by Peter McLean
“He helped me,” Trixie said. “When I slipped, I mean. He showed me… well, he…”
She has her own path to follow, Adam had told me. I nodded.
“I’m sure he did,” I said. I reached out and took her hand, “and I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
I was sure of no such thing, but like I’d told Adam, she was a big girl.
* * *
Adam came back later that afternoon, more’s the pity. I was still on my knees scrubbing the floor when he appeared in my office, which I have to admit didn’t do much for my standing as the alpha male in my own flat. I had taken Trixie down to Dave’s for lunch earlier on, but now she was resting again at my insistence. She might say she was fine now, but I don’t think either of us really believed it.
“How is she?” Adam said, by way of a greeting.
“Asleep, with a bit of luck,” I said. I got up and looked at him. “Look, Adam, I think we need to talk about Trixie.”
“Do you?” Adam asked mildly. “I really don’t think we do, you know.”
He made to walk past me towards the bedroom, but I reached out and put a hand on his arm.
“Yeah,” I said, “we really do.”
Adam looked down at my hand on the arm of his horribly expensive-looking suit, and back up at me again.
“I see,” he said.
Now I’m sorry, but I really was scared of Adam. I didn’t like him one little bit, however cool his teleporting trick might be, but I was scared of him all the same. Admittedly he hadn’t really done anything except shoot a man, and I was pretty sure I could do that too given the gun. That wasn’t the point though. With him, it was a simple matter of what he was. I dropped my hand.
“Look,” I said again. “About Trixie… I know what you said, and I know what I agreed to, but–”
“But what?” Adam interrupted me, his aristocratic voice turning to ice. “You are out of your depth here, Donald Drake. You are a very long way out of your depth indeed, in cold and shark-infested waters. Do you really want to question me on this?”
I met his eyes. He had very dark eyes, the irises almost completely black. I swallowed hard.
“Whatever,” I muttered. “Just… look after her, OK?”
“Of course,” Adam said. “I will always look after her.”
He turned away and went into the bedroom. The door closed softly behind him and I sagged onto the sofa. I realized my hands were trembling. Of all the crazy things I’d done recently, I couldn’t help thinking that might just have been the closest to actual bravery I’d ever come in my life. If these were shark-infested waters then he was the biggest damn shark in them, I was sure of that. Damn but he really did scare the living shit out of me.
I rubbed my hands over my face and swallowed hard, then very carefully slipped my shoes off. I tiptoed down the hall as quietly as I possibly could, almost holding my breath. I couldn’t help thinking it was faintly ridiculous to have to sneak around my own flat like this, but it couldn’t be helped. I pressed my ear right up against the bedroom door. I’d obviously missed the start of the conversation, and damn him for waking her up at all, but I could hear Trixie talking now.
“Will it help me, though?” she said.
“Fear no demon, Meselandrarasatrixiel,” Adam replied. “It is they who should fear us. I am a Duke, in Hell. I can command the Legion and the Leviathan, if I but order it. Do not ask, command. That is the true way to power. I told you, even this man Drake knows that much.”
“But I thought–”
“Command,” he said again. “Use the power I have shown you, child. Use it, and triumph.”
I winced. That didn’t sound good at all. I might not be a churchgoing man these days but I’d been raised Catholic as a lad and I knew what temptation sounded like when I heard it.
“Yes, Adam,” she said.
There was something in her voice just then, something cowed, something owned, that made me want to kick the door in and just flatten the posh smarmy cunt right there and then. If only life was that simple. It went quiet after that, and I eased myself away from the door and sneaked back down the hall before I was discovered skulking outside.
I had promised myself I would help Trixie figure out how to defeat the Furies, but, from the way things sounded right then, I reckoned the most important thing was to get Adam’s claws out of her before her little slip turned into a headlong fall into Hell.
Adam was right about one thing, I was out of my depth. I needed some advice, and I knew the Burned Man wasn’t the right one to give it to me. That, I’m afraid, didn’t leave me with a lot of options. I put my coat on, checked my pockets for money and keys and stuff, and knocked on the bedroom door.
“I’m going out,” I called. “Don’t wait up.”
I left without waiting for an answer.
Chapter Seventeen
There was a little Italian place a couple of streets away and I went there first for a bit of dinner. I was getting heartily sick of Big Dave’s bacon-with-everything menu for one thing, and for another he wasn’t licensed. The Italian place was, so I happily killed a bottle of red while I ate my spag bol. It felt good to be on my own for once, somewhere I was no different to any other punter. I almost had a minor nervous breakdown at one point when I saw a woman with red hair walk into the restaurant, but it wasn’t Ally. It’s just some redhead girl, I told myself as I finished my glass of wine in one long, shuddering swallow. Calm down man, for fuck’s sake. Ally’s hardly the only red haired woman in London.
I lingered over dessert and liqueur coffees until about ten o’clock, then paid up and went looking for a taxi. The roll of cash Trixie had given me was still comfortingly fat in my pocket, and I was buggered if I was walking all that way in the dark and the cold if I didn’t have to.
The cabbie pulled up where I told him to at about ten thirty, right at the end of the alley. I tipped him too much and waited for him to clear off before I started walking. I was nervous now, and getting paranoid about being seen going in. Fuck knows why, looking back on it. Like I said, things had been starting to get on top of me recently. They must have been, or I would never have thought this was a good idea in the first place.
I walked down the alley and stopped outside the hidden entrance to Wormwood’s club. I waved a hand over the graffiti-covered brickwork, and mumbled the words of entry a bit less clearly than usual. I walked into the wall, through the cold, sticky feeling of the glamour, and into the bar on the other side.
There was a sudden hush as I stepped into the dimly lit little bar. Connie was standing at the bottom of the stairs that led up into the club proper, wearing his dinner suit and looming the way a good bouncer should. He was the only person in there that I recognized, though. Well, I say person but you know what I mean. It dawned on me that I was actually the only human in there. Now we’re usually in the minority, admittedly, but I don’t think I’d ever been the only one before. I waved hastily at Connie before any of the patrons decided to make an issue of my being there.
“Yo, Connie,” I called out. “How’s it going, big lad?”
“All right, Don,” Connie said. He nodded at me, and I felt the mood in the room palpably relax.
Bless him, if he hadn’t been so ugly I could almost have kissed him right then. I was certainly ready to forgive him the various hidings he’d given me. It’s the same in clubs all over the world, I’m sure it is. If you’re in with the bouncer, you’re OK with everyone. I picked my way through the crowd to talk to him.
“Is the boss in?” I asked.
Connie jerked his head towards the top of the stairs.
“He’s upstairs,” he said. “Playing cards, I think. You ain’t going to go and spoil his night now, are you Don?”
“Who me? Nah, I just want a chat,” I said. “I’m after a bit of advice like, that’s all.”
Connie gave me a dubious look, but in the end he nodded.
“Go on up then,” he said. “You know the wa
y.”
Connie stood out of the way to let me up the stairs, and I climbed the thick red velvet carpet into the upstairs club. It was smoky up there already, and busier than it normally was this early in the evening. I recognized the hoodoo man over at a table in the far corner, drinking rum and playing craps with something enormous and covered in shaggy brown hair. The old man was wearing his top hat and tails again, and had his arm around a slender blonde who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. You old dog, I thought. I waved, and he grinned and tipped his hat at me in greeting. There were a few other actual humans up there, thankfully, but no one else I knew other than by sight.
Wormwood was sitting at his usual table with the two decks of cards neatly positioned on the green cloth in front of him, ready for Fates. He had an already full ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair by his elbow. The waitress with the cute tail was nowhere to be seen tonight, sadly, but there was a glass and an open bottle of single malt waiting by the empty chair opposite him for anyone who might fancy taking him on.
I walked up to his table and cleared my throat.
“Evening, Wormwood,” I said.
“If you’re here about that little bit of business,” Wormwood said quietly, “you need to learn some fucking protocol. I mean, well done and all that shit but this ain’t the time or the place to be talking about that sort of thing, you understand me?”
“Nah, no business tonight,” I said. “I just wanted a little chat. Like I told Connie, I’m after a bit of advice, that’s all.”
Now I know that going to Wormwood for advice probably makes me sound like I’d gone off my head. Maybe I had a bit, looking back on it, but you have to remember that Wormwood was an archdemon. A bloody horrible seedy one, granted, but an archdemon of Mammon none the less. He was a businessman, not a despoiler of worlds. He was a child of Mammon and a cunning, ruthless businessman, who had got where he was through influence and manipulation rather than violence.
If there was one thing Wormwood knew inside out it was how to get people to do what he wanted them to. If anyone could tell me how to get Adam’s claws out of Trixie without getting myself into a fight I had no chance of surviving, it was him.
“Nothing’s free in this life, not even advice,” Wormwood said, with a sour twist of his greyish lips. “Especially not in here, and even more so not when you want it from me. I’ll play you a hand for it, if you’ve got anything to bet.”
I sighed. Of course nothing was free – not from Wormwood it wasn’t anyway. I knew him that well, so I’d seen this coming. It would have been nice to have been wrong, but there we were.
“I’ve got one thing,” I said. “Just one though, so no raising, OK?”
“It’d better be good,” he said, but I could tell he knew it would be if I was even offering it to him.
“Oh yes,” I said. “It is.”
I took Lavender’s talisman out of my pocket and put it on the table between us.
“This summons a devourer,” I said. “And does some other shit too, but the devourer’s the star prize. That’s my bet.”
Wormwood’s eyes glittered with avarice. From what I had seen of them, I reckoned a single devourer probably represented more killing power than all the other muscle at his command put together. The look on his face told me I was right.
“What’s mine?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Against this? That advice I want, for one thing. Then, well, depending what you tell me, either your help carrying out that advice or you wipe my slate clean. And I’m still undervaluing this, and you know it.”
“Yeah well, you ain’t got anything else, have you, unless I’m wildly mistaken,” he said. He sucked his shit-coloured teeth for a moment while he made up his mind. “Deal.”
Normal blokes would have shaken hands at that point, but neither of us were exactly normal and neither of us much wanted to touch the other one. We nodded at each other instead, and the croupier cut the two decks and began to deal the minor arcana from the thicker of the two decks.
I poured myself a drink. I’d already done that bottle of red wine in the Italian, and three or four liqueur coffees after that, but now I really felt like I needed a drink. I tipped the first shot straight down my neck and was refilling the glass before I’d even finished swallowing. This was it. This, as I saw it, was pretty much my last chance to get between Adam and Trixie before it was too late.
I picked up my cards and fanned them, looking at a pair of sixes and a mixture of random junk. I kept my face smooth. Except for the uncontrollable tic that was beating under my left eye, anyway. Wormwood looked down at his own cards, his horrible weaselly little face expressionless. The way Fates is played, you have to decide on your minor arcana, your suits, before you draw your trump.
Wormwood plucked a card out of his fan and discarded it on the table, face down.
“Card,” he said.
I did the same. The dealer dished us each out another minor card, and I had to fight to keep my face still. Six of Pentacles – this was more like it.
Wormwood said nothing, nodded. He looked at me. “I’m good,” he said. “Stand.”
I swallowed another shot of whisky and poured again, fighting my nerves. My palms were itching so bad I wanted to scrape them on the side of the table until they were raw. Three of a kind was good, but this was Wormwood I was up against, and tonight I might very well be playing for an angel’s soul.
“Card,” I said, dropping a useless Three of Swords face down onto the table.
The dealer pushed a new card to me across the table, and I gently eased it up and into my fan. Six of Cups! That gave me four of a kind. I nodded, trying and failing to keep my left eye under control.
“Stand,” I said.
“Trumps then,” said Wormwood.
The dealer slipped us each a card from the slim deck of major arcana. You can’t change your trump card once it’s been dealt. That’s the “fate” part of Fates. I gently eased mine up and peered at the corner of the card. It was the motherloving Tower again, the very card that had started this whole miserable mess for me in the first place. I cleared my throat. I don’t know how well up on your tarot you are, but the Tower isn’t usually regarded as exactly what you’d call a good omen.
“We agreed no raising,” I reminded him. “This is it, Wormwood. What’ve you got?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Challengers first,” he said.
I shrugged and laid my cards out. Four sixes and the Tower was a blinding hand, and I knew it. The Tower might not be an auspicious card in tarot but it’s the sixteenth trump so at least it scores well. A smile was already starting to creep across my lips even before I saw the wide-eyed expression on Wormwood’s face.
“Four sixes?” he whispered. “You’ve got four sixes and sixteen, you wanker?”
I nodded. “Looks that way,” I said, unable to resist twisting the knife. “It ain’t your lucky night, Wormwood.”
“Smug little prick,” Wormwood muttered as he threw his cards face down onto the table.
I never did find out what he’d had, but it was a safe bet it was a losing hand. Wormwood doesn’t have a magnanimous side any more than he has a sense of humour.
“My hand, I think,” I said. “So let’s talk.”
“Knowing what a fuckup you are, as a rule,” Wormwood said, “I ain’t listening to your tales of woe in front of all these good people. Come into the office with me.”
He got up and led me across the club, patting backs and shaking hands as he went, exchanging nods and smiles and generally taking care of business. I trailed in his wake and tried to ignore all the curious stares I could feel following me through the crowd. Hardly anyone got a private audience with Wormwood, I knew that much, and the fact that I’d evidently just won mine at the card table seemed to be making me interesting.
He ushered me through a door and into an office. It was much nicer than the one downstairs where he had received me last time. This looked like it was wh
ere actual club business got done, as opposed to the other sort. He sat down behind a huge rosewood desk and waved brusquely at one of the chairs facing him. He lit a cigarette.
“So, advice then,” he said. “You won it fair and square Drake, much as it pains me to admit it. What’s on your mind?”
I told him all of it. I hadn’t meant to, not all of it anyway, but once I started I just couldn’t stop. The only thing I didn’t mention was the Burned Man. I didn’t like Wormwood. I knew damn well I couldn’t trust Wormwood, and yet… he was my constant, my anchor, know what I mean? He was the only person of any real influence that I’d known before all this kicked off. He was very old and very clever and… yeah I know, I really have to get over my father issues. Anyway, I clung to him in the way a shipwrecked sailor will cling to a splintered board, and I poured my guts out.
That probably wasn’t the cleverest thing I’ve ever done, truth be told.
“…so, it comes down to this,” I said at last. “How the hell do I stop Adam from corrupting Trixie any further, and forcing her fall? How to I help her to go home?”
Wormwood leaned his elbows on the desk, steepled his fingers in front of him, and blew a long stream of smoke in my face.
“So she killed Hedgefund Harry, not you,” he said. “Is that what you’re telling me, Drake? I gave you a job. Out of the misguided goodness of my heart I gave you a way to work off some of your ever-mounting debt to me, and you subcontracted it out to your half-sane pet angel, is that what you’re telling me?”
“What? No, no fuck that, that’s neither here nor there,” I said, coughing as his rancid smoke made my eyes water. “Haven’t you been listening to me? The point is–”
“It is here, and it’s quite possibly also fucking there as well,” Wormwood interrupted me. “You cheeky bastard, Drake. You cheeky, cheating, lying little wanker. I gave you respect for that job, and you never even fucking did it, did you?”
“It got done,” I said. “What more do you want?”
