Dominion Read online

  “Hi, Con,” I said, giving him a wave.

  “This is for you, Mr Drake,” the probably-waiter said.

  He passed me the case. It was surprisingly light for the size of it.

  “Cheers,” I said. “Tell his nibs thanks for me.”

  The waiter or whatever he was nodded and got into the back of the Roller without another word. I watched it slide smoothly into the traffic, shaking my head at Wormwood’s awful, naff WW 1 registration plate. I saw one or two heads turn to watch the car go past. Connie had driven it round to mine once before, but all the same you didn’t exactly see a lot of those around here. I went in and shut the door before anyone thought to notice me.

  I carried the flight case up the stairs and set it on my desk. Trixie pulled a face when I opened it.

  “I hate the thought of that thing,” she said. “It shouldn’t be here on Earth, being traded back and forth by…”

  “People like me?” I asked when she trailed off.

  I lifted the skull carefully out of the cut foam lining of the case and held it up to admire it. The bone was obviously very old, yellowed with age and smoothly polished as though by the passage of thousands of worshipful, avaricious hands. Perhaps it had been, at that. I suppose I could see where she was coming from, but all the same, that was a bit rude.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s not right.”

  “It’s what we needed,” I said. “You didn’t object last night.”

  “I wasn’t looking at it last night,” she said.

  Fair point, I supposed. I put the skull back in the case and closed the lid.

  “Look,” I said, “we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said, “but I have to. We need to speak to my Dominion about Bianakith, and just as importantly I need to know why it ignored me yesterday.”

  “Trixie,” I said, choosing my words extremely carefully, “if it doesn’t want to speak to you for some reason, for whatever reason, then it might not be best pleased when we do this. You do realise that, yeah?”

  She sighed and flicked her hair out of her face. She was wearing it loose today, and she looked absolutely gorgeous.

  “I suppose so, but it can’t be helped,” she said. “If I anger it, then so be it. It’s only the results that matter.”

  Yeah, that was my Trixie. The ends justified the means, every single sodding time. She had far more in common with the Burned Man than either of them would ever have been prepared to admit. I glanced sideways at her, taking in the wavering black tendrils in her aura. I didn’t think there were any more of them than usual, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. There certainly weren’t any less, that was for sure.

  I sighed and went through to the workroom to see about my triangle of art. I hadn’t done an evocation in donkey’s years but I had a circular black mirror already, tucked away in a cupboard in case I ever needed it, so it was simply a matter of constructing the triangle itself around it. Not a difficult job really, you just need a few bits of wood. You inscribe one God-name per side – Tetragrammaton, Primeumaton, Anaphaxeton – facing outwards, then the letters MI – CHA – EL set within them facing inwards and running in the other direction; place the mirror in the middle and you’re golden. One triangle of art, ta very much. That was the easy bit.

  I set the mirror in the middle of the triangle and stood it up in front of the grand summoning circle, then lit tall white candles at each of the cardinal points of the pentacle while the Burned Man watched me with a sceptical look on its nasty little face.

  “You sure about this?” it asked me.

  “Honestly? No. Fuck, I don’t know mate. It needs doing though.”

  “Blondie needs it doing, you mean,” it corrected. “Is she at least going to grace us with her presence for this?”

  “She’d better, or I’m not doing it,” I said. “Fucked if I’m facing that thing without her.”

  To be honest I was really rather starting to hope she had stood me up. I would rather have faced Bianakith alone than have to hear that Dominion again. At least, at the time I thought I would. Turned out I was wrong, but there you go.

  Trixie came in a moment later with the flight case in her hand. So much for that hope then. It looked like I was doing it.

  “You look good enough to eat as usual, Blondie,” the Burned Man said. I had a nasty suspicion it meant it literally.

  Trixie ignored it. “How does this work?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, and realised I couldn’t remember. It’s amazing how much you forget over the years. It’s my age, I’m sure it is. “Um, well.”

  “Oh for fucksake,” the Burned Man snapped. “Put the skull in the north cardinal of the circle, in front of the altar. Set the triangle up behind the skull, outside the circle, mind. You two stand in the circle. It’s not fucking rocket surgery, Drake, and we have done this before, you know. Any number of Billy No-Nuts occultists can do this.”

  “Not with a fucking Dominion they can’t,” I muttered, but I did as it said anyway.

  Truth be told the last time I had done an evocation I was still a spotty oik in university back when the Burned Man was training me. Once you can do real live summoning it seems a bit pointless really, but then I’d never expected to need to commune with anything too fucking dangerous to even attempt to summon. This was going to be fun. Not.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you know its true name?” I asked Trixie.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  She was standing in the circle next to me now. The circle was only really drawn out for one and that meant she was standing very close to me indeed, which wasn’t exactly helping me concentrate on the task at hand. All the same, she could try the patience of a diabolist sometimes.

  “And it’s… what?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, well it’s not really a word as such. I don’t know how I’d tell you – it’s more of a… I don’t know how you’d put it. A vibration, I suppose.”

  “Well vibrate it then, Blondie,” the Burned Man said. “I’ll do the rest, seeing as fucknut here seems to have forgotten his baby lessons.”

  I scowled at it, but it was right. A bloody long time had passed since we’d last done this, and I’d had other things on my mind. Trixie began to hum an alien note deep in her throat and a vision of the child swam suddenly up in front of me, the bloody holes where his eyes had been. I’d had so much on my mind over the years. There was that Russian mobster, torn to pieces by my vorehounds on the morning of his daughter’s wedding. The Giardi family, shredded by my screamers. Harry the Hat, nailed to the wall of his warehouse by a talonwraith. The child, bleeding beside his grandmother’s corpse. Danny McRoth had fought like a cornered bear to save that kid but I’d killed her all the same and then my screamers had taken the boy too. I’d tried to stop them, and I had failed miserably. The child died because of me. I killed him. Me. The child, the child, the child…

  “It’s coming,” the Burned Man said.

  Dear God, the guilt was killing me. I remembered taking Ally home and fucking her when I should have been with Debbie. I remembered that government job, a pack of vorehounds slaughtering their way through an Iraqi village in the middle of the night. I remembered Nicky Sparks, ripped open and splattered all over the back room of his snooker hall. I could feel tears on my cheeks, a hot burning in the back of my nose that meant I was close to sobbing like a fucking baby. The child, the child, the child…

  Oh yeah, it was coming all right. Judgment was coming.

  Damn those cards.

  Judgment again. There was no escaping it this time. It was coming for me. Justice was coming.

  Judgment.

  Dominion!

  The black mirror flared with sudden light, making me throw a hand across my eyes. I felt Trixie stiffen beside me, heard the sharp intake of her breath.

  Now, an evocation is supposed to be an astral experience, which means it mostly hap
pens in your head. Which a lot of the time basically means you’re kidding yourself and making it up.

  Not this time.

  A voice bellowed out of the mirror, making the room shake around us.

  “Who dares?” it demanded. “Who dares disturb a Dominion of the Word?”

  “Meselandrarasatrixiel,” Trixie said, and I noticed the nervous tremble in her voice. “I call you, Dominion, as I called to you yesterday.”

  “You have your instructions, Meselandrarasatrixiel,” it thundered. “The task is given, the work will be done. It is not for you to question us in this.”

  I felt a sudden need to kneel. This wasn’t quite like last time, with the Furies. That time the Dominion had actually manifested, and kneeling hadn’t been fucking optional. In fact, just the force of its presence had flattened me to the ground, leaving me grovelling on my face while it thundered and roared unseen behind me. It wasn’t quite that bad this time, but all the same I was overwhelmed.

  Something was different though.

  Last time I had felt an all-encompassing awe, the presence of a Divine too powerful, too perfect to withstand. This time I felt fear, pure and simple. A deep, instinctual fear. Maybe it was just because of what the Burned Man had said about the dangers of evoking a Dominion, but I wasn’t sure. It felt more dangerous this time even though it wasn’t even really there. I fell to my knees, shielding my eyes from the blazing light that was scorching out of the mirror like a nuclear chain reaction.

  “I beg for guidance,” Trixie said. “Bianakith walks the earth once more. I need to stop it, but I lack the strength.”

  “Bianakith is not your concern,” the Dominion rumbled, its voice dipping fractionally below the pain threshold. “The Word moves as the Word Wills.”

  “The elementals of the deep Earth are dying,” Trixie said. “The ground rots, and the thinnest of Veils are exposed. We cannot just ignore–”

  “Silence!” the Dominion roared. “Your task is given, Meselandrarasatrixiel. Guard the Burned Man on Earth. Carry out your task and do not question us again!”

  I glanced up at Trixie, at the black threads and greenish rotten patches in her aura, and I wondered. She hadn’t fallen, we were all quite clear on that point, but she had most definitely slipped a bit. All the same, I found myself wondering if a Dominion had an aura and if so, what this one’s looked like. Something was wrong.

  “But Dominion, I–”

  The triangle of art exploded.

  The blaze of light blinded me for a moment, and the noise was so shattering it passed beyond agony into utter silence. An impossible wave of pressure threw me off my knees, shards of broken black glass pattering noiselessly onto the hardwood floor around me as though in slow motion. I dug my fingers into my eyes and gasped, trying to clear my vision.

  Trixie was sprawled on the floor half in and half out of the circle, and I was lying almost on top of her. I shook my head and took a ragged breath, and reluctantly got off her. She was saying something, or at least her lips were moving, but all I could hear was a shrill whine. She frowned for a moment then reached out and touched my forehead with her fingertip, and my hearing came back.

  “…something wrong,” she said.

  “You fucking think?”

  “It’s Bianakith of all things, Don, the very essence of corruption. I can’t believe this is part of the Word’s plan. I just… I just can’t. My Dominion has never spoken to me like that before. So harsh, so dismissive, like I was nothing.”

  I got up, leaving her sitting on the floor. She pulled her knees up and folded her arms across them, and put her head down. I suddenly realised how scared she looked. I supposed it was understandable. Her whole foundation had just been pretty much ripped out from under her. If her Dominion was lying to her, then… I don’t know. Then, what? What the fuck had really just happened?

  “That could have gone a little bit better than it did,” the Burned Man said.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” I said. “Thoughts?”

  “You’re a prick?” it suggested. “I did tell you this was a fucking stupid idea.”

  It had, to be fair.

  “I can’t,” Trixie said. “I can’t be in here with that thing.”

  She got up and stalked out, shutting the door firmly behind her.

  “Well, that’s us told then innit?” the Burned Man said.

  “Look, mate,” I said, “could you maybe try and be a bit less of a cunt to her?”

  “Don’t see why I should,” it said. “She fucking stole me, remember?”

  “You wanted her to!” I shouted at it. “You were fucking banking on it, weren’t you?”

  The Burned Man coughed and scowled at me. It couldn’t talk about freedom and it could never ask to be free, those were two of the primary tenets governing its original binding, but all the same we both knew how badly it wanted out of that fetish.

  “I think,” it said after a moment, “that Dominion wasn’t being exactly straight with our Blondie.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Which scares the crap out of me, to be perfectly honest. If something like that isn’t playing with a straight bat then… what? For fucksake, what’s going on?”

  “Choose a side, your hoodoo daddy keeps telling you,” the Burned Man said. “Which side is that fucking thing on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what the sides are, and that’s the most worrying thing of all.”

  Once upon a time when I was a young occultist, before I met the Burned Man, it would have been obvious. You had angels and the forces of Heaven on one side and the demons of Hell on the other, and that was that. But I had an enslaved archdemon and a murderous angel on my side, and I’d done a deal and then fallen out with Lucifer and been almost killed by a Dominion that was now trying to tell us another archdemon was doing the Lord’s work. I closed my eyes and scrubbed my hands over my face, the stubble rough against my palms. Why was nothing simple any more?

  I didn’t know, but I knew a man who would.

  At least, I sincerely hoped he would.

  Chapter 10

  Papa Armand lived in a Knightsbridge penthouse that had to be worth eight figures even in today’s market. I had never been there before, and the doorman looked a bit dubious when I showed up, but after a short phone call upstairs he was all fawning politeness as he showed me to the lift. No, I didn’t tip the patronising bastard. I didn’t even know if I was supposed to, to be perfectly honest. This wasn’t exactly the sort of place I was used to visiting.

  Papa opened his door wearing an outrageous black silk kimono patterned all over with golden dragons. His bald head gleamed in the light and his big black feet were bare on the pure white hall carpet. The diamonds on his fingers shone like stars.

  “Hello Papa,” I said, bowing my head respectfully.

  “Don-boy Drake,” he said with a grin. “Good to see you!”

  I had called first of course, so he knew I was coming, but he still looked pleased and surprised to see me standing me at his door. He ushered me inside, and I felt a pang of self-consciousness. I had known he was rich, but this was bloody ridiculous. I took my shoes off without being asked and padded after him into an acre of white-carpeted living room. Almost one entire wall was made of smoked glass, with a stunning view out over Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine to Hyde Park. A flight of solid walnut floating stairs drifted artistically up one wall to the second floor, and there was a tall blonde who looked barely eighteen draped equally artistically over a white leather sofa under the window. She was wearing a satin copy of Papa’s kimono, albeit several feet shorter, her long bare legs providing an unwelcome distraction.

  “Papa, qui est-ce?” she asked.

  “En Anglais, chérie,” he said. “Don-boy not good with languages.”

  He laughed, the rich molasses and rum sound of his voice warming the cold monochrome tones of the room.

  “Oh,” she said, and swung her bare feet onto the carpet. “
Hello, Don-boy.”

  Her accent spoke of private schools in Switzerland and stately homes in the countryside, of old money and distant connections to the Royal Family. She was very posh and very pretty and far, far too young, but she was no Trixie. No one was, as far as I was concerned. I cleared my throat.

  “Just Don is fine,” I said. “Hi.”

  “I’m Jocasta,” she said, in her cut-glass accent.

  Of course she was.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, feeling increasingly awkward as she yawned and stretched.

  “I’m going back to bed,” she announced. “Don’t be too long Papa, I’ll get lonely.”

  “Papa got to talk some business just now,” he said, without looking at her. “Have a bath, watch some TV. There coke in the nightstand, case you get bored. Go ‘way.”

  She blew him a sulky kiss and strolled leisurely up the stairs in her ridiculously short kimono, making no attempt to hide her bare bottom. I shook my head in bewilderment and looked at Papa Armand.

  “Papa, I need your advice,” I said.

  “It make my heart sing that you come to me for advice, Don-boy,” he said. “I starting think Madame Zanj Bèl your whole life these days.”

  “No,” I said. “No, not all of it. You know I respect you, Papa.”

  He chuckled and touched a shiny gloss black cabinet. It unfolded like some magic trick of futuristic furniture origami, splitting and spreading and extruding a fully stocked cocktail bar. For fucksake, how much must a cupboard like that cost, and where would you get one even if you had the money? I tell you, Papa Armand lived in a whole different world to me.

  “Have a drink with Papa, Don-boy,” he said. “Then we talk.”