May Contain Traces of Magic (9 page)

In the event, entirely justified.
Five
dozen BB27Ks, with special promotional material; also two dozen bottomless purses, a gross of Instaglamour cream, two pocket universes and his entire car stock of anti-demon talismans. In fact, the only line he wasn't able to interest them in was DW6—

(‘We've been meaning to ask you,' said the eager, bespectacled young assistant manager. ‘This is probably a very silly question, but what's it actually
for
?' So, no sale there—)

The only slight flaw in an otherwise extremely pleasant call was a return: one NK77B, rejected by a customer as not fit for purpose—

‘But how did she know it's not working?' Chris asked.

The assistant manager looked at him. ‘She tried it. It didn't work. It's quite simple, really.'

Normally he wouldn't have bothered arguing the toss, but today he decided to give it a go, just for the hell of it. ‘But it's such a subjective thing, isn't it?' he said, smiling insidiously. ‘I mean, a mirror of desire, shows you what you really want. What did she actually see in it?'

The assistant manager grinned. ‘She saw herself looking into a mirror of desire that worked properly,' he replied.

‘Oh.'

So Chris had taken it back, all neatly packed away in its carton, and thrown it on the back seat along with all the other junk that had come to rest there over the years. Annoying, but not his fault. He started the engine and drove away.

He hadn't gone far when he hit the diversion again, but not to worry; he leant across and pressed SatNav's on switch. Nothing happened.

He swore, jerking the wheel, and the car swerved alarmingly. He pulled himself together, straightened up, made himself concentrate on the road. Chill, Chris told himself, it's just something broken, that's all. But that didn't work, because it wasn't an it, it was a she, a living creature shut up in a plastic box. Warm day; maybe the poor thing was suffocating in there. Anxiously he scanned the road ahead, and was enormously relieved to see a lay-by, not far off. He pulled in, switched off the engine, unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward—

- And, in doing so, happened to glance in his rear-view mirror. He froze. In the mirror, grinning at him, was a demon.

Being incapable of movement and therefore having nothing better to do with his time, Chris looked at it. Its skin was grey, the colour of builder's mortar, more like elephant hide than anything you'd expect to find on a human. Its body was about the size of a ten-year-old child's, but its head was bigger than his own, hairless, with round lidless eyes that were perfectly black. The teeth in its thin, very wide mouth were all about an inch long, thin and slightly curved, ending in needle points. It had a tiny snout rather than a nose, and its ears were pointed, just like Mr Spock's. It was bony but with well-defined muscles, its elbows grotesquely pointed, its hands broad and inhumanly flat, with long, slim, five-jointed fingers tipped with claws, like a cat's. And it was grinning; well, of course it was. With those teeth, if it closed its mouth it'd do itself an injury.

Well, Chris thought, here we go, just like poor Mr Newsome. He wondered if it would hurt, if there was an after-life, and if so was there a Nice Place and a Very Bad Place, and was the Nice Place as he'd always imagined it, a bit like the hotel in the Malverns where they had the annual sales conference. He didn't waste time speculating about the Very Bad Place, because as far as he was concerned he'd been there already, leaving at age seventeen with six GCSEs.

‘Hello?' he whispered.

The demon made a very soft hissing noise, like a gas fire before you light it, and slowly extended its right arm. Chris closed his eyes, kept them screwed tight shut until he felt something brush against his cheek, and smelt that smell again. He yelped and squirmed up against the car door, his eyes opening by reflex; and he saw the demon's arm, reaching carefully over his shoulder and touching the SatNav's power button with the point of its index claw.

‘Your route is being calculated, please - oh.'

For a split second, Chris felt an urge to grab the demon's wrist and pull it away, keep its filthy claws off her - But he didn't, and the demon withdrew its arm, winked at him, kicked open the nearside back door and scampered out.

 

‘Twice in two days,' the government man said. ‘They must like you.'

Not, Chris felt, a tactful thing to say, and if that was an example of his taxes at work he had a good mind to vote for the other lot next time round. No suitably pithy comeback occurred to him, so he gave the government man a nasty look instead. In the distance, from where he was sitting on the verge he watched the men in Day-Glo yellow jackets coning off the road, while sniffer dogs of a breed he'd never seen before and hoped never to see again were snuffling up and down the tarmac.

‘Look,' he said feebly, ‘I've told you everything I can remember, can I go now? Only—'

‘No chance,' the man replied scornfully. ‘Forensic's going to want to pull this car apart down to the sub-atomic level, so unless you fancy a long walk you aren't going anywhere.'

‘Oh,' Chris said. ‘I was hoping to scrounge a lift—'

Now he'd offended the government man. ‘Sorry, but we've got a job to do here. We're not a taxi service. Now, we'll be needing your clothes.'

‘What? You must be—'

‘For analysis,' the government man explained briskly. ‘DNA traces, maybe flakes of skin or traces of spit, if we're really lucky. Don't know if they'll want to shave all your hair off, it depends on what we find on the clothes and the car, but don't go touching it unless you absolutely have to or you could disturb the evidence.'

The government man went away, and Chris sat perfectly still for a quarter of an hour, as if his patch of grass was the only safe place left in the whole world. Then a familiar voice said his name, and he looked up.

‘I got here as quickly as I could,' Jill said, sitting down beside him and opening her carrier bag. She wasn't wearing Day-Glo yellow like the others: a plain dark M&S business suit and white blouse; very grown up, he couldn't help thinking. ‘Here, have a mini Swiss roll - you must be starving.'

Chris took one from her but made a real mess of taking off the foil wrapping. She took it back and did it for him.

‘Are they really going to shave my hair off?' he asked.

She grinned. ‘Bless them,' she said. ‘They're so thorough. It's all right, I'll have a word with them.'

‘And my clothes? Only this is my good suit, and—'

‘I'll make sure they don't shred it,' Jill said. ‘So,' she went on, ‘now you know what I do at work. Fun, isn't it?'

Chris shuddered. ‘And you actually - well, kill them?'

She nodded. ‘Actually, it's not so bad once you get used to it. It's a bit like picking up your dog's mess in a plastic bag: you try not to think about what you're actually doing, and then it's no big deal.'

‘I've never had a dog.'

She smiled. ‘I know,' she said. ‘Probably for that very reason. Have another Swiss roll, keep your blood sugar up.'

Pause; then, ‘Do you think you'll be able to find it?' Chris asked with his mouth full.

Jill shrugged. ‘Depends on the dogs, mostly. Trouble is, they can be pretty cunning about masking their scent. We've got helicopters out with ultra-blue thaumaturgical sensors, but they only really work at night - daylight blurs the image too much. The foot patrols might get lucky, I suppose, but I'm not holding my breath. So,' she went on, ‘tell me what happened.'

So he told her - the truth, whole and nothing but - right up to the moment where the demon had reached past him with its arm. For some reason, he left that bit out—

‘And then it winked at me, kicked the door open and scarpered,' he concluded. ‘And that's all, really. Doesn't sound much, when you're telling someone else.'

‘On the contrary,' Jill replied seriously, ‘you've given me at least half a dozen good strong leads, which'll be very helpful. For example, the pointed ears. That's a dead giveaway.'

‘Is it?'

‘Oh yes.' Profound nod. ‘Means it's a quaerens - that's Latin for someone who looks for things, a searcher. Reconnaissance and special forces, essentially. If it'd been basic rank-and-file infantry, it'd have had rounded ears with long, pendulous lobes, while the engineer and technical grades have ears that stick out sideways, and the sappers haven't got ears at all. The five finger-joints mean it was probably a mature specimen - the juveniles don't grow the fifth joint till they're at least seven hundred years old. Actually you're privileged, if you care to look at it that way: the quaerens grade's pretty rare. Some of the guys in the department have been in the business thirty years and never seen one.'

‘Bloody hell, Jill,' Chris growled. ‘You make it sound like birdwatching.'

She laughed. ‘Some of them are bit like that,' she sort-of-whispered back, ‘they've got copies of the
Observer Book of British Demons
that they carry with them wherever they go, and whenever they come across a grade or a subspecies they haven't seen before, they tick them off the list and boast about it for days in the canteen. All a bit sad, really, but I guess it's their way of keeping motivated. At least they don't have the dead ones stuffed and mounted any more, like they used to when I joined the department.'

She was being deliberately chatty; long practice at putting witnesses at their ease? Somehow Chris didn't like that. He was supposed to be her friend, damn it, not a witness. But then, he'd always reckoned that with Jill, work came first. And at least she wasn't threatening to shave off all his hair. He licked melted chocolate off his fingers.

‘What's got me puzzled,' she said, ‘is the way it just
left
—'

‘Without killing me first, you mean?'

Jill frowned, as though he'd said something in bad taste. ‘Well, bluntly, yes,' she said. ‘The thing about demons is, they never waste energy.'

‘What, they insulate their lofts and stuff?'

She recognised that as flippancy and ignored it. ‘Demons have the most amazing metabolisms,' she went on. ‘Absolutely incredible rate of cellular regeneration, which is why you can cut off a hand or a foot and twenty minutes later it'll have grown back, good as new. If only we could crack the science behind it we could do the most amazing things with human medicine, but for some reason the demons aren't terribly keen on cooperating with our researchers.' Bleak grin. ‘Anyway, it's good from their point of view, makes them practically impossible to kill without magic, but it means they use up a hell of a lot of energy; so they eat masses but that's awkward for them considering
what
they eat, they can't go around slaughtering people every time they get a fit of the nibbles or they'd pose a real threat to human society and it'd turn into open war. They've got more sense; they know that if they keep their attacks down to a minimum we'll keep covering it up to stop the public at large finding out that they exist - can't have that, obviously, there'd be mass hysteria. So,' she went on, after a pause for breath, ‘they've learned to conserve their energy. Like, you've seen lions at the zoo, right? All they do is lie around sleeping all day, because when they hunt - assuming they're not in zoos, I mean when they're in the wild - they burn off about a million calories a second, so when they're not hunting, they just flop. Same with demons, only more so, of course. I mean, just the effort of projecting themselves out of their native dimension and into the material world is enough to drain their batteries, which is why you only see them when they're actively on the warpath, so to speak. Which is why,' she went on, ‘I can't really figure out why your one went to all the trouble of materialising in your car, and then just smiled nicely at you and buggered off.'

‘I see,' Chris replied. He was starting to shake now. Delayed reaction, presumably.

‘Lucky for you, of course,' Jill added, ‘but a mystery. Now the one you saw yesterday, that was classic post-attack lethargy. It'd worn itself out killing the shop person, it simply couldn't be bothered with you. That's when they're at their most vulnerable, actually, just after feeding. Their batteries are flat after the kill, and until they've digested some food - they digest really quickly, but it still takes time - they're basically too weak to move, and their defences are low, too, which makes killing them that much easier.' A thought struck her, and she looked sideways at him; not one of her usual repertoire of looks. ‘The one yesterday,' she said. ‘Pointed ears?'

Chris tried to remember. ‘No,' he said. ‘More sort of knobbly, like stone muffins.'

‘Ah.' She nodded. ‘Just occurred to me, it might've been the same one, tracking you. They do that sometimes,' she added blithely. ‘Just seem to fixate on a particular human, follow him around for a bit before they strike. We've got no idea why they do that.'

‘Oh,' he said. ‘I wish you hadn't told me that.'

Jill laughed, as though he'd made a joke. ‘No,' she went on, ‘there must've been something that stopped it attacking you, something that either drained its energy or put it off, made you seem unappetising, as it were. Something you had with you in the car, perhaps.'

Chris pursed his lips. ‘Such as?'

‘Well, there's all sorts of things we believe they don't like. Same as vampires and garlic, only it's a bit subtler than that, different things repel different demons. For example—'