by Peter McLean
She feinted with her claws and drove the dagger savagely upwards with her other hand. Trixie twisted away at the last moment, but the evil-looking black blade still carved a long scratch in her side. Trixie staggered backwards as red lightning flickered along the length of the wound. She dashed the back of her sword-arm across her burning eyes.
Ally laughed again. “And all I have to do in return is kill you!”
“Adam!” Trixie wailed. “Tell me this isn’t true, Adam!”
“Three Furies trapped in one body, my dear,” Adam said. He didn’t seem to raise his voice, yet it boomed quite clearly over the howling wind all the same. “Destroy her now, and you destroy all of them at a stroke. You can end your war forever, right here and now.”
“Oh you shit!” Ally said.
“I can’t,” Trixie screamed. “They can’t die!”
Ally attacked again, her face twisted into a livid grimace of hatred. Trixie fell back before the flurry of blows, her sword moving in a blur as she parried desperately. Whether Furies could die or not seemed to be a moot point by then, from what I could see. At this rate, Trixie was going to lose.
“Use the power of Hell, and you can do anything!” Adam bellowed.
Trixie screamed in pain and rage, and caught Ally with a spinning kick so hard it made her fly backwards across the burning concrete.
“I don’t know how!” Trixie sobbed. She held the Burned Man aloft, shaking it in her hand. “Kill her, you little monster!”
“Get fucked,” the Burned Man said. “You stole me, you mad bint. You want me to help you? Fucking make me.”
To force your will straight down into Hell and take control of a demon directly without the use of the ritual summoning circle or any of the required ingredients was the very pinnacle of the diabolist’s art. This wasn’t even just raw summoning, like I had somehow managed to do with Adam. This was total mind control, utter domination. It was the highest level of attainment one could reach, or the lowest level of damnation to which one could sink, depending on your point of view. I had never even attempted it myself, but that was exactly what Adam was urging Trixie to do now – and so was the Burned Man. Oh yes, it thought it could break free if she fell all right, and by then I believed it.
Ally was getting back to her feet now, the dagger held out in front of her like a pistol. She slashed her claws against it once more, triggering it somehow, and lightning flickered and then leapt from the blade and arced through the air to strike Trixie in the chest. She screamed and fell to her knees. Her sword tumbled from her fingers and lay there burning, but she still gripped the Burned Man tightly in her other hand.
“Do what I tell you!” she shrieked at it, almost demented in her rage.
I could see she was focusing the full force of her will into the Burned Man now. The corona of white light around her flared like the sun for a moment, then the illusion collapsed as she lost concentration on it. I gaped as I saw the corrupted horror of her true aura. Her golden glow was streaked with writhing threads of black and green rot.
She’s not quite as angelic as she used to be, Ally had said.
No shit.
Trixie’s hair was on fire now, and molten flames were licking out of the corners of her eyes and running down her cheeks like tears. The Burned Man bellowed with laughter in her shaking grip.
“Do it now!” Adam urged her. “Three Furies in one body – destroy the trinity and you can be free at last. Use the power, Meselandrarasatrixiel! Reach down its throat into Hell and make it obey you!”
“That’s right Blondie, make me!”
She has her own path to follow, Adam had told me, but you know what? Fuck Adam. Trixie needed my help right then, and I owed it to her. I owed her this much for forgiving me, if nothing else, and the look of naked lust on the Burned Man’s face was enough to convince me. I couldn’t just stand by and let this happen any longer.
I jumped out of the back of the van and ran to Trixie’s side, dodging around the flames and narrowly avoiding a swipe of Ally’s claws that would probably have disembowelled me on the spot.
“Trixie, no!” I screamed at her. “Don’t! It’s not worth it, she’s not worth it! If you fall now they’ll never let you go home. Give me back the Burned Man and I’ll do it! It’s not too late for you. I’m damned anyway, but you… you’re not, Trixie. Please, I can’t watch you fall!”
I dropped to my knees beside her and reached out my hands for the Burned Man.
“Leave… me… alone!” she bellowed.
Trixie swept an arm out and hurled me bodily away from her, sending me sprawling. She turned back to Ally with a look of pure, simple hatred. Flames erupted from her right hand and streaked across the expanse of burning concrete. Ally threw herself out of their way with an expression of astonishment and sudden horror on her face.
“Come and take me, angel!” the Burned Man roared at her, its poisonous black aura billowing around it. “Shitting hellfire but I’ve been looking forward to this!”
“You…” Trixie snarled, and turned the full savagery of her insane stare on the Burned Man. “You will… do… as I… command!”
“Yes!” Adam hissed.
Trixie’s own aura was darkening by the second, the rotten-looking black streaks spreading and expanding as though they were eating what was left of the beautiful golden angel she had once been. I struggled onto my knees, beginning to despair as I watched it happen before my eyes.
“Help her!” I screamed in sheer desperation. “Excelsior Deus trismegistus in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti for fuck’s sake someone help her! Please, she’s falling!”
The very world tore open.
Golden light and thunder and searing heat and freezing, howling terror filled my head to bursting point. It felt as though every nuclear explosion in history had all happened at once, right behind me. A wave of indescribable pressure hurled me onto my face on the stained concrete and pinned me down in obeisance.
A single word shattered the air like a sonic boom.
“Stop.”
“Dominion!” Trixie wailed.
I managed to lift my head enough to see the Burned Man tumble from her hands. Its monstrous black aura shrivelled, and all the fires went out at once. Trixie collapsed to the floor in a sobbing, smouldering heap. Adam turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness. Ally gaped at me, at whatever was behind me. She shrieked. Her mouth stretched wide in an endless scream of agony, opening so far that it tore at the edges. Her long red hair crisped to ashes and blew away. Skin and flesh split open and peeled bloodlessly back from her face and from her hands and her throat and scalp until the blackened skeleton beneath was exposed. Maggots and grave worms writhed in the open cavities of her desiccated flesh as her eyes boiled and collapsed into her head.
The voice thundered and roared behind me, and still I couldn’t turn, still couldn’t see what it was that spoke. I’m not sure I’m sorry about that, all things considered.
“Thrones and Dominions I show you, furious children,” it bellowed. “Your time here is at an end.”
Ally exploded like she’d swallowed a kilo of Semtex.
So much for the Furies.
“You have saved my soldier-sister-daughter,” the voice rumbled, its volume finally dropping slightly below the pain threshold. “For the first time in your life, Donald Drake, you have put another before yourself. Today, you offered your first real sacrifice. There may yet be hope.”
I was speechless with a mixture of awe and sheer bloody terror.
“May I–” Trixie began, in a small, hoarse voice.
“This matter of the Burned Man is not ended, and this came close to catastrophe,” the voice cut over her as though she hadn’t spoken. “The thrones are watching over you, and I now task you as guardian. Guard your charge well.”
And that was all.
The atomic light and crushing pressure vanished as though they had never been. The silence was almost total. It seemed very dark
in there, now that the maelstrom of light and noise had disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The Burned Man coughed and muttered to itself, but wisely held its peace for once.
I heard the creak of the van’s suspension as Debbie finally climbed down from the back. She stood there staring at me for a moment, at Trixie and the Burned Man and the ragged tatters of what had once been Ally and her sisters. She had a look of dull, shellshocked horror on her face that reminded me of those people you see on the news sometimes, the survivors of disasters and war zones.
She shook her head slowly, and fixed me with a cold stare.
“I never want to see you again,” she said.
Chapter Twenty
It took some doing, but I eventually got Trixie and the Burned Man back to my place. The car park turned out to be underneath a condemned tower block not far from a parade of tatty shops. It was getting late by then, but eventually we managed to hail a cab on the high street. I don’t know where Debbie went. She walked quite deliberately in the opposite direction from us when we finally found our way out of the concrete labyrinth underneath the building, and I haven’t seen her since. The last I heard she’d moved to Glasgow.
If the cabbie wondered why Trixie was covered in cuts and blood and soot, or what exactly was wriggling and muttering to itself under my coat, my promise of a fifty quid tip in exchange for a silent ride home proved enough to stop him from actually asking.
I was starting to get worried about Trixie, truth be told. She hadn’t said a single word since the Dominion had left, if indeed that’s what it had been. She hadn’t even noticed when I had picked up Ally’s dagger and tucked it through my belt, before covering it and the Burned Man with my coat.
We drew up outside Mr Chowdhury’s shop after a long, tense drive. Trixie had spent the whole trip staring straight ahead, her bloodshot eyes glassy and blank looking. I paid off the driver and helped Trixie awkwardly out of the back of the cab, struggling to hold the Burned Man still under my coat with my other hand. The taxi drove off, and I unlocked my front door.
“I really have got to get around to doing something about that bloody sign,” I said, hoping to get some sort of response out of her to lighten the mood.
Trixie just looked at me, haunted eyes in an expressionless face, and said nothing. I nodded and pushed the door open with a sigh, and followed her inside. For once I didn’t even look at her arse as she climbed the stairs in front of me.
She walked into my office and sat down on the sofa, and still she hadn’t said anything. I tossed my coat over the desk and carried the Burned Man through to the workroom. It looked up at me as I set the piece of wood it was still chained to carefully back into the hole in the altar. The ancient wood would heal soon enough. I knew that all too well from my own attempt to steal it, all those years ago.
“We need to talk,” I said to it, keeping my voice as low as I could, “but not now. Do me a favour and just keep quiet for a bit, OK?”
It nodded slowly, and mercifully said nothing. It looked too crushed with disappointment to speak anyway. I was halfway out of the door when I remembered the dagger still stuck through my belt. I had seen what it could do, and I knew where it must have come from too. If Adam had given it to Ally then… well, let’s just say I wasn’t about to chuck something like that out without giving it some serious thought first. I opened one of the drawers in the big cupboard under my books and slipped the dagger inside. I stood there for a moment, looking at the chest of drawers, then nodded slowly. I closed the workroom door behind me.
Trixie was where I had left her, staring out of the office window with a vacant look on her face. I went into the kitchen and made coffee for us both. Her cigarette case and lighter were sitting on the kitchen table, I noticed. She still hadn’t moved when I came back through a few minutes later and held a cup of coffee in front of her face.
“Here,” I said.
She reached out and took it, that was something. I had been starting to get a bit scared that she might have gone catatonic on me. I held her fags out to her as well, and she took them from me without a word. She took a cigarette out of the case without even looking, lit it one-handed and blew a long stream of acrid Russian smoke into her coffee.
I put my cup on the edge of the desk and crouched down in front of her to look her in the eyes. She looked so lost it broke my heart. I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t quite dare.
“Trixie,” I said gently.
She surged to her feet and hurled her cup across the office with a primal scream of rage. The cup exploded against the far wall, sending a great gout of black coffee bursting across the dried remains of Lavender’s head that still decorated the plaster.
“Why?” she shrieked. “Why did he arm her? I’d have had the bitch if he hadn’t given her that fucking dagger!”
I took a wary step backwards. She had stopped bothering to try to mask her aura. The rotten taint had receded considerably from where it had been when she was trying to command the Burned Man, but it wasn’t gone altogether. There were still thin black tendrils running through her golden glow, surrounding a pattern of greenish blooms like mould on stale bread. One of them was moving even now, almost too slow to see, but I swear it was getting bigger.
“Trixie,” I said again, “look, um, sit down, yeah? I think I know the answer but… well, you’re scaring the shit out of me right now, to be perfectly honest with you.”
She looked at me and blinked in surprise as though noticing I was there for the first time.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She sat down and retrieved the cigarette she had dropped on the floor when she hurled her cup. She brushed ash from the end and took a slow drag, looking expectantly up at me. I had a sip of my coffee and sighed.
“Look,” I said, “I mean, I’m half guessing some of this here but… well, I think I’ve got it straight in my head now.”
“Go on then,” she said.
“So, Adam,” I said, and stopped again. “You do know who he is, yes?”
“Yes,” Trixie whispered. “I know.”
I must admit I had rather been hoping that she hadn’t, but there we were. I sighed again.
“Right,” I said. “So, well, you know he isn’t exactly the most trustworthy of people then, don’t you? By reputation at least, if nothing else.”
“I suppose,” Trixie said, almost too quietly to hear.
I nodded. “So, the way I see it, he’s been deliberately trying to make you fall all along, ever since you first, you know, slipped a bit. He’s been setting you up, and he’s been using Ally to do it. He brought the other two sisters back and put them in Ally’s body to make that fight too tempting for you to resist. He gave you the chance to end your war in a single stroke and finally go home at last, if you just killed her. You were never going to be able to turn that down, were you? But you’re good, Trixie, that was his problem. You’re hell on wheels with that sword, if you’ll pardon the expression, and he couldn’t take the risk that you might actually beat her on your own. That, and he had to make Ally think he was helping her if he wanted to get her to go along with the plan at all, so he gave her the dagger to give her an edge in your final showdown. With that in her hand and her sisters’ power added to hers as well you couldn’t beat her, could you? Not on your own, anyway, not unless you used the Burned Man.
“He might have told you I’d eventually give it to you but he never believed that and he never even wanted me to, because that would have spoiled his plan. No, he needed you to have to steal it, because so long as you didn’t legitimately own it the only way you could use it at all was to force your Will down into Hell and attempt to directly command it, which is what he wanted you to do all along because that would guarantee that you fell good and proper, wouldn’t it?”
Trixie stared at me for a long moment, then nodded miserably.
“Yes,” she admitted.
I pushed my hands back through my hair and grimaced. “The only thing I don’t
get is why. Why did he want you so badly in the first place, out of all the angels?”
“Because I’m good at what I do, like you said,” Trixie said, her voice flat and numb. “That’s why. I’m a soldier. A very good one. He needs soldiers like me, for what’s coming.”
I blinked at her. “I thought…” I started. “I’m sorry, but you’re the only angel I’ve ever met. I sort of thought you were all like that.”
“Oh no,” she said. “We are the messengers of the Word. The Word is life. The Word is light and the Word is love, and renewal and growth and healing and peace. Also the Word is law and judgment and justice, and sometimes… yes, sometimes the Word is death. There are a multitude of messengers for all these many facets of the Word, but only a very few of us are soldiers. I’m among the best of them. I’m a killer, Don. That’s what I’m for. He wanted me for what I can do, that’s all.”
I swallowed. I had a sudden sick suspicion that Trixie might just have been a little bit in love with Adam, even though she knew who he really was. I wasn’t going to ask. I didn’t want to know. She leaned forwards and covered her face with her hands, and said nothing.
I sat down behind my desk and swivelled my chair so that I was facing out of the window, staring at the gathering dusk with my back turned to her. She deserved her privacy for a moment, at least. I sipped my coffee and fought the prickly sting of tears at the back of my eyes. It was so… tragic, I suppose that’s the only word for it. Tragic in the classical sense.
After a few minutes I heard her get up, and then she put a hand lightly on my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment.
I turned to look up at her, and she smiled at me. She seemed to be coming back to life, that was something I supposed. I shrugged.
“What for?”
“For being prepared to take the fall for me,” she said. “For calling the Dominion. For saving my soul, you idiot!”
