by Peter McLean
“Yeah,” I said, after a moment. “Yeah, there is, as it goes.”
Nick Regan had been two years above me in high school, and he was an utter cunt. He had been the resident school bully until the day he was finally expelled. After that he became the local hard man and cock of the estate. The number of times him and his gang of hangers-on had beaten me and my friends up, taken our lunch money or our trainers or our Walkman or whatever we’d had, didn’t even bear counting. As we got older he had only got worse, selling drugs to kids and pushing girls around. I had escaped to university in the end, but in my first couple of years I had still been going home in the holidays to see my mum. And every time I came back to that shitty estate there was Nick, waiting for the nancy-boy student. Fuck me, but I hated that wanker with a passion.
To be fair Mum had remarried now and I didn’t like her new bloke much so I hadn’t been home for a couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, he was a lot better than Dad had been, he just wasn’t my cup of tea if you know what I mean. I still spoke to her on the phone now and again though. Last I heard, Nick had battered his pregnant girlfriend so badly she’d lost the baby. No one could prove anything of course, and he’d walked away scot free. Somehow he always did. If there was ever someone the world wouldn’t miss it was Nick fucking Regan.
“Thought there might be,” said the Burned Man. “Everyone’s got someone, in my experience. Right, fuck this Cheeseman bloke then, we’ll do your boy instead.”
“Right,” I said. “What do I need?”
I spent half the day getting rid of the rancid carpet and drawing out the grand summoning circle on the floorboards, my dog-eared, third-generation-photocopied copy of the great classical grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon propped open on the floor in front of me as I painstakingly copied the design in chalk. After that the Burned Man sent me off with the most bizarre shopping list I had ever seen in my life at the time – a pound of iron filings, an ounce of graveyard dirt, a pinch of powdered mandrake root and two live toads. Debbie had given me a bit of a funny look but she’d had everything I needed, bless her, including the toads. I supposed I should have realised right then that she was the woman for me, but then I was young and stupid and I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake with things like that. Ah well, hindsight and all that.
“Thanks, babe,” I said as she packed them up in my rucksack for me.
Debs smiled at me. “Don’t go calling up anything nasty,” she teased.
She knew I was a magician of course, but I don’t think she had any real idea of exactly what sort of magician I was. I had never mentioned the Burned Man to her, and I never intended to either. That secret had been strictly between Davidson and myself, and now he was dead it was just my business and no one else’s. And I knew it would have to stay that way.
“Nah, ‘course not,” I laughed. “I’m just trying some new symbolism.”
She kissed me. “Well, have fun,” she said. “Want me to come over tonight?”
Ah, shit. Yeah, that was going to be a bit of a problem. My bedsit was one room with a separate cupboard of a bathroom with a toilet and a shower in it, and that was it. Which meant there would be no hiding the Burned Man.
“How about I come here?” I said instead, thinking fast. “My place is getting worse by the week. You wouldn’t believe the new smell Cheeseman has invented.”
“Ew, gross,” she said, “it was bad enough already. Maybe it’d be better if you just came to me from now on.”
Her place was quite nice as student digs go. She was in a shared house with a beautiful and very well-to-do Indian girl called Rugveda who was hardly ever there, probably on account of the perpetual chemistry experiment that seemed to have been running in Debbie’s room for the last two years now. Either way, the other girl’s dad was a wealthy doctor and he paid the rent for her – she had just sublet her spare room to Debs for a bit of extra pocket money. It was a sweet setup and I’d much rather spend the night there than in Cheeseman’s palace of mould any day, especially now I had installed the Burned Man in my room. I can’t say I found the thought of it watching me sleep particularly appealing.
“Yeah, will do,” I said. “Thanks for the stuff.”
I hiked back to my place with the rucksack over my shoulder, trying and failing to pretend I couldn’t feel the toads wriggling about back there. I’ve never liked toads as it goes, which considering what I did with them is probably just as well.
“Right then,” I said to the Burned Man when I got home about nine o’clock that evening. “Shall we do this?”
“Do fucking let’s,” it said.
I set up my scrying glass then laid out the perimeter of the circle with the iron filings and drew the glyphs in the cardinal points with the mixture of powdered mandrake and graveyard dirt. Once that was done I gutted the toads in the kitchen sink behind the Burned Man’s altar while it did its thing. We had done some minor summonings together before of course, while it had been training me, but this would be my first actual sending.
“Ready?” it asked me.
I nodded.
“Ready,” I said.
We did what we needed to and moments later I was gazing into the scrying glass at the estate where I had grown up, as seen through the eyes of a real live vorehound.
“Bloody hell,” I whispered. I watched the darkened houses stream past in the glass as it loped towards Nick Regan’s place. “I’m going in. I need to ride it.”
The Burned Man laughed at me.
“Just let it be,” it told me, “it knows its business.”
“What if it gets loose?” I asked it.
I wasn’t taking any chances that this thing might end up running amok in the neighbourhood – my mum lived round the corner, after all. The Burned Man waved a chained hand at the grand summoning circle around me, at the carefully inscribed glyphs and the ingredients I still owed Debbie the money for.
“What do you think all this shit is for?” it asked me. “It can’t get loose, that’s the whole fucking point. Just let it do its thing and it’ll run off home again afterwards like a good little vorehound.”
“All the same,” I said. “Humour me.”
I plunged my Will through the scrying glass into the vorehound’s mind.
Trust me, inside the head of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. A vorehound is basically just a nasty demonic animal, but I’m probably underplaying the “nasty” part of that. A vorehound, as the name maybe suggests, exists to eat. It’s the closest thing there is to an actual landshark. They’re pure apex predators and they live to kill, simple as that.
The vorehound was a flood of sensations around me, powerful muscles in fluid motion, an overpowering rush of scents, the wind ruffling through its short, bristly fur as it ran. The feeling of four legs moving in perfect rhythm was almost hypnotic. I knew if I tried to actually control it I’d lose that rhythm instantly and pitch it onto its muzzle in the road so I just sat back and let it carry me along. It leapt Nick Regan’s garden wall in a single bound and ploughed headfirst through his front room window without breaking stride.
Nick lived in the terraced house he had inherited from his parents, only now it was more like a druggy’s squat than the modest but cosy little working-class family home it had once been. The vorehound landed on the bare floorboards in a shower of broken glass and paused to sniff the air, then bounded up the stairs with slobber streaming from its mouth as it took the scent. Vorehounds have no language so I couldn’t really hear its thoughts as such but I was receiving a flood of impressions, scents and instincts that all said one thing – Prey!
Nick was just coming out of his bedroom, barefoot and bare chested in tracksuit bottoms, with a fucking Samurai sword in his hand.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “No cunt puts my fucking windows in!”
The vorehound leapt for him. Two hundred pounds of devil dog hit him in the chest and his sword went flying as the demon bore him to
the ground. I looked out of its eyes, staring down into Nick Regan’s face. I could see the fear in his nasty piggy little eyes and fuck me but I liked it.
“Die, you horrible cunt,” I whispered.
The vorehound tore his throat out with a single slash of its terrible slavering jaws. I felt the hot rush of blood fill my mouth, and the whole thing suddenly lost its appeal. I pulled my Will back out of the vorehound and retched, gagging on the floor of my bedsit while the Burned Man laughed at me.
“Enjoy that?” it asked me.
I looked up at it. I could have done without the mouthful of blood, but other than that I’m sorry to say that yeah, I fucking had actually.
If this was power, I wanted more of it.
Chapter 16
If this was power you could fucking keep it.
Inside the head of the sort of demon you use for the things I do isn’t a nice place to be. I knew that of course, but over the years I had just got used to it. One thing I had never prepared for though was the possibility of having that sort of demon inside my head. Not just any old demon either, but the Burned Man itself. The Burned Man was an archdemon, of course. One of the most powerful of all the archdemons in fact, the one that the antler druid Oisin himself had chosen to bind to serve him on Earth.
Fucking hell.
I stared back into the mirror, at the wavering image of the Burned Man’s face.
“Yeah, you did say that,” I had to admit.
I’ve heard it said that the greatest conceit of any diabolist is to assume that the things you summon have no life outside of working for you. I mean, I knew the Burned Man secretly longed to be free, it had made that abundantly clear last year, but I had never even entertained the notion that something like this might or even possibly could happen. Apparently it could, and it had.
I wasn’t having it.
I clenched my fists on the edge of the sink and blasted the Burned Man with my Will, throwing every drop of strength I could find into a ferocious banishing. I focused as hard as I could on the image of the fetish in the next room, opened a psychic channel between my mind and that fetish and hurled the spirit of the Burned Man down it as though my life depended on it.
I thought it actually might, to be perfectly honest about it.
“I banish thee, Burned Man,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “Get thee gone!”
Sweat broke out on my forehead and my hands shook with the effort, my knuckles vibrating against the cold porcelain sink. My back arched and I bared my teeth, my head splitting with pain.
“I banish thee!”
I reached for the depths of my power, for that hideous, desperate strength I had found when I summoned Adam against his will last year. I dug as deep and as hard as I could and I poured the whole fucking lot of it into the mightiest banishing I had ever done in my life.
Are you done yet? the Burned Man’s voice sneered in my head. That doesn’t even tickle.
I sagged against the sink, gasping. My chin slumped against my chest and I took a great shuddering breath, feeling sweat trickle out of my hair and down my face. That was it. That was all I’d had in me.
I was beaten and I knew it.
I stared into the mirror, watching the poisonous black cloud of the Burned Man’s aura billow around my reflection. Beaten or not, I could hardly walk around looking like that. Thank fuck Trixie had been preoccupied with her Dominion, and then the revelation that Adam was up and about or she was bound to have noticed it by now.
“Do me a favour will you and hide that fucking aura?” I said.
That’s it? the Burned Man sniggered. That’s what you’re worried about right now, Drake, my fucking aura?
“One thing at a time,” I said, still trying to catch my breath. “This is too much to take in all in one go. Let’s not make life fucking worse by having Trixie notice something’s not right, yeah?”
Blondie, the Burned Man thought, and I felt a rush of pure naked lust.
Oh for God’s sake.
“You can pack that in too,” I said. “I tried it on with her last night and I made a total twat of myself.”
That’s because you are a total twat, it said, and I could feel it laughing somewhere inside me. All the same, the aura shrank and dissipated and a moment later all I could see was my own familiar blue haze. That was something, at least.
“Thanks,” I said.
I washed my face and concentrated on stopping my hands from shaking. I could still manage that, at least.
“Don?” I heard Trixie’s voice from the other side of the bathroom door. “Are you all right in there? You’re talking to yourself.”
“What? Oh, yeah. Shit, yeah sorry, I do that sometimes,” I said.
I do, to be fair. It doesn’t mean I’m crazy or anything. I flushed the toilet I hadn’t been using and ran the tap for a moment, then opened the door.
“Hi,” I said, rather stupidly.
She gave me a level look.
“Just how much did you have to drink before I dragged you out of the pub?”
“Sorry,” I said again. “Probably a bit too much for a lunchtime, to be honest. Sorry.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “Never mind, I’m making you a nice strong coffee then we’ve got more important things to talk about.”
I nodded and let her put the kettle on. I settled on the sofa in the office and stared across the room and out of the window, watching the late afternoon clouds drift past overhead. Oh what the holy fuck was I going to do now?
Having an archdemon living in your head might sound like it ought to make you some sort of superhero, and I had to admit that what I had done to Gold Steevie and his crew was pretty impressive now that I thought about it, but it was hardly fucking healthy. I’d owned the Burned Man for nearly twenty years after all, and I knew exactly what it was like. Oh I understood it, I even enjoyed bullshitting with it sometimes, but I never let myself forget what it really was.
It wasn’t my mate, I knew that much.
The thing that was really starting to scare me now was that I was no longer even sure whether my thoughts were my own. That awful thought I’d had in the pub at lunchtime today, writing the McRoths’ grandson off as nothing, that hadn’t been me had it? Of course not. That was the Burned Man through and through, I was sure it was.
Wasn’t I?
“Here,” Trixie said, putting a mug of strong black coffee in my hand. “Drink that.”
She sat down behind my desk and lit one of her awful Russian cigarettes. Those things really did stink to high heaven.
“Thanks,” I said. “Open the window, will you?”
She turned round and did as I asked, then fixed me with a level look.
“About Adam,” she said.
I sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you Trixie. He tried to have me killed.”
“I know,” she said. “He didn’t try terribly hard though, did he?”
“That old fucker nearly did me in,” I pointed out.
“But he didn’t,” she said. “He was only one old man with a telekinetic zombie, after all. From what your friend Weasel was saying, it sounds like Adam has followers all over the city. Adam knows you, Don. If he’d really wanted to hurt you I think he would have tried a bit harder than that, don’t you?”
Well, that was an interesting thought. I had only met the fallen angel who called himself Adam a handful of times, but the last time had been because I had summoned him all by myself by the pure force of my Will after Trixie had stolen the Burned Man from me. I supposed that must have given him at least a modicum of respect for me. And then of course a Dominion had come at my call, and that was when he ran away. Yeah, now that I thought about it, Adam probably did take me reasonably seriously. All the same though, poor old Mrs Page had been bloody dangerous. Maybe Adam was overestimating me, if anything. Fucking hell, people don’t do that very often.
“Maybe,” I said, sipping my coffee. She always made it just right, black as ta
r and so strong it was almost burnt. “So what was the point of that little charade then?”
“I think he was just saying hello,” Trixie said. “Letting you know he’s still about, if you see what I mean. Well of course it would have been letting us know if you’d seen fit to tell me about it at the time, but there we are.”
I winced at the waspish sting in her words, but she was absolutely right. I really should have told her right there and then, but all the fuss with Bianakith had been occupying both our minds at the time. And of course we still didn’t know where that horrible bloody thing had actually come from.
“Do you think Adam summoned Bianakith?” I asked her.
She blinked at me. “Why on earth would he have?”
“Oh how the fuck do I know, but someone did,” I pointed out. “There aren’t many human magicians who could have pulled it off. Actually, now that Wellington Phoenix is dead I can’t even think of a single person who could have done that.”
“Do you know every diabolist in the world?”
“Well no, of course I don’t,” I said, “but anyone that powerful would probably be someone I’d have at least heard of, you know what I mean?”
“I suppose so,” she admitted. “Even so, it doesn’t prove anything.”
I shrugged. I supposed it didn’t, at that. All the same, I could smell a rat again. Someone must have been behind it, and for whatever reason my mind kept going back to that pile of rotten slag that had apparently once been a statue of a cat. Why the fuck would there have been something like that in a cave half a mile underneath London? The same cave where Bianakith seemed to have made its temporary home. There was definitely something going on that I didn’t understand.
“Do you fancy a night out tonight?” Trixie asked.
“Er,” I said. “I suppose we could. Why?”
She tapped ash from her cigarette into her empty coffee cup and looked at me.
“I put out some feelers,” she said. “I know you’ve got your little Weasel asking questions but I thought it would be quicker to go straight to the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
