Bone Gods

CHAPTER 27

Pete had never died before. She’d been stabbed, when Jack and Algernon Treadwell had their dust-up over his body, but she’d never seen the Bleak Gates.

She opened her eyes to the flat, the same stained ceiling and Moorish chandelier. The same wrinkled rug under her back. For a moment, she thought the nightsong orchid hadn’t worked at all. She sat up, fuzzy headed, the walls pulsating slightly when she wobbled and grabbed the sofa for balance. She felt like nothing so much as tremendously hungover, mouth dry and eyes aching as the light from outside streamed through the shutters.

“Jack?” She was alone, the candles at the head and foot of the circle burnt down to nubs of wax that cascaded across the wood like lava flow. The flat was dark, bulbs in the lamps burnt out in their sockets. Mosswood and his tea had vanished from the sofa. “Jack!” Pete shouted. She took a step outside the chalk marks. Her boot crunched down on a fine grit across the floor. She bent and rubbed black, oily smut between her fingers.

“Soot,” Jack said from the kitchen archway. Pete felt her heart convulse inside her ribs at the sound.

“You fucking sneak!” she told him. “Scared me half to fucking death.”

“It’s soot.” Jack gestured at the black coating over every surface of the flat. Pete brushed her hand on her denim.

“Did it work? We’re in the exact same spot.”

“It worked.” Jack massaged his forehead. “Sight is going insane and I feel like I just drank enough whiskey to fill the Thames. That’s a nightsong trip, by the fucking book.”

Pete pulled the shutters open, squinting against the light. London was covered over by black smoke, clinging to the rooftops and obscuring the flash of the Thames in the distance. Their usual view was wreckage, all of the post-Blitz buildings vanished: in their place were blackened bricks and crooked chimneys. The windows of the flat were cracked and in a few cases shattered altogether, letting in the sounds of the street, the clatter of cars seventy years past their prime, and the wail of an occasional air-raid siren.

“Is this coal smoke?” Pete said, coughing as more of the stuff wafted inside. Under Victoria, the miasma got so thick it would sometimes fell infants and those with weak lungs, giving London the undesirable nickname of the Smoke. Victorian London, though, didn’t have cars, or klaxons, or their 1920s flat block.

Jack pointed east, to where the smoke thickened to obscurity, blotting out the horizon into a blurry line. “They’re burning their dead,” Jack said.

“Who?” Pete stared at the spot, discerning blue-white flame dancing at the horizon line. “There’s nobody out there,” she said. No footprints disturbed the soot and ash on the street below. All the noise came from far off, the empty city acting as a giant echo chamber.

“There’s an eternal fire at the Bleak Gates,” Jack said. “The souls who don’t pass or won’t stay in the fire forever. East is the Land of the Dead.” He closed the shutters. “We’re not going that way.”

Pete re-examined the flat, covered in the ashes of the damned souls trapped at the Bleak Gates. “Fine by me,” she said, trying again to swipe the oily stuff off her hands.

“We should move,” Jack said. “We’re a fucking homing beacon for anything hungry out here. Live souls don’t come along every hour.” He peered into the hall before stepping out, moving tight, eyes always roving.

“So, what will get us first?” Pete said, sticking close to his shoulder, a stagger pattern used by incident response teams. Of course, in incident response there were more than two people, and they had stab vests and rifles rather than jackboots and ragged denim.

“Damned souls. Scavengers. Demon on a day trip up from the pit,” Jack said. “Take your pick.”

A single bulb flickered in the hallway, and when they reached the street, Pete was assaulted by the dry, crackled scent of the funeral pyres and the flicker of shadowed, winged figures passing through the smoke overhead.

“I thought it would be more…” She looked at the ruins of the Mile End Road, the UNDERGOUND sign outside the tube station hanging by its wires. Far below them a train rumbled, whistle screaming as it ran on without stopping. The asphalt was pitted, down to the brick below in most places, and Pete stumbled. “More … otherworldly,” she finished.

“Think of the thin spaces like shared hallucinations,” Jack said. “We’re both pulling bits, things we’ve seen, psychic impressions, painting it onto the nothing out there. That’s what it is, you know. Sucking nothing. We stay too long and we’ll forget the street ever looked any other way.”

“It looks more like I imagined Hell,” Pete said, boot nudging aside burned and cracked bones. Human or animal, she didn’t care to stop and be sure.

Jack’s mouth tightened. “This is a far fucking cry from Hell. Trust me.”

Pete decided to ignore his black expression. “How do we get Carver back?”

Jack patted himself down for a cigarette, and then cursed. “Of everything in my pockets, you’d think I’d at least carry over the fags.”

Pete checked her own pockets experimentally. Her mobile was missing, along with her wallet, but her crumpled pack of Parliaments was still in evidence. Her clothes had changed as well, and she realized that Jack wasn’t wearing his black shirt and denim from before. “What the fuck?” she said, gesturing at him.

“This is what your soul chose to dress itself as,” Jack said, snatching the Parliaments from her hands. “Which is lucky, because I’ve seen blokes cross over starkers more than once.”

“You’re actually not complaining that I’m not naked?” Pete cadged a fag back and lit it.

“Not the time or place,” Jack said, and exhaled a cloud of blue. “More’s the fucking pity.”

“Certainly not,” Pete said. She passed the White Hart, her and Jack’s favorite pub on Whitechapel Road, and saw that it was burned out, twisted forms of metal lying in the wreckage. “I didn’t think I had anything in my head that was quite this apocalyptic.”

Jack flicked his fag away after a single drag. “Well, ’s not my fault. I was thinking about a Tahitian beach full of topless backup dancers when I went under.” He glanced up at the shapes moving through the shadows overhead and took Pete’s hand. “We should pick up speed. It’s going to be Mad fucking Max here in a few more minutes.”

Pete checked herself over as they walked, realized she was back in the clothes she’d been wearing the day Jack died. Thanks so fucking much for that. See Petunia. See Petunia’s dysfunctional subconscious. See Petunia have a nervous breakdown and be taken into care.

Jack, for his part, looked as he had the first time Pete had seen him at sixteen. Shredded Sham 69 shirt, denim that fit him like his skin, and the jacket that let him look bigger than he really was. Jack wasn’t the sort of man most sensible people would fuck with, but he definitely wasn’t going to win dust-ups on pure mass alone. The jacket was his old one, hammered with silver pyramid studs, drawn on and scraped up, the Dead Kennedys armband stained with something that was either curry sauce or blood: Pete had never asked. Subtract the lines from his face, add a little height to the bottle-blond hair, and it was Jack a dozen years ago plus change. Before he’d gone away and come back with the flatness in his eyes.

Pete focused on not turning her ankle on the pitted pavement rather than contemplating what she had to admit was true—Jack was different. How different, she didn’t know. Whatever Belial had done to him, though, she’d bet the admittedly anemic balance of her savings account that she’d find out soon.

“Stay with me,” Jack told her when she got a few paces behind him. “Nothing’s real, and nothing’s to be trusted.”

“You can die here, real enough,” Pete said, not letting it be a question. The shapes overhead were more, and lower, and she could hear the hiss of man-sized wings through the smoke-shrouded sky.

“You can die a lot of places,” Jack said. “This one just happens to be slightly more unpleasant than a gutter, or a grave.” He glanced upward at the shadows. “If you die here, you stay here. These bastards are sharper than I thought. We’d better get inside.”

He led the way into the burnt shell of the White Hart, mounting the creaking stairway to the upper floor. “Carver’s got to be close by.” Jack lit a fag and dragged on it. His wrist flashed free from his leather and Pete noticed that the white lines on his forearm were back. In her memory, Jack still had scars.

Pete settled herself by the window. The glass was just jagged teeth, mostly gone, and it caught on her elbow as she shifted. “Ah, dammit. You think we’d imagine someplace that wasn’t quite so sharp.”

“That’s the Black,” Jack said. “Putting sooty little fingers all over your third eye. You start bleeding,” he said, pointing to her torn shirt, “we’re fucked.” He came over to her and leaned out the window. “They aren’t after us yet, but live blood will light us up like Las Vegas. They’re looking for him.”

“What are they?” Pete watched slow-descending fireworks blossom as the air raid klaxons wailed on. Billows of fire erupted where they fell to earth, a meteor shower sprung from a human hand. Juniper’s mother had lived through the Blitz, as a teenager, and in the few years that Pete had been old enough to pay attention before she passed, Nana Morrow still refused to go into tube tunnels and hated any noise above pleasant, thoroughly British conversation. She’d been a far cry from their Grandmother Caldecott, whose father had been an IRA fighter and who, when Connor stepped out for a fag during their summers in Galway, had told Pete and MG stories about the fuckin’ Black and Tan bastards what dragged him away when she was a girl.

“Heard a lot of theories,” Jack said. “Lost souls. Things that don’t have souls. Grim reapers, if you want to get Judeo-Christian about it. They’re from the Underworld, but not welcome in it. They feed on the ones that fall by the wayside, don’t make it to the Bleak Gates. Anything that passes through. Human, demon, it doesn’t matter. They’re never short of new meat, though usually the meat’s not stupid enough to waggle itself under their noses.”

Pete watched the shadows’ passage as they drifted to the south over Limehouse, dipping low out across the river like ink drops, ever changing and shifting, until they dropped out of the smoke to alight on the diseased, sewage-choked water.

“There,” Jack said at her shoulder. “They’ve caught the scent. As it were, since it’d take a fucking miracle to smell anything in this place except burned bones and shit.”

Pete backed away from the window. “South?”

“South,” Jack agreed. “Down to the banks of the dirty river we go.”

CHAPTER 28

While they walked, things solidified. Pete stopped feeling as if her mind were two steps ahead of her body, and the lines of things no longer blurred when she moved her head too fast. She wondered how long she’d been under. How much pull the Bleak Gates exerted as the orchid slowly killed her.

“This is strange,” she said to Jack.

“We’re in fucking purgatory,” Jack said, as if she’d stated that she had black hair.

In the next step, before Pete could take the opening to air her feelings that nothing about this vision of the thin spaces was right or proper, nothing like when she’d seen a brief snatch while bleeding from Treadwell’s stab wound, nothing that was going to help them, a bank of floodlights snapped on and sliced across her face.

“Fuck!” Pete hissed, as her corneas flexed painfully.

“Stay still,” Jack told her.

Pete shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand, discerning shapes behind the blazing klieg lights but not much more. “Scavengers?” she said to Jack.

“No bloody idea,” he said. “But no, if it was, we’d be a meal by now.”

“At least somebody’s got their head twisted on straight around here,” said a voice from behind the lights. The largest of the shapes chopped a motion, and slowly the spots pointed at the ground rather than Pete’s eyes.

“Don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Jack told the voice. “But we’re not sticking about long. We’ll turn one way and you turn the other. How’s that sound?”

“I’ve not turned stupid just because I’m dead, you twat,” the voice growled. Pete could nearly place it—she’d heard it before, using the same scornful undertone.

“You lot aren’t from this place,” it said. “You’re living and breathing, and you’ve got flesh to go home to.” The figure stepped forward, backlit by the lights.

Pete squeezed her eyes shut as she saw the thick neck, bifurcated by a ragged cut, and the bottle-brush hair. “Shit. McCorkle, is that you?”

“What’s left of me,” he agreed, teeth pulling back from his lips. His face was a corpse’s face, blue and swollen on one side with livor mortis. Clad in tattered leathers, he looked more like the zombie from outside his flat than a thing that had ever been alive.

“Who the fuck’s McCorkle?” Jack said out the side of his mouth. “Boyfriend?”

“Naughton made him kill himself,” Pete replied in kind. “He stole some kind of musty artifact Naughton needs for the ritual. Him and Carver both.”

“Brave man,” Jack said aloud. “Stealing from a necromancer. But I see you learned the hard way, it’s ultimately idiotic.”

“I didn’t believe in magic,” McCorkle said. “Thought I was buying a relic, not a fucking piece of the fabric of Hell.”

“Freddy,” Pete said. “We’re just passing. We’re looking for your partner, not you.”

McCorkle reached out and pulled her close by the front of her clothing, until their faces were less than an inch apart. He smelled dead, too sweet, and slimy, and she could see the bilious black marks creeping under his skin. McCorkle was caught decaying, eternally falling apart while he was stuck in the thin spaces. If this was what McCorkle had seen, it was no wonder Naughton was able to convince him to carve his carotid like a Christmas ham. “Freddy’s not here any longer,” he told Pete. “And I know exactly what you want. Which is why I think you’ll be spending a little time with me instead.”

Another few of the decayed ghosts came forward and grabbed Jack, who moaned and grabbed at his temples, nails leaving long furrows, when they touched him.

“Please,” Pete said. “He’s a sensitive.”

McCorkle grinned at her, gums black. “Then you’d better hope I decide to let you go before his brain’s about as useful as a raw turnip, hadn’t you?”

He hustled her with him into the tunnel of light, and Pete didn’t resist, because it was that or be left alone in the thin space, with nothing but shadows for company.

CHAPTER 29

The gang took them to a rotting pier with a rotting warehouse piled on top, stretching out into the Thames. The Docklands before they’d been reinvented as the shining jewel on the breast of London—dirty, rat-infested, and full of cutthroats.

“Jack?” Pete said as what had been McCorkle prodded her along with his swollen hands. She hated the note of panic in her voice, hated that she was turning to him instead of trying to get out of this mess herself, but she looked to Jack and hoped that she wouldn’t see the same panic reflected in his face.

Jack tried to reach out for her, but the things jerked him away, three of them. The largest had a truncheon, and he slammed Jack across the back of the knees to still his struggling. Jack buckled. “Fuck! Fuck you straight up the arse, you poncey putrefied bastards!”

One of the three stuffed a greasy kerchief into Jack’s mouth, muffling his yells. “What should we do with ’im?” it asked.

“Chop him up!”

“Throw him in the river and let the naiads pick his flesh!”

McCorkle tossed Pete down to the splinter-ridden wood of the pier along with Jack. “How about you brain-rotted morons shut your gobs?”

“Ey,” the one who’d hit Jack leered. “You wait a bit longer, bright boy. Yours’ll rot like pudding as well.”

Jack mumbled something around the gag, and McCorkle jerked his hand. His nails were long and spotted with graveyard dirt. “Get the crow-mage out of my sight. He doesn’t have any wisdom for us.”

The other ghosts hauled Jack away, and McCorkle crouched, lifting Pete’s chin with his fingertip. That nail dug into her, pricking the tender spot under her chin. She pulled back. “Look, Freddy, I’m fresh out of shock and dismay, so why don’t you just exposit and threaten, and we’ll take it from there?”

McCorkle tried to grin. In the light, Pete could see his upper lip was bifurcated by a stray knife slash, exposing his full gums. “You’re a mouthy bitch, Caldecott. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Enough times that if I had a quid for each one, I’d be rich enough to buy myself a life without things like you in it,” Pete said.

McCorkle’s hand tightened on her. “You snark again and I’ll rip your tongue out of your head and swallow it whole.” He sat back on his heels and waited. Pete stared at him, refusing to blink first, but she kept quiet. Ghosts were the worst bits of you—rage and pettiness and fear—and McCorkle had hated her more than enough in life to do everything he’d threatened.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here.” McCorkle leaned in so he was almost whispering in her ear. “I’m just glad you came.” He lifted a finger toward the half-caved in roof. “You see those things up there? The carrion birds of the Underworld? They scavenge us like meat.” He snorted, and a bubble of bloody snot grew on one nostril. “Suppose I am that. Meat. But now…” He petted the spot under Pete’s chin where he’d cut her. “Now, we’ve got something live to feed them. Had me a snake when I was a boy, used to swallow mice that trembled just the way you are now. Predators love live meat.”

Pete stared into McCorkle’s sunken face. She realized that the lack of panic probably meant her mind had simply said “fuck it” and gone into standby mode until she could have a proper breakdown. She had to put that off as long as possible, preferably when she wasn’t a hairsbreadth from her eternal reward. “Naughton killed you,” she said. “Those others as well?”

“He’s been at it for a while,” McCorkle said. “Carver was very impressed with his old boss man.”

“But not you,” Pete ventured. The old scenario—distract the mad bastard until she had time to come up with something clever. Distract herself so she didn’t simply start screaming.

“We were schoolmates, Gerry and I,” McCorkle said. “Brain on that bastard was big and squashy, but he was a klepto even then. Mum used to beat the Hell out of him, and sweets and cigarettes would pop out of his pockets while he mewled and whinged.”

“So naturally when you became the very brightest of the dirty coppers, you turned to your mate with all of the best scratch,” Pete said.

“He didn’t want to sell me that thing, but his obese whore of a mother needed some hip wotsit. Could have told her fat arse to lay off the Guinness and chips and gotten the same result,” McCorkle said. “Then I start getting harassed. Sods in suits, jabbering about witchcraft. It was fucking comical. Thought so right up until Gerry got himself sliced. Thought so even as I did the same.”

“I could’ve told you not to trust a spoiled public school brat who mucks about with corpses,” Pete said. “Honestly, McCorkle, that shouldn’t have been a hard one even for someone like you.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you, you fucking Irish twat,” McCorkle said. “Someone tells you you’ve bought a reliquary for a dead god, you tell them to fuck off and stay on their meds. Don’t pretend you were so open-minded, before you spread your legs for all that nonsense.”

He drew a hunting knife out of his belt and waggled it in Pete’s vision, huge as Nelson’s column. “The only thing I need from you is to decide whether I gut you and leave you for the crows before or after I fuck you senseless.”

Pete’s heart sped up, even though she shouldn’t have a heartbeat at all in this place. The orchid trance was tipping over into actual death, and her only hope was that Mosswood would pull her out before McCorkle carved her up. But that would leave Jack behind, so she forced herself to stop shaking, reach up, and close her fist around the blade of McCorkle’s knife. “Don’t talk your power-and-control rapist shit at me, you poncey little cunt. You’re not the worst nightmare I’ve seen. Not by fucking far.” The blade slid into her hand as though her flesh were warm and buttery, and her blood was hot when it dribbled down her forearm. The pain of severed nerves came more slowly. Pete ignored it. Pain was tertiary.

“The only thing you can do to me,” McCorkle snarled, “is beg not to be alive when I violate you like the little Catholic whore you are.”

“First of all,” Pete said. “I haven’t been inside a church voluntarily since I was thirteen. Second of all, if you were going to do it, you’d’ve done it by now. Not your fault. I imagine at some point, your balls rotted and fell off.” Pete didn’t think about her bloody hand, the cool steel in her grip, Mosswood or Jack or any of it. McCorkle was all that mattered. He was standing between her and Carver. Between her and getting back to the daylight world with her soul.

McCorkle tried to pull his knife back, but Pete grabbed the hilt with her other hand, closing her fingers over his slimy digits. “I can help you,” she said, not blinking. If she blinked, or thought, she’d go mad with terror. Fear was the only sane response to something like McCorkle, to being in the thin spaces and so close to death at all.

“Help me? Do you realize where we are?” McCorkle barked a dead man’s deformed laugh, born from collapsed lungs.

“I know that you can’t leave again, unlike me,” Pete said. “I know it was Naughton who fucked you in the arse and sent you here. All of you. All I want in return is Carver.”

McCorkel’s face twitched spastically, his nerves running wild. “And what’ll you do for me?”

“I’ll send Nicholas Naughton down here in my place,” Pete said. “And him, you can do whatever you like with.”

She watched him with all her copper instincts, trying to pick a hint off of his mangled face. McCorkle sniffed deeply. “Why should I trust you? Naughton’s sent near a dozen of us down here, trying to cage his bloody demon or demigod or whatever it is. You won’t do any better against him.”

“I’m not like these sad things.” Pete pointed at the other ghosts, clustered a little way away. “As for Nick Naughton—I hate that bastard more than Hitler.”

“You’d slice him cold-blooded, for me?” McCorkle grinned and slowly released his grip on the knife. “I think I’m in love.”

The blade clattered to the boards, and Pete tucked her hand under her T-shirt, trying to sop up the free-flowing blood. It felt like she’d pressed a poker against her palm, red hot and prickling.

“Give me Carver,” she said, “you get Naughton. Soul for a soul. Even you can do that math, Freddy.” She got to her feet and raised the index finger on her good hand. “Oh, and Jack’s leaving here, too.”

“No,” McCorkle said at once. “The crow-mage stays.”

“Fine,” Pete said. “Then you might as well get on with the cutting and the raping, because Naughton is far too clever for the likes of you. You’ll be here until the crows out there suck you dry like a milkshake.”

“For a good little girl, you do seem to love sticking your fingers into the fires,” McCorkle said, and then bellowed gutturally. The trio of ghosts reappeared, dragging Jack.

Pete narrowed her eyes, a black sense of unease crawling up from the pit of her mind, where her talent lay. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He hasn’t told you?” McCorkle said. “How he crawled up out of Belial’s charnel house, like the snake in the garden of Eden?”

“I don’t care what Jack did for Belial,” Pete told McCorkle. It was none of his bloody buisness. He was a ghost. She was allowed to lie to those sorts of creatures.

“Belial?” McCorkle’s tongue flicked in, out. “No, I don’t think it’s the Prince you have to worry about. I’d wager it’s the Hag.”

“Jack’s a servant of the Morrigan,” Pete said. “It doesn’t mean a bloody thing.” She turned to go, but McCorkle snatched her arm. Jack extricated the kerchief from his mouth and started for them.

“Get your fucking hands off her.”

“Don’t think I will,” McCorkle told him. “You hear things, out here in the nothingness. Echoes from the Underworld, from the Hag herself, and the army she’s gathering at her feet. We hear the dead whispering, from inside the wall. So unless you want me to tell your little flower here what I’ve heard … you be sweet to me, crow-mage.”

Pete expected Jack to curse, sneer, and possibly set McCorkle on fire with his mind. She didn’t expect him to freeze, an expression close to panic on his face.

“Don’t,” he told McCorkle. “Or I’ll…”

“Or you’ll what, crow-mage?” McCorkle snarled. He let go of Pete and spread his arms. “I’m a piece of flesh and soul trapped in the maw of Hell, Winter! Do your fucking worst!”

Jack closed distance and took Pete’s hand. “Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s get the fuck away from here.”

“Go!” McCorkle crowed. “Carver’s on Blackfriars Bridge. He’s waiting for you, Petunia Caldecott. And so’s the truth!”

Jack yanked her along and they were clear of the warehouse and the horrid mortuary stink of the Thames. “Move it,” he said. “You’re bleeding like a pig and the crows’ll be thick as flies.”

Pete shrugged free of his grasp and stopped walking. She knew that McCorkle hadn’t been lying, at least not completely. She knew with the certainty that her talent gave her, that certain events were inexorable and fixed, and that the truth couldn’t be buried. “Are you?”

“I’m not running on demon fuel,” Jack said, too quickly. “I’m still flesh and blood. You should know after what we did.”

Pete shut her eyes. Don’t look. Don’t let him put the lie in your mind. “Are you who you were, Jack? Did the Morrigan do something for you? To you?”

Jack didn’t answer her. He only started walking again, and Pete was left to either follow or be left alone in crumbling, poisoned London.

CHAPTER 30

In Pete’s waking life, Blackfriars Bridge was a cluttered span of taxis and people, the red wrought iron appearing too delicate and lacy to support the load of London’s populace. Now it was sooty black and canted to one side, pilings groaning as the black tide of the Thames rushed around it.

At the center, where the river ran deepest, a single lamp was still lit, flickering like a firefly in a jar. Under the lamp waited a man, or at least a man-shaped shadow.

“Spirit,” Jack said, rubbing his index finger against his temple as if his brain itched. “Not a ghost. That’s a soul. At least that McCorkle wasn’t a liar on top of a great pasty twat.”

“Carver?” Pete called, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Gerard Carver?”

The shadow didn’t move, except to raise a hand and lower it again.

“Careful,” Jack said. “You stay here long enough when you’re not all the way dead, you get as crazy and vicious as those scavenger souls.”

“I think I’m tipping over,” Pete said. She could feel the mist now, the cold on her skin, every inch of her nerves and blood, as if she were really here as opposed to only visiting. “I’m smaller and I took the same dose. We need him before Mosswood pulls us out.”

“Fine, then,” Jack said. “What was that? Go big or go home?” He started straight for Carver, paying no mind to the holes in the road bed.

Carver looked better than he had in life, wearing a tweed suit and a midly interested expression, ginger beard neatly trimmed. “I knew someone would come,” he said. “You’re not any of Naughton’s.”

“Should bloody hope not,” Jack said.

“He did send us,” Pete said. “He wants you back. You cocked up his ritual.”

“Nicholas cocked up his own ritual,” Carver said viciously. “Tried it without the reliquary, in what might as well have been broad fucking daylight. Hated that arrogant bastard.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “Ethan Morningstar is big into the hatred, from what I’ve seen.”

Carver blinked at her from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles. “I might have known Ethan would hire on sorcerers. Always did have more drive than sense, God bless him.”

“Oi, you ginger cunt,” Jack said. “God’s not here. Never has been.”

“You cannot return me to my flesh,” Carver said, expression slipping into terror. “You don’t know what Naughton’s tried to do.”

“Reliquary, necromantic ritual, human sacrifice,” Pete said. “It’s a summoning, isn’t it? Some big nasty burrowed down in the muck of the Underworld.”

“So much worse,” Carver said with a laugh that sounded like ashes. “I’m not going back. I’ll stand here until the ashes have burned down and the dragon has wrapped himself around the world. That will be my final service to the Order. I’ll repent for all my necessary sins at last.”

Pete cut a glance at Jack, who rolled his eyes heavenward. “Madness sets in quicker for some,” she said.

“He’s not mad,” Jack said. “He’s just spouting that thirdhand apocalyptic crap. Jesus freaks and necromancers, I told you. And this bright lad is both.”

“Crow-mage,” Carver said, “you of all people should know that I’m speaking the truth. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“He’s here with me,” Pete said. “We’re taking you with us, so I suggest you don’t kick up a fuss.”

Carver smiled, and his mouth was a black slice in his pale face, his skin pulling back into a wide mockery of joy. “Winter’s not here with you, little one.”

“Shut up,” Pete told him. “I don’t need to be riddled by dead men.”

Carver stepped into the light. His eyes were pure black, the eyes of a ghost, seeing countries and dreamscapes far beyond living sight.

“The crow-mage isn’t your man, Weir. He’s come through fire. He’s changed.”

Pete waited for a rebuttal, but there was silence from Jack, and Carver began to laugh. The sound was like a nail in Pete’s skull. She became aware Jack was out of her eyeline, standing just behind her and to the side, looking down at his boots. “Jack?” she said softly, the plunge in her stomach having nothing to do with the cant of the bridge.

He said nothing, didn’t move, and Carver continued to laugh.

“You crawled out of Hell, you came through fire, and she didn’t find that suspicious?” He shook his head at Pete. “You stupid, stupid bitch.”

Pete pointed a finger at him. “You, shut your gob. Jack, what is he talking about?”

Jack finally raised his head. “You didn’t know what it was like there. In Hell. I was there for good. I belonged to Belial.”

“Jack…,” Pete started. “You didn’t…” Jack had never believed in destiny, any more than Pete had. The Morrigan had marked him as her own, but to Jack it didn’t mean anything more than his sight and a mildly irritating nickname. Jack detested his patron goddess even more than Belial. He wouldn’t have.

“She came to me at my lowest, and she explained what I’d always known, really. She’d put her mark on me, named me as the crow-mage for this moment, when the Black is in flux, dying and coming up from the ashes. Who’s standing when that happens is up to her. She’s the Hag, Pete. She’s the raven of war, the bedmate of death.”

Pete’s throat tightened as Jack went on in a flat shell-shocked tone barely audible over the rush of water. “There is a storm sweeping over the Black, and when it clears the shadow of the crow will reach across every face in it. It’s the Hag’s time, and the crow-mage stands at the head of the Hag’s army of the dead. Not the necromancers, not the Hecate, and nobody else. I’m her walker, Pete. I’m the hand of death. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

He stepped forward, stretching out his hand to Carver. “Gerard Carver, I bind you soul and spirit to your earthly flesh, life after death, until my word says otherwise. My will is your will, living and dead, ashes and dust.”

Pete felt the flare of magic, dark and sooty as the air around them. Black magic always felt like a needle, loaded with a drug and primed straight into her senses. It was hot coals and glacial ice, the stench of decaying flesh and of the fires of Hell, all at once. Jack shivered as the incantation passed through him.

Carver kept grinning. “You wait,” he told Pete. “He’s not finished.”

Pete couldn’t stir herself. She thought another bargain with Belial would be hard enough to take, but this … this told her that Jack had well and truly been broken. Hell had taken the one man she’d thought unbreakable and snapped him in two. He was the crow-mage now, truly, and he was to the Morrigan what she’d sworn she’d never be to the Hecate.

“Jack,” she said at last, “just let go.” She grabbed his shoulders and faced him toward her. “I don’t care. I know why you did it, and I would’ve done the same. I was wrong to say those things about you. I couldn’t survive Hell. I’m sorry, Jack. But you can walk away. You’re not the Morrigan’s slave. You don’t have to help her burn the Black.”

The Hecate hadn’t been wrong. That was the worst bit. If she’d killed Jack, the moment he’d come back, none of this would be happening. The Morrigan wouldn’t have her walker and Naughton wouldn’t have a shot at Carver, because Pete never could have done this ritual herself.

If she’d killed Jack, she’d have also killed Ollie, and let Naughton get away with two murders, at the very least.

There was no if for her, though, right as the Hecate was.

She never could have done it. She’d still be standing right here, because much as heroin and adrenaline were Jack’s drugs of choice, he was hers. The only thing she could never kick. The only person she’d ever needed, in the way of aching bones and desperate, clawing craving.

All she could do now was show him that was the truth.

“Just come back,” Pete whispered. “Don’t let her, Jack.”

“You are a servant of the Morrigan, Gerard Carver,” was all he said. “Bound to serve the crow-mage and only him. So it is now, so it is forever until you pass or the world does.”

“No…,” Pete told him. “No, Jack, we have to bring him back. Ollie will die…”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. He looked at her and then his gaze darted out to the water. “But this is my price, Pete. This is my task. Deliver the necromancer’s offering to the Morrigan, to use as she sees fit. Or she’ll give me back to Belial and we can never…” Jack drew a breath. “I can never go home again.” He reached out and put his hand on her cheek. “I had to betray you this time, Pete, so that I can be beside you the next. When the storm breaks. Please, just say you understand me.”

“I don’t understand any of this!” Pete shouted. “How could you, Jack? How could you?”

Jack moved his hand from her, and shook his head. “At least now I’ll have a little time to try and explain it to you.”

Pete heard the shriek of scavengers, and Carver snapped his head up. “If your Hag wants me, crow-mage, you better take me now. Otherwise you and I will be standing on this bridge until the Black burns down around us.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry, Pete. I hope you can forgive me.”

He put his hand on Carver, and the spirit flickered. The power rose around Pete like the ions in the air before a lightning storm.

“No,” Pete said. “No, Jack…” Before she could say anything else, there was a sharp tug in her chest, as if she’d been slapped with the business end of a cricket bat. Her head went light, and her vision screwed. “I’m not ready!” she shouted at Mosswood. “Damn it, Ian, not yet!”

Things went black, the slow swirling black of suffocation, and then Pete’s eyes snapped open and air rushed into her lungs. She saw the ceiling of her flat and smelled tobacco and incense. The honks and rattles and shouts of living London reached her ears. She lurched sideways and vomited, gasping until there was nothing left. Sticky black bile crept across the floorboards.

“All right.” Mosswood shoved her hair out of the way. “You’re all right, Pete.”

His hand on her skin started a feverish fire and Pete retched again, feeling the battered sensation of pulled muscles in her abdomen.

“You hang on,” Mosswood said. “I haven’t finished with Jack yet.”

Jack … Jack watching her with those icy eyes that were not his own, Jack stealing Gerard Carver’s soul.

Mosswood moved away from her and crouched by Jack’s head, touching a finger to his brow and murmuring a few words. When he was finished, he blew out the black candle at the head of the circle.

Pete forced herself up, hands and knees, then only knees, and then, using the sofa as a pulley system, to her feet. The flat swayed and pulsed around her as the remnants of the psychotropic danced through her system like ice water and hot coals at once.

“You shouldn’t be up,” Mosswood said sharply. “I haven’t opened the circle yet. Anything could have come back.”

Now that she was awake, it seemed so utterly simple to Pete. Jack hadn’t come back for her. He’d come back at the behest of the Morrigan. He’d never intended to help her stop Naughton’s murdering. He’d just used her to get to Carver, from the moment he’d pulled her out of the pit at the club.

She’d been a fool.

Jack came awake when Mosswood removed his hand, choking and letting some of the black stuff dribble down his chin. “Feel as if I’ve been hit by a fucking lorry,” he gasped.

Mosswood said something to him, but Pete couldn’t make out the words. She felt like kicked shit, her cracked rib still throbbed, and her head was muzzy from the orchid, but she couldn’t be in the same room with Jack any longer.

“Pete?” She felt his shadow drop over her, and she smacked Jack’s hands from her.

“Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“Can I explain, Pete?” he said, swaying when she shoved him back. “Can you at least give me that?”

“You’ve explained enough, I think,” Pete said. She pointed to the door. “I’d like to leave now.”

“Petunia,” Jack said, low. “She would have sent me back. She would have given me back to Belial and this was all she asked. As long as it’s not Naughton doing the ritual…”

“No,” Pete said. “It’s not. It’s the Morrigan, Jack. I’d ask you who exactly that ritual is supposed to call, but it doesn’t even matter. All she wants is death. And you’re helping her do it.”

“Helping to keep you safe,” Jack mumbled. “If I’m in Hell, I can’t be with you, Pete. I can’t protect you from what’s coming.”

“Fuck me,” Pete said. “You really have changed.” She wanted to smash her fists into him, scream at him for lying to her. Not that Jack had made a habit of the truth, but to do it so casually, so smoothly, as if she were just another mark in the crowd at a conjure show. “You used to know I didn’t need your fucking protection. I needed you, Jack. Not … not whatever you are.”

“You want to tell me I’m weak,” Jack said. “Go right the fuck ahead. I am weak. But don’t tell me you don’t understand why I did it.”

“Ollie’s going to die,” Pete said. “I might die, you might die—the whole fucking Black is going to collapse in on itself if that bitch goes through with Naughton’s ritual, and you’re licking her bloody boot.” Pete jabbed her finger into Jack’s chest. “I don’t think you’re weak, Jack. I think you’re a pussy.”

He snatched her hand, pressing it against her and shoving Pete backward into the wall. Her head knocked the plaster, and dust and paint chips rained down. “You don’t fucking know,” Jack snarled. “You haven’t been to Hell.”

“Then tell me,” Pete whispered. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

Jack dropped his head to her shoulder, nuzzling his lips into her neck. “It’s constant screaming. It’s your life, over and over and over again, until you can’t take it for one more second. He broke me, Pete. He shattered every bone in my body. He flayed my skin off by inches. And when he’d gotten tired of hearing me scream, he put me together with thread and stuffing, and he started all over again.”

Jack let her go and stood back, passing his hands over his face. “You think this is the first time the old gods have gotten their back up? I’ll do what the Morrigan has been chasing me for since I was fourteen fucking years old, and things will carry on much as they have.”

“You don’t believe that,” Pete said. “You would never have believed something like that, Jack.”

“Doing a hitch in Hell makes you believe a lot of things you never thought were possible,” Jack said. “There’s no room for showy heroics in this story, Pete. We’re giving Carver to the Hag, and Naughton can deal with her. Heath will probably be all right. And if he’s not, I’m bloody sorry, but that’s how things must be.”

All at once, hearing it from his lips, Pete’s confusion and grief hardened and tempered into rage. She cocked her fist back and slammed it into Jack’s jaw, hard and sharp, following through with all her weight.

Jack stumbled, his legs buckling. “You cunt!” he shouted. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“I’m not the cunt in this conversation,” Pete snarled. “Not by a long way.”

Jack struggled up to his feet. He’d already sprouted a bruise. “I did what I had to do, Pete. That’s all I can ever say about it. I know it wasn’t right. I fucking know that. But I had to. For me, for you. I could have stood the pain, but knowing you were alone—that, I couldn’t let stand. So yes, I’m the servant of the crow. And I’m not sorry.”

She wanted to draw back from the expression on his face, the cold, inhuman flatness in his eyes, but she steeled herself and moved nearer. “Just give me Carver. We can find a way—”

“I told you no,” Jack said. “Now will you listen this time, or do I have to slap a hex on you?”

“Don’t bother,” Pete told him. “I’m leaving.” She jerked the door open to find a gang of black suits and pale faces that crowded her back into the room. “No sudden moves,” said one, whom she recognized from the back room of Naughton’s vile club.

Three all together, like all bad things, and they moved straight for Jack. “Fuck me,” Jack muttered, backpedaling. “Boys, let’s talk about this, shall we?”

“Mr. Naughton says you’re out of time,” the one closest to Pete told her. “Do you have what we want?”

Pete jerked her chin at Jack. “He does.”

“Oh, yes. Lovely,” Jack said. “This is a terrible idea, mates. Trust me on that.”

“Don’t think so,” said the hulking one. “You’ve fucked with the big dog, my son, and now he’s going to bite your arse. Come along.”

Pete checked the sitting area, but Mosswood had gone, through some inscrutable method of his own. One less problem, but one less body for backup when things inevitably got ugly. She eased open the door of the entry table, scrabbling for the heavy torch she kept there for emergencies, but one of Naughton’s men saw, threw her to the ground, and stepped hard on her injured hand. Pete felt small bones go and let out a scream.

“Naughty, naughty,” the necromancer told her, and tilted his thin face toward Jack. “What do you say, Winter? You’ll come quietly for your little slice of heaven here?”

“She’s not worth it to me,” Jack said, and if Pete could’ve flinched any harder, she would have. Jack had a hard face, always, the kind of mask everyone who’d grown up poor and smacked around in a dirty factory town manufactured. But it had been just that, a mask. Not like it was at that moment. “You’re not going to coerce me, gents,” Jack said, “and you’re not going to scare me by roughing up some poor girl half your size, so why don’t you just toddle on home?”

The big one raised a hand. “How about instead we hex you and drag you back there boots-first?” He didn’t wait for Jack’s response before he threw the hex. Jack batted it aside and cracks blossomed in the plaster walls of the flat. The necromancer didn’t play about—the next thing he flung wasn’t a simple hex but a curse that turned the air to ozone and filled Pete’s nostrils with the scent of burnt rubber.

Jack went down hard, and the necromancer’s next effort bounced off a shield hex that rippled into being before his body. The feedback screamed through Pete’s skull, and she knew it would be ten times worse for Jack, letting his talent flow and his sight absorb magic unchecked.

The necromancer hit again, and again, and the entire flat shook. The high windows exploded, and in the kitchen Pete heard glasses and plates popping like firecrackers. Sharp-edged snow rained down to pepper her bare skin.

“You want me?” Jack sneered at the necromancers. “You want that sad little excuse for a soul cage for your boss? Come and get me.” He stepped back, slung his leg over the sill of the shatttered window, and dropped from view.

The trio of necromancers rushed to the window while Pete stared. “Fuck me,” said the one who’d stomped her hand. “Four stories straight down.”

“Demons juiced him,” said the big one. “ ’Least that’s what I heard.”

“Nah,” said the rat-faced one. “Heard he bedded down with the crow woman, got his powers the old, bloody way, like fucking Cù Chulainn or some shite.”

The rat-faced necromancer jerked his thumb at Pete. “What about her?”

“Pick her up and take her with us,” the big one said. “Let Mr. Naughton decide what to do.”

CHAPTER 31

Nick Naughton stroked his thumb over Pete’s cheek. She flexed her hands, the broken one knifing up her forearm. Naughton’s thugs had tied her well, with plastic zip ties that bit into her wrists. “I suppose you think you’ve very clever, playing the holdout game, waiting for your mage to save your arse.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said. She wasn’t in the mood for creativity, and Naughton didn’t deserve it anyway.

Naughton heaved a sigh. “Sean, get those off and hold her up.”

Sean, the hulking necromancer, looked at Naughton with wide eyes. “What if she, yanno, sucks all me talent out of me head? She’s a Weir.”

“She weights a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet, you great frilly girl,” Naughton sighed. “And it’s not as if she’s a bloody superhero.”

Sean cut the plastic with his flick knife and hauled Pete up, pinning her arms behind her back.

“So, Petunia,” Naughton said. His thumb stroked her lips. Being touched by him was like being touched by something drowned and dead—slimy, with the scent of damp, mossy places that had never seen the light of day. “What are we going to do about you?”

“You could let Ollie and me go,” she suggested.

“It’s good to keep your sense of humor.” Naughton’s hand dropped to her clavicle, the tips of his fingers skating under her collar. “But you and I have a mutual goal now—we both want what the crow-mage took from us. Why don’t you stop treating me as an enemy and go convince him to hand it over. Use your winning smile, and tell him nobody else will get hurt.” He grinned. “I mean, that part’s a lie. I rather like hurting people. But it sounds better that way.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Pete told him. “Carver. The reliquary. Why you tried to sacrifice him.”

“We succeeded in sacrificing Carver,” Naughton said. “That arse McCorkle thought he could rob me, and some unfortunate circumstances—they buggered the ritual, not the sacrifice. Well, to be more precise, one circumstance buggered the ritual. His name was Henry, and Henry is no longer with us. Isn’t that right, Sean?”

Sean gulped. Naughton patted Pete’s cheek. “You have nothing more than some thirdhand Babylonian legends and muttered rumors from a few mages scared of their own shadow. You don’t know, Miss Caldecott. You don’t even comprehend the scope of what’s coming up through the layers of the worlds below ours. What changes he will bring with him. But if you want to survive long enough to take a gander, then you’re going to do as I ask.”

“Or I could tell you to shove your poncey new world order right in your arse,” Pete said. Naughton considered.

“I suppose you could.”

“I think I am.”

“And I think you simply don’t understand the gravity of our situation,” Naughton said. “Perhaps you and I should go somewhere and have a more private chat.”

“The serpent winds the world,” Pete said, blurting out Morningstar’s prophecy. Anything to stop Naughton touching her. “The serpent. Whatever it is, that’s what you’re calling. That’s what the reliquary belonged to. That’s what the soul cage is for. It’s not a spirit at all.”

Naughton narrowed his eyes at her and was quiet long enough to let Pete know she’d touched some kind of nerve. He snapped his fingers like a pistol shot. “Sean.”

“Yes, guv?”

“Take Miss Caldecott into the kitchen. She’s so eager to see her fat friend, put her in with him.”

“Right.” Sean snatched Pete by the arm. “Come on, then.” He dragged her to the walk-in, thrust her inside, and slammed the door. Pete heard a chain clatter through the handle on the other side.

She patted herself down for her lighter and flicked it open. “Ollie?”

“Pete?” She felt a hand swat her, and then close around her arm as the flame flared to life. Ollie’s face was drawn and covered in stubble, but he looked healthy, and he grabbed her and gave her a hard squeeze. “Was beginning to think you forgot about me.”

“Never,” Pete said, thumping him on the back. “Who’d be around to eat half of my curry and harangue me that magic isn’t real if I let you kick off?”

Ollie’d been untied, but the spindleback chair was still the only furniture in the old freezer. The rest was full of boxes, musty and old as the hills, and Heath settled on the ground, his back against them. “Fuck me. Been sleeping on this floor for a decade, feels like.”

Pete took a seat next to him, careful to keep the lighter from the rat-gnawed cardboard. “I’m sorry. I really hoped this would be a rescue.”

He patted her knee. “Shit rescue, but it’s all right, Caldecott. Sooner or later that stiff bastard Patel will notice I’m not around for him to shout questions at, and he’ll send some plods looking for me.”

“We might not last that long,” Pete said. “Not that Naughton’s going to off us, but London might not be in the same shape by the time Patel catches on.”

“Fuck me, you’re a ray of bloody sunshine, aren’t you?” Ollie grumbled.

Pete fingered her pack of Parliaments and found it was empty. “They been treating you all right?”

“Aside from cramming me in this rat-infested shit trap? It’s been like a weekend in Blackpool,” Ollie said. “At least the takeaway that cunt-faced wanker Sean brings in isn’t too dodgy.”

“Sounds better than my day thus far.” Pete flung the empty pack into a corner.

“What about your boy Winter?” Ollie said. “Setting aside for a moment his trick act of showing up alive. Any chance he’ll be making a grand entrance?”

The mention of Jack forced a few tears from Pete’s eyes, unexpected and hot as fresh blood. “Jack and I aren’t together right now, Ollie. Not about all this.”

“Always said that bloke was miles beneath you.” Ollie sniffed. “You two have a falling out?”

“He’s a fucking liar,” Pete said. “I don’t want to talk about Jack, Ollie.” She shut the lighter since it was just the two of them and some junk in the dark, not worth wasting fluid on.

“Should we plot and scheme on how to bust out, then?” Ollie asked. “Or do you want to tell me what ridiculous bit of Doctor Who shenanigans that pasty lot out there is up to?”

“Necromancers,” Pete said. “Summoning something inhuman and horrible, likely. Sacrificial rites toward same. Cryptic prophecies. That sort of thing.” She could keep herself together for Ollie, but being shut up in the freezer was already making her twitch. Especially since she knew neither Felix Patel nor Jack would find them in time. That Jack would not come at all, until he’d done what the Morrigan demanded of him.

Pete wasn’t angry with him any longer. She simply felt like the greatest idiot in all of England for trusting Jack in the first place. He’d nearly gotten her killed when she was sixteen. He’d let her think he was dead once before. He’d lied about his deal with Belial, until the demon snatched him from under her nose. Jack Winter had never given her a single reason to trust him. And yet, her chest was still tight when she thought about the casual way he’d turned on her this time. The last time, Pete vowed.

“Necromancers,” Ollie said at last. “You know, Caldecott, eighteen months ago I would have put you in for a psychiatrist and a few weeks in the country. Now, I really don’t have a better explanation for all this crap.” Boxes rustled in the dark as he fidgeted. “Things are bad all over. Murders are up. The schizophrenics are screaming even stranger shite than usual when we get called out. You don’t have to be bloody magic to see that something’s slid out of tilt in this city.”

Pete nodded. “Way out. Out past coming back, I think.”

Ollie grunted. “How bad is it going to be?”

“Bad,” Pete said softly. “Worse than the bombs. Worse than the fires, maybe. It’s a fundamental shifting, if we all just sit back and let it happen. If we do, I don’t think we’re going to crawl out of our safe little holes to the same world.”

“Full-tilt zombie robot apocalypse.” Ollie snorted. “And me without my freeze-dried rations, machete, and girl in a leather bikini.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Pete asked him. “For not just riding the tide and waiting to see where everything comes down once the storm’s gone?”

“Somebody’s got to be on the side of the angels,” Ollie said. “And I think you’re a good pick, Caldecott. More than you credit yourself with.”

Pete let herself slide down until she was on her back on the floor, staring at the sliver of light through the exhaust port in the freezer’s ceiling. “That makes one of us thinking that, I suppose.”

A shadow flicked across the port, and she sat up. The owl landed, its passage causing the vent fan to spin, casting slices of light and shadow across Pete and Ollie.

I warned you, the Hecate whispered, as the owl tilted its head and stared down at her with glowing yellow eyes, perfectly round and fathomless as the sun.

“Just what I bloody needed,” Pete muttered. Ollie shifted in the dark, and Pete knew he was probably looking at her with suspicion.

“What are you on about?”

Kill the crow-mage, the owl whispered. I told you what you must do and you steadfastly ignored me. Now you’ve reaped the fruits of the poisoned tree. You should have cut it down and salted the earth.

“Sod you,” Pete told it. “I don’t run about stabbing people in the back.” She massaged her throbbing forehead, the proximity of the thing sending bright stabs of pain through the Black. “There’s got to be another way now.”

You don’t believe that, said the Hecate. But it doesn’t matter. You failed, Weir. You allowed the Hag an opening to release her army, not just into the Black, but into the daylight world. Death is walking because of you, Petunia Caldecott. Are you pleased?

“ ’Course I’m not fucking pleased!” Pete shouted at it. Ollie started, but she could explain her seemingly abrupt descent into chattering at birds later.

And neither am I, the Hecate said. The owl spread its wings. This is the end of all things, Weir. Now all that is left to me is punishment. Not recourse. Not bargaining. Not mercy. The Hag has banished those things as she encroaches. All I can look forward to is blood.

The air crackled around Pete, and every inch of her skin prickled. She heard Ollie say, “What in the—” before blackness dropped across Pete’s eyes and the worst pain she’d ever felt gripped her. It felt as if her consciousness and body were being yanked in opposite directions at roughly the speed of a bullet train, and that iron hooks had pinned themselves into her brain, spiking deep down into her talent. She heard herself scream, or maybe it was just the scream of wind past her ears, and then as quickly as the feeling had started, it stopped, and white light burned out Pete’s eyesight.

Blinking furiously, tears sliding over her cheeks, she reached out for anything, anything at all, but there was nothing but cool wind and wet droplets plastering her skin. Her knees buckled and falling down seemed like an extraordinarily good idea, so Pete did, landing on something soft that smelled of green and dirt.

Do you recognize this place? The Hecate, no longer the owl but the girl with the long, narrow face and the yellow eyes, placed her hand on the nape of Pete’s neck, pulling her close.

Pete, for her part, gulped and tried to assess whether she was still alive, and if alive, whether she had all her bits attached. “What did you do to me?”

Crossed you, said the Hecate. Through the gateways. You’re with me now, Pete. To do with as I see fit. Her slender fingers and their blunt nails tightened. Now, do you know what you see?

Pete tried to focus her eyes, tears drying cold on her cheeks and leaving salt trails like nerveless scar tissue. She sat with her legs akimbo at the top of a green hillock, looking down on a white clapboard cottage with a leaning chimney, surrounded by an untidy garden and a path that led down to a dirt road. Far away, over the humps of the blindingly green hills on the other side of the valley, Pete could glimpse the sea.

Pete knew the place. She hadn’t been in nearly fifteen years, but she knew it well enough to be able to pick out every missing brick in the garden path and avoid them.

Well? The Hecate stared at her. The wind running off the water ruffled her straight brown hair, spun it around her face like a spider’s web.

“It’s my grandmother’s house,” Pete said. Her throat was raw from screaming and her voice came out a rasp that blended with the breeze and the shriek of gulls overhead.

Very good, the Hecate told her. She gripped Pete’s arm. She was even smaller than Pete, but her fingers were like iron and she hauled Pete to her feet as easily as you’d toss an empty chip sack into the bin.

“I don’t understand,” Pete said. It couldn’t be anything good. Some part of her had always known that when she went to the thin spaces, not by design but by death, this was what she’d see. The ramshackle little house and the endless verdancy of Ireland, bound on all sides by salt and sea.

The Hag has her patron, said the Hecate, and I had mine. And she has failed me. So here you will stay, Petunia Caldecott. Not alive and not dead. At the crossroads of all worlds, buried for your sins until I see fit to release you. Or until the world burns down around you. It’s a toss-up at this point, I think.

“Wait!” Pete said as the Hecate started to walk away. “That’s it? I don’t turn to murder because you snap your fingers and so you just leave me here to rot?”

Not to rot, said the Hecate. Your body will be in what your friends will call a coma, and your soul will be here. Some day they may reunite, but by then you’ll be quite mad. She lifted her face to the weak sun peering through the wispy lace curtains of mist that floated across the hillside. Perhaps you and the gulls will learn to speak to one another, in the creaks and croaks of your ruined throat.

The Hecate turned away again, and Pete raced after her up the hill, feet sinking into the mucky peat. “Fuck you, you glassy-eyed bitch! You don’t own me! And if it was so important that Jack and Naughton not get Carver, you should’ve left me there to get him back!”

Pete could see only one of her glowing eyes and the razor edge of her child’s profile as the Hecate glared at her. You still don’t understand. Even on the brink of death, you maintain that the world will go on. And I do own you, Petunia. As the Hag owns Jack Winter, and as his dead god owns Nicholas Naughton, you are an avatar. You are one of the touched, the people who in the past would be saints and madmen.

“So then tell me what I’ve missed!” Pete shouted. “Give me a chance to fix it, if I’m your bloody chosen child!”

There is no chosen one, the Hecate hissed. There are the touched, and you are replaceable. I owe you nothing.

“Oh yeah?” Pete folded her arms. “Then why are you so angry?”

The Hecate sighed. The wind kicked up and raked fingers through Pete’s hair and over her chilled skin. Because you are a good person, Petunia Caldecott, and you should not have let the Hag and her general with his dead man’s eyes drag you into the mud.

“Just tell me what’s coming,” Pete said. “And I’ll find a way to stop it. Don’t just leave me here. I’m listening now. Please.” She refused to believe the wetness on her face was more tears. “I was wrong,” Pete whispered. “Tell me what’s going to happen.”

The Hecate came back to her. She placed her palm against Pete’s cheek and stared into her eyes. It was such a human, mothering gesture that Pete nearly recoiled. Gentleness should not come from a being that didn’t even understand the concept of compassion.

You really want to see what I see? the Hecate whispered. You truly desire?

Pete nodded wordlessly. The Hecate turned her around to look down the other side of the valley, where the ground sloped inland to eventually end in the motorway that lead into Galway proper.

There are triads in the Black, and there are triads before the Black, life and birth and death, stretching back to the beginning. At one time we were separate, and at one time we stood joined.

Below Pete, clouds blacker than any soot crawled across the valley, and crimson droplets spattered against the back of her hands and her cheeks. She swiped at them, the blood leaving streaky tracks.

Still, the Hecate ordered her. It’s a memory of the land, Petunia. It can’t touch you. Gods were born and gods died, and their corpses and their afterbirth became grave things. Other things, the Hecate whispered in her ear. The earth rippled under Pete’s boots, and from far below she heard a scream, expressed more as an earthquake than a sound.

They spilled their blood on the earth, and they gave their seed to heroes, and some of us birthed mages and monsters and some of us birthed your dreams, the Hecate said. Pete saw the clouds descend toward the ground, a clinging black mist that withered wherever it touched. A fat white sheep grazing the hillside tried to escape and was instantly reduced to a pile of bloated entrails.

Only one gave death, rather than birth. Pete saw a figure step out of the fog, not a spirit but a whole man, clad in black, fingers extraordinarily long, with black, oil-fed flames dancing across his black, fathomless eyes.

He killed what he touched. The ground where he stood turned to salt, and the cities he visited turned to ashes. The Hecate’s voice was no longer a reverent whisper, but scornful. She bit off each word and spat it at the figure. We spilled his blood, but we did not know what we’d done. When we cut him down, stopped his march across the face of the Black toward the living world, he gave us his revenge—a child.

The ground rattled again, and Pete lost her footing, going hard onto her hands and knees. A stone cut her palm, and the figure in the valley swiveled, elongated nostrils flaring. Pete met its eyes and clapped her bloody hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. It was like pressing hot needles into her brain, directly through her eye sockets. The thing below wasn’t simply wreathed in black magic—he was the source of it. The ground zero of the wave of malice that coated the valley, turning it into an abattoir for anything living.

The god of plague giving birth to the one thing that no god or demon could slay. The Hecate removed her hand from Pete. Irony is not lost on gods, Petunia. And the men trying to free the child from its bonds do not realize what will happen if it becomes so.

Pete stayed where she was, sitting back on her heels, trying to quell the wave of nausea and pain. The clouds rolled past, and the bloody rain dried on her skin, and it was as if nothing had happened to the valley at all.

And the Hag, said the Hecate, is no better. She is power hungry, and she will use the child to spread the armies of Death to the daylight world. And then, because she is arrogant and grasping, she will inevitably lose control, and the child will become as his father. She smoothed her hands over her dress. Nergal was slain before the world, but he has tried to return before. If the Morrigan weakens the Black, he will succeed.

“So that’s his name,” Pete said softly. “I wondered.”

A name, the Hecate said. There are many more for what he is.

“Can’t you stop her?” Pete said. “The Morrigan? You’re stronger. You walk the gateways.”

If the dragon crawls up out of its prison, I will perish, the Hecate said sadly. The offspring of the plague god can tread anywhere it wishes. It will shatter the gateways. Nothing is older or stronger than death, Petunia, and the Morrigan is death’s maiden.

“But in the Black…” Pete started. The Hecate shook her head.

There will be no Black, and no daylight world. They will bleed, until all of the crossroads are in flames, and when we are all gone to cinders, I wager the demons will caper up from Hell to chew on our bones. She gave Pete a humorless smile. Crafty little creatures, demons. The only true survivors in this wretched world.

“So what can I do?” Pete said quietly. “What will keep this … thing locked up?”

The owl woman sadly stroked a hand over Pete’s head where she crouched, her hand warm against Pete’s damp, bloody skin. There is nothing to be done now. If the dragon were still imprisoned, perhaps. But he is awake, and soon he will be free. Death comes for us all, Pete. Even gods.

“I won’t lie down,” Pete told her. “I know I didn’t do what you asked of me, but I can still stop Jack. Somewhere, he’s still got to be Jack.”

Hell changes a man, the Hecate said. It molds him into the worst obscenity of himself. He leaves shreds of his soul even if he is raised up again. The demon who claimed him is in him forever.

“You have to let me try,” Pete said. “I can get Jack. And if I can get Jack I’ll have the dragon’s soul cage, and we can keep Nergal from running roughshod over everything.” Maybe. If Jack hadn’t abandoned her completely.

The Hecate touched Pete’s cheek, and then shook her head. You are so young, even for a human.

“Please,” Pete said, because it had worked once before. She never begged—begging was for the weak, Connor had taught his daughters. Hell, asking was for the weak most of the time. Real coppers—who smoked and drank and lived off their hunches and smacked a suspect in the gob if it’d get things moving—didn’t ask anyone for anything. They didn’t ask if it was all right to go on and die with less than six months’ notice, and they didn’t ask to go out and make things right.

You cannot do what is necessary, the Hecate sighed. And so you’ll stay here. Until the storm passes or I do.

She began to walk down the hill to the motorway, and Pete rushed the words out.

“I’ll do it.”

The Hecate turned around and blinked once, slowly. She cocked her head and for a moment she was an owl, all downy feathers and silent wings. You will do what, Weir?

“It’s Jack or the whole bloody world, right?” Pete said. “I’m not a fucking idealist. I’ll do it. Let me out and I’ll do it.”

She held her breath, held every bit of herself absolutely still, and waited. A halfway decent Met detective could spot a liar, but Pete knew that she was an accomplished one, and also that the Hecate was about as far removed from human as England was from the moon.

If she’d really thought Jack would go through with ripping the Black to shreds, she wouldn’t have lied. But it was Jack—had to still be Jack, somewhere deep inside the new skin Hell had hardened onto his old one. She’d pulled him back from the Bleak Gates. Pulling the man from the Morrigan’s shadow couldn’t be so much different. Yeah, Caldecott, and a fucking complement of unicorns might march up and down outside Buckingham Palace when you do.

Very well, the Hecate said. Dispose of Winter and return the soul of Gerard Carver to my auspices and I will consider you in good standing.

Pete laughed, short and sharp. “You were just rattling my cage. Put me in the in-between and let me sweat a bit.” She tapped the Hecate on her breastbone. “I think you’re more human than you let on.”

The Hecate looked at her for a long moment before she blinked. Return to the world, Petunia Caldecott. Remember your vow. And do not disobey me again.

“Bloody gods,” Pete said as she spun back into her body, still flopped on its side on Naughton’s freezer floor.

CHAPTER 32

Ollie fussed over her until Pete managed to assure him, via repeated insistence and finally swatting at his hand, that she was all right.

“You were screamin’ to wake the dead,” Ollie said.

“Trust me, Ollie,” Pete told him. “The dead don’t need any help on that score.”

“Scared the piss out of me,” Ollie muttered. “I know we’re in a bad way but don’t do that again if you can help it, yeah?”

In a bizarre way, the pain and the psychic bombardment had cleared Pete’s head. She was past the point of no return—in that zone beyond exhausted where everything becomes tunnel visions and knife edges. She’d lied to the Hecate, she hadn’t delivered to Naughton, and she’d trusted the one person in the Black who could fuck her over properly the way no other could. Not to mention that Felix Patel would probably find a way to pin McCorkle’s murder and Ollie’s situation on her if he were given half a chance. If Pete were in Patel’s shoes, she’d arrest her too.

“I’m fucked,” Pete said out loud. “Properly.”

“Your sunny optimism never fails to gird my loins and strengthen my bloody spirit, you know,” Ollie said. “Don’t unravel on me now, Caldecott.”

“I’ve got bloody nothing in my hand,” Pete said. “Except I either go out and murder someone in cold blood or we stay here until the Met digs up our skeletons in a few decades and we become a mystery program on Channel 1.”

“Jesus,” Ollie said. “And there you go reassuring me.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete sighed. She stood up and paced to each wall, just to have something to do. “I just needed to say that to someone, before I screamed some more.”

“You know something?” Ollie said. “I hated you the first time I clapped eyes on you.”

“Is this your idea of helpful?” Pete said. She had to get the fuck out of this freezer and find Jack. At least try to talk him out of handing Carver over, if he hadn’t already.

“You were just some snot-nosed DC who had a famous da, clearly years too green for CID,” Ollie said. “And you remember what the first thing you said to me was when I reluctantly rolled meself over to shake your hand?”

“ ‘You’ve got kidney pie on your shirt,’ ” Pete muttered, glad it was dark so Ollie couldn’t see her flush. She had been green, barely twenty-six and well aware that everyone in the CID room at Holborn had been staring a hole in her.

“Too right, kidney pie,” Ollie said. “And I knew then that you were either even more of a little snot than I supposed or you had a pair of great brass ones.” He shifted in the dark. “I’m glad it was the latter, Caldecott, because you’ve kept my arse on the straight and narrow these past years, and you were a good copper, and you’re going to be all right now.” He reached out in the dark, caught her hand, and squeezed. “Now leave off your whingeing and use that cracking wit to get us out of here, will you?”

“Survival,” Pete said, Ollie’s words sprouting a mad idea in her head. It was more than mad—it was fucking suicidal, and it was something that Jack would have smacked her into a wall for even contemplating. But it was that or kill him, and Pete’s answer to that was still the same. Couldn’t fucking do it.

“ ’S what I said,” Ollie agreed.

Pete dug her lighter out again and flicked it on. “Open up these boxes. I need chalk, or paint—even a marker will do. Something to draw with.”

Ollie’s forehead crinkled, but he helped her, the rodent-chewed and broken-down cardboard coming apart in their hands. “Don’t mind my stupid question,” Ollie said, “but what d’you need to draw, anyway?”

“A circle,” Pete told him. “There’s someone that I need to talk to.”

She unearthed chalk and a wealth of discarded candle stubs in one of the boxes, along with bills for a band that had played Naughton’s club in 1989 and several Halloween decorations of the same vintage. Pete lit the candles, which guttered over the steel walls. “Stand back,” she told Ollie, putting the black candle at the head and the white at the foot.

“You sure know what you’re doing?” he said, backing up to the corner of the freezer.

“Yeah,” Pete said as she chalked a crooked ring between the candles. “I’m a bloody expert in all matters of the occult.” She didn’t know all the markings that Jack did, didn’t know the words his discipline had passed to him, but with this, all that mattered—really—was the name.

Pete drew another circle around herself, doubling it for safety. She sat, folding her hands over her knees, and looked back at Ollie. “No matter what happens, do not cross the chalk and do not break the circle, you understand me?”

Ollie’s eyes were wide. “Pete, what exactly is about to happen here?”

Pete shut her eyes and tried to take a calming breath that only aggravated her rib. “Probably nothing good.”

Jack would say that what she was doing was an obscenity. That it would probably kill her, and even if it didn’t, that it would rip her soul away from her surely as wind snuffed a candle flame. “But you’re not here,” Pete murmured as she chalked a final word in front of her toes. “Are you?”

Jack had brought her here. Because she’d believed his lies, and she’d let herself think that he was the man who could save the world, if it came to that. She’d followed him too far down the rabbit hole, and now there was no way back, only through. The choices were down to one—fight or lie down and die. And Pete had known since long before she clapped eyes on Jack Winter that she wasn’t the dying type.

She had to close the circle, imbue it with her will, and Pete pressed her thumbs into her forehead, trying to massage the twinge that rose when she reached down into herself and tried to push a little bit of talent into the chalk markings. Jack’s magic looked like blue fire, so Pete clung to that image, seeing faint blue flame rising from the twin ring of chalk marks. Her headache worsened, and she felt something warm and wet trickle from her nostrils. A hum built in her back teeth, vibrating all through her skeleton, and Pete recognized it as the same impulse that had rushed through her when she’d flung the hexes, simply sustained. It hurt like sticking her fingers into a socket, and she dug her nails into her palm to take her mind off it. There was an incantation for these sorts of things, dozens of them, in as many languages, but Pete didn’t know any by rote, so she used the name.

“Belial.”

Nothing happened, except an increase in her headache, verging from uncomfortable into the territory of concussions and blackout hangovers.

Pete swallowed, her mouth dry as a wad of cotton, and tried again. “Belial. Prince of the demons of Hell. Pete Caldecott wants to talk to Belial.”

The air shimmered before her, yawning into a black vortex, and Pete heard screaming and smelled the faint scent of fires, the sort of dirty smoke roiled by burning corpses.

“Belial?” Pete said, the power gathering behind her eyes making her skull throb. There was a time when the sight would have terrified her, but now she just sighed. “Come on, Belial, quit fucking about.”

The theatrics ceased, and in their place stood a small man in a black suit and white shirt, immaculate tie pressed and done with a ruby stickpin. Belial smoothed his greasy hair out of his pure black eyes and grinned at her with shark’s teeth. “Well, hello there, Pete. You wanted to see me?”

CHAPTER 33

Pete stood up. Belial wasn’t tall, in the body he chose to wear like a flash little overcoat, and she could nearly look him in the eye. “Suppose I did.”

Belial’s tongue flicked out and wriggled, tasting the air. “Never thought I’d see the day, but awfully glad that I did.”

Pete shot a glance at the circle. It was solid, but she started when she saw Ollie slumped unconscious against the wall. “What did you do to him?”

Belial shrugged. “You wanted to talk. Figured we should do it without that fat gobshite eavesdropping.”

“You’re a bloody bastard, you know?” Pete said.

His pointed teeth glowed in the guttering candlelight. “I am a demon, luv.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Pete assured him. Belial took a step toward her, and Pete took one back before she could stop herself. She stopped her foot before it rubbed out the chalk line. The demon laughed, sending cold dead fingers up and down her spine.

“So close and yet so far away. Jack’s taught you a thing or two, hasn’t he? Clever girl.”

“You’re going to have to at least work a little if you want out,” Pete said. “It’s not fancy, but it’ll hold.”

Belial shimmered, and when Pete blinked he was in front of her. He grabbed the back of her neck and drew them close enough to kiss. “You haven’t got the stones to hold me, Petunia. I’m not a trained dog. I’m here because you interest me.” He released her just as abruptly then fixed his tie. “Now why don’t you smooth out that frown and tell me what you want, before I get bored and take myself off to the cinema?”

“If I’m so horrible at this, then why are you standing here?” Pete waved a hand. “There’s the door. Go fly away, and open it for me while you’re at it.”

Belial chuckled again. “You may not have the finesse yet, but you’ve got bigger balls than Winter. He was crying and pissing blood when I came by his little summoning circle.”

“Jack was dying,” Pete snapped. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

“Oh yes,” Belial said. “You are.” He pressed his cheek against hers, inhaled her scent. This close, Pete could sense a glimmering of the thing beneath the skin—writhing, many eyed, many-voiced, screaming and clawing to be free. “I knew there was a reason Winter liked you,” Belial murmured. “You still smell sweet, no matter how many miles he puts on.”

Pete shoved him back, hard. The demon only laughed. “What, are you embarrassed to admit you shagged a wrung-out junkie like Winter? I would be, too, were I a put-together little thing like you. I bet you keep your nightie on.”

“Why don’t you just simmer down before I knock every one of those creepy teeth down your throat?” Pete suggested.

Belial frowned. “You just summoned me out of the blackest pits of Hell to chat, then?” He wagged a finger at her. “No, you’re desperate. But not for the same reasons as Winter. Your reasons aren’t petty and reeking of cowardice. ’S why I’m interested.” He twitched his cuffs and examined the ruby ring on his left hand, breathing on it and rubbing it on his suit. “Spit it out, luv. I’m getting bored.”

“About a dozen people want me dead, another dozen want Jack, and I’ve been locked in a fucking freezer by a pack of necromancers,” Pete said. “That enough for you, you fucking bastard?”

Belial cocked his head. “Lot of trouble for one little woman to get into. Prolific Petunia, harbinger of death and destruction.”

“I need help,” Pete admitted. “I need the sort of help a demon can give.”

“Surely you and Winter have a foolhardy little plan,” the demon said. “Some last ditch attempt to save the day and send the guilty to their judgement and the righteous to their reward?”

“No,” Pete said. “Besides, you know exactly what happened to Jack. You’re the one who lost custody, after all.”

“Winter licking the boots of the Hag and the rest of the Black beset by necromancy and terror?” Belial grinned. “Sounds like a Saturday night to me, Petunia. I don’t think you’re going to convince me otherwise.” His black glass eyes flicked up and down her body. “ ’Less, of course, you want to use that fine firm mouth of yours for something other than talking.”

“I thought demons loved a deal,” Pete said. Her head hurt so much her vision was doubling, and her voice sounded unreasonably loud in her ears. She wasn’t going to be able to hold the thin, slippery strings of power that girded the circle much longer. “I thought they loved bargains more than anything. I didn’t think they were quite so interested in flesh.”

“Me? I’m very interested,” Belial said. “You know what Hell is, Petunia? It’s fucking boring. We’ve got fleshpots and opium dens, torture chambers and souls to rip apart over and over again, to fuck and taste and deform to our pleasure.” He sighed, and felt his body over as if it were quite new. “You don’t have a fag, do you?”

“I’m out,” Pete said. “And you wouldn’t get one anyway.”

“Pity,” Belial said. “We have all of that, and I’m still bored out of my fucking skull. What I love is not the deal but when the deal comes due. And the sweeter the bargaining, the better it is for me. But you, Pete—you’re entirely too good to make that kind of bargaining. Your lily-white soul is just going to wilt and die in Hell.” He sniffed. “No fire in you. Just a misplaced need to run about playing savior.” Belial yawned. “Snore. Think I’m going to push down your little spellwork here and head off. I am sorry if I cause you a brain aneurysm or something when I break the circle.”

Pete wanted nothing so much as to punch Belial in his smug gob. She’d thought he would salivate at the idea of getting his hands on even the possibility of a bargain with her, and he was acting as if she were an unattractive girl in a chavvy nightclub. Fucking demons. “I’m not saving anything,” she said. “I’m just trying to keep Nergal’s fucking dragon in his place, so that all the Black, including your charming existence, can carry on.”

He paused with his shiny black shoe just short of the chalk, then turned to look at her. “What about a dragon?”

“Oh yeah, you know all about Nergal,” Pete said. “The Hecate told me. The biggest, baddest bastard on the block, until the rest of you decided to take him down a peg. The Morrigan’s after his child. She’s aiming high.”

Belial’s grin was unconscious this time, pure sadistic joy spreading across his features. “Oh, delicious. The Hag was always the worst of them. Old gods. Old farts, you ask me. Barking over table scraps, what was left over when the daylight world moved on. But this—this actually shows some spine. Well done.”

“Have we a bargain or not?” Pete demanded. Belial hadn’t been wrong when he’d hissed at her that she was scared. She was terrified—anyone with sense was terrified of demons. Pete rather thought that if she were throwing her weight around with no trepidation whatsoever, she’d be a fucking idiot.

“Depends.” Belial shrugged. “What wonders have you to entice me with, Petunia?”

“I don’t have anything,” Pete said softly. “Just myself.”

“Mmhmm,” Belial said. He tapped a forefinger against his own nose, once. “Tempting as that is, I think I’d rather have you in one piece, and willing to do something for me.”

“I don’t have a talent like Jack’s,” Pete said. “So unless you want me to go and fetch you takeaway…”

“I enjoy your sarcasm, Petunia, I really do,” Belial told her. “But unless you want me to tear your throat out and paint myself in your entrails, shut the fuck up and let me finish.”

Pete wondered if it was a measure of some kind of madness to want to kick a demon square between the legs. A particularly smug and annoying bastard of a demon, but a demon all the same.

“Good girl,” Belial said. “I don’t want you used up and spent like a fiver at a strip club. I want you alive and vital, and ready to turn that quick mind and that pert little body of yours to my ends.” He winked. “Having a favor with a Weir is never a poor life choice.”

“You think I’m stupid?” Pete said. “An unspecified favor. For you. Sure, I was born fucking yesterday. Let’s do it up.”

“I think you wouldn’t have called me if you were in a position to sass me,” Belial said. “I’ll help you smush your little plague lizard, and make the world safe for puppies, rainbows, and small children cavorting and licking lollipops, and in exchange, when I say it, you’ll do me one favor. It’s a very good deal, Petunia.” His fingers slipped into her hair, smoothed it back from her face. “You don’t even have to touch me.”

Pete stared at the demon, and Belial stared back, that infuriating smile playing at the corners of his narrow lips. He had her backed against a wall, and he knew it.

“Right,” she said. “If we’re walking that road, I want something just as vague and abusive from you.”

His nostrils flared. “I’d jump at the chance to abuse you, Petunia. Say what it is you want.”

“You want a favor from me, you do what I ask to help me, until such a time as we’ve put the Morrigan’s nasty little plan to rest or I’m dead,” Petunia said. “In which case you’ll drag me to Hell anyway, so it won’t matter.”

Belial shook his head at her. “Look at you, brokering deals like any streetwise black magic hustler. I think Winter’s taught you a thing or two about the dark side, Petunia.”

“And another thing,” Pete told him. “My name’s not fucking Petunia.”

“Duly noted,” the demon purred. “I’ll be your obedient pet monster, and you’ll be my card up the sleeve.” He stepped forward and extended his hand in a businesslike fashion. “I’ve made a deal, Petunia Grace Caldecott, of my own will and you of yours. And you, Petunia Grace Caldecott, of London, child of Connor Caldecott of Galway and Juniper Morrow of Salisbury, freely bargain with me, Belial, a Named demon of Hell and Prince therein. So be it.”

Pete grabbed the demon’s hand before she could hesitate, lose her nerve, and run screaming for the hills. Belial might as well have been reciting daily specials in a café for all the effort he put into the phrase, but the enormous power it carried landed on Pete like a sack of sand.

This was a deal with a demon. This was the point she couldn’t turn back from. No turning back. Only through.

“So be it, Belial.”

He held her hand fast, and with his free digit tilted her head to stare into her eyes. “This is one of the sweetest days of my long and varied life, make no mistake. Getting the crow-mage, that was fantastic, don’t get me wrong. Like having Ursula Andress in her prime suck your cock while being serenaded by a live performance of the entire Hunky Dory album. But this…” He grinned at Pete. “This is just a little sweeter.”

“I agreed,” Pete reminded him. “You can shut your gob now.”

“Well, then,” Belial said. “Consider it a bargain, freely made and freely worked. You’ve officially dabbled in the deviant side of magic, Pete. Does it give you a naughty tingle?”

Pete moved as far from him as she could within the confines of the circle, letting the power trickle away. Belial had her now. He wouldn’t hurt her simply for sport. “Can you just open up the door and get us out of here?”

“Giving orders already. Good woman.” Belial gestured at the door and it flew off the hinges and clear across the kitchen.

Pete ignored his showing off, and bent down next to Ollie to tweak him on the earlobe. “Wake up, Heath.”

Ollie groaned. “Jesus, me head.” He saw the demon and blinked. “Who the fuck is that? Am I having that bloody dream again with the funeral director and the parrot?”

“Oh, he’s funny, the fat man,” Belial said. “I think I’ll enjoy him a great deal.”

“Says the bloke dressed like he’s trying out for a Duran Duran cover band,” Ollie muttered.

“Ollie,” Pete said. Ollie caught on, thankfully, and shut up.

Belial walked over to the door, which had crushed Sean, who stared up at him with bulging eyes, legs trapped under the steel. “Never understood necromancy,” Belial said. “Mucking about with dead things. Got plenty of the dead in Hell, and I don’t go about fondling them. Disgusting.”

Pete cleared her throat and pointed behind the demon, where more of the pasty thugs that clung to Naughton like maggots on a corpse had appeared in the narrow back hall.

“How the fuck did they get out?” the first asked.

“You didn’t lock the fucking door, did you?” the other said.

“Gents.” Belial spread his hands. “You can go, or you can die. Shouldn’t be too hard, even for a brain trust such as yourselves.”

The necromancers considered for a moment, and the first shook his head. “Ain’t worth it, mate. That’s a fucking demon.”

“Fuck off,” the second said. “That’s not a demon. Just a git in an undertaker suit.”

Belial smiled, and showed them his teeth. The second said, “Oh, shit.”

“Forget it,” said the first. “I’d go back to hustling in Tower Hamlets. ’Least I’d be alive.”

He turned tail and ran, leaving the other standing alone, his eyes growing steadily larger as the demon advanced on him. Belial grabbed the necromancer by the front of his black windcheater and lifted him off his feet. The demon wasn’t much larger than Pete, but he moved with the speed and sharpness of a veldt predator, hands with their long black nails puncturing through the necromancer’s jacket and into his flesh.

The man let out a scream, and Belial shoved him up and back, the way Pete would knock aside an errant insect that had flown into her face. He carried the necromancer, hand reaching deep inside the man’s sternum, until he crashed through the door at the end of the hall and into the club proper. Belial tossed the body aside and picked up a neatly folded napkin on the nearest table, gingerly dabbing blood off his hand.

Pete looked behind her at Ollie, who’d gone white, spots of crimson on either cheek. “This is not on,” he muttered, his Adam’s apple working.

“He had it coming,” Pete said. “Trust me.”

Shouting echoed off the low soundproofed ceiling of the club, and Naughton rushed in, backed up by the big lug who’d busted into Pete’s apartment.

Belial turned to him and tilted his head. “Ah, one who’s not a complete chav. You must be the boss.”

Naughton stopped dead, stumbling over his own feet. “Oh, fuck me.”

“Just back off, Nicholas,” Pete told him. “We’re leaving, and I don’t want a fuss.”

She expected Naughton to throw a curse, or possibly, if he was less of a bastard than she’d calculated, break down and piss himself, but she hadn’t expected him to laugh. “I never took you for the type who bargains with Hell, Petunia. Never in a million years.”

“You don’t know everything,” Pete told him. “Now step, ’fore I have the demon pull out your spine and use it for a percussion instrument.”

“Go ahead.” Naughton gestured her toward the door. “You can’t stop what’s coming. Not you, and not that black beastie you’ve called up out of the pit.”

“There’s no need to get shirty,” Belial said. “I’m a bit more than a beastie. You can tell, else you wouldn’t be keeping your distance and”—his nostrils flared—“sweating that sweet, coppery mess into the air like a virgin on her wedding night.”

“You keep away from me,” Naughton told him. “I serve something much worse than a demon on a vacation from the pit.”

“Yeah, you and Nergal can circle-jerk until the end of days,” Belial said. “But you’re still not going to tangle with me, are you?”

“No,” Naughton said. “I’m not.” He pointed them to the door. “Go,” he said. “The son of Nergal still rises. The ashes of this world will still fertilize the soil of the next. The dragon of my god will see to it. I’ve done my duty. Who raises him is inconsequential.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Pete told Belial. “You let him, he’ll talk for hours. Loves the sound of his own voice.”

“It’s not going to work out the way you think, Nicky boy,” Belial told him. He examined the cuff of his shirt, which bore a halo of blood. “But yes. I’ll leave you for now. I do enjoy living things to play with.”

Pete helped Ollie outside, although his weight combined with her own wasn’t helping her stay upright. It was nearly morning: dampness on the cobbles, and a cold bite to the air that would vanish when the sun rose higher.

Belial inhaled deeply. “Smoke and piss and death. Smells just like home.”

Pete settled Ollie on the curb. “You all right?”

Ollie nodded, swiping sweat droplets off his pudgy jaw. “I’ll live. Feel a bit like puking my guts out in the nearest drain, though.” He looked between Pete and the demon. “You all right? And who’s this tosser? Don’t like his look.”

“But I like you a great deal, fat man.” Belial grinned. “You’d look so very pretty turning on a spit with a poker shoved up your bum.”

“You,” Pete told Belial, “shut it. You”—she pointed at Ollie—“get yourself home, and take a few days off.”

Ollie didn’t move his stare from Belial. He’d be feeling it, his lizard brain screaming at the intrusion of a predator into the fold, but he wouldn’t allow himself to quite answer his own question. “What am I supposed to tell Patel about falling off the map the night after me partner got himself sliced up and coming back looking like I’ve been bloody tenderized?”

“You’ll think of something,” Pete told him. “Now please, Ollie. Go home. If anything else happens to you, it can’t be because of me.”

Ollie narrowed his eyes, but he nodded. “Anything you need, Pete, you call me, all right? Fuck Patel and the rest.”

Pete patted his broad shoulder. “You’re a good man, Ollie. Go on now.”

“Sentimental git,” Belial said after Ollie walked away toward the main road.

Pete glared. “Nobody asked you.”

The demon sniffed the air, nostrils flaring white. “I’m famished. Everything smells so … so much. All grease and oil and digestive juices. I’d eat for days.”

“You expect me to believe you eat food?” Pete said. She walked a little way, settling against one of the orange columns that marked the way through Southwark to the Tate Gallery on the bank. She didn’t intend to stay long, just take some of the weight off her bruises and try to curb the dizziness and nausea that had become her constant minders.

“ ’Course I do,” Belial said. “What, did you think I gnawed on babies or summat? I like food.” He inhaled again, shutting his eyes and turning his face to the weak sunlight. “I like food, and the cinema, and feeling rain on my face. I’m not so different from a human, Pete.”

“You’re fucking miles from human,” Pete told it. “And don’t try to lull me into thinking otherwise.”

Belial shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

“I’d rather give Nicholas Naughton a deep tongue kiss,” Pete said.

“That’s rather harsh,” Belial said. “At least I’m not a necrophiliac like your little friend back there.” He walked out to the center of the street and turned in a slow circle. “I love this city. I can’t understand what humans find so terrible about their world that they try to destroy everything in it.”

“People aren’t famous for thinking in the long term,” Pete said. “ ’Sides, Naughton’s just arrogant enough to think he’ll be some kind of king of the apocalypse if his dead gods come out ahead.”

“It’s almost tempting to let Nergal chew him and spit him out,” Belial said. “But if Nergal returns, there won’t really be much left for me to enjoy in this world or any other, so how about you find Winter so I can gently persuade him to stop being a twat?”

Pete dug her thumbs into the corners of her eyes. “Give me a minute, all right?”

Belial shrugged, leaning against the column next to her. “Sure. Just stand here as long as you like. Nergal will wait patiently while you pull your shit together.”

Pete saw a tightness in Belial’s frame she’d never witnessed before. She’d hated him, sure he’d tricked Jack somehow, sure that the pleasure he took in pulling Jack into Hell was entirely sadistic. Now she was sure of nothing. Jack could have bargained with the demon freely, could have known exactly what he was getting into. And Belial wasn’t human. The bargain was sacred to a demon. Belial had never actually broken his bargain with Jack. He’d tortured him, yes, but only after he’d given Jack his allotted thirteen years.

Pete decided she really must be beyond exhaustion. She was considering trusting a demon. “You’re really piss-scared of Nergal, aren’t you?” she said. “He’s got your cage good and rattled.”

“Like you’re any different,” Belial said. For once his tone wasn’t the slick sneer that made Pete want to fetch him a smack. “You’re scared, because you’ve got sense. Nergal’s been around since the beginning of before the beginning. He’s a force, a thing. Mesopotamians named him, made him the god of all ills. The Christians gave him a starring role and cribbed all the best bits for the devil. That’s a PG-rated version of what he really is, though.”

Belial watched a pigeon land on the column above. “I’ve seen him, in the plague pits and the camps. In the mass graves and the suicide bombings. Plagues don’t have to be microscopic, Petunia. Black magic and violence and suffering and murder. Those are plagues of the soul, and they’re Nergal’s favorite kind, because there’s no cure. The ancients got him nearly right,” Belial said. “The adversary. The bringer of ill wind.”

“Sounds like a barrel of laughs.” Pete lifted herself away from the column. “I don’t know where Jack is and I don’t know how to find him. The one place he’d go that I know about, he won’t be there now.” Lawrence would never allow Jack back into the fold now. He was a good friend, but he had limits.

“I’m sorry Winter broke your heart,” Belial said. “But you’re the one who called me, and I’m holding up my end of the bargain.” Belial put his hand over Pete’s. “He fucked you. Get over it. Screw your head on and stop him from being the weak little cunt I always knew him to be.”

“Don’t play with me,” Pete said, slapping his hand away. “You’re not sorry. You’re prince of a race of serial killers. You don’t care how I’m feeling any more than you’d care about a cockroach crawling into the path of a lorry.”

“I don’t feel,” Belial said. “But I understand. I understand loss and desire. It’s the fabric of the bargains we make. It’s what knits a human soul together—pain, too, and agony, and ecstasy, and love. It’s such a fragile thing. You shouldn’t work, but you do. I suppose I’m interested in how it came to this, you being here with me and Winter being gone.”

“Like you’re interested in the cinema,” Pete said.

Belial nodded. “Has there been a Bond flick on? I do like that new bloke they’ve got doing the part.”

“We can go to my flat and I can see if I can figure out where he might have gone to ground,” Pete said.

“Won’t work, but all right,” Belial said.

“Then don’t come,” Pete snapped, “because it’s the only idea I’ve got.”

Belial followed her after a moment. They walked in silence. The only other humans in evidence were the street cleaners and the trashmen, going about their business in their neon slickers.

The area around Naughton’s club wasn’t made for daytime, and the street was gray and depressing in the light of the sun, weathered storefronts and pitted streets choked with garbage that sluiced away under the hissing hoses of the street cleaners. Pete realized they were being followed as they passed the entrance to the Tate and turned along the river, but she waited until they’d gone nearly a block before she turned around. She was reasonably certain it wasn’t a ghost or something like the zombie—she hadn’t felt the prickle of the Black that clung to those who’d crossed over from it.

“Hold up,” she told Belial. He stopped, and his black shark’s eyes scanned the street.

“It’s something alive,” he said. “Breath, blood, heartbeat. Want me to pull its limbs off until it tells us why it’s here?”

Pete crinkled her lip. “I was thinking I’d ask them what they want first.” She cupped her hands and shouted at the street. “We know you’re there. You might as well come out.”

After a few heartbeats, a shaggy black head leaned from the alley, followed by a lanky male body in a black leather coat and black jeans that clung like rot to the boy’s skin. He walked with the shuffling, stumbling gate of a user, staring at her warily from eyes rimmed in blue, sleepless bruises. His cheek twitched. “You Pete Caldecott?”

“I might be,” Pete allowed. The junkie looked at Belial.

“Who’s that?”

“My fucking butler,” Pete said. “Who are you?”

“Got a message to pass on,” the boy said. “Guy on the ward paid me twenty quid and hooked me up with his connection on the outside if I’d take it to this bird named Pete Caldecott.” He shoved a flat piece of flexible plastic at Pete. “Told me you might be here. Now I’m done.”

“Wait just a bloody minute,” Pete said as he started to turn away. “What ward? Who’s the bloke?”

“Dunno,” the boy shrugged. “Bad dye job, blue eyes, old, but he was tasty.” He rolled his shoulders. “I wouldn’t’ve charged him full price off the street.”

“Jack?” Pete said. “Was his name Jack?”

“Sweetheart,” said the boy, “in my line of work, they’re all named Jack.”

“Hey!” Pete shouted at the boy as he started to slump away. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

The boy walked backward for a moment. “He said come find him,” he called. “Said you’d figure out the rest.”

Pete looked back at the bracelet. LAVEY, GERALD was typed crookedly at the top, and a fat blue stripe warned Pete RESTRICTED PATIENT. Pete examined the hospital logo. St. Bernadette’s, a hospital near the city, as gray and unassuming as the rest of London’s postwar construction.

“What’s Jack got himself into now?” Belial asked.

“Fake name on a psych ward, far as I can tell,” Pete said. “Gerald Gardner and Anton LaVey—Jack’s idea of a joke.” She rubbed the strip between her fingers like rosary beads she used to count while she was waiting for mass to end as a girl, until her father hissed at her to stop the clicking. “He’s at the hospital that gave him this.” She held the bracelet, stripe out, to the demon’s view. “And apparently they think he’s gone insane.”

CHAPTER 34

St. Bernadette’s was doing a brisk business in the A&E when Pete and Belial arrived. A youth with a stab wound was screaming on a gurney while his hysterical mother shouted at the attending doctor in Polish and a pair of uniformed Met officers shouted at her in a counterpoint of Geordie and cockney accents.

“You stay here,” Pete told Belial. “If Jack sees you, he’s liable to blow a hole straight through the roof of this place.”

“Winter was always such a sensitive boy,” the demon purred, but he took a seat obediently in a salmon-pink chair bolted to the wall and picked up an ancient copy of Tattler.

Pete avoided the check-in desk, walking with the determined stride that told any observers she knew exactly where she was going and didn’t brook interference. With any luck, the nurses would assume she was with the pair of coppers dealing with the stab victim.

She skirted the curtains that contained patients deeper into their trauma than the boy in the entry, most lying quietly, many smelling of old lager and newer vomit. A glance at the floor map once she’d gotten past the gatekeepers told Pete that the psychiatric unit was on the fourth floor, and she got in the elevator, nodding to an orderly who got on at the same time. They rode in silence, and Pete disembarked into a low hall lit with flickering tube lights. A charge nurse sat behind a desk, and she looked up for less than a second when Pete approached.

“Visiting hours are posted in the lobby.”

“I’m not here for a visit,” Pete said. “Here about a patient of yours.”

The nurse sighed and reluctantly made eye contact. “What’s this regarding?”

“Gerald LaVey,” Pete said. “He was admitted…” Another Connor trick. Human beings were inclined to fill in relevant information. The nurse didn’t bite.

“If you’re a copper or a social worker, let’s see some ID and I’ll see about getting someone up here to unlock him.”

“Look,” Pete said. “I need to see him. What’s it going to cost me?”

The nurse regarded Pete as if she were something slimy and still moving that the woman had stepped in. “It’s gonna cost you a trip to the local station now.” She picked up the phone and punched an extension.

Pete reached out and slammed her finger on the disconnect button. The nurse jerked the phone from her. “Oi! How dare you?”

“I’m sorry,” Pete told her, stepping back and holding her hands up. “I’m very, very sorry.”

“You should be,” the nurse said. “And you’re gonna be sorrier when I get your arse hauled off to jail.”

“My dear woman.” Belial appeared at Pete’s shoulder, as if out of thin air. “I assure you that our intentions toward your patient benefit you as well as him.” He reached out and put his hand over the nurse’s, as she grabbed for the telephone receiver again. “It’s all right,” Belial told her, thumb stroking across the woman’s knuckles. “I know. I know the bills aren’t being paid, even though you’ve been working shifts back to back. I know about young Ned and his trouble at school, about those boys who held him down and took photos down his pants and posted them all over the net.” Belial leaned in. Pete watched as the nurse’s face went slack. “I know that every day since your husband left, you think about walking into this place with his skeet rifle and doing as many as you can before you cram a handful of those pills you feed the crazies down your gullet.”

The nurse stared at Belial, her jaw slack. One tear worked its way down her face, running into the furrow next to her nose. Her lips worked, lax and rubbery, and a pathetic sound came from her throat.

“I know how to make it all go away,” Belial said. “I think you do, too.”

Pete wanted to move, to tell Belial to stop, but she felt as rooted as the nurse. The demon’s power wasn’t like being touched by cold—it simply curled up and lived in her mind, as if it had always been there, whispering to her. It was like sinking under with a handful of the pills Belial had talked about. Warm, soft, a slowing heartbeat, and a flow of euphoria that made everything around Pete—the smell of the ward and the screams of the patients and the ding of the PA—matter very little.

Belial cut his eyes to her and mouthed Go.

“Don’t hurt her,” Pete said. She backed up a step, which lessened the thrall of Belial’s power, but not enough to completely stem the tide of fascination. She wanted him to speak to her, to touch her and read her like he was reading the nurse.

“I want you to do it right now,” Belial said, ignoring Pete completely. “Get up and do it.”

The nurse stood, gathered her purse and coat from behind her desk, and left the ward without a backward look. Pete watched her go, until the doors swished shut behind her ample rear.

“What did you do?” she said. Belial took up a seat behind the desk, putting his feet up.

“Convinced her she wants to be somewhere else. She’s going to go out there, empty her checking account, buy a ticket to Leeds, and look up the girl she was in love with at university. Of course, that one’s married with two girls and actually straight, but it’ll keep her out of our business.”

Pete snatched the charge list away from him and ran her finger down to Gerard LaVey. “You’re enjoying this.”

“Of course I am.” Belial laced his fingers behind his head. “People are so simple most of the time. Give them permission to do what they really like and they behave like animals, blood running in the streets.”

Pete threw the charge list back at him and grabbed up the nurse’s keycard, going to the third locked room on the ward. She swiped the card and waited for the slow progress of the electronic door.

Jack’s room was bereft of furniture, except for a steel bedframe propped on end against the far wall. He sat in the center of the painted cement, naked, knees drawn up to his chest. “There you are,” Pete said softly. She made a move to step inside, but Jack spoke.

“Don’t come in.”

Pete glanced around the cell-sized space, and saw that every inch of wall and floor, save a small spot for Jack to sit, was painted with ritual symbols. He’d started in marker, black ink jagged and done in shaking hands, and as the symbols flowed toward the center of the floor, they became blood, sticky and gleaming from long exposure to the air.

“Fuck me,” Pete said. “What have you done?”

“Don’t come inside,” Jack said. “Don’t come any closer.”

“You’d hurt me?” Pete said. She stuck an arm out and caught the doorframe. The Black flowing through the writing on the cell walls was like being smacked across the face, and left her skull ringing.

“They’re not for you,” Jack said. “Now go away.”

Pete took a step inside instead, and when nothing happened, sat next to Jack on the clear patch of floor, drawing her own legs up. “Been here long, then?”

“I was going to go and start the ritual and give the raven woman Carver,” Jack said. “Then I went back by the flat to get a few things. You were gone.” He put his forehead on the knobby points of his knees. “Didn’t know if you’d chucked me or Naughton had taken you. But I turned around and I checked into hospital. Figured some anti-psychotics would keep the sight down, thick steel walls. I fucked everyone I know to do this thing and I couldn’t even follow through on that.”

Pete realized that now that she was inside the cell, the Black had gone softer, as if they were behind thick stone walls muting a rush of traffic on the other side.

“I’m a waste,” Jack said. “Eventually she’ll find me, and I won’t go back to Hell. I’ll go to the Underworld, and then even Nicholas fucking Naughton can’t fetch me back.” He breathed deeply, back quivering. “Then it’ll be done.”

“Yeah, well,” Pete told him, lifting his face so she could look at him. “I’m not about lying down and dying, so you better snap the fuck out of it and get on with helping me.”

Jack put his hand over Pete’s, and tangled his fingers tight enough to bruise her. “What the fuck,” he snarled, “ever made you have such blind faith in me?”

“I don’t,” Pete said. “I have no faith in you, Jack. That’s over, and that’s between you and me.” She removed her hand from him. “Now, you promised Carver to the Morrigan?”

“You know I did,” Jack mumbled.

Pete stood, smudging her foot in a wide circle across as many of the symbols as she could. “Then I think it’s time we give her what she wants.”

CHAPTER 35

Jack started to shout at Pete, scrambling up and trying to grab her, but she twisted away from him and smeared at the walls with her hands, ink and blood coating her palms.

He screamed at her, but Pete soon lost the sound amid the wild rushing of wings, hundreds of wings and thousands of feathers, wind across an endless, empty place as the Black convulsed and shifted around them.

She’d seen the Morrigan before, once, when she’d appeared to take Algernon Treadwell’s soul back to the Underworld. Just a glimpse, and that had been enough. The raven woman had feathers for hair and black coals for eyes. Her skin was the skin of a corpse and her fingers dipped to run down Jack’s spine.

I knew you’d come, she whispered, and Jack let out a quiet sob.

“He’s not the one you’re dealing with,” Pete told her. The Morrigan turned her eyes on Pete, and staring at her, Pete felt her talent writhe, filled with the same empty, sharp feeling as when she’d come to the hospital for the last time—not to say goodbye to Connor, but to collect his things after the nurses had cleaned out his bed and packed them up.

The room, devoid of oxygen machines and heart monitors, the crisp pink spread and all of the flowers she and his friends from the Met had brought thrown away. Empty. Nothing.

You think you’re a hero, the Morrigan whispered. A bright soul that will outshine the dark. She put her clawed hands on either side of Pete’s face, and brought their lips so close they nearly brushed, sharing the air. The dark is greater than all of you. And I’ve lived in it for so long, Weir. It’s time the rest of you do as well.

“I know I’m not a hero,” Pete said. “But I wasn’t stupid enough to come alone.”

Belial stepped from the doorway and raised a hand. “Why, look at you. Out in the daylight and everything. Mind your tan.”

The Morrigan hissed, baring her teeth. Her canines were sharp as needles. Belial answered with his shark’s grin. “I like things the way they are,” he said. “The dead should stay dead. So why don’t you hop on your broomstick and leave the world as it is?”

Pete crouched next to Jack, pulling him to his feet. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going.”

The Morrigan turned on them, and Pete put her body between the raven woman and Jack. This changes nothing, the Morrigan snarled. You think I fear a maggot feasting on the flesh of lost souls? I am death. I am the maiden of war and the bride of blood since Nergal’s dragon first crept forth from the old places, the lost places. You won’t stop me.

Belial moved, but the Morrigan was quicker, and she raised her arms. Behind her, Pete saw the great wings rise, the wings that carried souls to the Underworld, and death from it.

The demon flew back into the corridor and slammed the wall. The body he rode let off a small wheeze, and Belial curled into a ball, blood coming from between his lips. Fat drops landed on the gray tile.

The Morrigan stretched out her hand to Jack. Give him to me. Or you go back to how I found you, alone and in Hell. And I will take your Weir to the Bleak Gates, and I will ensure she never sees the daylight world again, until everything goes to ashes.

Jack grabbed his skull, moaning, and then quickly as he’d convulsed, he went limp. Pete saw the symbols on the walls of the cell blur, fall away as the Black pushed through. Gerard Carver’s spirit stood before her, and behind him Pete saw the London of the in-between, burnt and blacked, its back broken.

The shadow she’d seen with the Hecate unfurled, and she became aware the Morrigan was speaking, and that this wasn’t the Black, but somewhere else. Older, buried down deep before the first human or thing that would become human had ever drawn breath.

Son of Nergal, serpent of the world. Eater of death and life, darkness and day, be free. The Morrigan didn’t raise her hands, or even chant. Her lips barely moved as she watched, reverent.

The dragon wasn’t a dragon in the sense of scales, but a shadow that wrapped London around and around, spilling forth from the place Gerard Carver’s ghost connected the hospital cell with. Pete felt it unfurl, saw that it was a prison, this place where the dragon had lain, and heard it scream as it came barreling toward Gerard Carver.

Pete tried to reach for Jack, but she wasn’t near him any longer, wasn’t anywhere. The dragon came, and it swallowed Carver, jerked as the soul cage tugged at it, pulling it down and holding over the burning city, as the spotlights roaming the sky winked out one by one.

Go, child, the Morrigan whispered to it. You have come to me, and because you have come, I offer you the chance to be free.

The dragon howled again, and the Morrigan passed her hand across Jack’s face. He will lead the way. And you will lead the dead, the armies of the Underworld, and the Black will be clean and new. She stroked his hair, ran her claws through it, and Jack shivered under her touch, leaning into it. None of the throbbing masses. None of the filth and sweat and blood. Clean and cold and free of what troubles you. You, crow-mage. You brought this dawn, and I thank you.

Pete watched as Jack stood, and the Morrigan drew something from her great dress of feathers and blackness. She handed Jack a black blade, and pressed her thumb to his forehead. All over Jack’s naked form new markings blossomed, tattoos that painted themselves onto his skin, burst to the surface like shattered veins. Jack screamed, going to his knees, clutching the blade so that blood flowed from his palms.

Belial was not stirring, and Pete tried to reach for him, but the Black was whirling, colliding with the daylight world. The London outside was burning, and Pete could hear screams and klaxons.

The dragon fed. Unwinding, devouring Carver’s soul, it fed and Pete felt the swell of all the things Belial had spoken of—the plagues of rage and greed and base human nature.

Give them permission to do what they like, and they’re like animals.

Jack’s ink became wings, claws, agonized faces of spirits frozen against his skin. He stood before the Morrigan naked, blood flowing over his hands, and watched as the dragon laid its coils over the city, a darkness so complete not even sound could pierce it.

“Jack,” Pete said. “Please don’t. Remember why you came here.”

“I am,” Jack mumured. “It’s like I told you, Pete. I did it so you could be safe. Aren’t you glad now?”

Come. The Morrigan folded him beneath her wings, pressed their lips together. Blood dribbled from their kiss, down the Morrigan’s chin, where she lapped it up.

Pete looked to Belial again, and saw his eyes open, cloudy and staring. She followed his gaze and saw the owl, sitting on the sill beyond the mesh and bars, amid the rain of ash.

“Jack,” she tried, one last time. He wouldn’t look at her, locked in the embrace of the Morrigan.

“This is what has to happen, Pete,” he said. “You can’t stop it. Nothing can stop it. Worlds have to die for a new world to be born.”

“A world of more death?” Pete whispered.

“I’m a part of it,” Jack said. “You never accepted it, but it’s always been that way. I’m one of the dead, Pete. I just didn’t know it until now.”

Pete felt the Morrigan’s death sense replaced with something else. It was the knowing, the truth she couldn’t lie her way out of.

The owl watched her. Behind it, Pete saw something larger rise, something beyond the dragon, older and larger, a vast intelligence without form, an ill wind blowing the ashes of the old London, the one she’d thought was real until she met Jack, before it.

She took a step toward Jack, then another. Reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. She shook, fingers vibrating, tears flowing thick down her face, running to the corners of her lips, salt in her mouth.

The Morrigan hissed, but Pete pulled Jack to face her. “I know,” she said. “I do. I know what you are, Jack.”

She gripped his wrists, and they were close enough to share a heartbeat. “That’s why I’m sorry,” Pete whispered.

Jack grabbed the back of her neck, pulled them so their foreheads touched. “Don’t be,” he said. Pete kissed him, and tasted his blood on her tongue. She let herself take just a moment, an extra heartbeat, to remember him. His scent, his warmth, the firmness of his hands and the feel of his palm against hers. Then she turned the black blade of the Morrigan, and drove it into Jack’s chest.

The Morrigan screamed, and all around them, in this burning London, thousands of crows took flight.

Do you have any idea, the Morrigan screamed at her, any idea what you’ve done?

Pete saw the owl take flight, join the crows. She felt nothing. Not like screaming, not like weeping, nothing. Jack was gone. Jack had always been gone. Touched by death, his presence in her life was a reprieve, not a certainty. And she’d fought, and refused to let go. Now there was nothing to hold at all, just ashes, and plagues, and the taste of blood in her mouth.

She met the Morrigan’s black, burning eyes, like oil burning on black water. “What I had to,” she whispered.

Beyond the window, the thing retreated, the prison doors rolling shut. The dragon gave a scream that shook the city to its foundations. The crows circled and then shot east, a great flock that could blot out ten suns, straight to the Bleak Gates.

Pete hoped Jack’s soul was among them, borne on to a place that would be, if not better than the one he’d found here, at least a place that wasn’t Hell.

Mark my words, Weir, the Morrigan snarled. You cannot cheat death. You cannot stop it or placate it or bargain with it. You and I, we know this. And someday, you’ll be at the Gates yourself.

Pete let the blade slip from her grasp. It landed by her feet with a dull thunk. “Until that day comes?” she told the Morrigan. “You can fuck right off.”

Tired beyond all reason, battered by the Black like driftwood, Pete felt herself slipping. Back from the Bleak Gates, back from the disturbance caused by the Morrigan, back into the cold, hard edges of the daylight world.

The Morrigan took flight, joining her crows, and the fires in the east winked out.

Pete heard rushing feet, the snap of surgical gloves, the thud of bodies. Shouts.

This one’s conscious!

Check the one in the hall—looks like bloody roadkill.

The fuck’s happening? Who is this git?

She lay on the ground. Jack lay a few feet away, a single long line in his abdomen, straight and thin, trailing surprisingly little blood. A pair of orderlies in white jumpsuits worked over him, bag on his face while the other prepped a defibrillator.

“Clear!” he shouted, and Jack’s body jumped. His new ink covered nearly every inch of him, from neck to feet, and he was still, and pale, and dead.

Pete choked, and that was all she could give. She was too wrung to cry, too spent to even try. A doctor in pink scrubs loomed over her, flashed a light in her eyes, checked her neck.

“You hurt, love?” she said. Pete managed to shake her head. The doctor helped her up.

“Let’s get you down to A&E,” she said. “Stand up, there’s a good girl. The hospital’s going to have some forms it’ll want you to sign about the patient who got out.”

An orderly came up on her left side and took her arm. “I’ll escort Miss Caldecott, Doctor. You tend the wounded.”

The doctor ran back inside the cell, where the other orderly shocked Jack again. She leaned over his chest and then shook her head. “Jolt him again. He’s not going to bleed out just yet, but it won’t do a bit of good if he’s brain-dead, will it?”

Psychic death. Would stop your heart surely as plunging onto concrete. Pete tugged against the orderly’s grasp, trying to be somewhere she didn’t have to look.

Don’t be.

He’d told her to. Told her to let him go. Pete saw the owl again, on the sill as if it had never left, gray and unremarkable in the sun. “Leave me alone,” she whispered. “I did what you wanted. Tell your bitch that.”

He was gone this time. Gone, to the land of the dead. She would never see him, talk to him, touch him. He was gone, and she was still here, and he wasn’t coming back.

The owl blinked, tilted its head, then took flight, as if it had suddenly remembered there was no need to hang about.

In the next moment, one of the machines working over Jack pipped. “I’ve got a rhythm,” the orderly shouted. The doctor took over the bag and pointed out the cell door. “Call trauma and get a surgery prepped. Get me some blood and a fucking surgeon. Fucking git, tries to kill two people and kick himself off. Doesn’t bloody deserve the fuss.”

Pete did sag then, against the orderly who grabbed her. “Best we be going,” Belial said in her ear.

“You’re all right,” she said as he dragged her to the lift. She was flat. Jack was alive. At least for the moment, and she was being dragged from the hospital by a demon.

“I’ve had better days,” Belial said. “Bitch walloped me a good one, tried to push me right out of my skin and back to the pit like a tube of toothpaste. But fortunately she’s only good at swanning about and looking terrifying. Piss-poor exorcist.” The demon cackled.

“I saw him,” Pete said, as they wound through the packed A&E lobby. “Nergal. I saw the dragon.”

They came out the door, and the scent of smoke went up Pete’s nose and choked her. She saw a motor accident in the street, ambulance versus taxi, and people sitting on the sidewalk, staring, some walking in circles. She heard screams over the klaxons that were no longer in her imagination. Saw two youths in hoodies pick up a rolling garbage can and toss it through a shop window, grabbing handfuls of pocket cameras and MP3 players.

“What the fuck…” Pete started. She was having a hard time standing, her eyes going unfocused in slow, rolling waves.

“The dragon,” Belial said. “Creeping up through the layers. It’ll die down.” He put her off and stood at arm’s length, looking at her. “It’s been fun, Petunia Caldecott,” he said. “And I’ll be dropping by, sooner or later, to collect my end. But until then…” Belial dropped her a wink. “You and Winter have a nice little life.”

“You’re not…” Pete breathed in, out, tried to keep on her feet. “You won’t try for Jack?”

“Winter gave me his soul,” Belial said. “I lost it because I was a stupid twat, and that winged bitch is stronger. For now.” He tipped his head back at the hospital. “Not to worry. I’ll have another try at the crow-mage’s soul, Petunia. You just wait and see.”

Belial faded away into the roiling crowd, and Pete sat down on the curb, holding her head. Jack was alive. The dragon was free, but Nergal was still in whatever hole the old gods had stuffed him in. The Black was shredded—she could feel it rolling and pulsing in her skull even now. She still owed Naughton, Ethan, still had McCorkle’s death hanging over her head.

It was a bad world, sooty and broken and hard. Full of nothing but trouble, if you listened to Jack. But Jack didn’t speak for her.

Pete stood up, and started for the tube. Whatever world she was in now, she reasoned, she would adapt and so would Jack. They would be survivors, together. The way it should be.