Drake Read online

  It stretched forward and bit into my chest again, a little harder than it really needed to in my opinion. Horrible thing.

  “You have to,” I reminded it. “I own you, Burned Man. I command it.”

  It whipped its head back again without opening its mouth first, spitefully taking a tiny chunk of bloody meat out of my chest. I yelled in pain and half-raised my hand to swat it before I remembered that would have been ten kinds of a stupid thing to do. I had to remind myself that this was just the fetish of the demon it represented and not the real thing. The real thing didn’t even bear thinking about. I let my hand fall and glared at it instead.

  “Bugger off,” it said, around a mouthful of meat.

  “I command it,” I said again. “I need an angel’s skull. Sharpish.”

  The Burned Man sniggered. “If I could summon up things you wouldn’t be broke, would you?” it sneered. “You don’t get to command me to do things I can’t actually do, it doesn’t work like that.”

  I sighed. The hideous little thing was quite right of course; it didn’t work like that at all. I stood up and pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets with a groan. I could feel warm blood trickling down my chest from where it had bitten a chunk out of me. My head was pounding, and I was seriously starting to reconsider the whole throwing-up thing.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” I said.

  It shrugged, rattling its slender iron chains.

  “Nothing you can do,” it said. “You can’t pay him and that’s that. You’ll just have to ’fess up and see what he says.”

  “How much,” I asked slowly, dreading the answer, “is an angel’s skull worth, exactly?”

  When it told me, I puked all over my shoes.

  * * *

  By the time I’d showered and tidied myself up a bit, put some fresh clothes on and swept up the broken whisky bottle it was almost noon. My head still felt like there was a marching band inside it but at least I seemed to have finally stopped being sick. I came out of the bathroom and glared at the closed door to my workroom. I’d had to shut the Burned Man in so I couldn’t hear it sniggering any more. I picked up the phone and called Wormwood’s office.

  “Hi Selina,” I said when she answered, trying for the charm offensive. “Don Drake here, how’s it going?”

  “Mr Drake,” she said. “I trust you are recovered from last night.”

  “Ah you know, bit of a thick head but OK otherwise,” I lied, and forced a laugh. “You know how it is.”

  “I’m afraid I really don’t,” she said, and I could almost hear the sour expression on her face. “Mr Wormwood is in a meeting at present. I’ll inform him that you telephoned.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said. “I was thinking, well, it might be better if I stopped by his office and saw him in person. We’ve got a few things to discuss so, you know, maybe face to face might be better?”

  Selina sniffed disapprovingly. I had a sinking feeling that she knew exactly what I had to say to Wormwood.

  “He’s a very busy man,” she said, and I heard the sound of a keyboard clicking as she checked his diary. “I can squeeze you in for fifteen minutes this afternoon at four. At the club, not the City office.”

  “Four’s good for me,” I said.

  “I very much doubt that,” she said, and hung up.

  I blinked stupidly at the phone for a moment, and put it down. So much for my charm.

  I had the best part of three hours to kill before I had to start walking to the club. I couldn’t face the thought of eating, and although I was tempted to have a quick drink to steady my nerves, I didn’t think my stomach was up to it yet. I did fleetingly think of dropping in on Debbie, but as on-off relationships go ours had been pretty much at the “off” stage for a while now. Besides which, if she decided to surprise me and turn it back on again I didn’t think I’d really be up to that either.

  “Sod it,” I muttered, and snagged my spare coat from the back of the bedroom door. “There’s always Big Dave.”

  I headed out. There was a café down on the high street next to the Bangladeshi grocers. A proper café, not one of those American coffee chains that seem to think it’s OK to charge you four bloody quid for a bucket of froth. I stopped to lock the door behind me, and noticed that some twat had scratched “drunken” in front of the “wanker” underneath my sign. Someone must have seen me come home last night then. I really must do something about that sign, I thought. Yeah I must, but not now.

  I walked into the café to be greeted by the ever-present smell of bacon and burnt grease.

  “All right, Rosie?” said Big Dave from his seat behind the counter.

  “Just a coffee, Dave,” I said. “Nice and strong, there’s a good lad.”

  I sat down by the window and picked up the newspaper someone had left lying on the plastic tablecloth. “Rosie Lee” is cockney for “cup of tea”, in case you didn’t know, and I hate tea. I never touch the stuff. I’m strictly a coffee man, so Big Dave calls me Rosie. London humour, huh? You get used to it. In case you’re wondering, Big Dave’s real name is Dave, and he’s a big lad. That’s about the standard of the banter around here.

  Big Dave brought me over a chipped but nearly clean mug of thick black coffee, and I gave him a quid. That’s what a café should be like, none of this crapachino business, thank you very much. I sipped my coffee and flipped through the abandoned newspaper, killing time. I had the place to myself for the moment, but I knew it would be getting busy with the lunch crowd fairly soon. The lingering smell of bacon from the breakfast trade was bad enough, I didn’t think my stomach would stand to watch people actually eat the stuff for lunch as well. I knew they would be, it was just about the only thing on the menu. I busied myself with the paper and tried not to think about it.

  “’Ere Rosie,” Big Dave said after twenty minutes or so. “Have a butchers at that!”

  I looked where he was pointing, out of the window and across the road.

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  She was drop-dead gorgeous, there’s just no other way I can describe her. I mean proper, full on, words-fail-me gorgeous. She was tall and blonde, wrapped in a tight black leather coat, and her gleaming hair was tied back in a long braid that fell forward over one shoulder to rest against a truly perfect curve. She was standing outside the newsagents opposite the café and staring intently across the road at the grocers.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a piece of that,” Big Dave muttered to himself, but I wasn’t really listening to him.

  I was staring at her. Now then, it’s confession time – for all my bullshit, I’m not actually that great at magic. I mean yeah, I can do some divination and banishings and a few other bits and pieces, but all the really big stuff I do comes from the Burned Man, not from me. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. One thing I can do by myself though is see glamours and auras, and two things about that stunning blonde really hit me. The first was her aura. Now, auras are largely pointless things unless you’re a magician and you know what to do with them – everyone’s got one, but they’re usually just a dull sort of blue fuzz around people. Most of the time I don’t even bother looking for them. Hers on the other hand was a brilliant white, and so bright I could see it quite clearly from where I was sitting without even really trying. That, to put it mildly, was bloody odd. The other thing I noticed was that there was absolutely no glamour on her at all – she really was that lovely.

  “Do you know her, Rosie?” Big Dave asked.

  “What? Nah, never saw her in my life,” I said. More’s the pity. I have to admit I’m a sucker for blondes.

  “Well she’s looking at your gaff,” he said.

  He was right, I realized. It wasn’t the grocers she was staring at, it was the window above it. That was my office window. I was just working out what to make of that when a doubledecker bus drove past outside, and when it was gone, so was she.

  “You snooze you lose,” Big Dave said, helpfully. “You should
have got out there and given her the chat while you had the chance, shouldn’t you?”

  “Mmmmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure about that, to be honest. Lovely she might have been, but something about that white aura was bothering the hell out of me.

  I realized my coffee was nearly cold, and anyway time was ticking now. On the plus side though, my hangover seemed to have cleared up while I had been sitting there.

  “Do us a bacon roll to go, mate,” I said.

  Big Dave busied himself for a couple of minutes and I left munching out of a paper bag full of bread and hot grease, feeling better than I had in days. Proper coffee can work miracles sometimes.

  * * *

  It was ten to four when I turned into the alley that led to Wormwood’s club. I had been there often enough that I knew the right place to stop without having to bother looking for the glamour. I moved my hand over the exact piece of graffiti-covered brickwork and muttered the words of entry under my breath before I walked into the wall. It felt cold and sticky like a huge spider’s web as I walked through it, but that was all. There was a plush little bar on the other side where the hoi polloi not actually invited up to the club itself tended to hang out at night. Right now though the main lights were on, making it look grubby and squalid. Nightspots always look crap in the daytime for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. Someone should do a study on that, get themselves a nice fat research grant.

  The bar was deserted except for Wormwood’s minder. He’d swapped his dinner suit for a pair of faded jeans that strained over his enormous thighs, and the largest knitted black sweater that I’d ever seen. If anything, he looked even bigger than I remembered. He was bald as a coot, and his two huge horns bulged out of his forehead. The sleeves of his sweater were pushed up over forearms that looked as thick as my legs. I nodded at him.

  “Afternoon,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment with your boss.”

  “You’re Drake,” he said. “Yeah, I had a text off Selina to say you’d be coming by.” He took his mobile phone out of the pocket of his jeans and held it up to show it to me, in case I wasn’t sure what he meant. He looked proud of it. “Come on up.”

  He led me up the staircase with its thick red carpet, and into the upstairs club. The bright lights were on up here as well, completely ruining the usual atmosphere. I took a look around, wondering how on Earth this place managed to look so classy at night. I tell you, there’s a social studies PhD thesis waiting to happen on the shitness of nightclubs in the daytime. I wish I’d thought of that while I was still a student.

  Something too tall and far too thin was standing behind the bar polishing glasses. Wormwood himself was sitting in an armchair near the windows, smoking and reading the Financial Times. He had cigarette ash on the lapel of his expensive looking black suit, and he still hadn’t shaved or washed his hair. Come to that I don’t think he ever did. He looked up and saw me.

  “Drake,” Wormwood said with a nod. “Don’t mean to be rude but I ain’t got long. What have you brought me?”

  I cleared my throat. I could feel Big Dave’s bacon roll turning over in my stomach as though it was suddenly crawling with maggots. I knew this wasn’t going to go well. I’d been trying to work out what I was going to say all the way over here, but my thoughts had kept wandering back to the blonde woman. I still had absolutely no idea what to tell him. I cleared my throat again.

  “Oh dear,” said Wormwood, his eyes narrowing until he looked like some sort of large oily weasel. “You’ve brought me fuck-all, haven’t you?”

  “I, um,” I said. “Um.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Wormwood snapped. “Hurt him, Connie.”

  I don’t know how something that big could possibly move that fast, but it did. The minder’s massive fist went into my guts like a freight train, and then somehow I was on my hands and knees six feet away from where I’d been standing, choking for breath. My bacon roll made an explosive return to the world all over Wormwood’s carpet.

  “Nasty,” said the minder, whose name seemed to be Connie of all things.

  He wasn’t kidding. I wiped snot and vomit from my mouth with the back of my hand and gagged again.

  “Look, Wormwood,” I gasped. “Gimme a few days and I’ll find a way to…”

  “No,” said Wormwood, “you won’t. Will he, Connie?”

  “I doubt it, Mr Wormwood,” said Connie.

  “What you will do,” Wormwood went on, “is exactly what I tell you to do. Do you understand me, Drake?”

  I nodded, still trying to catch my breath. I didn’t, not really, but that was hardly the point. One thing I did understand very clearly indeed was that I didn’t want Connie to hit me again.

  “Good boy,” said Wormwood. “Now, we both know you ain’t got a fucking chance of paying what you owe me, so you’re going to work the debt off instead. That sound fair?”

  Kneeling in front of him in a puddle of my own puke wasn’t exactly a strong negotiating position, so I just nodded again.

  “Get him up,” Wormwood said.

  The huge minder picked me up by the scruff of the neck, one handed, and plonked me down in the armchair opposite Wormwood. I groaned.

  “Thanks, Connie,” I muttered.

  “It’s Constantinos, actually,” he said, “but don’t worry about it. Connie’s fine.”

  “Now then,” said Wormwood, “I’ve got a situation. You’re going to sort it for me.”

  “What sort of a situation?” I asked him.

  “The sort you handle best,” Wormwood said. “I need some people removing.”

  “People?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, actual human people,” he said. “I mean, if this was my own type of folk I’d sort it myself, but my boys are a bit…”

  He gestured wordlessly at Connie, who was looming beside his armchair with his horns almost brushing the ceiling of the club.

  “Conspicuous?” I suggested.

  “Yeah, conspicuous. That’s a good word for it,” he said. “They’re conspicuous, and you ain’t. So you’re gonna sort it for me. Summon and send something, or go shoot them in the fucking head for all I care. I don’t care how you do it, but you are going to do it, Drake. You owe me.”

  “Who are we talking about, exactly?” I asked him.

  Then he told me, and I started feeling ill all over again.

  Chapter Two

  “He’s had you good and proper, hasn’t he?” the Burned Man said. “I reckon he knew all along you weren’t good for that skull.”

  I sighed. It was right, of course. I’d figured that much out for myself on the long, miserable trudge home from Wormwood’s club. I’d never actually played cards with Wormwood himself before last night, but I went to his club often enough. He knew who I was, where I lived, who I usually played cards with and how much the stakes were, and far too much else for him to ever have thought I had any money. The only thing of value I had left was the Burned Man itself, and I knew damn well Wormwood didn’t know I had that. No one did, and it was staying that way.

  I mean yeah, I made money, really good money – when I had a job. Even in South London though, even these days, there are only so many people who might want a demon set on someone. Jobs didn’t come round often, and money doesn’t last forever. Let’s just say I’ve always been better at playing Fates than I have at budgeting, and I’m shit at Fates. No doubt about it, Wormwood had set me up to fail. I’d thought the little bastard was cheating last night.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s not much I can do about it though, unless I want Connie rearranging my internal organs.”

  The Burned Man snorted. “If you welch on Wormwood, Connie will be the least of your problems.”

  “Yeah,” I said again. “So we’re going to have to do it, aren’t we?”

  “Looks that way,” said the Burned Man. “Who is it, anyway?”

  “Vincent and Danny,” I said.

  “Shit,” it said. “That’s going to be tricky. Can’t he j
ust buy them off instead?”

  “Why didn’t he just hire me to do the job?” I countered. “Wormwood didn’t get that rich by spending his money.”

  “Fair point,” it said. “Bad luck, mate.”

  Bad luck was an understatement. Vincent and Danny McRoth were known to every serious magician in the country, and not in a good way. They were the only people I knew of who had enough clout to even think about trying to muscle in on one of Wormwood’s business interests, and recently they’d been doing a lot more than just think about it. They were based out of Edinburgh, where, if anything, the Veils are even thinner than they are in South London. It’s a spooky old city is Edinburgh. The two of them had a nice little interest going in imported artefacts of power – pebbles from the shore of the Astral Sea, jewellery made of hellfire obsidian, holy relics, warpstones, various demonic body parts and fluids, all that good stuff. All the things magicians like me could use in our work. Wormwood had been cornering that market for years, and he wasn’t at all pleased to suddenly find he had new business rivals on the scene.

  “Their place will have wards on it a mile wide,” I said. “I don’t think tricky really covers it.”

  “Have faith, you miserable git,” the Burned Man said. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, and all that. You have made a will, haven’t you?”

  “Oh piss off,” I said, “this is serious.”

  “Yeah it is,” the Burned Man agreed. “That Vincent’s a nasty piece of work, we’ll have to hit him fast and hard, floor him before he can get his shit together. Screamers, I think. I don’t know his missus so well.”

  “Danny’s nastier, if anything,” I said. “From what I hear, she practises necromancy in her spare time. For fun.”

  “Oh joy,” it said.

  In a funny sort of way Wormwood was probably doing the world a favour by having those two bumped off, even if he was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I just wished he hadn’t dragged me into it.