Drake

by Peter McLean

  “Desert Eagle .50 calibre,” the man said as he calmly blew smoke from the barrel of the monstrous pistol. “I do so love modern things.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I repeated Lavender’s question like an idiot, feeling more than a bit in shock. I’d never seen a man shot through the head before, after all.

  “I am a friend of the one you call Trixie,” he said, confirming my worst fears. “She said you might need an eye keeping on you tonight. You may call me Adam.”

  “You’re a fallen angel,” I said. “A proper one, I mean. Aren’t you?”

  “Oh yes,” said Adam.

  “And Trixie asked you to help me?”

  “Yes,” he said again. “For a price, of course, which you have agreed to pay.”

  That, now that I thought about it, might just be about to bite me in the arse.

  “Which is?”

  “Leave her alone,” he said. “She has her own path to follow, and it’s none of your concern where it leads her. Do you understand me, Donald Drake? Her decisions are hers and hers alone to make.”

  “She’s a big girl,” I said, “I’m sure she can think for herself.”

  “She’s little more than a child, relatively speaking,” Adam said, “but she’s our child. Nobody needs a white knight in this day and age.”

  I was fully aware I was no one’s idea of a white knight. Not by a long way I wasn’t. I nodded.

  “Deal,” I said.

  * * *

  Adam had long since taken his shadows with him and disappeared by the time Trixie eventually came back. She limped into my office with blood trickling down her cheek from a long cut under her left eye. Her jacket was gone, and her black body armour was cracked open in two places. Her combat trousers were torn and ragged and dirty. There was a long burn down her bare right arm, and she was obviously favouring her right leg. She held two feet of broken sword in her hand.

  “Now that,” she said with a grin of satisfaction, “that was a fight!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot of it about today.”

  Trixie’s eyes widened as she took in the crimson and grey splatter all over the wall of my office, and then the corpse lying in a pool of blood on the floor on the other side of the desk.

  “Ah,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, no. I’m half dead from heroin comedown, and I’ve been paralyzed with borrowed magic. There’s a dead body on my office floor, brains and bits of head all up my wall, and apparently you’re mates with a fallen angel. I am a pretty long way from fucking all right as it goes, Trixie.”

  “Yes, well,” she said. She tossed the broken sword onto the sofa and limped towards me. “I can fix one of those things, anyway.”

  She picked up Lavender’s talisman from the desk and rubbed her thumb over it, and I sagged weakly in the chair as the paralysis lifted.

  “Careful with that,” I said. “He used it to summon something fucking ghastly. It ate my screamers without breaking stride.”

  Trixie nodded. “A devourer,” she said. “Yes, I recognize the glyph for it here. They’re nasty things. I should know, I’ve killed three of them already today.”

  Three of them? Her grin of savage triumph made me shiver. I’m just a soldier, she had said. Yeah, right. I was starting to think she was more like a one-woman panzer division, personally.

  “What about your mate Adam then?” I asked her. “What the bloody hell is that all about?”

  “Well by the looks of things it was about you not getting tortured to death,” Trixie said. She surveyed the room again, her gaze lingering pointedly on Lavender’s toolbox. “Do you have a problem with that, Don?”

  “Well, not as such, but… shit Trixie, where’s the other Don? The doppelganger?”

  Trixie sighed and sank into the chair opposite mine with a wince. The corpse at her feet didn’t seem to be bothering her, but I couldn’t help noticing that her injuries definitely were.

  “I did tell you I had my limits,” she said. “With three devourers to worry about, I’m afraid… well, there it is. That was the whole point of the exercise, after all. I knew I’d never be able to keep you safe and fight at the same time.”

  I put my head in my hands and groaned. It was just a doppelganger, I told myself. That’s all it was. A very, very convincing doppelganger. Go with that, Don, and don’t look back. Don’t ever look back.

  “What did you do with Phoenix?” I asked her.

  “Ah,” she said again. “I’m afraid he decided not to join us.”

  “What?” I sat bolt upright and stared at her. “You mean he’s still out there somewhere? Where is he?”

  “I have no idea,” Trixie admitted. She looked down at the body by her feet, and smiled. “But I know someone who will.”

  I followed her gaze, my guts turning over in a sick knot. I was feeling like death warmed up from the heroin comedown, and the sight of that ruined corpse wasn’t doing anything to help settle my stomach. What was worse, I had a horrible feeling that I knew where she was going with this.

  “Trixie…” I started.

  “Yes?”

  She has her own path to follow. I sighed and shook my head.

  “Nothing.”

  She shrugged. “Now then,” she said, “we might need your nasty little friend’s help with this, I think.”

  I was pretty sure I knew with what, but I was going to make her say it anyway.

  “With what, exactly?” I asked her.

  “With talking to him,” she said, prodding the body with her boot. “He must know where Phoenix is staying, or at least how to contact him.”

  “That’s necromancy, Trixie,” I said.

  “It’s getting the job done,” she snapped. “I’m tired, Don. I’m tired and I’m hurt and I’m not finished for the day yet, and I do not need you lecturing me right now!”

  I flinched as she glared at me, her bright blue eyes glittering in the dim light. Her decisions are hers and hers alone to make. I sighed and nodded. Maybe Adam was right, at that.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “Do you want a plaster or something? For your face, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “I heal fast,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Just help me get this into the other room.”

  I took Lavender by the feet. I’d help her if I had to, but there was no way I was holding the other end. It didn’t seem to bother her from what I could tell, but then she was a soldier after all. I was sure she had made enough corpses of her own over the years. Between us we lugged the body into my workroom, Trixie almost dragging her bad leg as she went.

  “You bring me the sweetest gifts, Trixie darling,” the Burned Man sniggered as we dumped the body in the middle of the circle.

  “Don’t waste my time, I’m not in the mood,” she said. “Now, help me get it talking.”

  “Are you fucking serious?” it asked.

  “She is,” I said. “Word to the wise, Burned Man. Don’t piss her off right now, OK?”

  The Burned Man took a proper look at her then, obviously noticing her wounds and the expression on her face for the first time. It nodded. I was beginning to suspect that the Burned Man might be a bit of a coward at heart.

  “Sorry, it can’t be done,” it said. “Well I mean it can, obviously, but you’d need some serious kit to make this work. Stuff you haven’t got any more. Chatting to a bloke with half a head is a bit beyond toads and mercury, if you know what I mean. If only some pillock hadn’t gambled away his warpstone, but there we are.”

  “Just cast the circle and let me take care of the rest of it,” Trixie said. “Don, you’ll have to do the talking I’m afraid. Just get him to tell us where Phoenix is.”

  “What are you–” I started, and gaped as Trixie stepped into the circle with the body.

  She crouched down with a grimace of obvious pain and pressed the fingertips of her right hand to Lavender’s chest, over his heart. She nodded at the Burned Man. I watched i
n horrified fascination as the Burned Man cast its circle around Trixie and the corpse together. Trixie shuddered and rocked on the balls of her feet, her back arching and her mouth opening wide in a silent scream. She shot to her feet and stared at me.

  “You,” she said.

  I’d have known that soft voice anywhere, and it wasn’t hers. I swallowed. This wasn’t like what mediums do, not by a long shot. This was more like a Vodou possession. I’d seen that once, seen the cool old hoodoo man from Wormwood’s club when Baron Samedi had been riding him. That refined, debonair old man had downed a bottle of pepper-spiced rum like it was water and run amok, whooping and shouting obscenities like he’d had a devil inside him. Which I suppose he had done, in a manner of speaking. In the same way Trixie had now.

  I didn’t like this one little bit.

  “Yeah, me,” I said.

  Trixie looked at me with Lavender’s flat, dead eyes.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, in Lavender’s voice.

  “Now this,” said the Burned Man, “this is some fucked up shit.”

  I had to agree with it. I dreaded to think where Trixie had learned how to do this, but I’d have bet good money that her mate Adam might have had something to do with it.

  “Phoenix,” I said. “I want Wellington Phoenix. Where is he?”

  “Why?” Lavender said. “If you think you can cut a deal with him, you are sadly mistaken. Once he takes a contract, he is relentless. Utterly.”

  This was going to be a bit of a gamble, I knew. I looked from Trixie to the corpse on the floor and back again, and rolled the dice.

  “I don’t want to fucking deal with that prick,” I said. “I want to kill him.”

  Lavender sprayed sudden, unexpected laughter through Trixie’s lips. “You?” he snorted. “You think you can take Phoenix?”

  I shook my head. “God no, not me,” I said. “Her.”

  Lavender paused then, as though considering the host body he wore for the first time.

  “Interesting,” he said after a moment. “What is she, exactly?”

  The Burned Man pricked its ears up at that, I noticed. I still hadn’t told it about Trixie, and I must admit I hadn’t been planning to either.

  “Powerful enough to have killed three devourers before dinner is what she is,” I said. “I think she can take down Phoenix.”

  “Why should I help you?” Lavender said. “I’m dead anyway, it’s no use to me.”

  “You’re dead because Phoenix got you killed today,” I said. “Are you seriously going to tell me you don’t want to get him back for that?”

  “His death won’t give me back my life, or bring me any pleasure,” Lavender said. “I choose not to answer your question.”

  Simple revenge wasn’t going to do it then, and I knew there was no point trying to appeal to his better nature as he quite obviously didn’t have one. Think, Drake. What does he want? Bring me any pleasure, he’d said. One thing I had learned about Lavender in the short and unpleasant time we’d known each other was that he loved his work. If there was one thing this vile little man wanted it was someone to hurt.

  “Tell me where he is,” I said, “and once he’s dead I’ll bind his shade to yours and send it down to you in Hell for you to torture for all eternity.”

  Lavender licked Trixie’s lips and stared at me. “Can you do that?”

  I pointed at the altar.

  “That is the fetish of the Burned Man,” I said. “You don’t want to know what I can do, down in Hell.”

  Lavender nodded slowly. After a moment, he gave me the address of the apartment Phoenix was renting in South Kensington. Trixie got rid of him sharpish after that. When it was done, and the Burned Man had closed the circle, she just stood there with a slightly sick expression on her face. She kept rubbing her bare arms with her hands as though trying to brush off something nasty.

  “What a revolting individual,” she said. “Can you do that, by the way? Make someone suffer more, in Hell?”

  I shrugged. “Buggered if I know,” I said. “Doubt it.”

  Trixie blinked at me, as though she was struggling to grasp the concept of a bluff.

  “Pity,” she said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There had been quite a lot of debate about whether I was going to Phoenix’s apartment with Trixie or not. When I say “debate” obviously I mean a standup row, which we’d had in my workroom whilst watching a pair of hastily summoned vorehounds eating Lavender’s corpse. It wasn’t the nicest evening I’ve ever spent with an attractive woman, all in all.

  I won in the end, somehow. Now I’m no Sir Galahad, I think we’re all pretty clear about that by now, but that wasn’t the point. The cut on her face and the burn on her arm might have healed over already, but she was clearly still hurting for all that she was trying to hide it. Add to that the fact that this whole mess was of my own making, and on top of that I still didn’t even completely understand why she was helping me at all. The Furies were her main interest, not Wellington Phoenix. He was nothing to do with her at all, and everything to do with me. She was only doing this to help me out, and it had already got her hurt. I didn’t feel like I had any choice, not if I wanted to be able to face myself in the mirror the next morning.

  Something was bothering me though – I wasn’t sure I was really buying her whole line about keeping me on the straight and narrow. It had sounded a lot more plausible yesterday when I was pissed than it did now, to be perfectly honest. Fair enough, she didn’t want me going so far off the deep end that I did something really stupid like release the Burned Man, but all that business about controlling the Furies by making me behave smelled more than a bit fishy to me now that I’d had time to think about it. That damage was well and truly done, as far as I could see. Whatever her reasons were though, she had forgiven me and no way was I going to let her face Wellington Phoenix on her own.

  “I still say you shouldn’t be coming with me,” she said, as the taxi drove us over the bridge and into the foreign country that was North Of The River.

  “And I’m still coming anyway,” I said.

  Trixie pulled a face and huddled into the spare coat I had lent her. There wasn’t time to fanny about with changes of clothes now. Still, I could hardly let her walk around the moneyed avenues of South Ken in her ragged fatigues and broken body armour, not even at two in the morning. People would stare, don’t you know, and whatever would the neighbours say, darling?

  We eventually pulled up two streets away from Phoenix’s building. I had decided it would be safer to do the last little bit on foot. There was no way of knowing exactly how this was going to go down, after all, and if the Old Bill ended up shoving their noses in, then the last thing I wanted was some smartarse of a cabbie remembering dropping two people off at the front door just beforehand. I paid the driver and we stepped out into a fine South Kensington night. It’s a funny thing, but somehow even the weather always seems better in the posh parts of the city. We had walked maybe half the distance when I realized just how badly hurt Trixie still was.

  “You’re limping like a pirate with a peg leg,” I said, offering her my arm.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, but I could tell she was gritting her teeth. “The last devourer broke my femur, I think.”

  I stared at her. She’s walking into battle on a broken thigh bone, seriously? “Are you in any shape to do this? Tell me honestly now, Trixie.”

  “Honestly? No, not really,” she said, “but we haven’t got any choice.”

  “We could–” I started.

  “Do you want to go to sleep and wait for him to realize something’s gone wrong?” she interrupted. “What do you think he’s going to do, exactly, when he decides that Lavender isn’t coming back?”

  I cleared my throat. That was a very good point. I had no desire to be woken up in the middle of the night by one of Phoenix’s horrors gnawing on my balls.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Just take my arm at least, w
ill you?”

  She did, and leaned on me heavily as we made our slow way to the front of Phoenix’s apartment building. I buried my free hand in my coat pocket and gingerly fingered the thing I had brought with me from the flat. I really hoped I wouldn’t need it, but I was starting to wonder. We climbed the steps to the front door slowly and, in Trixie’s case at least, painfully. The doorbell intercom was one of those video jobs, I noticed with a sinking feeling.

  “Just stay out of sight,” she said, and pushed the button.

  The machine bleeped.

  “It’s me,” Trixie said, in Lavender’s voice.

  I looked sharply at her. She was wearing Lavender’s face, above my spare coat. I shivered. She was a girl of many talents and no mistake.

  “About time,” a deep voice rumbled from the intercom, and the door buzzed open.

  “Yuk,” Trixie said, wiping away the glamour of Lavender with a distasteful swipe of her hand. “He really was not a very nice man.”

  “No shit,” I muttered as I followed her into the tastefully decorated Georgian lobby.

  “Third floor,” Trixie said.

  Thankfully there was a lift, a baroque confection of brass rods and levers that would probably be worth a fortune at one of those poncey Notting Hill antiques places. Good job too, as I really didn’t think she would have made it up three flights of stairs. She was leaning heavily on my arm again by the time we arrived outside Phoenix’s front door. I stood aside as she put on Lavender’s face once more and rang the doorbell. Wellington Phoenix opened the door, filling the opening like an ebony colossus in a dark grey suit and open-necked pink shirt.

  “Why has it taken this long?” he said, before he realized the body below Lavender’s face most definitely did not belong to Lavender.

  “In,” Trixie said, and shoved him in the chest so hard he staggered backwards into the apartment and hit the floor with a heavy thud.

  I followed her inside and kicked the door shut behind me. Phoenix was on his feet again already, and he was chanting. I remembered the broken sword Trixie had left on my sofa, and prayed she had another weapon hidden somewhere she could get to it in a hurry. Apparently she didn’t need one.