The white stretch limo was waiting for me in the train station car park. A smartly dressed chauffeur opened a passenger door and I got inside. The interior was plush white leather, the built-in drinks compartment stocked with snacks, sandwiches and non-alcoholic beverages.
Nice. Very nice indeed.
I handed my phone through the glass partition to the chauffeur. He looked at the message on the post-it note stuck to the phone, nodded and gave it back to me.
“Good weather we’re having for November,” he said.
“Not bad,” I replied.
We said nothing more as the limo purred out of town and headed for Avebury. I’d told Mum I was staying at Jess’s for the night. Mum didn’t protest. She was still feeling bad about the row we’d had. I was feeling sorry about it too, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I’d asked Jess via text if she could cover for me. She’d messaged back “Ok,” but nothing else. She was still angry about whatever it was, but again, I had enough to deal with right now.
I munched on a packet of salt and vinegar crisps as the countryside rolled past. Swigged down some Fanta.
Thought about everything Dee had told me the previous night.
*
I looked at the demonic looking, blue-skinned Deepak and blinked, my face deadpan. That was my entire reaction to Dee’s transformation, whatever Dee says. Then I turned my head away and sighed. The world was crazy, monsters were real, I was a spy working for a secret government agency and my best friend was a shape-shifting demon.
Sure. Okay.
Why not?
I rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers. I had a feeling this was going to be a long night.
Since showing his true form a minute earlier, Dee had been struggling with what to say next. We were still sitting in the car, our mobile phones safely locked away in the office.
“Soooo,” I said after a monumentally awkward pause, “You’re a, uh, some kind of demon, then?”
Dee breathed a small sigh of relief. I’d given him a starting point and hadn’t completely lost it. Not yet, at any rate.
“Not exactly,” Dee began, “We prefer the term ‘daemon’ with an ‘a’. Or ‘djinn’. Or even ‘helper spirits’ is better. Inaccurate, but a lot better than ‘demon’. Most of us that are left go with the term djinn these days so we don’t get confused with actual demons.”
“Djinn, wait, isn’t that the same as genies?” I said, “Are you going to grant me three wishes?”
Dee winced.
“Don’t be daft. I’m just not a demon like you think of it, at all. And look, please don’t use the ‘G’ word, okay? It’s a racist comment where I’m from.”
He was being serious.
“Ok, won’t happen again. But what’s the difference between geni – uh, djinn – and demons?”
“The word ‘demon’ suggests we’re evil and we want to hurt humans. We don’t. We exist to help humans, not harm them. That’s sort of our thing. Helper spirits. The good guys.”
“So you’re not evil and stuff?”
“No, not at all,” Dee replied.
“Well that’s a relief,” I muttered.
“I mean some actual djinn are evil, sure,” Dee continued, “but that’s down to individual choice the same as everyone else and is rare. Most of us are – or were – quietly helping humans along the way.”
“Were?”
“There was a schism in our society, mostly to do with the persecution of other supernatural creatures by humans. Some of us sided with the humans and evolved into angels, helping to kill all other supernaturals, claiming they were all the enemies of humanity. Others resisted, evolving into demons in the heaven and hellfire sense, to fight the angels. It became self-fulfilling mythology, if you like. We were characterised as angels and demons, so we became angels and demons. There was a civil war as a result, and over time we separated into three distinct races.”
“Three? You mean djinn, angels and demons?”
“Yeah,” Dee nodded, “Good to see you’re getting it. I’m a djinn, the original race. We refused to take sides in the civil war, mostly. Demons and angels, as you understand them, they evolved from us. The main difference between djinn, demons and angels came down to the other two warring sides possessing humans in order to fight their own corners. Possession of humans is forbidden under djinn law except in short bursts, and over time the angels’ and demons’ powers degraded as a result. Well, that’s one interpretation – the djinn interpretation. They’d say they evolved in other directions. I’d like to see any of them move stuff with their mind, speak in tongues, shape-shift and be able to materialise into a physical form, though.”
Dee sniffed at the last part. Clearly there were pride issues involved.
Before I could quiz him over his last sentence, he pressed on with his explanation of the history.
“As the war became increasingly bitter, the demons stopped giving a damn about humanity altogether. They evolved into corrupted creatures, and they blamed humans for the whole mess. The angels, meanwhile, well a lot of them seemed to enjoy hunting and killing other supernaturals a little too much. They suck just as bad as demons in their own way. Don’t be fooled by all the golden glowing eyes and white feathered wings. They’re as much a bunch of sadists as regular demons. They even came after the djinn, even though we were doing our best to sit it out and not get involved.”
“Right,” I said, trying to get my head wrapped around it and only partially succeeding.
“Despite that, some of us tried to carry on in our ‘helper spirit’ roles as before. We didn’t take sides and kept our original forms and powers. The original djinn. Both sides ended up looking down on us for not getting involved – and the ‘G’ word got thrown around a lot.
“None of it matters now, because of what happened seventy years ago, which brought the whole sorry civil war saga to an end.”
“What was that?”
“The dimension we all come from, Arcadia, is a vast source of magical energy. It’s where warlocks and witches draw power from to cast most of their spells. Our dimension isn’t like heaven or hell. It’s closer to the Garden of Eden. Nice place, decent weather, good for a laugh. Or it was until everyone went to war.
“Anyway. The gates between this world and our dimension, the magical realm, were closed, or maybe Arcadia was destroyed. I don’t know how or why, but those of us left have been stuck here ever since. The remaining angels and demons on this side pretty much wiped each other out in the last seven decades, most of them wearing meatsuits. There’s maybe a handful of us left as far as I’m aware. I’m the only true djinn I know of on this side.”
“That must kind of suck,” I said.
“Yeah, it does actually. Almost as bad as getting it in the neck for being a British-Indian kid. If I have to hear one more idiot tell me to ‘go home’ I swear I’ll show my true form just for the hell of it. Anyway, as I was saying, mate...”
“Are we?” I asked, eyes narrowed and voice sharp.
“What?” Dee replied.
“Mates?”
“Of course we are, but, see this is why I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d freak out. I’m doing this as an absolute last resort because of the danger you’re putting yourself in.”
“I’m not freaking out.”
“You are a little bit,” Dee said with his familiar, cheeky grin.
It was eerie, seeing this djinn-thing that had the tone and mannerisms of the kid I’d known for five years.
“Fine, but you can hardly blame me. I mean, this is beyond weird. What...how are you...I mean who are you? How old are you? Why are you wandering around as a sixteen-year-old British-Indian kid?”
“See? I knew you’d freak out,” Dee replied. He sounded smug about it.
“Idiot,” I said.
Dee chuckled through sharp teeth.
“Look, seeing you like that is too much, would you mind changing back to, you know, Dee for now? I mean, you can do that right? Change back?”
“Sure,” Dee said.
His body reverted to the form I knew. Teeth and nails retracted. Skin lost its blue tinge, eyes returned to their normal brown colour. There he was again, Deepak Patel. My best mate since I was eleven.
Except he wasn’t Dee at all. Or at least not the Dee I thought I knew.
“So, who are you?”
“As near as I can remember I’m a hundred years old. I think. The problem is that since the portals between our worlds were locked, everything’s been hazy. We draw our energy from our dimension, and with the connection severed everything is more difficult. My memory is fuzzy, especially since I took this human form. In the past I could shift from spirit to physical form in the blink of an eye. It was a great party trick. Now the best I can manage is to shift into something close to my original physical form and a small bit of telekinesis here and there.”
“Tele-what?”
“Telekinesis. Moving stuff with my mind. Good grief Ethan, have you ever read a comic book?”
“No, not really. Batman sometimes. You can move stuff with your mind?”
“Only little stuff. A pen rolling across a table for no reason. A coin spinning in the air for a second too long. The odd untied shoelace here and there...”
The penny dropped.
I gawped at my best friend.
“All those times you predicted when someone was about to trip over and stuff. That was you. You were doing it, not predicting it.”
Dee grinned, “Yeah, well. You’ve got to have some fun, right?”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Hey, it made us both laugh and no-one ever got hurt so what’s the harm?” Dee replied.
“So what have you got to do with all this stuff that’s been going on? Why are you here?”
“I didn’t have any choice. I was bound to you when you were a young child by a warlock.”
The more Dee talked, the deeper the rabbit hole got.
“I need an aspirin,” I said.
*
The white limo passed through Avebury. The village, in the south west of England, is famous for its three stone circles. One of them is the largest megalithic circle in the world and surrounds the six-hundred resident village, making it a major tourist attraction.
The circles aren’t as impressive as Stonehenge, although almost as well known. They have no horizontal roof stones and many of the original stones have long since vanished, leaving the three circles incomplete. Like Stonehenge, however, the reason for the circles’ construction is unknown. There are multiple theories, often to do with rituals, funerals or ancient astronomy.
The fact is that no-one knows why these massive stone monuments were built by our ancestors almost 5,000 years ago.
Avebury the village sits partially within one of the circles, and as well as being a major draw during the solstices has a cafe, gift shop, a manor and garden you can tour, a museum and more, much of it run by the National Trust.
The limo didn’t stop at Avebury, however. Instead we kept going for ten minutes past the village until we came to a small road marked with a ‘Private Property’ sign. A little further along that road and reached a tall metal gate with a two-metre high wall stretching around the grounds on the other side.
The gates opened automatically. We drove through a well-tended estate towards the mansion in the centre. The weather had turned sour in the meantime, with grey clouds covering the sky and the first few drops of falling rain threatening a downpour.
A few groundskeepers were working the gardens. They stopped to observe as we pulled up in front of the mansion.
Victoria Pryce was waiting to meet us.
Honestly, I hate everything about this chapter, but hey-ho. I'm pretty sure that the account I got from Ethan relating to what he was told by Dee is unreliable, and Dee's memory is fuzzy at best at this point. But this is how it came out from the notes I currently have.
In other news; I'm moving to 5 chapters a week, first on Patreon, then here, which will take 4 weeks to kick in for non-subscribers.
Advance chapters can be read here:
https://www.patreon.com/OfMagicAndMonsters
