Drake by Peter McLean Read Free Book Online Page A

should have been watching them.”
    â€œYou should have stayed and fucked Debbie, and done this tomorrow when your head was straight, but she wouldn’t have you would she?” it said. “It’s her fault.”
    I threw up some more. It wasn’t Debbie’s fault, of course it wasn’t, but that was better than it being my fault. He was five years old. He was five, and my screamer tore him to bloody rags.
    Never again.

Chapter Four
    I suppose I must have passed out at some point. When I woke up my eyes were crusted with dried tears and my bloody back was stuck to the sheet under me. My head was hammering like it was about to burst, and I felt sick to my stomach. I whimpered when I realized I hadn’t dreamed it. Daylight streamed through the half-open curtains and made my eyes water.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from sobbing. “I’m so sorry.”
    I felt broken, there’s no other word for it. The hangover was nothing new, although this felt like it was going to be a vintage one even for me. I shouldn’t have brought that girl back with me last night, whatever her name was. Ally, I remembered. Ally who was far more fun than I deserved, even if she had seemed to like hurting me. I vaguely remembered I had probably hurt her, too. That hadn’t been right, any of it. I felt… to be honest it had been so long since I last felt this way, I could hardly find the word for it. Guilty, that was it. I felt guilty. Hell, I was guilty.
    Now look, let’s be absolutely fucking honest here – I kill people for a living. Oh sure, I tell the world I’m a hieromancer, and I tell myself I’m a great magician and a mighty diabolist, master of the Burned Man and all that. What I am really, when you boil it right down to the gristle, is a hitman. I summon and send demons, and they kill people. I might not rip my targets’ throats out with my own teeth, but then neither does a sniper. The Burned Man is my rifle, the demons are my bullets, and it’s the same fucking thing in the end.
    Me and the Burned Man, well, we’ve killed a lot of people together over the years. In my defence though, for what little it’s worth, they were bad people. My clients, the sort of people who know that what I do even exists, well they’re bad people too, by and large, and people like that tend to make enemies among their own kind. I’ve killed gangsters and terrorists and black magicians, for other gangsters and terrorists and black magicians. And sometimes for other people too, well-spoken gentlemen in Savile Row suits who I’ve always rather suspected might work for the government. Anyway, the point is I’d never killed an innocent as far as I knew, until last night.
    He was five years old.
    â€œI’m so sorry,” I said again.
    â€œSo you should be.”
    I sat bolt upright, my heart thundering in my chest. The light was behind her, coming through the gap in the curtains and stabbing into my bloodshot eyes like blades. The crusty sheet had torn away from my back when I sat up, and I could feel myself bleeding all over again. Damn, how bad did she cut me up exactly? Not that I cared. It had been fucking brilliant, and that just made the guilt so much worse. I deserved to bleed for that thought alone.
    For a moment I thought Ally had changed her mind and come back, but this wasn’t Ally. She had swapped her tight leather coat for a cream linen jacket and white silk blouse and designer jeans, but the blonde’s aura was as blindingly bright as it had been when I’d seen her across the road from Big Dave’s café window the day before yesterday.
    â€œIt’s you,” I said, rather stupidly.
    â€œIt is me,” she said. “Well spotted.”
    â€œI mean…” I stopped to rub my eyes, to get my shit together enough to think for a moment. “How the hell did you get into my