Drake

by Peter McLean

I coughed. So if I had tried that one on Phoenix first instead of going straight for the big guns he might well have killed Trixie in the time it would have taken me to figure out that the spell wasn’t going to do anything. All because I hadn’t known how a talisman works. It’s times like that when I seriously start to worry about what else I don’t know and really should. It was starting to look like the Burned Man had left more than a few holes in my education.

  “What does the other glyph mean? Any idea?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “No, sorry, I haven’t got a clue. There’s still power in it though, whatever it is.”

  “Well I’m not trying it just to find out,” I said.

  “No, no, I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” she said.

  She slipped the talisman into the pocket of her jeans, as though to make sure I didn’t do that. I shrugged. It was no use to me now anyway, and she was probably right. Curiosity was bound to have gotten the better of me sooner or later, and whenever that happens I usually fuck something up.

  “I’m going for a lie down,” Trixie said.

  “Help yourself,” I said, again trying not to think about her lying in my bed. “It’ll do you good.”

  She left the room and I sighed and went to make myself a coffee. I stood at the kitchen window drinking it, looking down into the yard behind the grocers where Mr Chowdhury and his eldest son were sitting by their back door on a pair of upturned crates. They were drinking cups of tea and laughing together. For a moment I envied them their normal life. Good for you, Mr Chowdhury, I thought. Make the most of it.

  The phone in my office rang. I hurried through to get it before the noise disturbed Trixie, cursing under my breath as I slopped hot coffee over the back of my hand. I just reached it before the machine picked up.

  “Don Drake,” I said.

  “Don, thank God!”

  It was Debbie. I put the cup down in a hurry, spilling more coffee on the desk. Her voice sounded fuzzy, like she was on a mobile somewhere with lousy reception.

  “Debs? Debs, what’s the matter, where are you? I–”

  “Shut up and listen,” she interrupted, and now I could hear the panic in her voice. “I don’t know where I am, Don! She took me away, sometime last night. She’s–”

  I heard a muffled voice in the background, then there was a sharp crack and a howl of pain. I’d have known that sound anywhere – the evil cow had obviously got herself a new fucking whip.

  “Hello sweetie,” Ally purred down the phone, her voice like battery acid poured over an open wound. “I’ve got your little friend. You’re actually quite brave in your weaselly little way, aren’t you sweetie? Tormenting you will take me years, and to be perfectly frank, I can’t be arsed. Still, you have the very devil of a conscience. If I hurt her, well, you’ll drive yourself crazy over it for me, won’t you?”

  “You fucking bitch!” I yelled down the phone at her. “Where are you? Where’s Debbie?”

  I heard another crack of the whip, another shriek, and the line went dead. I screamed and hurled the phone across the room. The worst of it was, she was absolutely right. I would drive myself crazy, more than I already was. That was it. That was just fucking it! The bitch was never going to go away, was she? I couldn’t stand by while she hurt Debs, that much was for certain. I stormed into the workroom.

  “Fuck the cost, how do I kill a Fury?” I demanded, before I really took in what I was seeing.

  Trixie was standing over the Burned Man with the talisman in her hand. She was pressing down on the third glyph, and whatever that one did it was halfway through cutting a hole in my altar around the Burned Man.

  “This way,” she said. She turned to stare at me, and something in her eyes looked quite unhinged. “The third glyph is a spell for opening things, Don. Locked doors mostly, but this is working just fine.”

  “Trixie…” I started.

  “No! I’m sick of this,” she screamed at me. “Sick of waiting! Get close to him, Adam said. Kill for him, make him owe you, make him love you, he said, and sooner or later he’ll give it to you. But you won’t, will you? You love this… this fucking thing more than anyone on Earth, don’t you?”

  I stared at her in astonishment. That was the first time I had ever heard Trixie swear. Adam said… I had a very, very bad feeling about that.

  “I’m touched,” the Burned Man sneered, but I couldn’t mistake the gleeful look in its beady little eyes. “The angel says you love me.”

  “Adam said… you want the Burned Man?” I said. “That’s what you were after, all along?”

  You don’t think there’s even the tiniest chance she might want something in return? the Burned Man had asked me, but I don’t think it had ever occurred to either of us that what she really wanted was the Burned Man itself. And now it knew what she was. That was bad. I still wasn’t quite sure why, but I knew that it was.

  “I need it,” she said. “I can do it, with this. I can finally destroy Aleto and go home!”

  I suppose I should have pointed out that Meg and Tess weren’t actually dead so killing Ally wouldn’t get her home anyway, but Trixie looked so close to going for my throat right then that I honestly didn’t dare. All the same, I didn’t dare let her try to steal the Burned Man either.

  “Trixie,” I said, “you can’t–”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” she shrieked.

  She threw out a hand towards me and some psychic outpouring of her rage picked me up and hurled me bodily across the room like a rag doll. My head slammed into the wall with a solid crunch. You can’t steal the Burned Man, I had been trying to tell her. It doesn’t work like that.

  I slumped to the floor in a heap and the lights went out.

  * * *

  I had tried it myself, of course. Davidson had been well on his way to dying of cirrhosis of the liver by then, but he was taking far too long about it for my liking.

  “Why the fuck should I wait any longer?” I demanded, pacing Davidson’s study with a glass of his whisky in my hand. “I’m sick of waiting.”

  I had been a student of the Burned Man for almost four years by then, and I was running short of patience. I had learned everything it had to teach me, or so I thought at the time, and there was little more we could usefully do now until I actually owned it. Davidson assured me he had left it to me in his will, described rather obtusely as “a curious statue of which Donald has grown fond”.

  Fond might not be quite the right word for it. The Burned Man still revolted me and frightened me by turns, but I couldn’t deny its power. I had my own keys to Davidson’s place by then and I had taken to feeding the Burned Man myself, since Davidson was rarely in any state to do it these days. I had also taken to drinking too much, and not spending as much time with Debbie as I should. She had actually joked that she thought I might be having some sort of gay affair with Davidson. At least, I sincerely hoped she had been joking.

  He was thoroughly repellent by then, of course, and if I had been gay I’d like to think I could have done a good deal better. He was never sober, rarely functional, and he stank all the time. The university had pensioned him off two years ago, when he started to become too much of a public embarrassment for them to pretend to ignore it any longer. He still steadfastly refused to see a doctor, and, as much as I hate to admit it, I hadn’t exactly encouraged him to either. To put it bluntly, I needed him dead.

  “They say all things come to those who wait,” the Burned Man said.

  “Things come to those who reach out and fucking take them for themselves,” I snapped at it. “You told me that yourself.”

  “So I did,” it said, and chuckled.

  Davidson chose that moment to stagger into the room. He was wearing a stained dressing gown of a sort of dirty mustard yellow that matched the colour his skin seemed to be gradually turning. He smelled horrific.

  “Don, dear boy,” he slurred. “Lovely… to see you.”

  It was eleven o’clock on
a Saturday morning and he was shitfaced. He stood there for a moment, swaying on his bare feet with a slightly confused look on his face. A moment later he turned and shuffled out of the room again.

  “You can’t still want to belong to that,” I said. “The man’s an alcoholic wreck.”

  “Never said I did,” the Burned Man said, “but I do belong to him and there it is. He has to give me to you, and he won’t while he’s still alive. He’s said as much. We’ll just have to wait for him to finish drinking himself to death.”

  “How long is that going to take?”

  The Burned Man shrugged. “I can’t see it being more than another year or two, the state he’s in these days,” it said.

  “Oh fuck that,” I said. “I’m not getting any younger here. I’m not waiting another year!”

  I was all of twenty-four by then, after all.

  “You’ll just have to, unless you want to do him in,” it said. “I can’t help you with that I’m afraid, not while he still owns me. And if you try to do it by yourself you’ll only fuck it up and end up dead or in prison, so that’s the end of that.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said. “Things come to those who take them.”

  “I’ve told you before, I can’t be stolen,” it said.

  “And I’m telling you, bullshit.”

  I threw the last of the whisky down my throat and stormed out.

  My mate Jim had dropped out of university altogether by then and was working locally as a carpenter of all things. I shudder to think what his painfully middle class parents must have thought of that, after what his abandoned education had cost them. I dropped round to see him that afternoon, and borrowed his electric circular saw. I can’t remember what line of crap I gave him about why I wanted it, but by the time we’d killed the case of beer I’d turned up at his flat with, he was happy enough to lend it to me for the rest of the weekend. I stumbled home with it over my shoulder in a canvas rucksack.

  I let myself into Davidson’s place bright and early the next morning, and checked to make sure the old soak was still passed out from the night before. Needless to say he was. I found him curled up on his unmade bed in the foetal position, with fresh vomit staining his pillow. Delightful. I closed his bedroom door firmly behind me and went through to the study.

  “Morning,” I said, putting the rucksack down in front of the altar.

  “I hope you’ve cheered up a bit since yesterday, you miserable bugger,” the Burned Man said.

  I grinned and opened the rucksack.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I have.”

  I took the saw out and plugged it in.

  “Now hold on a minute,” the Burned Man said. “If that’s for what I think it is, you’re a fucking idiot.”

  “I’m reaching out and taking what’s rightfully mine, that’s all,” I said.

  I pulled the triggers and the saw roared into life as I bent over the altar. The shiny new blade chewed through the ancient wood with a satisfying growl, drowning out whatever the Burned Man was trying to say to me. I worked the blade across the altar on the Burned Man’s left, then again on its right, cutting out a neat slice of wood with it chained in the middle. I shut off the saw and lifted the chunk of wood free, holding it up until the Burned Man stood level with my face.

  “Oh you’ve done it now,” it said.

  “Yes I have,” I grinned at it. “Come on, you’re coming with me.”

  I put the piece of altar wood carefully in the bottom of the rucksack and closed the bag over the Burned Man’s head. I could feel it struggling as I hefted the bag onto my shoulder. It might not be a dignified way to travel, exactly, but what the hell. It would forgive me once I got it home, I was sure.

  I’d got maybe halfway down Davidson’s hall when my eyes started to itch, then sting, and then really burn. By the time I got to the front door my view of the world had turned into a blurry mist as tears streamed down my cheeks. It was like getting grit blown into your eyes on a windy day, if the grit was made of broken glass. Broken glass that was on fire, at that.

  I stumbled against the door almost clawing at my eyes, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I dumped the rucksack in the hall and dashed into the filthy bathroom, and turned the basin taps on by feel alone. Handfuls of cold water hit my face as I desperately tried to wash my eyes. The pain got steadily worse and worse until it was unbearable.

  I threw my head back and screamed in agony, and that’s when I made out my reflection in the spotted shaving mirror over the sink. The whites of my eyes were crimson with blood, and my eyelids were burning. Actually, literally on fire. I howled.

  “What the fuck have you done to me?” I screamed.

  “Told you,” came the muffled voice of the Burned Man, from my rucksack in the hall. “It can’t be done.”

  I poured more water over my face, sobbing miserably and ready to slam my head against the wall with the pain. I heard unsteady footsteps behind me.

  “Stupid boy,” Davidson mumbled. “Knew you’d try it, sooner or later. Damn impatient stupid bloody boy. Stupid…”

  I fell to my knees, sobbing, banging my head against the side of the bath, the heels of my hands pressed helplessly against my burning eyes. I heard Davidson shuffle down the hall and mutter something to the Burned Man. I think I was still screaming when I finally lost consciousness.

  The miserable old fucker must have just left me lying there on his piss-stinking bathroom carpet, because that’s where I woke up some time later. I whimpered, terrified I might have gone permanently blind, but when I finally summoned the courage to open my eyes I found I could see as well as ever. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet and risked a look in the mirror. My eyes were a bit bloodshot but no more than that, and even my eyelashes were intact. I had seen them burning, but there they were none the less.

  I washed my face with shaking hands. One look at Davidson’s slimy towel was enough to make me decide to just drip dry, sitting on the edge of the bath with my head in my hands. After a while I made myself get up and go and look in the study. The Burned Man was back where it had always been, in the middle of the altar. There were rough seams on the long piece of ancient wood, like half-healed wounds, but it was definitely all one piece again.

  “I did tell you, you twat,” it said. “That always happens.”

  * * *

  I opened my eyes with a groan and sat up on the floor of my workroom. Trixie was gone, and so was the Burned Man. I rubbed my hands over my face and got up, gingerly feeling the lump on the back of my head. There was a neat, perfectly circular hole cut out of the middle of the altar where the Burned Man should have been standing. I stared at that hole and felt… I don’t know what, exactly. Empty, I suppose. Lost. And perhaps a little bit relieved, if I’m completely honest about it. I owed everything I had to the Burned Man, but when I remembered the bright-eyed, easygoing twenty year-old I had once been I couldn’t help feeling that maybe it had taken away a good deal more than it had given me over the years.

  I just couldn’t believe she’d done it. I mean, I’d always been a bit wary of Trixie, in between intermittently feeling like I was falling in love with her, but all the same. I supposed I’d had my doubts all along though, from that first moment I saw her standing across from the café, the day after I’d lost that first game of Fates to Wormwood. I… Well fucking hell!

  Maybe the bang on the head had finally knocked some sense into me, I don’t know, but just then I could have cheerfully kicked myself all the way down the street and back again. It had suddenly dawned on me that the first time I had seen Trixie had been the day before the Vincent and Danny job. A day before the Furies even knew I was alive.

  I supposed it was beyond doubt now that she really was stuck with this impossible mission to kill the Furies, but she must have already been looking for me independently of that. No, she wasn’t looking for me at all, I thought with a sudden sick feeling. She was looking for the Burned Man. It had just been bloody lucky for her that I had fu
cked the job up the way I had and brought the Furies down on myself. That, or the Furies had been following Trixie while she was looking for me, and I was lucky for them, I really wasn’t sure any more. I kicked the wall in frustration. Whichever way it had gone down, I’d been royally had.

  “Fuck it!” I shouted at the empty flat.

  I supposed it didn’t even matter now which way around it had been. I’d been played good and proper, and that was all there was to it. All the same though… Had she really believed I would ever give her the Burned Man, whatever she did for me? Adam said… The smell of rat was back in a big way. I had a really deep, really nasty suspicion that Adam at least had never believed anything of the sort. Trixie wasn’t stupid by any means, but I did get the distinct impression that she was a little bit naive about certain things. Adam, on the other hand, definitely was not.

  Still, that wasn’t the point now. The point was that Trixie had done something terrible and, unless I was completely wide of the mark, she was in serious danger of doing something much, much worse any time now. This was all Adam’s doing, I just knew it was. I remembered all that big talk I’d overheard from him about command and power and triumph, all the words of temptation. He wanted… no, he didn’t just want, for some reason he was desperate to complete her fall.

  “You set her up didn’t you, you smarmy bastard,” I whispered aloud. “You wanted her to do this all along.”

  She had obviously got it into her head, no doubt from Adam, that she could somehow use the Burned Man to destroy the Furies once and for all. Whether that was true or not didn’t even really matter any more. The point was that if she tried it she would fall. I can command the legion and the leviathan, if I but order it, I remembered hearing him say to her. Do not ask, command. That is the true way to power.

  If she tried that on the Burned Man she would fall for real, and there would be nothing I or anyone else could do to save her then. Not only that, but I couldn’t help remembering the gleeful look on the Burned Man’s face as she was cutting it out of the altar. I could only imagine the amount of magical power that might be generated by the fall of an angel. I had a horrible suspicion that the Burned Man believed it would be able to harvest enough of that power to break free of the fetish all by itself, ritual or no ritual. And it might be right. I knew there was a reason I hadn’t wanted it to find out what she was. It could almost taste its freedom, I knew it could.