Drake (10 page)

Look at the wealth he has, that you will never have,
the talonwraith thought.
You want to be him so much that you have to kill him, is that the way of it? There's a name for that sort of illness, I think. You want to be him almost as much as you want to be me.

I ignored it. The mark was sitting in a black leather and chrome armchair, staring at his multi-million pound view. There was a low glass table beside the chair, with a tumbler of whisky on it. I took a step towards him.

Next time you want a succubus, you could summon her and me together and wear me to fuck her in, have you ever thought of that? I'm sure you must have thought of doing that, you oily little pervert. Or isn't that enough? Why not wear a vorehound, that's got a cock too. Even a succubus probably wouldn't like that much. You'd prefer it that way, wouldn't you? If she really didn't like it. Raping her, wearing a hound…

Will you shut the fuck up!
I snarled at it.

Why should I? You're raping me right now. It's no different. You're inside me, using me, and I never said you could. It's the same thing. Do you like that? I think you do.

I gritted teeth I couldn't feel anymore, back in my workroom, and ignored it. I drove the talonwraith forward while it continued to rant obscenities at me. I made it circle the chair, trusting in its invisibility, until I could see the mark's face. I had to be sure I had the right bloke.

It was him all right, the man from the photograph in Wormwood's paper, his eyes open and staring out of the window. I raised the wraith's hands and was about to drive those awful talons into the mark's chest when I noticed the blue tinge to his lips.

There wasn't a scratch on him but he was quite, quite dead.

I pushed myself free of the talonwraith and opened my eyes with a shudder of relief. I was glad to see the back of it, obviously, but more than that I was strangely relieved that I hadn't had to do the job after all. In a way I felt like maybe I hadn't betrayed Debbie quite so badly, this way. Yeah OK, I'd still lied to her and stolen from her, but at least I hadn't killed anyone else.

“Well?” the Burned Man said. “All done?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Send it home.”

“How was it?”

“About as charming as they usually are,” I said. “Horrible bloody things.”

“But what?”

I looked at it, and realized it could tell something was up.

“It's done,” I said, “but I didn't do it. Someone beat me to him.”

“You what?” it asked.

“He was dead when I got there,” I said. “Blue around the lips, not breathing. Like he'd had a heart attack or something but, I dunno, I mean this bloke was only in his thirties and he looked pretty healthy to me.”

“Apart from being dead, you mean?” The Burned Man snorted. “Waste of time and toads then, we needn't have bothered.”

“Mmmm,” I said. “It's a hell of a handy coincidence, him just deciding to die like that. I'm not a great believer in coincidence, as it goes.”

“Me neither,” it said. “Still, job done. Dead's dead, at the end of the day, and that's what his nibs wanted.”

“There is that, I suppose,” I said.

I balled my fists in the small of my back and stretched until my spine cracked satisfyingly. Fuck, that felt good. I half turned, stretching my arms out over my head to pop the stiffness out of my shoulders, and spotted something out of place.

“What's that?” I said.

“What's what?”

“That,” I said, pointing.

There was something on top of the chest of drawers. I hadn't noticed it before, busy wallowing in my own misery as I had been, but now I'd relaxed a bit it had caught my eye. I walked over and picked up the small white stone from the top of the drawers. It wasn't much bigger than a kid's marble and had been tucked away behind a corner of one of the books that littered the surface. It wasn't anything to look at, just a plain little pebble, but I knew it wasn't mine.

“Did you put that there?” I asked.

The Burned Man lifted its arms and rattled its tiny chains sarcastically. “What do you think?”

“Course you didn't, sorry,” I said. “No one else has been in here though, except…”

“Blondie,” said the Burned Man.

I nodded. “Did she maybe sneak this onto there?”

“I haven't got a clue,” it confessed. “I, you know… wasn't paying that much attention.”

You were looking at her arse not her hands,
I thought, but I could hardly blame it in all honesty. I sighed and held the stone up where the Burned Man could see it.

“Any idea what this is?”

It shrugged. “Could be anything,” it said. “Could be a lucky charm, could be a hexstone. It could just be a fucking rock.”

“Could it,” I began, with a sinking feeling of growing certainty, “perhaps be a way of spying on us?”

The Burned Man's ugly little face twisted into a grimace. “I suppose it could,” it said.

“In which case someone might have known exactly who we were going after tonight, mightn't someone, if they had been listening to us in here.”

“They might,” it admitted. “Fuck.”

I opened the window and flung the stone out of it.

“That's put a stop to it, whatever it was,” I said.

“What'd be the point, though?” the Burned Man asked. “I mean, even if it
was
her who left that there and you haven't just forgotten you had it, even if she
was
spying on us for whatever reason, why the hell would she want to do your job for you?”

“No idea,” I said, and patted the amulet through my shirt. “With a bit of luck I won't get the chance to ask her, either.”

“Shame though,” the Burned Man said. “Arse like that.”

I shook my head and left it to its sordid little fantasies.

I needed to check in with Wormwood, to let him know the job was done. I hadn't bothered last time, what with everything, and anyway I had figured he would just know. That was when he'd started in with all that crap about owing him interest. I wasn't falling for that one again.

I decided to have a good hot shower to wash the filthy taint of the talonwraith out of my system then pop down to Big Dave's for a bit of dinner. I could wander over to the club later on and give Wormwood the happy news in person.

I
never got there
.

I don't have a lot of luck in life but right then I was actually feeling pretty good about myself, all things considered. I sauntered up the road with a belly full of Big Dave's meat and bacon pie, my amulet riding comfortingly against my chest. My bruises were horrible but I hadn't had to kill that bloke after all, Wormwood was paid off for real this time, and Trixie couldn't get near me anymore. I was even starting to let myself think that I could probably talk Debbie back round in a week or two. Admittedly I was running out of money so fast I hadn't wanted to shell out for a taxi, but all the same things were, as far as they get for me, going relatively well. I was halfway to the club when it all went to shit in a sack.

I don't even really know how it happened. I was crossing a deserted backstreet when a white van pulled out from the forecourt of one of those grotty tyre-and-exhaust places you get all over the place round this part of town. The van stopped dead in front of me so hard I almost walked straight into the side of it.

“Oi, watch it mate!” I shouted, then something hit me very hard in the back of the head and that was all she wrote for a while.

It's all a bit confused after that. I sort of came to at one point, lying on the dirty metal floor in the back of the van with my hands tied behind my back. There was an angry looking black woman crouched beside me, wearing jeans and a red hooded top. Something silver glinted around her left wrist. The van was moving, bouncing over the pothole-ridden streets. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a siren.

“You don't get to touch her again,” she said. “I don't like it when you touch her.”

She drove something sharp into my shoulder, through my coat.

“Sorry,” I said. “Who…”

I passed out again.

The second time I woke up I was somewhere else, and the black woman was cutting my clothes off with a Stanley knife. I was sitting in what felt like a cheap folding garden chair, my wrists tightly tied to the plastic armrests. From what I could see, we were in an underground car park of some sort. The van was standing a dozen yards away with the back doors open.

“What…” I started.

She slapped me across the face with her free hand as the knife sliced my shirt open. I felt her hand close around my amulet.

“No,” said another female voice, from somewhere behind me. “I think we'd better let him keep that.”

“You don't
touch
her,” the black woman hissed in my face.

I heard footsteps behind me, the sound of heavy boots on concrete, then another needle went into my arm and it all went black again.

The third time I woke up I felt horrible. I was lying on my side on the ground, with cold damp concrete against my bare skin. I was stark bollock naked except for the amulet, which was still hanging round my neck on its leather cord. My wrists were tied in front of my body with a length of thick, greasy blue nylon rope. I looked down and saw that that they had used the same stuff to lash my ankles together as well. I was cold, and my head was pounding like I had that morning's five-star hangover all over again. Whatever they'd been injecting me with obviously wasn't gentle on the comedown.

I looked around as best I could. The van was still there, although the lawn chair had been taken away. There was a car parked over there now too, a big black one. For one heartstopping moment I thought it was Gold Steevie's Bentley, that he'd rumbled me and I was about to lose some fingers, but it wasn't. This was some American job that I didn't recognize. I shivered, and coughed up bile onto the concrete.

“He's awake,” said a woman's voice.

It sounded like the one I'd heard before, the one who'd told the black woman to let me keep the amulet. She walked into my field of view, the heels of her heavy motorcycle boots scuffing on the concrete. She was very tall, and looked like she might be worryingly muscular under her faded jeans and black leather bomber jacket. Her pale blonde hair was cut severely short, clippered round the sides and back like an army haircut. She looked me over like I was a side of meat, her grey eyes showing no hint of emotion.

“Well,” she said, “you're nothing special are you.”

It wasn't a question. I shivered in the cold again, feeling overly self-conscious about my current shrivelled state.

“I'm not exactly at my best at the moment,” I admitted.

“I don't think you have a best,” she said. “What do you think, Meg?”

The black woman jumped down from the back of the van and sauntered over, her white Nikes almost silent on the hard ground.

“I think,” she said, “that I want to hurt him.”

“Well…” the tall woman said again.

“
Can
I hurt him, Tess?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Now hang on a minute,” I said, only to be cut off by Meg's foot connecting with my face at high speed.

My head snapped back into the concrete and I saw stars for a moment.

“Do we have your attention now, Mr Drake?” asked Tess, looming over me with her large hands on her hips. She was wearing some sort of silver bracelet, I noticed. “Your undivided attention?”

“To be fair, you had that already,” I said. “I don't get kidnapped very often.”

“Pity,” said Meg, and kicked me again.

Her foot slammed into my stomach this time, bringing me up sharply into a sitting position with my bound hands clasped to my guts.

“For fucksake!” I gasped. “Who the fuck even are you?”

“I'm sorry, we haven't been introduced have we?” said Tess. “I'm Tess, this is Meg.”

“Yeah, I got that much,” I muttered.

“Of course, you already know our sister.”

She pointed towards the big black American car. The back door opened just then and a high-heeled shoe emerged on the end of a long, nylon-clad leg. The leg was followed by a flash of short black skirt, which was followed by Ally.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“Shut up,” Meg snapped, and kicked me once again.

Ally stalked towards me, her high heels clicking on the concrete.

“Don, sweetie,” she said. “How did you enjoy last night?”

“I didn't,” I snapped. “You know fucking well I didn't, you mad bitch. I don't know why the bloody hell I left Debbie to go off with you.”

“Ah, well to be fair you didn't have a lot of choice, sweetie,” she said. She wound a lock of her red hair around her little finger and smiled at me. “Not a lot of choice at all.”

I'd been right then – she
had
been doing something to my head. I was fucking sure she had.

“Don't look at her like that,” Meg snarled. “Don't
look
at her!”

She stamped on my left knee, and I howled.

“Oh don't be such a baby,” Ally said. “From the look of you today, I'd say you heal suspiciously quickly.”

“I can hurt him faster than
anything
can heal,” Tess assured her.

“Why do you want to hurt me at all?” I protested.

“Why darling, it's what we do,” Ally said. “My sister Meg gets very jealous when I've been with a man, I'm afraid, and Tess, well… Tess just enjoys hurting people like you.”

“People like me how?” I said.

“Oh come on sweetie, don't play innocent with me,” Ally said. “I know what you did. We
all
know what you did.”

“That little boy,” said Tess.

“That poor child,” said Meg.

“That was an accident,” I protested, wondering how in the world they could
possibly
know about that. “I'm sorry!”

“He's sorry,” Tess said in a low, flat voice.

Ally pouted. “He was so sorry he got blind drunk, took me home and fucked me,” she said. “That's how sorry he was. Going to bed with me was a bad idea, I'm afraid. Once I've had you, sweetie, I've
got
you. I'm in your head and you're mine now, whenever I want you. You didn't have any choice but to come with me last night and you know it. I
own
you now.”

“You set me up from the start, didn't you?” I said. “That night creature attacking you, everything. It was all a fit-up, wasn't it?”

“Oh yes,” said Ally. “Dear me, did you only just work that out? Are you so used to total strangers leaping into your bed that you didn't stop to think that perhaps it was a
teensy
little bit unlikely?”

I had to admit she had a point there. I mean I had wondered, but whatever spell she had put me under had left me too foggy to really join the dots until now.

“Well…” I started.

Tess grabbed my hair with one hand and yanked my head up, and slammed the inside of her other forearm into my throat. I choked and gagged, and Meg landed a solid kick to my guts.

“You're no fun tonight, sweetie,” Ally said. “I liked you better when you put up a bit of a fight.”

“I tied your hands in front of you for a reason,” Tess said. “You're supposed to at least
try
to defend yourself.”

“It's more fun that way,” Meg said. “You try, and we show you that you can't.”

“Like this,” said Tess, and booted me in the face.

Pain and brilliant white light exploded in front of my eyes. I rolled helplessly across the concrete, skinning my elbows and knees in a largely pathetic attempt to get away from them. Tess had a point of course, but with my ankles tied how they were I was stuck on my knees at best. I struggled up into a kneeling position and raised my bound hands in front of me, and just about managed to fend off the next kick Meg sent towards my face.

“That's the idea,” Tess said encouragingly. “That's much better.”

“Yes, much better,” said Meg, and deftly hooked a roundhouse kick around my guard and into the side of my head.

I crashed sideways into the concrete, seeing stars all over again. This was bad, I knew it was. The two of them were knocking lumps out of me and showing no sign of stopping, but I'd been beaten up enough times before for that not to be the end of the world. I hate to admit it but it was Ally I was really scared of. She was somewhere behind me where I couldn't see her, and I was getting increasingly worried about what she might be doing back there. Those fears were all too soon justified when her bullwhip cracked violently over my head.

“Oh, fuck me,” I whimpered.

“Oh no, sweetie, I don't think so,” she said. “Not again. You're really not that good.”

The whip lashed down my back in a searing flash of pain. I shrieked. I know, I'm not proud of it, but for fuck's sake have
you
ever been bullwhipped? No, I didn't think so. The force of the blow threw me to my face on the concrete, and it was all I could do to roll desperately sideways before she struck again. The whip cracked against the concrete where I had been sprawled, and I heard Tess laugh.

“There,” she said, “he's starting to get the hang of it now.”

I whimpered and spat, feeling hot blood trickling down my back. I struggled onto my knees, my bound hands held defensively in front of me as they started to circle. I was trying to keep all three of them in sight at once but it was hopeless. Ally with her whip was the most terrifying, but every time I swivelled on my torn and bleeding knees to keep my eyes on her, one of the others would blindside me with a kick or a punch. Meg's feet were quicker, I soon decided, but Tess punched like a professional boxer.

Bruised and bleeding, I sobbed as Meg knocked me off my knees yet again with a kick I never even saw. I fell heavily onto my side and Ally's whip flicked over my head, then lashed down to open a long red gash across my left shoulder.

“Please!” I screamed.

“Please, he says,” Tess said. “Please don't hurt me. Please don't kill any more children. Please, Don, please.”

“Please
us
,” Meg snarled.

“Please
me,
” Ally chuckled.

The whip hit me again, and I screamed until my throat was raw.

“I'm bored. I'm going to get my knives out of the van,” Tess said. “Back in a tick.”

“No!” I sobbed. “No knives!”

“She's good with those knives,” Meg assured me. “Really good. Have you ever seen one of your own bones?”

She yanked me up by the hair and kicked me in the kidneys so hard I actually pissed myself a bit.

“You dirty boy,” Ally laughed, and cracked her whip so close to my head that she sliced my right ear open.

I threw myself sideways as hard as I could, blood from my torn ear streaming in the air like a ragged red banner as the whip lashed after me again. I don't know if it was the pain or the humiliation or the sheer fucking terror that made me do it, but right then I was desperate enough to clutch at any straw I could think of, however unlikely it might seem. I reached up to my throat with my bound hands and yanked the amulet off over my head. I grunted as I hurled it as far away from myself as I could. I heard it bounce off the concrete and skitter away into the distance. It was no wonder Tess hadn't wanted to take it off me, all things considered.

“Meselandrarasatrixiel, I undo thy bindings,” I screamed. “Trixie,
help!
”

“You worthless little fucker,” Tess snarled, jumping down from the back of the van with a glittering blade in each hand. “She won't come for you.”

But she did. Mother of all that's merciful, she came. I didn't know how or why or from where, but right then I couldn't have cared less. All I knew was I could suddenly smell Russian tobacco. I dragged myself up onto my knees and gaped.

Trixie stalked out of the shadows on glossy black low-heeled boots, her long leather coat open over jeans and a tight brown jumper and the glow of her unnatural white aura. She had one of her black cigarettes in one hand, and a sword in the other.

“Now we're talking,” she said.