Damnation

by Peter McLean

  I frowned at the answering machine. I’d got a telephone number for the gnomes out of Wormwood once before and I knew I had written it down. Somewhere.

  Obviously I couldn’t find the fucking thing. The scrap of paper I had written it on had probably been in the drawer of my old desk, which had no doubt gone to the tip months ago. Fuck it!

  I did still have Wormwood’s mobile number though.

  I punched it into the phone and waited until he picked up.

  “What?” he said.

  Oh good, he was still as charming as ever then. Wormwood was another archdemon, albeit a very humanlike one. He was a child of Mammon, and he ran an illicit casino and drinking club frequented by magicians and demons alike.

  He was also a businessman, in my debt, and shit scared of Trixie. For all that he was bloody horrible, Wormwood was a very useful person to know. Well, I say “person”, but you know what I mean.

  “All right, Wormwood,” I said. “It’s Don Drake.”

  “Fuck me,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Yeah well, sorry to disappoint you and all that, but I’m not,” I said. “And I’m back in London.”

  There was a pause while he nosily lit a cigarette. I could almost hear the wet phlegm on his lips.

  “Am I supposed to be pleased about either of those things?” he asked.

  Oh fuck you very much, you cunt.

  “Spare me the charm, Wormwood,” I said.

  “Yeah well, Selina has been trying to get hold of you for fucking months,” he said. “Them gnomes are looking for you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I confessed. “I didn’t at the time, but I do now. I need that number you had for them. I know you gave it me before but I’ve lost the bastard and I need it.”

  “Tough,” he said. “Look Drake, you–”

  “Trixie is back in town too,” I said. “We could come to your club tonight, if you wanted. She’d love to see you.”

  She wouldn’t love to see him at all, obviously, but not half as much as he didn’t want to see her. Wormwood really was bloody terrified of Trixie, and with good reason. He really had no business being on Earth at all. He was only here in the first place because some bloody idiot had summoned him and messed it up, and he had got loose. That was a very long time ago – if he got sent back to Hell now he’d probably never get back out again, and he knew damn well that Trixie could dispatch him without even breaking a sweat. Wormwood was a ruthless businessman but he was no one’s idea of a fighter.

  “Keep your panties on, I’ve got it somewhere,” he muttered.

  He fiddled with his phone for a moment then read me out a number which I scribbled down in the fresh notebook that Trixie had thoughtfully left in the drawer of the new desk for me.

  “Ta,” I said, and hung up on him.

  I heard a horn sound from the street outside.

  “The removal men have arrived with your things, Lord Keeper,” Mazin said.

  I waved distractedly at him. “Yeah, sort that will you?” I said. “I’ve got to make a call.”

  Fuck me, I think I was finally starting to get the hang of having “people”. I must admit I rather liked it.

  I called the number Wormwood had given me and waited while it rang and rang. I remembered that the last time I had tried to phone down to gnomeland it had taken forever for anyone to answer, too. I suspected they only had one phone, probably spliced into one of the backbone telecom cables that ran underneath the Tube tunnels.

  Eventually someone picked up.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Don Drake,” I said. “I’m returning a call from Janice. Can I speak to her please?”

  I bloody well hoped I could. If anything nasty had happened to her in the six weeks since she had left that message I would never forgive myself.

  “Oh,” the voice said. “Oh, all right. Hang on.”

  I heard the phone being put down, and sighed with relief. It sounded like whoever that had been was on their way to find her, so at least she was still alive. I’m sorry but I do tend to assume the worst, and I really was fond of Janice.

  Eventually the phone was picked up again and I heard her snuffly little voice.

  “Hi Don,” she said. “It’s Janice. Thanks for calling back. I was starting to think that, well, that you weren’t going to.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said. I put a finger in my other ear as the removal men started lugging our stuff up the stairs and into my flat, thumping and banging the way that removal men always do. “I’ve been, um… Sorry. I’ve been in Scotland. For, um, for a long time. Shit, look, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, and I felt something in my guts unclench.

  Oh thank fuck for that.

  “Good,” I said. “So what’s up?”

  “I’m afraid the matriarch has passed away,” she said.

  I remembered the matriarch of the gnomes. Nice lady, and obviously very old even by gnome standards. I supposed it had had to happen eventually.

  “Oh,” I said. “I, um, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It was her time,” Janice said sadly. “It’s all right, we knew it was coming. What with Bianakith and all the work she had to do to heal the warrens afterwards, I think she was all used up. There’s only so much root and rhyme in anyone isn’t there, whoever they are?”

  Is there? I had no real idea how gnome magic worked, but that was their business not mine as far as I could see.

  “Right,” I said. “So, um…”

  “It’s not that,” Janice said, “it’s something she said before she passed. She said it was very important that the hero should be told. That’s you, Don.”

  The hero was Trixie as far as I was concerned, but whatever.

  “What’s that then?” I asked her.

  “She said to tell you ‘The throne is burning’. I’m sorry I don’t know what that means, but it was very important to her that you be told. She was, well, raving a bit towards the end, I’m afraid. It might not even mean anything at all. I think, well, with everything that happened… Bless her. She was very old, Don. Very, very old.”

  I dread to think how many years was “very, very old” to a gnome. Two hundred? Three? More than that? I wondered what the poor old thing had thought when the Victorians first started digging sodding great holes on top of her warren to build the Tube. I wondered what she had made of Crossrail, for that matter. That had probably helped finish her off, poor love. Bloody technology was spoiling everything for everyone.

  “Right,” I said. “Well I’m afraid it doesn’t mean anything to me at the moment but I suppose it might do one day so, um, thanks. Thanks, Janice.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and I could hear the shy smile in her voice. “I wanted you to know, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said again. “So, um, do you have a new matriarch now, then?”

  “Oh, well yes,” Janice said. “That, um, well, that would be me.”

  I blinked. Shit, really?

  “Well, then thank you, Highness,” I said.

  “Oh you don’t have to call me that,” Janice said. “It was all a bit of a surprise really, but we held the moot and I was voted for even though I didn’t ask to be and, well, it’s all a bit awkward at the moment. I suppose I’ll get used to it in time. All the, you know, the bowing and everything.”

  I glanced at Mazin and I knew exactly what she meant.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I can imagine. Anyway look, thanks for telling me.”

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up just as the removal men were bringing up the last of the boxes.

  “What was that all about?” Trixie asked me. “Is everything all right?”

  She was standing beside my desk smoking one of her long black cigarettes while Mazin herded the removal guys around the flat, directing the unpacking.

  I waved her a bit closer, and spoke quietly.

  “Janice is fine,” I said. “The gnomes’ matriarch died and J
anice got voted in as her replacement, apparently.”

  Trixie nodded. “Good for her,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Anyway, what she wanted was to pass on a message from the old matriarch, something she said before she died. She wanted to tell me ‘The throne is burning’.”

  Trixie seemed to pale.

  “Say that again?”

  “The throne is burning,” I repeated. “Buggered if I know what it means, but apparently the old matriarch was insistent that someone tell us.”

  “It… it could be nothing,” Trixie said.

  “It could be the nonsense ravings of a potty old woman, to be fair,” I said. “From what Janice was saying, it sounds like the old matriarch went a bit gaga before she died.”

  “Yes,” Trixie said. “Yes, it could just be that.”

  She turned away and went through to the bedroom to supervise, and that was the end of it. There was something though, something about the look in her eyes and the sudden paleness of her face that made me wonder. I loved Trixie, I really did, but sometimes I was damn sure she wasn’t telling me everything.

  I sighed and swivelled my chair around to look out of the window. I’m not sure Trixie was ever telling me everything, to be fair. All this business about Adam and the Soulless, for one thing. Was he really that much of a prick, that he would set these tossers on us just to see them killed, as a way of saying hello? Actually he probably was, now that I thought about it. The Soulless were utterly dispensable, to him. Anyone who made an actual pact with the Devil had to expect it to bite them in the arse eventually, I supposed.

  I thought about the Burned Man, sleeping somewhere in the back of my head, and shuddered. That wasn’t exactly the same thing of course – I mean, I hadn’t made any sort of deal with the bloody thing after all, I had just royally fucked up an invocation. All the same, it made my palms itch just to think about it.

  Diabolists go to Hell, Don.

  Yeah, thanks for that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The removal guys buggered off in the end, leaving me and Mazin and Trixie in a surprisingly habitable version of my flat. Obviously none of them had been allowed in my workroom, but now that we were alone I left Trixie and Mazin in the kitchen and took myself in there and shut the door behind me.

  The fetish of the Burned Man hung lifeless in its chains on the altar, inanimate and thick with dust. I looked at it and felt a twinge deep inside me.

  Mate, I thought. Is there any chance…?

  Nope, the Burned Man thought back at me, waking up for the first time in hours. Not going to happen. I hate that fucking thing and I’m not going back in there. Fucking forget it, Drake.

  I sighed. I supposed it wasn’t, at that.

  Yeah, all right, I conceded. Now that you’re alive again, make yourself useful. What the fuck does “the throne is burning” mean?

  I felt it mentally shrug. Could mean all sorts of things, it said. The throne of where?

  Fucked if I know, I admitted.

  I went to check everything was still where it should be in my cupboard. Thankfully it was. I looked at the contents of the “special” drawer, at my warpstone and the flat black case that contained the hexring, and at the curved black Blade of Unmaking that I had enchanted with the soul of the Burned Man. The Burned Man wasn’t in it any more, of course, but that dagger had been forged in the depths of Hell and it was still a powerful artefact in its own right. Everything was still there, thank fuck. It really wouldn’t have done for any of them to have gone walkabout while I was away. I dreaded to think what sort of mess some half-trained oik of a wannabe magician could have got themselves into with any one of those artefacts. I owed Trixie a very big thank you for keeping everything safe for me while I was off my head in Scotland.

  I sighed.

  I owed Trixie for all sorts of things. I owed her more than I could ever repay her, I knew that much.

  The phone rang. I hurried back through to the office but Mazin had already picked up.

  “Don Drake’s office, how may I help you?” he said. He frowned, then put his hand over the receiver and looked at me. “Lord Keeper, there is a very angry Russian-sounding gentleman on the telephone, demanding to speak to you.”

  I groaned. My past just refused to leave me alone, didn’t it? The Russian was a gangster like Gold Steevie had been, and no I didn’t have the faintest idea what his name was. Everyone just called him “the Russian”, and that was all he answered to. I had done bits of work for him in the past, for all that him and Steevie had been enemies. I had never been Steevie’s bitch, you understand, no matter what he might have thought. I had always been strictly freelance. I imagined that with Steevie dead the Russian had expanded into his territory pretty quickly, and got even more obnoxious than he had already been.

  “Give it here,” I said, holding out a hand for the phone. “Russian, it’s Drake.”

  “Where the fuck you been?” he said by way of greeting. “I need a job doing.”

  I knew exactly what sort of job it would be, too. These pricks only ever came to me when they wanted a demon setting on someone. Now I’m sorry but I didn’t do that any more. Not after Calum McRoth I didn’t, and certainly not now I had Olivia to think about. I saw Trixie looking at me, her cold blue eyes watching as she waited for me to say something.

  “I’ve retired,” I said. “I’m out of the business.”

  “Fuck you are,” the Russian said. “Gold Ponce is dead, you work for me now.”

  “I never worked for him,” I pointed out. “I always just worked for whoever was paying the best, and now I’ve retired. Find someone else.”

  I didn’t even know if there was anyone else, not in London anyway, but that was hardly my problem. This arsehole could go fuck a bear for all I cared, I was through with that life. I looked at Mazin, and thought about Menhit. I couldn’t help thinking that the life I had got myself into instead was probably worse, but there we were.

  “You say ‘no’ to me?” the Russian asked, and in that moment he sounded exactly like Gold Steevie. Apart from the accent, obviously.

  For fucksake, I really had had it with these pricks and all their macho posturing.

  “Yeah, I’m saying no,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Drake,” the Russian growled in my ear. “I’ll hurt you for this.”

  He hung up on me, and I shrugged. I really didn’t need him as an enemy but then compared to everything else that was going on I supposed he was a drop in the ocean. I looked up and saw Trixie smiling at me.

  I gave her a nod and went to put the kettle on. Which I realized was a bit pointless when I opened the kitchen cupboard and saw there was nothing in there, not even coffee. Trixie seemed to have had the place cleaned while it was empty, which I have to admit it had badly needed, but the cleaners had obviously chucked out everything in the kitchen that had been out of date. Which was everything in the kitchen, if I’m honest about it.

  “Bugger,” I muttered.

  “I will have groceries delivered, Lord Keeper,” Mazin said from the doorway behind me. “If you intend to stay here, that is.”

  I caught the look of slight distaste on his face and winced. He obviously didn’t think much of my place. Which was hardly surprising, I supposed. What with him being the head of the Order of the Keeper and in charge of all that lovely money, I suspected that wherever he lived was a damn sight nicer than this. That put my back up at once, and I felt my stubbornness kicking in.

  “Yeah I am as it happens,” I said. “I live here, mate.”

  I was being stupid, I knew I was. I had no affection for that bloody flat at all, but Trixie had put so much effort into looking after it and cleaning it up that I didn’t have the heart to just turn my back on it and get somewhere else, even assuming Mazin would have paid for better. I thought about the palatial apartment he had rented for us in Edinburgh, and decided that of course he would if I told him to.

  “I… understand, Lord Keeper,” he said, for
all that he obviously didn’t.

  “Right, look,” I said. “Thanks for everything Mazin, but you’ve had a bloody long drive and you must be knackered. Take the rest of the day off, yeah?”

  To be fair it was late evening already so that wasn’t particularly generous of me, but I just wanted to get rid of him. I didn’t mind the bloke but he was always there, you know what I mean? Perhaps I hadn’t quite got the hang of having “people” yet, after all.

  Mazin bowed and went, leaving me alone in the flat with Trixie.

  “You hungry?” I asked her.

  I hadn’t had anything to eat all day other than an alleged cheeseburger at a motorway services that I was still trying to forget about, and I was bloody starving.

  “Yes,” Trixie said. “I suppose so, anyway.”

  We had a quick wash and a brush up and headed out to the little Italian place round the corner. Everything was feeling nice and normal, like we were just a regular couple out on a date. I should have known it wouldn’t last.

  We were half way through our meals and on our second bottle of red when it all went pear shaped. The geezer walked up to our table wearing his long black overcoat and his sunglasses, despite the comfortably dim light in the restaurant. It was the other hunter, Mikael’s mate. This was the one who had given Adam’s card to Trixie in the pub in Edinburgh.

  “Angelus,” he said, interrupting whatever I had been in the middle of saying to her. “The Lord Adamus sends his respects.”

  Trixie glanced up at him, then waved him to a spare chair at our table. That surprised me a bit, I have to admit.

  “Hello Heinrich,” she said. “You remember Don.”

  I stared at the Soulless, trying to get my head around the fact that Trixie seemed to be on first name terms with him. He had been the more civilized of the two, admittedly. He had certainly been a hell of a lot better than Mikael anyway, but all the same. What the fuck was she up to?

  “All right?” I muttered as he nodded to me.

  “The Lord Adamus has been making enquiries, as you asked him to,” this Heinrich geezer said. “It seems your suspicions were correct, Angelus. The goddess intends to see an end to the fallen Dominion once and for all, even though it now dwells in Hell.”