Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

‘Well, maybe you’d like to show us exactly how sorry you are,’ Zucker suggested sardonically. ‘Maybe you’d be interested in switching sides. How does that sound?’

‘Love to. Love to. Whose side am I on now, then? I mean, whose side was I on before I switched to yours? Because I jumped across as soon as you suggested it. Straight up. You tell me whose back you want me to stab, and I’m there. Just give it a name, okay?’

Zucker hesitated. I knew why, too: when you’re the one with the other guy’s balls in your hand, so to speak, it goes against the grain to answer a direct question. It’s almost as though you’re giving away the advantage. He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. ‘Examine your conscience,’ he suggested, baring his teeth. ‘Who’s been asking you for favours lately?’

Who indeed? Juliet. The Torringtons. The London Met. If this was what an embarrassment of riches felt like, I decided I could live without it: it was too sharp and pointy by half. But it would really help to know who I had to thank for this special attention, so I decided to push the issue just an inch or so further.

‘I’m hugely in demand,’ I said. Po had unconsciously relaxed his grip by a fraction, so I was getting some of my breath back now. ‘You’ll have to give me a clue. You’re not working for a drug pusher, are you? Gent by the name of Pauley? No? Because my mate in Serious Crimes reckons I might be in line for what he called “the frighteners”. Do you gents qualify as frighteners, or are you more in the line of softeners-up for the frighteners still to come? Sort of a John the Baptist deal, if you take my meaning?’

They were looking at me in bewilderment. But then they gave it up and got down to business again. The edge of the knife touched my cheek in a way that was unpleasantly suggestive. While this was going on, though, I was turning over in my hand the object I’d palmed when they dragged me to my feet. Metallic, certainly: rounded, basically cylindrical but hollow at one end and with a tapering extension at the other. The goblet. I’d picked up the goblet I carry around with me for the very rare occasions when I’m tempted to try my hand at black magic.

‘We need information,’ said Zucker. ‘And you need to convince us that we shouldn’t cut all sorts of pieces off you. So listen to me, okay? Just listen. We know how far they got, and we know why they stopped. Someone didn’t close the circle, right? A little bird flew the nest? But if there was even a partial breach, we could be knee-deep in each other’s entrails before the fucking day is out. Did they promise you immunity? If they did, they didn’t mean it. You’re not stupid enough to fall for that line, are you?’

All of which made about as much sense to me as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

‘Maybe I’m more naive than you think,’ I said. It seemed safely non-committal.

It was at this point that Po re-entered the conversation. ‘Let me eat one of his eyes,’ he suggested.

Zucker ignored this suggestion. ‘You think it might be possible to squeeze some advantage out of the situation,’ he said. ‘Your sort always do. I can promise you, Castor, there’s no profit here for anyone. Just death, and then after that the things that are worse than death.’

‘You’re going to kill me and then rape me?’

Po lifted his free hand over my head and balled it into a fist, but Zucker shook his head just once and the move stopped dead.

‘They’ll close the circle,’ he growled, bringing his face up very close to mine, ‘and do the whole thing again from scratch. Things will get bad then. Very bad, very quickly. And they won’t need you any more. Do you think any assurances they’ve given you will still hold after that? Do you think they’ll keep you as a pet?’

Zucker put out a hand and pressed his index finger against my temple. His nail was as sharp and tapered as a claw, but he didn’t break the skin. With Po still gripping my throat I couldn’t pull away as the nail traced a path across my face until it rested on my left cheek, a millimetre away from my eye.

‘If you’ll work for us,’ he said, with an absolute calm that was a lot more chilling than Po’s slightly crazed anger, ‘then there’s a point in keeping you alive. If you won’t, we’re wasting our time.’

I put on a pensive expression. And underneath it I really was thinking hard. What I was thinking was this: since I didn’t have the slightest idea what these two escaped lunatics were talking about, the likelihood that I could talk them into not ripping my head off and sucking out the juices with a straw was small. So the time had come to play my ace in the hole.

‘All right,’ I muttered, dropping my gaze again. ‘All right. I admit it, they made me a good offer. Fuck, what would you have done?’ As I said it, I threw out my hands in a mute appeal – and brought my right hand around on the rebound, jamming what was in it directly into Po’s face.

I’d rather have had the dagger, to be honest – but the chalice was made of silver too, and the base had a sharp rim. I drove it into the guy’s cheekbone hard enough to draw blood, because that was the whole point. Seeing that white metal gleam in my hand, the other were-man took a hasty step back and brought up his hands to protect his face and chest even before he saw what it was he was protecting them from.

Loup-garous don’t like silver: it’s some kind of an allergic reaction that comes with the package – with being a pirate soul and flying the colours of someone else’s flesh. Po shrieked in agony the instant his spilled blood made contact with the virgin metal, and as he slapped both his hands to his face he let me drop.

I ducked out from under his outstretched arms, and as I came up I landed an almighty punch on the point of Zucker’s jaw. Not the punch I would have chosen – you can break your wrist on a jawbone very easily, and nine times out of ten a jab to the stomach will give you a better return – but it made the most of the angle and the fact that I was already moving. The knife fell out of his hands as he staggered backwards, and I snatched it up on the fly. Luckily enough, I caught it by the hilt: if I’d closed my fist around the blade I’d have left behind a few fingers.

Then I was off and running, Po’s outraged bellowing fading at my back. I was heading for the open gate I’d come in through, but once I rounded the folly and put it between me and the two loup-garous , I swerved off the path into the undergrowth, uttering a fervent prayer to the God I don’t believe in that I didn’t trip over a root or a pothole in the dark.

The fence loomed ahead of me. I threw the knife over, planted my hands in between the decorative flat-metal spearheads on the fence’s top and vaulted up. More by luck than judgement, I was able to get one foot up on the spaces between the spikes, and then the other.

While I balanced there, indecisive, looking for a way to shinny over without impaling myself, something thumped into my left shoulder, hard and cold. That settled the matter: I lost my balance and went sprawling down into the street, my coat catching long enough to jerk me sideways before it tore and dumped me onto the ground on my face.

Pain was spreading out from my shoulder in hot filaments, but my arm still seemed to work so I had to ignore it for now. I scrambled to my feet, snatching up the knife again, and glanced around. This was the next hurdle: I didn’t have a bloody clue where I was in relation to the car. I took a look behind me and wished I hadn’t. The two dark figures on the other side of the fence were loping through the undergrowth on all fours, covering the distance at twice my speed. One of them – Po, I assumed, since he was about the size of a rhino – tensed for the jump, and I knew damn well he’d clear the fence like a Grand National winner.