Drake (4 page)

S
ometimes
you just can't get drunk enough. God only knew I was trying though.

There's this little trick I can do with probability. Not enough to win the lottery or beat Wormwood at Fates, more's the pity, but I'm good enough to tickle the hundred quid jackpot out of the fruit machine in the Rose and Crown when I need to. As long as I don't do it often enough to get Shirley suspicious, it's all good. It keeps me in beer money if nothing else. I'd drunk about half of it so far and I was still awake, which was a lot less good. I don't know if I even
could
have got drunk enough to forget the last few hours but I was determined to give it my best shot.

“Gis another round Shirl,” I said.

“Really, Don?” she asked me. “You ought to be getting off home, duck.”

I looked up at her from my position half slumped over the bar. Shirley was an absolute sweetheart, a proper old-fashioned East End matriarch. What she was doing in the haunted wilds of South London I never had found out, but she kept a nice pub.

“Come on Duchess, it's cold out there,” I said, mustering what passed for a grin. It was a pretty piss-poor effort in all honesty, but considering that all I wanted to do was break down and cry it would have to do. “Gis another.”

I waved a twenty at her and she sighed and pulled me a pint. She set a whisky chaser down beside it and smiled sadly.

“Penny for 'em,” she said.

I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Trust me, treacle, you don't want to know.”

I
didn't want to know, that's why I was in there in the first place. I can't tell you how much I didn't want to know what I had done that night.
Fucking disaster
didn't even come close to it. I drank off the top of the lager and upended the whisky into my pint glass. I was on a fucking mission to oblivion and no mistake. I gave the drink a swish around and drank.

You rely on that bloody thing too much,
I told myself, thinking of the Burned Man and how it had looked at me, afterwards.

I remembered the very first time I had worked a proper job with it, and how it had laughed at me. Summoning and sending is complicated, and kind of misnamed. Summoning is just what it sounds like, making something appear before the circle so you can talk to it, ask it questions or make deals with it, whatever. Summoning and sending though, when you want to set something on someone, is a bit different. If you want your demon to savage someone in Paris, say, and you're in London, you don't actually call it to where you are and then wait around while it flies or swims or fucking hitchhikes to Paris. What you do is, you focus your Will on where your target is and you use your summoning circle to call up your demon and send it straight there, to where you want it to be. Obviously you can't
see
Paris or wherever it might be, so you use a scrying glass to see through your demon's eyes instead.

The beautiful part of that is you're in its head, and that means you can control it properly. I mean
really
control it if you want to, like you're wearing the thing. The ugly part of that is that you're in its head. Trust me, inside the head of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. Anyway, the first time we did this the Burned Man had laughed itself silly at me.

“Just let it be,” it told me, “it knows its business.”

“What if it gets loose?” I asked it.

The Burned Man had gestured at the grand summoning circle around me, at the carefully inscribed glyphs and all the expensive ingredients.

“What do you think all this shit is for?” it asked me. “It
can't
get loose, that's the whole fucking point. Just let it do its thing and it'll run off home again afterwards like a good little vorehound.”

It was right, of course, but all the same I couldn't help staying with my demon just to make sure. The moment it attacked and I felt my mouth fill with hot human blood the whole thing suddenly lost its appeal.

The next time I gave the demon its head just before it attacked. The time after, I only rode it long enough to make sure it had got to the right place. Ever since then I had settled for just watching in the scrying glass to make sure the job got done. Tonight I hadn't even really done that, and look what had fucking happened.

“It's her fault,” I said.

“Oh pet, it always is,” Shirl laughed. “Who is she this time, and what did she do to you?”

“What?” I said, before I realized I had said that last bit out loud. The sound of her laugh went through my head like broken glass. No one should be laughing tonight. “Oh, nothing. Never mind. Gis another round Shirl.”

“You really have had enough, my love,” Shirl said. “Get off home with you now.”

“Just a short, then,” I said.

Shirl pulled a face but stuck a glass under the whisky optic for me anyway.
God, what a total fucking balls up
. I knocked back the whisky in one swallow. Too much to drink, and not nearly enough.
Nowhere fucking near enough
. Oblivion was still frustratingly out of reach. I prodded my empty pint glass across the bar.

“Don't be silly love,” Shirl said.

“I want another beer,” I said, a touch belligerently.

Now Shirl is lovely, she really is, but in her pub she's the absolute monarch, make no mistake about it. She's sixty if she's a day and she's still saucy-looking in a brassy sort of way, but one thing she does not take is crap off drunks.

“Alfie, c'mere a minute,” she shouted up the stairs behind the bar. “I could do with a hand.”

Alfie is Shirl's son. If there's a human version of Connie, he's it. It was time to go.

“No bother, Duchess, no bother,” I said. “I'll be on me way then.”

Shirl gave me a sweet smile.

“Mind how you go now, love,” she said. “It's cold out there.”

It was. The pub door swung shut behind me, and I swung gracefully into the hanging baskets as the freezing air hit me in the face and my balance decided it didn't want to work anymore. Drink is a bastard sometimes. I couldn't talk properly, I couldn't see straight and I certainly couldn't walk straight, but I was still remembering perfectly well – and that was the very thing I was trying to stop doing. I didn't want to remember anything at all, but I kept seeing his face.

The wards had been easy enough to get through in the end. The Burned Man knew its business, you had to give it that. Those manticore spines had bought me three perfectly formed screamers, and they went howling across Edinburgh and tore through Vincent and Danny's wards like they weren't even there. I'd still been watching the scrying glass then, out of curiosity if nothing else. Inside, the house was much what I would have expected – a magician's version of Debbie's flat. There was stuff absolutely everywhere, books and scrolls and crystals, swords and wands and skulls, and even an honest-to-god stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling of Vincent's study. I'm sorry, but I had to laugh when I saw that. I hadn't laughed since, that was for fucking sure.

I burped and staggered into the street, blinking tears out of my eyes.
Keep your shit together till you get home, Don,
I told myself
. You can break down in private later, where no one can see you
.

The Rose and Crown was my local, but despite what you might see on the telly there
isn't
a pub on every street corner in London so it was still a good fifteen minute walk home. That's if you're walking in a straight line, and I wasn't. It was getting late now, well past eleven, and the pavements were empty. I was only a couple of streets away from my office when I heard her scream.

I almost kept walking. I know, I know, I'm a shitbag. It was late and cold and I was blind drunk and I had more than enough fucking woes of my own, and I almost kept walking. But I didn't, you have to give me that much credit. I stopped, listening, until she screamed again. It was coming from my left, from an alley that ran between two long, low-rise blocks of flats. I rubbed a hand over my wet eyes and turned into the alley, stumbled off a wall and bumped into a dustbin, and started to get angry. Angry was good. Angry would burn the hurt away.

I had a sudden moment of doubt when it belatedly crossed my mind that it might turn out to be half a dozen skinheads hassling whoever she was, but thankfully it wasn't. It was a night creature, as I had suspected, and I could cope with those. By some miracle there was a streetlight in the alley that actually worked and she had at least had the sense to get under it. The night creature was keeping outside the pool of dim yellow light, its scaly clawed hands emerging from the patch of darkness it had shrouded itself in and darting out at her in short, vicious slashes. She was pressed back against the wall under the light, her long red hair in a wild tangle around her face. There were rips in her little black dress where the night creature had been at her. Have I mentioned I'm a sucker for redheads? And blondes? And, you know, attractive women in general really.

“Oi!” I shouted. “Pack it in, you wanker!”

The night creature turned with a snarl, its long, alligator-like snout pushing out of its shroud of darkness to menace me. I glared at it.

“Do you know who I am, pissant?” I said.

It growled, and backed off a step. It knew, all right.

“We've got a deal,” I said. “You don't bother me and I don't come and bother you, remember? Well you're fucking bothering me. Now piss off, or come the morning I'll summon and send something down your holes to eat the bastard lot of you.”

What on Earth I thought I was going to do if it just went for my throat there and then I have no idea, and to be honest right then I didn't really care. Luckily, night creatures aren't very brave or very bright. I forked the sign of the evil eye at it with the outstretched fingers of my right hand and growled a few words of banishing under my breath. I gave it a hard stab of my Will to make my point. Wisps of smoke rose from inside the shadows around it and it hissed with pain. Pain was good. Pain was better than anger. I jabbed at it with my Will again, wanting to hurt it. It backed off again, whined, and turned and ran.

“Wow,” the girl said in a shaky voice. “Just… wow.”

“Are you all right love?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, and brushed her hair back with one hand. She was wearing a silver bracelet, I noticed, shaped like some sort of snake or something. “No, no not really.”

She started to cry. I took a half step towards her before it occurred to me that someone who had just been almost raped and eaten by a demon probably didn't really want a cuddle from a drunk stranger. Apparently I was wrong. She threw herself into my arms, and started sobbing on my shoulder.

“What was that thing?” she whimpered.

“A night creature,” I said. “They're nasty and they're bullies, but they're all cowards at heart really.”
Well, that one was anyway.

She pulled back a little and smiled at me, and suddenly she wasn't crying at all.

“It's like it was scared of you,” she said. “It was amazing! Who
are
you?”

“My name's Don,” I said. “I'm a magician.”

That may have been the single most stupid-sounding thing I had ever said in my life, but I was drunk and it had been a fucking horrific night, and dear God she was cute. She pushed her hair back from her face again. She had very long nails, I noticed, painted a glossy dark red. Now that she was nice and close I could see that her bracelet was in the shape of an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail that symbolizes eternity. She'd probably got it from one of those awful, naff new age shops in Covent Garden but it was pretty and I was drunk enough to think maybe it was a good omen for once. I could have really used one of those about then.

“Well Don,” she said, “I'm Ally, and I could really, really use a drink about now.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “It's a bit late for the pub but my place is just round the corner. We could pick up a bottle from the late shop and, well, I dunno…”

Fuck it. Just
fuck
it, you know what I mean? Debs had dumped me anyway, and I didn't think I
could
sink any lower than I already had that night.

Turned out I was wrong.

“I do,” she said, and winked at me. “I know exactly what we could do.”

S
he did as well
, and it was bloody great. It didn't have any right to be, trust me I know that, but it was all the same. I knew that if I closed my eyes I'd still see his ruined face but so long as I kept them open I could see Ally's eyes staring up into mine instead, willing and wanton. That and I was drunk as a lord from the pub and then the bottle of corner-shop vodka we'd killed between us before we moved from the sofa in my office to the bedroom. Her nails were as sharp as they were long and she seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of tearing into my back with them. It hurt like hell but like I said, pain was good right then. My pain, the night creature's, even hers. I had to take that night out on someone and there she was, right there under me.

We went at it like fucking animals, rough and ugly. That's not my style normally but I had to do something to keep his face away. I don't think I'd ever done it quite
that
rough before but then I was feeling weird in general, more than even the horror and the shame and the truly monumental amount of booze could account for. I'm not sure I was completely in my right mind at the time, looking back on it.

Maybe I finished a bit quickly but she didn't seem that bothered, and at least she'd had the good grace not to mention the patchwork of old, faded scars that covered my chest, or the fresh plaster that I had stuck over my latest wound. Afterwards I sagged onto the sweaty sheets beside her, out of breath and knackered, and wishing I still bothered to keep some tissues near the bed. My back was actually bleeding, so I could still hold out some hope that she had enjoyed herself too.