Drake

by Peter McLean

  “So?” I asked it. “Any bright ideas?”

  “Oh you know me, I’m full of bright ideas,” it said. “You’ll need to run out and get me some bits and pieces though.”

  “What do we need this time?”

  “Two pounds of iron filings,” it said, and I nodded. “Three pints of goat’s blood, one vial of tincture of mercury, two live toads, and a quarter ounce of powdered manticore spines.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake!” I shouted at it. “Manticore spines?”

  “Do you want this done properly or not?” it said. “Manticore spines, or you take your chances with something that ain’t up to the job. Do you want Vicious Vincent and Danny-a-Necromancer-for-Fun living long enough to come looking for you?”

  “Fine, fine,” I grumbled.

  “Say hi to Debbie for me,” it smirked as I left the room.

  Yeah, that’s going to go well, I thought. Debbie, as I think I mentioned, was my sort of girlfriend. Sometimes, anyway. She was also one of the best alchemists in London, and the only one even remotely likely to let me have anything on credit. You don’t need an alchemist to get hold of iron filings of course, and I had plenty of those already, a big sack of them in the bottom of my wardrobe, and goat’s blood and toads are cheap. To be fair, you don’t strictly need an alchemist for either of those either, but you’d be a long while waiting to catch any toads or a wild goat on Peckham High Street, know what I mean? The alternative, to head out into the bloody awful countryside with a big net or whatever the hell you’d need, didn’t exactly appeal to me. The tincture of mercury wasn’t going to break the bank either, but manticore spines were another matter. Even a quarter of an ounce was a quarter of an ounce more than I could afford right then.

  I supposed I’d just have to hope the old Don Drake charm worked a bit better on Debbie than it had on Selina.

  * * *

  It didn’t.

  “You’ve got a bloody nerve,” Debbie said, glaring at me through a haze of purple smoke. “Why should I?”

  She was crushing something unidentifiable with a big stone pestle and mortar. All around her, mysterious things bubbled through what looked like several miles of strangely curved glass tubing and condensers and retorts and other things I didn’t even know the names for, before dripping into a variety of flasks and beakers and bottles. There were Bunsen burners hissing away underneath some of the apparatus, and purple and green smoke escaping from various seemingly random valves and gaskets along the way. I had no idea what any of it was for, but the whole affair looked like some sort of mad chemistry teacher’s wet dream. This was in her living room – the rest of the flat was much worse. I knew she kept the toads in the bathroom, for one thing, and the kitchen didn’t even bear thinking about. The last time I’d seen the inside of her bedroom there had been a live goat in there.

  “Old times’ sake?” I suggested, hopefully.

  “Get stuffed, Don,” she said. “I don’t know why I even let you in.”

  “Because…” I started, about to say something glib and cute, but the look on her face made me think better of it. I gave honesty a try instead. “Because you know I need your help.”

  “You should have thought of that the last time you stood me up to go and play cards, or because you were drunk, or out with some tart or whatever the hell you were doing,” she muttered, putting the pestle down to fiddle with some of her glass tubes.

  “I’m sorry Debs,” I said. “Really. And I’m in deep shit if you don’t help me.”

  “Tough,” she said, and looked at me. “Who with this time?”

  “Wormwood,” I confessed.

  She winced. “Ouch,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s pretty bad.”

  “Not that you pillock, I burned myself.” She came out from behind her workbench and gave me a stern look. “I’ll be back in a minute – don’t touch anything.”

  She disappeared into the bathroom, sucking on a scalded finger. I sighed and looked around the room. Most of two walls were covered floor to ceiling with shelves full of hundreds, maybe thousands, of glass bottles, vials and jars, each one with a carefully handwritten label. She had pennyroyal oil and graveyard dirt for the hoodoos, holy water for people who liked that sort of thing, bloods and tinctures and ground this and powdered that and distilled the other in a bewildering array. She’d have some manticore spines somewhere, I knew she would. She certainly had a lot of pickled dead things in jars, most of them with far too many tentacles for my liking. At least I really hoped they were dead.

  Debbie came back a minute or two later with a damp cloth wrapped around her hand and a slightly less pissed-off look on her face. She had a smudge of soot on one freckled cheek, I noticed now, and bits of some sort of dried plant caught in her auburn ponytail. I smiled at her, and she laughed and shook her head.

  “You really are a bloody idiot, Don, you do know that don’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. Next to her I certainly was – Debbie was a hell of a lot cleverer than I’ll ever be, I knew that much. She was also, bless her, a bit of a soft touch. “Come here, you’ve got a bit of something…”

  I wiped the soot off her cheek with my thumb, and leaned forwards to kiss her. That, as it turned out, was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. She stepped back, away from me. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Don. Not anymore.”

  Ouch indeed. “Look,” I said, feeling a bit awkward, “that last time… well, I wasn’t with a woman, OK?”

  “Just drunk and gambling then? Well that makes it all OK, I’m sure,” she said, a bit snippily I thought. “No, I’m sorry, it’s your life, you do what you want with it. Just, well, you just do it on your own from now on, OK?”

  I sighed. Charm obviously wasn’t my strong suit today either. I rubbed a hand over my face and sighed again.

  “Look, Debs,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “You can have your bits and pieces,” she said. “We’re still… whatever we were all those years ago, before I was ever stupid enough to start going to bed with you. Friends, I suppose. Whatever you want to call it. I wouldn’t want to see Wormwood eat you, OK?”

  At least that was something we could agree on.

  “Thanks Debs,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “You owe me thirty-four, by my count,” she said.

  In all honesty it was probably more than that, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to say so just then. I stood there while she packaged up what I needed, feeling like some naughty schoolboy being told off in the headmistress’s office. At least she let me have it all on tick.

  “Here,” she said at last as she thrust an old supermarket carrier bag into my hands. “It’s all there.”

  I peeked into the top of the bag. It was all there as well, even the manticore spines.

  “You’re a sweetheart,” I said.

  “I’m an idiot,” she muttered as she turned away. “Now go on, piss off before I change my mind.”

  I wanted to say something but I honestly couldn’t think what, and now she had her back to me as she fiddled with her tubes and things. Her shoulders were trembling, I noticed. I chickened out and left.

  It wasn’t that far back to my place, but the whole time I kept the bag clutched tight in my hand and a wary eye on the people around me. There’d be no replacing this stuff if it got nicked now. The bag was wriggling horribly on account of the toads, which I supposed reduced the chances of anyone actually wanting to pinch it, but all the same. In that neighbourhood you never knew.

  The Burned Man was waiting impatiently when I got back.

  “Well?” it said. “Did you blag it with her?”

  “Shut up,” I muttered as I emptied the bag onto my workroom floor. “It’s all here.”

  “Good ol’ Debs,” it sniggered.

  “Shut up,” I said again. “Just leave her out of it, OK?”

  “Touchy,” it said, and smi
rked. “Go on then, get us set up.”

  Getting us set up took most of the rest of the day. Summoning and sending is hard. By the time I had the circle laid out exactly right, it was dark outside. I stood back and admired my handiwork. It had taken an age to mix the iron filings with the goat’s blood and mercury until the consistency was just right, but now the end result was piped perfectly onto the outline of the grand summoning circle that was inscribed on the floor. I had used the powdered manticore spines to draw the correct glyphs inside each point of the pentacle, and done what was necessary with the toads. I put the knife down and stretched my back until it cracked, and looked at the Burned Man.

  “Ready?” I asked it.

  I could see the hunger in its eyes.

  “Ready,” it said.

  Of course, it was a fucking disaster.

  Chapter Three

  Sometimes you just can’t get drunk enough. God only knew I was trying though.

  There’s this little trick I can do with probability. Not enough to win the lottery or beat Wormwood at Fates, more’s the pity, but I’m good enough to tickle the hundred quid jackpot out of the fruit machine in the Rose and Crown when I need to. As long as I don’t do it often enough to get Shirley suspicious, it’s all good. It keeps me in beer money if nothing else. I’d drunk about half of it so far and I was still awake, which was a lot less good. I don’t know if I even could have got drunk enough to forget the last few hours but I was determined to give it my best shot.

  “Gis another round Shirl,” I said.

  “Really, Don?” she asked me. “You ought to be getting off home, duck.”

  I looked up at her from my position half slumped over the bar. Shirley was an absolute sweetheart, a proper old-fashioned East End matriarch. What she was doing in the haunted wilds of South London I never had found out, but she kept a nice pub.

  “Come on Duchess, it’s cold out there,” I said, mustering what passed for a grin. It was a pretty piss-poor effort in all honesty, but considering that all I wanted to do was break down and cry it would have to do. “Gis another.”

  I waved a twenty at her and she sighed and pulled me a pint. She set a whisky chaser down beside it and smiled sadly.

  “Penny for ’em,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Trust me, treacle, you don’t want to know.”

  I didn’t want to know, that’s why I was in there in the first place. I can’t tell you how much I didn’t want to know what I had done that night. Fucking disaster didn’t even come close to it. I drank off the top of the lager and upended the whisky into my pint glass. I was on a fucking mission to oblivion and no mistake. I gave the drink a swish around and drank.

  You rely on that bloody thing too much, I told myself, thinking of the Burned Man and how it had looked at me, afterwards.

  I remembered the very first time I had worked a proper job with it, and how it had laughed at me. Summoning and sending is complicated, and kind of misnamed. Summoning is just what it sounds like, making something appear before the circle so you can talk to it, ask it questions or make deals with it, whatever. Summoning and sending though, when you want to set something on someone, is a bit different. If you want your demon to savage someone in Paris, say, and you’re in London, you don’t actually call it to where you are and then wait around while it flies or swims or fucking hitchhikes to Paris. What you do is, you focus your Will on where your target is and you use your summoning circle to call up your demon and send it straight there, to where you want it to be. Obviously you can’t see Paris or wherever it might be, so you use a scrying glass to see through your demon’s eyes instead.

  The beautiful part of that is you’re in its head, and that means you can control it properly. I mean really control it if you want to, like you’re wearing the thing. The ugly part of that is that you’re in its head. Trust me, inside the head of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. Anyway, the first time we did this the Burned Man had laughed itself silly at me.

  “Just let it be,” it told me, “it knows its business.”

  “What if it gets loose?” I asked it.

  The Burned Man had gestured at the grand summoning circle around me, at the carefully inscribed glyphs and all the expensive ingredients.

  “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.”

  It was right, of course, but all the same I couldn’t help staying with my demon just to make sure. The moment it attacked and I felt my mouth fill with hot human blood the whole thing suddenly lost its appeal.

  The next time I gave the demon its head just before it attacked. The time after, I only rode it long enough to make sure it had got to the right place. Ever since then I had settled for just watching in the scrying glass to make sure the job got done. Tonight I hadn’t even really done that, and look what had fucking happened.

  “It’s her fault,” I said.

  “Oh pet, it always is,” Shirl laughed. “Who is she this time, and what did she do to you?”

  “What?” I said, before I realized I had said that last bit out loud. The sound of her laugh went through my head like broken glass. No one should be laughing tonight. “Oh, nothing. Never mind. Gis another round Shirl.”

  “You really have had enough, my love,” Shirl said. “Get off home with you now.”

  “Just a short, then,” I said.

  Shirl pulled a face but stuck a glass under the whisky optic for me anyway. God, what a total fucking balls up. I knocked back the whisky in one swallow. Too much to drink, and not nearly enough. Nowhere fucking near enough. Oblivion was still frustratingly out of reach. I prodded my empty pint glass across the bar.

  “Don’t be silly love,” Shirl said.

  “I want another beer,” I said, a touch belligerently.

  Now Shirl is lovely, she really is, but in her pub she’s the absolute monarch, make no mistake about it. She’s sixty if she’s a day and she’s still saucy-looking in a brassy sort of way, but one thing she does not take is crap off drunks.

  “Alfie, c’mere a minute,” she shouted up the stairs behind the bar. “I could do with a hand.”

  Alfie is Shirl’s son. If there’s a human version of Connie, he’s it. It was time to go.

  “No bother, Duchess, no bother,” I said. “I’ll be on me way then.”

  Shirl gave me a sweet smile.

  “Mind how you go now, love,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”

  It was. The pub door swung shut behind me, and I swung gracefully into the hanging baskets as the freezing air hit me in the face and my balance decided it didn’t want to work anymore. Drink is a bastard sometimes. I couldn’t talk properly, I couldn’t see straight and I certainly couldn’t walk straight, but I was still remembering perfectly well – and that was the very thing I was trying to stop doing. I didn't want to remember anything at all, but I kept seeing his face.

  The wards had been easy enough to get through in the end. The Burned Man knew its business, you had to give it that. Those manticore spines had bought me three perfectly formed screamers, and they went howling across Edinburgh and tore through Vincent and Danny’s wards like they weren’t even there. I’d still been watching the scrying glass then, out of curiosity if nothing else. Inside, the house was much what I would have expected – a magician’s version of Debbie’s flat. There was stuff absolutely everywhere, books and scrolls and crystals, swords and wands and skulls, and even an honest-to-god stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling of Vincent’s study. I’m sorry, but I had to laugh when I saw that. I hadn’t laughed since, that was for fucking sure.

  I burped and staggered into the street, blinking tears out of my eyes. Keep your shit together till you get home, Don, I told myself. You can break down in private later, where no one can see you.

  The Rose and Cro
wn was my local, but despite what you might see on the telly there isn’t a pub on every street corner in London so it was still a good fifteen minute walk home. That’s if you’re walking in a straight line, and I wasn’t. It was getting late now, well past eleven, and the pavements were empty. I was only a couple of streets away from my office when I heard her scream.

  I almost kept walking. I know, I know, I’m a shitbag. It was late and cold and I was blind drunk and I had more than enough fucking woes of my own, and I almost kept walking. But I didn’t, you have to give me that much credit. I stopped, listening, until she screamed again. It was coming from my left, from an alley that ran between two long, low-rise blocks of flats. I rubbed a hand over my wet eyes and turned into the alley, stumbled off a wall and bumped into a dustbin, and started to get angry. Angry was good. Angry would burn the hurt away.

  I had a sudden moment of doubt when it belatedly crossed my mind that it might turn out to be half a dozen skinheads hassling whoever she was, but thankfully it wasn’t. It was a night creature, as I had suspected, and I could cope with those. By some miracle there was a streetlight in the alley that actually worked and she had at least had the sense to get under it. The night creature was keeping outside the pool of dim yellow light, its scaly clawed hands emerging from the patch of darkness it had shrouded itself in and darting out at her in short, vicious slashes. She was pressed back against the wall under the light, her long red hair in a wild tangle around her face. There were rips in her little black dress where the night creature had been at her. Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for redheads? And blondes? And, you know, attractive women in general really.

  “Oi!” I shouted. “Pack it in, you wanker!”

  The night creature turned with a snarl, its long, alligator-like snout pushing out of its shroud of darkness to menace me. I glared at it.

  “Do you know who I am, pissant?” I said.

  It growled, and backed off a step. It knew, all right.

  “We’ve got a deal,” I said. “You don’t bother me and I don’t come and bother you, remember? Well you’re fucking bothering me. Now piss off, or come the morning I’ll summon and send something down your holes to eat the bastard lot of you.”