Drake Read Online Free PDF Page B

was determined to give it my best shot.
    â€œGis another round Shirl,” I said.
    â€œReally, Don?” she asked me. “You ought to be getting off home, duck.”
    I looked up at her from my position half slumped over the bar. Shirley was an absolute sweetheart, a proper old-fashioned East End matriarch. What she was doing in the haunted wilds of South London I never had found out, but she kept a nice pub.
    â€œCome on Duchess, it’s cold out there,” I said, mustering what passed for a grin. It was a pretty piss-poor effort in all honesty, but considering that all I wanted to do was break down and cry it would have to do. “Gis another.”
    I waved a twenty at her and she sighed and pulled me a pint. She set a whisky chaser down beside it and smiled sadly.
    â€œPenny for ’em,” she said.
    I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Trust me, treacle, you don’t want to know.”
    I didn’t want to know, that’s why I was in there in the first place. I can’t tell you how much I didn’t want to know what I had done that night. Fucking disaster didn’t even come close to it. I drank off the top of the lager and upended the whisky into my pint glass. I was on a fucking mission to oblivion and no mistake. I gave the drink a swish around and drank.
    You rely on that bloody thing too much, I told myself, thinking of the Burned Man and how it had looked at me, afterwards.
    I remembered the very first time I had worked a proper job with it, and how it had laughed at me. Summoning and sending is complicated, and kind of misnamed. Summoning is just what it sounds like, making something appear before the circle so you can talk to it, ask it questions or make deals with it, whatever. Summoning and sending though, when you want to set something on someone, is a bit different. If you want your demon to savage someone in Paris, say, and you’re in London, you don’t actually call it to where you are and then wait around while it flies or swims or fucking hitchhikes to Paris. What you do is, you focus your Will on where your target is and you use your summoning circle to call up your demon and send it straight there, to where you want it to be. Obviously you can’t see Paris or wherever it might be, so you use a scrying glass to see through your demon’s eyes instead.
    The beautiful part of that is you’re in its head, and that means you can control it properly. I mean really control it if you want to, like you’re wearing the thing. The ugly part of that is that you’re in its head. Trust me, inside the head of the kind of demon you use for this sort of thing is not a nice place to be. Anyway, the first time we did this the Burned Man had laughed itself silly at me.
    â€œJust let it be,” it told me, “it knows its business.”
    â€œWhat if it gets loose?” I asked it.
    The Burned Man had gestured at the grand summoning circle around me, at the carefully inscribed glyphs and all the expensive ingredients.
    â€œWhat 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.”
    It was right, of course, but all the same I couldn’t help staying with my demon just to make sure. The moment it attacked and I felt my mouth fill with hot human blood the whole thing suddenly lost its appeal.
    The next time I gave the demon its head just before it attacked. The time after, I only rode it long enough to make sure it had got to the right place. Ever since then I had settled for just watching in the scrying glass to make sure the job got done. Tonight I hadn’t even really done that, and look what had fucking happened.
    â€œIt’s her fault,” I said.
    â€œOh pet, it always is,” Shirl laughed. “Who is she this time, and what did she do to