Drag Hunt Read online

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2013 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Desk Editor: David Moore

  Cover art and graphic design: Pye Parr

  Marketing and PR: Michael Molcher

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Copyright © 2013 Rebellion Publishing Ltd.

  ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-528-5

  ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-529-2

  Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  Run to Ground

  England, six months ago.

  ACHING WITH AGUE, his joints stiff with age, the tramp ran, though he could barely remember how. In desperation, he cast aside the bundle of plastic bags containing all his hoarded worldly possessions, nothing now but ballast. They split as they hit the ground, their contents scattered to the winds as he fled.

  He couldn’t understand why they were chasing him. He couldn’t even remember his name; it had been so long since anyone had used it. But he remembered fear, and he ran.

  He darted through the bedraggled copse beyond the abandoned industrial estate, all that remained of the wildwood that once dominated his dreams, now a haunt of underage drinkers and doggers—old rituals turned sour. He loped down old tracks that no longer existed in anything but his threadbare memory. It wasn’t even conscious. It was pure instinct.

  In the dark, black hounds, eyes glowing as red as torturers’ coals, bayed at his heels.

  HE’D SPENT HIS day in the town centre, the kingdom of his prime, reduced to a pile of jealously guarded soggy cardboard boxes and shopping bags, under bowers of concrete blooming with graffiti. In his dreams, people sought him out with offerings, for blessings. Now, invisible, forgotten, he had to beg.

  Then they showed up.

  The silver-haired businessman with the woollen coat had dropped loose change into his broken polystyrene cup.

  “I’m sorry,” the businessman had said.

  The tramp gave him an uncomprehending toothless grin, and watched as the man walked away, taking a small glass tablet from his pocket, and drawing mystical runes on its surface.

  “Found him,” the businessman said to it. “A genius loci, no doubt.”

  Spooked, the tramp gathered up his dirty blanket, plastic bags and cardboard, and shuffled off. Maybe he was a council man. He looked the type. It was time to move on, anyhow. The shops were shutting. Their skips would be filling with out-of-date foods. Sandwiches and cakes. Left for him, like the votive offerings of his dreams.

  NOW, AIR ESCAPED from his lungs in long, dry rasps. Lank, wet, yellow-grey hair lashed his face as he glanced behind him at the pursuing shadows.

  The ground fell away beneath him. He tumbled down the embankment, staggered, dazed and half-blinded, onto the motorway.

  He whirled, confused. Around him, rushing lights striated in the hard biting rain. Squeals and screeches filled the night air as metallic monsters roared by. He threw up his arms against the light as cars swerved to avoid him, horns blaring.

  He took momentary refuge on the central reservation, before crossing the far lanes in a mad pirouetting dash and scrambling up the embankment on the other side.

  Cold, biting rain whipped across the moors above the town. He stumbled over the heather and across the bog that held the bodies of those willingly sacrificed to him, bodies long since drained of any sacred power he might have drawn from them.

  They were getting closer.

  Why? They didn’t need to do this. He was no threat to anyone.

  But his pursuers knew the old ways. They had beaten his bounds. They had run him to earth. The boundaries of his dominion had become a cage. Now they were closing in. There was only one place left to run.

  The stones rose above him on the brow of Hillstone Howe. Ancient and solitary, the stone circle, known as the Devil’s Fingers, had stood there since the town of Bridstowe had been naught but a ford across the river. They had weathered the centuries better than he had. He hobbled in desperation toward its centre, to the tall stone that stood there.

  The air burned in his chest as he reached out to touch the greasy wet surface of the menhir, and trace the illegible weathered runes carved into its lichen-poxed surface. He rested his forehead against the soothing cool damp of the stone. In his dreams, this was the seat of his tiny realm. His sacred place. His hearg. The one place he should be safe.

  “You gave us good sport!” a voice called through the wind.

  The tramp turned his back against the stone.

  “Go away! I ain’t done nuffin’.”

  The large black hounds prowled round the edge of the stone circle, low growls issuing from curled black lips. The hound master, a slim man with black hair, jet black eyes and an insolent smile, called out.

  “Little god, little god, can we come in?”

  A man with auburn hair strode from the shadows and took a defiant step into the stone circle. He looked about, as if expecting something to happen. Nothing did. A grin split his face.

  He opened his arms wide. “What, no welcome? Have you forgotten your fridh?”

  The tramp dug his heels into the dirt to scrabble backwards, but the stone was hard at his back. There was no further retreat. “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

  He saw the well-dressed businessman with his phone, hanging back. Is that how he got his kicks, having his bullyboys beat up defenceless old men?

  “You... you ain’t a bunch of them happy slappers, are you?” He’d heard apocryphal tales on the grapevine, of homeless men torched in bus shelters for the entertainment of teenage bastards with nothing better to do.

  The auburn haired man shook his head in despair. “That new bypass weakened you, practically drove a stake right through your heart. We’re just finishing the job. See it as a mercy killing. You can’t survive much longer anyway.

  “Look to yourself. Your name is long lost. You are dying, decade by decade. You are tied to this place, to the past, and it is killing you. I can give you a future. Or we can leave you and your eventual death can be meaningless. It is the Wyrd. Your choice here will have consequences. This way, you will live on, become part of something greater.” He looked around. The sickly dirty orange glow of the conurbation leeched over the hills. In the distance, the constant rubber rumble of the motorway rushed like a river. He waved a dismissive hand. “This is no place for gods. House god, show him.”

  Bristling at the name, the businessman in the woollen greatcoat and scarf stepped forward and crouched down on his haunches, pinching and pulling his trousers at the knees fastidiously as he did so. He placed his palms either side of the tramp’s head, and searched his rheumy eyes.

  “You’ve lost your memories. I know where they are.”

  Under his touch, the tramp felt the truth of the words. He remembered now. Those who dwelt around here once
worshipped him, they used to seek him out, ask favours and boon. He remembered the offerings, the sacrifices and the fornicating in his honour, but now, all that remained were embers of his greatness and they were fast fading to ashes. He was old and tired, the glories of his youth long behind him. He had been dying for centuries, piece by piece, his spirit necrotising under a creeping industrialisation that spread like a canker across his ward. He was forgetting who he was, what he was. Fading. His end was inevitable.

  He drew a great sucking breath, like a drowning man come to air. It was as if he had shed a great burden, although he could no longer say what it was; but the relief was palpable. He relaxed, slumping back against the standing stone. The tramp looked up and smiled, his puffy red eyes welling with tears, nose running with snot. At last, he knew. He remembered. He looked up at the auburn haired man.

  “Something greater. You promise?” he asked with a note of desperation, as if this moment of lucidity was only fleeting and would soon be gone again.

  The auburn haired man nodded.

  The tramp stood up with some measure of pride now in his bearing, an echo of the being he once was. “Then I give it, willingly.”

  The auburn haired man stood over him and from a sheath at his hip drew a knife, its blade etched with runes.

  The man grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, exposing the pale throat, its pores blackened with grime beneath the dirty yellow-grey beard. With a swift movement, he slit the tramp’s throat with the knife. Black liquid welled up from the gash.

  “Thank... you,” said the tramp, his voice a hoarse whisper as his eyes locked with those of his redeemer.

  “Quick!” hissed the auburn haired man. “His sacrifice here isn’t enough. Catch his ichor. We need his godsblood.”

  Another man stepped forward with a large ornate two-handled silver phial, catching the vital fluid that issued from the wellspring of the tramp’s throat, filling the container and stoppering it.

  The tramp’s body stiffened. His wretched jumble of clothing appeared to swell, but it was his body shrivelling, the black ichor escaping from his throat now transforming, on contact with the air, into a swirling black vapour, like greasy smoke, that was caught in the rain, dissolved in relentless drops, and pounded back into the earth.

  The sodden clothing crumpled, empty, to the ground.

  Within moments, the wind began to shriek round the stones, as if the very earth were keening for the loss of its warden.

  And in the sodium twilight of the town below, the dogs began to howl.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Coyote Makes His Mark

  THE COYOTE LOPED through the brush of the Mojave desert, toward the heat-rippled vertical smudges of civilisation in the distance.

  He loved the rocks, the sand, this shrub here, that abandoned, half-buried shopping trolley over there. He loved it all.

  He looked at the sinking sun and grinned. He did that. Him. He gave sunlight to the world. He stole it from right under Owl’s wing. Some might consider it a mere etiologic tale, but every word of it was true. It was in books and everything.

  And here, in the Mojave desert, mortals had briefly created their own man-made sun. The power of creation and destruction, once held to be the purview of gods. Some gods didn’t like that. Not Coyote, though. He admired humans for it. How far they’d come since he stole fire for the People. He found them fascinating.

  He raised his nose into the wind catching the scents, searching for something. He found it, stopped, inhaled deeply and licked his chops. Women in ranches. Like hens. Heh. A coyote in the hen house. He tried to smile although he’d never quite got the hang of it. It looked like he was just baring his teeth, but inside... inside he was smiling. Lewdly.

  The serenity of the desert evening was shattered by a loud, shrill fart.

  “Shut up. Nobody asked you,” said the coyote, flicking his tail.

  To his left, a cluster of small rocks toppled from an outcrop.

  “And the world agrees with me!” the coyote declared with satisfaction.

  He sat and watched from a vantage point as the sun set and the lights of the town flickered into life below it. The Sky Beam pierced the evening sky.

  The coyote sighed, flicked his tail and headed down into Las Vegas.

  EYES OPENED HESITANTLY as he surfaced to consciousness. Reality trickled in. He took in the small environment about him; snapshots of indeterminate ground, like a NASA Mars robot testing its camera. He waited for his focus to adjust, while his senses flooded with data—mostly pain—until he was drowning in it.

  He was slumped against the side of a dumpster in a puddle of his own piss. His chinos were wet and cold at the crotch. He put a hand to his head. His fingers came away covered with tiny rust flakes of dried blood. Unable to breathe through his nose, he prised a dried plug of bloodied snot from his nostril with a fingernail and the iron tang caught the back of his throat as he hawked up.

  He needed a little help here. He patted himself down. Nothing was broken. Sore, yes. But not broken. No wallet. No ID. No hotel key card. Great.

  Something bobbed to the surface. A name. Green. Richard Green. It was quickly followed by the floating memory turds of recent events.

  He let out a groan.

  No matter how stubbornly he tried to flush them away, the unsavoury facts of his life remained.

  A month before, he had had a small but comfortable flat, a safe, if boring, job and a girlfriend, Becky. He’d been happy. Well, not happy exactly, content maybe. But you couldn’t be happy all the time. Happiness was moments. Brilliant moments to be sure, but they never lasted. They were the highs, the peak of the wave. Contentment was more of your cruising altitude. Only he’d nosedived from contentment into despair.

  Britain had been dogged by outbreaks of misfortune. ‘Bad Luck Britain!’ the tabloids cawed, gleefully cataloguing the latest misfortunes: a refinery fire in the North East, fourteen dead; three dead from a collapsing church spire in the Midlands.

  And six months ago, the tide of bad luck lapped Bridstowe; a multiple pile-up on the bypass, a young kiddy gone missing, the local team on a losing streak that would cost them the final if they couldn’t pull their bloody finger out, a swingeing round of cuts from the council. And then, without warning, he was laid off from the electrical chain store where he worked. That was when Becky left him. At least, he had his redundancy pay. That was something.

  “You’ve never done anything with your life. Now’s the chance,” his mates had said down theDesk and Jockey pub. “Go to Las Vegas, live a little!”

  Dave had gone on a stag do. It was proper brilliant, apparently.

  It was pointless trying to argue over the blare of the HDTV music channel on the flat screen above their heads, so he’d nodded and grinned, unconvinced at the time, as Dave regaled them with tales of the luck, loot and lewdness to be had. Slightly pissed, a crooked smile slewed across Richard’s face as he listened, and the idea grew on him. He staggered back from the pub a little the worse for wear. Before he’d had a chance to sober up and consider the proposition, he’d toggled on his tablet, booked the flights and the hotel.

  He’d show Becky.

  Oh, yeah. He’d shown her all right. At first Richard didn’t realise he could move and, when he did, it hurt. He levered himself upright, leaning heavily on the dumpster, and staggered into the street.

  There sidewalk hawkers taunted him with flyers for ranch houses, brothels and escorts. Gaggles of women staggered down the street in impossibly high heels, clutching popcorn-sized buckets full of Margaritas.

  Richard glowered at them all right now. He resented Las Vegas with every fibre of his being. He begrudged every cheery raucous shout and smiling face. He hated the gaudy neon lights and huge monumental edifices to greed that rose from every corner.

  Las Vegas had shrugged off the resentment of millions of losers; chewed them up, parted them from their cash and their dreams, and spat them out. It didn’t notice one more.


  Richard Green wandered the Strip in a daze, his mind fixated on the stranger who had got him into this mess in the first place, and his vitriol reserved for the one place that got him into this mess in the first place, the Olympus.

  “‘Trust me, I have a system...’” he muttered to himself in a mocking whine. He shook his head in disbelief at his own gullibility. “Fuck.”

  FOR THIRTY YEARS, the Olympus had been the biggest draw in Las Vegas, popular with tourists for its amazing light show. The Bellagio and Luxor both attempted to ape its grandeur and its sheer opulence, but ultimately paled into insignificance. Still, the sympathetic magic worked, up to a point.

  Set back from Las Vegas Boulevard, a curved avenue lined with statues of athletically posed Greek heroes led up to it and, nestled within the curve, a full-sized Parthenon sat in front of the hotel complex.

  Atop the seventy-floor, white, ancient-Greek-themed building, was a classical Greek temple. This acropolis was as far above the tourists below as the gods were above mortals, and just as unreachable. Each evening, a bank of clouds rolled out from the summit of the Olympus, an ephemeral stage for an aerial Light Spectacular, a show of musical thunder and multicoloured lightning flashing within the clouds, while CGI spectacles were projected up onto the cloud base as Greek myths played out above the tourists’ heads.

  In the Parthenon, half naked, bronzed and oiled Spartans flexed and posed for the tourists, with refrains of “This. Is. Vegas!” to the squeals of delight from giddy women old enough to know better, but old enough not to care.

  It was top of the list for every tourist and Richard had been no exception. It was all part of the genuine Las Vegas experience. The brochures said so. Not that he could afford to stay there. Still, it was something to tick off his list.

  Richard pushed through the crowd of tourists, the space filled with the chirps of cameras and smartphones pecking at the sights like ravenous gulls.