion under his head and closed his eyes; I will go to sleep, I will go to sleep. He forced a dozen sheep into existence and compelled them to jump over a drystone wall. He was wide awake. He—

  A demon claw was stroking the lobe of his ear.

  Chris’s eyes opened. He knew it was a demon, because in dreams intuition really works, but she didn’t look like the others. She was dark-haired and fair-skinned, with soft mauve eyes and a long, delicately-shaped face, not just pretty but beautiful; she had little silver ear-studs shaped like butte
rflies, and a nice tusk-free smile.

  “We apologise,” she said, “for any inconvenience.”

  Chris stared at her, then said, “You woke me up.”

  “No,” she said.

  Well, of course. Different dimensions, different sides of the line. Falling asleep back home meant waking up here, just as terrifyingly hideous at home was disarmingly lovely here. He wondered vaguely if it was the same with, for example, good and evil.

  “You put me to sleep,” he corrected himself. “Yes.”

  “Thanks,” Chris said. “I was having trouble dropping off.”

  “Our pleasure,” the demon said. Behind her, the room he’d just fallen asleep in; or rather, it was as though someone had drained all the colours out, leaving just plain black and white outlines, and then coloured them in again in different shades, presumably using the demonic equivalent of Microsoft Paint. In which case; he was interested to discover that pale Wedgwood blue was the opposite of what Karen liked to call peach but which he’d always thought of as slightly-off-taramasalata. Well. You learn something new every day.

  “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

  She giggled. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  She looked mildly offended. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “But I’m in trouble,” he persisted.

  “You bet,” she replied. “Quite apart from the whole triangle thing with your girlfriend and your female best friend, there’s the fact that you’re bored with your job and not really trying, which means that when your boss finds he needs to cut costs in about nine months’ time, you’re definitely in the cross-hairs for the sack. Also, you eat far too many pizzas and kebabs and rubbish and you don’t take any exercise, so you’re just asking for trouble on that front. Also, in eight years’ time you’ll be forty, and your hair’s just about to start getting thin on top. Sorry, but I wouldn’t be you for a million pounds.”

  Chris sighed. “Apart from that.”

  “You don’t think that’s enough to be going on with?”

  “Apart from real-life trouble,” he explained.

  “Oh, I see. You mean, why am I here and what are you going to do to me? Got you. Sorry, but we’re not used to the way your lot think. It’s sort of squiggly. Not straight lines. Also, a bit like icebergs, nine-tenths hidden. It’s amazing you can live like that. And that’s without the stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  She nodded vigorously. “The stuff. The things. Material objects, possessions. Good heavens, if we had to contend with all that we wouldn’t be able to cope for five minutes. Take furniture, for instance. Or electronics. How do you people do it?”

  Chris blinked. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Just sort of comes naturally, I guess.”

  “Amazing.” She did look genuinely impressed. “We simply can’t begin to understand. From our perspective, it’s insane. For one thing, you only live, what, ninety years; but you cheerfully trade a huge slice of that in return for things. And the way you go about it, this concept of work— spending the majority of your waking hours doing things you don’t like doing and mostly don’t even understand, as an incredibly roundabout way of getting food—and don’t get me started on food and eating, that’s just plain weird—and all this stuff. Completely beyond us, really, we can’t begin to understand. I mean, on our side of the line, inanimate objects don’t even exist.”

  She’s very strange, Chris thought, but curiously nice. “Are you really a demon?”

  “Of course we are, silly. Don’t you recognise us? Well, no, we guess you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “We’ve met before.”

  “Oh yes. In that car park.”

  “What, the Ettingate Retail—?”

  She winced. “Please don’t use names,” she said, and it was as though he’d just lit a cigarette in the middle of a busy restaurant. “You weren’t to know, of course, but we don’t have them here. They’re bad for us, they—pin us down.” She looked very unhappy. “So, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s quite all right.”

  Chris couldn’t resist. “Is that really true?” he asked. “Things don’t exist here?”

  She smiled indulgently. “Perfectly true.”

  “But that’s—I mean, what am I sitting on, if there’s no sofas or chairs?”

  She laughed. “You have no weight to support,” she replied. “That’s why we had to borrow your own surroundings. It’s only here so you won’t feel uncomfortable.”

  “Oh” was the only possible reply to that, followed by an awkward silence, during which she looked at him; not menacingly, or hungrily; curiously, if anything, in the way he’d seen crowds of Indian village children in documentaries happily staring at the camera.

  “Everything’s different here, isn’t it?” he said.

  She smiled. “You could say that,” she replied. “Also, of course, the same. Like in a mirror, we suppose you could say—the same but round the other way. But that’s so simplistic it’s actively misleading.”

  “Ah, right.” Chris tried to get his head around that, failed, and asked, “What am I doing here?”

  “We want to ask you a question. Also, to explain.”

  My God, he thought; the E word. “OK,” he said. “And then?”

  “You can go home again.”

  “You’re not going to—?”

  “No.” She moved slightly. “Can we get you anything, by the way? Coffee taste? Tea sensation? The illusion of a doughnut?”

  “No, thanks, I’m fine.” He hesitated, then went on: “You said something about explaining.”

  “What? Oh yes, so we did. Sorry. Sidetracked.” She settled herself comfortably on a footstool (he hadn’t got one but had always wanted one; Karen wouldn’t let him have one, because it’d have been clutter). “Where would you like us to start?”

  Good question; to which at the beginning probably wouldn’t count as an acceptable answer; either that, or he’d get a whole lot of guff about the Big Bang. “What exactly do you people want from me?”

  She looked at him, with her head slightly on one side. “We want to know where we can find the one who is to come,” she said.

  “So you can stop her?”

  “No.” Made it sound like he’d said something crazy, or stupid. “No, of course not. So we can bring her home, of course.”

  “Ah,” Chris said. “So you’re the good guys. I mean, the ones who don’t hold with the traditional ways.”

  She gave him a puzzled frown. “Sorry,” she said, “we don’t understand.”

  “Someone told me—” He stopped, tried to pull himself together. “Isn’t it the case that there are some of you who don’t want to kill my lot any more, and they’d rather try and find a way of harvesting our emotions without us even knowing? To prevent an all-out war?”

  He’d lost her. “Who told you that?”

  “Sa—” He stopped, unsure whether it’d count as a name. “My satellite navigation device,” he said. “Only really, she’s a princess of the Fey. At least,” he added rather desperately, because she was giving him ever such a funny look, “that’s what she told me she was.”

  “Well, she’s quite right,” she replied. “Partly, anyhow. Actually, she’s about six hundred years behind the times, but the Fey are a bit like that, not so hot on linear time. No, there was a—” She paused, then said, “Don’t know whether you’d call it a lively debate or a civil war. Anyhow, it was hundreds of years ago, and what I suppose you’d call the good guys won. Which is why there’s only a handful of demon attacks a year your side, of course, carried out by the tiny minority who refused to give up the old ways. The vast majority of us live off sustainable emotion, like you just said.”

  Well, that did make a kind of sense, Chris supposed; but it wasn’t what SatNav had said; and it didn’t really fit well with Jill’s reaction, either. “All right,” he said.
“Let’s say for argument’s sake I believe you. So, who’s this one-who-is-to-come person?”

  She pulled a sad face. “Just one of us,” she said. “Originally she was the leader of the traditionalist faction. When they lost the debate, she went off to your side of the line in a huff, and I’m afraid the rest of us said that if that was how she felt, she might as well stay there and not bother coming back. But since then we’ve changed our minds; there’s no point keeping the old wounds open, it’s just divisive and spoils everything, so we’re looking for her to tell her it’s all right to come home. That’s all it is, really. But we’re a very tightly knit community. It’s probably hard for you to understand how much we mean to each other, because—no offence—your lot sometimes seem like they care as much or more about stuff than about people. It’s not like that here. We’re all we’ve got. So, naturally, one of us going into self-imposed exile is quite a big deal. Also, we have an idea that she either doesn’t know or doesn’t believe that we want her to come home.”

  Bullshit, Chris thought; but he looked at her, and he found it pretty well impossible to believe that she was lying. All right, sucker for a pretty face, fair enough, and surely by now he’d learned not to trust the uncorroborated evidence of his eyes in any case. It wasn’t like that, though. Either she was one hell of an actress, or—

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t believe you.”

  Grin. “Thought you mightn’t. All right, then, look at it this way. If our people really did have to kill in order to get what they needed the murder rate on your side would be so colossal that no government would be able to keep a lid on it. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but mere’s close on a thousand of us. We’d be having to slaughter two and a half thousand of you every week just to keep soul together. And your people would notice that, now wouldn’t they?”

  Nastily valid point she’d got there, and it echoed what Chris had thought when she’d first claimed to be one of the nice demons. He could almost believe he was convinced—