She risked a glance. The beggar struggled on his back, little legs waggling in the air like an upturned cockroach. She made the traditional two-fingered English salute before resuming her flight. Rosalynne rounded a corner to find the blind beggar leaning against a wall.
“Henry?” she asked.
“You look tired, beauty,” the blind beggar replied.
It wasn’t Henry’s voice. The blind beggar had a rich baritone.
“You’re the daemon,” said Rosalynne, edging away.
“There’s no fooling you, beauty,” said the daemon, mockingly.
She automatically reached into her bag for her daemonbane amulet. The daemon smiled at her encouragingly. The amulet wasn’t in her bag. It was in the daemon’s hand.
“You were the shopkeeper, as well,” she said.
“Albert Pumplecheck at your service, madam,” it bowed, morphing into the shopkeeper. “I can’t believe you swallowed that name.”
It slapped its thigh, chortling.
“Were you looking for this?” it asked.
The daemon dangled her amulet in front of her face. She grabbed the charm but it was a trick. The amulet turned into a slimy toad in her hand.
“Yuk,” she said, dropping it.
The toad hopped off with an outraged croak. The daemon laughed like Vincent Price in a low budget movie. It changed again, this time into the form of a tall, fit man with jet black hair and a sardonically handsome face.
“I like this shape,” it said. “What do you think? Cat got your tongue, witch? Oh well, I think it suits me.”
The catchphrase from the Fast Show’s gay tailors popped into her head, “Suits you, sir,” Focus, girl, she thought. This thing’s dangerous and it’s stalking you.
“You are so delightfully naive, beauty. I like that in a woman,” it said. “It adds to your charms. We will have such fun together.”
He rubbed his hands together, enthusiastically.
Rosalynne ground her teeth together. This bloody daemon was getting on her tits. It was a supercilious, sexist pig of monumental proportions, even when judged against the low standard set by the average London male. She got a grip on her emotions. It was deliberately goading her.
“What do you want?” she asked, in an attempt to get to the point.
“You are in a bit of a bind, witch,” the daemon said. “How would you like me to take you home?”
Rosalynne dismissed the offer out of hand. Daemons didn’t do favors for free. They made bargains and humans inevitably got the worst of the deal. It didn’t seem to realize that it had already provided her with the means to escape the otherworld. Let it keep the amulet; she had the mugwort.
“No, thank you,” she replied, politely. Only a fool was rude to a daemon.
“Ah well,” it said, waving a hand languidly. “Please yourself. Just whistle if you change your mind. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”
The daemon did its Vincent Price impression again.
“I suppose you were the top-hatted letch as well, just throwing a scare into me to get me running?” she asked.
“Actually, no!” said the daemon. “I assumed you would run without needing to be prodded.”
A high-pitched giggle sounded behind her. Rosalynne did her startled rabbit impression and shot past the grinning daemon. She soon slowed down when a stitch stabbed at her stomach. She was hungry, she was thirsty and her feet ached. Why had she worn high heels? She bent over to catch her breath.
The top-hatted psycho strode out of the smog, like he was taking a constitutional in Regent’s Park. Rosalynne groaned and trotted off. Ten meters further on, the alley was blocked by a great heap of rotten waste. She tried climbing over it but fell when she clasped a branch that proved to be a leg loosely attached to a dog’s rotting corpse. Top Hat leered at her as she rolled on the ground. He opened the carpetbag and produced the shiny knife.
“Beautiful witch for the cutting,” he chanted, in a singsong voice.
A metal ring jarred her wounded shoulder when she rolled over to get up. She took a firm grip on it and pulled, lifting a wooden trapdoor that had been hidden by muck. Rosalynne threw herself through headfirst, almost breaking her neck from the long drop onto a hard earth floor. The trapdoor crashed shut behind her.
The cellar was lit by flames from a fireplace against one wall. A family with two young children and a baby warmed themselves in front of it. The woman gazed listlessly at Rosalynne. Her man lay flat on his back, a dry cough wracking his emaciated body.
Two women in rags huddled together in a corner. They looked seventy but were probably nearer seventeen. One’s face was already pox-scarred. A man lay on his side beside an empty bottle.
The cellar looked like a scene for hell in the flickering red and orange firelight. The trapdoor above Rosalynne opened. She saw a top hat silhouetted against the light. She ran for a vertical wooden ladder in a corner. As she climbed, a heavy body thumped down into the cellar. It giggled: she climbed.
There was another trapdoor at the top of the ladder. She pushed it open with her shoulder and scrambled through. At the top, she dropped the trapdoor shut, slamming it on a sword stick that thrust through the gap.
Rosalynne fled down a narrow corridor. She flung open a door at random. The room was lined with parallel ropes. A dozen or more bodies were suspended on them. The ropes ran under their armpits, holding them vertically upright with their feet dragging on the floor. To her horror, some of the bodies stirred. The nearest opened his eyes.
“Piss off, dollymop. I’m trying to sleep.”
She ran on, pounding up a staircase, round a corner, then up another flight. There was a door at the top. It opened outwards and she ran through—into empty space above a yard. Rosalynne felt like a protagonist in a Warner Brothers cartoon, except she dropped like a shot grouse. She hit a rope and bounced. She grabbed it desperately, hanging on for her life.
She was head-down over a huge copper vat. It was filled with strips of leather hanging in bubbling green liquid. The smell would have choked a ferret. Smoke and yellow-green steam billowed around her, leaving no doubt as to the purpose of the vat. Someone was tanning leather in boiling urine.
Rosalynne lay tangled in a rope bridge that spanned the gap to a house across the yard. There was a single rope to walk on and one for each hand. She hauled herself up and shuffled gingerly across. It was not easy. Her feet kept trying to rotate over her head. Rosalynne was a city girl. Rope bridges had never entered her curriculum.
Somehow she made it to the other side. The ropes were attached to hooks screwed into the wooden wall around a small wooden platform under a loading bay. The platform creaked alarmingly under her weight. Rosalynne was exhausted. Running was no longer an option. She had to finish this, one way or another.
Top Hat appeared in the far doorway. He pointed a finger at her like a gun barrel, then stepped onto the rope. He made far better time across the rope bridge than she had. The bastard had probably been a boy scout. She watched with resignation, like a trapped rabbit in front of a stoat.
Rosalynne sprang to life when he was about a third of the way across. She sawed frantically on the footrope with her athame. The small knife was hardly ideal for the purpose but the rope was old and cut easily. It parted when Top Hat was only halfway across. He hung from the remaining ropes by his hands, his stick and bag dropping into the vat with a plop. A puff of fetid, ammonia-rich steam wafted up.
Top Hat kept on coming, swinging from hand to hand like a demented gibbon. Rosalynne resumed sawing on the next rope. When it parted, he almost fell, swinging wildly by one hand until he got a two-handed grip on the last rope. If anything, he increased speed, handing himself along the single line in a smooth motion.
Rosalynne cut frantically but the last rope was in better condition and resisted the knife. Top Hat swung onto the wooden platform, reaching out for her. The rotten wood gave under their combined weight, pitching them both into space.
Top Hat
fell backwards into the boiling urine. An eruption of steam blotted out his death throes but Rosalynne heard the screams. She grabbed the remaining strand of the bridge, swinging clear of the building.
She managed to turn around and began inching her way back along the rope. To her horror, she had done her work too well, and strands unraveled where she had hacked at it. She crossed the cut and had almost reached the remains of the platform when the rope parted.
Rosalynne crashed down against the side of the building. The rope slipped through her hands, burning the skin. Somehow she braked her fall until she hung above the vat. She could not climb up. She could barely hold on. Her grip relaxed for a second and she dropped another centimeter, stripping more flesh. Blood made the rope slippery.
Rosalynne was a natural optimist but this was too much. To drown in scalding urine after all she had endured. It just wasn’t fair. She began to cry at the injustice.
The daemon sat down in the loading bay, dangling its legs over the drop. It was in its tall, dark and handsome guise.
“Look at all this broken wood,” it said to Rosalynne in a conversational voice. “This building is a disgrace. I could get splinters.”
“Haul me up, please,” Rosalynne pleaded.
“Do you want to bargain for my help?” asked the daemon, carefully.
“No!” Rosalynne replied.
Never, never deal with a daemon—that was the rule—there was always a price and the daemon always got the better of the bargain. Rosalynne looked down. The top hat surfaced on an upsurge of hot urine, rolled over, and sank down again. There was no sign of a body. She slipped another centimeter down the rope.
“Yes,” Rosalynne blubbed. “Yes, yes, yes. You win. Hurry, I can’t hold on any longer.”
“Then let’s get down to business,” it said. “The contract!”
The daemon snapped its fingers and produced a rolled-up parchment. It pulled the red ribbon and the parchment unrolled, all two meters of it.
“Shall I go through the subclauses for you, to make sure you understand the small print?” said the daemon considerately, taking a pair of reading glasses out of a breast pocket.
“No, no, I agree,” Rosalynne said. “For the Goddess’ sake, hurry up.”
She couldn’t feel her hands. Her fingers were completely numb.
“Excellent, then sign at the bottom,”
“How?” asked Rosalynne. “You may have noticed that I have a problem.”
“Just say—I sign,” the daemon replied.
“I sign,” Rosalynne said, desperately.
Her fingers finally gave way and she fell.
* * *
Rosalynne woke up screaming in her bed, in her flat, in London. She put her hands over her face—her hands, oh Goddess, her hands. She took a deep breath and looked at them. They were unmarked. Her shoulder didn’t hurt; it wasn’t even scarred. She should be filthy dirty, but she wasn’t. She lay back on crisp cotton sheets that smelled faintly of washing powder.
It couldn’t have been a dream, she thought. It was all so real. The nightmare chase through a Dickensian rookery, the psycho with the giggle, the daemon—oh, Goddess, she had made a bargain with a daemon! What had she agreed to? Her thoughts went round like clothes in a tumble drier.
Her Jimmy Choos stood beside the bed, unmarked. Why weren’t they ruined? It couldn’t have all been a nightmare, could it?
Like many crooks, Rosalynne had a high capacity for optimistic self-delusion. Deep down she knew that truth was what you believed it to be and the events of the night before were already fading. She jumped out of bed and pulled on a wrap. Light streamed in when she threw back the curtains. Her bedside clock showed that it was almost midday. She went into the bathroom and ran the hot tap. She squirted a generous portion of Foxy Lady body oil into the steaming water, savoring the rich scent of musk and jasmine.
Rosalynne flashed back, hanging over bubbling urine. She couldn’t get her breath. She gripped the bath with both hands until her knuckles whitened. Slowly, she got her breathing under control. She had not had a panic attack for months. When each breath was slow and deep she straightened up. She should take more care of herself. This wasn’t good.
Rosalynne examined herself in the mirror. Maybe she was putting on a little weight? Henry had put too much tonic water in her gin. That thought reminded her of the Blind Beggar and the daemon. She dismissed the heretical memory. Maybe it was all a nightmare, or some sort of magical attack from an enemy too gutless to take her on face to face? That made sense.
Rosalynne slipped the wrap off her shoulders to make a more intimate examination. Her reflection had a smudge on her left breast. She rubbed a hand over the blemish, but it didn’t come off. She looked down, lifting her breast. It wasn’t a smudge; it was a tattoo, a tattoo of a gargoyle with stubby wings and a single horn on its nose. She pulled the gown around her body.
“Oh, bugger!” Rosalynne said, softly. She had a daemon mark, what Aleister Crowley called the Mark of the Beast. At one time, you could get burnt just for having such a thing. The clergy believed it signified a pact with the devil or one of his minions. The clergy were not entirely deluded.
Rosalynne took a deep breath.
“Oh sodding bugger,” she said, sincerity making up for lack of imagination.
She slid her wrap open and checked the gargoyle again. It turned its head to look up at her and winked. She felt a pull as if an invisible rope was tugging at her stomach. The contractions built up in waves, like giving birth. It ended in one almighty wrench that felt like she was being pulled inside out, like a rubber glove.
Rosalynne felt the resumption of the panic attack. She bent over on the bath to catch her breath. Someone goosed her. She jumped, squeaking indignantly, panic attack forgotten. The daemon, in his mister tall, dark and handsome form, leaned against the wall. He wore the same sardonic smile. She licked her lips.
“I’m your pathway to this world. That’s what you wanted from me. You couldn’t get in without having a native familiar. How long did I sign up for?” she asked.
“Only the standard short contract for a thousand days. A witch’s life isn’t worth more,” it replied.
“Three years,” she said, doing a rough calculation.
“One thousand Black Citadel days,” said the daemon, smugly. “About fifty London years, I fancy.”
“What!” Rosalynne said. “Fifty years as a door.”
“Not just a door, beautiful witch, although that is a useful attribute,” said the daemon. “I own you body and soul for the duration of the contract, the most beautiful, valuable jewel in my collection.”
Rosalynne didn’t like the way it lingered on the word “body” and pulled her wrap tighter.
“You set it all up to ensnare me. You planned everything,” she said.
“Down to the last detail, beauty,” the daemon said. “I ran you like a rat in a maze.”
“But how could you know that I would use high-energy magic against Karla in the Beggar?” Rosalynne asked. “That opened the door for you. Without that, you couldn’t have got into the pub in the first place. You couldn’t have known that Jameson would search for me there, unless . . .”
She looked at the grinning daemon with dawning comprehension. “Unless Henry tipped them off and set the whole thing up.”
“You get there in the end, beauty,” the daemon said. “Henry owed me a favor and you had pissed him off once too often.”
“But I could have been killed,” Rosalynne said.
The daemon shrugged. “You wouldn’t have been much use to me if you couldn’t look after yourself. Henry reckoned you were a survivor, completely amoral and ruthless. I think he likes you. He wants to borrow you but I don’t share my possessions. Well, not unless I get a really good offer.”
The daemon advanced on her. Rosalynne retreated step by step until she was against the wall. It stepped in really close and kissed her on the lips. She tried to punch but it held her wrists. It was i
ncredibly strong. It pushed her arms over her head and pinned them against the wall with one hand, pushing her wrap open with the other.
She kicked between its legs but it was quick, as fast as Karla. It turned its thigh and she bruised her knee on hard-packed muscle. It stroked the underside of her breast and kissed her again.
“The most beautiful, valuable jewel in my collection,” it repeated, almost fondly.
It caressed her breast. When its thumb rubbed over the daemon mark, waves of pleasure rippled up and down her body. Her knees turned to jelly. It let go of her arms and she draped them around its neck.
“Bastard,” she said.
It was naked. How had that happened? She offered no resistance when strong hands parted her thighs. He slid into her and she surrendered to him, collapsing on his hard, masculine body.
“You bastard,” she repeated, in case he hadn’t got the message first time around. She kissed him savagely.
“What a beauty,” he said, when she came up for air.
* * *
Rosalynne lay back in her bath listening to the hiss of popping bubbles. She ached all over, a satisfied, fulfilled sort of ache, like one got at the end of a successful gym session. The bastard had enjoyed her body, thoroughly.
She had difficulty sorting her emotions out. She had never surrendered completely to a man, never given anyone that power over her. It was wonderful and terrifying, all at the same time. She had given herself to a daemon, not a man. Was that better or worse? She couldn’t decide. He owned her body and soul, for the next fifty years. Then there was the matter of Henry and what retribution she could deliver for his treachery. Bastards, all men were bastards.
The Commission wouldn’t give up until they had a body. The name on her flat’s lease was an alias but, sooner or later, they would find her. Rosalynne blinked back tears; her beautiful flat was her home, her refuge, and she didn’t want to leave. She had worked so hard for it. It just was not fair. She always had to run.
Rosalynne looked down at the gargoyle mark on her breast. It winked at her suggestively, and she felt the tug of her magical connection with her daemon, her owner. Bastard!
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