May Contain Traces of Magic (15 page)

‘Looks like it,' the voice conceded unhappily.

Right, then, Chris thought briskly, in that case, you'd better get on and kill me, hadn't you? Come to that, you might even let me go.

Silence; then, just as he was starting to wonder, the voice laughed and said, ‘Nice try.' At which point, all that calm, stoical acceptance that had purged him of the fear of death sizzled away like milk on a hot stove, and terror came flooding back, and Chris discovered that, after all, he really,
really
didn't want to die, especially not if there was even the remotest chance that it'd hurt. He launched himself at the invisible seat belt, which bounced him sharply back against the invisible seat, so he tried to wriggle sideways, and found he couldn't do that either; and he couldn't hear the voice any more, and that was all the confirmation he needed, because anybody could see that demons aren't the sort of creatures who talk to their food—

But there was another voice, one that Chris recognised. ‘Get away from him,' she shouted, and he heard the demon hiss; not with his mind but with his ears. Then a noise just like a butcher cleaving through a thick joint of beef, and a scream, not human, and the
ting
of one metal object glancing off another. Then another scream, as much rage as pain, and the sound of a woman grunting with effort; and then the light came on.

It was like when Karen suddenly switched on the bedside lamp, when she'd woken up in the middle of the night and needed to read for a bit before she could get back to sleep. The sudden glare was like a slap on the face, and Chris instinctively turned his head away from it. When he looked back, he saw her; the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen. Not just film-star or supermodel beautiful; they are, after all, only human. The point being, she obviously wasn't. In fact (he rationalised later) she didn't actually look all that much like a human female; or rather, she looked like the original, of which human beings are cheap knock-off copies you buy on market stalls. Human skin doesn't glow, and neither does human hair shimmer; it's too thick and stiff and hard, though you don't notice it until you get a chance to take a good close look at the real thing.

She was dressed in some sort of silvery thing that was either scales or feathers or, somehow or other, both. She was leaning forward with both hands on the grip of a sword (except it wasn't; where the blade should have been there was just a long thin black line, so thin it barely made three dimensions) and the light he was staring at her by came, he realised, from her skin and hair and that funny silvery dress; it defined the shape where the car had been, but there was nothing contained in that space besides the two of them and a moderate helping of air.

‘It's you,' Chris heard himself say. ‘I recognised your voice.'

She turned her head to face him, and her eyes were as bright as a welder's arc, burning half-moons across his retina as her head moved. ‘I don't think so,' she said.

‘Yes, it is, it's you,' he insisted. ‘You're her. You're SatNav.'

The eyes flared; he raised his hand to shield himself from them, but it did no good. He could still see them through his own palm.

‘Oh shut up,' she said, and she swung the sword up and brought it swishing down, straight at him. Chris opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out, and he felt the unseen seat belt give way. Without it to restrain him he rolled forward out of the invisible seat, and as he fell towards the solid black ground the light faded; not to pitch black but to a gloomy sort of twilight, because that was how dim and feeble ordinary daylight was in comparison.

He sat up. He was sitting on the tarmac of a parking space in the Ettingate Retail Park car park, in between an old red Volvo and a silver Peugeot, and there was a thin smear of blood seeping through his shirt front from a shallow graze, roughly where a seat belt would normally have crossed his chest.

 

 

‘
A
nd you're sure it was her,' Jill said, for the fifth time. ‘You're
sure.
'

‘Absolutely,' Chris replied, stifling a yawn. ‘I'd know her voice anywhere. It's been telling me where to go for the last five months.'

Jill's office wasn't a bit like he'd imagined. He'd had this mental picture of something out of an American cop show, the 14th Precinct or whatever: open-plan bustle, men in shirt-sleeves, phones ringing, a Brownian commotion of activity. But no. It was small - the building used to be an ordinary mid-Victorian house, Jill had told him, and her bit of it had been a boiler room - and cluttered, with filing cabinets jostling round her desk like gawpers at an accident scene. There were piles of green, blue and beige folders all over her desk, the windowsill and the floor. She had a computer and a phone, a stapler and a Darth Vader coffee mug, and in one corner there was an umbrella stand, crammed with weapons. He'd been trying not to stare at them ever since she'd brought him in.

‘Sorry,' Jill said, ‘but I'd like to go through the sequence of events just one more time. I'm sure I must be missing something. '

(There was an axe, for example, and a sledgehammer, two short spears and a variety of different swords - straight and curved, long, short, thick and thin - and a big slashy sort of thing with very peculiar lettering on the blade, and something that looked like a saw on a stick—)

‘We got lost,' Chris said wearily. ‘I got us lost, I'm not much good at maps—'

‘That's strange,' she interrupted. ‘In your line of work, I mean. I'd have thought you must've got quite good at reading maps. You haven't always had a—'

Delicacy of feeling, he assumed, made her tail off before actually saying the S-word. ‘I managed,' he replied. ‘And after a bit, you keep going to the same places, you know the way, you don't need a map.'

Jill's eyebrow raised a little. ‘That's another thing,' she said. ‘You've got your set rounds, right? And, like you say, you know how to get to them, you could probably find your way around your routes with your eyes shut. So why did you need to use the—?'

He broke eye contact and didn't reply.

‘It's all right,' she said nicely. ‘You aren't the first person it's happened to, you know. And it's important that we understand exactly how close the - well, the link between you and it was. You see, the closer the link, the worse the obsession is, if they get loose. If you only used it, say, once a month, it'd be hard for it to find you. But if you used it every day—'

She looked at Chris as she said it. He nodded.

‘If you used it every day,' Jill repeated, ‘it sort of gets tuned in to you, and it can home in on you really easily. Which I guess explains how she found you.'

Chris grinned sadly. ‘My own stupid fault, in other words.'

‘You can see it like that if you want to,' she replied. ‘I don't. Personally I think they can be very dangerous things, and there ought to be strict controls on how they're sold. But,' she added, with a shrug, ‘the people who matter don't agree with me, or at least not yet, so there we go. Anyway, I'm sorry, I interrupted. Go on with what you were saying.'

So he went through it yet again, while Jill made them both a coffee with the kettle perched on a crag of folders: the car park, Angela's sudden disappearance, the demon, the threats, the pain, where is she, all that—

‘And it was just about to kill me,' Chris said, ‘when she turned up.'

(There was a photo of Jill's mum and dad on the desk, buried among the paperwork like miners trapped in a cave-in. He barely recognised them, because of the dust on the glass.)

‘It does seem like a bit of a coincidence,' Jill said, not for the very first time.

He shrugged. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘it does, rather. Anyway, I couldn't see what was going on, but I'm pretty sure she fought the demon, because it screamed a lot, didn't sound like it was having a very nice time, and when the lights came on it wasn't there any more, and she was looking a bit puffed, leaning on the sword thing she had with her. A bit,' he couldn't help adding, ‘like that one you've got there. Look - wedged in between the meat cleaver and the polo mallet.'

Jill smiled indulgently. ‘You mean the estoc,' she said. ‘And the meat cleaver's a bardische, and that's not a polo mallet, it's a martel. You use it for hammering stakes into the hearts of vampires.'

‘Oh.'

‘Quite,' she said. ‘Serves you right for asking. Actually,' she added, ‘now you mention it, that's quite interesting, if what it had really was an estoc.'

‘What's an—?'

‘Very specialised,' she replied. ‘Quite rare, too. The blade is a single hair from the head of a fallen angel.'

‘Oh.'

‘Really, it is,' Jill said, with a grin. ‘No kidding. It's given like a really, really heavy relaxing treatment, to keep it straight, and it'll cut through pretty much anything.'

‘Like a pantacopt,' Chris said, without thinking.

She gave him ever such a funny look. ‘A bit like a pantacopt,' she replied. ‘Only not as good, obviously.' She paused. ‘You're pretty well informed, aren't you?'

‘Ah well,' Chris replied, trying to sound flippant, and failing. ‘Magic artefacts are my business, so I know a lot of—'

‘Not one of JWW Retail's biggest-volume lines, though, are they? Or if they are, we really ought to know about it.'

‘I read about them in some book, OK?' He could feel the conversation starting to seize up, like an unlubricated engine. ‘Stuck in my mind for some reason. They reminded me of light sabres, in
Star Wars
.'

‘What in what?'

Chris frowned. ‘It's a film,' he said.

‘Oh.' Jill shrugged. ‘Anyway,' she said, ‘if the entity from your SatNav really has managed to get hold of an estoc, that's not good at all. I'm starting to wonder if it stole it from here, before it broke out. We'll have to do an inventory.'

‘Glad you're taking it seriously,' he said. ‘Bearing in mind it was me she tried to chop up with the bloody thing.'

‘Quite.' Jill leaned back a little in her chair. She was starting to get a bit of a double chin, he noticed, and her face was a bit rounder than it used to be. ‘About that. You say it attacked you.'

Chris nodded. ‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘After she'd chased off the demon.' He paused, then said, ‘I guess it was my fault. You see, I recognised her voice, when she yelled something at the demon, and I told her so. I said “I know who you are” or something like that. She said no, I must be wrong, but I insisted, and then she slashed at me with the sword thing. Luckily she missed me but cut the seat belt, and I fell forward and - well, there I was in the car park. But it was me insisting I knew who she was that made her go for me, I'm sure of it.'

Jill nodded. ‘You were very lucky,' she said. ‘All the way through, in fact. Actually, it's amazing you're still here.'

‘That's nice to know,' Chris growled; then, ‘Look, what exactly
did
happen to me? You've been asking all these questions, but you haven't told me anything, and I think I've got a right—'

‘Fair enough,' Jill said. ‘All right, this is what we think happened. Most of it's just speculation, mind, we don't actually know, but the theory is that you were lured there deliberately by the demons, because they think you know something.'

Chris scowled. ‘They should've talked to Miss Hickey, then,' he said. ‘She always reckoned I didn't know anything.'

‘I don't think they're interested in GCSE-level geography,' Jill replied. ‘We do know that it wasn't your trainee that called at your flat. We checked; her mother said she was in her room all morning, working on a research project for her degree course, so she never left the house. What you saw was probably a demon under a glamour.'

‘Oh.'

‘No reason why you should've suspected anything,' Jill said. ‘It's fairly basic technology, and just the sort of thing demons are good at. Also, we checked with your Mr Burnoz and it was the first he'd heard of any of it; so it's definitely looking like a set-up, and they wanted you in that car park at that particular time.'

‘I see,' Chris said. ‘Why there?'

‘Geometaphysical fault line runs slap bang though the middle of the Ettingate Retail Park,' she told him. ‘Been known about for centuries, but when we told the local planning authority they just weren't interested. We think the demons chose it because the fault makes it easier to shift a material object - you, for example - out of our dimension into theirs. That and the portable parking space.'

‘What, they used a BB27—'

‘Probably stolen from your car,' Jill said, with a commiserating smile. ‘It's well known that they can cause dimensional-interface ruptures. They'll have kept the space empty while they were waiting for you to arrive with some kind of illusion, so the shoppers would've thought the space was taken. The demon pretending to be Angela simply parked the car on top of it and - swoosh, there you go.'

‘Hang on, though,' Chris said. ‘We were lost, I got us lost. So how did they know I'd drive us to exactly that—?'

Another smile. ‘The map was jinxed,' she said. ‘Again, fairly elementary stuff. It made you go there. So there's one positive thing to come out of all of this. You're not nearly as rubbish at map-reading as you thought you were.'

Chris sighed. ‘Sort of makes it all seem worthwhile, really.'

‘Quite.' Jill laughed. She had, he remembered, always laughed at his jokes. ‘So the real mystery is,' she went on, ‘what it is that they think you know, and they're so desperate to find out. It must be something really important to them, because all this, the planning, the set-up, it's a hell of a lot of trouble for them to go to; really expensive, in terms of energy expended in our dimension, I mean.'