Vicious Circle

“These guys backed off sharpish. The man she’d shot wasn’t dead, amazingly. He had his hands clutched to his throat, trying to stop the blood or at least slow it down, but he still seemed to be able to breathe so I suppose she must have missed his trachea or whatever it’s called. But his feet started to slip and slide and he was obviously about to fall down, so his two mates took a hand each and they dragged him off toward the door. They threw a couple of curses at Mel, but all the fight had gone out of them.

“That was when I noticed that the barman had a copper’s nightstick in his hand: not a PC Plod effort, one of the big sidewinders that takes no fucking prisoners. He’d fished it up from some little cubbyhole under the bar, and he was walking up behind Mel with this thing under his shoulder ready to swing it up and over and crack her head open.

“I picked up a beer bottle and let fly. Caught him in the mouth and almost floored him. Then Mel turned around and saw him and she got the drop on him with the gun before he could get his feet under him again and use the stick. She stood up, pressed the gun to the side of his head, and told him to kneel down. She took the stick away from him with her left hand, still holding the gun right up against his temple.

“ ‘You were going to hit me with this?’ she said to him. ‘Because your friends tried to rape me and I wouldn’t play along?’ He was babbling something, saying he was sorry or that he didn’t want any trouble or whatever. Mel shook her head. No excuses. No mercy.

“She lifted the gun up, away from his skull, and she wagged it in his face like a schoolmistress wagging her finger. Then she brought her other arm back, just about halfway, and swung it down again. Smacked him in the mouth, really hard, with the nightstick. Crack.” Peace gestured vividly. “Blood and teeth everywhere. He went down, crying like a baby, clutching his face and rolling away from her across the floor. But she’d had her fun now. She tossed the stick back behind the bar and turned to me as though she’d only just noticed me. ‘We’d better get out of here,’ she said. ‘The police are likely to take his side.’

“But she didn’t leave right away. She looked down at the barman again, moaning and whimpering at her feet. She seemed to like that. She gave him a measured kick in the balls, pivoting on her heel so that she was more sort of stamping on him with her heel. I suppose she wouldn’t have got much force otherwise, with open-toed shoes.

“Then she led the way, and I followed.”

“Was that the night that Abbie was conceived?” I asked, breaking another reflective silence.

Peace shook his head, pulling himself out of the vivid past into the painful present with difficulty. “No. We did spend that night together, but Abbie—that came later. That all came later.

“Mel was staying at the Independence, and she took me back there even though the doorman looked like he were sucking a mouthful of lemons when he saw how I was dressed.

“She was incredible in bed: a little bit scary, even. Not just uninhibited but totally off the fucking leash. She was into bondage—degradation, submission, slave-and-master shit—and she had some games I’d never come up with in my wildest dreams. She was into drugs, too, and we were as high as Kiliman-sodding-jaro as we fucked. I’m not likely to forget that night in a hurry. I wish I could, in a lot of ways.

“I stayed with her for a couple of weeks. Fifteen days, actually, and some odd hours. And I found out a fair bit more about the weird shit she was into. It didn’t stop with sex games. In fact, I think the weird sex was a side effect of the other stuff.”

“ ‘The other stuff’?” I thought I knew what he meant, I just wanted to check, because it sounded like we might be getting to the point at last.

“Black magic. She was a necromancer. And when she found out I could do the binding and loosing stuff, she couldn’t get enough of me. She used to make me raise up ghosts and bring them to watch while we were . . . you know. While we were in bed, or wherever else she chose to do it. She was a natural sensitive, so she could always see them. It used to send her right over the top—infallibly. The kind of orgasms that go into legend.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed them hard with the balls of his hands. His head had fallen back onto the makeshift pillow again, and he looked even paler and more exhausted than before.

“It all got a bit intense,” he sighed, with what sounded to me like exquisite understatement. “I mean, it was fun. Most of the time. But she was a bit rich for my blood, all things considered, and I didn’t like some of the people she hung out with. There was this one guy especially who used to give me the creeps. Big blond bruiser with these weird violet eyes. His name was Anton, Anton Fanke . . .”

He stopped, seeing my reaction to the name. For a moment, a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. “You know him?” he demanded.