Damnation Read online

  I drew my cards up into a fan and looked at them. I had three sixes and two irrelevant bits of crap, but for a first draw that was a blinding hand. I looked at him and tried to keep my face still, feeling the usual tick wanting to beat under my left eye. I forced it to be still. This might be important.

  “Card,” I said.

  He dealt me another and I tossed a useless Two of Cups onto the table between us. I drew a Four of Swords, which was no better.

  “I’ll stand,” he said, for all that he hadn’t changed a single card.

  Damn it, I thought. He’s got a bloody good hand, or he’s bluffing, or he’s stupid.

  I was already damn sure Davey wasn’t stupid, so that option was out. Was he bluffing? I looked at his bearded face and met his twinkling blue eyes. Davey looked like some idealized nineteenth-century pastoral painting of a tramp, with his big shabby coat and his wiry iron-grey beard and that sparkle in his eye, but I wasn’t fooled. It wasn’t a glamour, I knew that much. I can see glamours like I can see auras, and they don’t fool me for a minute. No, it wasn’t a glamour but I fucking knew it was an act of some sort. A low-rent magician like him in a place like this, attended by a mob of half-feral thugs, and I was supposed to think he was on the level? Nah, no chance mate. There was definitely more to Davey than met the eye, and whatever it was I didn’t like it. He really did make me feel like I was covered in ants. The sort that bite.

  “Card,” I said.

  He dealt another card, face down on the table in front of me. I threw in a Knight of Pentacles and eased the new card up into my fan. Eight of Cups. That was no fucking help either, then. I had a long swallow of my pint and sighed. I looked down at the cards again, at my three sixes. They would just have to be good enough, I reckoned.

  “That’s us then,” I said. “I’ll stand.”

  He nodded. “Trumps then.”

  He picked up the slim deck of major arcana and dealt us a card each. The way Fates is played, you can’t change your trump once it’s been dealt. That’s the whole “Fate” part of the game, and it’s where the biggest part of the divination comes into it. I eased my card up off the table and looked at it.

  Oh for fuck’s sake.

  I slipped the Lovers into my fan with a weary sense of resignation. That wasn’t even funny. Here I was hiding from Trixie and trying to find Debbie who was obviously hiding from me, and I drew the sodding Lovers as my trump? Someone was taking the piss, weren’t they? The Lovers is the sixth trump so it doesn’t even score all that well.

  “Well now,” Davey said. “We’re playing for truth so there’s no point in raising and all that shite. The truth is the truth. What’ve you got?”

  I shrugged and laid my hand down on the table. Not a bad hand at all, but not a brilliant one either. Davey smiled, showed me three Kings and the Hermit, and started to laugh.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” I snapped.

  “Your trump,” he said. “Lover boy.”

  “Get fucked,” I muttered, but I could see his point.

  I helped myself to another shot of his whisky and looked glumly down at the cards. I’d lost, and as far as I could tell it had been fair and square for all that I was sure it had been nothing of the sort. There wasn’t much I could do about that really. Whatever he was going to ask me, I’d have to answer him. Whether I actually told him the truth might be another matter, of course. I didn’t really care one way or another. I just wanted to find Debbie, and it seemed Davey had been my last hope of tracking down someone who might help me.

  “So, what do you want to know?” I asked him.

  “Ah, now,” he said, pouring himself another drink. “Old Davey wants to know a lot of things, but not right now. I think I’d rather you owed me a truth for later.”

  “Later?” I repeated, frowning. That was more than a bit odd. “When later?”

  I hadn’t exactly been planning on ever seeing him again if I could help it.

  “When it suits me,” he said. “When I’ve heard some other things from other people, maybe then I’ll want to hear a truth from you, Don Drake. Until then you can owe me.”

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  That was a bloody horrible thought.

  I know it sounds weird, but the thought of owing grotty old Davey anything, even information, made me feel uneasy. Still, I could hardly force him to ask his question so there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about it, as far as I could see.

  “Do ye want another?” he asked, pushing the bottle towards me.

  Is a bear Catholic? At least I was getting a drink out of him, I supposed there was that. I poured and drank, and looked at him over the rim of my glass. He was still smiling his horrible brown gap-toothed smile at me, and there was that twinkle in his eye again. There was suddenly something fatherly about that twinkle that just pushed all my buttons. I didn’t like him and I didn’t trust him, and I wasn’t at all sure what this kindly old gentleman-of-the-road act was all about but I had to admit it was starting to work on me despite myself. That or there was something in the whisky.

  “Ta,” I said. “Look, Davey…”

  “Aye?” he said, when I tailed off.

  “Look, I mean, I wouldn’t normally go asking for a favour but… oh fuck it. Look, mate, have you any idea where my Debbie is?”

  “No,” he said. “Sorry.”

  I ground my teeth in exasperation. Everyone in this bloody freezing, miserable country seemed to be trying to take me for a mug, and it was starting to get on my tits.

  “Well what the fuck were you going to tell me if I won?” I snapped.

  “I was going to tell you I had no idea,” he said. “We were playing for truths, and that’s the truth.”

  God give me strength…

  Fatherly or not, he was winding me up now and he suddenly started to make me itch all over again. Whatever he had been doing to me, that sort of shitty reply had broken his spell.

  Fair play for hitting the target, I thought, but you haven’t figured me out that well, have you? Not as well as you reckon you have, anyway. Fatherly always gets me, you got that much right, but don’t take the piss. Don’t be like my dad or you’ll lose me right there, you arsehole.

  I put a hand over my eyes for a moment while the Burned Man sniggered in the back of my head.

  Oh I like him, it said. He’s a proper cunt.

  Takes one to know one, I thought back at it. Just shut up will you?

  “I’ll tell you something though,” Davey went on, leaning towards me over the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “Edinburgh,” he said.

  “What about Edinburgh?”

  Edinburgh was where Vincent and Danny McRoth had lived. Edinburgh was where my screamers had killed their little grandson and everything in my entire life had gone so horribly fucking wrong. I never wanted to see Edinburgh in my bloody life.

  “You should go there,” he said.

  “Why? Debbie’s in Glasgow.”

  “Is she? You’ve no done very well finding her so far, have you?”

  “I know she came here,” I said.

  “Aye, but did she stay here?”

  “I don’t fucking know, do I?” I snapped at him. “If I knew where she was I wouldn’t be in a shithole like this having to talk to people like you to try and fucking find her, would I?”

  I realized I was shouting, and I was suddenly very aware of Davey’s henchmen crowding close behind me with violence on their tiny minds. I coughed and lowered my voice. It wouldn’t do, not now. Not when any one of that lot would have knifed me in a heartbeat, and Davey was obviously far more respected in here than he looked like he had any right to be.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m a bit… stressed.”

  “Aye,” he said, and topped his whisky up. “You are. You’re a fucking rude prick as well.”

  I blinked at him. I mean yeah, that had been a bit rude of me, but all the same. He was lecturing me on manners, really?

&nb
sp; “I, um…” I said.

  “It’s all right, I’m a fucking rude prick too,” he said. He leaned closer, and suddenly the kindly, fatherly old tramp act was a distant memory.

  His eyes glittered with anger, and there it was. That was the sort of father I remembered, the one with the bloodshot eyes and the hard hand. The one who would backhand a nine year-old kid across the kitchen floor because there was no whisky in the cupboard. Oh yeah, well done Davey. If you were trying to push my “father” button you’ve fucking managed it in spades, mate, but not the way you wanted to.

  “So let me finish with this,” he went on. “Tell Margarite that if she ever sends me another worthless wee shite like you I’ll boil her in her own piss. Now get out of Glasgow and away the fuck tae Edinburgh where you belong.”

  Oh don’t you fucking worry, I was going. Anywhere to get away from you, mate.

  I got up and shouldered my way through his crowd of glowering thugs, and fled.

  * * *

  That went well, the Burned Man muttered when we were safely back in my city centre hotel room.

  I had to admit it really hadn’t. So much for the lovely Margarite and her “I know a man who knows everything”. No love, no you don’t. You know a grotty, lying old tramp with a filthy temper who probably cheats at Fates even though he’s too good for me to catch him at it. I didn’t even know what sort of magician Davey was, but I didn’t think he was a diabolist like me. I hadn’t quite got that vibe off him, but he was obviously one of the other dodgy sorts. A very dodgy sort. Most magicians are basically dodgy, when you come right down to it, but he was something else.

  “Load of bollocks,” I muttered to myself as I poured a shot of whisky into the plastic tooth glass from the bathroom.

  I was buggered if I was paying the prices in the hotel bar so I’d just bought myself a bottle from a late shop on my way back from the horrible pub on the outskirts. Truth be told I was starting to get a bit low on money. This hotel was hardly flash but it was all right, and whilst Glasgow hotel prices might not be quite as eyewatering as they are in London, the place still wasn’t exactly what you’d call cheap. I had been there for nearly three weeks now. What with that and food and buying drinks for every magician in Glasgow, not to mention needing to buy myself clothes and a razor and toiletries and all the other shit I hadn’t brought when I ran away from London, I had spent a worrying amount of money in a fairly short space of time.

  I couldn’t even see a way to earn any more. I didn’t know anyone up here except the other magicians I had met. I didn’t know an alchemist here and I had no prospective clients, and no way to find any without treading on other people’s toes. When the money was gone it was gone, and then what was I going to do? There were only so many times I could get away with doing my little trick with the fruit machines before someone caught me at it and I got my head kicked in. I fingered the amulet through my shirt, and sighed. I wanted to take it off and call her name. I wanted to let her find me, and I knew damn well why I couldn’t.

  The amulet had been pretty much all I had brought with me, other than the clothes I stood up in and all the cash I could get my hands on. I’d had to make the amulet in a hurry and it was a bit of a slapdash job, but it was working so far. It’s amazing what knowing someone’s true name can achieve if you know what you’re doing. I sat down on the bed and sipped my whisky, and thought about her.

  Bad idea, I thought, or the Burned Man did. I wasn’t even sure which one of us that had been but it was true all the same. The last thing I needed to be doing right then was thinking about Trixie. It sounded like what I should be doing was going to Edinburgh.

  I didn’t want to, but I didn’t think Davey had been stringing me along. Oh he wanted rid of me all right, and that was the Burned Man’s fault for shooting its mouth off, but all the same his words had had the ring of truth about them.

  I didn’t know much about Edinburgh. I knew it was Scotland’s capital city, obviously, and that it was where all the tourists went. Apparently there was tartan and bagpipes everywhere you went, like some awful Disneyfied vision of Scotland, and I’d already gathered that the good folk of Glasgow regarded the place as something of a joke.

  Great.

  I’m a city boy, I always have been, and for all that Glasgow was cold and wet even in late spring there was something about its grey austerity that made it feel like home. It was a lot like London, in a way. It didn’t sound like Edinburgh was really going to be my sort of place.

  I sighed and poured another drink. I was starting to go off Scotland in a big way.

  Chapter Three

  Edinburgh was bloody beautiful.

  I got off the train at Waverley station and walked out into the strangest looking capital city I could have imagined. I’d been reading the paper on the train and worrying about Menhit and what the fuck she was going to do to me when she finally found me instead of looking out of the window, so it was all a bit of a shock when I came out of the station. The steps led out onto a road bridge over the railway tracks and on the other side of it was a public park, with what looked like some bizarre sort of Victorian spaceship standing in it. I later discovered that this was the Scott Monument, but right then it looked for all the world like something out of one of Jules Verne’s early science fiction stories. There was a busy road with shops and hotels on my right, and to the left the city rose up in a cliff of grand and ancient buildings that ended in a looming basalt crag with a bloody great castle perched on top of it. This was definitely not anything like London.

  “Fuck me,” I muttered, and almost got run over by an open-topped tour bus as I stepped off the kerb without looking.

  The bus was full of tourists wearing brightly coloured anoraks against the weather, which to be fair wasn’t any better than it had been in Glasgow. That was enough to reassure me that I was still in Scotland and hadn’t stepped through some sort of wormhole into another dimension. Where the bloody hell were the skyscrapers? Where was the noise, and the filth? Was this really a capital city?

  I crossed the road a bit more carefully this time and headed up onto the main road. There were at least shops there that I’d heard of, although the clean, modern electric tram that slid past made me jump. You didn’t get trams round my part of South London.

  I found a hotel that didn’t look too horrifyingly expensive and checked in, but all the same I was getting more and more concerned about the state of my finances. I’d have to find somewhere cheaper tomorrow, maybe a bed and breakfast or something. I dumped my bag in the room and headed out again.

  Of course now that I was here I’d have to start all over again, find the local action and make some contacts. Magicians don’t exactly advertise, even in this day and age, but you can usually track them down if you know what to look for. All the same it was a pain in the bloody arse.

  I walked aimlessly for a while, getting a feel for the place. I went back over the bridge past the railway station and up an asthma-inducing hill, following the flow of tourists. I actually could hear someone playing the bagpipes somewhere, I realized.

  The road wound its way up a hill and into the old part of the city, the long road that led up to the castle. Here it really was Disney Scotland, where every other shop sold tartan knitwear or single malt whisky or cuddly Loch Ness Monsters and all that tat, but it didn’t matter. The architecture was breathtaking, most of the buildings easily six or seven hundred years old.

  There was an imposing cathedral further up the hill and I headed that way, drawn by the way the top of the tower resembled a crown. Fuck knows why, looking back on it, but at the time it just appealed to me.

  I stood outside the cathedral staring up at it and feeling a bit lost. It wasn’t St Paul’s but it was still bloody impressive in a dour, grey sort of way. I could almost picture Trixie standing on the top of the tower with her flaming sword raised high. God but I missed her.

  Oh for fucksake, man up, the Burned Man snorted in my head. What sort of wet week
are you turning into?

  I ignored it and kept walking, my hands buried in my coat pockets and my collar turned up against the damp wind. At least it wasn’t actually raining, that was something I supposed. I headed up towards the castle then turned left on a whim. I walked down a flight of steep stone steps under a bridge and into what appeared to be the trendy district. Here it was all street cafes and bars and little vintage boutiques, and thankfully most of the tourist tat seemed to have been left behind.

  Now we were getting somewhere. If you want to get to know a place you have to know its people, not its visitors. You don’t learn about Londoners by hanging around theatres in the West End, if you know what I mean. I kept walking, looking around but not really taking much in. I carried on for maybe another half an hour, and I didn’t know where I was going until I got there. I had only ever seen the place in my scrying glass but something in the dusty recesses of my memory must have been pointing me in the right direction.

  This was Vincent and Danny’s house.

  I stood across the road and looked at it, at the overgrown front garden and the forlorn For Sale sign that was leaning at a windblown angle against the garden wall. I imagined the estate agent had probably all but given up on shifting the murder house by now. Even with the Edinburgh property market being how it was, who was going to want to buy a house where three people had been inexplicably torn to shreds by person or persons unknown? Especially when one of them had been a five year-old child. The case was still unsolved. The windows were dark and grimy, unlived in and unloved for over six months now.

  “Oh fuck me,” I said.

  What the fuck are we doing here? the Burned Man asked.

  Nothing, I thought. Nothing at all.

  I sat on a wall and stared across the road at the house. I was that person or persons unknown, of course. Well not exactly me, not literally anyway, but I had been responsible for what had happened in that house. It had been me who had summoned the screamers and sent them in there to murder Vincent and Danny McRoth for the crime of trying to muscle in on Wormwood’s business interests. It had been me who had had a fight with Debbie that night and hadn’t been paying attention to the scrying glass, me who hadn’t realized there was a child in the house until it was far, far too late. Me who had tried to regain control of the screamers and save that little boy’s life, and who had failed so utterly. My summoning had killed that child, my magic. My diabolism.