Drake (21 page)

I threw the last of the whisky down my throat and stormed out.

My mate Jim had dropped out of university altogether by then and was working locally as a carpenter of all things. I shudder to think what his painfully middle class parents must have thought of that, after what his abandoned education had cost them. I dropped round to see him that afternoon, and borrowed his electric circular saw. I can't remember what line of crap I gave him about why I wanted it, but by the time we'd killed the case of beer I'd turned up at his flat with, he was happy enough to lend it to me for the rest of the weekend. I stumbled home with it over my shoulder in a canvas rucksack.

I let myself into Davidson's place bright and early the next morning, and checked to make sure the old soak was still passed out from the night before. Needless to say he was. I found him curled up on his unmade bed in the foetal position, with fresh vomit staining his pillow. Delightful. I closed his bedroom door firmly behind me and went through to the study.

“Morning,” I said, putting the rucksack down in front of the altar.

“I hope you've cheered up a bit since yesterday, you miserable bugger,” the Burned Man said.

I grinned and opened the rucksack.

“Yeah,” I said, “I have.”

I took the saw out and plugged it in.

“Now hold on a minute,” the Burned Man said. “If that's for what I think it is, you're a fucking idiot.”

“I'm reaching out and taking what's rightfully mine, that's all,” I said.

I pulled the triggers and the saw roared into life as I bent over the altar. The shiny new blade chewed through the ancient wood with a satisfying growl, drowning out whatever the Burned Man was trying to say to me. I worked the blade across the altar on the Burned Man's left, then again on its right, cutting out a neat slice of wood with it chained in the middle. I shut off the saw and lifted the chunk of wood free, holding it up until the Burned Man stood level with my face.

“Oh you've done it now,” it said.

“Yes I have,” I grinned at it. “Come on, you're coming with me.”

I put the piece of altar wood carefully in the bottom of the rucksack and closed the bag over the Burned Man's head. I could feel it struggling as I hefted the bag onto my shoulder. It might not be a dignified way to travel, exactly, but what the hell. It would forgive me once I got it home, I was sure.

I'd got maybe halfway down Davidson's hall when my eyes started to itch, then sting, and then really burn. By the time I got to the front door my view of the world had turned into a blurry mist as tears streamed down my cheeks. It was like getting grit blown into your eyes on a windy day, if the grit was made of broken glass. Broken glass that was on fire, at that.

I stumbled against the door almost clawing at my eyes, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I dumped the rucksack in the hall and dashed into the filthy bathroom, and turned the basin taps on by feel alone. Handfuls of cold water hit my face as I desperately tried to wash my eyes. The pain got steadily worse and worse until it was unbearable.

I threw my head back and screamed in agony, and that's when I made out my reflection in the spotted shaving mirror over the sink. The whites of my eyes were crimson with blood, and my eyelids were burning. Actually, literally on fire. I howled.

“What the fuck have you done to me?” I screamed.

“Told you,” came the muffled voice of the Burned Man, from my rucksack in the hall. “It can't be done.”

I poured more water over my face, sobbing miserably and ready to slam my head against the wall with the pain. I heard unsteady footsteps behind me.

“Stupid boy,” Davidson mumbled. “Knew you'd try it, sooner or later. Damn impatient stupid bloody boy. Stupid…”

I fell to my knees, sobbing, banging my head against the side of the bath, the heels of my hands pressed helplessly against my burning eyes. I heard Davidson shuffle down the hall and mutter something to the Burned Man. I think I was still screaming when I finally lost consciousness.

The miserable old fucker must have just left me lying there on his piss-stinking bathroom carpet, because that's where I woke up some time later. I whimpered, terrified I might have gone permanently blind, but when I finally summoned the courage to open my eyes I found I could see as well as ever. I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet and risked a look in the mirror. My eyes were a bit bloodshot but no more than that, and even my eyelashes were intact. I had
seen
them burning, but there they were none the less.

I washed my face with shaking hands. One look at Davidson's slimy towel was enough to make me decide to just drip dry, sitting on the edge of the bath with my head in my hands. After a while I made myself get up and go and look in the study. The Burned Man was back where it had always been, in the middle of the altar. There were rough seams on the long piece of ancient wood, like half-healed wounds, but it was definitely all one piece again.

“I did tell you, you twat,” it said. “That always happens.”

I
opened
my eyes with a groan and sat up on the floor of my workroom. Trixie was gone, and so was the Burned Man. I rubbed my hands over my face and got up, gingerly feeling the lump on the back of my head. There was a neat, perfectly circular hole cut out of the middle of the altar where the Burned Man should have been standing. I stared at that hole and felt… I don't know what, exactly. Empty, I suppose. Lost. And perhaps a little bit relieved, if I'm completely honest about it. I owed everything I had to the Burned Man, but when I remembered the bright-eyed, easygoing twenty year-old I had once been I couldn't help feeling that maybe it had taken away a good deal more than it had given me over the years.

I just couldn't believe she'd done it. I mean, I'd always been a bit wary of Trixie, in between intermittently feeling like I was falling in love with her, but all the same. I supposed I'd had my doubts all along though, from that first moment I saw her standing across from the café, the day after I'd lost that first game of Fates to Wormwood. I…
Well fucking hell!

Maybe the bang on the head had finally knocked some sense into me, I don't know, but just then I could have cheerfully kicked myself all the way down the street and back again. It had suddenly dawned on me that the first time I had seen Trixie had been the day
before
the Vincent and Danny job. A day before the Furies even knew I was alive.

I supposed it was beyond doubt now that she really was stuck with this impossible mission to kill the Furies, but she must have already been looking for me independently of that.
No, she wasn't looking for me at all,
I thought with a sudden sick feeling.
She was looking for the Burned Man.
It had just been bloody lucky for her that I had fucked the job up the way I had and brought the Furies down on myself. That, or the Furies had been following Trixie while she was looking for me, and I was lucky for them, I really wasn't sure any more. I kicked the wall in frustration. Whichever way it had gone down, I'd been royally had.

“Fuck it!” I shouted at the empty flat.

I supposed it didn't even matter now which way around it had been. I'd been played good and proper, and that was all there was to it. All the same though… Had she really believed I would ever
give
her the Burned Man, whatever she did for me?
Adam said…
The smell of rat was back in a big way. I had a really deep, really nasty suspicion that Adam at least had never believed anything of the sort. Trixie wasn't stupid by any means, but I did get the distinct impression that she was a little bit naive about certain things. Adam, on the other hand, definitely was not.

Still, that wasn't the point now. The point was that Trixie had done something terrible and, unless I was completely wide of the mark, she was in serious danger of doing something much, much worse any time now. This was all Adam's doing, I just knew it was. I remembered all that big talk I'd overheard from him about command and power and triumph, all the words of temptation. He wanted… no, he didn't just want, for some reason he was
desperate
to complete her fall.

“You set her up didn't you, you smarmy bastard,” I whispered aloud. “You wanted her to do this all along.”

She had obviously got it into her head, no doubt from Adam, that she could somehow use the Burned Man to destroy the Furies once and for all. Whether that was true or not didn't even really matter any more. The point was that if she tried it she would fall. I can command the legion and the leviathan, if I but order it, I remembered hearing him say to her. Do not ask, command. That is the true way to power.

If she tried that on the Burned Man she would fall for real, and there would be nothing I or anyone else could do to save her then. Not only that, but I couldn't help remembering the gleeful look on the Burned Man's face as she was cutting it out of the altar. I could only imagine the amount of magical power that might be generated by the fall of an angel. I had a horrible suspicion that the Burned Man believed it would be able to harvest enough of that power to break free of the fetish all by itself, ritual or no ritual. And it might be right. I
knew
there was a reason I hadn't wanted it to find out what she was. It could almost taste its freedom, I knew it could.

All the same, I thought about just washing my hands of the whole fucking mess and leaving her to it, I really did. For about two seconds, anyway. After everything I've done in my life, after all the killings and betrayals I've been responsible for, there was no way I was having a fallen angel on my conscience as well. There was still just enough of that long-gone twenty year-old left in me somewhere that I knew I couldn't live with that. That, and she had forgiven me. I closed my eyes, and saw his face.

I forgive you, she had said, and those three words had meant the world to me. Perhaps more than that. She was an angel, after all. It was just possible that those words had meant my
soul.

I had to stop her, and I had to rescue Debbie too. I didn't even know where they were but it stood to reason that they'd both be in the same place, and that was wherever Ally was. Unfortunately the only person I could think of who was likely to be able to find Trixie and get me to her in time was Adam himself.

I wanted nothing in the world more than to knock that prick's teeth down his throat, but for one thing I needed him and for another I knew he'd eat me alive if I so much as looked at him funny. A sad fact I know, but there we were. I gritted my teeth and called his name.

“Adam, I need your help,” I shouted. “Please Adam, this is important.
Trixie
needs your help.”

He might just humour me, with that one. I certainly wasn't about to admit I was wise to his game, and it wouldn't surprise me if he wanted to gloat over her fall anyway. Fuck it but I wished I knew his true name. That would bring him a damn sight faster than just asking nicely was ever going to. Whatever his name was, it obviously wasn't going to actually be Adam – that would be far too easy. Things like him don't give away their true names for free, after all. Trixie had, to be fair, but that was just another sign of how naive she could still be about certain things. She's a child, relatively speaking, Adam had said, and I could tell he was right about that in a way. I paced the workroom for five minutes before I had to admit to myself that he wasn't coming.

“Damn it,” I muttered aloud to myself, “why do you call yourself Adam? Trixie's simple enough, it's just a short form of the end of her bloody unwieldy true name, but you? No, you wouldn't do that. You're clever, aren't you? Oh yes, you're too bloody clever by half you are. You think you're
so
fucking clever no one can touch you, so you leave clues, don't you? It
is
a clue isn't it, you cocksucker, I know it is.”

I paced some more, painfully aware of the seconds ticking by. I didn't even know how long I had been knocked out for but the daylight coming into the room didn't seem to have changed so I could only hope it hadn't been too long.

“Basics first,” I told myself, still thinking out loud. I do that sometimes, when I'm tense. It doesn't mean I'm crazy or anything. “Adam was the first human in the Abrahamic creation myth, everyone knows that. You're
not
human though, you never have been, so why call yourself that? It's an Abrahamic form though, so that's the paradigm we're working with here. Adam was the first man in both Genesis and the Quran, but you're not a man, so what am I missing? The first something else maybe, but what? So what
are
you? You're a fallen angel. You're…”

Oh fuck me.

“The first fallen angel was Lucifer, any first year occultist or heavy metal fan will tell you that, but that's no fucking use to man or beast is it?” I was starting to rant now, I knew I was, but I really didn't give a toss any more. “That's a title not a name, that's just Latin Vulgate for morning star from a dodgy King James translation of the Hebrew Bible, in which it appears precisely once and is virtually irrelevant anyway. What's your fucking
name?
”

I tore into my dusty pile of books like a man possessed. I couldn't believe I didn't know the answer, but it had never really come up before, and truth be told I'd never expected to
need
to know it. The first of the fallen was an archangel, I knew that much, although, according to Trixie, that made him a lot less high up in the great scheme of things than most people would have you believe. How had she put it? The archangels are like our sergeants, something like that.

That made sense. Lucifer was still a big deal, don't get me wrong, but he was a long way from being the boss downstairs. Hell was there before he fell into it, after all, and something must have already been in charge down there when he turned up. All the same, it was a start. I read furiously, tossing one book aside and grabbing another, cross-indexing in my head as I went. I hadn't been a student for all those years for nothing, you know.