Damnation

by Peter McLean

  I opened the front door and went back up to my office, where Trixie was sitting waiting for me.

  “How was the Weasel?” she asked me.

  I shrugged. At least she was talking to me again, that was something.

  “Interesting,” I said. “As grotty as ever, but the little bugger does know things.”

  “See?” Trixie said. “I told you the day hadn’t been a complete waste. Anything that narrows the search is progress, however it may be achieved.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said with a sigh. “And you were right about that, too – we’ve narrowed the search quite a bit now, actually.”

  I know, I was taking the easy way out as usual. It was just… it was just fucking easier, you know? If she wanted to overlook certain things, like four dead geezers in a car lot, then that was her business and not mine.

  I told her what Weasel had told me, and her eyebrows lifted in surprise.

  “I don’t know a Soulless called Dimitri,” she said, “but Heinrich might.”

  “Right, good,” I said. “Can you get hold of this Heinrich? By the throat, ideally.”

  Trixie gave me a smile. There was no warmth in that smile, none at all. It looked reptilian, almost shark-like, and I have to admit that frightened me a bit. Her blinding white aura was taunting me with how much utter bullshit it was. I tried to ignore it, tried to stop thinking about what she might be hiding underneath that brilliant white lie. I couldn’t help but wonder just how badly rotted her real aura was by now.

  Oh my poor love, you’re getting so close to the edge aren’t you?

  She was, but I had no fucking idea what I could do about it. Trixie was strong and fiercely independent, and I dread to think what would have happened if I had started trying to lecture her on morality. Not that I was exactly in a position to do that, not any more I wasn’t, but you know what I mean. What she really needed was a shrink but that was hardly going to happen, was it? Half an hour’s conversation with Trixie would probably have sent a psychiatrist running to his symbolic mother.

  She has her own path to follow.

  I wished I could stop hearing the memories of Adam’s voice in the back of my head. The bloody Burned Man was quite bad enough, ta very much. The last thing I needed was that smug wanker’s deceitful platitudes wafting through my brain as well.

  “Of course I can,” Trixie said, and I must admit I almost wished she had said no.

  I mean sure, that was handy but… well, it raised some questions of its own, didn’t it? I mean like how, for one thing? All the same, she produced another burner phone from her handbag and punched a number from memory.

  She spoke for a moment in German, listened, and hung up. She looked up at me and smiled. At least it was a proper smile this time, a Trixie smile. That was the face of the woman I loved, not that cold, reptilian killer’s grin.

  “He’ll be here in five minutes,” she said.

  I swallowed. She gets to order Heinrich about now, does she? That’s new, and not in a good way.

  “Right,” I said. “Right, good. Thanks, Trixie.”

  She lit a long black cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “I have… reached an understanding, with the Soulless,” she said.

  “Oh? How does that work then?”

  “They do as I say, and I don’t kill any more of them.”

  I have to admit that was pretty much exactly the same deal I had made with the local night creatures when I first moved into this part of South London, so I supposed I couldn’t really fault her for that. All the same though, there was a matter of scale. The Soulless were a sight scarier than night creatures, for one thing. Still, I supposed I had to admit that Trixie was a whole order of magnitude scarier than me so it probably worked out much the same in the end.

  They’re not much to worry about unless there are an awful lot of them, she had told me, or something like that anyway. I supposed that made sense. There was only one of Trixie, but a Sword of the Word had to be worth thirty of those arseholes any day. At least.

  The doorbell rang.

  Trixie answered the buzzer and a moment later Heinrich was standing in my office in his overcoat and sunglasses. Now I’ve had Lucifer himself round my flat so I suppose I shouldn’t really have been fazed by this geezer, but all the same the sight of him there was enough to raise goosebumps on the backs of my arms. I think it was because he had been the reasonable one, you know what I mean? Pricks like Mikael I knew how to deal with. They were just thugs at the end of the day. Supernatural thugs maybe, but they were still basically just oiks like the Russian’s minders had been. This one though, he was connected. He was the one who had given us Adam’s card, after all. He was the one who got to make the decisions, and talk with the grownups.

  “Take your shades off,” I told him.

  I don’t even know why, really, but he did as I asked and I stared into his glowing red eyes.

  Talk to me, I told the Burned Man. What are we dealing with here?

  Soulless, it said at once, but you know that. Him in particular? He’s a cut above the rest of them, I’ll give you that. I don’t know who he was before he died but he must have had some serious bollocks on him. His pact isn’t like most of them, I can see that much. He’s got clout, this one has. Even Adam listens to him, I reckon.

  Yeah, I had thought so. Heinrich was just a little bit too sure of himself, a little bit too together, to be like the other Soulless. I reckoned he must have been a pretty serious magician in his Earthly life, whenever that had been. He may even have been a magus of some sort, for all I knew. He’d still been greedy and stupid enough to make a pact in the first place though, hadn’t he?

  “Good evening,” he said.

  “All right,” I said. “I want a word.”

  “I assumed that you did,” he said. “The Lord Adamus has told me about you, Don Drake. When the Angelus telephoned me, I–”

  “Yeah that’s nice,” I interrupted him. “Where’s my daughter?”

  He held me with his red gaze for a long moment, then put his sunglasses back on as though to make the point that actually no, I didn’t get to order him about. Well we’d soon see about that.

  “Do you have a daughter?” he asked me.

  “You know fucking well that I have,” I snapped. “Your Dimitri took her, him and two other of your clowns. Are you really going to try and tell me they’re not yours?”

  “I know a Dimitri,” he said with a shrug. “It may not be a common name in this country perhaps, but it’s hardly unheard of. What makes you think that–”

  “Don’t, Heinrich,” Trixie said, cutting him off. “If you know something, now would be the time to say.”

  Heinrich turned and looked at Trixie, and he suddenly seemed to lose his bottle. Funny that.

  He sighed.

  “You refused the request of your goddess,” he said.

  I felt cold all over.

  “You mean Menhit arranged this?” I said. “To blackmail me?”

  I couldn’t believe that, somehow. Oh, I was sure she was extremely fucked off with me at the moment, but this just didn’t seem like her style. Blackmail wasn’t how a war goddess went about getting things done, was it?

  “Great lord, no,” Heinrich said. His lip twitched with an amused smirk that made me want to hit him. “The Lord Adamus set this in motion, to persuade you to his point of view.”

  Menhit and Adam have made common cause, I remembered Trixie saying.

  Mazin knew I had a daughter, which meant Menhit knew, and she had told Adam. Common cause indeed. Menhit wanted me to go to Hell and end the fallen Dominion once and for all. Adam wanted the fallen Dominion ended, and he needed help to do it. I had, funnily fucking enough, not much fancied the idea of going to Hell. And now my daughter had been kidnapped by Adam’s buttmonkeys. Yeah, it made sense. It also made me want to smash Heinrich’s head open.

  I felt the Burned Man growl in the back of my head, low and menacing. It was get
ting very attuned to my emotions, I had noticed. That or I was getting very good at rousing it when I wanted it, one or the other. I wasn’t too sure which way around it was, these days.

  Either way, my right hand suddenly burst into flame and I was at Heinrich’s throat before I even really knew what I was doing. I felt the rush of power as the Burned Man took over, but this time I was still sort of there too, still at the front of my mind instead of elbowed into the background like I usually was. Come to think of it, it had been like that in Mickey Two Hats’ snooker hall earlier, too. I’d been so bloody angry that I hadn’t really taken it in at the time, but it was true all the same. That was new.

  Whatever, one way or another Heinrich was suddenly bent backwards over my desk with my left hand around his throat and my right raised over his face, flames streaming up from my extended fingers.

  “Those pretty glasses won’t stop me shoving my fingers through your eye sockets and nailing your fucking head to the desk,” the Burned Man growled at him with my voice. “Who’s Dimitri, and where’s my fucking daughter?”

  I felt Trixie take a step towards us. I wasn’t sure if she was intending to intervene or if she just wanted to be certain I had the situation under control. Either way, she stopped short of us and stood there, watching as I held Heinrich pinned over the desk. I’m sorry but if she was about to get in the middle of us then we were going to have a fucking row, right here and now.

  I had promised Olivia that I would do anything in my power to protect her, and this arsehole was about to find out exactly how far that power could reach.

  “Dimitri is one of us,” he said, “and your child is safe. For now.”

  “For now?” I shouted at him. “What the fuck does for now mean, you cunt? You might have been a big shit in your day but I’m the man with his hand round your fucking throat. A pact doesn’t look too fucking clever when it comes time to pay up, does it?”

  He smiled up at me, and there was no fear in his face. None at all.

  “Can you end me, Burned Man?” he asked. “Can you? Then end me. I would welcome it.”

  Fuck.

  Fuck, yeah, perhaps he would at that. It suddenly dawned on me that threatening what was effectively a shade bound to eternal damnation might not be that much of a threat after all. Oh sure, the Soulless had a bit of power and a sort of pseudo-life, but I dreaded to think what they went home to at the end of each little job they did for their infernal masters. Heinrich, I was pretty sure, was enslaved to Adam himself. That probably wasn’t a lot of fun, all things considered.

  Also, I suddenly realized, he knew he was talking to the Burned Man and not me. That little secret seemed to be getting less secret by the day and I didn’t like that one little bit, but the point was that he still wasn’t scared. No, fuck it, this wasn’t going to work, was it? That meant I was going to have to change tactics and do what I do best.

  Cheat.

  I yanked him back up to his feet and grinned at him.

  “Nah, that’d be far too easy mate,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll make a deal with you.”

  Heinrich arched an eyebrow behind his thick black sunglasses.

  “Oh?”

  “You help me,” I said, “and I won’t tell Adam you helped me. Refuse me and I’ll fucking get there in the end somehow, and when I do I’ll tell him all about how you rolled over for me and told me everything.”

  Heinrich went white, and I knew I had won.

  Of course he was scared of me – well of the Burned Man anyway – and I knew damned well he was scared of Trixie too. He might have said he wanted to be ended but I was sure he didn’t, not really. The human spirit clings to any sort of life it can get, and eternal death holds a terror for us all, but he was obviously much more scared of Adam. The thought of Adam’s rage, of Adam thinking he had betrayed him, of Adam’s punishment… Oh yeah, that broke him in a way that violence never could have.

  I have to admit to feeling a bit irritated that this geezer was more scared of Adam than he was of Trixie and me but I supposed it was hardly surprising really. Still, what the fuck did it matter? The ends justified the means, as Trixie was forever telling me. Whatever those means might be.

  “All right,” Heinrich said. “All right, you win.”

  I let him go and took a step backwards to let him straighten himself up. Trixie lit a cigarette and stood watching us.

  “So?” I said, after a moment. “Start fucking talking.”

  “You’ll never get her back, you know,” Heinrich said. “The Lord Adamus has her now. He holds the child as collateral to force you to go along with his and Menhit’s plan.”

  “Where is he?” I demanded. “I’ll find him and I will take Olivia back with all the power I can muster. A Sword of the Word stands beside me. I will storm any fortress he has built, and I will tear down his walls and bring her out. I can raise devourers from the very depths of the pit, if I have to, and I will not be denied!”

  Fuck me, can I? That was the Burned Man talking again, I knew. I also knew that summoning a devourer required human sacrifice. I sincerely hoped the Burned Man was bluffing, as there was no way on earth I was doing that. Unless it knew something that it hadn’t been telling me, of course. This would hardly be the first time that had happened.

  Heinrich smirked.

  “I wish you well with that,” he said. “The Lord Adamus has taken the child to Purgatory.”

  He started to laugh, and to weep, and once he had started he didn’t seem to be able to stop.

  * * *

  We obviously weren’t going to get any more sense out of him after that, so I let Trixie kick him out. I wanted to kill the fucker, personally, but I had a word with myself about that until I calmed down a bit. He might come in handy again later, after all. Maybe, anyway.

  “Purgatory,” I said to Trixie once he was gone. “Fuck, my mythology is all over the place. I’ve got too many pantheons going on. What exactly is he talking about in this context?”

  “Mmmm,” Trixie said as she lit another cigarette. “That rather depends.”

  I gritted my teeth. I loved her dearly but fuck me she could be hard work sometimes.

  “Depends on what, exactly?”

  “Well,” she said. “Purgatory can mean a lot of different things to different people. As far as I’m concerned, it’s where I would have to go before I… before I could go home, I suppose. A place of purification, prior to entering Heaven. To others it’s a sort of limbo. Hades, the land of the dead between Heaven and Hell. A place to await judgment. Others might just call it the ‘spirit world’. It’s sort of, well, I don’t really know how you’d phrase it in English, I’m afraid. We have a word for the idea but… oh I don’t know, Don. I suppose it’s whatever you think it is.”

  Fucking hell, that’s helpful, I thought. Not. I gave the Burned Man a mental kick up the arse.

  Where the fuck is Purgatory? I asked it. And more to the point, how do I get there without dying?

  The Burned Man snorted in the back of my head.

  Purgatory? it said. That’s Hell with training wheels. Fucksake Drake, why do you want to know about that all of a sudden?

  That threw me, I have to admit. Had it been asleep while I was having my little discussion with Heinrich? No, of course it hadn’t – it had been right there with me, setting my hand on fire for me when I wanted it to, and threatening Heinrich with my voice. I had heard it growl and everything, and threaten to nail his head to the desk with my fingers. I had heard it talk of summoning devourers, for fucksake. I mean, that had been the Burned Man, hadn’t it? That hadn’t been me.

  Had it? Jesus Christ, I had a sudden awful realization that perhaps it had. I couldn’t be so far gone that the lines between us were blurred that much, could I?

  I only fucking wished I knew. I knew I had changed, though, I knew that much. I had changed very fast and very much for the worse. I hated it. I hated the thought of this man who threatened to nail heads to desks and set people
on fire being anything to do with me or my daughter, but he was, wasn’t he? He was, and there just wasn’t fucking time to worry about it now.

  Anything in my power to protect her. Anything at all.

  And I meant it, too.

  Anything.

  Humour me, I thought at the Burned Man. Purgatory. How do I go there?

  By dying? the Burned Man suggested. I don’t fucking know, dickhead. I’ve been owned by about two hundred different magicians since Oisin first bound me and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before. Why the fuck would anyone in their right mind want to go to Purgatory?

  I shut it out of my head and turned and stared out of my office window. Why? Because Olivia was there, according to Heinrich anyway. He might have been lying, of course, but I didn’t think so.

  How do I get to Purgatory without dying? I had no fucking idea, but I had a feeling I might just know a man who did.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Davey wasn’t an easy bloke to track down. I know we were in London and he was supposedly somewhere in Scotland, but the more I thought about Davey the more I figured that a lot of people down here ought to know who he was. I was right, too. They did, but they didn’t want to talk about him. I spent the evening working my way back though my telephone list of scumbags, and this time I got a lot more cold shoulder than I had before. Davey, it seemed, was a bit of a taboo subject. Thinking about how badly he had made my skin crawl, I supposed that shouldn’t really have surprised me.

  It was nearly midnight by the time I gave it up for a bad job and just phoned the Weasel again. Now as I might have said, Harry the Weasel was bloody horrible but he knew pretty much everyone else who was horrible too, and in our circles that was a fucking lot of people. Weasel knew Davey all right, or at least he knew who he was.

  Now Harry the Weasel, don’t forget, was still trying to get back into my good books even after our lunch date today. So the little shit should be, after he had betrayed me last year. He probably didn’t want to talk about Davey any more than anyone else did, but he was clever enough to know when he could work something to his advantage. He spilled his guts.