Vicious Circle (42 page)

Peace smiled grimly. “Sorry, friend. On the face of the evidence, that’s exactly what you did. Sit down.”

Again, I was punctilious about doing exactly what I was told. I was fairly sure by this time that that blanket was hiding something a lot worse than the damage to Peace’s face, and I was starting to worry about what he’d do if he felt himself losing consciousness. He certainly wouldn’t want to leave me hanging around as an extant threat. That added a certain urgency to the task of talking him around.

“When I asked your connection at the other Oriflamme to pass on a message for me,” I said, “I meant it. All I’ve been looking for is a chance to talk to you.”

“Carla? Yeah, that was a cute touch. But by the time she called me I already knew they had an exorcist sniffing after me. I saw you coming, remember? You tried to get a fix on Abbie and I shut you down.”

“Three times,” I acknowledged. “Nicely done. The second time you almost shoved my brain out of the back of my head. How’d you do that one?”

“We’re not swapping recipes,” Peace said, grimly. “The way I read this, you’re trying to find reasons why I shouldn’t kill you. Just to let you know, your score is still on zero.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well let me know if any of these make the cut. One, you’ve been hurt really badly—probably when those two werewolves caught up with you—and you need help. On top of that, I think you’ve been awake since Saturday night keeping up whatever psychic defenses you’ve got so no one else will try to find Abbie the way I did; that’s why you needed to score the uppers from Carla. Sooner or later you’re going to crash, big time: I’d put my money on sooner. If you don’t trust me, you’ve still got to find someone you do trust—and you’ve got to do it fast.

“Two, after you tried to use me as a crash mat at the
Collective,
you saw me running interference with the loup-garous. That Jeep that went through the fence, and knocked the big one off his feet, that was me. So how does that square with me being the enemy? The truth is that I started to smell a whole bag of rats as soon as I took this job on: ever since then I’ve been trying to find out what’s really going down.”

I paused for breath. He’d kept his poker face on throughout the whole of that recital. I wasn’t getting to him.

“Is there a three?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “there’s a three. You’ve got a hell of a reputation, Dennis. Everyone says you’re a hard man who’s done a lot of bad things. Even Bourbon Bryant warned me not to piss you off, and he never has a harsh word to say about anyone.” Peace was staring hard at me and I met that stare head-on. “But tell me this,” I said, quietly. “Are you really prepared to kill an unarmed man in front of Abbie, and let her watch while he bleeds out? Because if you are, I think I’m all out of cards.”

We carried on playing blink-chicken for a moment or two longer, but I had nothing else to say so I let him win: it was Peace’s call now. I looked up at the black void beyond the candlelight’s meager reach, and waited for him to make it. After a long silence, he lowered his arm and set the gun down on the floor. I glanced at him again. A smile spread slowly across his face: a bleak, strained smile that was painful to look at.

“You’ve got balls, Castor,” he said.

He gave the gun a shove, and it slid across the floor toward me. It didn’t get very far: the soot-streaked concrete was too rough and uneven. But it crossed the magical midway point where I’d be able to get to it before he did—assuming he could even move.

I stood up, stepped over the gun, and walked across to him. I squatted down beside him, on the opposite side of the blanket from Abbie, who continued to stare at us both in silence. I felt her solemn, calm attention like a physical pressure on the back of my neck, the light touch of cold fingertips.

Peace stared up into my face, which must have looked a bit sinister lit from below by a single candle.

“You’ve got a bit of a reputation yourself,” he said, letting his head fall back onto the rolled up jacket he was using as a pillow. “Let’s see if you can live up to it.” This close up, his face looked a lot paler and a lot more strained; or maybe he was just done with pretending now. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead and cheek that gleamed dully in the candlelight.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“What you said. The were-fucks caught up with me again a couple of miles further on—pardon my French, Abbie. I got one of them with a knife: clever little gadget I bought in Algiers, with a chasing of silver up the blade. He won’t be doing any ballroom dancing for a while. But I had to get in close to do it, and he—” Peace gestured at his ruined face.

“Is that the worst of it?” I asked.

“No,” he muttered. “This is the worst of it. Look away, Abbie.”

The ghost of Abbie Torrington shook her head, but it was a protest rather than a refusal. She turned her back on us, her movements once again unaccompanied by the slightest sound. As soon as she was facing the wall, Peace pulled the blanket aside. It was hard, at first, to make out what I was looking at: it looked for a moment like a seventies tank top with a complicated pattern on it. Then I realized that it was his bare flesh; not so bare as all that, though, because his torso was rucked and rutted with half-healed cuts and flaking scabs. The predominant color was furious red, but there was yellow in there, too: some of the wounds had gone massively septic.

“Christ!” I muttered involuntarily.

“Yeah, by all means say a blessing over it. Might even help.”

That was wishful thinking, though. Religious nostrums do have some degree of power over demons and the undead, but only when they’re wielded by someone who actually believes in them. A prayer from me would be about as much use as one of those little stamps with Jesus on them that they used to give out at Sunday school: the royal mail doesn’t accept them, so the message never gets delivered.

“You don’t need a blessing,” I told Peace. “You need a doctor.”

Peace twisted his head away from me to stare at his daughter’s ghost. “Abbie,” he growled sternly, “don’t you be trying to take a peek—it’s not a game we’re playing here.”

Then he looked back at me. “No doctors,” he said vehemently, trying to sit up and not quite managing it. “You don’t know who you’re up against. Any 999 call gets logged—any call to a GP surgery likewise. Even if you could get someone to come out here and ask no questions, he’d still get to know about it and he’d be down on me before you could fill the fucking prescription.” There was a brief pause, and then he added as he let his head back down heavily onto the rolled-up jacket “Pardon my French, Abbie.”

He pulled the blanket back up to cover the horrific landscape of his wounds. “You can turn round again now, sweetheart,” he muttered, but Abbie seemed not to have heard. Her insubstantial figure, barely edged in the darkness, remained staring away from us into the corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. I didn’t want to speculate about what she was seeing there.

I thought about my own infection. That had come from a single cut, and it had laid me out like ten quid’s worth of loose change in a sock. It was a miracle that Peace was still conscious at all. It also occurred to me to wonder how it was that the loup-garous hadn’t been able to follow his scent the way they’d followed mine. Maybe the faint smell of incense had something to do with that, but I was willing to bet that Peace had ways of blindsiding them just as he’d done to me. He was a foxy bastard, no doubt about it, but now he had his leg in the trap and his options were running out.

“Peace,” I said, “you’re right about the call-logging, but take it from me that this is going to get worse, not better. I think you’ll most likely die if you won’t let anyone treat you.”

He absorbed that in silence, thinking it through.

“Carla,” he muttered at last. “Go and see Carla. Get me some more speed. I’ll ride the bastard out.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment it looked as though he was sinking into a doze, but then he bared his teeth in a grimace, letting out a long, ragged breath. “No,” he said, “I won’t, will I?” The eyes snapped open again, fixed me with a fierce glare. “I can’t die, Castor. I can’t. If I die, then they’ll . . .” He hesitated, his gaze flicking to Abbie and then back to me. “I can’t leave her alone.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I might be able to get you what you need without going through a hospital or a practice. Can I use my mobile?”

“To call who?” I saw his fists clench: even without the gun, and even in the ravaged state he was in now, he was still a force to be reckoned with. I didn’t want to have to argue with him.

“A friend,” I said. “A very old friend. My landlady, in fact. Who by a very happy coincidence is currently doing the nasty with a doctor. She’s also got healing hands on her own account. Holistic medicine, kind of thing. So this is a two-for-one deal.” That phrase made me think of Susan Book—she’d said something similar about Juliet and me—and for a moment I felt a premonitory qualm.

Peace, on the other hand, relaxed slightly as he saw a way of squaring the circle.

“And she can be trusted?”

“Absolutely. She’s not even capable of telling a lie. It’s against her religion.”

“God-botherer?” Peace’s lip curled back in distaste, and he waved a hand over his midriff to indicate what the blanket now hid. “Those fucking Catholics did this to me.”

“No, Pen’s sort of a religion of one these days,” I said. “Believe me, she’s not going to shop you to the Anathemata.”

He gave a very faint nod, surrendering the point as though he was too weak to hammer it out anymore. “All right,” he said, “call her. But tell her to make sure nobody follows her. If she’s that close to you, they could be watching her, too.”

I called Pen at home. The phone rang six times, and then the answering machine kicked in. “Hi, this is Pamela Bruckner. I can’t come to the phone right now . . .” Pen picked up as the message was still playing, to my great relief. “Hello?” she said, her voice sounding fuzzy with sleep.

“Pen, it’s me. Sorry to wake you, but this is a bit of an emergency.”

“Fix? Where are you? It’s—”

“Two in the morning. I know, I know. Listen, you remember the state I was in when you found me on the doorstep? Well, I’m with someone else who’s had a bigger dose of the same thing, and he’s in a really bad way. Did that little Scottish guy leave any of those antibiotics lying around?”

“I don’t think so. But I can call Dylan. Where are you?”

“Way out west. Call him now and then call me back, okay.”

“Okay.”

She hung up. Pen gets the point quickly, bless her, and she doesn’t waste words. I turned back to Peace. “Do you want me to meet her somewhere else?” I asked. “She can pass the drugs on to me without finding out where you and Abbie are.”

“You said she might be able to do some good herself,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, I did say that.”

“Then let her come.”

He closed his eyes again, his breath coming quick and shallow now. He’d been holding on by pure willpower, and it was starting to falter now that he’d put himself in my hands. Not good: not good at all.

I felt a sensation like the epidermal prickling you get with pins and needles, and glanced up to find Abbie’s wraithlike form hovering beside me.

“Will my dad be okay?” she asked, her voice touching my ear without stirring the still air.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “He’s in a bad way. It’s not so much the wounds, it’s the infection.”

“Make him better,” Abbie whispered, sounding younger than her fourteen years. She’d never be older now.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, my own voice barely louder than hers.

The phone rang, smacking me out of unpleasant thoughts. It was Pen. I turned away from Abbie and Peace to take the call.

“Dylan said he’d come himself,” she told me. “He’s at home—in Pinner. He says he’s got some vancomycin there, but he’s not giving it away without seeing the patient. So if you tell me where you are, I can tell him and he can come and meet you.”

Chinese Whispers is a lousy game at the best of times. Peace had said it was okay to tell Pen: he hadn’t given me permission to bring in any third parties.

I glanced around, saw that Peace still had his eyes closed.

“Peace,” I called. He didn’t respond. I called again, but he seemed to be sleeping. At any rate, his eyes were still closed.

I thought it through, and decided that I didn’t have a choice. Without antibiotics, he wasn’t going to see the night out. I put the phone back to my ear.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know Castlebar Hill?”

“No.”

“Maybe Dylan does. It’s almost local for him. Tell him to go to the top of the Uxbridge Road and take a right. Just before you get up to the golf course there’s a roundabout. I’m on it.”

“On the roundabout?”

“Yeah. It’s a big one. You have to park up on one of the side streets and walk in. There’s a building—the remains of a building. It burned down a few years back.”

“And that’s where you are? At two in the morning?”

“Don’t start.”

“Okay. I’ve told him it’s an emergency. He’ll get there as quick as he can.”

“We’re not going anywhere. Thanks, Pen.”

“You can pay me back by telling me the whole story.”

“If I survive it, I will.”

She hung up again and I pocketed the phone. I sat down on the floor beside Peace, with nothing to do now but wait. The dead girl walked across to stand over me, her feet not quite touching the ground. For ghosts, most things come down to memory and routine. They behave as though they still have flesh but all they’ve really got is habits. She stared down at her father, himself more dead than alive, and the expression on her face was hard to bear.

“Help’s on the way,” I said.

Abbie nodded. “I don’t want him to die,” she whispered. “I don’t want anything to hurt him.”

All I could do was nod in my turn.

Peace stirred and woke from his shallow sleep, looked up at me in momentary dislocation. Almost he reached for his gun: then he seemed to remember who I was and what was going on. “There’s coffee,” he muttered thickly, pointing to a small stash of packets and jars up against the wall near the gas burner. “And bottled water.”