by Peter McLean
“Oh no you don’t,” she said.
She pivoted smoothly on her bad leg and kicked Phoenix in the side of the knee with the toe of her boot. He howled and went down again.
“I’m not messing around with any more of your vile pets,” she said. “This time it’s just you and me, Wellington.”
She reached down and grabbed him by the throat with her right hand, and hauled him up onto his knees. Phoenix was a huge man, still well over twenty stone even in his old age, but Trixie lifted him with no more than a grunt. She punched him in the solar plexus with her left fist, doubling him over, then followed that up by kicking him so hard he went crashing into an antique writing desk.
It had all been going so well up until then.
Phoenix hauled himself up and wrenched open the desk drawer. His hand dipped inside and came back out holding a long, ornate dagger.
“What are you, woman?” he panted. “Something that can die, I hope.”
He had so far ignored me completely, I noticed. I have to admit that pissed me off a bit.
“Not by your hand,” Trixie said.
She grinned and twisted her empty right hand through a double figure-of-eight movement. There was a sort of blurry shimmer in the air, and when she finished there was a sword in her hand. A new one. She swung into her guard position and cut for Phoenix’s head before he could get his breath back enough to start his summoning chant again. He threw himself desperately to one side and knocked over an occasional table, sending a priceless-looking Chinese vase crashing to the carpet. She held her guard posture as he lumbered back to his feet once more.
Phoenix bellowed and charged.
It was an unorthodox move certainly, and definitely not a gentlemanly one, but it worked – after a fashion. Trixie stepped smoothly out of his way of course, pivoting like a dancer, one foot crossing behind the other as she brought her blade up and over for the killing stroke.
Her broken leg collapsed.
She went down with a shriek of pain and Phoenix fell on her with all his weight. He slammed the sword from her hand, sending it flying across the carpet. The point of his dagger slipped through one of the cracks in her armour and he drove it into her stomach to the hilt.
“Trixie!” I screamed.
My hand plunged into my coat pocket as Phoenix started to work the dagger free from the blood-slick armour. I pulled Lavender’s talisman out of my pocket and stared helplessly at it, wishing I’d had time to study it properly before we’d left my flat. There were three glyphs engraved on the disk. One was a fairly straightforward representation of a human figure with thin lines extending from its wrists and ankles which I could only assume was for the paralysis spell. It was going to take a lot more than that to stop Wellington Phoenix, I was sure. The other two meant nothing to me, but in my experience the more complicated a Goetic sigil is, the nastier the thing it represents. I mashed my thumb down onto the biggest and ugliest of the glyphs and focused my Will into it as hard as I’d ever focused on anything in my life.
“Come to me,” I whispered. “Come on, you horrible thing, come here…”
The air tore open beside me, and dripping black tentacles boiled into the room from some unseen void of darkness. I have to confess that wasn’t the best time to realize I had absolutely no idea how to control a devourer. Often though, in magic as in life, the simplest answer is the right one. I pointed at Wellington Phoenix where he crouched over Trixie’s prone body. He had the dagger free at last, and was raising it over her throat for the final blow.
“Kill,” I said.
The tentacles surged forwards, accompanied by a stomach-churning slobbering noise from the hole in the air. Phoenix spun around, his dagger raised, but the look on his face told me it was already too late.
“No!” he screamed.
The devourer’s tentacles grabbed him, three or four to each arm and leg. Muscles bunched under the slick, rubbery skin as they began to squeeze.
“Kill him!” I yelled at the monstrosity.
Phoenix wailed as the Devourer yanked him off his feet and dragged him through the air towards the shimmering black void. I had a momentary glimpse of teeth in there, thousands of hideous, glistening teeth, then he was gone. The portal closed with a thoroughly revolting noise that sounded a lot like chewing. I dropped the talisman like it was a warm turd and hurried to kneel at Trixie’s side.
“Don’t be dead,” I whispered as I cradled her head in my hands. “Oh dear God please don’t be dead.”
“She’s not,” said an aristocratic voice behind me.
I almost died of shock. I leaped to my feet and whirled around to keep myself between Trixie and whoever it was, in the throes of a brief fit of suicidal bravery. I relaxed when I saw who it was. A bit, anyway.
“You’re a bit fucking late,” I said.
Adam chuckled. “It looks to me like you did just fine without me,” he said. “You showed good control of the devourer there, and a very strong will.”
“Spare me the man love and help me with Trixie,” I said, kneeling beside her again. “I can’t lose her now.”
He scooped Trixie effortlessly up from the floor and never said a word about the blood soaking into the front of his immaculate suit. He simply nodded at one corner of the room, where it suddenly got very dark indeed until I couldn’t even see Phoenix’s opulent wallpaper any more.
“Coming?” he asked, and strode into the darkness with Trixie in his arms.
Now I admit that following a self-confessed fallen angel into unknown darkness might not sound like it was one of my better plans, but there was no way I was letting him out of my sight while he had Trixie. I grabbed up the talisman, swallowed hard and went after him.
Chapter Sixteen
I can’t tell you how relieved I was when we stepped out of the darkness into my office and not into the depths of Hell.
“Bedroom?” Adam asked.
I pointed wordlessly to the door at the end of the hall, trying not to think about how exactly the fuck I had just walked home from South Kensington in a single step. Adam nodded and carried Trixie inside. I was just starting after him when he shut the door firmly in my face. I stared helplessly at it for a moment, then went back to the office and slumped onto the sofa. It might be my flat, but I could tell there was something going on in there that I really wasn’t supposed to see. That was fine by me. It had been, to put it mildly, a fucking long day. I let my head sag back and closed my eyes.
Phoenix was dead and in Hell where he belonged, so I was at least reasonably confident I would live to see the morning. Whether Trixie would was another matter – Phoenix’s knife had gone into her to the hilt, and there had been a frightening amount of blood. I was far from thrilled at having a fallen angel under my roof but if Adam could save her, I’d be willing to forgive him almost anything.
She’ll be back on her feet slaying Furies in no time¸ I told myself.
I wanted to believe it, I really did. Poor Trixie was desperate to destroy Ally and her sisters so she could finally go home. I could understand that, but how she thought she was ever going to kill something that apparently wouldn’t stay dead I really had no idea.
I sighed. Trixie had forgiven me, and fought for me, and tonight she had almost died for me. The least I could do was help her figure out how to kill the Furies once and for all.
“Oi, numbnuts, is that you back?” the Burned Man called out from the workroom.
I groaned and got up again.
“Yeah,” I said as I pushed the door open. “Yeah, we’re back.”
“And?”
“Phoenix is gone,” I said. “Adam is back. Trixie is… I dunno. Half dead, I think.”
“Who the fuck is Adam?” it demanded.
Damn it. It really had been a long day, I was starting to slip up.
“Friend of Trixie’s,” I said. “Don’t wind him up, OK?”
“As if I would,” it said. “Are you planning on feeding me today, by the way?”
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“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I muttered, but I opened my shirt and sank wearily to my knees in front of it anyway. “Don’t blame me if you nod out, I don’t know how much smack there still is in my system.”
“Doesn’t affect me,” the Burned Man said, and sank its teeth into my chest with a wet slurp of satisfaction.
I groaned and let it feed. I was still kneeling there when the door opened and Adam walked in.
“Oh my,” he said.
Oh bollocks, I thought.
“Well now, isn’t this interesting,” Adam said.
He came into the room and shut the door behind him. The front of his shirt was sodden with blood.
“How’s Trixie?” I asked.
“She’s asleep,” he said. “Don’t worry, she’ll be right as rain in the morning. We do heal awfully fast you know, and I’ve helped her along a little.”
The Burned Man let go of my chest so fast I thought it had been stung.
“We?” it asked, its eyes glittering eagerly. “What are you then, mate? You and her?”
“They’re friends,” I said at once. “Aren’t you, Adam?”
“We have a mutual understanding I suppose you might say, Don,” he said, a wry smile playing around his lips. “I don’t suppose I could make myself a cup of coffee?”
“Help yourself,” I said. “Kitchen’s down the hall.”
He nodded and left the room again.
“Bugger it, Drake, what aren’t you telling me?” the Burned Man demanded. “You know something, don’t you?”
“You’re done feeding for the night, I know that much,” I said, and got to my feet.
“Bastard!” it shouted at my back as I closed the door on it.
I wasn’t even really sure why I didn’t want it to know what Trixie was, but something at the back of my mind kept telling me it was very important that it didn’t find out. It had been the Burned Man that had been so adamant she wasn’t an angel in the first place, after all, and something about that was starting to smell bad.
I found Adam in the kitchen stirring sugar into a cup of black coffee. “Thanks for that,” I said.
He gave me a level look.
“The Burned Man, Don. I’m impressed. It’s no wonder you handled the devourer so deftly if you’re accustomed to controlling that.”
Controlling might be putting a bit of a gloss on it, I thought, but I saw no reason to disillusion him just then.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“No, I’m not sure that I do,” Adam said. “You’ll have to tell me all about it some time.”
“Look, I don’t know about you mate but I’m bloody knackered,” I said. I thought of Trixie lying in my bed, and sighed. “I’ll take the sofa.”
Adam gave me a thin smile. “You do that,” he said.
I hate sleeping on sofas but I was so tired I went out like a light. I don’t know how long I slept for, but when I was woken up by the sound of raised voices it must have been sometime around mid morning. The shouting sounded like it was coming from my bedroom. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, trying to listen.
“...even he knows that much. Now that I’ve seen…”
That was Adam’s voice, definitely, although I could only make out snatches through the closed door. I didn’t know whether he’d gone away and come back again or not, but the thought that he might have spent the night in there with Trixie irritated me much more than it should have done.
“…be done, or I’d have…” Trixie replied, sounding waspish and irritable. “…close to him… your idea in the first place.”
“Plans change. You must…”
“…want to go home!”
She sounded upset now, there was no mistaking that, but thank God she was still alive. I got up and padded down the hall. The voices stopped abruptly, and Adam opened the door. I looked past his shoulder to see Trixie propped up on my pillows with the sheets pulled up to her chin and her blonde hair spread out in loose disarray. The sight of her in my bed made my insides do something strange.
“Morning,” I said.
“Yes it is,” said Adam, without much warmth to his tone. “Did you want something?”
Whose place is this anyway? I thought, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to say it just then.
“I just wanted to see how Trixie is,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Much better, thank you Don,” she said. “Adam has quite a healing touch.”
Adam’s touch was the last thing I wanted to hear her talk about. I cleared my throat, feeling awkward.
“Good,” I said. “Good, I’m, um, glad to hear it. Well, um, I’ll leave you to it then.”
Adam nodded and closed the door on me without another word. After that there was no more shouting, and if they were still talking at all they were doing it quietly enough that I couldn’t hear them through the door. I sighed and went to put the kettle on. My stomach felt fluttery, the way it had during my lost week, but I knew she wasn’t doing anything to me now. This was my own head playing games with me. I wanted to slap myself.
Have a word with yourself Don, for fuck’s sake. I was just missing Debbie, that was all it was. I was missing female company in general to be honest, so I was looking for it in completely the wrong place. As usual. I made a coffee and carried it back through to my office. The huge blood-and-brains stain on the wall greeted me with its presence. A spot of cleaning will take my mind off things, I thought. I sat down behind my desk, sipped my coffee, and stared at the telephone. It’s still too soon to call her. I picked up the receiver and punched Debbie’s number anyway.
“Hi, this is Debbie,” said her answering machine. “I can’t…”
Her mobile went straight to voicemail too. I hung up and sighed. Cleaning it was, then.
I rooted through the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a bucket and scrubbing brush, but I must admit the enormity of the task seemed a bit daunting. I supposed I could scrub the sticky patch off the floor and just buy a rug or something to cover the inevitable stain, but the wall was a bit beyond my meagre domestic skills. There was a crater where the bullet had ended up that would need filling, for one thing. It would probably be easier to just repaint the whole thing, but that would mean going out and buying paint, and a roller, and why the fucking hell was I even worrying about that right now anyway?
I picked up the phone and called Debbie again. The answer machine picked up, and I howled with frustration and hurled the phone onto the floor in a fit of sudden rage. I stared at it for a moment, then picked it up again and put it gently back on the desk. I sank into my chair and laid my head on the desk. Things were, I think it’s fair to say at this point, starting to get on top of me a bit.
I suppose I must have dozed off again like that, because the next thing I knew Trixie was shaking me gently by the shoulder. I looked up at her and frowned. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts and a pair of jogging bottoms I had forgotten I owned. She looked much, much better than she had any right to, all things considered. She looked bloody gorgeous, to be perfectly honest, but I was trying not to think about that.
“Sleepyhead,” she said, with a smile.
“Mmmmh,” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes vigorously. “How are you feeling?”
“Much better,” she said. “Look.”
She walked slowly across the room and back again to prove it. She was still limping a bit, but for someone who’d had a collapsed femur and a horrific stab wound less than twelve hours ago it was beyond belief.
“Wow,” was all I managed to come up with.
“I told you, Adam has a healing touch.”
“Where is he anyway?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s gone,” she said. “He had some things he had to do, but he’ll be back later.”
“Oh good,” I said, trying and completely failing to keep the vinegar out of my voice. “Look, about Adam. Honestly Trixie, I’m not sure he’s really the best company you could be keeping at the mo
ment, if you know what I mean.”
“Damn it, Don, he’s the only one of my own kind who still even speaks to me,” Trixie snapped.
Your own kind? Not any more he’s not.
“I’m just not sure Adam has your best interests at heart, that’s all,” I said.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Who knows what’s best, these days?”
I shrugged. That, as ever, was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
“What is best for you?” I asked her. “What do you really want, Trixie?”
Her eyes blazed with sudden anger. “I want to go home,” she shouted at me. “Is that so bad of me? I just want to go home, but I can’t, can I? I can’t go home until I’ve killed the Furies, and the Furies can’t be killed. I’ll be stuck here forever, trapped on Earth on an impossible mission I can never complete. It’s not fair!”
I frowned at her. It certainly didn’t sound very fair to me, but then of course life isn’t. “Who would even give you a job like that?”
“My Dominion,” she said, and sighed. “My boss, sort of, to put it in words you’d understand. No that’s not right, much more than my boss. My king, my father, my… Oh I don’t know, it doesn’t really translate into English. I’m just an angel, just… a soldier, like I told you. Do you understand how armies work?”
I nodded. “Sort of,” I said. I’d watched a lot of war movies. “Enough, probably. Go on.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m a soldier. Above me are the archangels. They’re our sergeants, sort of, then the principalities above them, they’re like the officers. They take their orders directly from the Dominions, the top brass. The only ones above them are the thrones and the seraphim, but it starts to get very weird up there by all accounts. I wouldn’t really know what they’re like I’m afraid, and I don’t even pretend to understand how the Upper Echelon actually works. I’m just a soldier, Don, and like most soldiers all I want to do is stop fighting and go home.”
“Spending time with Adam probably isn’t going to help with that,” I pointed out. “If you slipped a bit then he fell right off the bloody cliff, didn’t he?”