Drake (18 page)

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.

T
here 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, will 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.

“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.

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?”

“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 moment, 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?”

“He helped me,” Trixie said. “When I slipped, I mean. He showed me… well, he…”

She has her own path to follow
, Adam had told me. I nodded.

“I'm sure he did,” I said. I reached out and took her hand, “and I'm sure you know what you're doing.”

I was sure of no such thing, but like I'd told Adam, she was a big girl.

A
dam came back later
that afternoon, more's the pity. I was still on my knees scrubbing the floor when he appeared in my office, which I have to admit didn't do much for my standing as the alpha male in my own flat. I had taken Trixie down to Dave's for lunch earlier on, but now she was resting again at my insistence. She might say she was fine now, but I don't think either of us really believed it.

“How is she?” Adam said, by way of a greeting.

“Asleep, with a bit of luck,” I said. I got up and looked at him. “Look, Adam, I think we need to talk about Trixie.”

“Do you?” Adam asked mildly. “I really don't think we do, you know.”

He made to walk past me towards the bedroom, but I reached out and put a hand on his arm.

“Yeah,” I said, “we really do.”

Adam looked down at my hand on the arm of his horribly expensive-looking suit, and back up at me again.

“I see,” he said.

Now I'm sorry, but I really was scared of Adam. I didn't like him one little bit, however cool his teleporting trick might be, but I was scared of him all the same. Admittedly he hadn't really
done
anything except shoot a man, and I was pretty sure I could do that too given the gun. That wasn't the point though. With him, it was a simple matter of what he
was.
I dropped my hand.