Read Drake for Free Online

you?”
    â€œWhat?” I said, before I realized I had said that last bit out loud. The sound of her laugh went through my head like broken glass. No one should be laughing tonight. “Oh, nothing. Never mind. Gis another round Shirl.”
    â€œYou really have had enough, my love,” Shirl said. “Get off home with you now.”
    â€œJust a short, then,” I said.
    Shirl pulled a face but stuck a glass under the whisky optic for me anyway. God, what a total fucking balls up . I knocked back the whisky in one swallow. Too much to drink, and not nearly enough. Nowhere fucking near enough . Oblivion was still frustratingly out of reach. I prodded my empty pint glass across the bar.
    â€œDon’t be silly love,” Shirl said.
    â€œI want another beer,” I said, a touch belligerently.
    Now Shirl is lovely, she really is, but in her pub she’s the absolute monarch, make no mistake about it. She’s sixty if she’s a day and she’s still saucy-looking in a brassy sort of way, but one thing she does not take is crap off drunks.
    â€œAlfie, c’mere a minute,” she shouted up the stairs behind the bar. “I could do with a hand.”
    Alfie is Shirl’s son. If there’s a human version of Connie, he’s it. It was time to go.
    â€œNo bother, Duchess, no bother,” I said. “I’ll be on me way then.”
    Shirl gave me a sweet smile.
    â€œMind how you go now, love,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”
    It was. The pub door swung shut behind me, and I swung gracefully into the hanging baskets as the freezing air hit me in the face and my balance decided it didn’t want to work anymore. Drink is a bastard sometimes. I couldn’t talk properly, I couldn’t see straight and I certainly couldn’t walk straight, but I was still remembering perfectly well – and that was the very thing I was trying to stop doing. I didn't want to remember anything at all, but I kept seeing his face.
    The wards had been easy enough to get through in the end. The Burned Man knew its business, you had to give it that. Those manticore spines had bought me three perfectly formed screamers, and they went howling across Edinburgh and tore through Vincent and Danny’s wards like they weren’t even there. I’d still been watching the scrying glass then, out of curiosity if nothing else. Inside, the house was much what I would have expected – a magician’s version of Debbie’s flat. There was stuff absolutely everywhere, books and scrolls and crystals, swords and wands and skulls, and even an honest-to-god stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling of Vincent’s study. I’m sorry, but I had to laugh when I saw that. I hadn’t laughed since, that was for fucking sure.
    I burped and staggered into the street, blinking tears out of my eyes. Keep your shit together till you get home, Don, I told myself . You can break down in private later, where no one can see you .
    The Rose and Crown was my local, but despite what you might see on the telly there isn’t a pub on every street corner in London so it was still a good fifteen minute walk home. That’s if you’re walking in a straight line, and I wasn’t. It was getting late now, well past eleven, and the pavements were empty. I was only a couple of streets away from my office when I heard her scream.
    I almost kept walking. I know, I know, I’m a shitbag. It was late and cold and I was blind drunk and I had more than enough fucking woes of my own, and I almost kept walking. But I didn’t, you have to give me that much credit. I stopped, listening, until she screamed again. It was coming from my left, from an alley that ran between two long, low-rise blocks of flats. I rubbed a hand over my wet eyes and turned into the alley, stumbled off a wall and bumped into a dustbin, and started to get angry. Angry was good. Angry would burn the hurt