by Peter McLean
“Yeah, we’re doing it,” I said.
I got up and went to weigh out the iron filings and round up the toads. This job was nowhere near as complicated as the last one had been, and we were good to go by about six o’clock. I squatted on my heels in the circle and fixed the Burned Man with a hard stare.
“This time,” I said, “there aren’t going to be any screwups, OK? I’m going in with it, and I’m riding it all the way.”
“You don’t really want to do that, do you?” the Burned Man said.
“I want to do that a hell of a lot more than I want a repeat of what happened last time,” I told it. “We’ve got one mark, that’s who we’ve got to kill, and it’s damn well going to be the only person we kill this time.”
The Burned Man shrugged.
“Suit yourself,” it said. “I don’t suppose you want to use a vorehound then.”
I grimaced. “Not if I can help it,” I said. “I hate wearing quadrupeds, I keep getting my legs in a muddle.”
“Well you can’t have a screamer, not with just graveyard dirt and mandrake,” it said. “I did the shopping list for a vorehound. Throw in the last of that goat’s blood and I could probably rustle up a talonwraith, I suppose.”
“Oh that’ll be a barrel of fun,” I muttered.
“For fuck’s sake, it’s a talonwraith or four-legged Fido, mate,” the Burned Man snapped. “There are limits, you know.”
“Yeah OK, OK,” I said, “a talonwraith it is then.”
I had to admit the goat’s blood was a bit past its best by then, congealed and clotted into rancid lumps, but I did my best to work it into the mix. Fuck it, it would just have to do. I got myself set up with the scrying glass while the Burned Man did its thing.
“Ready?” it asked me after a while. “One grumpy talonwraith, on its way.”
I focused my Will on the glass, gazing into it until the smooth black surface resolved into an image of an empty hallway seen through the wraith’s eyes. There was a thick, plush carpet on the floor, and a few widely-spaced doors with little brass numbers on them.
Flat 702, I reminded myself.
The image in the glass moved slowly as the talonwraith took a step forwards, pulling itself out of the wall opposite the doors. I plunged my Will through the glass and into the wraith’s mind before it had a chance to orientate itself.
I may have mentioned this before, but inside the mind of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. Doubly so, if the demon in question is a talonwraith. Now a vorehound is basically just a nasty demonic animal, and at the other end of the spectrum a screamer is something like a rabid, psychotic axe murderer hopped up on PCP. Neither of them are anything you can have a conversation with, to put it mildly. A talonwraith though, now those are different. They might not be as savage as screamers, but talonwraiths think.
I shuddered as I settled into the wraith’s head.
You don’t need to come and watch, little diabolist, it hissed in its mind. I have my instructions.
I’m not here to watch, I told it. I’ll be driving.
Oh will you now?
It tried to throw me out there and then, but I’d been expecting that. I dug my Will into its horrible black little brain and squeezed. Hard.
Yes, I told it. Yes I will.
It called up a stream of images in our newly shared mind, scenes of horror and madness. I wrestled with it as it dragged me through its treasured memories of murder and rape and torture, concentration camps and famine and plague. I opened the dark door in my own memory and brought forth the child’s face, the horror where his eyes had been, and threw it back at the wraith. Whatever atrocities it might have seen and done, they weren’t anything to do with me. The child was. That was personal, and that made it so much worse than anything the wraith showed me could ever possibly be.
I’m not impressed, I snarled at it. Now pipe down, you fucker.
I felt a furious rush of malice and hatred, but I thought I had it under control now. The emotional charge that image carried for me had been enough to break the wraith’s concentration. I lifted one of its hands into view in front of its face. Talonwraiths are invisible to the human eye, but of course now I was seeing through its own eyes and it could see itself perfectly well. It stood at least seven feet tall, and its skeletally thin hand was enormous. Flaky grey skin was stretched taut over the prominent bones, and each of its three fingers was tipped with a filthy two foot long claw. When I lowered its hands back to its sides, the tips of those terrible claws brushed the carpet underfoot.
Stop masturbating and get on with it, you pitiful sack of meat, the talonwraith sneered at me. Your jealousy disgusts me.
I snorted and walked it through the front door of 702. The wraith passed through the wood-veneered steel door as though it wasn’t there, and stepped smoothly into a spacious entrance hall. I could hear music playing from somewhere, something classical that I didn’t know. I followed the sound.
You get off on this, don’t you? the wraith thought. Have you ever summoned a succubus just to fuck her? I bet you have. You’re that sort, aren’t you? You’re all about the control you can’t get any other way.
Shut up, I told it.
You have, haven’t you? I thought so.
I told you to shut up.
I slipped through another door and the music got louder. The room was starkly white and enormous and virtually empty, one of those minimalist places that very rich people seem to like so much. It’s almost like he was saying I don’t need all this space because I don’t actually like stuff, but I can afford to have it anyway so fuck you. The far wall was all glass, commanding a magnificent seventh-floor view of the City of London. It was dark outside now, and the thousands of lights glittered like stars.
Look at the wealth he has, that you will never have, the talonwraith thought. You want to be him so much that you have to kill him, is that the way of it? There’s a name for that sort of illness, I think. You want to be him almost as much as you want to be me.
I ignored it. The mark was sitting in a black leather and chrome armchair, staring at his multi-million pound view. There was a low glass table beside the chair, with a tumbler of whisky on it. I took a step towards him.
Next time you want a succubus, you could summon her and me together and wear me to fuck her in, have you ever thought of that? I’m sure you must have thought of doing that, you oily little pervert. Or isn’t that enough? Why not wear a vorehound, that’s got a cock too. Even a succubus probably wouldn’t like that much. You’d prefer it that way, wouldn’t you? If she really didn’t like it. Raping her, wearing a hound…
Will you shut the fuck up! I snarled at it.
Why should I? You’re raping me right now. It’s no different. You’re inside me, using me, and I never said you could. It’s the same thing. Do you like that? I think you do.
I gritted teeth I couldn’t feel anymore, back in my workroom, and ignored it. I drove the talonwraith forward while it continued to rant obscenities at me. I made it circle the chair, trusting in its invisibility, until I could see the mark’s face. I had to be sure I had the right bloke.
It was him all right, the man from the photograph in Wormwood’s paper, his eyes open and staring out of the window. I raised the wraith’s hands and was about to drive those awful talons into the mark’s chest when I noticed the blue tinge to his lips.
There wasn’t a scratch on him but he was quite, quite dead.
I pushed myself free of the talonwraith and opened my eyes with a shudder of relief. I was glad to see the back of it, obviously, but more than that I was strangely relieved that I hadn’t had to do the job after all. In a way I felt like maybe I hadn’t betrayed Debbie quite so badly, this way. Yeah OK, I’d still lied to her and stolen from her, but at least I hadn’t killed anyone else.
“Well?” the Burned Man said. “All done?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Send it home.”
“How was it
?”
“About as charming as they usually are,” I said. “Horrible bloody things.”
“But what?”
I looked at it, and realized it could tell something was up.
“It’s done,” I said, “but I didn’t do it. Someone beat me to him.”
“You what?” it asked.
“He was dead when I got there,” I said. “Blue around the lips, not breathing. Like he’d had a heart attack or something but, I dunno, I mean this bloke was only in his thirties and he looked pretty healthy to me.”
“Apart from being dead, you mean?” The Burned Man snorted. “Waste of time and toads then, we needn’t have bothered.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “It’s a hell of a handy coincidence, him just deciding to die like that. I’m not a great believer in coincidence, as it goes.”
“Me neither,” it said. “Still, job done. Dead’s dead, at the end of the day, and that’s what his nibs wanted.”
“There is that, I suppose,” I said.
I balled my fists in the small of my back and stretched until my spine cracked satisfyingly. Fuck, that felt good. I half turned, stretching my arms out over my head to pop the stiffness out of my shoulders, and spotted something out of place.
“What’s that?” I said.
“What’s what?”
“That,” I said, pointing.
There was something on top of the chest of drawers. I hadn’t noticed it before, busy wallowing in my own misery as I had been, but now I’d relaxed a bit it had caught my eye. I walked over and picked up the small white stone from the top of the drawers. It wasn’t much bigger than a kid’s marble and had been tucked away behind a corner of one of the books that littered the surface. It wasn’t anything to look at, just a plain little pebble, but I knew it wasn’t mine.
“Did you put that there?” I asked.
The Burned Man lifted its arms and rattled its tiny chains sarcastically. “What do you think?”
“Course you didn’t, sorry,” I said. “No one else has been in here though, except…”
“Blondie,” said the Burned Man.
I nodded. “Did she maybe sneak this onto there?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” it confessed. “I, you know… wasn’t paying that much attention.”
You were looking at her arse not her hands, I thought, but I could hardly blame it in all honesty. I sighed and held the stone up where the Burned Man could see it.
“Any idea what this is?”
It shrugged. “Could be anything,” it said. “Could be a lucky charm, could be a hexstone. It could just be a fucking rock.”
“Could it,” I began, with a sinking feeling of growing certainty, “perhaps be a way of spying on us?”
The Burned Man’s ugly little face twisted into a grimace. “I suppose it could,” it said.
“In which case someone might have known exactly who we were going after tonight, mightn’t someone, if they had been listening to us in here.”
“They might,” it admitted. “Fuck.”
I opened the window and flung the stone out of it.
“That’s put a stop to it, whatever it was,” I said.
“What’d be the point, though?” the Burned Man asked. “I mean, even if it was her who left that there and you haven’t just forgotten you had it, even if she was spying on us for whatever reason, why the hell would she want to do your job for you?”
“No idea,” I said, and patted the amulet through my shirt. “With a bit of luck I won’t get the chance to ask her, either.”
“Shame though,” the Burned Man said. “Arse like that.”
I shook my head and left it to its sordid little fantasies.
I needed to check in with Wormwood, to let him know the job was done. I hadn’t bothered last time, what with everything, and anyway I had figured he would just know. That was when he’d started in with all that crap about owing him interest. I wasn’t falling for that one again.
I decided to have a good hot shower to wash the filthy taint of the talonwraith out of my system then pop down to Big Dave’s for a bit of dinner. I could wander over to the club later on and give Wormwood the happy news in person.
Chapter Nine
I never got there.
I don’t have a lot of luck in life but right then I was actually feeling pretty good about myself, all things considered. I sauntered up the road with a belly full of Big Dave’s meat and bacon pie, my amulet riding comfortingly against my chest. My bruises were horrible but I hadn’t had to kill that bloke after all, Wormwood was paid off for real this time, and Trixie couldn’t get near me anymore. I was even starting to let myself think that I could probably talk Debbie back round in a week or two. Admittedly I was running out of money so fast I hadn’t wanted to shell out for a taxi, but all the same things were, as far as they get for me, going relatively well. I was halfway to the club when it all went to shit in a sack.
I don’t even really know how it happened. I was crossing a deserted backstreet when a white van pulled out from the forecourt of one of those grotty tyre-and-exhaust places you get all over the place round this part of town. The van stopped dead in front of me so hard I almost walked straight into the side of it.
“Oi, watch it mate!” I shouted, then something hit me very hard in the back of the head and that was all she wrote for a while.
It’s all a bit confused after that. I sort of came to at one point, lying on the dirty metal floor in the back of the van with my hands tied behind my back. There was an angry looking black woman crouched beside me, wearing jeans and a red hooded top. Something silver glinted around her left wrist. The van was moving, bouncing over the pothole-ridden streets. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a siren.
“You don’t get to touch her again,” she said. “I don’t like it when you touch her.”
She drove something sharp into my shoulder, through my coat.
“Sorry,” I said. “Who…”
I passed out again.
The second time I woke up I was somewhere else, and the black woman was cutting my clothes off with a Stanley knife. I was sitting in what felt like a cheap folding garden chair, my wrists tightly tied to the plastic armrests. From what I could see, we were in an underground car park of some sort. The van was standing a dozen yards away with the back doors open.
“What…” I started.
She slapped me across the face with her free hand as the knife sliced my shirt open. I felt her hand close around my amulet.
“No,” said another female voice, from somewhere behind me. “I think we’d better let him keep that.”
“You don’t touch her,” the black woman hissed in my face.
I heard footsteps behind me, the sound of heavy boots on concrete, then another needle went into my arm and it all went black again.
The third time I woke up I felt horrible. I was lying on my side on the ground, with cold damp concrete against my bare skin. I was stark bollock naked except for the amulet, which was still hanging round my neck on its leather cord. My wrists were tied in front of my body with a length of thick, greasy blue nylon rope. I looked down and saw that that they had used the same stuff to lash my ankles together as well. I was cold, and my head was pounding like I had that morning’s five-star hangover all over again. Whatever they’d been injecting me with obviously wasn’t gentle on the comedown.
I looked around as best I could. The van was still there, although the lawn chair had been taken away. There was a car parked over there now too, a big black one. For one heartstopping moment I thought it was Gold Steevie’s Bentley, that he’d rumbled me and I was about to lose some fingers, but it wasn’t. This was some American job that I didn’t recognize. I shivered, and coughed up bile onto the concrete.
“He’s awake,” said a woman’s voice.
It sounded like the one I’d heard before, the one who’d told the black woman to let me keep the amulet. She walked into my field of view, the heels of her heavy motorc
ycle boots scuffing on the concrete. She was very tall, and looked like she might be worryingly muscular under her faded jeans and black leather bomber jacket. Her pale blonde hair was cut severely short, clippered round the sides and back like an army haircut. She looked me over like I was a side of meat, her grey eyes showing no hint of emotion.
“Well,” she said, “you’re nothing special are you.”
It wasn’t a question. I shivered in the cold again, feeling overly self-conscious about my current shrivelled state.
“I’m not exactly at my best at the moment,” I admitted.
“I don’t think you have a best,” she said. “What do you think, Meg?”
The black woman jumped down from the back of the van and sauntered over, her white Nikes almost silent on the hard ground.
“I think,” she said, “that I want to hurt him.”
“Well…” the tall woman said again.
“Can I hurt him, Tess?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Now hang on a minute,” I said, only to be cut off by Meg’s foot connecting with my face at high speed.
My head snapped back into the concrete and I saw stars for a moment.
“Do we have your attention now, Mr Drake?” asked Tess, looming over me with her large hands on her hips. She was wearing some sort of silver bracelet, I noticed. “Your undivided attention?”
“To be fair, you had that already,” I said. “I don’t get kidnapped very often.”
“Pity,” said Meg, and kicked me again.
Her foot slammed into my stomach this time, bringing me up sharply into a sitting position with my bound hands clasped to my guts.
“For fucksake!” I gasped. “Who the fuck even are you?”
“I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced have we?” said Tess. “I’m Tess, this is Meg.”
“Yeah, I got that much,” I muttered.
“Of course, you already know our sister.”
