by Peter McLean
Danny Lambert knew I was a magician, but the only way he could have known about the amulet was if someone had told him. And, now that I thought about it, it didn’t matter how long the chain of someone-told-someone was, it must have started somewhere. There was only one person who could have originally known or at least guessed that I was wearing that amulet.
And that person was Trixie.
“I have to get that amulet back,” I said. “Right fucking now.”
I couldn’t just make another one, it didn’t work like that. Oh you can make hundreds of amulets for general things, like good luck or protection from the Evil Eye or whatever, everyone can wear one of those if they want to. But an amulet for binding a specific person away from another specific person? Nope.
There could only be one of those at a time or it wouldn’t work. This was the second one I had made to bind Trixie from me, admittedly. It had only worked a second time because the first one had been destroyed when the council finally got around to dynamiting the condemned building where I had abandoned it while the Furies were torturing me. Unless the second one was also destroyed I couldn’t make a third that would actually work. I had to get the original back and that was all there was to it.
And how the fuck are you going to do that? the Burned Man sneered.
I got up and pulled my shirt and coat on, still shivering, and picked up the sputtering candle. I stuffed a few more candles and the lighter and my knife into my pockets, and walked out into the hallway.
“The old fashioned way,” I told it.
I started kicking in doors.
The first two flats were empty. In the third I found two grotty junkies huddled in sleeping bags, snoring on the nod.
“Oi!” I shouted.
I gave one of the sleeping bags a kick, and the Burned Man took the hint and obligingly called up the flames from my right hand. That was a hell of a lot better than my candle, so I chucked it into a corner and let it go out. The junkie I had kicked struggled to sit up, a hand over his face to protect his eyes from the light of the leaping flames that were roaring up from my hand. Her face, I corrected myself. Oh crap. I hated to see women in this state, almost as much as I hated to see myself in it.
“Bloody nightmares,” she muttered.
“I’m a bloody nightmare all right,” I said. “I’m looking for a pimp called Joey. Sleazy looking, dresses like it’s 1988. Where do I find him?”
“I dunno, I’m no on the game,” she said, and laughed bitterly. “Who’d have me?”
She lay down again and turned her back, obviously writing me off as just another hallucination. She was nodding again in seconds.
I cursed and crossed the hallway, and booted open another door. The flat was empty. Jesus this was going to take all night at this rate, and I was pretty sure I didn’t have all night. If I had called out to Trixie I knew she would have been there in a flash, but even without me doing that I didn’t think it would take her long to find me now that I had lost the amulet. Assuming she still wanted to find me, of course. It occurred to me that I might be seriously flattering myself here, but I couldn’t take the risk. She was the Burned Man’s Guardian, after all, and I suspected that meant she didn’t have a lot of choice. She would come whether she wanted to or not. She had to.
I hurried on down the corridor, flames trailing from my hand as I kicked in doors at random. I was getting desperate and I knew it. I do rash things when I’m desperate, in case you hadn’t noticed. There could have been half a dozen outlaw bikers crashing for the night in one of those flats, or some headcase with a meth problem and an Uzi. Neither of those things were impossible around here, not by a long way they weren’t.
Slow down and fucking think it through, I told myself. Joey’s a pimp. Pimps have toms. Toms need somewhere to live and work.
A house then, but where? The Muirhouse estate is fucking huge, in case you didn’t know. Half of it had been redeveloped into endless rows of new council houses and half of it was still like this, old and grim and falling to bits. If Joey was remotely competent at his job he’d have his girls in the new bit somewhere, but where? I had to find a lead, find someone who would know. I remembered the grotty ned from that morning, the one whose arm I had set on fire. I reckoned he might well know, and I knew which squat was his.
I hurried along the corridor to his door and smashed it in with my boot.
“Oh Jesus Ratty, don’t hurt me no more!” he wailed.
He was already awake, sitting up in his sleeping bags with filthy rags wrapped around his burned arm, sweating and looking feverish. The silly sod obviously hadn’t been to the hospital, probably on account of all the drugs in his system and how he didn’t want to breach the probation he was almost certainly on. I had to admit I felt a little bit guilty now, looking at the state of him. Only a little bit, though.
“I’m looking for Joey the pimp,” I said.
He blinked in surprise, cowering from the fire that still blazed up from my right hand.
“Joey?” he asked. “Dinnae go to Joey, his tarts have all got the fuckin’ HIV an’ that.”
“I don’t want his fucking tarts…” I started.
“I should hope not,” a voice said from behind me.
I froze as I realized I could suddenly smell Russian tobacco.
Oh God...
I turned slowly, my hand still burning. She was standing in the doorway wearing jeans and low-heeled boots and a leather coat, her beautiful blonde hair loose around her face. A long black cigarette was smouldering between the fingers of her left hand, and in her right she held a sword.
For a moment I thought she was going to go for me, and I just simply didn’t care. I was so far gone, at the very rock bottom of despair and addiction and torment that I just wanted it to end, right there and then. Hepatitis might not have come for me but I would have welcomed anything to make it all stop, even Trixie’s blade.
The thought of her standing there looking at me, the thought of what she must be seeing, filled me with so much shame that I just couldn’t bear it.
“Which one of you am I talking to?” she asked, her voice sounding strained.
I swallowed.
“Trixie, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Don.”
She nodded, the flames from my hand reflecting in her beautiful blue eyes.
“Put the fire out, Don,” she said. “If you still can.”
“I… Shit, yeah, sorry,” I said, giving the Burned Man a mental kick.
It resisted for a moment, but for all that I knew it didn’t like Trixie, I suspected it was a bit scared of her too. So it bloody well should be. The flames disappeared, and left us in darkness. Trixie produced a torch from her coat pocket and turned it on, and I saw that she had made her sword go away. For now, anyway.
“I can control it,” I said, although I wasn’t at all sure that was true any more.
That was why I had run away in the first place, after all, but looking at her now I was so pleased to see her I just wanted to cry. Whether or not she was pleased to see me still remained to be seen.
“I see,” she said, and that could have meant anything at all. “Don, what on earth are you doing in this horrible place?”
I cleared my throat, feeling a fresh wave of shame sweep over me. “I, um,” I said. “Um, I live here.”
“Here?” she echoed.
“In a squat down the hall,” I muttered. “Things, um, haven’t been going very well recently.”
The ned sniggered. I had almost forgotten about him, but now any guilt I might have felt for hurting him was fast vanishing.
“Aye, he’s Ratty the ratcatcher,” he said. “Ratty the weird old junkie. He’s nae better than the rest of us, hen.”
I could have strangled him. I mean I was going to have to tell her, I knew that, but I had hoped I could maybe break the news a bit more gently than that.
“Be quiet,” was all she said, and something in her voice shut the little bastard up. “Don, come with me.�
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She led me out of the ned’s squat and along the corridor and down the stairs, and all the way there she didn’t say anything else and I didn’t dare speak at all. We went out of the front door and into the small patch of wilderness that passed for a garden between the flats and the road. Trixie sat down on a low wall. It was cold and dark, and half the streetlights weren’t working. I sat beside her, pulling my filthy coat around me against the chill night air. I didn’t think I’d ever felt more ashamed in my life.
“Mazin will be here soon with the car,” she told me. “I telephoned him an hour ago, as soon as I was sure I knew where you were.”
“Right,” I said, wondering if she knew how long it took to drive from London to Edinburgh, even in the middle of the night.
“We were in Glasgow anyway,” she said. “It’s not all that far away.”
“Oh, right.” It wasn’t, to be fair.
I just didn’t know what to say to her. I hadn’t seen her for six months and I was horribly conscious of how I looked and smelled, and never mind that it was only going to be a few hours before I started twitching for smack.
Then I was going to get ill. Really ill.
I was penniless and I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Trixie for drug money. I still had some pride, after all.
Or so I thought at the time, anyway.
Even if I had had any money, I couldn’t see Trixie letting me go off and score. There was nothing to be done and that was all there was to it.
“We were in Glasgow because I had a telephone call from a man there who said someone who worked for him called Daniel Lambert had found you,” she went on. “I had to go and see this man to find out who Daniel Lambert was, and to give him the reward.”
“Right,” I said again.
What fucking reward?
She carried on as though I hadn’t spoken. “While we were there Daniel Lambert called again and said he had arranged for your amulet to be taken, and to be ready. I came as soon as I could, Don. I came as soon as I was allowed to.”
It took me a moment to realize she was crying. Very quietly, but she was definitely crying. I wanted to hold her, but I didn’t quite dare. For one thing I really wasn’t sure where we stood right at that moment, and for another I could smell myself and I very much doubted she would want me to touch her in my current state. I put my grimy hand over hers on the wall instead, and she didn’t seem to mind that.
After a few minutes she stopped crying and spoke again.
“He told me it was funny because he’d met you months ago, before he knew anyone was looking for you, and by the time he found out about the reward he didn’t know where you were any more,” she said. “It took him weeks to track you down, he said.”
“Who was he?” I asked, for want of anything better to say. “The man in Glasgow, I mean?”
“His name was Davey,” she said. “I didn’t get a last name.”
Davey. Oh that’s just great. Grotty old Davey had got Danny “Lambo” Lambert to set Joey the pimp on me to steal my amulet. Cheers Davey, you horrible old git. I fucking owe you one.
Although, thinking about it, that meant grotty old Davey got to tell Lambert what to do. I still didn’t really remember Lambert very well but I knew I had met him somewhere in the middle of Edinburgh – somewhere decent, not out here in the badlands of the outskirts. That ought to make him several cuts above Davey in the general pecking order, but apparently it didn’t. I shivered. Not for the first time I found myself wondering who Davey was, and exactly what it was that he did. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, to be perfectly honest. I had a nasty feeling I really wouldn’t like the answer.
“Here’s Mazin now,” Trixie said, and I forgot all about Davey as a bloody great Mercedes pulled up at the kerb in front of us.
It was one of the really huge posh ones, a Maybach I think they’re called, eighteen feet of glossy black land yacht with tinted windows and an engine that purred like a contented tiger. I hardly ever get to drive a car but I do like a nice motor, you know what I mean?
Mazin got out of the driver’s seat, walked around the car, and bowed low to us both.
“Lord Keeper,” he said. “Madam Guardian.”
I couldn’t have looked or felt less like a lord at that precise moment, but all the same I couldn’t help but smile. It was as though angels had come and rescued me from Hell. Which, to be fair, was pretty much exactly what had just happened.
Well, an angel anyway. I still wasn’t too sure about Mazin.
“Hi Mazin,” I said.
He was tall and broad shouldered and sort of Arabic looking, wearing a butter-soft leather jacket over jeans and a white shirt. I had only met the geezer once before and I didn’t know him at all, but apparently he was in charge of my “people”. I still had no fucking idea what that even meant – everything had gone to shit so quickly after he first turned up that I hadn’t had time to find out. The gist of it seemed to be that he was the boss of whoever the people were who had worked for Rashid, who had been my predecessor as Menhit’s Keeper of the Veil. Apparently I had inherited Mazin and his whole organisation when Menhit had murdered Rashid and pretty much ordered me to take his job. I still didn’t really know what that meant either, come to think of it, or even if I still had the job after walking out on it and disappearing after barely a month in office. I must admit I had been rather hoping that she had fired me in my absence – at least that way I wouldn’t have had to see her again. I supposed this meant that she hadn’t.
“Hello,” Trixie said. “We should go. The car will be conspicuous here.”
That was a bit of an understatement really, and if it hadn’t been four or five in the morning we’d probably all have been robbed or shot or something by now. Well I mean obviously we wouldn’t, not with Trixie there, but you know what I mean. There would certainly have been a scene, and no one wanted that.
“Of course, Madam,” Mazin said.
He opened the back door of the car for her, then led me around the other side and ushered me in beside her. The door closed with a heavy clunk and I sat back into a cushioning dream of quilted cream leather. The car had two individual rear seats rather than a bench, with footrests and armrests and a big raised console thing between them. It was a bit like how I had always imaged being in a private jet must be.
I rubbed my hands over my bearded face in stunned astonishment. This was… not how I had expected the rest of my day to go. Mazin got into the driver’s seat and the car’s interior lights gently dimmed as he closed his door. He slotted the transmission into drive and eased the huge car away from the kerb.
I looked out through the tinted window and watched the Muirhouse estate slide past. I had pretty much expected to die there, had started wanting to in fact, and now here I was being chauffeured away in a limousine. This really, really wasn’t anything I had been expecting. It was wonderful, except for one tiny little thing.
I could feel the first twinges already, the early warning signs that I was going to start twitching in a couple of hours. And then I was going to start hurting.
Badly.
One thing at a time, I told myself. Fuck that and just enjoy the ride. You’re saved.
Chapter Six
I wasn’t saved.
Oh fuck me no, I was a very long way away from that. I vomited for the sixth time in an hour, shaking and sobbing pitifully as I spat rancid, stinking bile into the toilet bowl. I had a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and I was shivering with cold and pouring with sweat at the same time, out of my mind with a desperate, frantic animal need. My stomach cramped and clenched, and if there had been anything left in there I honestly would have shit myself. Again. It wouldn’t have been the first time in the last three days, I’m ashamed to say.
If someone had offered to kill me I would have cheerfully let them. If someone had offered me heroin I would have done anything, and I mean anything, to get it. I was a wreck. A tortured, screaming, hallucinating, pitiful wreck.
For God’s sake can’t you do something? I begged the Burned Man for the hundredth time that day.
Still no, it said. I’m suffering too, you cunt. I fucking told you not to get hooked on that filthy shit.
It had, to be fair. When I first started my slide into addiction it had raged at me about it, and the more it had raged the more I wanted to get off my face to shut it up. That had been a self-fulfilling prophecy and no mistake.
I clutched the toilet and gagged, wanting to tear it off the floor and hurl it through the wall. Anything to make me feel better. Anything to stop the agonising need.
Trixie and Mazin were ruthless.
For all that Trixie was naive about certain things I was pretty sure Mazin wasn’t, and someone had obviously explained this to her well enough. We were holed up in a beautiful four-bedroom Georgian apartment in Edinburgh’s New Town, a whole floor of one of those grand grey terraces. It was all huge rooms and marble fireplaces, high ceilings and towering velvet drapes over the windows. I would have gone back to my filthy squat on the Muirhouse in a heartbeat if I could just have had some fucking smack.
“Just a little bit,” I sobbed, and puked again. “For fucksake it’s not fair, I need it!”
I was crying again. Jesus wept, I know I haven’t ever been exactly what you’d call an upstanding citizen but I didn’t think I’d ever been as pathetic as this in my life. Had I really thought I still had some pride? Not any fucking more I didn’t.
The apartment was locked down like the world’s poshest jail and they wouldn’t let me out for a second. The windows didn’t even open, which meant the whole place now stank of Trixie’s cigarettes despite the best efforts of the air conditioning system. I couldn’t imagine how much this place must be costing or who was paying for it, but that really was the least of my fucking worries at that point.
I convulsed helplessly, my head swimming. I was starting to see things again, I knew I was. That was bad. I had seen the child twice so far since I had been going cold turkey.
