He was as well.
The sun had disappeared behind the more usual London haze hours ago and it was bloody cold out there now. The poor bugger must have been freezing. I must say the chilly walk home had sobered me up no end too, which was probably best. At least Trixie had stopped giving me snippy looks for being drunk on duty anyway.
Weasel was sitting on the pavement with his back to my front door, smoking a sad-looking rollup and waiting for us. He looked so much like a homeless person it was a surprise people weren’t giving him the price of a cup of tea as they passed. Actually, round here it wasn’t surprising at all, but you know what I mean.
“Mr Drake,” Weasel said, when he saw us coming. He pulled himself awkwardly up and stood there shivering with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tracksuit and his rollup stuck to his droopy lower lip. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“So you have, Weasel,” I said.
I unlocked the front door and held it open for Trixie, then ushered Weasel up the stairs ahead of me and shut the door behind us.
“Sit down,” I told him once we were in my office, pointing at the sofa. “Trixie, this is Weasel.”
“How nice,” she said. “Excuse me a moment.”
I sat down behind the desk while she took herself off to the bathroom. I noticed Weasel staring intently at her, frowning with a fierce concentration that spoke of considerable effort being expended.
“Mr Drake, am I seeing things or is her aura… white?”
“Yes, Weasel, it is,” I said. “Trixie is an angel.”
Both of those things were true after all, although one had nothing to do with the other.
He gaped at me. “Are you taking the mickey out of me, Mr Drake?”
“Nah, I don’t do that, it’s too easy,” I said. “She’s a real live angel, so you show her some fucking respect.”
“An angel?” he echoed.
“You want to learn from me, Weasel? Well this is the sort of thing I do. These are the people I mix with, you understand?”
He nodded slowly. “Right,” he said. He looked like he might be starting to reconsider that little ambition right about then.
Trixie came back a minute later and perched on the edge of my desk.
“So,” she said, fixing Weasel with her dazzlingly blue eyes. “What’s Adam up to then?”
He almost jumped out of his skin. I could see that now he knew what she was he was suddenly terrified of her.
Good.
“He’s… Well, I don’t really know, like. Ma’am,” he added. “There’s all sorts of fuss though. The left hand path brigade are all up in arms. There’s black candles burning all over the city, if you know what I mean. It’s like the second coming of Lucifer out there right now.”
“Yes,” said Trixie, and again she had that faraway look on her face. “Yes, I suppose it would be.”
“Who is he then, Mr Drake? Ma’am? This Adam, I mean.”
“Never you mind, Weasel,” I said. “I don’t want you worrying your ugly little head about things like that, I just want to know who’s doing what.”
“Well, the Whitechapel Thirteen have got back together,” he said, “and there was some sort of big ritual up at Highgate the other night. Other than that, well, I don’t rightly know Mr Drake. I mean, these ain’t the sort of people what give me the time of day as a rule, if you know what I mean.”
I can’t think why.
“I know, Weasel,” I said. “That’s why you’re going to have to dig a bit harder, aren’t you? I want to know what’s happening, not what some bloke you bought a pint for told you he heard off a tom who shagged someone whose second fucking cousin knows a geezer, you understand me? Get out there and get me some fucking facts, Weasel.”
“Yes, Mr Drake,” he muttered.
“I like facts,” said Trixie, fixing Weasel with a flat blue stare.
I do believe she was starting to get the hang of this, bless her. Intimidating people like Harry the Weasel really isn’t that hard once you get your eye in.
“Yes, ma’am,” Weasel whispered.
For fucksake, he was already more scared of her than he’d ever been of me. That was hardly surprising I supposed, but it was irritating all the same.
“Go on then, fuck off,” I told him. “You’re supposed to be a seeker, after all. Go and fucking seek. Come back when you’ve got something useful to tell me. To tell us, I mean.”
“Yes, Mr Drake,” he said again.
He got up and scurried out of my office like he had a vorehound on his tail. I snorted as the door banged shut behind him. Ridiculous little prick.
“Poor little man,” Trixie said.
“You what?” I blinked at her. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling sorry for the Weasel?”
“You’re horrible to him,” she said.
I shrugged. “So what, he’s horrible,” I said. “And he owes me, and he wants more from me besides. Fair’s fair, Trixie.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “Don’t bully him, Don. I don’t like that.”
A bully, me? Me? For fucksake, I knew all about bullies. I’d grown up on a bastard of a tough estate and I’d been to an even worse high school before I escaped to university. I knew all about bullies, and I knew I wasn’t one.
Was I?
OK, maybe I had been a bit firm with him, but that’s how you got stuff done around here. Gold Steevie never got where he was by asking nicely, you know what I mean? Although now that I thought about it, where Gold Steevie had got in the end was melted to the floor of his warehouse by someone he had been trying to bully. That was another interesting thought right there.
“Yeah,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry Trixie. I don’t know what’s got into me today.”
“It’s easy to pick on someone weak when you feel strong,” she said. “I should know.”
I blinked at her. I supposed she probably would at that.
“Yeah,” I said again.
“That doesn’t make it right,” she said.
She stood up and turned and stared out of the window, lost in her own thoughts.
“Right,” I said. “Right, well. Yeah, OK. No more bullying the Weasel, then.”
“Good,” she said, without looking at me.
I turned in my chair and looked around, and caught sight of the dagger still sitting on the end of the desk. Fuck me, the Burned Man must be doing its nut by now, stuck in there.
I scooped the blade up in my hand and stood up. Trixie didn’t seem to notice, so I left her to her thoughts and went into the workroom. The fetish was still hanging immobile in its chains where I had left it. I looked at it for a moment, then knelt down in front of the altar and gently eased the point of the blade into the tiny incision in the fetish’s chest.
“Sorry it’s taken this long,” I said. “Out you come then, and I’ll give you a feed.”
Nothing happened.
I frowned and pressed the tip of the blade a little deeper into the unresisting body of the fetish. They felt lifeless, dagger and fetish both.
“You awake in there, mate?”
I delved into the dagger with my Will. I couldn’t feel anything in there. Nothing at all.
Oh fuck.
“Burned Man, can you hear me?” I said.
There was nothing. What the hell? It couldn’t have escaped, I knew that much. It was bound, and although I knew there was supposedly a way to undo those bindings, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was and I had no desire to find out. I couldn’t have accidentally freed it, there was just no way. Besides, even if I had freed it, I think ripping my head off and shitting down my neck would probably have been the first thing it would have done. No, it was still bound all right… somewhere.
The fetish was as cold and inert as it had become the moment I drew the Burned Man into the dagger, and it had no aura whatsoever any more, so it definitely hadn’t gone back in there. The dagger was still enchanted of course, but I could feel that it was soulless now as well, just an empty blade. So it wasn’t in there either.
So where the fuck was it?
Think, Don, I told myself. What did you actually do? I had invoked the Burned Man back into the dagger. I had invoked it against its will, sucked it back in as hard as I could until it smacked into me and disappeared. Except it wasn’t in the dagger like it was supposed to be, was it?
It smacked into me and disappeared.
It smacked into me. I had invoked the Burned Man…
Oh fuck me, no.
It was starting to make sense now. Steevie and his boys, all of it. Oh dear God, what had I done?
I wanted to throw up.
All this shit was starting to make sense now, each piece falling into place in my head with the wet thump of rotten meat hitting the floor. The way I hadn’t been shaken up after the battle with Bianakith. What I had done to Steevie, and how I had treated Weasel. How I’d been acting in general, and how I’d felt like I had been shut in forever. I hadn’t been myself at all today, not even a little bit. And now that I thought about it, I thought I knew why.
I shoved the dagger back into a drawer in my cupboard and hurried to the bathroom, catching a glimpse as I went of Trixie still staring out of my office window. She obviously had something on her mind, but I’d have bet money it wasn’t as big as deal as my own current little clusterfuck of a situation.
I shut the bathroom door behind me and stared into the mirror, gripping the sides of the sink with both hands to steady myself. There I was, looking back at me. The same old Don Drake. I hadn’t bothered to shave that morning and I needed a haircut, but then I usually did. Other than that I looked like myself. I thought I did, anyway. I stared into my own eyes, and my eyes stared back at me. I gripped the cold porcelain of the sink until I thought my knuckles might crack.
Don’t be such a fucking coward, I told myself. Do it.
I forced myself to really look then, to look for my own aura in the reflection. I might be a magician but I’m still just a man, and my aura should have been the same sort of dull, fuzzy blue as anyone else’s, the same as yours or your mum’s or the woman at the post office’s. But it wasn’t. I gazed into the mirror with that particular, trained magician’s gaze, and I saw a poisonous black cloud around my reflection. That was the Burned Man’s aura, I’d have known it anywhere.
Oh dear God.
That awful thought I’d had in the pub, everything today in general, suddenly I understood. The Burned Man was in my head. Somehow I had managed to invoke it wholesale, bindings and all, and bind it to me. I stared at my reflection and it wavered before my eyes, the image swimming in the spotted glass of my bathroom mirror, and now I could see it. I watched it haze in and out the same way I had seen the kindly, smiling image of Legba wavering over Papa Armand’s face in the club on Wednesday night, after he had thrown his chicken bones on the craps table. This face wasn’t smiling though, or kindly.
Not even a fucking little bit it wasn’t.
I could still see myself, but I could see the Burned Man too. I could see it in all its hideous glory, not nine inches tall any more but life-sized, man-sized. My size. There was the Burned Man’s face superimposed over my own, blackened and burned and cracked, the weeping red fissures in the charred flesh making me feel slightly sick just to look at them. It spoke to me, and whether it was actually my reflection talking or just a voice in my head I didn’t know and by then I really didn’t even care any more.
“I told you I’d make you powerful,” it said.
The Burned Man had told me that, I remembered it very clearly.
“You’ve got real potential, boy, potential like I haven’t seen for a thousand years or more,” it had told me all those years ago. “Do what I tell you and I’ll make you more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
I was twenty-four years old and Professor Davidson was dead in the next room, lying in a puddle of the bloody vomit he had choked on. The reading of his last will and testament was only a formality at this point – the Burned Man belonged to me now.
Getting the Burned Man on its altar out of Davidson’s flat took some doing, of course, but anything is possible with enough determination. Eventually the wooden crate I had knocked up around it was delivered to my digs.
My digs in those days were a shitty bedsit on the third floor of an old Victorian townhouse half a mile from the university. The landlord rejoiced in the name of Roger Cheeseman, which I suppose may have gone some way to explaining the all-pervading smell in the building. All the same, the place was mine and mine alone, two damp rooms with an interesting pattern of mould on the ceiling and one of those gas-powered instant water heaters over the sink that tried to kill you every time you lit it. If you wanted hot water you had to hold down the button, chuck a lit match down the back of it, and pray for divine intervention. The number of times I’d had a mushroom cloud of flame hit the ceiling was nicely evidenced by the black scorch marks on the plaster above the heater, which was pretty much the only place the mould didn’t grow. That was something, I supposed.
They had only just invented health and safety in those days, and landlords like Cheeseman were quite happy to pretend they still hadn’t. Still, it was what I could afford and it was a lot better than a shared room in the halls of residence would have been. I couldn’t quite imagine the sort of roommate who wouldn’t have minded me bringing the Burned Man home with me, and if there had been someone like that, then I dare say I wouldn’t have wanted to share a room with them in the first place.
I had borrowed a pair of sawhorses from my old friend Jim, an ex-fellow student who had dropped out the year before to become a carpenter. He was actually doing quite well for himself now, to the bewilderment of his painfully middle class parents. Anyway, I set the sawhorses up at the far end of my living room/bedroom/kitchen and balanced the altar on top of them.
“Fuck a bloody duck up the arse, don’t tell me you actually live in this shithole,” the Burned Man said. “And there I was thinking Davidson was a waste of fucking effort.”
I cleared my throat, feeling ridiculously embarrassed. “Yeah well,” I said. “We’ll get something a bit smarter soon.”
“We’d better,” it said. “What’s that fucking smell?”
I shrugged. “No one really knows,” I said. “Mr Cheeseman always swears blind he can’t smell anything when he comes round for the rent.”
The Burned Man cast a disgusted look at the pattern of black rot that decorated the ceiling. “That right?” it said. “How much do you like this Cheeseman cunt?”
“Not a lot,” I said.
Truth be told Cheeseman was a horrible man, with a fat nose full of broken veins and a smell about him that told me he wanked too much and didn’t wash nearly enough.
“Good,” the Burned Man said. “Time for a bit of practice then. I assume you know an alchemist?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, sort of, anyway.”
I was thinking of Debbie, of course. She was still at the same university as me, studying for her masters in chemistry but spending more time than she really should have been studying alchemy too. That was my fault, I supposed, but damn she was good at it.
“Good,” it said again. “Right, you’ll need to get some bits and pieces. And rip up this fucking awful excuse for a carpet, too. You’ll want a bare floor to lay out the circle.”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “What sort of practice are you talking about exactly?”
“Think of it as a live firing exercise,” the Burned Man said. “Someone nice and easy. Someone expendable.”
“Oh, fuck that,” I said. “Cheeseman’s grotty and a slumlord and I’m not exactly in love with the bloke but that doesn’t mean I want to fucking kill him. Anyway, then we’ll have nowhere to bloody live, will we?”
“Huh,” said the Burned Man. “Fair enough, I suppose. All the same, there must be someone you want to hurt.”
“Yeah,” I said, after a moment. “Yeah, there is, as it goes.”
Nick Regan had been two years above me in high school, and he was an utter cunt. He had been the resident school bully until the day he was finally expelled. After that he became the local hard man and cock of the estate. The number of times him and his gang of hangers-on had beaten me and my friends up, taken our lunch money or our trainers or our Walkman or whatever we’d had, didn’t even bear counting. As we got older he had only got worse, selling drugs to kids and pushing girls around. I had escaped to university in the end, but in my first couple of years I had still been going home in the holidays to see my mum. And every time I came back to that shitty estate there was Nick, waiting for the nancy-boy student. Fuck me, but I hated that wanker with a passion.
To be fair Mum had remarried now and I didn’t like her new bloke much so I hadn’t been home for a couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, he was a lot better than Dad had been, he just wasn’t my cup of tea if you know what I mean. I still spoke to her on the phone now and again though. Last I heard, Nick had battered his pregnant girlfriend so badly she’d lost the baby. No one could prove anything of course, and he’d walked away scot free. Somehow he always did. If there was ever someone the world wouldn’t miss it was Nick fucking Regan.
“Thought there might be,” said the Burned Man. “Everyone’s got someone, in my experience. Right, fuck this Cheeseman bloke then, we’ll do your boy instead.”
“Right,” I said. “What do I need?”
I spent half the day getting rid of the rancid carpet and drawing out the grand summoning circle on the floorboards, my dog-eared, third-generation-photocopied copy of the great classical grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon propped open on the floor in front of me as I painstakingly copied the design in chalk. After that the Burned Man sent me off with the most bizarre shopping list I had ever seen in my life at the time – a pound of iron filings, an ounce of graveyard dirt, a pinch of powdered mandrake root and two live toads. Debbie had given me a bit of a funny look but she’d had everything I needed, bless her, including the toads. I supposed I should have realised right then that she was the woman for me, but then I was young and stupid and I’ve always been a bit slow on the uptake with things like that. Ah well, hindsight and all that.
“Thanks, babe,” I said as she packed them up in my rucksack for me.
Debs smiled at me. “Don’t go calling up anything nasty,” she teased.
She knew I was a magician of course, but I don’t think she had any real idea of exactly what sort of magician I was. I had never mentioned the Burned Man to her, and I never intended to either. That secret had been strictly between Davidson and myself, and now he was dead it was just my business and no one else’s. And I knew it would have to stay that way.
“Nah, ‘course not,” I laughed. “I’m just trying some new symbolism.”
She kissed me. “Well, have fun,” she said. “Want me to come over tonight?”
Ah, shit. Yeah, that was going to be a bit of a problem. My bedsit was one room with a separate cupboard of a bathroom with a toilet and a shower in it, and that was it. Which meant there would be no hiding the Burned Man.
“How about I come here?” I said instead, thinking fast. “My place is getting worse by the week. You wouldn’t believe the new smell Cheeseman has invented.”
“Ew, gross,” she said, “it was bad enough already. Maybe it’d be better if you just came to me from now on.”
Her place was quite nice as student digs go. She was in a shared house with a beautiful and very well-to-do Indian girl called Rugveda who was hardly ever there, probably on account of the perpetual chemistry experiment that seemed to have been running in Debbie’s room for the last two years now. Either way, the other girl’s dad was a wealthy doctor and he paid the rent for her – she had just sublet her spare room to Debs for a bit of extra pocket money. It was a sweet setup and I’d much rather spend the night there than in Cheeseman’s palace of mould any day, especially now I had installed the Burned Man in my room. I can’t say I found the thought of it watching me sleep particularly appealing.
“Yeah, will do,” I said. “Thanks for the stuff.”
I hiked back to my place with the rucksack over my shoulder, trying and failing to pretend I couldn’t feel the toads wriggling about back there. I’ve never liked toads as it goes, which considering what I did with them is probably just as well.
“Right then,” I said to the Burned Man when I got home about nine o’clock that evening. “Shall we do this?”
“Do fucking let’s,” it said.
I set up my scrying glass then laid out the perimeter of the circle with the iron filings and drew the glyphs in the cardinal points with the mixture of powdered mandrake and graveyard dirt. Once that was done I gutted the toads in the kitchen sink behind the Burned Man’s altar while it did its thing. We had done some minor summonings together before of course, while it had been training me, but this would be my first actual sending.
“Ready?” it asked me.
I nodded.
“Ready,” I said.
We did what we needed to and moments later I was gazing into the scrying glass at the estate where I had grown up, as seen through the eyes of a real live vorehound.
“Bloody hell,” I whispered. I watched the darkened houses stream past in the glass as it loped towards Nick Regan’s place. “I’m going in. I need to ride it.”
The Burned Man laughed at me.
“Just let it be,” it told me, “it knows its business.”
“What if it gets loose?” I asked it.
I wasn’t taking any chances that this thing might end up running amok in the neighbourhood – my mum lived round the corner, after all. The Burned Man waved a chained hand at the grand summoning circle around me, at the carefully inscribed glyphs and the ingredients I still owed Debbie the money for.
“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.”
“All the same,” I said. “Humour me.”
I plunged my Will through the scrying glass into the vorehound’s mind.
Trust me, inside the head of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. A vorehound is basically just a nasty demonic animal, but I’m probably underplaying the “nasty” part of that. A vorehound, as the name maybe suggests, exists to eat. It’s the closest thing there is to an actual landshark. They’re pure apex predators and they live to kill, simple as that.
The vorehound was a flood of sensations around me, powerful muscles in fluid motion, an overpowering rush of scents, the wind ruffling through its short, bristly fur as it ran. The feeling of four legs moving in perfect rhythm was almost hypnotic. I knew if I tried to actually control it I’d lose that rhythm instantly and pitch it onto its muzzle in the road so I just sat back and let it carry me along. It leapt Nick Regan’s garden wall in a single bound and ploughed headfirst through his front room window without breaking stride.
Nick lived in the terraced house he had inherited from his parents, only now it was more like a druggy’s squat than the modest but cosy little working-class family home it had once been. The vorehound landed on the bare floorboards in a shower of broken glass and paused to sniff the air, then bounded up the stairs with slobber streaming from its mouth as it took the scent. Vorehounds have no language so I couldn’t really hear its thoughts as such but I was receiving a flood of impressions, scents and instincts that all said one thing – Prey!
Nick was just coming out of his bedroom, barefoot and bare chested in tracksuit bottoms, with a fucking Samurai sword in his hand.
“Who’s there?” he shouted. “No cunt puts my fucking windows in!”
The vorehound leapt for him. Two hundred pounds of devil dog hit him in the chest and his sword went flying as the demon bore him to the ground. I looked out of its eyes, staring down into Nick Regan’s face. I could see the fear in his nasty piggy little eyes and fuck me but I liked it.
“Die, you horrible cunt,” I whispered.
The vorehound tore his throat out with a single slash of its terrible slavering jaws. I felt the hot rush of blood fill my mouth, and the whole thing suddenly lost its appeal. I pulled my Will back out of the vorehound and retched, gagging on the floor of my bedsit while the Burned Man laughed at me.
“Enjoy that?” it asked me.
I looked up at it. I could have done without the mouthful of blood, but other than that I’m sorry to say that yeah, I fucking had actually.
If this was power, I wanted more of it.