by Peter McLean
“Yeah I know about Davey, Mr Drake,” he told me over the phone. “A lot of people know about Davey, for all they might not exactly want to say so.”
“Good,” I said. “Well done, Weasel. Good for you. I know him too. What I actually asked was how do I fucking get hold of Davey? The bloke’s bleedin’ invisible.”
“Ah,” said the Weasel. “Ah, yeah. Right, I’ve got you, Mr Drake.”
Oh well that was fucking all right then. Harry the Weasel had fucking got me. Wonderful. I felt so much better for that, knowing I was in such safe hands. For fucksake…
“How do I contact him?” I asked, slowly and clearly.
Honestly, Weasel wasn’t thick but he did a bloody good impression of it sometimes, you know what I mean?
“Well,” he said, “I might be able to get you a phone number.”
The unspoken “but it’ll cost you” hung in the air between us for a moment.
“You fucking owe me, Weasel,” I reminded him, “and not just for lunch. You sold me out to the peacock woman, remember? You nearly got me killed. If you fucking ever want to learn anything from me again you’d better start being bastard well helpful, you understand me?”
“Yes, Mr Drake,” he muttered. “Leave it with me.”
* * *
It was the middle of the next morning before Weasel finally called me back, by which time I had practically worn a groove in my office floor from pacing up and down. He gave me a mobile phone number.
I hung up on him and dialled.
“Aye?” Davey asked, after a few rings.
“It’s Don Drake,” I said.
He laughed.
“Fuck me, it’s Danny’s bane so it is,” he said, sounding Irish today. I wished the horrible old bugger would just pick an accent and stick to it, I really did. “And what can I do for you, Don Drake?”
Now this might be a bit tricky, I thought.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’re in London?” I asked him.
“Almighty God, no,” he said. “Why would any right thinking man be in London?”
I had to admit he had a point there.
“Shit,” I said. “It’s just… look, I really want to talk to you, and it’s not a conversation for over the phone, if you know what I mean.”
He laughed. “I can be in London in an hour or so,” he said. “Where?”
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I still sort of was. I mean, as far as I knew he was in Glasgow. It’s only about an hour’s actual flight from Glasgow to London, but with all the fannying about that’s involved in airports these days that still meant a good three or four hours’ travelling time at least. Still, I wasn’t going to argue about it. I gave him the address of the Rose and Crown. A lunchtime pint it was, then.
“Aye, I’ll see you there,” he said, and hung up.
I put the phone down and pushed my hands back through my hair with a sigh. Was this really what it had come to? Going to Davey for advice? Grotty old Davey of the eight brown teeth and the mysterious and inexplicably horrifying wheel? I had to admit that it really had. I knew I could have asked Papa Armand but this was well outside of his pantheon and I didn’t want to accidentally end up in the wrong fucking dimension, you know what I mean? Davey though… Oh fuck it, I don’t know. I didn’t know a lot about him but there was just something about the bloke that I was struggling to articulate, even to myself.
He was obviously very, very powerful, whoever he was. The Burned Man had called him famous, for all that I had no fucking idea who he was supposed to be, and it obviously took him seriously. I didn’t even really know what sort of magician he was but… oh I didn’t fucking know, did I?
Call it a hunch. Call it a gut feeling, whatever. If there’s one thing you have to learn as a magician, it’s to listen to your gut. To listen to your intuition. And mine was telling me to talk to Davey, however much I didn’t want to.
Trixie was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking.
“I’m going down the pub,” I said. “Want to come?”
“Not particularly,” she said, which I must admit I had been sort of banking on.
I had a feeling it might be best to keep Trixie and Davey apart, at least for now. I didn’t really know why, but… yeah. Listening to my gut, I suppose. Davey was so abrasive I just had a feeling it wouldn’t go well.
“Fair enough,” I said. “See you later, then.”
“Yes,” she said.
I shrugged and went to find my coat and wallet and keys and all the other shit you need when you’re going out. Trixie was in a funny mood in general at the moment, but after yesterday’s encounters with the Russian and Mickey Two Hats and then Heinrich I supposed it was hardly surprising. I was worried about what all this was doing to her, I have to admit. She was hard as iron of course, but she was also so brittle these days I was starting to think she could just shatter at any moment, like a pane of glass dropped from a height. I had to keep that from happening, whatever the cost. If that meant keeping certain things from her then so be it.
Of course, I really should have been worrying about what all this was doing to me, but by then I was too fixated on finding Olivia to think about that.
The ends justify the means, I could almost hear Trixie saying.
Yeah, right now they really did. At the moment the only end that mattered was getting Olivia back, and that fucking justified anything.
I put my coat on and went out.
The Rose and Crown was my local, or sort of anyway. Whatever you’ve seen on the telly there really isn’t a pub on every street corner in London, and it was a good fifteen minutes’ walk there from my flat. Even so, when I finally got to the pub I felt like I was home. I ducked under the hanging baskets and pushed the door open, and stepped into a long, dim burrow of beery warmth and comfort and people who knew how shit was supposed to work.
The Rose and Crown was one of those places where everyone knew everyone, and pretty much everyone was dodgy in some way, shape or form. It was full of what the people around these parts call “characters”, which is a sort of friendly euphemism for “hardened criminals”. All the same, these were my people. This was family.
I weaved my way through the lunchtime crowd, exchanging nods and handshakes and pats on the back as I went. Shirley was behind the bar as usual, all peroxide blonde hair and shiny satin blouse. She was sixty if she was a day and she was an absolute sweetheart, but in here her word was law. Shirley was the unquestioned monarch of the Rose and Crown, and you behaved yourself in there if you knew what was good for you. It’s funny really, but the sort of trendy bars that normal people go to usually have bouncers on the door at night and coppers outside at the weekends, waiting to mop up the trouble. In the Rose and Crown there just wasn’t any trouble, and on the rare occasions someone tried to make some it was very quickly taken care of by either the regulars or Alfie, Shirley’s son. There’s a lot to be said for a self-policing society, I tell you.
Anyway, that aside I was fucking glad to be home at last.
“Don, how are you, duck?” Shirley said, treating me to a wide smile as I made my way to the bar. “I ain’t seen you for so long I was starting to think you were dead!”
It’s a good job I love Shirley. I really was getting heartily sick of people thinking I was dead, although looking back on how I had spent the last six months I might as well have been.
“Nah, I’m all right thanks, Duchess,” I said. “I’ve been away, that’s all. Do me a pint and a chaser will you? And one for yourself, of course.”
Shirley gave me a sympathetic nod. In these circles, “away” was shorthand for “in prison”, and I was perfectly happy for everyone to think that. It was nothing remarkable and it would save any awkward explanations. Being banged up was a lot more respectable than being a junkie was, that was for damn sure.
I put a twenty quid note down on the bar. I was still spending Trixie’s money and she didn’t mind and always se
emed to have plenty of it, but now that I thought about it I couldn’t help wondering why I should have to. I mean, surely Mazin should have put me on a retainer by now if nothing else? I frowned as I watched Shirley sort herself a large vodka and tonic before she pulled my pint. I mean, seven hundred and however many million dollars and he couldn’t give me some pocket money?
Mazin was all right, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t help remembering what Wormwood had told me about the books. An awful lot of Menhit’s money had gone missing over the years. An awful lot. I knew Mazin couldn’t have had anything to do with that – he was human after all, and at his age I guessed he couldn’t have worked for the Order of the Keeper for more than twenty years tops. All the same, it made me wonder. He seemed like a clever bloke; maybe he had figured out what had been going on. Maybe that explained why he was being so bloody tight with the funds.
Oh fuck it, it was Menhit’s money not mine at the end of the day, what did I care? I only hoped Mazin had enough of a lid on it that Menhit herself wasn’t going to find out. I dread to think what she would have done to anyone she caught stealing from her. Shirley gave me my drinks and I retreated to a blissfully empty corner table by the fireplace to wait for Davey.
He didn’t keep me long, to be fair. It can’t have been much more than an hour since we spoke on the phone before he walked into the pub, so I supposed I had to give him that. He still looked like shit, like some grotty old tramp who’d spent the night passed out in a gutter somewhere, wrapped up in his rancid old tramp’s coat. Even so, people got out of Davey’s way and made room for him as he shuffled across the pub to the bar.
I watched with narrowed eyes, examining his aura as he went. It was still a normal human blue to a casual glance but yeah, there was that nagging feeling again. That sensation of running your hand over smooth wood and feeling a tiny splinter you couldn’t see. There was definitely something very wrong about Davey, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Looking at him was making me feel a bit ill. Not just that itchy, skin-crawling feeling that I had got from him before but something worse than that. He was giving me the same sort of sick knot in the guts that you get the moment you realize that you’re actually the butt of the cruel joke you’ve been laughing along with for the last however long. That feeling that told you someone had well and truly taken you for a cunt.
No one else in the pub had an ounce of magical sensibility as far as I knew, but all the same this was like the time I had brought Papa Armand here. People just got out of his way, and they looked at him with respect even though I could tell they didn’t even really know why. Oh yeah, grotty old Davey was a lot more than he seemed, all right.
But what, though?
That was the fucking question, wasn’t it? I waved at him across the bar and he came and sat down at my table with a pint and a whisky in his hands.
“Donny boy,” he said. “How’s the world treating you this fine day?”
“Like fucking shit,” I said, meeting his twinkling, fatherly eyes with a hard stare of my own. “I’m not in the mood for the jolly old Scottish-Irish-Welsh-fucking-made-up-shit Daddy routine, Davey.”
All the twinkle went out of his eyes at once, and he necked his whisky in a single swallow.
“Oh is that right?” he asked me.
“Yeah it fucking is, as it happens,” I said. “Can we just cut through all the bullshit this time and talk like grownups?”
“We can do that,” he said. “If I’m talking to you, we can. Don Drake, that’s who I came to this miserable den of sin you call London to talk to. The Burned Man, I wouldn’t give the steam off my piss.”
“You know I’m fucking here, you syphilitic old whoremonger,” the Burned Man said with my voice. “I’m sitting right here in front of you wearing this pathetic excuse for a magician but you remember me, don’t you? You remember me, right Davey?”
Davey cleared his throat and looked at me.
“Aye,” he said. “We fought once before, Burned Man. You beat me then, aye, I’ll give you that. But that was a fucking long time ago, and it wasn’t me who got himself bound in a wee fucking toy doll, now was it?”
“Oh go and stick it up your arse,” I said, before I got a hold of myself and remembered that it was actually me who had invited him here, because I needed his help. “Look, shit. Look, sorry about that. I, um, I’m not always myself these days.”
That was a fucking understatement if ever I had uttered one. I hadn’t been myself for quite some time now and I bloody well knew it.
“No you’re not, Donny boy,” he said, and grinned at me. Fuck but I wished he wouldn’t do that, it really wasn’t a pretty sight. “You’re the Burned Man half the time, aren’t you? Even when you’re not you still sort of are, these days. It’s changing you, isn’t it, having that filthy wee shite living in your head? It’s changing you, and not for the better.”
I had to admit he was all too right about that. Having your soul slowly eaten could only lead in one direction, as far as I could see. Straight down to Hell in the end, whether I liked it or not. But not now, not for Menhit and most fucking definitely not for Adam.
Diabolists go to Hell, Don.
I pinched the inside of my wrist until it hurt to shut myself up. That wasn’t a conversation I was having with fucking Davey of all people.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“Thank fuck I don’t know how it is,” he said, “but you’ve my sympathy all the same. Well, some of it anyway. What do you actually want, Donny boy? London’s no better than I remember it and I’ll not spend any longer here than I fucking have to, if you know what I mean.”
Of course I knew what he meant. That said though, he was here wasn’t he? He was here because I had asked him to be, and he had come for all that he obviously hadn’t really wanted to. That had to mean something. Him and the Burned Man obviously had history together, which must make him very old indeed. Oh yes, there really was something about grotty old Davey that I hadn’t quite got my head around yet.
“What are you?” I asked him. “Really, I mean?”
Now that was downright rude of me, I have to admit. You just didn’t ask people about who and what they were, you know what I mean? That wasn’t done, in our circles.
You’re a fucking rude prick, I remembered Davey telling me in Glasgow.
Oh screw it, yes I was. But then so was he, by his own admission. I reckoned that made us about even in the rude prick stakes, and I had far more important things to worry about at that moment than fucking etiquette.
“Now what sort of question is that to be asking?” he said.
“Oh come off it,” I said. “Your aura looks human but I fucking know there’s something wrong with it, and if you know the Burned Man from before it was bound then you sodding well can’t be human, can you? Even Methuselah didn’t live that long.”
“My mother was human, God rest her soul,” he said. “My father… aye well, I suppose I had one somewhere along the line. Do ye know what a cambion is, Donny boy?”
That felt like an exam question, all of a sudden. I racked my brains, trying to remember what I had read in the stack of dusty old books I kept in my workroom. I did a bit of mental cross-referencing and the little bit of my brain that will be forever an undergraduate kicked into action.
“An impossible half-breed demon,” I said, starting to lecture like I tend to on the rare occasions when I’m asked an interesting question that I actually know the answer to. “Well sort of, anyway. I don’t think the term itself was used until the nineteenth century, in De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, but there’s something in the Malleus Maleficarum about the idea. About how demons can’t breed with humans, but if a succubus fucks a geezer and passes his sperm on to an incubus who then has his way with a human woman using the mortal seed then she’s guaranteed to get up the stick and the offspring isn’t quite human, and… bloody hell! Is that what you are? Cambions are rare as all fuck
. Sorry, but should I have heard of you?”
“Aye, that you should, although you might know me by another name,” Davey said, grinning to make sure I could see every one of his spit-slick brown teeth. “You might know me as Merlin.”
I almost choked, and the look on my face at that moment was probably somewhere between goldfish and simpleton. This grotty, smug, foul-mouthed old git was Merlin? Seriously?
Nah, I couldn’t believe that. All the same I couldn’t help remembering that first game of Fates I had played with Davey, back in Glasgow, and how he had drawn the Hermit as his trump. The Hermit, as Wormwood had pretty much said, is the card in the major arcana representing wisdom, power and authority, a great teacher and respected elder. A father, by any other name.
Is he taking the piss? I thought at the Burned Man.
Nope, it replied, and I could feel the horrible little thing sniggering in the back of my mind. I did tell you, Drake.
Did you fuck as like, I snapped at it.
“Oh fucking come on,” Davey said. “You’ve got the Burned Man living in your head, Donny boy. You cannae tell me that my name never came up in conversation.”
You knew? I thought furiously at the Burned Man. You bloody well knew and you didn’t think to say anything? You didn’t think to tell me he was cunting Merlin, for fucksake?
Course I knew, it sniggered. And I did tell you, you just weren’t paying attention at the time.
Fucking hell, had it?
Actually now that I thought hard about it I did remember the Burned Man asking me “what do you make of old Merlin here”, the night I first met Davey. Of course I had thought that was just a turn of phrase, on account of his bushy beard and wild hair. I had never dreamed for a moment that it was being bloody serious.
I gritted my teeth in frustration. The Burned Man never said anything it didn’t mean, I knew that, but sometimes the things you think don’t really mean anything turn out to be vitally important. All the same, this was just taking the piss. It was usually so free and easy with the vernacular, after all. How the fuck was I supposed to have picked up on that? The bloody thing really wasn’t on my side half the time, I was sure it wasn’t.