The End - Visions of Apocalypse

Occult hitman Don Drake gambles his way into the debt of the nastiest demon in London. He can’t drink his way out of this one, but maybe he can make a deal with something else to save his skin. Something much worse…

5. THE LAST HAND

by Pete McLean

He saw my warpstone and raised me an angel’s skull, and there was no way I could cover that bet. I had a Knight-high flush and the Tower, a fair hand in Fates, but that warpstone was all I had left. My palms were itching. I looked down at my cards, and the face of the Knight of Cups looked back up at me. He looked drunk and happy in his painted tarot world, the lucky sod. I was only drunk.

Someone laughed, away on the other side of the smoky club. Glasses clinked. Across the table from me, Wormwood was starting to look impatient. He lit another cigarette off the butt of the last and poked it between his thin, grey lips before he mashed the old one out in the overflowing ashtray beside him. A strand of his long hair was stuck greasily to the three-day growth of stubble on his cheek.

He rested his free hand on top of the skull and stroked the pristine white bone with fingers that were nicotine-stained to the colour of dark mahogany.

“Well, Drake?” he asked. “I ain’t got all bleedin’ night.”

I cleared my throat, and the waitress wiggled up beside me and poured another generous slosh of whisky into my glass. Very old single malt whisky. I nodded a thanks at her. She was pretty, I thought. Nice tail. Another night I might have tried it on with her, but this was serious now and I needed to concentrate on the game. I knocked the whisky straight back and set the glass down on the table.

The Tower, again. This was the third hand tonight that I’d drawn it as my trump, and if that didn’t suck for an omen I didn’t know what did. I glanced at the two decks of cards on the table, the thick one for the suits and the slimmer deck of major arcana, the trumps in the game. I half wondered if Wormwood was cheating somehow, but that was a dangerous kind of thought to be having here. I reached up and loosened my tie a little, stretched out my aching neck. He was drumming his fingers on the skull now, and his ugly, horned minder was starting to give me that look that said I’d better not be taking the piss.

“Well now,” I said. “I’d be about ready to call you on that, but, ah…”

“But you’re skint,” Wormwood finished for me. “Ain’t you?”

He grinned. He had one of the most repulsive grins I’ve ever seen, and he stank. I could smell him from where I was sitting, with three feet of card table between us and enough cigarette smoke in the air to kill a beagle. It wasn’t that unwashed body stink like tramps got, it was worse than that. Wormwood smelled of rot, somehow, of disease and misery. And cheap cigarettes, I thought. Lots and lots of cheap cigarettes.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

His mean little eyes glittered as he looked at me.

“Now I might,” he went on, “be able to do something about that.”

I reached for my glass, and remembered it was empty. I glanced around the club instead, playing it cool. There were maybe twenty punters in tonight, a mixture of us and them. Mostly them. Wormwood’s club was private, obviously, not open to the general public. Hell, it wasn’t even visible to the general public. You’d walk straight past it if you didn’t know exactly where to stop in the alley, and precisely which bit of graffiti-covered brickwork was a glamour covering the front door.

“Oh?” I said. “How’s that then?”

“I might sub you,” he said. “Enough to finish this hand, anyway.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“I know you’re good for it,” he said. “Anyway, I like you Drake.”

No you don’t, I thought. You don’t like anyone.

I had a Knight-high flush and the Tower, and I really, really wanted that skull. There was a lot I could do with an angel’s skull. I met his eyes, trying to feel him out. If I folded now I’d lost the warpstone anyway. If I went for it, if I won, I’d walk away with both and a good pile of cash besides.

What’ve you got, you little bastard? I wondered.

The waitress was filling my glass again. She really did have a cute little tail. I swallowed the drink and coughed, feeling the shot of ancient whisky burn its way down my throat and chase all its little friends into my guts. There were a fair few people watching us now, I noticed. Well, I say that, but people might be stretching it a bit. This was Wormwood’s club, after all.

“All right,” I said. “Sub me then, and I’ll call.”

I laid my hand out on the table. Wormwood took a long, careful look at my cards, and slowly shook his head. He turned his own hand over to show a full house and Judgment. Bastard.

“It ain’t your lucky night, Drake,” he said.