Drake

by Peter McLean

  You might remember what a mess she’d made of my back last time. With me stark naked and tied spread-eagled to the bed and her straddling my waist, I’ll just let you imagine what she did to my chest. The worst of it was she hadn’t even taken any of her clothes off yet. This wasn’t exactly sex this time, at least not the way I know it. I was struggling to see where the fun in this was supposed to be, but then I’ve never been all that fond of the sight of my own blood. Ally certainly seemed to enjoy herself though.

  “I’ve missed you, Don,” she sighed as she ground herself back and forth on top of me, her nails gouging my chest and shoulders with each roll of her fully-dressed hips. “I’m so glad you got rid of your little friend.”

  “My what?” I mumbled.

  Thinking about it, I’d probably drunk most of the vodka myself. Ally had kept on filling my glass up but I couldn’t remember her actually drinking that much at all. I winced as she twisted my nipples between her fingers, her hips moving faster on me as I gasped in pain.

  “Your friend,” she said. “The mean one.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. “I’ve got a lot of mean friends.”

  She smiled. “I’m sure you have,” she said.

  “I’m starting to wonder if you’re one of them,” I said. I was starting to wonder if she was ever going to take her knickers off, actually, but that’s not really the kind of thing you can say out loud on a second date.

  “Now don’t be like that,” she said, and slapped my face. Hard.

  I blinked with shock, more surprised than hurt. “Debs didn’t mind me going off with you,” I said, although I knew for a fact that wasn’t true. She had minded, for all that she didn’t have any real right to. “We’re just friends, she said so herself.”

  Ally laughed and raked her nails from my shoulders to my belly button, leaving long red welts behind them and re-opening the half-healed wound the Burned Man had left me with when I last fed it.

  “That sad little thing in the restaurant?” she said. “No, not her. She could never keep me away from you, Don.”

  “Fuck me, that hurts!” I gasped.

  “It’s supposed to hurt,” she said, “and I’m not fucking you. Not again. Once was enough, sweetie. Once is all I need.”

  She gave me another slap across the face that made me gasp, then grinned and hopped off me without warning, leaving me standing to attention like the last private on parade.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded. “We’ve got unfinished business here!”

  Maybe I’m slow on the uptake but I was still assuming that at some point we were going to have some semblance of sex. You know, like normal people. How silly of me.

  “Two ticks,” she said.

  She bent over her handbag, giving me a view of her behind that ensured she held my full attention. She pulled something out of the bag, and kept on pulling. When she turned back to face me with six feet of rapidly uncoiling bullwhip in her hand I think the awful truth finally sank in. I have to confess I actually started to whimper. No doubt there are people who’d pay good money for this sort of thing but I assure you I’m not one of them. The fingernails had been more than kinky enough for me, ta very much.

  “Oi, leave it out!” I said, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice.

  I’ve never gone in for stuff like this, and now suddenly the whole being tied up business was rapidly losing whatever scant appeal it might have had in the first place. Ally cracked her whip in the air over my prone and helpless body, her eyes gleaming with obvious excitement.

  “You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you Don,” she said. “A very bad boy indeed.”

  “I fucking mean it,” I said, twisting against the knots that held me. “I don’t want to do this, Ally. Seriously, I don’t.”

  That was the end of the last private on parade, let me tell you. He was asleep on duty in double-quick time.

  “Oh you spoilsport,” Ally said. “You rotten spoilsport, I was really hoping to give that a good lick of the whip.”

  She flicked me with it anyway and I twisted away just in time. All the same, she laid a long red stripe down the outside of my right thigh. I howled.

  “Jesus!” I shouted. “Jesus fucking Christ you bitch!”

  “Potty mouth,” Ally giggled, and cracked the whip again.

  She was so fast I barely saw it coming, but just managed to jerk my head out of the way so that it only laid open the side of my cheek. If I hadn’t moved quickly enough I seriously think she might have taken an eye out.

  “I don’t want to!” I yelled at her, struggling violently against the woolly winter scarves and old belts she’d used to tie me up with.

  I worked my left hand free at last and flailed wildly in the air with it, trying to keep the whip away from me. Ally giggled and snapped the length of oiled leather back into her hand.

  “Oh you’re no fun tonight,” she giggled. “You’re regretting telling your little friend to get lost now, I bet.”

  I was regretting all sorts of things by then, to be honest. Letting Ally tie me up was pretty much top of the list, but leaving Debs in the restaurant was running a very close second. Blokes, I told you – we think with our dicks. I fumbled lefthanded at the belt wrapped around my right wrist until it came loose, all the while watching Ally standing there laughing at me.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I demanded. “Why the hell can’t we just sleep together like normal people.”

  Ally laughed. “I’m not normal people, and neither are you,” she said. “Besides, I don’t sleep much.”

  I was still untying my ankles by the time she’d finished coiling her whip back into her bag. She blew me a kiss and slipped out of the door. For some mad reason I half thought about going after her and dragging her back to bed, but I shook my head and told myself just how daft that would be. What the hell was wrong with me?

  The cuts on my leg and face were really starting to hurt now. I flopped back on the sweaty sheets and groaned. It was about then that I realized I’d been so busy looking at Ally that I hadn’t realized what I wasn’t seeing when I looked at her. She had no aura, none at all.

  Now, everything that’s alive has an aura, and by something that’s alive, I mean everything with any sort of conscious energy at all, demons, monsters and animals included. If it moves, if it thinks, it has an aura of some sort. The only way Ally could possibly appear not to have one was if she was savvy enough to know how to hide it, and therefore how to hide what she was. That meant she was either a pretty sharp witch, or something else altogether. That, now that I thought about it, might go a way towards explaining a few things. That feeling of unreality I seemed to get around her, for one.

  You’re regretting telling your little friend to get lost, she had said. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Ally since the first time Trixie had visited me, and almost as soon as I banished Trixie there was Ally again. Coincidence? Maybe, but no magician worth his salt is a great believer in coincidence. I frowned. It was a worrying thought, but I soon lost track of it as the pain started to really clamour for attention over the haze of vodka and sexual frustration. Ally had torn my chest up pretty good with her nails, but that was fast fading into insignificance as the searing whip cuts on my leg and face began to burn like a mad bastard.

  “Dear God,” I whimpered, and forced myself up into a sitting position on the bed. “Why the hell didn’t I force down a vindaloo and go home with Debs?”

  I sat there waiting for the pain to subside, but it just didn’t. Eventually I swallowed my pride and dragged myself in front of the Burned Man. It gawped at me for a minute, then began to laugh.

  “Oh cock me silly,” it snorted, “did you try to fuck a bear or something?”

  “Or something,” I said. “God knows what, though. Do me a favour, will you?”

  “I take it this wasn’t our blonde friend’s doing?” it asked me.

  I shook my head. Someho
w I couldn’t imagine Trixie really went in for sex, sexy though she might be. I just couldn’t see it.

  “Nah,” I said. “Just a girl without an aura.”

  The Burned Man frowned at me. “Never a good sign,” it said. “She’s got something to hide, that once has, and the brains to know how to hide it. Come here then, you thick twat.”

  I winced and knelt down in front of it, feeling the long cut on my thigh pulling open again as I did so. I bowed my head. The Burned Man reached forwards, its chains rattling, and put a tiny blackened hand on my forehead like some awful parody of a priest giving the benediction.

  “Bugger me, how much have you had to drink?” it complained. “Even your aura’s ninety percent proof!”

  “Just fix me,” I said. “Please mate.”

  “Mate, he says, when he’s shagging arse and I’m not,” the Burned Man muttered.

  I shuddered as it did its thing, feeling the long wet cuts on my thigh and face and chest slowly close up and heal over. The Burned Man wasn’t just a Summoning machine, after all.

  “Thanks,” I said when it was done.

  “You’ll have bruises like you did ten rounds with a pro,” it warned me, “and I’m leaving you the hangover for the morning. You earned that, you can bloody well keep it.”

  I nodded. I felt like shit already and I knew it was only going to get worse. The Burned Man can do some clever stuff, but only gods can create energy from nothing and it’s not a god. The healing energy it used had to come from somewhere, and I’m afraid its not the charitable sort. My knees sagged and I fell forwards onto my hands, feeling utterly drained. Even my heart felt like it was beating much too slowly in my chest.

  “Go to bed while you can still get there,” the Burned Man said.

  I nodded and crawled pathetically out of the room on my hands and knees, struggling to keep my eyelids open. By the time I dragged myself back into the bedroom my eyes were all the way closed and I was going by feel alone. I think hauling myself up off the floor and into my sweaty, bloody, crumpled bed was possibly one of the hardest things I had ever done. I fell backwards onto the pillows and passed out.

  Chapter Eight

  I’d rather not dwell on the next morning. I was so pitifully hungover from all that godawful cheap vodka that it was all I could do to kneel on the bathroom floor hugging the toilet and whimpering until it was over. I finally got back on my feet and had a look at myself in the mirror over the sink. I really wasn’t a pretty sight, even by my standards. The side of my face sported a yellow-edged purple bruise from temple to jaw where the Burned Man had healed Ally’s whip cut, and my chest and the side of my leg were much the same. I groaned and leaned over the sink to bathe my face in cold water, wincing as my fingers touched the puffy skin of the bruise. Explaining this to Debs was going to take a truly masterful work of bullshit, I thought.

  It didn’t though. She just shook her head disgustedly when she opened the door to me a couple of hours later, and ushered me inside.

  “I got mugged,” I muttered.

  “What a shame,” she said. “Those mandrake roots still need grinding, the ones you were going to do before you left yesterday.”

  “Right, OK,” I said.

  So, it’s like that then. I supposed that’s what I got for introducing her as my friend, although what the hell else I was supposed to have said I really didn’t know. My girlfriend? Well, not according to her she wasn’t, so I was buggered if I knew.

  “What was your curry like?” I asked as I set to with the pestle and mortar.

  “Lonely,” she said.

  Oh for fuck’s sake!

  “Look, I’m sorry OK?” I said. “I thought… well, and you did say…”

  “Yes,” Debs said. “I did.”

  I sighed and gave it up as a bad job. If she wanted to be pissed off that was fine with me. Whatever, yeah? At least she’d let me in, and conveniently it was cold enough in her flat to give me a reason to keep my coat on. I had the Burned Man’s shopping list in the back of my mind, and I just needed the chance to grab what I needed and get out of there. I looked at her, leaning over one of her enormous handwritten recipe books with her beautiful auburn hair hanging in her eyes just so, and sighed again. If she just hadn’t been so damn cute, if she hadn’t made me feel so… I don’t know. So much of a shit all the time, I supposed. The hell with it, it wasn’t me who’d called things off.

  Handily enough she already had me powdering mandrake so it was easy enough to swipe a pinch or two of that, and I spotted the graveyard dirt on a shelf nearby in a neat little row of half-ounce vials. Two of those sneaked into my coat pocket while Debbie had her back turned for a moment. That only left one more thing I needed.

  “How’re the toads?” I asked after a while, breaking the chilly silence.

  “What?” Debs said, giving me the sort of look you might give a puppy that had just crapped on the carpet. “How do you think they are? Warty, croaky, ugly and living in my bath, same as always.”

  I nodded. It was a good job the bathroom in Debbie’s flat had a separate shower cubicle, that’s all I can say. The bathtub hadn’t been usable on account of toads for as long as I’d known her.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just wondering.”

  “Don,” she said, and pushed the hair back from her eyes with an irritated sweep of her hand, “if the health of my toads is your idea of smalltalk while we work then I think I’d rather you just kept quiet, if it’s all the same to you.”

  I flushed. “Whatever,” I said.

  I had to admit, now that I’d thought it through with a clear head, that there was a tiny flaw in my plan. The grand scheme had originally been to swipe what I needed from Debbie’s place this morning while she was on the bog having a discussion with last night’s curry. Of course, I had expected to be spending the night there at that point. As things had sadly worked out I’d turned up so late this morning that ship had already sailed. The other fundamental problem with my plan, now that I thought about it, was that the toads and the toilet were in the same room.

  “Bugger,” I muttered to myself.

  “What?” Debbie snapped.

  “Um,” I said, thinking fast. “Nothing. I just, um, caught my thumb with the pestle.”

  “Well don’t,” she said. “No one wants your thumbnail in their mandrake.”

  “No, no, I suppose they wouldn’t,” I said. “I’m just going to the bathroom to give it a wash, OK?”

  Debbie shrugged in a way that said she didn’t give a rat’s arse what I did. I slipped past her and down the short corridor that led to her bedroom, one hand stuffed in my coat pocket to stop the vials of graveyard dirt clinking together. The bathroom door was on the left, and I closed and hastily bolted it behind me. I looked into the bath, and the toads looked back at me. One of them croaked reproachfully.

  “Shhhhh,” I told it.

  * * *

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I was in a bit of a rush so I let the machine pick it up.

  “You bastard!” Debbie’s voice shrieked out of the speaker. “Pick up! You must be home by now, fucking pick up the fucking phone!”

  I wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t that long a walk home from her place, but any walk is basically too long when you’ve got a pair of live toads stuffed under your coat and they really don’t want to be there. I finally dumped them in the sink and tossed my coat on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe I’d just burn it, later.

  “You went out my fucking bathroom window, didn’t you?” Debbie shouted out of my answer machine.

  I pulled my soggy shirt off as well and dropped it on top of the coat. Toads aren’t entirely pleasant, all things considered. I went back through to the office to take my bollocking like a man.

  “I had.. to kick… the fucking door in!”

  I had to smile despite myself. Debbie always started getting short of breath when she’d really got her yelling head on.

  “You stole… my fucking… toads!” />
  Damn. I’d been holding out some sort of half-hearted hope that she wouldn’t realize she was short two toads, but needless to say she had. Sooner or later she’d notice a couple of vials of graveyard dirt had walked too, not that it really mattered now. There was only one thing I could possibly want with live toads, and she knew damn well what it was.

  “If I ever see your lying, thieving, ugly fucking face again I’ll…”

  I reached across the desk and hit the mute button. I didn’t want to hear it any more. That’s that, then, I thought. I sank onto the sofa and sighed. Debbie knew I was going back into business, even after what had happened last time. After everything I’d said to her, and all the promises I had made. She was never going to speak to me again and that was that.

  “Damn you, Wormwood,” I whispered.

  “Oi,” the Burned Man shouted from the workroom. “Is that toads I can hear now the screaming has stopped?”

  “Yeah.”

  I heard it cackle. “The boy done good,” it said.

  “No,” I said. “No, he really didn’t.”

  I sighed again, and leaned forward to bury my head in my hands. The amulet I had made swung from its leather cord around my neck. It felt heavy as a millstone, weighed down with my guilt. For a moment I half considered taking it off and letting Trixie come back but I wasn’t sure that was really the answer. I still didn’t even know what she was, for one thing, and while she might have been full of advice, I hadn’t understood half of it. Not only that, but while I was prepared to admit it was technically possible that she really had been keeping Ally away from me somehow, I was still far from sure that she had my best interests at heart herself. Oh what the bloody hell am I going to do?

  “Oi,” the Burned Man called again. “Are we doing this or not?”

  We were doing it. It’s not like I had any choice, is it? I’d burnt my last bridge with Debbie for good and all now, whether I did it or not. If I didn’t I’d have Wormwood to face. And Connie, of course. Let us not forget dear, sweet Connie and his fists like cannonballs.