Dominion

by Peter McLean

  That was seldom good.

  “Who was it?”

  “He said his name was Harry,” she said.

  “Oh, that’ll be Weasel,” I said. “I’ll catch up with him later.”

  “Weasel?”

  “Yeah, it’s sort of a nickname,” I said.

  “It suits him,” she said. “He didn’t look very salubrious.”

  “Nah, well that’s because he’s not,” I said. “Still, he has his uses. He sort of works for me sometimes.”

  “Doing what?” she asked.

  “This and that,” I said evasively.

  I still hadn’t mentioned what I had found at Charlie Page’s house. It occurred to me that there had been quite a few things recently that I hadn’t mentioned to Trixie. It was getting to be a habit, and I wasn’t sure that it was a good one. Trixie sipped her drink and raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Look,” I said, “now we’re sitting down with a drink there’s something I ought to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Remember that charity job I did? The old fella with the batty wife? Well, it turns out it wasn’t quite as simple as that.”

  “Oh?”

  I filled her in, and she stared at me.

  “Adam says,” she said, with a slightly strange look on her face. “And you’re only just now telling me this? That was nearly a week ago, Don.”

  “Yeah well, we’ve been a bit busy what with one thing and another, haven’t we?” I said. “Anyway, that’s what I’ve got Weasel doing, following up on the Adam thing for me. He’s a shifty little git but he knows pretty much everyone, and he knows how to keep his ear to the ground. Hopefully he’s got something for me.”

  “For us,” Trixie corrected me. “I need to have a little chat with this Weasel of yours, I think.”

  Sorry, Weasel.

  Oh fuck it, no I wasn’t. If he wanted to play with the grownups it was time he learned what that involved. Meeting Trixie would do him good.

  Sort of, anyway.

  “Fair enough,” I said. I drained my pint. “Right, well we ought to be getting back then. If I know Weasel he’ll be camped out on the doorstep waiting for me by now.”

  Chapter 15

  He was as well.

  The sun had disappeared behind the more usual London haze hours ago and it was bloody cold out there now. The poor bugger must have been freezing. I must say the chilly walk home had sobered me up no end too, which was probably best. At least Trixie had stopped giving me snippy looks for being drunk on duty anyway.

  Weasel was sitting on the pavement with his back to my front door, smoking a sad-looking rollup and waiting for us. He looked so much like a homeless person it was a surprise people weren’t giving him the price of a cup of tea as they passed. Actually, round here it wasn’t surprising at all, but you know what I mean.

  “Mr Drake,” Weasel said, when he saw us coming. He pulled himself awkwardly up and stood there shivering with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tracksuit and his rollup stuck to his droopy lower lip. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “So you have, Weasel,” I said.

  I unlocked the front door and held it open for Trixie, then ushered Weasel up the stairs ahead of me and shut the door behind us.

  “Sit down,” I told him once we were in my office, pointing at the sofa. “Trixie, this is Weasel.”

  “How nice,” she said. “Excuse me a moment.”

  I sat down behind the desk while she took herself off to the bathroom. I noticed Weasel staring intently at her, frowning with a fierce concentration that spoke of considerable effort being expended.

  “Mr Drake, am I seeing things or is her aura… white?”

  “Yes, Weasel, it is,” I said. “Trixie is an angel.”

  Both of those things were true after all, although one had nothing to do with the other.

  He gaped at me. “Are you taking the mickey out of me, Mr Drake?”

  “Nah, I don’t do that, it’s too easy,” I said. “She’s a real live angel, so you show her some fucking respect.”

  “An angel?” he echoed.

  “You want to learn from me, Weasel? Well this is the sort of thing I do. These are the people I mix with, you understand?”

  He nodded slowly. “Right,” he said. He looked like he might be starting to reconsider that little ambition right about then.

  Trixie came back a minute later and perched on the edge of my desk.

  “So,” she said, fixing Weasel with her dazzlingly blue eyes. “What’s Adam up to then?”

  He almost jumped out of his skin. I could see that now he knew what she was he was suddenly terrified of her.

  Good.

  “He’s… Well, I don’t really know, like. Ma’am,” he added. “There’s all sorts of fuss though. The left hand path brigade are all up in arms. There’s black candles burning all over the city, if you know what I mean. It’s like the second coming of Lucifer out there right now.”

  “Yes,” said Trixie, and again she had that faraway look on her face. “Yes, I suppose it would be.”

  “Who is he then, Mr Drake? Ma’am? This Adam, I mean.”

  “Never you mind, Weasel,” I said. “I don’t want you worrying your ugly little head about things like that, I just want to know who’s doing what.”

  “Well, the Whitechapel Thirteen have got back together,” he said, “and there was some sort of big ritual up at Highgate the other night. Other than that, well, I don’t rightly know Mr Drake. I mean, these ain’t the sort of people what give me the time of day as a rule, if you know what I mean.”

  I can’t think why.

  “I know, Weasel,” I said. “That’s why you’re going to have to dig a bit harder, aren’t you? I want to know what’s happening, not what some bloke you bought a pint for told you he heard off a tom who shagged someone whose second fucking cousin knows a geezer, you understand me? Get out there and get me some fucking facts, Weasel.”

  “Yes, Mr Drake,” he muttered.

  “I like facts,” said Trixie, fixing Weasel with a flat blue stare.

  I do believe she was starting to get the hang of this, bless her. Intimidating people like Harry the Weasel really isn’t that hard once you get your eye in.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Weasel whispered.

  For fucksake, he was already more scared of her than he’d ever been of me. That was hardly surprising I supposed, but it was irritating all the same.

  “Go on then, fuck off,” I told him. “You’re supposed to be a seeker, after all. Go and fucking seek. Come back when you’ve got something useful to tell me. To tell us, I mean.”

  “Yes, Mr Drake,” he said again.

  He got up and scurried out of my office like he had a vorehound on his tail. I snorted as the door banged shut behind him. Ridiculous little prick.

  “Poor little man,” Trixie said.

  “You what?” I blinked at her. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling sorry for the Weasel?”

  “You’re horrible to him,” she said.

  I shrugged. “So what, he’s horrible,” I said. “And he owes me, and he wants more from me besides. Fair’s fair, Trixie.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. “Don’t bully him, Don. I don’t like that.”

  A bully, me? Me? For fucksake, I knew all about bullies. I’d grown up on a bastard of a tough estate and I’d been to an even worse high school before I escaped to university. I knew all about bullies, and I knew I wasn’t one.

  Was I?

  OK, maybe I had been a bit firm with him, but that’s how you got stuff done around here. Gold Steevie never got where he was by asking nicely, you know what I mean? Although now that I thought about it, where Gold Steevie had got in the end was melted to the floor of his warehouse by someone he had been trying to bully. That was another interesting thought right there.

  “Yeah,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry Trixie. I don’t know what’s got into me today.”

  �
�It’s easy to pick on someone weak when you feel strong,” she said. “I should know.”

  I blinked at her. I supposed she probably would at that.

  “Yeah,” I said again.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” she said.

  She stood up and turned and stared out of the window, lost in her own thoughts.

  “Right,” I said. “Right, well. Yeah, OK. No more bullying the Weasel, then.”

  “Good,” she said, without looking at me.

  I turned in my chair and looked around, and caught sight of the dagger still sitting on the end of the desk. Fuck me, the Burned Man must be doing its nut by now, stuck in there.

  I scooped the blade up in my hand and stood up. Trixie didn’t seem to notice, so I left her to her thoughts and went into the workroom. The fetish was still hanging immobile in its chains where I had left it. I looked at it for a moment, then knelt down in front of the altar and gently eased the point of the blade into the tiny incision in the fetish’s chest.

  “Sorry it’s taken this long,” I said. “Out you come then, and I’ll give you a feed.”

  Nothing happened.

  I frowned and pressed the tip of the blade a little deeper into the unresisting body of the fetish. They felt lifeless, dagger and fetish both.

  “You awake in there, mate?”

  I delved into the dagger with my Will. I couldn’t feel anything in there. Nothing at all.

  Oh fuck.

  “Burned Man, can you hear me?” I said.

  There was nothing. What the hell? It couldn’t have escaped, I knew that much. It was bound, and although I knew there was supposedly a way to undo those bindings, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was and I had no desire to find out. I couldn’t have accidentally freed it, there was just no way. Besides, even if I had freed it, I think ripping my head off and shitting down my neck would probably have been the first thing it would have done. No, it was still bound all right… somewhere.

  The fetish was as cold and inert as it had become the moment I drew the Burned Man into the dagger, and it had no aura whatsoever any more, so it definitely hadn’t gone back in there. The dagger was still enchanted of course, but I could feel that it was soulless now as well, just an empty blade. So it wasn’t in there either.

  So where the fuck was it?

  Think, Don, I told myself. What did you actually do? I had invoked the Burned Man back into the dagger. I had invoked it against its will, sucked it back in as hard as I could until it smacked into me and disappeared. Except it wasn’t in the dagger like it was supposed to be, was it?

  It smacked into me and disappeared.

  It smacked into me. I had invoked the Burned Man…

  Oh fuck me, no.

  It was starting to make sense now. Steevie and his boys, all of it. Oh dear God, what had I done?

  I wanted to throw up.

  All this shit was starting to make sense now, each piece falling into place in my head with the wet thump of rotten meat hitting the floor. The way I hadn’t been shaken up after the battle with Bianakith. What I had done to Steevie, and how I had treated Weasel. How I’d been acting in general, and how I’d felt like I had been shut in forever. I hadn’t been myself at all today, not even a little bit. And now that I thought about it, I thought I knew why.

  I shoved the dagger back into a drawer in my cupboard and hurried to the bathroom, catching a glimpse as I went of Trixie still staring out of my office window. She obviously had something on her mind, but I’d have bet money it wasn’t as big as deal as my own current little clusterfuck of a situation.

  I shut the bathroom door behind me and stared into the mirror, gripping the sides of the sink with both hands to steady myself. There I was, looking back at me. The same old Don Drake. I hadn’t bothered to shave that morning and I needed a haircut, but then I usually did. Other than that I looked like myself. I thought I did, anyway. I stared into my own eyes, and my eyes stared back at me. I gripped the cold porcelain of the sink until I thought my knuckles might crack.

  Don’t be such a fucking coward, I told myself. Do it.

  I forced myself to really look then, to look for my own aura in the reflection. I might be a magician but I’m still just a man, and my aura should have been the same sort of dull, fuzzy blue as anyone else’s, the same as yours or your mum’s or the woman at the post office’s. But it wasn’t. I gazed into the mirror with that particular, trained magician’s gaze, and I saw a poisonous black cloud around my reflection. That was the Burned Man’s aura, I’d have known it anywhere.

  Oh dear God.

  That awful thought I’d had in the pub, everything today in general, suddenly I understood. The Burned Man was in my head. Somehow I had managed to invoke it wholesale, bindings and all, and bind it to me. I stared at my reflection and it wavered before my eyes, the image swimming in the spotted glass of my bathroom mirror, and now I could see it. I watched it haze in and out the same way I had seen the kindly, smiling image of Legba wavering over Papa Armand’s face in the club on Wednesday night, after he had thrown his chicken bones on the craps table. This face wasn’t smiling though, or kindly.

  Not even a fucking little bit it wasn’t.

  I could still see myself, but I could see the Burned Man too. I could see it in all its hideous glory, not nine inches tall any more but life-sized, man-sized. My size. There was the Burned Man’s face superimposed over my own, blackened and burned and cracked, the weeping red fissures in the charred flesh making me feel slightly sick just to look at them. It spoke to me, and whether it was actually my reflection talking or just a voice in my head I didn’t know and by then I really didn’t even care any more.

  “I told you I’d make you powerful,” it said.

  * * *

  The Burned Man had told me that, I remembered it very clearly.

  “You’ve got real potential, boy, potential like I haven’t seen for a thousand years or more,” it had told me all those years ago. “Do what I tell you and I’ll make you more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

  I was twenty-four years old and Professor Davidson was dead in the next room, lying in a puddle of the bloody vomit he had choked on. The reading of his last will and testament was only a formality at this point – the Burned Man belonged to me now.

  Getting the Burned Man on its altar out of Davidson’s flat took some doing, of course, but anything is possible with enough determination. Eventually the wooden crate I had knocked up around it was delivered to my digs.

  My digs in those days were a shitty bedsit on the third floor of an old Victorian townhouse half a mile from the university. The landlord rejoiced in the name of Roger Cheeseman, which I suppose may have gone some way to explaining the all-pervading smell in the building. All the same, the place was mine and mine alone, two damp rooms with an interesting pattern of mould on the ceiling and one of those gas-powered instant water heaters over the sink that tried to kill you every time you lit it. If you wanted hot water you had to hold down the button, chuck a lit match down the back of it, and pray for divine intervention. The number of times I’d had a mushroom cloud of flame hit the ceiling was nicely evidenced by the black scorch marks on the plaster above the heater, which was pretty much the only place the mould didn’t grow. That was something, I supposed.

  They had only just invented health and safety in those days, and landlords like Cheeseman were quite happy to pretend they still hadn’t. Still, it was what I could afford and it was a lot better than a shared room in the halls of residence would have been. I couldn’t quite imagine the sort of roommate who wouldn’t have minded me bringing the Burned Man home with me, and if there had been someone like that, then I dare say I wouldn’t have wanted to share a room with them in the first place.

  I had borrowed a pair of sawhorses from my old friend Jim, an ex-fellow student who had dropped out the year before to become a carpenter. He was actually doing quite well for himself now, to the bewilderment of his painfully middle
class parents. Anyway, I set the sawhorses up at the far end of my living room/bedroom/kitchen and balanced the altar on top of them.

  “Fuck a bloody duck up the arse, don’t tell me you actually live in this shithole,” the Burned Man said. “And there I was thinking Davidson was a waste of fucking effort.”

  I cleared my throat, feeling ridiculously embarrassed. “Yeah well,” I said. “We’ll get something a bit smarter soon.”

  “We’d better,” it said. “What’s that fucking smell?”

  I shrugged. “No one really knows,” I said. “Mr Cheeseman always swears blind he can’t smell anything when he comes round for the rent.”

  The Burned Man cast a disgusted look at the pattern of black rot that decorated the ceiling. “That right?” it said. “How much do you like this Cheeseman cunt?”

  “Not a lot,” I said.

  Truth be told Cheeseman was a horrible man, with a fat nose full of broken veins and a smell about him that told me he wanked too much and didn’t wash nearly enough.

  “Good,” the Burned Man said. “Time for a bit of practice then. I assume you know an alchemist?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, sort of, anyway.”

  I was thinking of Debbie, of course. She was still at the same university as me, studying for her masters in chemistry but spending more time than she really should have been studying alchemy too. That was my fault, I supposed, but damn she was good at it.

  “Good,” it said again. “Right, you’ll need to get some bits and pieces. And rip up this fucking awful excuse for a carpet, too. You’ll want a bare floor to lay out the circle.”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. “What sort of practice are you talking about exactly?”

  “Think of it as a live firing exercise,” the Burned Man said. “Someone nice and easy. Someone expendable.”

  “Oh, fuck that,” I said. “Cheeseman’s grotty and a slumlord and I’m not exactly in love with the bloke but that doesn’t mean I want to fucking kill him. Anyway, then we’ll have nowhere to bloody live, will we?”

  “Huh,” said the Burned Man. “Fair enough, I suppose. All the same, there must be someone you want to hurt.”