Demon Bound

Chapter One

A crow sat on the dead branch of the dead tree that watched over two gravestones in the corner of Brompton Cemetery. It watched Jack Winter with its black eyes like beads, and he watched the crow in turn, with eyes that most people called ice, but that he called simply blue.

Jack drew a Parliament out of the air and touched his finger to the tip. He sucked a lungful of smoke and blew it at the crow, which flapped its wings and snapped its beak in irritation. “Fuck off, then,” Jack told it. “Not like I want you hanging about.”

“Leave that bird alone,” said his companion. “If the map I got from tourist information is right, the graves are close by here.” Her circular ramble through the headstones came to a stop next to Jack. “Oh. You found them.”

“Mary and Stuart Poole,” Jack said, flicking his fag at Mary’s headstone. “Who says the gods don’t have the occasional bout of humor?”

Pete Caldecott gave Jack what he’d describe as a dirty look, and not dirty in the manner that led to being naked and sweaty. She strode over and picked up his litter, shoving it into her coat pocket. “You’re a bloody child, you know that? Emotionally twelve. Thirteen at the most.”

Jack shrugged. “Been accused of worse.” He felt in the inside pocket of his motorbike jacket for another Parliament, but thought better of it when Pete put a hand on her hip.

“We’ve a job to do, and if we don’t do it, we don’t get paid, so are you going to stand there all day with your thumb in your arse or are you going to get to work?”

Jack withdrew his hand from his coat slowly, feeling rather like a nun had caught him with a dirty magazine. Pete was, at the first look, not a She Who Must Be Obeyed sort, but Jack knew better. Shorter than him by a head, she had green eyes straight from the Emerald Isle, and dark hair and sun-shy skin that turned her to Snow White in torn denim and an army jacket. Lips plump like rubyfruit, a body that a bloke could spend hours on and still feel like he was starving for it.

But at moments like now, when she glared at him and tapped her foot on the dead grass over the Pooles’ final rest, Jack had learned he was better off doing as he was told. Unless he felt like a smack in the head, and it was too early in the day for kinky foreplay.

Jack picked up the black canvas tote they’d brought along and crouched between the Pooles’ headstones. The entire practice of raising the dead for things like “closure” and “peace” was a load of bollocks, but Pete’s Irish temper kept him from articulating the thought, and she was right, besides—they did have a job.

“’S still a bloody stupid request from the family,” Jack told her. “Just like I said when you took them on.”

Pete folded her arms. “I spent near a decade of my life pushing paper around a desk at the Metropolitan Police, so once you’ve dealt with expense reports and a DCI who thinks that equipment that works is a luxury, not a necessity, you can jabber on about bloody stupid, all right?”

Jack grimaced. “I’m not a party trick, luv. This here is my talent and using it thusly . . . well . . . frankly, it’s demeaning.”

Pete pointed down at the grave. “Get to work, Winter. Before I lay you a smack.”

“I should have been a fucking fortune teller,” Jack grumbled. “The future is an open book compared to this shite.” He heaved a sigh for effect while he unzipped the satchel and pulled out his spirit heart. Pete merely folded her arms, her expression ever the impassive copper.

In Jack’s hand, the clockwork contraption weighed no more than a melon and was of comparable size. Round, made from brass, and hung from a chain, the spirit heart held a small hollowed-out chamber in its bottom. Jack dug the plastic baggie of galangal root out of the satchel and breathed on a pinch of the stuff.

Just a touch of sorcery, just enough to wake up the strands of magic that lived in the galangal. Jack rubbed the pinch between his fingers and tamped it into the chamber of the spirit heart. A stab of pressure hit him in the temple and he rubbed his forehead before standing. His talent knew what was coming, even if his mind didn’t, and Jack braced himself to take the punch of spirit energy the galangal root conducted.

Pete reached out and touched him on the arm, the lightest of touches, on his leathers no less, but he still felt it, dancing down through his blood and nerves to his bones. Her own talent felt like gooseflesh, like being touched by a girl you fancied for the first time, every time. It was different from his own slippery, slithering magic as a tube tunnel from a sewer. Similar functions, separated by miles of intent.

“You all right, Jack?” she said.

He lied to her with a small, tight nod and a smile. His head throbbed harder. “Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, luv. Let’s have this over with.”

Pete wasn’t fooled, and the twin lines between her eyes said so, but she had the grace to step back and pretend that Jack was as skillful a liar as he claimed.

Jack supposed if he had any sense, he’d be worried. Using magic wasn’t supposed to hurt. Not him, not a mage of the Fiach Dubh. The brothers of the crow were the rock stars of a magic trade often fraught with blood and blackness, hard and wicked men whom no one crossed.

Many of them were that. Jack was not. And if he did have sense, he’d stop before his talent burned a hole in him.

No one had ever accused him of having sense, though. Of being a wanker, yes. A thief, a sinner, and a murderer, certainly. But sensible, no. Jack thought that the day someone did accuse him of sense, it would likely be time to hang up his spurs.

“All right, you dusty lot,” he murmured, so low only the dead could hear. “Come and give me a haunt.”

Pete drew her small digital video kit from the bag and readied it, training the lens on Jack and the graves.

For his part, Jack held the spirit heart straight out above the earth, arm rigid as a divining rod. The clockwork pendulum swung gently, aimlessly. Jack inhaled and held the air. Panic chewed on the ends of his guts, scratched at his neck, and wormed into his brain. His body knew what he was about to do, and it was screaming.

Times like this, Jack felt the longing for a fix like the grasp of a familiar lover—tight, hot, gathered behind his eyes, knotting him up, making him cold, telling him, I have what you need. Take it and warm yourself, save yourself, taste the golden delights of the floating world.

The hiss of need had only grown louder since he’d kicked heroin, begging and pleading to have a chance, just one more chance to make it right.

All Jack could do was tighten his grip on the spirit heart, the cold brass warming to the same degree as his palm, and drown the murmuring of the fix in a tide of other whispers, crying and shouting, faint and fierce, buried and so old no one knew they were buried any longer.

The dead came to Jack as they always came, and he let himself see, do what he’d started fixing to avoid in the first place. Sight was his curse, and the one thing he could never fully erase.

In his hands, the spirit heart gave a tick.

Jack’s second sight found ghosts, thick here as a crowd in Trafalgar Square. They stood, for the most part, silent and staring at the living intruder in their pale, witch-lit world. A few hissed at him, black-eyed revenants with their flesh hanging off their bones. Revenants fed on the malice of their lives, which followed them in death like a shroud of black, twisting magic, spots on celluloid film.

Pete moved nearer to him. She couldn’t see what he saw, but she knew all the same, perhaps better than Jack, the chill of having the dead always just out of view. “Want me to start it?” she asked quietly. Giving him a way out, a way to pretend that merely looking through his sight wasn’t causing him the sort of headache normally found only after strong whiskey and passing out on something hard.

The spirit heart gave another tick, louder, stronger, and Jack nodded. “Wake them up.”

“Mary and Stuart Poole.” Pete raised her voice and pitched it sharp. Jack flinched as a ghost drifted closer to Pete, a girl with dark wet hair still tangled with the garbage she’d drowned in. The salt-sour stink of the Thames at low tide tickled his nostrils.

The girl ran her hand longingly across Pete’s cheek. Jack narrowed his eyes. “Oi. Shove off, miss. That’s not yours to take.”

Pete shivered, but continued. “Mary and Stuart Poole, we call you to this resting place. Come back to your bones.”

The drowned ghost drifted away, her torn dress and lank hair trailing behind her in a remembered river current. Jack felt a pull at his arm, and the spirit heart began to tick faster and faster, clockwork innards spinning like the earth was revolving too fast. He planted his feet and concentrated on staying merely upright. It shouldn’t be a task during a simple spirit raising

“Mary and Stuart Poole,” Pete said again. “Come back to your bones.”

There was power in triplets. Jack had taught her that. Pete never forgot something when you told her once.

A tug on his arm warned Jack that his insistence on going ahead while his magic was spinning out of control may have cost him his arse. The spirit heart was twirling now, as if someone had spun a globe and walked away. The brass caught the low afternoon sun and threw off light, the whirring of the clockwork like a bird’s heartbeat. Too fast. Too fast and too soon. The Pooles were coming to his summons, and they could get loose if he didn’t rein the power in.

Jack pushed against the swirl of enticement generated by the beating clockwork, forced it into a shape. A focus like the heart, or salt, or stone was important—raw magic pulled from something like a spirit could blow your insides out surely as a shotgun blast.

A halo, black, gathered around the spirit heart, touched it experimentally, the lightest of caresses, while the spirit heart shot blue sparks through the realm of the dead. Pete couldn’t see them, but she stepped back all the same. “They coming, then?”

“If I have any say,” Jack answered, and tugged ever so gently at the curiosity, the suggestion of minds and bodies that floated from the graves, and guided them to the spirit heart. Coaxed them, teased them, but never ordered them. Ghosts didn’t like being pushed about.

Jack had learned that rule the hard way.

In his hand, the spirit heart stopped.

It gave a last click, and the sides opened to allow the Pooles’ residual energies in. Jack released his grip on the chain, and the spirit heart floated under its own steam, turning gently in the passage of power from the awakened ghosts.

“Yes? Hello?” Mary Poole stood partly in the earth, ankles cut off by the grave. Her burial clothes clung to her frame in tatters. “Hello, yes? Can you hear me?”

“What do you want?” Stuart Poole was heavy, a heavy face full of jowls sitting on top of a heavy mound of body. “Who are you?”

“Jack Winter,” Jack said. “This here’s Petunia Caldecott.”

He flinched when Pete fetched him a punch in the shoulder. “Tosser.” She faced the ghost, pleasant and pointed as if Stuart Poole were a banker she suspected of defrauding his clientele. “Mr. Poole, we’re here on behalf of your children. Jayne and Stuart, the junior?”

“Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Can you hear me?”

“Repeater,” Jack said at Pete’s questioning eyebrow. “Just a fragment of a spirit left behind with the bones. Mary Poole’s been taken on to her eternal reward, if you believe that bollocks.”

“Comforting to know what’s waiting when I shuffle loose the mortal coil,” Pete muttered.

“Pardon me, but I’ve asked a question—who in blazes are you?” Stuart Poole demanded. “This is most irregular.”

“Pete,” Pete said. “And that’s Jack, like we’ve established. Your children have some questions about your will, Mr. Poole. Seems they’re absent from it?”

“Your beloved offspring were wondering if perhaps there was some mistake there,” Jack expanded. The dead pressed closer behind him, and he heard the wings, like wind through a grove of trees, but they were wings. He knew the sound. It was familiar, old, as much a part of him as his tattoos or the vertical scar on his right cheek from the business end of a smashed witch bottle.

Jack supposed he had stolen that necromancer’s Hand of Glory, and his wife, but he still thought the bloke had overreacted.

Scars faded, but the rush of wings never did. They always circled back, always came to him when he talked to the dead. A living walker in death’s realm always called to them, the eyes and wings of the Underworld. The crows of Death.

“Jack . . .,” Pete said, right on cue. She didn’t have the sight, but she did have a connection he didn’t, to the push and pull of power under the world, the constant tide of the Black under their feet.

“I know, I know,” he snapped. “Wrapping up—how is it, Stu? You cut your brats out of the will, or was it all a terrible misunderstanding that will be resolved with tears and hugging and vows to be a better sort of person because it’s what Mum and Dad would have wanted if they hadn’t kicked off in that lorry collision?”

Stuart Poole puffed up, his silvery insubstantial form spreading out over the graves. “It most certainly was not a misunderstanding. Jayne and my son were miscreants—Stuart with his embezzling and Jayne with her women.”

Jack cocked an eyebrow at Pete. “The very nerve.”

“They’re not getting a penny!” Stuart Poole bellowed. “Not a single cold shilling, you understand?”

“Perfectly.” Jack dropped a wink at Stuart Poole. “Hope you’re less of a miserable sod in the afterlife, guv.”

“I never heard such . . . ,” Poole began, but Jack let go of the thin thread of spirit he’d caught, and Stuart sputtered out like a run-down torch.

The wings were much closer now, ruffling the leaves and the grass around their feet, filling up the air with hisses and cries.

“Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Hello?”

“Shove off, luv,” Jack said. “Your ticket’s pulled. Run on and frolic up in God’s heaven, now.”

“Jack, honestly,” Pete said, rolling her eyes. She snapped the camera shut and tucked it back into the bag.

Jack reached out and gently cradled the heart as the clockwork slowed to nothing. The sound of ghosts leaving the living was almost never a howl, an explosion, or a dramatic dying gasp. Like most things, the dead just faded away.

The wings went with them. The ravens of the Bleak Gates, the guards of the entrance to death, had found their quarry, and it hadn’t been him. Today.

“Good job of that,” Pete said. “Quick and quiet, and the Poole family can’t dispute it.”

“Pete, people will always dispute what they don’t want to hear,” Jack said. “Although if you’re desperate enough to call on a shady ghost-raising sod like meself, I really don’t think you can dispute much of anything. Certainly not that you’re a tosser.”

“And I thought I was a pessimist.” Pete folded the camera into its case and handed him the bag. Jack shoved his spirit heart inside and shouldered the weight. He’d never had to drag around a bloody satchel when he was living as a mage. A little salt and chalk in the pocket, a sliver of mirror or silver, and it was enough to curse or hex his way out of and into most trouble. He’d carried more kit to shoot up than to work magic.

“Let’s call on the Pooles and get this over with, shall we?” he asked Pete, ignoring her last comment. You couldn’t spend any time at all in the Black and not lose faith in men, gods, and basic decency. The only ones who didn’t were the prize idiots who soon got themselves topped, if the older, hungrier citizens of his world were merciful.

“Now we’re eager to work?” Pete shoved her hands into her jacket. “This isn’t going to be a pleasant scene, you know.”

“Yes, well. The less time I have to spend doing parlor tricks for rich twats, the better off we’ll all be.” Jack added extra weight to his step as they reached Old Brompton Road and started for the tube station. His jackboots rang against the pavement like funeral knells.

Pete let the twat remark pass, and for that Jack was grateful. His temper had returned with a vengeance when he kicked his habit, and lost the thing keeping his sight at bay. The sight was no longer intermittent and faulty, forcing him to live rough and desperate as he used to keep the dead where the dead belonged. Now it was raw, like a fire eating through the paper of his mind, and it played hell with his control.

Pete got the brunt of it, and though she bore it with sharpness and a frown like a Victorian nursemaid, she didn’t deserve it. The heroin hadn’t eaten away enough of his brain to mask that fact. He was a twat himself for the things he said and did to her, but she’d chosen to stay with him, chosen the Black over her old, safe life, and Jack wasn’t so noble he would force her away for her own good.

The truth was, if he didn’t have the fix he needed her. And needing anything wasn’t a luxury a mage of his situation could afford.

But it was the truth, and Jack knew that in the Black, there was no changing truth.

Chapter Two

The Pooles lived in Kensington, in a million-pound row house that Jack would have happily vandalized at a point in the not-so-distant past. Pete stepped up and rang the bell, the camera dangling from her fist. “Let me talk to them, right? Let’s have a minimum of interrupting and an absence of swearing until the check’s in hand.”

Jack sighed, irritation spiking like acid in his guts. “I know how to play nicely, Pete. I’m not going to steal the silver or insult the Queen.”

“The Pooles’ kids are not going to be pleased,” Pete said. “The last thing I need is you making things worse.”

“Oi, who’s the teacher and who’s the apprentice, luv?” Jack said. “I’ve been raising ghosts since you were in nappies.”

“You’re the teacher, it’s true and you’re brilliant,” Pete said, with that deceptively sweet smile, the one that would take your head off like a razor if you got too close to it. “But you have the social skills of a chimpanzee on match day, and I’ll be doing the talking.”

“Well and good,” Jack grumbled in assent, since he’d probably say something to get the police called with the mood his headache and the effort of raising the spirits had fetched.

Jayne Poole opened the door and drew back, like one did when they found salesmen on the stoop. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve found something?” Jayne Poole had a pinched, anxious air to her, like a thin, nervous dog with thin, nervous blood.

“We did, Ms. Poole,” Pete said. “May we come in?”

Jayne Poole stepped aside and gestured them into the dank bowels of the house, which still smelled like her parents even after the nearly full year since their deaths. Jack couldn’t blame her entirely for the grim memorializing that was going on—death by runaway beer lorry wasn’t the most dignified end a couple of posh twats could come to.

Pete walked ahead of Jayne Poole, who moved slow and sloppy with pills or gin, or both. Jack would wager there was a regular Sid and Nancy doing a dance in her bloodstream.

“We made contact with your mum and dad,” Pete said, “and spoke about the issue of the will. . . .”

“Yes?” Jayne Poole chewed on her bloodless lower lip, one long square nail tapping her overbite. All that money, Jack thought, and the Pooles couldn’t fix their daughter’s traditional English teeth.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Pete said. Jayne Poole put her hand on her throat, covering the large emerald pendant that sat in the hollow like a wart on a wicked witch.

“What on earth is that supposed to mean, Miss Caldecott? I was Father’s favorite. I paid you good money . . .”

Jack cleared his throat. “Not to split hairs, but your brother paid us, and it don’t change the result—you and he both get nothing. And incidentally, the old man? Not such a fan of yours.”

Jayne Poole’s mouth flapped open, snapped shut, and she jabbed her finger at Pete. “How dare he speak to me that way? How dare the both of you take our money and deliver this . . . this . . . shite?”

Pete opened the camcorder and pressed the playback. Stuart Poole’s voice rattled through the sitting room, the windy, eldritch sound that ghosts on film took on.

Two heat flowers blossomed on Jayne Poole’s cheeks. “It’s fake,” she said hotly. “You must have faked it. Father would never say such things. Patently ridiculous.”

“Ms. Poole, we’ve done the job you paid us for,” Pete said, “and we’d like the rest of the money now.”

Jayne Poole clopped over to the door on her spiked shoes, heels digging divots out of the soft wood floors. Jack thought of his flesh, and flinched. “Get out,” Jayne Poole snapped, flinging the door wide to let in the muted daytime sounds of Kensington. “You’ll get not one red cent from me, and you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.”

“Ms. Poole,” Pete warned, her eyes going jewel-hard. “I advise you to think carefully before you decide not to pay us.”

“What are you going to do?” Jayne Poole’s horsey lip curled back. “Put a curse on me?”

“Don’t bloody tempt me,” Jack muttered, and grunted at the sharp pain when Pete jabbed him in the ribs.

“I’ll deal with this,” she said, low. “Ms. Poole . . .”

“Out!” Jayne Poole cried. “Out, right now, before I call the police.”

Pete threw up her hands. “I would love to see you do that,” she told Jayne Poole. She shut the camera with a slap and shoved it into the bag. “Come on, Jack. We’re finished.”

Jack followed Pete to the door, stopping on the threshold and turning his eyes back to Jayne Poole, who stood in the center of the foyer huffing like a well-coiffed freight train. “Your father hated you,” he told Jayne. “Right down to your greedy, rotten core, and it’s easy to see why. You’ll see him again sooner than you think, so perhaps you should spend your remaining years trying to become a bit less of a cunt.”

Jayne Poole’s fists curled, and she let out a sound of fury, but Jack ducked out before she could land a blow. “You take care, now, Ms. Poole.”

Pete rubbed her forehead as the door slammed behind them, leaving them with curious looks from the pavement population, tourists and posh types browsing in the nearby antique shop. Jack glared at the nearest group. “Take a photo or piss off.”

“Must you do that?” Pete said. “To everyone we meet? Must you play the villain?”

“Jayne Poole? That rotted-out bitch had it coming,” Jack said. He went around to the street and climbed in the passenger side of Pete’s battered Mini Cooper. Pete climbed behind the wheel, slinging the bag into the rear seat with force. The spirit heart rattled, reminding Jack with a few ticks of clockwork how badly the day so far had gone, and warning it wasn’t over yet. He stood by his words, though. The Jayne Pooles of the world did have it coming, the fate they thought couldn’t apply to them rushing up from the next life. Jack knew better than most that Death could tread your tracks for a very long time, until you got tired and gave out. He’d seen Death do that very thing, to a score of people a far better class of soul than Jayne Poole.

“We needed that money,” Pete said, her fingers tight on the steering. “As if I needed the reminder, my savings are nearly out and you’ve got the shirt on your back, if that.” She cast a look at the red slogan splashed across Jack’s chest, the one that read NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF. “And did it have to be that shirt, in particular?”

“Hasn’t got any holes,” Jack protested. “No visible stains. What’s wrong with it?”

“Forget I said it,” Pete muttered, jamming the Mini into gear and lurching into traffic with a wheeze of abused cylinders. Jack thought better of saying anything else, like they may need Jayne Poole’s bloody money but he’d be fucked by a priest, face-first up against the confessional, if he wanted anything to do with this spooks-for-hire business at all. It was risky, and silly, and it was only going to end with somebody getting their head jammed up their arse by an angry ghost.

Pete headed them back across the city toward White-chapel, and Jack sat still in the passenger seat, not saying all of the bitter things sitting on his tongue. They’d dissolve eventually, as they always did, and he’d swallow them back down and let them rot his guts a bit more.

Chapter Three

Pete parked in the alley next to Jack’s flat in the Mile End Road, and went inside without a word to him. Jack sat on the Mini’s bonnet and lit a fag, drawing it deep into his lungs, feeling the hiss and whisper of the Black fade in the face of something darker, more present.

Roman citizens burned their dead on the fields of Whitechapel, to the east of the City walls. Eighty thousand souls crouched there during the reign of Victoria, all of them steeped in magic and misery as Jack the Ripper stalked among them, blood trickling through his fingers to the smooth-rubbed cobblestones, while just behind him, the far larger and more terrifying specter of poverty and a smoke-tinged, stinking death marched, implacable and inexorable.

Whitechapel was the only place in London where Jack found a little relief from his sight. The dark and bloody veins of power that ran through the place masked the vibrations of the Black, put the volume down so he could at least sleep, if he had a fix in him. He’d first found the place going on twenty years ago, fresh off the train from Manchester and sleeping rough.

Whitechapel became home, an odd sort of home, dirty and sooty and filled up with past misery. But you didn’t choose where you rested your bones, the place chose you. Whitechapel was in Jack’s blood surely as the fix had once been.

Jack worked a hand under his collar and scratched at the tattoo on his left collarbone, one of the twin eyes of Horus resting under his skin. Pete had imbued them with power, the kind only someone of her talent could draw to a thing. And it held, mostly. The ink did as the skag had before it. But never enough, never as completely nor as quietly, never with the feeling of wrapping cotton wool over his third eye.

Shutting his eyes, Jack let the sounds of the real London, the real world, cover him. Slamming doors from his building, shouts in Urdu from his neighbor’s children, the flow of traffic on Mile End Road, the rumble of a train in the Hammersmith & City Line under his feet.

A window slid open four landings above, and Pete stuck her head out. “Jack, you coming up?”

He exhaled a last halo of blue smoke and ground the burning butt out under his boot. “In a minute, yeah.”

“You fancy tea?” Pete, though she lived here, in what many still considered a slum, with him, who most would consider a bum, kept her middle-class habits. Jack found his mouth quirking. The fact that she assumed civility of him was oddly charming, though he’d put a boot in the face of anyone who suggested such a thing.

“I suppose,” Jack said.

“I’ll get something in from Tesco, then,” Pete said, and disappeared, shutting the window. Jack felt her power waver away from him, descend the lift, and drift up the street to the Tesco Express before it slipped away, so much sand through fingertips. Jack ran a hand over his face. Told himself the noise of the street and the muted dark heartbeat of Whitechapel was all he heard.

It helped, for the moment, but it was always temporary. Always, the Black clawed at his mind, and the dead, which came to Jack because he radiated power like a torn electrical cable, hovered. The madness that had caused him to shove a needle in his arm in the first place sat in the corner with its face hidden, and it laughed.

The laughter turned and twisted, lapped back on itself until it bounced off the brick around his head, and Jack felt a sharp pain like a hot iron blade cut through his skull, behind his eyes.

He had enough time to think, This isn’t right.

Briefly, he was seventeen again and face-down on a carpet that smelled like dust and pipe tobacco as the dead danced around him, a funeral procession for any shred of his mind that remained protected from the sight. For a single clock tick, the dead reached out their hands and begged Jack to join them as they had that day.

The Black couldn’t invade consciousness, couldn’t move him from one place to another, up and down through time. Jack ground his knuckles into his forehead, hoping pain would bring him back to the present.

He was in the alley behind his flat.

He was thirty-eight years old.

And he was clean. The things the Black showed him weren’t real, they were only memories birthed from dreams.

Even though he whispered the mantra to himself, over and over—Not real, not real, I’m clean, I’m clean—the laughter became corporeal, a velvet touch on the back of his neck.

Belatedly, Jack knew the pain for what it was, and anger burned the panic out of him. Panic was for common people, those who had never touched the Black. Panic was death. He recognized the pain in his skull, greeted the sensation as one he’d hoped never to feel again.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve crawling up out of Hell in me backyard, whoever you are,” he told the demon.

“Always a kind word for your friends, Jack,” the demon purred, and Jack felt his admittedly ill-used heart give a jump against his bones. The voice, the voice that came out of the haze in his head, through the memory of blood gone cold against skin, and of broken bones that pressed against nerve.

The voice. When Jack dreamed of the deed, he dreamed of the voice. The voice that whispered secrets, terrible secrets into his ear, and called him . . .

“Jack,” the demon said again, running black-painted nails over a black silk tie. Its shirt was white, too white for the real London, its suit coal, eyes and hair to match. In them an ember burned, the flicker of visible power Jack recognized from his own eyes. The demon’s were crimson with corruption, like oil fire floating on a darkened sea.

“Jack,” the demon said a third time, because it knew the power of names and of triads, had taught them to the first member of the Fiach Dubh a thousand years past. It drew its bloodied lips back over twin, pointed front teeth. “Don’t say you’re surprised to see me.”

Chapter Four

For all he prided himself on quick reflexes and quicker wits, Jack froze. He froze like a man caught out, with his sins on display like scars.

“You thought we wouldn’t meet, on the eve of the deed?” the demon questioned. He took a step toward Jack, his gait gliding as if he moved on a snake’s belly. Jack felt his heartbeat slow, his blood thump through his ears like the bass on stage during one of his sets with the Poor Dead Bastards, back in the bad old days. The edges of the world smoothed out, and he felt a cold, empty well open up behind his eyes.

“It’s been thirteen years for you, Jack Winter,” the demon said. Its tongue flicked its lips, crimson like it had just been dipped in blood. “Or nearly so.”

Jack didn’t allow himself the luxury of more than a few seconds of shock. That was all you got, and then the bastards ripped your spine out because you’d stood there catching flies, insensible with fear.

He dug deep, grabbed a great handful of magic, and flung it outward, toward the demon.

The protection hex came to life in a flare of blue witch-fire, the excess energy curling around Jack’s hands like tongues of flame around a tree branch. The air between the demon and himself rippled as the hex took hold. It wasn’t elegant and it wasn’t solid, but it was strong and rolled over the demon like a wave on rock.

The demon shook its head as if it had been caught up in a nest of cobwebs, and gave Jack a reproachful frown. “Still the same old Jack, jumping at shadows.” It glided forward again, like the snap of a camera lens—one heartbeat, one flicker of movement, and the demon was close enough to embrace him. Jack felt its thick, smoky aura brush up against his hex, heavy and dense. It was a fifty-fifty shot as to whether the hex would hold. Jack was mortal, and the demon was a creature of Hell. A thing made of magic against a bag of flesh with an unusual talent. This was usually the bit where the mage died horribly.

“If I didn’t know you so well, Jackie, I’d feel insulted,” the demon said. It smoothed a hand over its tie. The veins under the flesh stood out black as roads on a map. “But I do know you, boy. Paranoid as a schizophrenic on the corner. Impotent as a rapist with a bird who fights back.”

The demon chuckled to itself, and Jack found his voice. “I have time.”

“Ah, true,” the demon purred. “But how much? Have you counted? Have you marked a thick black X across the remaining days?”

“I have time,” Jack repeated. “And you and I have no business before that day. Threaten me again and you’ll find exactly how unpleasant I can be when some sulfur-scented bastard comes onto me home turf.”

“Your better half appears absent,” said the demon. “You won’t be able to do to me as you did to poor, foolish Talshebeth.” It sucked on its teeth, whistling against the air. “Pity, that is. Rumor has it she’s soft, supple, and willing. That true, Winter?”

Jack knew that the demon was toying with him, down in the hard and rational part of himself that kept him from getting into fights he couldn’t win over exactly this—a girl, an insult, or a petty threat. The demon was only exacting torment for Jack and Pete’s banishment of its mate, Talshebeth. Jack had called the demon of lost things to find a little girl who’d been stolen by the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell. Treadwell hadn’t taken kindly to this, and Talshebeth had tried to make Jack into a meal when their arrangement went pear shaped.

Jack knew this, but the witchfire around his hands flared and the hex vibrated like it had been struck. Black rage boiled up, filling the space between the demon and Jack, hot and throbbing on his skin like he’d hit a brick wall at full speed. The rage chased away rationality, and Jack started talking before he fully knew the words. “You don’t fucking speak about her. I’ll peel your skin off, roll it up, and shove it down your fucking throat, you cunt.”

Twin flames in its eyes dancing, the demon laughed again. Jack felt his hex waver as his rage warred with his concentration. His own arse was one thing, but Pete . . . enough of the Black already wanted the both of them on spikes. The demon would not touch Pete while Jack was drawing down air.

“Jack?” She appeared at the end of the alley like he’d summoned her, a plastic Tesco sack dangling from her hand. “Who are you talking to?”

He whipped back toward the demon, and found only empty air wavering beyond his protection hex. Jack let out his breath and massaged the center of his forehead. “No one, luv. Just no one.”

Pete raised one eyebrow in a dainty, disbelieving arch. “So you just decided to hex the alley for the fun of it, then?”

“What sort of tea did you get?” Jack slipped the new subject in like he’d dip into an unwary pocket for a wallet.

Pete favored him with a look that said she wasn’t put off in the least by his bullshit. “Cranberry sandwiches, and I popped by the off-license for some good Belgian lager. Thought we both deserved a treat after that wretched scene at the Pooles’.”

“I’ve half a mind to go back and curse that woman so her ugly teeth fall out,” Jack said, glad she’d let the matter drop where it was. Pete couldn’t know about the demon. Not yet, at least. If Jack failed at great swaths of life, he could at least keep a fucking secret. It was a point of mage pride—the good ones became paranoid bastards in short order, so that no one learned their tricks.

“Mm-hmm,” Pete said. They walked into the stairwell of Jack’s flat. “And wouldn’t that be brilliant for business, what little of it we have.”

“Oi,” Jack said, slinging his arm over her shoulders. “It was your brilliant idea that we become a bloody ITV special made flesh, so don’t give me any of your sass.”

Pete favored him with a half smile. “However much you complain, Jack, us exorcising spirits and raising the same put this tea on the table, and if you’ve got a better solution for both of us being skint broke and nigh unemployable, I’d love to hear it.”

“No dice, Petunia,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re the brains of this little operation.” They mounted the narrow stairs, the tread shifting under Jack’s weight. The lift was unreliable at best and Jack preferred the narrow, dim stairway even with lifelong smoker’s lungs. The lift was closed, gated, trapped. If an entity manifested, he’d have nowhere to go, no recourse to banish it, trapped within four walls of iron.

Living with the sight taught you quickly and with great finality what sorts of places to avoid if you expected to live to next week. At least, to live in the sorts of places that didn’t have bars on the windows and serve Thorazine smoothies.

“Stop calling me Petunia,” Pete said. She shrugged off his arm as they reached the second-floor landing. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about that display in the alley.”

Jack finished the climb to his flat in silence and waited while Pete unlocked the door. “I told you, it weren’t nothing.” He could shrug off one incident as his own jumpiness now that only tenuous ink, flesh, and a pinch of magic held back his sight. He’d have to be more careful when the demon came back.

Because it was most definitely fucking when, not if.

Pete slammed the doors of the kitchen cabinets as she brought out plates, glasses, and napkins. “You have to talk to me sooner or later, Jack. Are you seeing things again? Have you been lying to me since we did the ink?”

“I’m not bothered by the sight,” Jack said honestly. Just bedeviled by a demon . . .

Pete let out a small humph. “I was a copper. I know when you’re lying to me, Jack Winter.” She ripped the packaging off her sandwich and sat down, gesturing for him to join her.

What Jack really wanted was a smoke, needed it with every jangling nerve at the ends of his body, but he forced himself to sit at the dinette table across from Pete, open his tea, and take a bite. He consumed the sandwich in less time than he could have counted. Casting the hex had left him drained. It was a new sensation to be hungry—before, he just wandered the streets nerve-jangled and sleepless until he found a hit and a bed to take it in. His body was like a wrung sponge, magic soaking up his every reserve. And yet now, when he’d kicked, gained weight, and even had someone feeding him, the magic hurt more.

It was a problem, but not the one set to rip his head off at the moment, so Jack pushed it to the back of his mind.

“I’m not, luv,” he said after he’d wiped away bits of Brie and cranberry with the back of his hand. “Lying to you. I swear it.” He needed a shave, needed to sleep.

Needed a fix, needed it like a drowning man needs oxygen . . .

“All right,” Pete said, lighting a cigarette and tapping ash onto her sandwich crust, “if you want to shut me out it’s your own bloody funeral.”

“Isn’t that the bloody truth.” Jack shoved the last of the sandwich into his mouth so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. No magic let Pete detect untruths—just a life as a copper and a copper’s daughter before it.

“If you feel like talking about it, I’ll listen,” she said at length, her cigarette growing a long crown of ash as she failed to draw on it.

Jack heard the need to keep pulling, keep interrogating in her voice, but Pete merely reached across the table and slid her hand over his, small and warm. “You know I would, about anything. The truth, heavens forfend. You haven’t scared me off yet, Jack.”

Jack shut his eyes, pulled his hand from under Pete’s, and pushed back from the table. “I’m going to catch some kip,” he told her. “Been a long day already.”

Pete whipped her hand back to her side as if she’d only intended to brush away crumbs. “I’ll leave you the washing up, then, since I got the tea.”

“As long as you don’t mind it taking place at some future date,” Jack said, as he retreated to the flat’s only bedroom. His and Pete’s sleep was cyclical enough that one bed was all they needed, even if she hadn’t agreed to share with him yet. Her last words were lost to the door slamming.

Jack leaned against the backside, an ancient Poor Dead Bastards poster crinkling against his head. He felt sick, the sandwich having its revenge on him, sight chipping in with a throb at the center of his forehead. His heart accelerated as he remembered the pop of the Black, the way the demon was just there with nary a warning whisper in his mind.

That could have meant he was dead. That was a serious problem for the longevity of Jack Winter, cock-up mage.

Sweat broke out along Jack’s spine, his shoulders, all of the lines of his bones, and he grabbed for a fag, lit it with his finger with a savage snap, and inhaled so deeply that he started to choke.

He sat on the bed and lay back, setting the smoke in the ashtray, where a thin trail of blue curled toward the stained ceiling, yellow flakes of plaster hanging on like scales.

Pain in his head redoubled. His magic curled and howled inside his head, clawing for release, and perhaps it was a memory or perhaps it was a whisper, but again Jack heard and felt the wings of the crows, the inexorable wings and eyes of Death.

The memory of being cold, bloodless, immobile, with stone digging into his back and pain through every inch of him, hit Jack like a boot in the mouth. He pressed his hands over his face, breathing shallowly. It didn’t help. Not one bit.

Jack banged open the bedroom door and made a beeline for the loo, dropping his head over the toilet and vomiting until his throat burned and his abdomen ached like he’d just taken a fist to the belly.

“Jack?” Pete’s feet rumbled up beside him, her hands went to his neck, his shoulder, fingers grazing through the bleached and ragged edges of his hair. “Luv, are you all right?”

Gasping, Jack swiped his hand across his mouth. He should push Pete away, tell her there was nothing wrong with him past a bad sandwich. Should, and didn’t. Story of his bloody life.

“I . . .” He looked up and caught sight of them in the mirror. Pete pressed her forehead against his temple, stroking the back of his neck. Jack’s own eyes stared accusingly back at him even as he turned into her touch.

The demon had come back to him. Jack’s thirteen years were nearly up.

Bent over the bog, he considered facts. It was as good a spot as any to do so. He owed the demon a demon’s bargain, and when Pete found out the particulars she’d try to work him out of it. She was stubborn, and clever, and still thought that counted for more than it did in a place like the Black. She’d convince Jack he could find his way out of his entanglement, that Hell could be tricked, wheedled, or softened.

And because it was a creature of Hell, and cruel, the demon would end her without a second thought when Jack tried. Or take her as his very own curiosity, the soft, supple, willing Petunia Caldecott, with her talent that let her talk to the Black and to the worlds beyond, to the Land of the Dead and even Hell itself.

As Pete murmured in his ear, her breath warm and her hands cool, her presence bringing him equilibrium like he was the wheel and she was the spoke, Jack’s own eyes in the mirror told him that Pete could never know the truth.

Chapter Five

Pounding on the front door of the flat broke the spell. Pete heaved a sigh. “Bollocks, if it’s that neighbor brat from 402 again, I’m going to feed him his Transformer toys.” She grabbed a rag, ran water over it, and placed it on the back of Jack’s neck. “Stay put. Back in two ticks.”

That was Pete, quick and commanding and certain. Never wavered, never doubted that she’d solve everything and set it right side up again.

Jack pressed his forehead against the rim of the toilet bowl. He’d been low when he was shooting junk, but never as low as this. His lies had been small lies, of survival, cowardice, or necessity. The black dog treading in his footprints had never mattered, because no one else had ever been in range of its jaws. And now, just when the dog was close enough that Jack could feel breath on his neck, it mattered. Pete was an innocent, someone who hadn’t come to the Black willingly and borne the terrible price it exacted from anyone human. All the scars she bore were dream-scars, a set of nightmares about him and their time together, when she’d been barely sixteen. About the visitation of Algernon Treadwell and the hunger of Talshebeth, but the Black had left her relatively untouched. She was its child, a speaker for magic. She wasn’t a citizen of its bleak, hungry streets and alleys on sufferance, like Jack.

Pete hadn’t paid the price Jack and his brethren had, and she wasn’t going to if he could still draw a breath into his useless lungs. Jack was skilled at lying to himself as he was to anyone else, but he admitted that Pete being here, being close enough for the demon to use against him, was his fault. Entirely his.

His stomach clenched again, but nothing came up. He was empty, hollowed out, ready to be filled by the demon’s bargain.

But not yet. He had time. Enough time to put things right and to keep the one who’d pulled him from the Pit from harm. He owed a second debt, an unspoken one, to Pete. He owed her at least the decency of staying alive to teach her to survive the vagaries of a life with a talent. They’d barely begun. He couldn’t leave yet.

“Pete,” he called, standing up and slinging the cloth into the basin. No reply echoed from the front of the flat. “Pete!” he said again, padding into the narrow hallway. “Petunia, where’ve you gone to?”

She turned away from the flat’s front door, beyond which Jack could see, standing, the sort of man who would have told Jack to Find a job, you miserable cunt when he was sleeping on the streets, shaking in the dead of winter and thirty pounds underweight. The visitor wore a black sport coat, black sweater, and soft heather trousers. His hair was trimmed over his ears, expensively, and his eyes were soft brown. A trustworthy soft, a grasping, sinking soft. Jack disliked him instantly.

“What sod’s this, then?” he demanded, letting the full burr of a Manchester childhood creep into his voice. Nothing like a reminder of factories, dirty hands, and steel boots to warn off a ponce at the door.

“Mr. Naughton,” Pete said, shooting Jack her customary Shut up afore I kill you look, “this is my associate, Jack Winter. Please, come in.”

Naughton smiled at Pete, and she smiled back. Jack felt his jaw twitch. He didn’t get tetchy or jealous easily, because birds were the cause of nearly all of life’s avoidable ills, but this was Pete, and she was giving the nonce her real smile, the one that curled up one side of her mouth more than the other, that spread into her eyes.

“Thank you, miss,” Naughton said. He looked between Jack and Pete, feigning polite confusion. “It is Miss Caldecott?”

“You can call me Pete,” she said. “Would you like a cuppa? We were just having tea.”

Naughton nodded his assent and then stuck out his hand to Jack. “Nicholas Naughton, Mr. Winter.”

Jack watched his eyes follow Pete’s rear end, showcased in black denim as it was, into the kitchen, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t shake hands,” he explained. “Might get a look at something both you and me don’t want eyes on.”

It was a better class of rudeness than Jack’s first impulse, which was to pull the smarmy git close and kick him in the balls.

But Pete’d rip his tackle off if Jack insinuated her honor needed defending, and so he settled for staring at Naughton until the other man backed up a step. And then another. Sweat worked in a fat drop down his neck, into the collar of his cashmere.

Staring was a vastly underrated talent to Jack’s mind—fix a bloke with a dead man’s stare, put the full force of your magic behind it, and watch him piss his pants for reasons even he can’t entirely explain.

Naughton had practically climbed up into the crown molding of the front hall by the time Pete returned with tea. “Jack,” she scolded, “at least offer him a place to sit down.” She gestured at Naughton. “In the front room, please, sir. We can discuss your problem there.”

“Call me Nicholas,” he said, the charm crawling back into play like a rodent curling up in a warm place. He shot a glance back at Jack, who’d brought up the rear. Jack dropped him a wink, and put some power behind it. Nothing fancy, just nightmare fodder for the next few weeks. Eyes, fire, secret black places, perhaps a touch of the old Oedipal complex.

It was petty, but after the day he’d had, Jack felt he’d behaved with remarkable restraint.

Chapter Six

Naughton sat on the sofa and Pete took the armchair, leaving Jack to perch on the wide windowsill. He nudged it open and lit a cigarette to cover the taste of vomit in the back of his throat.

“I’ll get to the point,” Naughton said, fidgeting as he cast an eye at the peeling plaster and meager furniture. The only thing Jack spent any hard cash on was books, and they were in evidence, in multitude, where furniture and objets d’art should be. “My family home is experiencing some extremely . . . unusual phenomena, and I need it stopped.”

“ ‘Unusual.’ ’S a bit general—care to expand on that?” Pete said. She reached into the pile of books and papers on the end table and withdrew a pad and pen. Pete, for all her crispness, was as much a pack rat as Jack when it came to books and notes. If Jack were the sort of teacher who put store in memorizing spells and conjury by rote, he and Pete could have had a fine time ensconced in his library. Unfortunately, a book could never prepare one for the first sight of a ghost. Or a demon. Or hell, a ruddy tanuki with its bollocks swinging free. Jack knew more than one mage who’d pissed himself at the sight of the Black’s citizens in flesh and blood. Or ichor. Or vapor.

Words couldn’t prepare you for the embrace of magic. Only magic could do it, and sometimes a mind wasn’t meant to see. Those who couldn’t handle it lost their grip, became the screaming psychotics in state hospitals or gibbering madmen on street corners. The junkies with the needles and the hollowed-out eyes.

Naughton sighed, in the seat that should be Jack’s, and took an irritable sip of his tea.

“I have to admit, this isn’t what I expected when I came calling on a couple of ghost hunters.”

Jack exhaled, flicking ash onto the fire escape. “What were you expecting, then? Foot rub to go along with your tea? Happy ending with the sandwiches and cakes?”

“Jack,” Pete hissed at him, and then gave Naughton another one of the smiles that Jack knew were to be hoarded like treasures, but that Naughton lapped up as if they were his due. “You’ll have to excuse my colleague.”

“It’s no matter,” said Naughton, moving closer to her. “I’ve heard Jack Winter could help me, and you’re just a pleasant surprise.”

Pete cocked an eyebrow, and crossed her legs primly at the ankle. “What seems to be your problem, Mr. Naughton?”

“Please,” he said. “It’s Nicholas, or Nick.”

“Nick, then,” Pete said, tapping her pen irritably against her chin. “The question stands.”

Jack pinched out the end of his smoke and disappeared it back into a pocket. “Here’s how it works, Nicky boy,” he told Naughton. “You give us your story of old Gran knocking about up in the attic, waking the baby and frightening the missus, we take care of the problem, if you’re not just jerking us off, and you pay. If you are jerking us off, well . . .”

“What Mr. Winter is trying to say,” Pete said, reaching over and whacking Jack on the knee with her notepad, “is that we take this seriously and we expect you to as well.”

“My family owns a country home in the Dartmoor forest,” Nick said. “It’s always been a spooky, dank old place since my brother Danny and I would summer there as children, but lately . . .” He sighed. “It’s not right there, Miss Caldecott. I live in the city home, taking care of Mother, and Danny . . . well. Danny was in charge of the estate.”

Jack watched Nick Naughton’s mask peel away in layers as he talked, the charm and the breeding and the manners stripping back to reveal something thin and desperate, the kind of deep fear that only people who had touched the Black and not understood it possessed. Naughton may be a ponce, but he wasn’t lying.

Pete’s pen scratched away, ever the Detective Inspector. “And you and your brother each witnessed phenomena at your estate?”

“Voices,” Nick said quietly, as if he were relaying bad news. “Cold spots, writing on the wall, sooty handprints that appear and disappear. Laughing. Danny’s always been the drinker, the odd party drug or two, so at first I thought he was getting worse. Then I saw and heard it—them—too.”

“Right,” Pete said, scratching notes absently along the margins of the pad. “This is how we conduct an investigation, Nick: we’ll need access to your estate to do some research, and we discuss payment when we’ve determined what we’re dealing with. Should you want us to proceed with an exorcism, or if more investigation is needed, payment is half up front and half when the case is . . . resolved. Plus a retainer now.”

“And you might want to let your brother know we’re coming,” Jack said, “in case he wants to set up the bleeding walls and rattling chains in advance.”

Pete mimed stabbing him with her pen, but Naughton didn’t rise to the bait.

“There’s no need of that,” he said. “Danny hanged himself two weeks ago from the crossbeams in the attic. He’s dead.”

Chapter Seven

After Nick Naughton finally quit the flat, leaving behind a check for five hundred pounds and the key to his family’s Dartmoor estate, Jack watched a crow land on the wires outside the flat block and stare at him with one black, reflective eye. Psychopomps, his treacherous rote memory recited. Harbingers of death and war. Ushers to the Land of the Dead. The crow preened its feathers and tucked its head down against its breast. It could ferry souls to the Bleak Gates, but now it was content to merely stare a hole through Jack.

It took Jack several seconds of glaring back at the crow to realize Pete was talking to him. “Sorry, luv. What’s that?”

Pete took the check, folded it in precise quarters, and slipped it into her hip pocket. “I said, what do you think?”

Jack shook his head. “Dodgy, at best. Ghosts don’t just cause a bloke to hang himself for no good reason. They don’t stir up like a mixed drink after a hundred years of silence, either. Personally, I’d give Sir Ponce his check back and tell him to sod off.”

“Personally, would you happen to take exception to Naughton being a wealthy and attractive man?” Pete inquired.

“I take exception to liars,” Jack said. “Rich, poor, fuck-ugly, or otherwise.” Although really, today Jack and Naughton were just alike. Minus the fuck-ugly bit on Jack’s part.

Pete came over and put her hands on Jack’s shoulders. “I’m not an idiot, you know,” she said. Her touch was cool, vibrating with power, not altogether unpleasant. Jack had a flash of second sight, of lips crushed against his and pale, pale skin turning rosy under his hands.

He shifted so Pete wouldn’t see his face or any other traitorous part of him. “I know that, Petunia,” he said softly.

“Then tell me what the bloody hell is wrong with you. You’re pale as a ghost, you’re puking in the loo, you’re surly to a paying client—surly for you, and that’s saying something, and now you don’t want a job you would have jumped on with a rugby tackle a few weeks ago.” Her mouth lifted at one side. “You’re Jack fucking Winter. You chase the monsters, not vice versa.”

Jack felt Death’s specter following him patiently, ticking off the seconds on the gears that unfurled the Bleak Gates to allow a new soul through. Jack would stop the clock as long as he could, had to, even if it meant becoming ten times worse a liar than Naughton.

“Nothing’s wrong, Pete,” he said, making sure not to look her directly in the eye, nor look away. The stare of Truth, practiced over a hundred arrests and a hundred more dodgy meetings with mages and Fae in the Black. “Tea was past its date, or I could be catching the flu—as for Naughton, I think he’s a sanctimonious cunt and nothing more. There’s no monsters in his mansion. Bats in the belfry, maybe. You know how the landed gentry love their inbreeding.”

Pete rolled her eyes and went on tiptoe to brush her lips across his forehead. “He’s giving us five hundred quid to go chase his bats, so speak for yourself, but I’m packing up and heading to Dartmoor tomorrow. Just as soon as I check with my friend in the murder squad about Danny Naughton.”

Jack lifted one shoulder. The money was the thing—he was flat broke and Pete’s savings were what you’d expect from an ex-civil servant. If he wanted to keep his new-found habit of eating, Nancy Naughton was his meal ticket. He’d just have to deal with the demon afterward. And Pete would need the money, if he was gone . . .

Not if, the fix whispered. When, Jack. When.

“Guess there’s no harm in it,” he said. Famous last words. No harm in it. How many disasters had he preceded with just those words?

“And you were the one whingeing about parlor tricks and useless jobs,” Pete said. “This might be real. Think of that. A real spook-house instead of this inheritance and last wishes tripe, which, I admit, gets on my last nerve as much as yours.”

“Bloody Algernon Treadwell all over again,” Jack muttered, rubbing at the center of his forehead. The pain had retreated a little, but only a little.

Pete sobered immediately.

“I didn’t mean it like that. Jack, I don’t blame . . .”

He held up his hand to stop her. “Go cash the check before Duke Nancy changes his mind. I’ll round up a few exorcism tools from Lawrence while you check with CID.”

Pete nodded her assent and backed out of the room too quickly. She grabbed her bag and her jumper, and a moment later the door slammed. She was fleeing a discussion of Algernon Treadwell and her ghost sickness, and Jack didn’t blame her in the slightest.

He went to the kitchen, fishing in the cramped cabinets for a bottle of vinegar. Pete wouldn’t allow hard liquor in the flat since she’d moved in. All roads led to the fix.

Jack personally thought it was bloody stupid—he’d been a junkie, not an alcoholic, and right now he’d murder a pint of anything. But he washed his mouth out and pulled on his leather to go visit Lawrence in Bayswater Road. He thought walking to the tube station might shake the breath of the demon off his neck, but he saw the blank-eyed face in every passerby and felt the inexorable tide of the Black stronger than ever under the dark heartbeat of Whitechapel.

He walked through the street market outside the Whitechapel tube station, hunched old women in saris picking over fruit, men in long caftans shouting in three different languages, competing with the white newsagent bleating about the latest footballer scandal and the music drifting out from the kebab shops and money changer’s.

A breath of hot wind on his face, a whisper of sand, and Jack turned his head to see a man in a stall selling knock-off handbags stare back at him with flaming eyes, his skin flowing from brown to burnished gold. “Have a care, crow-mage,” he said. “They’ve been here. Searching for you.”

Jack blinked as a pair of Japanese tourists who’d undoubtedly gotten off at entirely the wrong stop on their way to the British Museum jostled past him, and when he could see again the djinn was gone, just a swirl of gold dust dislodged into the gutter and flung asunder by a passing lorry.

“Well,” Jack said to no one in the cacophony outside the tube station, “bollocks.”

Chapter Eight

He felt eyes on him the entire way to Bayswater. You didn’t have to walk up to a bloke and knock him one in the teeth to make him feel uncomfortable. Jack knew there were things in the train tunnels, things that liked the dark, that waited and watched for the scraps and leavings of humanity to fall down to them.

He knew that if they were hungry enough, sometimes they wouldn’t wait at all. The older the tube stations got, the more he sweated inside his jacket. At one time—too long ago to be anything but a middle-aged sot and his nostalgia—the pyramid spikes and patches and hand-painted slogans had been his armor, a clear warning to anything even half-human that he wasn’t to be fucked with. He wore the boots, the leather, and the black hair bleached startling blond everywhere but the roots still, but the hungry things were older and wiser, too, and they saw behind his mask.

Jack just felt older in that moment, and wrung out. He hated being underground. It reminded him too much of when he’d taken peyote on his single trip to the United States, when he’d seen the Bleak Gates, stood in front of them and felt the terrible weight of the dead on his inner mind, his mage’s mind, and knew that his sight and his magic were linked in a way that wasn’t normal or natural, even for the Black. Hated being underground. Too close to the dead for comfort, entirely.

Baker Street passed, and he caught a skittering on the train roof over the clatter of the track, small nails and paws, and the hiss of tongues that couldn’t form words any human ear understood.

Jack closed his hand around the flick-knife in his pocket, closed his mind around a protection hex, waited.

The next station passed, tunnels growing newer and shallower, and the whispers retreated. They hadn’t been hungry enough, in broad daylight, but they’d known he was there and that was bad enough.

“Fucking demons,” Jack muttered aloud, garnering a look from the girl in the nearest seat. She was holding a guidebook, her thumb loosely marking her page, and had short red hair and large eyes, like a fey creature. A bit of blood, long ago, Jack thought, when her family still lived in the Isles. “Where are you going, then?” he asked her.

“Tower Bridge,” she said. “Meeting my friend.” Her accent was American, the rounded vowels of the Midwest. Jack had never seen a place so flat, or so devoid of decent drugs.

“You want the next, then,” he said out loud. “Change to the Circle Line and it’ll take you straight over.”

“Thanks!” the girl said brightly, tucking her guidebook into her canvas bag. “You take care.”

Jack watched her long legs and shapely back end exit the car, and felt only the barest interest. Americans were like fish in a barrel, and he wasn’t even going after her to find out why she’d come to the UK, where she was staying, if she had a boyfriend and whether she was open to experimenting with a bloke who could say bloody hell, football and fancy a shag? authentically.

It wasn’t like he was married to Pete.

Jack swapped for the District Line, pressed up against the window amid a gaggle of be-knapsacked Germans.

It wasn’t like he’d done anything to Pete, except a single kiss, sitting on the edge of a swamp in Blackpool. A fine kiss, to be sure, probably one of the best since he’d still been new enough at it to find them all fine, but still. There was no ribbon around their hands. And Pete had made it crystal clear that she wasn’t keen to pick up her old flirtation with a middle-aged junkie ex-boyfriend, which Jack wouldn’t blame her for even if he could and not be a great bloody hypocrite.

It wasn’t Pete, he argued. The old days of the chase, the hunt, and the parade of women were just that—old. He wasn’t that Jack Winter any longer. The demon and the smack had made sure of that.

The tube doors slid shut with a sigh and a breath of coal-scented air, and the train moved on.

Everything and everyone in the Black knew what happened when a debt to Hell went unpaid, and they knew better what happened when the debtor tried to be clever and weasel out in any of the usual ways. Jack could try to be a clever boy, but it would be a try and nothing else.

Clever boys’ bodies ended up in gutters. Their souls ended up on trial before the three ruling demons of Hell for breaking a bond as sacred as any church vow. No one who owed a demon a bargain was stupid enough to risk it.

But Jack still got off the train at Queensway and walked to Lawrence’s flat, taking comfort in the crush of tourists and foreigners working the cheap souvenir shops and chain restaurants, and in the smell of sweat, smoke, diesel fumes, and humans. The feeling of being watched retreated, but only a little. Jack had to get out of London before someone or -thing decided to speed his bargain along to the main event by putting claws or a bullet in his back.

Jack guessed that Nancy Naughton had been good for something, after all.

Chapter Eight

Lawrence folded his arms when he answered Jack’s knock, eyes glittering hard as gems. “Jack Winter, why you always bringin’ trouble to my door?”

Jack took a step back, out of choking distance. “I’ve only just bloody gotten here, Lawrence. Give me a few minutes to work up a proper trouble for you.”

Lawrence’s face broke into a grin. “Come you in, Jack. Always did like to take the piss from you, old devil.”

“No such thing,” Jack said, returning the smile, not meaning it. Lawrence stepped aside and let Jack in. There were no protection hexes in his flat, none of the dove-gray magic Jack trafficked in. Lawrence’s hearth magic enfolded his flat, created a glimmering wall of power that ugly and hungry things in the Black could never claw through. Being a white witch did have its rewards.

Jack shut the door after himself while Lawrence went to take the needle off his record. Jack stood in the center of Lawrence’s smothered living room, rugs and books and hunched furniture giving the place the air of a fussy old woman, not a six-foot-odd Rastafarian.

“You be wanting a beer?” Lawrence said, shuffling into his pocket-sized kitchen and rooting in the icebox.

Jack grinned. “Is the Pope a skin-changing incubus?”

Lawrence tossed him a bottle of Newcastle. Jack un-screwed the top with the tail of his shirt and sank into Lawrence’s armchair, downing the beer faster than was strictly gentle to his empty stomach.

“So tell me, Jack Winter, what trouble be vexing you this fine day?” Lawrence opened his own bottle and changed the record. Soft strains of Al Green floated through the thick air of the flat, scented with incense and high-quality marijuana. Jack grimaced around his mouthful of ale.

“You trying to calm me down, Lawrence? Keep me from doing something foolish?” Lawrence’s spell was subtle, smell, sound, and tactile sensation, but it was there, pressing on him gently as a helping hand.

“Anyone got eyes can see you wound up tight, boy,” Lawrence said calmly. “You clean now, I can’t offer you a toke, so I’m doing you the favor. Be gracious, now.”

“Trust me, you’re the only bastard who cares about that,” Jack said. “The cleanliness or lack thereof of my bloodstream.” He rubbed his chin. He still needed the shave. “I may be fucked, Lawrence.” The spell made it easy to talk, a safe sound booth with the world locked out.

Lawrence rolled his bottle in his hands. “Wouldn’t be him first time, being fucked.”

“Not this way,” Jack muttered darkly. “Not this hard.”

“True?” Lawrence said. “Tell me.”

Jack sighed. Lawrence was a stand-up white witch, and he operated strictly on the daylit side of the Black. Jack might well get himself punched in the balls and thrown out of the flat when he told Lawrence his problem. Hearth witches didn’t deal with demons. In the bad times, the bloody times, they’d hunted those who did by the side of the witchfinders. Jack rolled his bottle across the back of his neck. The flat was close and too warm, smothering him all at once. That had been war. This was Lawrence. Lawrence had to at least hear him out. Jack hoped.

“What would you say if I told you I owed a very bad bloke?” he asked Lawrence. “The kind who doesn’t fuck about.”

Lawrence lifted one shoulder. “How bad we talking, mate?”

“Peel the skin off of adorable household pets in front of your kiddies, bad,” Jack said. “And not patient, and not kind.”

Lawrence nodded once, slowly. “Bad, yes. That is. Three times bad for you, Jack Winter.”

“He’s put the word on the infernal wires,” Jack said. “So I can’t even try to reason with . . . him.” Demons favored certain bodies, but Jack had never known one with a definite set of gear. “I’ve got my bloody foot clamped right in a bear trap,” he told Lawrence, “and I can’t see my way to chewing it off.”

Lawrence set his beer down, pressed his hands together like he was in church. He didn’t look at Jack until he finally asked, “How much time you got?”

“Some,” Jack said. “Not enough.”

“Let’s Stay Together” ended and the record hissed softly in the space between music.

“I had ideas, mind,” Lawrence said. “You got a duppy on you back, Jack Winter, sure as any man I ever met. I seen the hints, little things you say and do.”

“Like go shambling around London stoned to me gills?” Jack quirked a grin, an entirely fake one. Lawrence didn’t return it.

The telephone buzzed from under a pile of Aramaic scrolls, and on the third ring Lawrence stirred himself and plucked the old rotary handset from the mess. “Hail.”

After a moment he passed the set to Jack. “It’s your woman.”

“She’s not my anything,” Jack said. “Oi, Pete.”

Pete’s voice came from far away, down a well full of other souls. In the background Jack heard the cool female robot of the Underground announce, “This is a Hammersmith & City Line to Hammersmith.”

“I spoke with Inspector Patel at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. A bus horn blatted in the background as she ascended from tube sounds to traffic sounds.

“Where are you?” Jack said, tucking the phone under his chin.

“Paddington,” Pete said. “Just fetching a bite before I go home. It was a suicide, Jack. The local coppers cleared it last week.”

“Doesn’t mean a ghost,” he insisted. “Sometimes a hanging is just a hanging.”

Pete huffed. “Fine. Do you want to give back the five hundred quid, or should I?’

“It’s a questionable job, Pete, and I’m not bounding over the Moor like sodding Heathcliff on some nonce’s say-so,” he said.

Lawrence shook his head, drawing a finger across his throat. Jack threw him the bird while Pete muttered something on the line. It might have been “Tosser.”

“Meet me at the station and we’ll go home, then,” she snapped. “Since you know bloody everything today.”

The phone gave a pathetic click when she rang off, and Jack hung up the set.

“You a braver man than I,” Lawrence said, chuckling. “I spoke to my lady so, she’d cut me head off and put it in a flowerpot.”

“It ain’t like that,” Jack said, irritation crawling all over him like a swarm of ants.

“She could be right.” Lawrence fixed Jack with a hard stare. “The Smoke be no place for you until this is settled. Too many eyes watchin’, too many tongues waggin’. Country air clears the mind. Even inside your thick skull.”

“Bugger off,” Jack muttered. “You want to be my mum, put on an apron and fix me a meat pie.”

Lawrence stood and went to the door, flipping the bolt and opening it enough for someone skinny as Jack to slip out. “I have sympathy for what you done, Jack. But now the truth be known, I can’t be your sanctuary.”

Jack stood. He didn’t feel angry or betrayed, or any of the things you were supposed to feel when one friend of only a few turned his back on you. In a lifetime of doors slamming in his face, the novelty wore off quickly. The stone in his chest just grew a bit heavier. “Thanks for not turning me in, at any rate.”

“I am a worthy witch,” Lawrence growled. “I bow to no demon’s order.”

“In a few months we’ll have a pint and a laugh about this,” Jack promised, stepping into the hallway. The Black rushed back, flowing around Lawrence’s flat like water around a bridge piling in the Thames.

“Jack.” Lawrence bowed his head. “You know you don’t go making promises you can’t keep. How bad is it?”

“I bargained for my life,” Jack said shortly. “And a life is what I owe it. It’s bad business, Lawrence. Bad all around, up, down, and sideways. But don’t worry your pretty head.” Jack dropped Lawrence a wink. “I’ll get it sorted. I’m still planning on being here at thirteen years and a day.”

“Don’t you take up no fortune-telling, boy,” Lawrence said. “The future, she not your strong point.”

Chapter Nine

The rain had started when Jack’s boots hit the pavement, the thin miserable midwinter rain that foreigners thought of when they thought of England. Jack hunched inside his leather, and felt ice slide down his shoulders into the curve of his spine.

He wound through side streets like a maze rat until the porticoes of Paddington loomed up, and the rain finally ceased.

Pete waited beside a ticket machine near the National Rail tracks, under the grimy iron braces and the blackened ceiling of the station’s top floor. Being inside Paddington was like being inside a giant lung, black and tarred over from decades of smoke and the resultant soot.

Pete stood still and watchful in the way that only coppers and psychopaths excelled at. Hands in pockets, head thrown back to give the appearance of indifference, eyes unblinking and sharp as they skipped from the kiosks selling pastries and noodles to the groups of anxious foreign travelers gathered under the bank of National Rail schedule boards to the heavily peroxided Londoner stuffed like an anemic sausage into her slim dungarees, designer boots, and fur jacket.

“It was awful, just awful,” the woman intoned into her mobile. “Not a proper vodka tonic anywhere in the hotel. That’s bloody France for you.”

Jack considered taking a dip inside her handbag, one of those enormous blue sharkskin types that a family of refugees could live inside comfortably for some months, but gave it up in favor of watching Pete.

She hadn’t seen him yet. One small hand went to her neck, worked the kinks free. Pete’s old gig with the Met had made her a hand at blending, but in recent weeks she’d scuttled her wool pea coat for the canvas army jacket and had begun wearing her hair down instead of in a practical knot at the back of her skull. Little touches—pink lip gloss rather than plain, black nails like the very first time Jack had seen her, a dozen years ago at an underground club in Soho.

Not a dozen. Nearly thirteen. The weight of the demon’s smile washed away the odd sort of calm Pete carried with her. She had the demeanor of a battlefield nurse, unyielding but a comfort nonetheless simply because she’d ventured into the corpses and laid a hand against your cheek.

She’s too good for the likes of you, the fix whispered. Come with me, luv. I’ll never tell you no.

The pressure of a rotten and magic-riddled day built up behind Jack’s eyes. At least Paddington was so crushed with life and strapped with iron that the sight was silent.

He took a step forward, raised a hand. “Pete.”

The woman with the mobile smacked into him, shoulder to shoulder. Hers was even bonier than Jack’s.

“Watch out,” she snarled. “I’ve a mind to call the policeman over here, you.”

“Eat a curry, luv, and cheer up,” Jack returned. “Unless you’re keeping so slim because your bloke fancies a bit of necrophilia.”

“Cretin!” the woman snapped, and stomped away, boot heels clacking like bones on the station’s tile floor.

“I think she likes you,” Pete said. “The two of you could share bleaching tips.”

“Sod off,” Jack said, and Pete rewarded him by smiling. No Naughton, this time. Just him.

The secret of the demon grew larger and sharper, pushing on Jack’s heart and his guts.

“What is it?” Pete said. “You look peaked.”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Just fancy a fag, is all.”

“Can it wait?” Pete worried the zip on her jacket. “We should get to driving if we want to make Naughton’s by midnight.”

“’Course.” Jack shrugged. He could do apathetic, do it well. He’d been a punk frontman, after all.

Pete slipped her arm through his and her sudden proximity, her smell of clean linen shampoo and perfume and a little sweat, nearly made him stagger. He rolled his eyes upward in an effort to stave off a word, or a touch, or fuck it, a thought that would betray him as nowhere near cool and in control, the diametric opposite of what Pete and the world at large thought him. He was nearly forty—he shouldn’t be fainting at a girl’s touch. But the problem came again: it wasn’t a girl. It was Pete.

When Jack opened his eyes, the crow sat on the cross-beams of the station roof, and flicked its beak behind Jack as if to say, Watch your arse, old son.

In the same moment, his sight flared, like someone had put a pipe across the back of his skull.

Jack spun back the way he’d come, so quickly that he dragged Pete around in a drunken dance with him.

Two figures moved through the crowd disgorged from a Bristol train, two men in workman’s coveralls when he looked straight on, and emaciated forms with black, bleeding holes for eyes when he blinked.

Jack skidded to a stop, Pete stumbling against him. “Fuck.”

Pete’s eyes widened. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Those two.” Jack jerked his chin. The figures passed by and through travelers, and where they touched, faces fell and eyes narrowed in anger. Travelers shoved. Babies shrieked. A woman in a green wool coat slapped her lover and ran off in the direction of the loo, sobbing.

“Yeah?” Pete let go of him, dropping her shoulders and curling her fists, like a small but determined bulldog. Jack had witnessed her drop men twice her size, but these were not men. The cold encroachment of their energy prickled the hair on his arms, made the ink in his tattoos dance, made the Black spin in front of his eyes as his sight screamed to show him the true faces of the things before him.

“Sluagh,” he said.

“Gesundheit?” Pete said hopefully. Jack shook his head. An entry from one of Seth McBride’s diaries swam up into his mind. Sluagh. Restless spirits.

Seth may have been a wanker, the bastard child of con man, mage, and roaring Irish drunk, but he knew ghosts, knew them better than any man besides Jack himself. He’d taught Jack enough to stay alive for another nineteen-odd years, at least.

“The restless dead,” Jack said aloud. “Sent away from the Bleak Gates to trouble the living.”

The twinned ghosts opened their mouths in a single, silent scream, and in unison raised arms of dessicated flesh and bone tipped with black nails that curled over with graveyard growth. They pointed at Jack, eyes and teeth spilling black pollution across the psychic space of Paddington.

“I gather they’re not here to have a pint and a laugh?” Pete said.

“No,” Jack said. “The sluagh appear at the moment of a person’s death.” He turned in a slow circle, watching more and more of the silent, howling, and pointing figures appear in the crowd. “And they always travel in packs.”

“They’re here for you?” Pete snugged close against his side, their arms touching along the length. She wasn’t asking him the question except as a courtesy, and Jack was relieved he didn’t have to answer. As a mage, whatever horrid thing crawled from under a rock was most likely there for you and your skin, and Pete had at least learned that much.

Jack watched the sluagh by turns, counted them, felt the chill abrasion of the dead against his sight.

They advanced, in flickers and slithers, leaving a black trail across the floor of Paddington. Cold stole across Jack’s cheeks and burned his lungs, and the sluagh watched, pointed, marked him as the death they’d come to claim.

“Jack!” He became aware of Pete shouting, in a harsh whisper to avoid passersby noticing her panic. Still tight against him, like they were twins sharing a heart. “Shield hex?” she mouthed.

The sluagh were close enough to touch now, if he’d been a madman with a death wish. “No,” Jack said tightly. “No bloody good.” The dead were not tempered or repelled by living magic. Unwanted, the memory of Algernon Treadwell and his overweening hunger came to Jack, borne on the cold air ruffled by the passage of the sluagh.

Don’t just stand there like a knob. Not the fix, now. A little of Seth, a little of Pete, a little of his own survival instinct, battered and bloodied as it was.

Only blood could sate a spirit, and only dead blood could sate the sluagh.

Jack snatched Pete’s hand, and the jolt of her magic, the sight, and his own talent nearly unbalanced him again. “Run,” he ordered. “Run and don’t look back.”

With his free hand, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled forth his flick knife. The blade popped, a gleam of quicksilver obscured by crimson as Jack turned the knife to slice through the back of his opposite hand.

Blood fell to the dirty, mud-crusted floor of the station. One drop, two, three.

“Go dtáthaí mé tú,” Jack muttered, and the gray tendrils of the spell feebly sought out the sluagh. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. Jack needed more blood and more time to keep the dead away.

But it was his spell, the ghost box, his strongest magic. As the blood fell, Jack wove the cage of power and sight, holding the spirits back, keeping the dead at bay for just a little longer. The ghost box was the first spell he’d learned, the first, desperate magic that he’d tried when he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t simply succumbing to the same kind of delusion that made his mother talk to her plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary. Jack had first felt the Black enter him alone on the floor of a filthy, leaking squat on the outskirts of Manchester. He’d poxed it up, and was lucky he hadn’t died then and there, but the ghost box, straight from a mouldering “ye olde chaos magicke” tome at the library, had held.

Jack hoped fervently, with a jump of nerves in his chest that hadn’t happened in years, that it held now.

The sluagh drew back from the entanglement of blood magic, their silent mouths growing long, ghostly white teeth.

Jack ducked through a gap in their ranks and ran, towing Pete behind him. She hadn’t obeyed his order to run, but he hadn’t expected her to. Pete was too stubborn to run even for her own bloody good.

Jack took the stairs to the Underground lines two at a time, shoving passengers out of the way. He let go of Pete and vaulted the fare gates, a transit worker shouting at him, just a blur of blue and life next to the overwhelming, encroaching flock of sluagh.

Jack veered into the tunnel for the Bakerloo Line, his heart pulsating like to break his ribs. He had a moment of This is it, you’ve blown your wad as his vision blacked, and then he was on the platform and a train was roaring into the tunnel and Pete snatched his arm and kept him from going over the edge onto the tracks.

The doors sprang open, disgorging their human load, and Jack shoved his way inside.

“Please stand clear of the doors,” the robot announced. “This is a Bakerloo Line train to Elephant and Castle.”

Jack slumped against the train window as the car pulled out of the station. The sluagh stood on the platform in a cluster of nightmares, hollowed-out eyes following him until the train rounded a corner and they were lost to blackness and reflection.

“Too much iron,” Jack rasped. The need for a fag was vicious, and had claws. “Even for them.”

“What did they want with you?” Pete said. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, palms making a soft hiss against the leather.

“Me dead, I suppose,” Jack said. “’S the only thing sluagh ever want.”

“Because they’re restless?” Pete stepped to the door as the train pulled into the next station, at Edgeware Road. “Unfinished business or some bollocks?”

“Not likely,” Jack said. “The restless dead are them too full of malice and hunger even for the Land of the Dead.” Sluagh were wild spirits, feral dogs feeding on the souls and deaths of the living. Picking spectral bones, until there was nothing left.

They came into the day, out of the tunnels at last, and Jack breathed in a lungful of cold, damp air. It was nearly as good as nicotine. “They’re hungry, plain and simple,” he told Pete. “And they’ve been pointed at me to feed themselves.”

“Maybe we should put off this job.” Pete worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “I could tell Naughton something’s come up.”

Jack hunched inside his leather. The rain had ceased, but the thick iron clouds crouched overhead promised a proper storm when they’d finished massing. “No,” he said. “We should take the fucking job.”

Pete cocked one eyebrow, and Jack spread his hands in return. “We need it, yeah?”

The scene in Paddington had cemented his resolve to leave London until he could figure out what to do with the demon. Lawrence was right, as Lawrence often was—the Smoke wasn’t his place now, not while he was marked so.

“Well, if you’re so keen all of a sudden,” Pete said, “the car’s this way.”

Chapter Ten

In Pete’s Mini, with the window down, Jack let the air wash over him, keep him awake. Keep him from drifting. His fag flared as the wind caught it, trailing ash along the M5.

“You’ve barely said a word since we left,” Pete said. “Long face for such a little person, my da would say.”

Jack crinkled his nose. “’M not little.”

“Something’s on your mind all the same,” Pete replied. “What is it?”

“Not a thing, luv,” Jack lied. Lying was easy when only your own reflection was staring back.

The Black rippled and churned as they drew farther and farther from the tangled and teeming knot of energies, ghosts, and monsters that was London. City of plague pits and cemeteries, of iron, smoke, and bells. All of it faded, like a radio station under the shadow of a hill.

“All right.” Pete hit the flat of her hand against the wheel. “You don’t want to talk to me, suit yourself. Don’t come whingeing to me when your dark magely secrecy bites you in the arse, all right?”

“Believe me,” Jack snapped, “You’re the last person I’ll be whingeing to.”

“Good,” Pete said, and turned the dial on the Mini’s ancient stereo. “Good Times Bad Times” floated around Jack and closed him off in a wall of sound.

“Good,” he agreed, unheard.

He’d had a 78 turntable when he was ten or twelve, from a jumble sale at the church his mum sometimes stumbled into. His Uncle Ned took it when no one wanted it, and gave it to Jack. No one wanted records, either—it was all bootleg Walkman tapes and CDs if you didn’t live in the rotting council flats beside the church, as Jack did. Jack took custody of his mother’s few albums that she hadn’t pawned, and played them over and over until Kev, the pimp boyfriend and man of the house—as he never tired of telling Jack—took them out in the car park and smashed them.

Jack had owned albums since, master tapes for the Bastards, free CDs from friends with recording contracts, but he never forgot the hiss and scratch of the needle on the vinyl, the particular magic of wringing sound from a thin slice of nothing.

He touched his head to the now-cool glass of the Mini’s window, looked into the depths of the passing darkness. Something loped beside the car, long and lean with teeth that caught the moonlight. Jack’s skin went cold, needles and pins all over like it should have with the sluagh, in the station.

That wasn’t his fault. Too much iron and distraction. A desire not to see or think about what waited for him making him careless. Didn’t mean he was slipping loose from his power as the thirteen years came closer, that using magic was agony as his talent shut down and that even his sight was giving him up for dead.

The demon wasn’t waiting. It would drag Jack to its side by any means. And Pete would be there when it came to collect him, and she’d know. She’d see his sins, count them by turns, and cast him out.

Or the demon would kill her, drain her, use her like Algernon Treadwell had tried to use her, the ancient and terrible talent of the Weirs and their line to the old gods a sweet too tempting to resist.

Jack slid a fingernail under the plaster on his cut, scratched. Wished for a fag. Looked over at Pete. She hid a yawn as the motorway unfurled in the Mini’s headlamps.

“I could drive for a bit,” he suggested. “Let you catch some kip.”

“Jack, you haven’t a license,” Pete protested. “What was the last thing you drove?”

“A Maserati,” Jack said. “For nearly six blocks.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You had a Maserati?”

“Nah, it belonged to some Italian bloke. Wasn’t using it at the time.”

Lefty Nottingham, the Bastards’ roadie and later—much later—Jack’s first smack connection, had bet him he wouldn’t. He’d flashed the flat roll of foil, eyed the sports car idling at the curb like an eager beast, and rumbled in his smoker’s basso, like the selfsame needle dropping onto a 78, “Bet you wouldn’t for a day’s worth of hits, Winter.”

The Maserati ended its life with a post box in the bonnet and Jack walked away with that flat roll of foil in his pocket. And a concussion, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you worried over when there was half a gram of skag burning a hole in your denim.

Pete chuckled softly. “I’ll take my chances, I think.”

Jack put his head back against the rest, trying to drain the tension of Pete’s company from his neck. He preferred birds he could compartmentalize. Friend, fuck, foe. Pete was a combination of all, or none. She wasn’t easy, and the old Jack didn’t like that. The present Jack just felt like a useless wanker for having to lie.

He didn’t think he could sleep, but the draft of warm air from the heating vents, combined with blood loss and exhaustion, dropped him into a drowse.

He woke to Pete’s shaking. She pointed out the wind-screen and Jack saw black turrets, dead trees, and a slice of sky tarnished silver by moonlight.

“That’s the place?” he said. “Christ, where’s the lightning and the sinister albino butler?”

He put his hand on the door, and it was far as he got.

The Black shuddered and pulsed around the house, and Jack grabbed his head as a spike of pain split the front of his skull. The Black wasn’t just around the house, it was in the house, a part of it as much as beams and mortar, a great swirling well of magic, dragging him under, dragging him to drowning . . .

“Jack!” A small cool hand slapped him across the face, and the sting was enough to quiet the scream of the void.

He’d fallen out of the car and onto damp gravel. The stones dug divots in the side of his face, and a finger-light mist kissed his eyelashes with droplets.

Pete helped him sit up, and when he looked at the house again it was perfectly silent, just a house surrounded by overgrown gardens and backed by the sweep of the moor. “Fucking hell,” Jack muttered, brushing mud off his cheek.

“Everything all right?” Pete crouched down with hands on knees to examine his eyes and breathing, like they taught you in a first-aid course.

“Not sure.” Jack shook himself, shrugging off the last vestiges of the Black. It slithered reluctantly back into the small, secret place inside his head where his talent resided, hissing as it coiled up and went back to sleep.

Pull yourself together, Winter, the fix whispered. Until you can’t any longer, and you come begging for a taste.

“Fuck off,” Jack grumbled. Pete cocked her head.

“Excuse me?”

“Not you,” Jack said. He pulled his boots under him and climbed up to his feet. The maneuver took him several more steps than it had even five years ago. Jack decided creaky knees and a back permanently out of line from sleeping rough on squat floors were the least of his worries at the moment. He could be a vain sod when his head wasn’t breaking apart like an egg. “Let’s get on with this sorry endeavor and see what skeletons Naughton has rattling around his family manse.”

Chapter Eleven

The interior of Nicholas Naughton’s mansion was much like the exterior—grim, dusty, and unwelcoming. Pete hit the light inside the double front door, igniting exactly two bulbs in the fifty-lamp chandelier looking down on a marble entry so thick with dust even Pete’s petite frame left footprints.

A grand stairway lead up to a landing of peeling wallpaper and rotting carpet, and two hallways trailed deeper into Naughton’s residence like dark, clotted veins. The place smelled of rot and damp—cemetery smells, with the musical accompaniment of rats and bugs scuttling over the decaying bones in holes Jack couldn’t see.

He took in the shrouded furniture, the third-rate landscapes hanging from the picture rails in the narrow front parlor, the stained walls and cracked mirrors that reflected jagged, mismatched Jacks back to his gaze. “This is what Danny Naughton lived with? Cross and crow, I’d hang meself within the week.”

“Kitchen’s this way, looks like,” Pete said, flipping another switch. The lights along the hall flickered ominously. One bulb exploded in a blue cacophony of sparks.

“Not that I’m terribly keen to see the state of it,” Jack said. Something slithered, fluttered, across the underside of his mind and then the mansion settled, went as quiet as a coffin.

A house shouldn’t echo so silently in the unseen spaces. All things had a footprint in the Black. The Naughton manse was a void, a space into which you could fall and lose yourself.

“Jack.” Pete waggled her fingers in front of his face, expression letting him know he’d gone to the vacant place like an addled teenager chewing on mushrooms. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” Jack said, moving himself along. The fluctuations of energy around the house could be nothing special—or they could be why Danny Naughton had strung himself up. For a sensitive who didn’t know his own power, such a place would be unbearable. That feeling, of your head too full and your heart pumping too hard, Jack knew firsthand. It whispered, Come to me like a siren on the rocks, searing the compulsion into a psychic’s mind until the psychic would do anything to make it stop. Booze. Smack. Chisel to the forehead. Jack knew this firsthand, too.

He just hoped Pete wouldn’t pry into it overmuch. Jack’s head and his heart that still beat out of sequence after the shock in the drive weren’t putting him in a confessional mood.

The kitchen was no better than the rest of the place—Jack wagered it was even worse than his own pre-war one burner/one kettle setup in Whitechapel. At least nothing furry was alive in his sink drain.

Pete wrinkled her nose at the mice scuttling around the baseboards and the mold blossoming everywhere else. “He might have had it cleaned before he sent us here. Jesus.”

“Somehow I think Naughton is more the flashy type than the one to grab a mop, luv.” Jack dropped the tattered kit he’d packed in a rush back at the flat on the kitchen table. He’d leave the discovery of every casting implement and important bit and bob he’d forgotten in his hurry until tomorrow. “I’m off to find a bed without anything residing in it.”

“Best of luck,” Pete said, hiding a yawn with the back of her hand.

“Tomorrow we’ll take a proper look around,” Jack said. “See if this wasn’t all a laugh cooked up by Nancy Lad to make Danny Boy hang himself.”

“Why would Naughton want his brother dead?” Pete sighed.

“That’s your department, luv,” he said. “I just exorcise the ghosts. Assuming there are actual spirits and not just bloody great rats in this place.”

“I’ll go pay respects to the local constabulary tomorrow,” Pete said. “I saw a sign for Princetown back at the last fork. They’ll have proper police to check on the Naughton’s history and see if Nick lied to me.”

“As if that’d be a bloody surprise,” Jack said, more to himself than Pete. She rolled her eyes at the kitchen ceiling, stained with browned and mellowed continents of unknown origin.

“This possessive streak is becoming less and less attractive, Jack.”

“Just looking out for you,” he protested. Pete held up a hand.

“You made it clear after Blackpool we’re not anything, Jack. So don’t pretend this is for my benefit and not to make yourself feel bigger.”

The silence ran long and thin, and Jack contemplated whether he should put his fist through the wall or merely break Naughton’s tacky family china against it. He didn’t have much pride, but he had enough to dislike it when attractive women called him on his shite. Jack discarded all of his arguments while his blood beat in his ears. Pete had heard them all at least once. Finally he decided it was simpler to change the subject entirely. Blackpool was months past, and seemed like an eternity. There was no point in standing under the storm it had stirred in him when he could be indoors.

“Princetown, you say?” Jack rubbed his chin. Had to do something about the beard before he started looking like a fucking hippie.

“That’s what the sign read,” Pete said, dropping her own luggage. She found and mounted the servants’ stairs, which lead them to a back hall and a warren of rooms filled with boxes, naked dressmaker’s dummies, and camp cots for the eponymous servants.

The bedrooms for the gentry were numerous and nearly as cluttered.

“Danny was a bit of a pack rat,” Pete said.

“Crazier than a bowl of bar nuts, you mean,” Jack said, as they encountered one room filled entirely with back issues of Penthouse, stacked neatly by year, and jar upon jar of kosher pickles, also arranged by year.

“That as well,” Pete agreed. She found the master suite, a great oppressive four-poster dominating the scene like the set of a particularly dull vintage porno film. “This will do for me.”

“And you’re welcome to it,” Jack said. Even the colors of the room, muted bloody purples and bruised blues, depressed him. “Don’t let the ghosties bite.”

“Jack.” Pete put her hand on his arm. “Do you know someone in Princetown?”

“Why?” Jack said. “Jealous?”

“No, but when I said the name you reacted like someone had stuck a hat pin in your arse.” Pete took her hand away. “You owe another gangster money?”

Jack blew out a breath. It was a fair question, and had it been anyone besides Pete asking he might have shrugged, even made a joke of it. “That’s all you think of me? Bad man with bad debts?” The words came out far harsher than he’d intended.

“I didn’t mean . . . ,” Pete said. Then her face set, hollowed out and as tired as his own must be. “Let’s face facts, Jack. You’ve a lot of carnage in your wake and I like to know what I’m getting into when I’m with you.”

“There’s nothing sinister in Princetown,” Jack snapped. “Just another lot of musty old ghosts, like this place.” And because it was Pete and not anyone else, he felt compelled to twist the knife he’d landed. “You have sweet dreams, luv, since you’re so bloody innocent.”

Jack slammed the door on Pete’s thin-lipped face and stomped down the grand staircase, wanting to break his fist on something vulnerable but settling for a smoke instead.

He stopped on the landing, breathed out, lit the fag, breathed in. Sweet, blessed nicotine. Every addict’s pity fuck.

A shape shimmered in the broken mirror, over Jack’s left shoulder. His own profile half obscured by smoke, he fixated on the spot, unsure if he’d even seen it.

Wasn’t that every poxy haunting he’d ever seen on telly? Smoke, shadow, and no substance?

Jack exhaled at his reflection. The mirror sucked all the color out of its view, drained everything but his face down a black whirl pool.

“Come on then,” Jack sneered. “No cameras. No whimpering psychics. Just you and me, a pair of mean old bastards.”

Nothing moved beyond him in the glass. Jack shut his eyes and rubbed his temples. Mirrors were useful, but not this water-spotted mess. Old mirrors, made with silver, were what attracted spirits. New glass just served to spook over-tired mages.

Jack opened his eyes, resolved to have one more fag and then bed, when a pair of hands grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him down the stairs.

Chapter Twelve

He landed on his back, on the stone, and saw stars as all of his air escaped in a last, mocking puff of blue smoke.

Jack choked, unable to do anything except flop like a hooked mackerel while his mind screamed at him from the primal place of blood and birth to Run, run you stupid cunt, get free before it kills you.

He pushed the panic away, focused on his various bits, the quick mental check one developed after one had taken a few beatings. No lancing pain in his sides, his hands, or his legs, no bone scraping muscle anywhere, but he’d had the wind knocked out of him, properly.

“Jack?” Pete appeared at the top of the stairs, barefooted and barelegged, wearing a stretched Siouxsie shirt as a nightie. “Jack!” She took the steps two at a time, landing next to him on the cold floor, able fingers feeling his pulse and checking his pupils. “What happened? Did you black out? It’s a miracle you’re not gushing blood all across the floor.” Her words blended together, skipped and flowed over one another like water over rocks and mingled with the current ringing in his skull.

Jack shut his eyes because it seemed a remarkably good plan. Enough beatings also taught that sometimes, you didn’t want to get up. You just lay there and bled until the hurt passed and whoever had put you down in the first place lost interest.

The plan worked well, until Pete slapped him hard across the face. “The nearest hospital is thirty-five kilometers away and if you think I’m driving you there in my night things, you’re bloody stoned.”

Jack forced himself back to the surface of waking. Everything was quiet again. No shapes fluttered in the mirrors and no great howling morass cried to him across the Black. The Naughton mansion was, to his senses, dead as a doornail once more.

Pete laid the back of her hand on his forehead, cradling his skull on her knees. Her nightshirt was cut out in the collar and from his vantage Jack could see the top curves of her breasts, Snow White skin dusted with a helping of Black Irish freckles. He gave what he hoped was a sickly but courageous smile.

“That feels good, luv.”

Pete followed his eyes and huffed. “Sit up, you wanker.”

Jack did as he was told, with great reluctance on the part of his swimming vision and screaming muscles. Pete went and fetched her penlight from her kit, shining it in his eyes.

“Your pupils are the same size,” Pete said. “Your head isn’t bleeding badly. Just don’t go to sleep for a few hours.” She held out her hand and Jack let her pull him up. The Naughton’s foyer swayed agreeably, like he’d chased the fag with some high-grade opium.

He held on to Pete. “I’m spent, luv.” He brushed his thumb over the back of her knuckles. “Though you could always keep me awake.”

“Fuck off.” Pete gave him a gentle shove with her free hand.

Jack swapped his grip for her waist under the nightshirt, fingers slotting between Pete’s ribs, pulling her flush against him. They were a good fit.

“’M not joking, Pete.” The terrible thing was, he wasn’t. If Pete had, in that moment, put her hands on him in return, Jack wouldn’t have stopped himself.

Not for the demon, not because Pete was an innocent in matters of the Black. Jack knew one thing surely about himself and that was, he was rubbish against temptation. Pete was flame and he was paper, and if he touched her he’d burn. No question about the matter.

“Get some rest,” Pete said softly. “I’m sure the ghosts will keep until morning.”

Jack rubbed the back of his skull, where a lump roughly the size of the Isle of Man was rising. His back would be a mass of bruises by morning, if the ache along his shoulder blades was anything to go by. “Not this one,” he said. “Pushy bastard. Quite literally.”

Pete’s brow wrinkled. “Will you be all right?”

Jack flashed her a grin. It was a cold comfort as she stepped away and adjusted the shirt to cover the flash and curve of skin on her exposed shoulder. “’Course. Go back to bed, darling. I’ll sit up for a bit to make sure me brain stays inside its house.”

Pete started up the stairs, and then turned back and went on tiptoe, planting a kiss on his bruised cheek.

Jack watched her go and then shut off the arthritic light and sat on the stairs in the dark, watching the ember of his last fag glow like a dying, faraway sun.

In a way, the poltergeist shoving him arse over teakettle had been a gift. It meant there was something in Naughton’s house, something dead and full of screaming, clawing rage. The dead silence lied to him, just as he was lying to Pete. It hid the thing that crept and crawled in the Black, exposed itself and vanished again like a movie-screen phantom. The intermittent magic of the Naughton house was a puzzle, but it wasn’t one that could distract him from exorcising a poltergeist. Poltergeists were solid, a good fight and good practice for exorcism. Plus, he could ratchet the charge into the stratosphere for that cunt Naughton, if only to make up for nearly turning his brain into pudding in the man’s grand entry.

Jack exhaled and watched the smoke rise and curl its fingers around the air until it disappeared, his own small spirit that was soon vanquished.

The ghost meant he was needed, for at least a little longer. It meant the company of the dead, the only presence Jack had relied on since he was fourteen years old. He had its scent, and even though his sight was changeable and treacherous in this curious vortex of Black and nothing, Jack was going to run it to ground.

If nothing else, the ghost meant he wasn’t alone.

Chapter Thirteen

Pete moved under him, her body arched against the iron shackles that held her wrists above her head, flush against the stone. The air tingled, chill, drops of dew collecting in the hollows of her clavicle, the planes of her stomach, crowning her nipples in crystal tears.

A ring of torches and a ring of watchers closed Jack and Pete inside surely as a lover’s embrace. On the stone within a circle of stones, Jack touched her, put his mouth on her skin, tasted sweat and bitterness from the blue woad the women had painted on her, before she was brought to him, in the circle, on the stone, with the scent of rowan in the air.

Pete met his eyes, her slim pale thighs bruising under the pressure of his hands. Jack knew this place, in the primal sense memory of his magic, and from the same memory the ritual power curled around him, whispered what it wanted, begged him to close the circle.

Pete struggled as Jack moved her legs akimbo, gasped as he placed himself against her, warm wet burning him against the cold contrast of the stone.

Pete held his gaze, her own eyes wide and pooling. “Please. Please, Jack . . .”

The chanting crested, the power of the place with it, and Jack fell over the edge, into the swirling vortex of the Black . . .

The Mini’s car horn cut through the fog of sleep, and Jack winced as light and sound hooked their claws in his consciousness and dragged him into the waking world.

He felt wrung out and stiff, hungover without the fuzzy memory or naked bird in his bed to make it at all worthwhile.

“Jack!” Pete shouted at him from mansion drive. “It’s not a bloody hotel, so rouse yourself before noon, if it pleases you, and let’s get this done!”

He stumbled to the window and saw Pete standing with her hand in the car window. She hit the horn again. Jack slid up the sash and stuck his head out.

“One fucking moment, Your Highness! Some of us don’t roll from slumber ready for telly!”

“Hurry up!” Pete shouted. “I’m starving and the Naugh-tons hadn’t any food.”

“I’d be a deal faster if you’d stop blowing that fucking horn,” Jack returned, and shut the window. He had aches in every part of his torso, a throbbing in his head, and a raging hard-on. A morning at some point in the distant past might have started off worse, but Jack couldn’t think of it offhand.

He pulled on boots, dungarees, decided the undershirt he’d worn the day before—and the day before that—was still in service. He rooted through the drawers for something to keep out the cold.

The last occupant of the room had lived in the mansion during a time when lapels had sat wide enough to take flight and ties were made to blind oncoming pedestrians, but Jack found a flannel that smelled of stale tobacco and staler pot, shrugged his leather over it. Flick-knife, fags, lighter. The essential kit Jack Winter required to face the cold, cruel world.

Briefly, he debated asking for Pete’s help with the hard-on, and decided it would only get him smacked in his already tender head.

“Jack!” More of the horn. “I’m not a taxi!”

Before he left, Jack risked a look into the bedroom mirror. Nothing stared back at him except his bruised reflection, and that was terrifying enough.

He limped down the stairs and out to Pete, collapsing into the Mini with a grateful sigh. Normally, he despised the little car that folded up his more than generous legs like he was inside a Christmas cracker, but today it was a chariot of the gods moving him toward caffeine and civilization.

“Sleep all right?” Pete said, once they were out of the drive and on a road that could have doubled as a ride at Euro Disney. In the daylight, hedgerows stripped of foliage bent over the car, scraping the Mini’s paint job like bone fingers.

“Slept like the dead,” Jack lied.

“I had terrible nightmares, myself,” Pete said. Jack watched her profile as she downshifted to take them up a hill and around a hairpin turn, where the road narrowed from something chancy to drive to a route that should only be traversed by hobbits.

“Nothing like . . .” He winced as the wheels pitched them sideways into the ditch that grooved next to the road. “Nothing like the ghost dreams?”

“No,” Pete said quietly. “Not like that. Cold eyes, mostly. Silver eyes, pairs and pairs of them just . . . staring. Not blinking. Like they were waiting.”

Weirs like Pete could see the truth in dreams, and Jack was gratified that her dream-sense, at least, also believed the mansion was bedeviled by a haunt.

“It wasn’t anything like the things Treadwell made me see, but it was damn spooky,” Pete continued. “So much cold, predatory attention . . .” She stomped on the brake pedal as a lorry materialized from around a bend. “Fuck!”

Jack ricocheted off the dash, which set his aches aflame anew. “How does anyone bloody live here without becoming a statistic?”

“They’re fucking hermits, I suppose,” Pete fumed, reversing until she found a pull-off to let the lorry by. “No wonder Heathcliff went mad.”

After a time, during which Jack found himself gripping his seat in panic more than he’d ever admit to in public, they arrived in Princetown.

“There’s the police station,” Pete said. “I’ll go introduce myself and you—” she looked Jack over. He looked at the trickle of morning shoppers in turn, most in windcheaters and wellington boots, checkered caps or overcoats. He stood out like a Sikh at a skinhead rally.

“I’ll try not to set any fires,” he promised.

Pete crossed the street and entered the small tan police headquarters. As soon as she was out of sight, Jack unfolded himself from the Mini’s interior and lit a fag, leaning on the fender.

Princetown held a small market square, the usual compliment of pubs and a chip shop, the Jubilee and Memorial Railway Inn, which looked like a fine place to get yourself murdered in a cozy mystery on the BBC, and a tourist information center manned by a teenage girl with blue stripes in her hair and a surly look on her face.

Jack checked for cars, and quickly crossed the square, slipping down a side street. If he was quick, he could be back before Pete knew he’d been gone. This wasn’t the sort of social call he wanted to explain to anyone, least of all her. And honestly, Jack thought, asking him to sit in the car like a sidekick in a place like Princetown was simply cruel and unusual.

He walked past house after house topped with damp thatch, surrounded by dead flowers, and populated by stony-eyed moor folk who glared at the platinum blond sore thumb from behind faded sprigged curtains. No cinema, no decent pub, and not even a newsagent’s where one could indulge in the bored country vices of smoking, cheap lager, and porno mags.

“Cruel, Pete,” he said. “Definitely cruel.”

The house Jack sought out was how he remembered it, perhaps a little sadder, a little more sag along the roof line and a few more feet of dead, tangled grass in the front garden.

Sidestepping a drift of newspapers and mail, Jack mounted the steps and pounded on the door with the flat of his fist.

A youth in an overcoat, iPod buds dangling from his ears, opened the door and stared Jack over with bloodshot eyes before he shifted the wad of gum in his mouth and spoke. “Yeah? What do you want, then?”

Jack flicked his fag into the bushes. “Looking for Elsie. Her folks still live here?”

“Nope,” said the youth. “They kicked.”

“Simon!” A voice that could pierce a pit full of drunken punks twenty men thick echoed from inside the house. “Who’s at the door?”

“Oi, Elsie!” Jack shouted, shoving the youth out of the way. “Elsie Dinsmore!”

“Jack?” Elsie came barreling from somewhere in the shadowed interior, beyond the beaded curtains and head-high stacks of magazines. Her shawl and layers of skirt flapped behind her and enveloped him as she threw her arms around his neck. It was rather like being embraced by an enthusiastic parrot. “Jack fucking Winter! Always knew you weren’t dead, you sly skinny bastard!”

“Elsie Dinsmore,” Jack said with a grin. “You still look beautiful as when you wore your hair three feet high and wrapped yourself in DIY tape.”

She laughed from deep in smoke-scraped lungs. “You’re a flatterer, you are, but it’s Elsie Boote now. Haven’t used that shite stage name in ages.”

Elsie took Jack’s face between her hands, turned his head from side to side. “But you’re still Jack Winter, aren’t you?”

“Some of us are rubbish at moving on,” Jack said.

“Well don’t just stand there like a knob!” Elsie cried, grabbing his arm. “Come have yourself seat. SIMON!” she bellowed at earsplitting volume. “Put on the kettle for our guest and get some of them chocolate biscuits I bought on a plate.”

Jack let himself be gently dragged into a sitting room smothered in tapestries and furniture made entirely out of pillows braced on wooden frames. Herbs hung in dusty clusters, so thick the ceiling beams looked like furrows of earth. Dozens of birdcages blocked the light from the window, full of dead birds with glass eyes that stared balefully at Jack.

The only bare surface in the entire space was a round table covered in purple velvet. A box made of carved bone sat at the center, scenes of nymphs and harvest orgies parading around the edge of its lid.

Elsie settled herself with a groan into an armchair opposite the table. Jack perched on the edge of the pillows and tried not to lose his balance or sneeze at the overwhelming cinnamon incense that blanketed the room in a sticky amber miasma.

“Jack, Jack, Jack.” Elsie grinned at him. “Tell me everything about you. Last time we were together . . .”

“Leeds, 1997,” Jack said.

Elsie nodded. “You were down the rabbit hole, lovie.” Her gravel-pit voice and avalanche of platinum hair, the two assets that made her the post-apocalyptic stunner vocalist for the Razor Babies a dozen years before, were both present now but greatly diminished. Her hair was long, knotted, going gray at the roots, and she’d covered herself in the same garish gypsy getup as her snug house.

She was a far cry from the girl who wrapped herself in tape and cut it off with razor blades throughout the set, for certain. The shine was still in her eyes, though, and the smirk still on her lips. Elsie hadn’t lost her fire and Jack was relieved, because he needed something burned.

“Only climbed out recently,” he admitted. “Spent too many years in Wonderland, I suppose.”

Elsie shifted her bulk, which had grown considerably in the intervening years. Jack supposed that was fair—he’d diminished nearly as much.

“I don’t think you’d be here at the family sprawl on a social call, once I’ve considered.” Her mouth turned down. “You’d never come by just to see old Elsie getting on.” She snorted. “Then again, neither would I.”

Simon skulked in and set down a tray of tea and biscuits.

“Your mum and dad gone away, then?” Jack asked. Simon simply stood, in his overcoat and fingerless gloves, staring dumbly at Jack.

“Far away,” Elsie said. “Mum passed nearly five years ago now. Dad followed her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you ain’t.” Elsie hooted. “You weren’t sorry when Death crossed your path, Jack. Not once.”

“Things change,” he said shortly, and turned his worst glare on Simon. “You need something, my son, or are you just holding up that bit of wall?”

“He’s harmless,” Elsie assured Jack. “Got a snip of talent and not much of a brain. Simon, go feed the cats and take in the wash. There’s a fog brewing up.”

Simon shuffled away like an enormous carrion bird, and Jack turned his eyes back to Elsie.

“I need you to read for me.”

Elsie’s tea stopped halfway to her lips. “Thought you didn’t believe in the future, Jack. You said there was no point.”

“And I told you, things change.” Jack reached out and put his hand on the bone box. “Afraid of my future, Elsie?”

“You had any sense, wanker, you’d be afraid, too.” Elsie set down her teacup with a bone-on-bone clink. “Give it here. Of course I’ll read for you. One old conjurer to another.”

She opened the bone box and drew out her tarot cards. Elsie hadn’t had much beyond a filthy shirt, ripped tights, and a skirt that barely kept her decent when Jack had met her, but she’d had the cards, rolled in purple velvet in her knapsack. She’d had the magic to make them dance under her stubby fingers, to unfurl the future with the ink and paper and quicksilver dance of the seventy-two images that she turned into windows on the mind and soul.

Elsie shuffled once, twice, thrice. No ceremony—she was fast and hard as a dealer in Monte Carlo. She slapped the cards in front of Jack. “Cut.”

Jack did as she said, making sure to touch the cards only with his fingertips. They weren’t a new-age scam that you could buy in any Waterstone’s. Elsie’s deck was at least a hundred and fifty years old, stiff paper inked by hand. A Death’s deck, every card a representation of the Bleak Gates, the Land of the Dead, or Death itself, in all its guises from Thanatos to the pale Horseman.

In her band days, Elsie claimed the deck was inked in sorcerer’s ink and colored in human blood. Feeling the pinprick shock of foreign magic, old magic that did not brook disturbance, Jack was only half sure she’d been jerking him off.

Elsie held the cards between her palms and then with a snap, laid the first one face up on the velvet.

“Death,” Jack said. “Shocking, I tell you.”

“Death right side up is a change,” Elsie said. “Transition. Evolution. The painful birth of the new.”

“And the Fool card is a stubborn sod and the Lovers mean everybody hug,” Jack muttered. Crystals and tarot and candles only served to allow the weak talents to think they had more than their share, and the non-talents to fuck about where they had no business. Objects of magic threw Jack off balance, made his stomach lurch and his skin crawl. They were never good omens, and frequently the harbinger of a royal cocking-up on the part of the owner.

Elsie flipped the next card. The Devil leered up at Jack as he copulated with a pale-skinned virgin on a funeral pyre.

“Well,” she said. “You’re off to a strong fucking start, my darling. Death and destruction.”

“Just another day, luv.” Jack shrugged, although a faint prickle of unease crawled through him. The Black woven through Elsie’s smothering house grew restless, like ghostly wings against his cheeks, and the dead birds swayed in their cages as a wind blew in.

“Storm’s coming!” Simon shouted from the kitchen, slamming a door and a basket. “Laundry’s all gone to shit.”

Elsie didn’t stir. Her eyes were distant, gray mist drifting across the surface of her pupils while her fingers, nubby with arthritis, communed with her cards. Jack’s eyes did something similar when he was in the throes of a spell. Pete said it made him look “like one of those bloody kids from that spooky village movie.”

The next card flipped, and Jack’s breath stopped.

Death, his skeletal form standing atop the highest tower in the Land of the Dead.

Death stared him down with hollow eyes. “No,” Elsie rasped.

“No, no . . .” Her eyes snapped back in her head, and the fog of energy stole her gaze until something fathomless and old, something Not-Elsie stared out.

Her fingers moved of their own accord, laying down card after card. Death, and the Devil. Across the velvet they marched, death and destruction cutting a swath like an execution squad.

Jack reached out and grabbed Elsie’s wrist. “That’s enough.”

Elsie’s lip curled back and she snarled, hands continuing to twitch spasmodically, card after card after card glaring up at Jack from the velvet. Skull and horn. Death and the Devil.

“Oi.” Jack grabbed her by the shoulder, shook her. “Elsie!”

She slammed the last card down with a bang and stared into his eyes. Her face was a skull with skin stretched over bone like a death masque. Her eyes were storm clouds hiding lightning.

“No escape,” Elsie croaked. “Not for you.”

Her voice was the demon’s voice. Jack jerked, his knee slamming the underside of the table, sending it tumbling. Seventy-two Deaths and Devil fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves.

“Run, Jack.” The demon grinned at him as Elsie shuddered, head thrown back and legs twitching in convulsion as the demon rode her body. “Run while you still can.”

Chapter Fourteen

Pete was at the car when he returned, leaning on the bonnet, arms and ankles crossed. Jack slowed his feet, slowed his breathing, composed his face into a mask. “Waiting long?”

Pete sliced him with her gaze. “Where the bloody hell were you?”

Jack waved a pack of Parliaments. “I was out. Went over to the pub.”

His heart hammered loudly enough that he was sure they could hear him in the next county, and cold sweat clung to his skin under his clothes. The demon’s message was clear as a churchbell: No escape. Not for you.

“You look pale as the dead,” Pete said. “Are you sure you just went for fags?”

“’Course I’m sure,” Jack said. The words didn’t slide off his tongue easily this time, and Pete’s pretense of believing it cracked as she jerked the car door open and jammed her keys into the Mini’s ignition. Jack climbed in, shut the door, and nearly had his head whipped off as Pete kicked the little car into motion.

“The locals didn’t have much to add,” she said once they’d left the square. The moors rose on either side of the ribbon of road, a petrified sea that could fold over your head and swallow you down.

“He topped himself?” Jack said. Pete nodded.

“No medical examiner here, of course, and no proper morgue, but he most definitely suffocated. Naughton called the locals immediately and the sergeant I spoke to—Hogan—said Danny was in the attic on the crossbeam. ‘Swingin’ like a Christmas ornament’ is how he put it, I believe.”

Jack watched the tops of the moors slowly fade away as fog crept over the crest and down the hillside, the sky turning from the peculiar empty blue-white of open spaces to the hard gray iron of rain and storm. “Could explain the poltergeist. Suicide doesn’t usually leave Casper the Friendly Fucking Ghost behind.”

“So?” Pete slowed at a junction and squinted at the signs. Fingers of fog obscured the miles to the next town.

“So, what?” Jack cast a glance at her. They were alone now, just the road and the fog and a bit of stone wall separating them from the windswept nothingness of the Dartmoor.

“What do we do now?” Pete asked, going left. “If it’s only a poltergeist and not a real haunting?” The Mini jolted as the road turned abruptly from paved to gravel.

“Cleanse the house,” Jack said. “If it doesn’t take care of Danny Boy it will at least tell me what I’m dealing with.” Jack wasn’t convinced the great, grasping void of the Naughton estate was simple resonance from a suicide. The power that had taken a crowbar to his sight wasn’t natural, as much as anything in the Black was ever natural.

“What we’re dealing with,” Pete said.

Jack rubbed the center of his forehead. “Yeah. ’Course.”

Pete gritted her teeth as the Mini’s undercarriage scraped the track. “It is we, you know.”

Jack debated with himself, and then nodded agreement. He was crap at looking contrite, so he patted himself down for a light but found nothing useful. “You’re right, luv. ‘We’ it is. Forgive me?”

Pete hissed through her teeth. “I’d be a deal more inclined to forgive the sins of the world at large if I knew where the bloody hell we were.”

The road was nearly invisible beyond the Mini’s bonnet, and Jack shivered as the fog formed vines and tangles outside the windscreen. They were alone, closed off, and the road narrowed and turned back on itself.

Pete stopped and set the emergency brake, turning off the car. “I’m lost.”

Jack looked behind them, but there was only fathomless gray, like the mists outside the walls of the Land of the Dead. Endless, cold, and full of lost souls.

“Must have taken a wrong turn in the muck,” he suggested. “It’s all right. All of us get lost at one time or another. The trick is getting found again.”

Pete drummed her fingers on the wheel. “I guess there’s nowhere to go but forward. Have to come out somewhere.”

Jack joined in her drumming, the bass line to “Shut Up and Fuck Off” springing up under his fingers. He’d written the song with Dix McGowan, the Poor Dead Bastards’ drummer, after a night sitting up with more bottles of whiskey than comfortably fit in the bin of Dix’s minuscule flat. Dix was newly dumped, Jack was pissed, and he felt good enough about being too drunk to see the dead that he wrote a song. It hadn’t gone on the Bastards’ single LP, and only hit a few set lists in their club gigs, but it was Jack’s favorite. Simple, uncomplicated. Shut up, fuck off, I’m not your Prince Charming, I’m not your broken heart.

“Jack.” Pete tapped him on the back of his hand. “You with us?” She turned the ignition key, and the Mini coughed and shuddered.

He folded up the memory and put it with all the others that lived in a rat-eaten cardboard box marked Before the Fix. In the Mini, there was no warmth and no biting scent of whiskey, no guitar neck under his hands. Jack felt as if a finger of fog and damp had slipped in and placed a hand on the back of his neck. “Try it again,” he said to Pete, trying to keep the low urgency from his voice even as his chest felt as if a giant had closed its fist about him.

The Black boiled, in the wake of something passing through, large and ancient, that set all of Jack’s mental alarms to screaming.

Pete jiggled the key and then hit the dash. “Bollocks! I knew that bloke who replaced the alternator was dodgy.”

Jack put his fingertips against the Mini’s window. His prints turned the mist to droplets and they slid down the glass, turning his handprint into nothing but streaks on a pane.

Outside, on a lone telephone wire, a crow landed, and stared at him. It darted a gaze left and right, and then took wing, cawing madly.

Magic prickled up and down Jack’s body, and he shivered as the crow’s call faded into nothingness along with all else.

The Black of the Dartmoor was not the Black of London. There were layers in the city, ley lines of abandoned tunnel and underground river, the cool sting of iron railway tracks and bridges binding the wild power of the Thames. London breathed, it fluttered and shouted, wriggled and screamed. A million energies spread across the Black, slithering through smoke and stone, caressing his sight like a lover’s insistent hand.

Here, the moor was simply alive, an open wound. Raw power from the Black trickled through Jack’s consciousness, undiluted and primal. The tors and pagan sites scattered across the landscape were like torches in a vast darkness, floating on a sea of raw power.

It was an ancient place, a place of wild magic, and Jack watched his breath make a cloud when he exhaled. Even though it was freezing in the Mini, sweat broke all over Jack’s skin, under his leather. His pulse jittered, and his nerves crept up and down his flesh. The Black of the Dartmoor felt like nothing so much as ghost sickness. Jack shut his eyes, tried to push against the tide of the sight. Had to, because if he left Pete alone out here by checking out they’d both be fucked.

“I’m going to check the motor,” Pete said, climbing out. “Open the bonnet, would you?”

Jack did as she asked and followed her. They were in pea soup now, and Jack smelled the icy, freshwater scent of rain on the breeze.

“We shouldn’t linger,” he said. The waves of power only worsened, outside the protective steel bubble of the Mini.

Pete poked at the innards of the engine, while Jack lit a fag. “You know,” she said, “you should be doing this, you being the man and all.”

“Sorry, luv,” Jack told her. “My manly prowess is confined to picking locks, smoking, and being ridiculously good looking.”

“You’re bent.” Pete shook her head, fighting a smile.

Jack returned it. Seeing Pete smile started a small fire under his stomach, and it helped mute the buzzing of the Black, for a moment. “I don’t hear you disagreeing, luv.”

Pete sighed, at him or the car, he wasn’t sure, and shut the bonnet. “Well, it’s buggered.” She pulled out her BlackBerry and held it up to the sky. “No service, either. We either walk, or wait to be pancaked by a lorry.”

Jack looked into the fog, where he knew the hills were watching them. Gathering magic. Waiting.

“How far can it be?” he said gamely. Pete got her bag and jacket, locked the Mini, and joined him on the edge of the road.

“Hopefully not so far my shoes start leaking. I’m in a foul enough mood already.”

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets, keeping a few steps ahead of Pete. He swept the hills from one side of the road to the other, steps hard and sharp on the gravel, heartbeat sharper. Whatever was out there in the fog stared back. Jack could see nothing except the phantoms of mist wandering aimlessly among the hedges and the hills, but he felt it. His skin went colder than the air, and he curled his fists inside his leather, scrabbling for a little magic to throw behind a shield hex. He wasn’t going to be dragged away like a sod in a fairy tale. Whatever had stalked them to this deserted spot clearly didn’t know what sort of a mood he was in.

Nothing sprang at him as they walked away from the Mini, but the wild power of the moor followed, and the watcher followed with it. Jack resigned himself to a game of seeing which of them broke nerve first—the mage, or the creature.

“You know,” Pete said as they squelched through the dead grass on the shoulder of the road, “this reminds me of that night. You remember the one, where you played the set at Club Bleu . . .”

“And your sister got herself pissed on tequila,” Jack remembered. Pete’s sister MG was a vision in black lace, long Bettie Page curls, wide eyes, and lips made for blow jobs All of which hid a mind that would have done the bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction proud. In other words, she was just Jack’s—old Jack, Bastards frontman Jack—type. If there wasn’t a chance a bird would come at you with a kitchen knife, where was the laugh?

“Right, and she made us walk for miles at three in the morning looking for a curry.” Pete picked up the thread.

“Not just any curry,” Jack said.

“A green curry.” They mimicked MG’s put-on posh accent together.

“Thank God they only made one of her.” Pete sighed. “That’s what our Da used to say.”

Jack had first seen Pete standing at the edge of the pit in Fiver’s, a hole in the wall shitebox, far from Club Bleu as she was from her sister, even though they’d arrived together. Where MG dominated every room she entered, Pete stayed small and pale, worrying a full pint glass between her hands. There was no great lightning bolt, no flash of recognition from past lives. She looked at him, and he looked at her, while the music played.

And suddenly, MG had been the furthest person from his thoughts.

“I . . .” Jack swallowed his words. Whatever he’d seen in the dirty basement club that night was gone now. Now, there was a demon, and a dozen years of growing older and harder in between.

“Yes?” Pete turned back to face him. They were standing close as they’d ever been, save for the night Jack had pulled Pete out of Highgate Cemetery, bleeding for trying to keep him from being swallowed by the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell.

Closer even than when she’d kissed him.

Jack reached out and brushed the droplets of mist from her hair. “Not a thing, luv.” He dropped his hand, and stepped back. “Not a bloody thing.”

Behind Pete, in the fog, something moved. Jack didn’t see it, not really. His headache spiked and his skin numbed as if a north wind had blown across his face, and a shadow flicked in and out of his vision faster than the shadow from a nightmare.

Hulking and dark, it moved across his sight, parting the mist. A long, low howl echoed between the hills, lower than the wail of the bansidhe or the scream of the bean nighe.

Pete whipped her head around. Her sixth sense, the part of her connected to the Black, felt it—the soul-stealing cold, the oppressive weight of a creature of magic breaking the barrier between worlds.

“Jack.” She reached back and grabbed for his hand without taking her eyes off the spot where the thing stood. It was indistinct, the size of a small horse, just a black blur of fog surrounded by lighter mist. Whatever Jack had imagined coming when he’d felt the magic of the moor awaken, he hadn’t imagined it would be quite as large.

Or seem quite as slagged off.

“Pete,” he said in return, to let her know he was still there, wasn’t running.

The thing snarled, a sound that cut through his ribs straight to his heart. Twin golden globes blossomed in the fog, as if the creature were all flame inside. Eyes, golden and round, staring at Jack and through him, straight down to the bone.

“Pete,” Jack repeated. “We need to get back to the car.”

The creature in the fog took a step forward, its power brushing up against Jack’s. The creature was cold, the cold of dead skin and frozen iron. Its magic was hard and un-yielding, power borne of the Underworld.

It could cut through Jack’s shield hex like a razor through a wrist.

He wasn’t up for debating the point, either. Maybe twenty years ago, when he was stupid and carried a death wish with him like a scar. But not today. He was too old and too bastard-clever now to engage with something that had crawled straight up from the Land of the Dead. Particularly when that something so clearly wanted to gnaw his bones.

Pete twined her fingers in his, and he felt the flutter of the gateway she carried in her talent. A Weir possessed a direct line to the oldest, sharpest, bloodiest part of the Black. It promised a mage like him power beyond imagination, if only he were willing to burn himself to ash and Pete, too, in the process. When a Weir and a mage met, the uncontrolled magic could eat you alive. Terrible catastrophes had resulted, and the sweet, overwhelming desire to let the magic take him was the reason.

Jack yanked his hand free. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Running was nearly always a better option than dying, so Jack turned and pelted for the Mini as if the coppers were chasing him and he had open warrants.

The thing gave chase, cold breath on his back, panting in his ear, and the howl that could rend flesh ululating across the moor.

Jack’s fingers fumbled for the Mini’s door, scrabbled uselessly as Pete dove across the driver’s seat and sprang the latch.

Jack fell in, his sight shrieking, and slammed the door.

“What the bloody fuck is that thing?” Pete shouted, but he barely heard her. She was down a long tunnel, back in the living world. The Black boiled up around him, threatening to drag him under, take him to that primal bloodlust that flowed under the moor. Under the hill, to the old races that waited there.

Jack had seen what lived under the hill.

He wouldn’t go back.

The cut on his hand from Paddington was raw and weeping still, but he turned the flick-knife on the same digits, his off hand. If he needed to work a spell or, fuck, pick a pocket, he needed his left.

He sliced the fat of his palm deep, felt the cold bite of metal and the serpent sting.

The air was so cold now from the encroach of the creature that his blood steamed when it hit the glass. Jack smeared his palm down the car window, leaving a ruddy streak, and when he had enough blood began to draw.

Sigils weren’t something the Fiach Dubh had much faith in. Their magic was gut-deep, physical, the shield hex and the summoning circle. Pretty drawings are for pretty faeries, boy. Seth McBride’s voice, roughened by cigarettes and hard magic, crept in as Jack tried to push magic into the blood. Seth had taught Jack the hard and fast, boot-tothe-bollocks rules. The ways and wicked tricks of the Brothers of the Crow. He came back, unbidden, most often when Jack had gotten himself into a situation that would end either with him a corpse or royally fucked.

“Shut your gob, Seth. Crusty old Mick,” Jack muttered as he finished the cycle. Picked it from the notebook of Declan Disher, a Vatican-trained exorcist who found Wicca and swanned about in a hippie shirt and pentacle until a gang of Stygian Brothers cut out his liver one night in a dark pub washroom and used it as a ceremonial offering to Nergal. Or perhaps Dagon. Jack got the two mixed up sometimes.

Declan had always been a git, but he was a hand with markings. The sigil had saved Jack’s arse before, and now it would save him and Pete one more time.

It had to, because if the creature broke through, he was out of brilliant ideas.

“Jack. Jack!” Pete grabbed his shoulder and shook. “There’s something out there and it’s not stopping for a chat!”

“Give me half a fucking second,” he gritted. The symbols were slippery, transient, escaping his attempt to infuse them with power. Concentration shot, panic rising, wild magic threatening to claw his brain apart—never the best time to draw a complex magical wotsit.

Pete stilled herself with effort, effort that manifested in the widening of her pupils, the cords in her neck pulled taut by fear. “All right. All right. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Jack put his hand against the symbols. They flopped with faint energy, like dying goldfish. Outside, the creature prowled, circling the car, scenting for life and magic.

Fuck it, he couldn’t take the chance that the sigil would crumble under the creature’s onslaught. He couldn’t chance visiting the Bleak Gates, not when the demon was walking in his shadow. Jack turned to Pete.

“What you can do is take my hand.”

She put her palm in his without hesitation. Warm, sure, alive. Trusting.

Like he’d spun a tap, power rushed through him, making his fingers and toes and everything else tingle. The sigil cycle glowed and then it lapped up his magic, strengthening, locking out the malevolent Black that crawled beyond the glass.

He felt the vast well of the Weir, the doorway to the old magics, the blood and bone and sex magics. It was sweet as bubbling spring water, hot as coal. It filled Jack with the high that only the Black could give.

The creature outside snarled, and then whined. It circled the Mini once more and then with a final throaty growl, it retreated, great fog lamps of eyes fading into the mist.

The power of the moor leached away at a far slower pace—whatever had gotten it up in the first place, called the creature, was strong enough to bend the raw Black to its will, to command a thin space between the worlds to appear and release its denizens.

Jack let out his first breath in what he swore was hours, felt his lungs burn and his head lighten. Pete let go of him. Her face was drawn and she was panting a little, grim circles standing out around her eyes and veins crawling up her face.

The first time her Weir talent had touched his magic, she’d passed out cold on the floor of his flat. This was an improvement, if not a vast one.

He brushed the backs of his knuckles over her cheek, reflexively. Make sure she was still warm and still had blood beating in her. “You all right, luv?”

She took in a breath, let it out, hands gripping her knees, wrinkling the denim hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Fine. What in fucking hell was that thing?”

The mist blew onward, wind rocking the Mini, and behind the mist came the rain, in soft gray sheets that wafted across the moor like wraiths chasing witchfire across the lowland bogs near Seth’s farmhouse in County Cork.

“Nasty,” Jack murmured. “A hungry, nasty creature of the Black.” His blood was drying to sticky paste on the window, and his palm ached. Pushing magic through his own blood always left him cold, fever-achy, and drained like he’d passed out in a pub loo and woken with a crick in his neck.

It left too the faint craving for that floating, golden place where his talent met Pete’s Weir. He wished to drink down every last drop of Pete’s power, ride it forever.

One fix or another, it made no difference.

“That’s it?” Pete jiggled the key and the Mini started on the first crank, purring contentedly as always. “Usually you talk my ear off, Professor. Have you ever seen something like it before?”

“Once,” Jack said, as they turned back onto the paved road and crawled back through the thinning fog to the junction.

He could still hear the howl, echoing off the low stone wall and thatch roof of Seth McBride’s farmhouse. He’d climbed up on the roof and lit a fag, watching the enormous spectral creature pad on four feet across the fields, a purpose in its step so terrible and deliberate that even though the night was warm and soft, the height of an Irish summer, Jack had felt bone-chilled.

The creature had looked at him, great blazing eyes staring across the distance and searing him body and sight. Then it had walked on, over the rise and into the valley, where Seth’s closest neighbors resided.

In the morning an ambulance bumped over the dirt track and into the same valley, left again with cargo wrapped in a yellow hazmat bag.

You got yourself under stone when you heard a cu sith at bay. The black dog scented for blood, and the blood of the soul he’d come for was the only blood that would do.

It was the first time Jack felt real fear toward a creature of the Black. Demons could swallow you down into Hell and Fae could bargain your memories away for a song, but they had rules. They could be tricked. No one bargained with the cu sith, the hound of Death. No mortal could make it see reason, no matter how clever a bastard he might be. Jack didn’t like fear—fear was useless in the Black, the stealthy, laughing killer that made you freeze, forget your hexing words, and piss yourself before something bit your head off.

The cu sith was a subject of fear, of the inexorable human fate that conjured it. You couldn’t look into its lantern eyes and not see death staring back, unblinking and untenable.

“It’s a cu sith,” Jack said. “Lots of names besides the Irish—black dog, in English. Harbinger of death. Chases down souls and drags them through the Gates.”

They pulled into the circular drive of the Naughton house and Jack had the peculiar sensation again of falling into a vortex, the Black swirling and concentrating in this spot. After the cu sith, though, the state of Naughton’s psychic real estate seemed a minor concern.

“Any particular souls?” Pete climbed out and approached the sucking void, but Jack blinked and it was just a rotted-out, rundown estate again.

“Any it can get its jaws around,” he said. Pete bit her lip as if she wanted to press him, but she merely collected her keys and bag and went inside.

Jack stayed for a moment, reluctant to walk back into Naughton’s eldritch problem.

If the cu sith had only been hungry, it might have happened upon him by accident.

But he was a mage and this was the Black and there weren’t any accidents or fucking coincidences. The cu sith had come for him, had seen the brand of the demon hovering just out of view. Marked for bloody death, and a cu sith’s favorite snack. Jack had the cold comfort that the cu sith was stepping onto the demon’s turf and that the demon made short work of those who tried to play with its toys.

The only downside to the equation was Jack being the toy.

He watched the crow land on the finial of Naughton’s roof and caw, spreading its wings and widening its beak until it looked grotesque, as if it were trying to answer Pete’s query.

Any particular soul?

Only mine, Jack replied. Jack fucking Winter, dead man bloody walking.

Chapter Fifteen

Jack didn’t believe in dwelling on the inevitable. Try to change the future, and the future would just fuck you back, bent over and proper. Instead, he went into the Naughton house, went to his room, and checked his kit for graveyard dirt, coffin nails, herbs, and his scrying mirror. Matches, chalk, and copper wire. The essential tools of Jack Winter, exorcist. Much different than Jack Winter, wrung-out junkie, and much preferable. It gave him something to think about other than the demon’s bargain. He was good at exorcisms, sure of them and himself when he was performing them. If he could solve Naughton’s poxy problem and get Pete some cash in the doing, so much the better.

“Cleansing will take an hour or so,” he told Pete when she came to the door and propped herself against the jamb by her shoulder, watching him lay out his kit. “Got to find a setup spot where the poltergeist can’t fling any crockery at me head.”

“I’m going to look in Danny’s room in the meantime,” she said. “See if there’s anything Nick missed.”

“Might be a good spot,” Jack decided. Nick. Christ on a bike. Nothing but bloody Nick. “Close to but not too close to where he kicked off.” Setting up a cleansing on a suicide’s last breathing spot was just asking to have your lungs ripped through your nose by an angry spirit.

Jack gathered his tools and followed Pete to Danny’s room, a large back bedroom that looked out on the rotting, soggy gardens. The rain lashed down in earnest outside, and wind crawled under the slanted eaves of the Naughton house, moaning low and lost. Day outside darkened to the half-night of storms and dreams.

Jack wiggled his eyebrows at Pete when a bad gust rattled the windows. “How apropos. Always did like a bit of mood weather.”

Now, with the job, he could put the cu sith and the ghosts in Paddington out of his mind. At least for the few moments it took to cleanse Danny’s sad, wandering spirit.

The room Danny Naughton had chosen was worse than Jack’s own flat, if that were possible—the peeling plaster and warped floors, the chipped war-era furniture, all attached to a crumbling en suite equipped with the sort of plumbing American comedians cracked jokes about.

The bed was stripped bare, a stained mattress the only sign anyone had recently slept atop it. Drawers stood half open, clothes trailing out and across the floor like shed skin. Nancy Nick had been in a whirlwind hurry to get out of the place after Danny hung himself, Jack thought. That or he’d been keen to erase evidence of something before the emergency crew showed themselves. Jack’d cleaned up enough mates who’d overdosed to know the signs.

A massive mirror opposite the bed was covered with a sheet, and Pete moved to snatch it off. Jack stopped her with a hand up.

“Leave it. Mirrors could let something watch us that we don’t want.”

Pete frowned. “Do you think he knew? Danny? That this place was off?”

Jack kicked an empty plastic bottle, and it rolled to join three more fellows under the bed. “I think he liked his vodka cheap and by the quart.”

Pete examined the empty closet, jangling wire hangers the only residents. She was methodical, sifting through the detritus atop the dresser and each drawer with quick, professional fingers. Jack could imagine her in a pants suit and blue nitrile gloves, standing in this same room while white-suited crime scene technicians moved around her like explorers on a foreign moon.

Her hair would be pulled back in the low, efficient ballerina twist she’d worn during her time at the Met. Her warrant card and badge clipped to her belt along with handcuffs and pepper spray. A low heel, nothing flashy or trampy, just enough to elevate her petite frame to eye level with the male detectives of the squad.

“You’re staring at me,” Pete said. “Keep it up and I’m going to think I have something growing out of my forehead.”

She wriggled the bedside drawer. “This one’s locked.”

“Let me,” Jack said. He passed his fingers over the lock, and then pulled his ring of skeleton keys from his leather. They wore an enchantment, just the smallest charm to conduct a spell. Jack found them years ago at a bazaar in Leeds, mixed in with a box of mundane junk. He sometimes wondered about the mage who’d lost such a valuable tool, but not often.

Jack stuck the smallest key into the lock and whispered the words inscribed around the hilt and down the shaft of each skeleton key.

There was a click and the drawer popped open, over-flowing with small squares of paper.

“You should teach me that one,” Pete said.

“You wouldn’t want it,” Jack said. Pete took a handful of the slips and shuffled through them.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Lockpicking is transmutation. Transmutation is black magic,” Jack said. “You don’t want to have that on your first try, luv.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You do it. I’ve seen you crack open a lock a dozen times.”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “I’ve got an affinity for breaking and entering, luv. Has more to do with nicking things when I was a stupid kid than magic, truth be told.”

“Of course,” Pete snapped. “You have the ease of everything. I’d just pox it up, like some stupid kid. Not like bloody Jack Winter.” She crumpled the slips viciously.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Jack protested. Pete’s temper, like her freckles, was Irish and her glare could have cut glass. “You have an affinity, luv. You find things like no one I’ve ever seen.” Jack stepped back and let Pete examine the drawer. “Lost papers. Lost children.” He swallowed, his tongue dry in the closed-up room. “Lost souls.”

Pete’s anger faded, replaced by half of a small smile. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at,” she said at last. Jack nodded.

“It’s the truth. What have you found, then?”

“They’re betting slips,” Pete said. “From all over the country. Losing bets, mostly.”

“So Danny boy spent the time he wasn’t getting pissed and seeing ghosts betting on the ponies?” Jack said. As far as skeletons in a rich twat’s closet went, it was fairly mundane. Nobody was even wearing lady’s underthings. “Nicky might have mentioned that,” he murmured. “Seems quite a thing to omit.”

“He might not have known,” Pete said. “You’d be surprised what families can keep from one another. Met a bloke once, had a mistress living one flat block over from his wife and children. They used to pass each other in the street and nod hello. Did it for years.”

“Why’d you get involved, then?” Jack dropped to one knee and started setting up his supplies. Ritual was familiarity as much as magic. Setting out the tools of exorcism quieted the mind, readied it for the things an exorcist would see pulling in wayward ghosts.

“His wife puzzled it out and blew his head off with a skeet rifle,” Pete said. “Can’t say I blamed her overly much.”

“That’s a secret for you,” Jack said. “Like vicious little dogs. Never know when they’ll turn around and bite.”

Pete stopped her searching and cast her gaze on him. Her eyes could cut you like broken green glass if she meant to get the truth.

“Indeed,” was all she said.

Jack put out his scrying mirror, a black ceramic bowl, and matches for burning herbs, a nub of chalk for the circle. He sat down cross-legged even though he felt a groan in the hinges of his knees and fingered a piece of chalk, deciding what to draw into the varnish-bubbled floorboards. Spells and hexes ran wild in a mage’s blood, scrawled on car windows and dripped onto tube station floors, but exorcisms had to be orderly.

Seth had shown him the results when they weren’t orderly and measured. When an exorcist lost his cool.

Once Jack had finished vomiting his breakfast into Seth’s loo, he’d paid attention to the lessons, and he hadn’t let a ghost get over on him yet. Until Algernon Treadwell’s ghost. But that time, Pete had been there. She’d yanked him back from the Gates with her talent, and anchored him to the living world.

He owed Pete a favor, no question. And such a favor wasn’t lying about the demon’s bargain. Jack could deceive others with ease but lying to Pete always took on a hollow quality, made him feel rotted and twisted up inside like a car wreck.

“Find anything else? More rattling skeletons?” he asked as Pete poked about in the wardrobe, so that she wouldn’t take his silence for what it was and ask him, in the manner of nosy coppers, what he was thinking about.

“Aside from a baggie of extraordinarily mediocre pot and the slips? No.” Pete sat on the edge of the mattress. “Just the usual leftovers of life.”

“Pot?” Jack perked up. “Mediocre or not, at least the lad wasn’t completely boring.” He winked at Pete. “Give it here.”

“Not a chance.” Pete stuffed the dusty baggie into her jeans.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what to do with that stuff,” Jack teased her.

Pete rolled her eyes. “Please. I went to university.”

“Did you, now.” Jack found the black silk squares and cord at the bottom of his bag. “Smoking marijuana, getting up to mischief—if you tell me there was inexperienced but enthusiastic lesbian experimentation, I could die a happy man.”

One of Danny Naughton’s worn-out loafers narrowly missed his head. “You’re a sod,” Pete said, but she was chewing her lip to mask the smile.

Jack grabbed his baggies of exorcism herbs and patted the spot next to him on the floor. “Come here, luv. First things first.” Protect yourself before you even think about ghosts. An unguarded exorcism was akin to painting yourself with honey and insulting a grizzly bear’s mum.

Pete folded up into a seat across from him. “If this is anything perverted and unnatural . . .”

Jack folded the herbs into the silk—camphor, white pine, and garlic root drifting past his nose in waves—and tied them up with a red ribbon. “Perverted and unnatural comes later.” He winked. “This is just a conjure bag. Keeps the ghosts from doing . . . what Treadwell did.”

“This smells like a Pizza Express,” Pete complained.

“Lawrence taught it to me,” Jack said, preparing his own bag and slipping it around his neck. “His grandmother uses them back home to keep away the duppies.”

Pete softened at the mention of Lawrence, and put the cord over her head. “Jack, it’s not going to happen again. Treadwell. Going to the thin spaces. Any of it.” She grabbed his hand, unexpectedly. He’d been shivering since they saw the cu sith, colder than the air around him, but her touch warmed.

“I’m stronger now,” Pete whispered. “And so are you. It’ll never happen again, Jack. I won’t let it.”

Jack’s memory of the night in Highgate came back in snatches. Treadwell had tried to take his flesh, to cast out Jack’s spirit into the thin spaces, the mists outside the walls of the Underworld. A reverse exorcism, Jack supposed. Throw out the living git and move into his empty meat sack.

He hadn’t seen anything in the thin spaces besides his own life parading past in reverse, but it had been bad enough.

Jack knew what was waiting for him, when the clock wound back to zero.

And then Pete had come, and she’d pulled him back, and she’d banished Treadwell back through the Bleak Gates. Lain bleeding by the gravestones afterward, blood staining the white linen of her shirtfront, eyes clouded over with the pure white of the Weir.

His palms had gone cold. Blood was supposed to be warm, but when it soaked his fingers it was chill.

Jack had never had fear like that moment since. Not the kind that put claws into your throat and drained all the hardness and wickedness out of a person.

In the present, far from the bloody grass of Highgate Cemetery, Pete squeezed his fingers between hers, and Jack nearly told her everything. The only thing that stopped him was the thought that Pete wouldn’t understand she had to leave him, get as far away as possible once she’d heard the true story.

She’d stay and try to face the demon. And it would end just like it had the first time.

“I won’t let it,” Pete said again, and Jack heard the desperate strain creep into her voice.

“Pete . . .” He sighed, but there weren’t words for it. No words could explain that after he’d been walking dead for a decade, she breathed life back into him. No way to explain that Pete was in every heartbeat since the day they’d found each other again, in a filthy Bloomsbury hotel room.

She made him solid. Pete was the thing keeping the world real. And no one, no matter how hard-bitten and capable they thought they were, deserved to hear that. No woman deserved the responsibility of keeping Jack Winter in one piece.

Pete’s tongue darted out, licked her lips. “What, Jack? What’s the matter?” In the pale halfling light of the storm, her skin was translucent and her eyes drowning deep. When she looked at him like that, Jack’s fine thread of control snapped at last.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling her close by their connected hand, his other taking the back of her neck, wrapping his fingers in her hair.

It was nothing like the kiss in the marsh, not hesitant and not slow. Pete’s lips were warm, parted, and breathless. Jack could have drunk her, every drop, and still been parched.

Her hands, trapped as they were against his chest, pushed him back, and they broke apart as abruptly as they’d come together, Pete’s taste in Jack’s mouth, melting and dissolving. Nothing he could do to save it. The bitterness returned when Pete stood up, cheeks flushed to roses and breath ragged.

“I shouldn’t have done that.” She flexed her fingers, fists and not, over and over. “Shit. I really shouldn’t have.”

“Too right,” Jack murmured, though he wasn’t talking about Pete. His own heart was thrumming, speeding along like he’d just choked down a handful of uppers. The drug was power, and the fix was Pete. How he wanted to taste her again, throw her down on the dirty mattress, expose that snow-petal skin, make the blood rush to the surface as she took away his pain quick as any needle.

“It’s not . . . I mean, it wasn’t . . .” Pete slammed her fist against the wall. Plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling. “Bloody hell, Jack. I know there’s something you’re not saying. Until you trust me, I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

Quick as it had come upon him, the need subsided and left the same small dirty knot Jack felt in his chest when he stole from Lawrence, or nicked pensioners’ prescriptions, or woke up in a filthy squat with no memory of how he’d come to be there.

Before, the solution was simple—get high again and bollocks to guilt and shame.

Jack rolled the kinks out of his neck and picked up his chalk, short savage slashes on the polished floor drawing the beginnings of his circle. “Let’s just get this done and get back to the city, yeah?”

“Best, I suppose,” Pete said. “What should I do?”

“Just stay out of the way, if you please,” he snapped. Pete’s eyes narrowed and then she took a large, deliberate step back to the window that overlooked the fields beyond the back garden.

“You git,” she said softly.

Jack’s chalk snapped in half from the force of his stroke. “Never claimed I was Prince Charming, did I?”

Pete shook her head, but she stayed where she was, rain lashing the glass behind her. Jack focused on the circle blossoming under his chalk stub, the grit between his fingers and the soft scratch on the wood. It didn’t make him less of a wanker, but it helped dull the facts.

Ghosts were thin and slippery creatures, and a circle for an exorcism was about control more than power. Demons a sorcerer summoned needed power, drank it and craved it. Ghosts a mage tangled with were inevitably hungry and desperate, and they would rush the electric fence until it broke.

The exorcism circle required precision, focus, clarity. The trifecta of things Jack Winter didn’t have and had never held in any quantity.

You’re a selfish little knob, Jackie boy, Seth rasped. No thought and no control for anything, including yourself. Bloody good thing you’ve got charm to spare.

“You’re right,” he said. The magic words. Bollocks to I love you or You look beautiful. You’re right had gotten him off the sofa a hundred times over.

Pete sniffed. “Of course I am.”

“When we’ve done what we came here to do,” Jack said slowly, “I promise I’ll tell you why I’ve been . . .”

“A complete and utter cock-stain?” Pete supplied.

“That,” Jack said. “But it won’t matter if we’re out on the street for want of cash, and right now I need to concentrate. Can we put a hold on the couple drama, please, until I kick this poltergeist back beyond the beyond?”

He expected an argument or maybe a slap—Pete was the kind of woman who slapped rather than sulked—but instead she frowned a little, and then her shoulders dropped and her fists relaxed.

“You called us a couple.”

Jack felt one side of his mouth curl. “Did I? Must have inhaled some of that shite pot you found.”

The baggie smacked him in the side of the head. “Arse-hole.” Pete glared at him as he worked, the circle growing and expanding and building on itself, a framework intricate as any clock, ready to hold the power of cleansing spells.

Jack finished the circle, checked the symbols to make sure he hadn’t cocked up, and dumped incense into the bowl. He added a pinch of galangal to draw any lingering spirits to the smoke. His lighter clicked thrice before he called a flame and touched it to the pile of dry herbs.

The house held its breath, stayed silent and still. Nothing inside his head except echoes and nothing before his sight except darkness.

“Feels normal,” Pete said. “Just a dusty old house.”

“That’s bothersome,” Jack said. “Old place, shouldn’t be so quiet. Old homes, old bones. Echoes.”

“Not every place is a backdrop for Masters of Horror,” Pete said. “The Naughtons may have been happy.”

“Can you look at Sir Nicholas and honestly tell me you believe that sack of wank-leavings was ever happy, for a single moment in his life?” Jack slipped his scrying mirror from the velvet. He set it gently on the floor and pointed at his bag. “Hand me that white candle, would you?”

Pete found it and passed it across, keeping well clear of his chalk markings. Jack lit the white candle and placed it west, the direction of the dead. He set his mirror on the floor and sat, fingers on the glass.

Waited.

The Naughton house was curiously blank, like a dead station on the radio, not music, not static. Just silence, eerie in its stillness and breadth. Jack’s skin crawled all up and down his body.

“Daniel Naughton,” he said, putting a push behind the words. “Master of this house. Come to me, spirit. To the circle, you are called. Tar do mo fhuil beo.”

Pete shifted. “Where is he?”

“It’s not a summoning spell,” Jack said shortly. “Ghost summoning’s what put us here to start, luv, and I don’t fancy another Treadwell.”

“Still . . . if this is a haunting shouldn’t he be doing . . . hauntish things?” Pete glared at all the corners of the room, brow wrinkling like she could will Danny into being.

Jack took in a breath, tried again. “Daniel Naughton. Master of this house. Come, spirit. By the power of circle and crow, come.”

Rain fell, battered the windowpanes. Jack’s heart pumped blood against his ears, all of his extremities vibrating against the power of the spell. His nose detected the sticky-sweet of the incense and the tang of the galangal, and for one perfect moment, his sight and the Black were utterly silent and still.

Then the mirror in the corner shattered into ten thousand snowflakes of glass, scattering across the floor. A piece of glass kissed his cheek, a hot sting and a lick of blood.

“Bloody hell!” Pete shrieked, swiping at the scratches on her own face.

From all the corners of the room a low giggle burbled, scratchy as a needle across vinyl, mad and grating against Jack’s ears.

“Daniel Naughton,” Jack gritted. “By the power of iron and smoke. By the power of the binding words. Show yourself. And quit fucking about,” he added as the sounds of madness increased, the bulbs in the lamp overhead flickering madly.

Jack could see his own breath as the ghost crawled around the perimeter of the circle, drawn by the ritual but too strong to allow the markings to drag it down. Yet.

“Pete,” Jack said. “You try.”

She dabbed at her cheek, lined with thin deep scratches that leaked blood. “Me? I haven’t got a thing to say to the bastard ghost.”

“You’re a speaker for the magic,” Jack said. He felt his power struggling to grasp the ghost, like picking up handfuls of mud, cold and dead and futile.

The sounds rose in pitch, and more voices joined them. One by one the bulbs in the lamps blew, showering down sparks.

Jack could see his breath as he commanded Pete, “Call him! Before something gets in here and fucks me proper!”

“Daniel Naughton.” Pete drew her spine straight. Her eyes were wide and her body was strung with wire, but Jack gave her credit—her voice was sure and strong. “Master of this house. Come, spirit. Appear and be heard.”

Danny boy can’t play right now. The voice slithered up out of the Black, and on the wall opposite Jack he saw black handprints blossom, bleeding into the plaster as they fought their way toward the shattered mirror’s frame, finger marks and handprints in remembered blood, chromatic as an old horror film.

“Who speaks?” Jack demanded. This part he knew like lines in a well-rehearsed stage play. He’d done plenty of séances when he was skint, and a mage willing to commune with an unknown spirit, to risk possession and ghost sickness, was worth enough coin for a bed and a few weeks of the fix.

“Who calls from the arch of the Bleak Gates?” he said. “Tell me your name.”

You’ll know my name soon enough, crow-mage. The voice wasn’t the sibilant rasp of a fully formed ghost. It was small and high, playful in the way of a child who enjoyed killing small furry things.

In the pit of his stomach, Jack felt a twist. The twist of needing the fix and the twist of a guilty secret. If he were being honest, he’d call it fear, the same fear that came upon him in Highgate. The bastard fear that chewed him up. This voice, this crawling evil on his shoulder, wasn’t a simple poltergeist. There was something else in the house, and it had come out to play with him.

He stiffened his fingers on the mirror. He wouldn’t shake and he wouldn’t show it the fear, not an ounce. “How do you know that name?”

The giggling increased tenfold. Wouldn’t you like to know, grumpy old man.

“Tell me or I exorcise you on the spot,” Jack growled. “I don’t need a name and a lock of hair to do it, and you’re on me last nerve, cunt. Polite or otherwise.”

Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Jack.”

A spirit stood in front of the mirror, framed by jagged reflections of Jack and Pete’s faces. The spirit looked like a girl, in an old-style sailor dress, hair curled into painfully tight sausages against her scalp. Her eyes were black, bleeding hollows and she grinned at him. Laughed at him.

You should mind your tongue, before I take a notion to cut it out.

The walls were covered in the black miasma now, the air choked with malignant strands of the Black. It spread like water stains, and Jack smelled decay as the temperature dropped, the too-sweet stench of rotted orchids.

Such a funny man you are, the spirit hissed. So much fun to cut you open and see what clockwork makes you walk and talk.

She started for him, hollow eyes reaching down into the black howling depths, and Jack felt again the tug on his skull, the vortex of Black energy gathering and swelling until it threatened to burst the bonds of the circle.

“You are not welcome in this house,” Jack said. “Go. Last chance, little one.”

I belong here, the ghost snarled. We belong here. You’re the nasty trespassers.

All around the circle Jack saw more shapes, struggling to form, twisted spirit figures bathed in the same wicked-smelling magic as the little girl.

A man in a waistcoat with a dark slash across his neck that dripped blood. A woman in an apron with burns bubbling across her arms and face. A boy, tall and rangy-limbed with the first spurt of growth, legs twisted to unrecognizable sticks as he pulled himself across the floor on his hands with the sickening thud-thunk of flesh hitting wood.

Jack didn’t grace them with a look. Didn’t even grace them with a sharpening of breath. If you wanted a ghost to obey, it couldn’t see anything except your contempt and your magic. It sure as fuck couldn’t get its teeth into your roiling, rollicking panic.

Jack stared at his mirror. He said, “Pete. Salt.”

She grabbed the leather sack from his bag and tossed it to him. Jack took a handful and flung it in a careless circle. The ghosts drew back, all except the little girl.

You think that’s enough? she mewled. I’ll trim your wings, crow-mage, and chop off your feet to make my curse bags.

“Too much talk, luv,” Jack said. “And no substance.” He threw a fat handful of salt on the ghost and she melted away into nothing with a scream, like a Black-ridden garden slug.

Jack let go of the mirror, let himself slump and feel as if his strings had gotten cut. His muscles trembled and the echoes of the ghosts scraped nails through his skull. Vomit welled in the back of his throat but he breathed, fought the feeling down, and pulled his spine upright at last.

“I don’t think we’re dealing with just a suicide,” Pete said finally. Jack laughed. It came out high and hysterical.

“Do you think so, really?”

“All of them were murdered,” Pete said. “Or they died right quick and nasty.”

Jack extinguished the herbs and opened a window. The rain landed on his face, cold like old tears. It felt good after the touch of the dead. “No arguments. And four of them, plus Danny’s chain-knocker. Lots more than dear old Nancy let on.” He swiped the water from his skin, through his hair where it wilted his usual crop of spikes. “Inbred liar, just like I fancied him.”

“This isn’t Naughton’s fault,” Pete snapped. “This place is terribly haunted, just as he said. Spirits don’t just find a house and say ‘My, this looks lovely. And such a wonderful garden. I think I’ll stay and drive the owner to hang himself.’”

Thunder rolled from the moors, back and forth like the rumble of a cell door.

Jack shut the window and kept his hands on the sash until his fingers could open a lock or lift a wallet again. The shaking retreated—mostly.

“No,” he said. “They surely don’t.”

He left the circle, left the room with its echoes of ghosts and the cloying scent of decay. He wanted fresh air and to be outside the walls of the Naughton’s house.

Pete followed him, as he shoved the front door open and went to the Mini. He held out a hand to her. “Keys.”

She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re fixing to kill something.”

Jack unlocked the boot and pulled a crowbar from the mess of Pete’s tools, blankets, and a battered picnic hamper.

He turned back to the mansion. The deadness of the Black tickled the back of his mind—the Black didn’t simply fade and then flood. It was constant, a current through his brain straight to his core. It was a comfort and a torment, but always, it flowed.

Jack had felt the flow die once before, faced with a necromancer in the United States. The man fancied himself a warlock, one of the city masters of old, who bent themselves over for a demon. He’d eaten up the Black of Savannah, the city of moss and necropolises in Georgia, until he’d knotted the ghosts of the place so tightly that they tore him apart when Jack took his clay necromancy tablets and burned them in a cleansing fire of sage and cedar wood.

What had been the man’s name? Clemens, or Collins. A small man with small delusions who’d managed to grab himself a great gob of power. He’d given Jack a fight, but not a very large one. Not many men, professed wicked men or no, could stare the hungry dead in the eye for long.

Pete grabbed his arm as he re-entered the house. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing stalking around like bloody Jason Voorhees with that thing?”

Jack stomped back up the stairs, taking pleasure at the black marks his boots left on the wood and the plaster that sifted down around him from impact. “You said it yourself—too many ghosts. Things that hungry are territorial, and here there’s at least four all sharing nice as you please.” He kicked open the door to Danny’s bedroom. The doorknob left a fist-sized dent in the wall.

“Spirits like what I called up are bound to a place whether they fancy it or not,” Jack said, “and there’s only a few sure ways I know to do such a thing.”

Jack had dabbled in black magic, of course. Stuck a hand in the water, felt the currents and the pull of dark, old things, but he’d never immersed himself. Once you were under that water, it filled up your lungs and you drowned. Sorcerers were gits with a short life expectancy and shorter ambitions—they wanted magic. Or money. Or sex. But he’d never met a sorcerer worth the curses he spat. The Fiach Dubh made sure one of theirs could kick the legs out from under a sorcerer without a second thought.

Still, binding ghosts was the work of a soul shot through with desire, the desire for control or the belief that they could outrun Death. And if any sorcerer he’d met had held real knowledge and truth instead of a load of bollocks and a taste for black clothing and theatrical over statement, Jack would have swung down the path of sorcery in a heartbeat, and bugger Seth and all his lessons.

But you couldn’t outwit Death. It was the single constant of magic and mortality. A thread, a measuring, and a cut. Anyone who thought they were a special case was a bloody fool.

Jack swung the crowbar and bashed through the plaster of the wall behind the great mirror. Dust swirled up, a pale imitation of a spirit. Pete coughed and Jack joined her, the horsehair plaster and wooden slats crumbling under his assault.

“I hope there’s a point to this,” Pete choked out. “Because that’s vile dust.”

“Mixed it with arsenic and horsehair in the day,” Jack said. “Lovely stuff.” The wall was rotted through, and he cleared away debris, half hoping he’d find nothing behind the plaster. He’d never be so lucky, though.

Pete held her sleeve over her nose and mouth. “There’s something back there. In the joists.”

Jack stuck his hand into the blank space between the studs and closed around dusty glass, sealed with wax. He drew out the small blue bottle, and another, and another, four in all for the quadrant of spirits his exorcism attempt had attracted. “Yeah. There is,” he growled. The bottles rolled in his hand, clinking in discordant notes with each other.

He held one up to the light, watched the liquid inside slosh back and forth. “Corpse water,” he told Pete. “Used to wash the bodies before burial. Before formaldehyde and all of that shit.”

Pete plucked one of the bottles from his hand. “And this binds the ghosts?”

Jack set the bottles in a row amidst the broken glass and crouched before them. “It’s a very old trick. A nasty one. Keep the last thing you touched in this world close and keep you from the Underworld.”

Pete knelt next to him. “Did you ever do anything like this?”

Jack shook his head. “No. Never fancied keeping a ghost that close to me.” The thought of attracting a ghost on purpose was laughable. They’d found good old Jack Winter all on their own.

Jack had thought he was simply going crazy. Madness would have been a welcome reprieve from the chill, breathless feeling that overcame him when the dead reached out, tried to make him see, to make him their instrument to finish whatever scraps of life they’d left behind.

He’d found magic first in books and then as a failed experiment to make the voices and the sight stop. He hadn’t properly understood until he’d met Seth that the ability to speak with the dead marked him as a servant of the crow. Seth had taught him about things like corpse water, bound spirits, and how Jack Winter would never stop seeing—he could only hope to keep the dead at bay until the crow woman came for him, as well.

Seth wasn’t one to paint a rosy future where only ash existed.

He stayed silent, staring at the little bottles for long enough that Pete chewed on her lip. “Well, what now? We get rid of them, yeah?”

Jack stood, his boots crushing the mirror shards to sand. His immediate reaction was to flee the Naughton house and never come back, but that was the boy in him, the death-fear that sat on his shoulder and whispered in the demon’s voice. More than half of being a successful exorcist was simply not cutting and fleeing like your arse was on fire when the spook show started.

“These specters died here, on the grounds,” he said. “And whoever bound them was here, on the grounds.”

Pete looked relieved to be back in a domain she understood. “I can check with the local council about suspicious deaths, get a record of property ownership to see if this place always belonged to Naughton.”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “But this wasn’t recent, some spousal dust-up or a kiddie-fiddler hiding his shame. Going by the clothes alone, we’re looking at fifty or sixty years gone for the newest.”

“Except for Danny,” Pete reminded him. Jack looked at the mirror, ten fractured images staring back where glass clung to the frame.

“You’d think Naughton might have mentioned wholesale murder going on amongst the family heirlooms,” he grumbled.

“I’m sure he didn’t know,” Pete protested. Jack felt a surge of heat against his heart that she was in any way defending the ponce. He didn’t think it was irrational—when a woman like Pete stepped in for a waste of flesh like Nicholas Naughton, Jack thought his feelings were entirely fucking rational.

“I’ll drop you wherever it is you need to go,” Pete said, jingling the Mini’s keys.

“Town,” Jack said, turning his back on the reflections. Jealousy wouldn’t matter for much longer, if the demon had his way. Nothing that Jack currently held dear would. Demons thrived on stripping you down to the bone, when they bargained with you, stealing a life and leaving you hollowed out for Hell to fill back up.

Jack said to Pete, “I’ve got some more ghosts to talk with.”

Chapter Sixteen

St. Michael and All Angels crouched on a hillock staring down upon the hulk of Dartmoor Prison. The mica in the cell house stones gleamed in the sunlight after the rain, and Jack squinted and turned his back on the grim edifice. He’d heard that they’d faced the windows toward the moor deliberately, so that a prisoner could contemplate the great heather-choked nothingness and despair of ever leaving the place alive.

The church itself was disused, friendly plaques posted by the Anglicans explaining that services were now held in the next town due to budgetary concerns.

Jack wasn’t interested in churches. There hadn’t been a time, even a sliver of a second, when he’d truly believed a benevolent God would lift him out of Manchester, away from his mother, her pills, and the endless parade of dingy council flats and dingier boyfriends. What could an invisible man in the sky do against thrown bottles, drunken rages, fists and words and touches that did their level best to reduce him to a shadow?

Bloody nothing, that was what. And all the while the church charities that came to the Winter flat wearing their good hats and shoes, carrying their boxes of musty hand-me-downs, had told him, God helps those who help themselves. A grand fucking joke if he’d ever heard one.

The graveyard around the church was what drew Jack to the place. Overgrown with shaggy weeds, toothy gravestones poking every which way from the dirt, right up to the edges of the church wall, the place seethed with spirit energy. A grotesque of life, a mockery of the feeling he got in a crowded tube or shoving along Oxford Street at holiday time.

Teeming ghosts meant at least one chatty soul in the mix, and Jack drew out his spirit heart over a likely-looking grave. The name was nearly washed from the limestone from forty years of winter rain and year-round wind howling off the moor, but Jack brushed the moss away and spoke it loud.

“Jonathan Lovett.”

The spirit heart began to spin instantly. The ghosts in the churchyard, bound by the iron fence, were bored and restless and any hint of magic drew them in like flies on flayed skin.

Jonathan Lovett, plump and serious in life, appeared in a blue uniform and peaked cap that didn’t entirely hide a gaping black dent full of hair and brains in his ethereal skull. “Yes? You want something, boy?”

Jack grimaced. A bloody prison guard. Just his luck.

“Thought maybe you could help a bloke with a bit of knowledge,” Jack said. Lovett’s face crinkled.

“I’ll have you know I don’t care for Northerners. One of ’em stove my skull in, winter of 1966. A thrice-damned Geordie.”

“Can’t imagine why he’d want to go and do a thing like that,” Jack muttered. “Anyway, I hail from Manchester, so we’ve nothing to fuss about.”

Lovett huffed. His cheeks rippled, like he was made out of sail cloth. “I suppose. Get on with it.”

Jack let the chain of the spirit heart twine in his fingers, but he kept it between himself and the spirit. Even cordial ghosts could turn. The mage who thought they couldn’t was the mage who had a spirit reach into his chest and stop his heart like a cheap watch.

“You know a house, about twelve miles from here as the crow flies?” Jack asked Lovett. “The Naughton estate?”

Lovett shivered. “I certainly do, and I wouldn’t go up that lane if you paid me.”

“Oh?” Jack feigned disinterest. “And why is that?”

“When I was . . . how d’you say . . .” The spirit chewed on its lower lip.

“Alive?” Jack prompted.

Lovett twitched his cuffs in irritation. “Yes, well. All sorts of stories about the place back then. Sacrifices, naked dancing about bonfires, screams in the night. Old women around town said Aleister Crowley himself came and stayed for a summer, long way back. Said the crops died and the virgins of the village got themselves in a family way, down to the girl. Not to be crude, you understand.”

“I think me heart can take it,” Jack said. Aside from the tick of the spirit heart and the whistle of the wind, the only sound was his breath and the rustle and hiss of ghosts at the edges of his mind. They didn’t like Lovett getting all the attention. Jack had to finish with Lovett before their attention turned to demands.

“After . . .” Lovett shivered, tucking his several chins down into the collar of his uniform. “After I got into this state, I didn’t wander far from the churchyard. That Naughton place is cold, and the moors will blow you all to pieces, scatter you every which way. There’s a bad thing in those groomed gardens and fancy turrets, my son. Hungry, howling, and cold.”

“Cold?” Jack thought of the sucking quiet that surrounded the house—when it wasn’t trying to drown him in a wellspring of the Black. “Second time you’ve said cold. Cold how?”

“Ice cold and rotten,” Lovett murmured. “Spreading out black fingers, feeling in the dark for anything it can catch. All knotted up in the bones of that house, that cold. Such an awful feeling. Burns, it’s so cold.”

Jack’s skin prickled in sympathy, even though he was shielded from the wind by the wall of the church.

“Didn’t used to be this way.” Lovett sighed, his form flickering like dirt on celluloid. “But now there’s badness gathered there, and blackness. And the cold, always the cold.”

Jack stopped the spirit heart, metal running cool and dimpled under his fingertip. “Much obliged, Officer Lovett.”

“Wait!” Lovett wavered, losing cohesion as Jack’s spell spun to a stop. “My wife . . . she never found the necklace. My mother’s necklace. It was Valentine’s Day.” Lovett reached for Jack and Jack took a fast step, nearly tumbling over another headstone. “The day I died . . .”

“Sorry, mate.” Jack snapped the spirit heart shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Guess us Northerners are all the same.”

Lovett faded with a sigh, just another formless silver shade drifting among the tombstones and weeds, and Jack made his way back to the iron gate, which hung open at an angle that imitated a cheap paperback gothic.

“Shame on you, Jack Winter.” The voice was far too smug and solid to come from a spirit throat. “Leaving that poor soul with his noncey unfinished business.”

Jack turned sharply, saw nothing. “Leave off your games,” he snarled. “If you’ve got something to say, look at me face. If not, bloody well fuck off. I still have time.”

“Do you really?” the demon purred. He was there, in the slice of shadow cast by the gate, same suit but sporting white on black this time and the same black, black eyes. “Or do you only have as much time as I give you?”

Jack jerked his chin. “This how all you gits dress in the Pit? Or did you lose your way en route to the Clockwork Orange fancy-dress party?”

The demon narrowed its eyes. “You should take care how you’re speaking to me, Jack Winter. What’s that the little black book says? As above, so below? Show me fealty now and I could perhaps find some little time to spare you. Time with Miss Caldecott, just for instance.”

“You’re not screwing me with that particular dildo, not again,” Jack snapped. He turned to walk away, because he knew it would slag the demon off. Demons were creatures of ritual and respect to the point of compulsion. Jack tipped a salute over his shoulder. “Do give my regards to the other droogs.”

“You don’t want her?”

Jack stopped in the middle of the road that ran by the church, looked back. The demon smirked, rocking back and forth on the balls of its feet like it was waiting for the punchline of a joke. Jack sneered in return, contempt he didn’t feel except as a nervous boil in his guts.

“You know exactly what I want, you bastard.”

The demon smiled, tongue flicking out between its teeth. “I suppose that’s why we’re here, isn’t it, Jack?”

“It is,” Jack agreed. “But the difference between you and me is that me, I don’t care about my moth-eaten old soul. But I’ll be thrice-damned if I drag Pete down with me, so if you show your face again before it’s my time, I’ll exorcise you so far back into Hell you won’t even have a name.”

“Ohhh.” The demon shut its eyes and breathed deep, nostrils flaring, as if Jack’s belly-deep, sweaty fear was a heady perfume. “Jack, Jack. You shouldn’t threaten me so, old son. You know that I can visit you any time I like. Can do anything to you that might come into my little head.”

“Fuck. Off,” Jack said plainly, putting the rest of the road between the demon’s grin and his person.

The demon raised its hand as if to say farewell, and Jack felt the breathless, vertiginous sensation of magic, demon magic, too late as it gripped hold of his mind and dug its claws in deep.

Pete shivered in the night air, the rain causing the torches at the edge of the stones to spit and smoke. Her hands tugged against the iron restraints, small delicate fingers begging to return the gesture as Jack’s hands searched over her stomach, her ribs, coming to rest on her breasts. His finger pads stroked her nipples, smearing the blue paint in time with his thrusts.

This was raw magic, how it had always been, since the first druid and the first Weir long ago. Layers of power wrapped Jack, sweat grown cold against his skin. Pete circled her legs about his waist. Her heels dug into his thighs and her lips parted, panting wordless cries that urged him on to finish, to bind the spell their bodies wove, to take her magic as his own, by force. . . .

Jack raised his face from the pavement, feeling small pockmarks where grit had wormed its way into the flesh of his jaw. A car horn sounded from somewhere far off.

“Jack?” Pete’s voice drew closer and small hands felt his pulse, checked his pupils, and then sat him up.

“’M all right, luv,” he managed. “Just wanting tea, I expect. Low blood sugar.”

Pete favored him with her Don’t pull my bloody leg eye-brow.

“Alien abduction?” Jack offered. “Over eager and/or amorous sheep?”

“Don’t think we won’t discuss this when you’re not sprawled in the dirt,” Pete said, offering him a hand up.

After what the demon showed him, Jack knew better this time than to take it and expose himself to her talent. Even so, he swayed like he’d downed six pints when he managed to pull his shivery legs under him and stand. “But?” he said as Pete climbed back into the Mini.

“But I found something at the council that you need to hear about,” she said. “So loosen your corset and try not to swoon again, Mr. Darcy.”

Jack collapsed into the passenger seat with a grateful sound, rather like someone had punctured him and let the air out. “That’s hurtful, that is. I’m far better looking than Colin Firth.”

Pete steered them back toward the estate, even though it was the second-to-last place in England and the Black that Jack wanted to go at that moment. He kept that to himself. He had pride.

“I looked at old newspapers and provincial records, trying to find any deaths that might be our four,” Pete said. “And fended off a sweet old thing who kept trying to give me a biscuit and send me out on a date with her grandson.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack leaned his head back. “Any potential there?”

“He stuffs lamb sausages for a living, so no.”

Jack grinned with his eyes closed. He didn’t have to look at Pete to make her blush. “You know you could never give me up, luv. I’m in your blood like the Black.”

“The hell you are.” Pete snorted. “Like cheap vodka, maybe. Give me a fag and a coffee and I’m well rid of you.”

Jack opened his eyes then. Wanted to say, I could be. If you let me. But he’d just told off a demon, claimed he was the white knight who wanted for no strength or nobility.

It was a fucking nightmare, being the knight. No small wonder white witches always looked like they had poles up their bums.

Pete stayed quiet while they rode back to the estate, and she handed him a sheaf of photocopies when they were in the kitchen. She plugged in the ancient and calcified electric kettle and found two mugs, as well as a box of loose tea. “I’m thinking eating anything in this kitchen is asking for us to join the ranks of the gloopy dead upstairs,” she said.

Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.

“Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”

Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.

The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed Ten fine head of horse flesh.

The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.

June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.

Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”

Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”

“Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”

“What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.

Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache returned, swift and vicious as a Staffordshire terrier latching on to a postman.

“I can undo the necromancer’s bindings. But to get the ghosts out of the house, I have to find their gravesites and set them to rest and if I can’t find little Creepy June’s remains I can’t bloody do that, can I?”

Pete sighed. “Let me see if I can call in a favor with Ollie at the Met. They’ve got some toys for sniffing out cadavers that are quite good.”

“Cadavers that have been under a log for seventy years?” Jack said. Pete sighed.

“Must you shoot down everything I say?”

Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”

Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”

He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.

“Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”

“Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.

Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.

“Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”

“And the binding?” Pete said. “We need something to show Nicholas, otherwise we won’t get a bloody shilling out of him. It’ll be the Pooles on repeat.”

Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”

He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”

Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”

“Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”

“We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.

“If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.

Jack sobered. “I think after that cu sith showed its lumpy face we’d be safer together, luv.”

Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . . locked up in here. It’s not a good place to be.”

“You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”

She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”

“Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”

Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”

Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”

She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.

“Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.

“That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”

“You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.

“Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”

Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”

“Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”

“So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”

Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”

He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”

Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”

Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”

Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”

“It just bloody is!” Pete snapped. She shoved the box back at him. “I can’t do fancy tricks. I just have this awful, deep, dark hole inside of me and sometimes the monster inside it wakes up. I can’t control it, Jack. I’m not touched with magic like you. I’m stained with it and it doesn’t wash off.”

“Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”

“Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”

Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?

“Just try it?” he said finally, softening his frown and giving Pete one of his smiles. “For my humor, luv?”

When Jack had nothing else, he still had his snake’s charm, even if it made him feel like a low-down hustler to use it on Pete. He reverted back to the clever animal he’d been on the streets, fixing, with the false face and the predator’s smile.

And Pete finally nodded, and touched the music box again. “I feel stupid as anything.”

“Don’t think about that. Don’t trouble yourself over anything,” Jack said. “Just feel. Bend the lock to your will, and say the words. Tell it oscail.”

Pete’s lips pursed and she shut her eyes. In the curious void that the necromancer’s magic left around the house, her power sent out waves like a stone in a pool, like a bell in misty dawn air. It played across his skin like the light drag of fingers and Jack shivered.

After a moment, Pete blew out a breath. “It’s no good. I feel it but every time it gets away from me. Like trying to grab a greased cat.”

Jack set his hand next to hers. But not touching. Not when her magic was up. He didn’t fancy sending either of them into a coma. “Try it again. It takes doing but if you can open a lock, you can call flame and if you can call a flame you can . . . well . . . do practically anything.”

“Make someone spit toads?” Pete’s lips parted in a smile but her eyes stayed shut.

“I suppose, if that’s what gets you off,” Jack said.

“I’ve a few old schoolmates who deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.

Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”

Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”

“So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the Fiach Dubh. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.

“When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”

“I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”

“Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”

“Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”

“More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.

Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was beginning to set behind the moor, and soon enough it would be time to go to work. For now, all he could do was sit and think about Pete, his wicked, wild Pete, and the running hourglass of time ticking off his moments with her.

Chapter Seventeen

After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.

There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.

He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.

Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.

Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London, stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and crannies where he could see it coming. Not to mention there wasn’t a decent pub or curry stand for miles in any direction.

Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”

“Coffee and a pain au chocolat,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.

He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”

“No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.

“You take care of Pete, you hear?” Ollie’s Midlands brogue reminded Jack of a council worker who’d sneaked about in the dead of night and shagged his mother for a reduction in their electric bill. “Lord knows, she deserves better than you.”

Jack didn’t know if he disliked Ollie because the man was a prick or because he was right. Most likely both.

He pulled out the crinkled tourist map of the Dartmoor that Pete had procured on her visit to the archives and breathed onto his palm.

Witchfire blossomed, blue and spectral, from his skin, the gentle burn-off of extra magic against the night air. The flames drifted lazily into the twilit sky, the silvery glow lighting the map, just. Jack turned west. “Not much farther.”

“What are we looking for?” Pete asked. Wind swept down from the crest of the hill and lifted her hair like a flight of black feathers against her cheek. Rain followed it, in a soft ice-cold sheet, and Jack cursed as it dribbled into his eyes.

“A road.”

“Jack,” Pete grumbled, “there’s a bloody road running right in front of the bloody house. Fuck me.”

“Not that road.” Jack felt his feet sink into mud as his boots found another ditch, and then gained a roadbed that was little more than gravel and dirt turning rapidly to sludge.

Pete cursed and stumbled against him. Between the witchfire gently bathing them in a bubble of blue and the sideways rain, Jack was none too balanced, but he caught her. She didn’t weigh much, but she was undeniably present.

Pete looked up at him, skin translucent and eyes black pebbles in the light. “Thanks.”

“Just up here,” Jack said, as the moor whispered to him, licked at him with teasing tongues of power. It wanted him to join in the wild celebration, in the mud and the rain. The Black here teased him with memories of what the demon had made him see. Such a place as this was made for the oldest rituals of the Fiach Dubh. The deep magic, the old magic that had fallen to the wayside as the people and their power hid in cities, curled up behind iron walls, in front of tellys instead of bonfires, and no longer needed to spill blood into the good soil to procure crops, children, and rebirth.

“This feels wrong,” Pete said, dropping her voice so that it blended with the rain. Jack also felt the urge to be silent, creep like a mouse under floorboards. The wild magic around him rose, gathered, and in the back of his consciousness he sensed the prickle of warning that had kept him alive as long as he’d managed the trick thus far.

“We should go back,” Pete said, more forcefully. She’d stopped walking, her gaze roving beyond the confines of the witchfire, too much white about the pupil. Fear-white. Her hands clutched her jacket at the neck, knuckles tight.

Jack’s heart sped up, warned him that they should go back, that they weren’t wanted here, that whatever was hunting on the moor tonight was bigger, older, and hungrier than he.

Cold, Jonathan Lovett’s ghost hissed. Always the cold.

“Fuck off,” Jack growled under his breath. The day he turned tail was the day he might as well take a razor to his own wrists. It was the single quality that he could lay claim to as a mage—he might not be as strong or quick as a sorcerer but he’d fight. And the fight he gave would be dirty and mean.

The crossroad loomed out of the rain and the gathering mist, a road sign knocked onto its side in the dying grass the only signal of human occupation.

Jack knelt and opened his bag, pulling out a battered tin and unscrewing the top. He pulled out his flick-knife and scraped up a layer of damp dirt, another. He filled the tin halfway, more than enough for the unwinding spell, but proper crossroads dirt, touched by no human hand, was difficult to come by and he could sell it. When he was back in London. Home.

Pete shivered and she hadn’t stopped looking around, but she crouched and watched him. “MG said once that you bury things at the crossroads and a demon comes to grant you a wish.”

“They buried murderers at a crossroads,” Jack said. “Couldn’t have them in a consecrated cemetery. The demon story is a load of shit.” Like so much of what MG said. Just enough truth in the lie to be destructive.

“Demons exist, though,” Pete murmured. Jack slapped the lid back on the tin with more force than he needed.

“Yes, they do. And calling them is much, much simpler than burying some ruddy box in a crossroads at the dark of the moon.”

He shoved the dirt into his bag and folded up the knife. They were walking a dangerous edge, and he needed to steer Pete away. “Now if we’re done talking about it, may I suggest you don’t try to summon anything from the crossroad, and that we get the unwinding over with so we can find June Kemp?”

Pete sighed. “My sister said a lot of things. I’m not messing about with Hell, Jack. You don’t need to worry.”

He breathed in, out, tried to get the panicky tremors in his hands to stop. This deception deep under his skin was like detoxing all over again, shaking and stuttering and freezing to death even in a warm bed. “I’m not worried for you, luv. You’re much brighter than me and mine.”

Pete smiled, but even that couldn’t warm him. “I’m soaked. Let’s get back and get this nasty business done so we can go home.”

Jack’s witchfire faded as his concentration stuttered and they were swept up into the blue-black of moonless night and rain. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he watched and tried to keep the rain off, not succeeding. Mud worked its way into his boots, water between his toes, rain down the sides of his face.

Pete stumbled and cursed. “Hold on.” She felt in her pockets. “I’ve got my light here somewhere.”

Jack looked back to the crossroads as a thin beam of weak gold sprang to life from Pete’s penlight. In the witch-fire, which gave everything deceptive sharp edges, he might have missed a section of shadow peeling off its fellows and padding forward into the roadbed, but he didn’t miss it now.

“Fuck,” he hissed, as the wild magic rose to a roar in his head, drowning out even the rain.

“Jack?” Pete spun around, training her light on the spot where something moved.

“Pete,” he said softly. “You need to listen to me now.” His brain clicked over like he’d just snorted a straight hit of crystal—it was too far to the house, they’d never make it in time. Not both of them, at any rate. His bag just held herbs and the odd tin of dirt, not salt, not iron.

All he had was his flick-knife. He was fucked.

“It’s . . . it’s that thing from this afternoon,” Pete whispered as the cu sith advanced on them, inexorably, the limpid glow of its eyes like a lamprey floating through the soft sheets of mist and rain. “The black dog.”

“Caught our scent,” Jack muttered. The black dog drew back its lip to reveal blade-sized teeth. “Pete,” Jack said. “When I tell you, you have to run. Really run, this time. For your life, and don’t look back. Get inside the house. Salt the doors and windows—every entrance.”

Pete’s fingers clutched his arm as the black dog snarled, a sound that vibrated through the soles of Jack’s boots. “Why the fuck are you telling me all of this?”

“The same reason I taught you the lockpicking charm,” Jack said, prising her grip off his jacket. “Because I might not be there when you need it.”

Pete tried to grab for him again but he held her at arm’s length. He hated letting go of her, hated the expression of utter bone-deep betrayal on her face. But he had practice calling whatever outward expression he needed in the moment to his face, too much practice, and he kept his features calm. “Go, Pete. Salt the doors.”

She hesitated for an instant, and Jack pushed her. “I said run, you stupid bint!”

Pete ran, her footsteps crunching on gravel and fading as they joined the grass of the moor.

Jack faced the black dog.

The thing stopped a few meters from him, scenting the air. It chuffed, large head swinging from side to side.

“You’re too late,” Jack told it. “Too late for anything except scraps. She’s gone.”

He squared up his shoulders. This wasn’t what he’d imagined—a creature of the Black doing the demon’s work—but he supposed it was fitting as anything. “Get on with it, then. Lock your jaws on me and drag me down under the hill, if you would.”

The black dog cocked its head. It took another step and Jack’s body, the traitorous thing that craved a fix and Pete and life, took a jerky step back in return.

“You heard me!” Jack shouted, dropping his bag and spreading his arms. “What are you waiting for? Come the fuck on!”

He waited for the cold, deathless sensation of a Fae creature sinking its teeth into his magic, into his very soul, but it didn’t come. The dog just snarled, swiping at the air with a paw. Its claws looked like carving knives.

Jack held his ground, heart slamming fit to break his ribs. He stared into the black dog’s soft candle-flame eyes, and the black dog stared back. For a shred of eternity, Jack and the Fae creature shared the moor, the wild magic flowing around them, over and through Jack, filling him up with the desire to let go of his earthly burdens and step into the grasp of the cu sith, to give in to the inexorable pull of the Bleak Gates and admit that unless he found a way to get free of the demon, Death waited beyond every breath.

We don’t want the crow-mage, the black dog purred in the sibilant bell-voice endemic to the Fae.

“I’m what you’re getting,” Jack gritted, but desperation was birthing a frantic plan in his hindbrain. The black dog was hunting, not feeding. It wanted something.

Creatures that wanted something could be bargained with.

They could be tricked. The sure and swift fate of those marked by the cu sith might not be his, after all.

We seek the blood-born messenger of the old voices, the girl on the owl’s wing, the dog rumbled.

“Can’t help you there, mate,” Jack said. “Kiss me or kill me, but you’re not getting Pete.”

Crow-mage, in your arrogance do not make the mistake of thinking we will mind the Hellspawn’s bargain, the dog whispered, and Jack’s stomach went sideways.

“How do you know about that?”

We guard the doorways and the byways, the secret places and all who pass. We see much. We see you.

The dog let out a howl that could bleed eardrums, that rolled and echoed off the hillside.

“It’s not Pete you want,” Jack said, the edge of frantic making his voice ragged. “You have to leave, do you understand? Leave her alone.”

We are not seeking harm, crow-mage, the dog hissed. We are seeking to keep her from the taint of death, the mud and blood and carnage of the crow. We do not expect you to understand.

Jack felt his temper fray, a curious physical sensation akin to standing up too fast when you’d gone and tied a few pints on. His shield hex grew in front of him before he was even aware he’d whispered “Cosain,” and he felt witchfire curl across his exposed skin as his fury burned in the night.

Gone was the fear. Now he just wanted the thing in front of him to hurt, burn, and cower before his magic.

The black dog crouched, nails digging into the mud. You think I fear a flesh-and-blood thing such as you, crow-mage? Bitch of the war-hag?

“You’re one to talk about bitches,” Jack said. “And I think you’re scared enough to keep away from me, to skulk around in shadows like a shade. If you want to kill me, you’re welcome, mate. Here’s your open chance. Take your fucking try.”

The black dog reared, charged, and Jack braced himself for the psychic impact on his hex. It felt like nothing so much as sticking your head inside a great bloody bell and ringing the clapper, loud and riotously painful.

Something streaked into his vision from the left, a small form with a silver weapon. Pete swung the crowbar over her head and down, landing it squarely on the black dog’s spine.

“Go back where you sodding came from!” she shrieked.

The dog howled at the touch of cold iron, and stumbled. Jack spun out of the way, going on his arse in the mud and avoiding the thing’s claws by inches.

Cease! The dog howled. We mean to take you as our own, Weir. . . .

“Not bloody likely.” Pete clutched the crowbar, her breath rasping in and out like a saw, lips parted and body trembling. “Now I’m no mage and I’m no sure hand at this but if you come near me again I’ll send you back to the fucking Dark Ages, you mangy git, so take the chance and fuck off!”

She swung the crowbar again, catching the dog across the snout, and it yelped and cowered, eyes fading to a sick shade of orange.

That, it told Pete, was a grave error in judgment, girl.

“Wouldn’t be the first,” Pete said, her voice icy as the aura surrounding the black dog. “Won’t be the last.”

Jack gripped Pete’s arm, causing her to lower the crow-bar. The black dog skirted around the edges of his hex, wary now of the iron, its breath leaving great dragon puffs of white in the freezing air. “We need to go,” Jack told Pete. “We need to go now.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” Pete said. She dropped the crow-bar and backed up until she was pressed arm-to-arm with Jack, and as one they turned and ran.

Jack felt his lungs protest after the first few steps, a cutting sensation sawing against his breastbone. For the first time in his adult life, he wholeheartedly promised any higher power listening that if he survived past the next few minutes, he’d seriously consider cutting back on the fags.

They pelted down the hill, Jack snatching glances into the night behind him, watching for the black dog.

The baying started when the estate was just within reach, a few hundred meters across the muddy grass.

On the crest of the hill, Jack saw the black shadow ripple and re-form as the dog stopped to scent him, and then two other shadows join it, all of them raising their snouts to the hidden moon and offering their blood oath.

“What d’you know,” he panted. “I thought it was just being a pretentious git using the royal we.”

“Less talk!” Pete snapped. “More moving!”

The house lay so close, back door open, a slice of light spilling forth like the Heaven that the priests of his childhood assured Jack he’d never see.

Behind him, the black dogs bayed and he felt their breath, heard their pants as he ran through the rain, dug in his toes, and really pulled for the line. He wasn’t going to die in the mud, brought down like a rabbit.

Jack didn’t have much, but he was better than that.

Just when he thought he was going to drop, when black closed in at the edges of his eyes and his breath felt like a rusty bayonet ripping through his chest, he hit the door, tripped over the threshold, fell hard on the shoulder the poltergeist had bollocksed.

Pete stumbled after him, slamming the door and sliding the bolt home. Jack felt the wild magic following them, like a cloud of toxic smoke, and he pointed at the kitchen. “Salt!”

In the fetid kitchen, Jack snatched up the big tin he kept in his kit and Pete grabbed for the leather packets laced with thongs, jerking one around her neck and tossing one at Jack. He put it on as he flung a line of white crystal at every window and door he passed. With each application, the magic retreated a bit, loosening its bony grip on his heart. The baying of the hounds faded, and finally, as Jack salted the front door, all that remained was the gentle wash of the rain against the glass and discordant drip of water from a leak somewhere high above.

Jack realized his hands were shaking as he closed up the salt tin, and it took a few tries to shut it tight. He leaned his forehead against the front door and fumbled for a fag. His pack was flat and empty. “Shit,” he muttered. It never rained but it poured.

The shivering wasn’t just from coming so close to the cu sith and its mates a second time—he was soaked to the bone and the mansion was erratically heated at best.

“Pete?” he shouted, checking the salt lines one last time. Nothing from the Black was coming into the mansion. Nothing was getting out, either. Jack hoped the poltergeist of Danny Naughton would hold off from smacking him about until Jack’d managed to put a ration of whiskey and a cup of tea down his throat.

Until he stopped shaking, stopped betraying the bottomless fear that had crept up when he saw the black dog again. When it spoke to him. Fae creatures, other than the Unseelie, didn’t speak to humans, and they certainly didn’t threaten them like the black dog had.

“Kitchen, still,” Pete called. Jack put the salt away in his bag, and pushed his hands through his hair before he left the front hall. It was damp and frozen at the tips, and started him shivering again.

Pete had poured the last of a cloudy bottle of whiskey into two jam jars. She took hers, mounting the servants’ stairs. “I’m freezing. I’m going to get dried off.”

“Are you all right?” Jack said as she started up.

“Of course,” Pete said. “Shaken, a bit. But fine.”

She didn’t meet his eyes, and Jack took her gently by the wrists, drawing her close. “Why did you come back? I told you to stay inside. Stay behind the salt.”

Pete still wouldn’t look at him. “Jack . . .”

“Why, Petunia?” He gave her a small shake. “Do you realize what could have happened?”

“Of course I do!” Pete flared. “I’m not bloody stupid!” She shrugged him off with an angry slap. “I’m not fine, Jack, and I don’t know precisely what happened but I do know that you don’t get to give me orders. Not about things like this. I won’t let you fling yourself on a sword for me. No one gets the right to do that, you understand?”

Jack grabbed her again, pushing her back against the door, her skull and his knuckles rattling against the wood. “You need to understand, Pete. I won’t always be able to tell you what to do, so you have to learn, now. Before . . .”

He trailed off, letting go of her, scrubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes. The secrets crowded close in his brain and his skull throbbed like it was going to shatter.

“Before what?” Pete said, softly. She took his hands, pulled them down so she could look at his face. “Before what, Jack?”

It was her touch that undid his resolve, because it was gentle. Pete could be hard—Jack’d experienced it firsthand when she’d handcuffed him to her bedpost and forced him to detox from the heroin.

But she held his hands gently, and squeezed them. “Jack . . . just tell me.”

He looked at his boots. They were crusted with mud and salt, drying now, the battered leather stained. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t, Pete.”

Her touch went away. “If that’s how it is then we can’t be anything, Jack. We’ll do the job and we’ll collect the pay but if you can’t tell me something even when it’s eating you up, then this can’t go on.”

She mounted the stairs and she was out of sight before Jack found his voice. “I’m sorry, Petunia,” he murmured. “I am so, so sorry.”

Chapter Eighteen

He followed her after a time, found her stripped down to her undershirt and denim. Her muddy clothes were in a heap on the carpet and she’d lit a small fire in the smoky grate.

Jack held out a mouse-nibbled pink towel. “Peace offering?”

Pete sighed and then snatched it from him, using it on her face and hair. “Only because I’m like a drowned rat.”

“No,” Jack said, using his own manky towel to dry his hair. “You’re never that, luv.”

“Jack,” Pete sighed. “Do me a favor and don’t try and make this better by coming on to me. It’s just horrid and confusing at this point.”

He turned his back so Pete wouldn’t see him looking gut-punched, because what sort of a hard and wicked mage would he be if he got sour over a girl shooting him down?

“My apologies,” Jack said. “In a platonic and boring fashion, is it all right if I share your fire until me clothes dry out? I have a feeling if I fall asleep damp I’ll wake up with some horrid Victorian disease.”

“That’s fine,” Pete said. Her posture unwound when she realized he wasn’t going to push her.

How he wanted to push her. He wanted to touch cool milky skin with his fingers, feel hot breath on his neck, crush her with the desperate pressure he felt whenever she came within a meter of him.

Jack stripped off his shirt, the sodden thing landing with Pete’s clothes, and unlaced his boots, setting them on the hob. His tattoos licked up the firelight, and he was surprised when Pete sat next to him on the edge of the bed, blocking the dancing shadows.

“I trusted you, you know,” she said. “When we met again. I trusted you even though it nearly killed me.”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “Trust isn’t a commodity that has any value in this life, Pete.”

“But it does between us,” she said. “And the fact that you won’t trust me speaks buckets.”

He stayed silent. There was nothing to be said, and Jack valued silence, always had. When one grew up with screaming, crying, and soft whimpering day and night, silence was worth more than gold. And when there was nothing to be said that didn’t bring fury on your head, you shut the fuck up and you took your lumps.

“And the real pisser of it is that I like you,” Pete said. “If this were some bloke at work, or a regular, normal, dull-as-dishwater boyfriend, I wouldn’t care. I’d move on. But you, Jack. You had to make me take the plunge into this life with you, and now you won’t trust me and that’s just bloody shit of you, isn’t it?”

“Can’t,” Jack corrected her, voice barely more than a cigarette rasp. “Not won’t. Can’t trust you.”

Pete’s lip curled. “Well, Jack Winter, tell me: what can you do?”

Jack felt the weight of the secret, in his gut like a stone. He felt the demon’s secret as mercury on his tongue, cold and slippery and begging to be spilled.

Instead, he grabbed Pete by the nape of her neck and pressed their lips together.

She let out a small sound, her cheek going flush and warm against his as their bodies met, and her hands searched up his bare chest for his shoulders, finger pads digging in and holding fast.

As he slid his tongue between her lips, and they parted warm and willing for his advance, Jack thought to himself that he should stop. If he had any kind of decency left, he’d stop. He’d remove himself from temptation then and there, and never see Petunia Caldecott again.

But Jack knew the story of him and temptation, knew it by rote. The bright, hot, shining things always tempted him. And sooner or later, Jack always gave in.

Pete climbed into his lap, slim strong thighs pressing against his legs, breaking the kiss long enough to tangle her hand in his hair, dig the other into the flesh of his back, press her tits against his chest and her core against the swell of his cock, which grew harder, nearly painful, at even the hint of her touch.

Jack wasn’t naive enough to think he held any control over himself any longer. He put his lips against Pete’s neck, the deep-down reptile memory expecting the taste of sweat and sex and woad from his vision.

She tasted cool instead, a few raindrop still clinging to her skin, her pulse fluttering under his mouth as he frantically drank down as much of her as he could. It was his last chance, his only chance, and Jack breathed her in instead of air as his hands searched out the hem of her shirt and tugged.

Abruptly, Pete pulled back, away from him, and Jack came back to himself with a vertiginous jolt. He was too warm, the air was too cold, and his hard-on scraped painfully against his jeans.

Of course she’d stop him. This was Pete he was with, not some coke-addled Bastards groupie or blissed-out junkie girl fucking him for a bed in a squat.

Pete put her finger under his chin, drew his gaze up. Every touch sent waves of the Black echoing through him, their magics twining even now, as Jack struggled to keep himself from simply grabbing her and doing what every fiber in his body demanded.

“Jack, what are we doing?” she whispered. Her voice was rough and her breaths were heavy, in time with Jack’s own throbbing heart. Pete was spinning out as badly as he was, and for some reason the knowledge filled Jack with a giddy joy. He might as well have chased a handful of downers with a shot of espresso.

“I don’t know anymore,” he whispered back, pressing his forehead against hers, their lips close enough to share any secret.

Except one.

Pete swallowed hard, the enticing alabaster length of her throat flexing. “Fuck it,” she said roughly. “I don’t care.”

Jack stroked down her neck, over her clavicle, feeling the rise and fall of bone and skin beneath his fingers. His sight made everything silver tinged as the power gathered around him and made him fly, made him float, the only high he’d felt that was better than the needle could ever be.

Still, the small bit of him that whispered when he couldn’t sleep, when he saw things a man tried to bury with fags and booze and easy companionship, made him speak. “I do. I don’t want to be your mistake, Pete.”

“Too late for that,” she murmured. “I told you you’re in my blood, Jack.” She shut her eyes, and Jack saw silvery tears shimmer at the corners. “You’re in my blood like poison.”

Jack took her face in his hands, stroked the tears away with his thumbs. “Petunia, no. Don’t cry, luv.”

Pete opened her eyes, and her hands crawled around his neck, her body insistent against the bulge in his trousers, hip bone on hip bone. “You’re in my blood like poison,” she repeated, her voice scraped. “And I’d die because of you.”

Jack saw it in her eyes, that reckless feral desperation he recognized. He’d seen it on his own face, in cracked bathroom mirrors and shards of glass for cutting lines, too many times.

He grabbed Pete by her hair, pulled her mouth down to his, answered that he felt the same as she.

Pete moaned, and Jack slid his other hand down to her arse, lifting them both from the bed, swaying with her added weight and going down hard on his knees on the threadbare Persian carpet in front of the fire.

He let go of Pete, barely gave her time to catch her breath before he pushed her to the floor, nudging her knees open with his own, capturing the sweet expanse of skin just above her collarbone in his mouth.

“Jack,” Pete whimpered. “Jack, I need . . .”

“I know,” he said into her skin. “Me, too.” He moved, though he could have stayed in the spot forever, and fumbled with her undershirt, trapped as it was against the floor. Pete’s hands found his belt buckle, tugged it loose with far more skill. The pyramid studs made a dull thunk as they hit the floor and Jack muttered, “Fuck it.” He grabbed the neckline of Pete’s top and yanked. The lacy fabric gave way and Jack tossed it aside, pausing to appreciate the sight of Pete’s small but impressive tits encased only in a black lace bra. The blush of her nipples was visible in the fire-light, and Jack grinned.

“Petunia, you wicked, wicked girl.”

She reached behind her and unhooked the strap in response. “I told you, didn’t I.”

The bra joined the undershirt, and Jack dropped his mouth to Pete’s nipple, skating over her breast and taking the nub between his teeth. Pete cried out, her hips swaying under him, and Jack decided to hell with taking it slowly or softly. Slow and soft was for ponces and virgins. This was Pete. He was making it count.

He undid the fly of her jeans, helped her wriggle until they were halfway down her legs. Pete grabbed his hips, pulled him up to her lips, and kissed him deeply as her hands worked at his cock, stroking him length and breadth, teasing his balls with her fingertips, and grinning against his mouth.

“You like it, luv?” he murmured, rubbing circles against her tits with his thumbs, coaxing the soft high moans from her that made his cock leap in her hands.

“Yes.” Pete drew back and eyed him seriously. “I may faint from sheer awe.”

“You slag,” Jack growled, hooking his fingers in her panties and jerking them down to mid-thigh.

Pete let out a gasp as his hand found her, parting the thin stripe of black hair at her pelvis and sliding from her clit to her opening.

Jack felt wet against his fingers, enough of it to tell him that Pete wasn’t waiting. A rub of his thumb against her clit confirmed his theory, as she gasped, her back going rigid and pushing her bare tits against him.

“Fuck. Jack.”

He pushed into her with his fingers. She was still tight, soaking wet but not quite ready for him. Any other time, with any other woman, Jack would have been happy to give the assist, but he felt that if he didn’t put himself inside her in the next few seconds he was going to combust.

The tip of his cock had stroked the outer fold of her when she stopped him.

“My overnight bag,” Pete murmured thickly, palms against his hips. “The outside pocket.”

Jack braced himself on his arms, looked down at her. “You have got to be sodding kidding me, Petunia.”

“Jack,” she said, still panting. Mussed and flushed as she was, Jack knew she wouldn’t stop him if he simply fucked her with no further chatter.

“Now who doesn’t trust who?” he said peevishly as he snagged the bag and found the packet of rubbers where Pete said it would be.

“Not you,” Pete said, grabbing them from him. “Just all of the other women you’ve been fucking.”

She tore the packet and flung it to the side, and although her movements were frenetic they were still too slow. “Pete,” Jack said, the hoarse note in his voice entirely involuntary. “Do you want to drive a bloke into cardiac arrest?”

She took his cock and slid the rubber over it, biting her lip in such a fashion that Jack was nearly blinded by the urge to make her come, so she’d repeat the gesture while she screamed his name.

“There,” she said. “Was that so . . .”

The last word lost as Jack shoved her thighs akimbo and drove himself into her, Pete let out a gasp, half pain. Jack gave a groan of his own as she closed around him, and even though he’d resolved to make it last, to lose himself, he kept moving, hard and rhythmic as the drum line of a Bastards song.

Pete, for her part, arched her back upward, digging her nails into his back and meeting his thrusts. It was nothing like his vision—it was hot and frantic and present, and their magic wasn’t colliding but combining and nearly sending Jack off-balance as he edged closer to the finish.

He watched as Pete dropped one of her hands between her own legs while Jack drove himself faster as the telltale heat waves spread across his vision.

“Oh, Petunia,” he growled, the sight nearly sending him over then and there. “The things I’m going to do to you.”

“Do it, then,” Pete dared him, her cheeks flaming. “I want to come, Jack. Make me.”

Even though his base instinct snarled in protest, Jack pulled out of her, and Pete gave a cry of protest. He grabbed her hips and flipped her easily onto her stomach on the carpet—one of the benefits of fucking such a petite little thing.

His left hand dug into the firm, yielding flesh of her arse. His right reached down into her curls and found her clit as he re-entered her, his cock finding its deepest purchase yet.

Pete gave a small scream, shocked and hoarse, and Jack fingered her in time with his thrusts, her cries driving him harder and faster with every movement of his hips.

“Jack,” Pete whispered. “Jack . . . Jack . . . ”

She shuddered around him, the first hint of release, and her breath was little more than ragged sounds. “Stop,” Pete begged. “Stop it . . . I can’t . . .”

“No,” Jack said. “No, my sweet, I’m not done yet.”

But Pete was, and with the next stroke of his fingers she lost herself, her pussy closing around him and fluttering along the length of his cock as he moved.

“Oh, fuck!” Pete screamed out, trembling as another wave took her. Jack pushed her back down as she started to rise, gripping her shoulder and using it to lever himself for one last thrust.

Jack felt himself come, and it bent him over, gasping, as he spent himself and spent himself again inside Pete. When he’d finished he stayed still for a moment, the two of them crouched, his chest touching her back and his arms around her waist.

Pete moved at last, gently distancing herself and rolling over to pull up her panties. Jack sat back on his heels, his sight roiling and his heart speeding along at two hundred kilometers.

“Fuck me,” he said finally. “I’d murder a fag.”

Pete let out a shaky laugh. “Here.” She fished in her bag and handed him a new pack. Jack lit one for himself and offered one to Pete. She took it, her hand still shaking.

“That was . . .” She inhaled too deep, coughed, exhaled a cloud of blue. “I never know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything,” Jack said, unkinking his legs and stretching out in front of the fire. He shot Pete a grin. “I’m just getting started, luv.”

Pete’s lips parted, and her next draw on her fag was positively pornographic. “Are you?”

“Do I ever make a promise I don’t keep?” Jack asked her. For just a moment, the length of his burning cigarette, he allowed himself to believe he hadn’t made a royal mess of his good intentions, that Pete was still safe and that he could stay with her long as he pleased.

Then Pete flicked away her fag and moved into his lap again, and it didn’t matter any longer.

Chapter Nineteen

Thin gray morning light lay across his face when Jack woke, fingerlets of silver reaching through the moth-eaten drapes. His neck was stiff from passing out against the hard feather pillows, but the rest of him was warm and content to float between sleep and waking.

Slowly, so he wouldn’t wake her, Jack twisted to look at Pete. She slept curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek and her bare shoulder exposed where the coverlet slid off.

Jack pressed his lips to the spot and then levered himself out of bed, grabbing Pete’s pack of fags on his way to the loo. He lit one, took a piss, and looked out the uncurtained window at the morning. Mist hugged the grass and moisture filmed the windows of the Mini. He couldn’t see beyond the gates. The moor had vanished in the fog.

A reflection moved behind him in the window glass and Jack looked sharply at the bathroom door. Smoke stung his eyes as it drifted.

The demon grinned at him. “Caught you with your knickers down, Winter.” It held Jack’s denim on the crook of its index finger.

Jack tugged on the rusty chain of the ancient loo and flicked his fag butt into the water. “See something you like, mate?”

“Don’t play the happy sod with me, Winter,” the demon purred. “Your lady-love is asleep in the next room, after all.”

“If you touch her you’ll be dust before you draw your next breath,” Jack promised. The fear had fled with the light and left in its place a flat, hard resolve. The detritus of a retreating tide, sitting jagged in his chest.

Jack Winter wasn’t a man who got dragged to Hell and tortured. Not when the Black was trying to devour a friend, because friends were a rare enough commodity in his life as to be practically mythic.

“You think you stand a chance?” the demon asked, head tilting to catch the beam of morning on its waxy skin, like sunlight touching the face of a corpse with a torn shroud.

“I may not beat you,” Jack said, pulling a little magic to him from the bones of the house. “But I’ll fight you, tooth and nail.” The magic slithered and thrashed, unwilling to be caught. Jack grimaced. It might be a short fight. Many poor sods had the idea just before the end to fight, to cheat, to wriggle free of their bonds, but Jack wagered that none of them were quite as desperate as he. Desperation counted for much, when you dealt with demons.

“You’re a bit peevish, aren’t you?” the demon said. “Not even a proper hello, just moaning and whingeing as usual.” Its gaze drifted past Jack and landed on Pete’s form in the bed, her bare skin pale as the morning light and hair dark as ink spilled on it. The demon’s lips parted. “Was the little Weir slut not everything you hoped for?”

“I’m only going to say this once,” Jack told the demon. Posturing with citizens of Hell never ended well, but acting the hard man was natural camouflage when he was backed against a wall. “Your business is with me, not with Pete. Stop threatening her, and stop sending your fucking Fae emissaries to chase me all over creation. I’m not some bare-breasted twit in a B-grade horror movie, so don’t think you can frighten me with a few loose ghosties in a train station and some chatty cunt of a cu sith on the moor.”

The demon frowned. The expression was unnatural on its face, like watching a dead body try to frown once its muscles had seized in rigor mortis. “I have no idea what you’re babbling about.” It tossed the denim at him. “Put your pants on, mage. You and I have matters to discuss.”

The demon stared out the window, breath making wing-shaped patterns on the glass, while Jack dressed and splashed water on his face. Post-coital warm fuzzies lasted exactly as long as it took him to either realize his girl of the night was three pints south of shaggable or for a boyfriend to burst in.

Or demon, as the case might be.

“This place,” the demon murmured. “It’s a dead place. How do you stand it?”

“Not planning on being here much longer,” Jack said. “Doing what needs doing and going home to London.”

“Enjoying what time you have,” the demon murmured. “Most people would call you a bright lad.”

“Why are you here?” Jack leaned against the sink but he didn’t relax. “You appear to me in the loo to have an idle chat, or, let me guess—you’re lonely.”

“I wanted to speak with you, Jack,” the demon said. “Not as an adversary but as a mage. Can you do that? Put our dealing aside for the moment and listen?”

“You prepared to rescind your claim on me?” Jack asked. “Because I’m not putting anything aside, and if you’re not prepared to offer something, you can fuck right off back to the Pit.”

“Jack.” The demon sighed. It folded its arms, and back-lit against the glass it looked almost angelic, if angels had existed. “I could have left you to die that day when you called for me, and instead I reached out my hand. So I think maybe, just maybe, you should leave off your complaints and show me a bit of fucking respect.”

The air around the demon’s form flared with power, and Jack grabbed his forehead. The demon stretched and grew, a black shadow robed in smoke, the same black stone eyes boring into him like drill bits.

Jack shut his eyes. He let the old mantra pound through his skull. Not there. Not real. Not real. Not real.

The demon gave a soft chuckle. “Just remember who you’re dealing with, boy. Do you want to hear my proposition or not?”

Jack massaged at the throb in his temples, ineffectually. “All right, then,” he said. “Talk. Thrill me.”

“When we met,” the demon said, “I chose to bind a bargain with you because I sensed something of the demon in your nasty, soot-stained little soul.”

“I think your crystal ball needs adjusting, mate,” Jack said. “I’m just plain old flesh and blood.”

“Mostly blood, as I recall.” The demon chuckled. “Jack, in spite of your mouth and that sullen mien, I do like you, boy.”

Jack braced himself on the sink. “So you came to me for a lift, is that it?” The door was only two feet from him—if he needed, he could be through it and to his bag of tricks before the demon had time to worm its way past his shield hex.

“I know that even though you’ve got a weakness for flesh and a bigger one for drugs, you’re one of mine, boy.” The demon regurgitated the phrase with a sneer. “You’re a liar and a cheat and you think you’re far cleverer than you actually are—”

“And I am, really,” Jack interjected. “Quite clever. Cause of and solution to all me problems, cleverness.”

The demon gave him the blade edge of a smile. “If you were that clever, Jack, we wouldn’t be talking.”

“If you didn’t have the pressing need to hear your own voice, we wouldn’t be talking either,” Jack muttered.

“Don’t think I don’t know you would wriggle out of my bargain in a moment if you were clever enough,” the demon purred. “Or that I don’t know your little mind is whirring away even now, wondering, How can I flip and flop and squirm out of yet another tight spot?” It reached out and patted Jack on the cheek. “You can’t. And the fact that you haven’t openly tried any foolishness is the only reason you’re still taking up oxygen, Jackie boy. Believe me.”

Jack fished another fag out of the pack. He could only take so much inane chatter from Hell’s denizens before the craving for nicotine made him more than a shade rude. He sucked in smoke, relished the burn as something real to cling to while the demon’s smoky, musky aura swirled around him, poisoning the air breath by breath.

“I sense this is going somewhere,” he said. “In the slow and meandering manner of a London bus in rush hour. Care to cut the journey short? I’ve better things to do, like go downstairs and drop a tire iron on me foot.”

“There’s another,” the demon said. “Another man. Equally desperate when we met.” The demon bared its teeth. “But he fancies himself far, far cleverer than you, Jack Winter, in the most odious way possible.” The demon gave its tie an irritable stroke, smoothing out all its wrinkled edges and glaring at nothing.

Jack grinned around his fag. “I don’t believe it. This bloke found a way to cheat you?”

“That’s a bloody lie!” The demon flared, and the witch-fire in his eyes moved, slick and oily like ripples across a pool of runoff.

“All right, he didn’t.” Jack shrugged. “No skin off me that you’re in denial.”

“Oh, but it will be,” the demon said. “If I lose one of my charges, I will lose all of my charges, and the one who takes them from my cold, lifeless hand will not be a sweet forgiving old sot, like me.”

“I’d hate to see who’s unforgiving in the Pit,” Jack said. “If you’re the nice old granny of the lot.”

“Someone must go among the pagans of his hiding place,” the demon said. “Someone must return him to my patch to face his trial.”

“And this someone can’t be yourself . . . why, exactly?” Jack exhaled. He’d swear, if demons could look put out, his would at that moment.

“It’s not my land,” the demon said stiffly. “It’s not mine to trespass on.”

“Someone bigger ’n’ badder than you runs the patch!” Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough when he sucked smoke down the wrong pipe. He hacked for a moment, eyes watering. One of these days, he should really slap on some of those patches Pete was always buying and abandoning around his flat.

“You’re treading on thin fucking ice, mage,” the demon hissed. “Be mindful of the next step.”

Jack watched his fag ash for a moment. He could smart off all day long but it didn’t change the fact that he would have to give the demon an answer. A yes would bring him that much closer to the bosom of Hell. A no would only start his clock unwinding again, the number growing alarmingly low as the days passed.

“Maybe you should abandon this cryptic shite and tell me what you want,” he said finally. “Because I’m bored, mate. Dead bored, of your mysterious appearing and your riddles and your fucking Saturday Night Fever wardrobe.”

“What an apt choice of words,” said the demon. “You always had a facility, didn’t you?” It scratched its chin and then said, “Go to the pagan city and bring this man home. That’s all you have to do, Jack. He’s a mage, like you. He even plays a bit of music. You two lads should get on famously.”

Jack shifted his posture, only a little. Shoulders forward, arms folded. Every smallish boy turned skinny bloke learns how-to-make themselves look bigger, if they don’t want an arse-pounding or worse. Jack had the advantage of height on the demon, but he still felt its magic like a boot on his chest. Made him defensive, like the demon had come in and pissed all over his belongings. “And if I bring your little lost lamb to the fold? What then?”

“I suppose I’ll owe you a favor, won’t I?” The demon showed its teeth.

Jack returned the gesture. “Not good enough. I want your word. I want something tangible.”

“Oh?” The demon raised its eyebrows. “Conditions. And specifics. The little Weir’s taught you well, my son.”

“I’m not your fucking anything,” Jack snarled. “Let’s get that straight, at the outset. I’m not your rent boy, I’m your hired gun. Condition the first.”

The demon’s eyes barely flickered. “Accepted.”

“Condition the second,” Jack said. “I agree to fetch this arse-monkey for you, I get something for it. Something I choose.”

The demon’s posture stiffened and it licked its lips. It liked Jack setting the pace far less than simply invading his head with visions of Pete. Jack watched its face carefully, even though looking the thing in the eye hurt at the bottom of his forehead, the space where hippie gits said your third eye rode.

This was the litmus test. If the demon agreed, it needed him badly. And it wasn’t telling him the whole truth. If demons even understood the concept.

Finally, the demon exhaled, a sharp irritated huff of air. “All right. Agreed.” It sneered. “State your grand terms.”

Jack felt a cold snatch of excitement in his belly. The bloke who’d slagged off the demon must really be on to something, and the thing guarding his hideout must have sharp fucking teeth indeed. Two things in his favor. It might as well have been fucking Yuletide.

“If I find him and bring him back,” Jack said, stubbing out his fag on the edge of the sink. “I get your name.”

The demon hissed, sucking the breath back through its razory teeth. “Impossible.”

“Suits me,” Jack said, making for the door. “Have a fine time getting your naughty boy back home, and while you’re at it, go stick a cactus in your bum, you great tight-arsed poof.”

“Stop.” The demon’s voice rattled the mirror and the windowpanes, although it didn’t raise it.

Jack put his hand on the doorknob. Small acts of defiance let them know they weren’t in control, not fully. It sent them off, made them stupid and grasping. “Those are my terms,” he told the demon softly. “Take them or leave them.”

During the long moment of silence that followed the words, Jack watched a fat crow land on the windowsill and peer inside, at him, at the demon.

The crow preened and then stared at Jack, head cocked as if to ask him what exactly Jack thought he was on about.

“It seems I have no choice,” the demon said, at last. “And how you’ll chew over that bit of victory, Winter, I’m sure. Savor it. You won’t have another.”

“I don’t care about you,” Jack said, and had never meant anything more. “If there’s a chance for me to get your name, I’m taking that chance, mate.”

The demon felt inside its coat pocket and Jack felt the rotten snap of its magic. It produced a small blue folder, stamped with red.

“This will get you where you need to go,” it said. Jack took the ticket, inspected the destination. BANGKOK stared back at him, the ink blurred and off center on the line.

“I haven’t a passport,” he said.

“Explain to me how, exactly, that’s my problem?” the demon said mildly.

Jack spread his hands. “You want me to go fetch, you give me the ball, mate.”

The demon sighed and produced the square red wallet from another pocket. Jack found his likeness inside, and his vitals. The passport photo was even hideous and badly lit.

“Think of everything, do you?” he grumbled.

“You have a week, Winter,” the demon warned him. “The time of your bargain. After that . . . we go back to spinning the same old records until the lights go down.”

Jack turned his back, yanked open the door. “Yeah, don’t twist your knickers. I’ll find him.”

“His name is Miles Hornby,” said the demon. “He’s white, American, he’s twenty-seven years old, and he disappeared into Bangkok after he got the notion he could fuck me about.” The demon pressed its finger into Jack’s bare chest, over one of his eye tattoos. The ink lit up like a house fire under the demon’s touch. “He can’t. And neither can you, so be the good boy and bring our Miles home to me.”

With a puff of displaced air, the demon blinked out, leaving Jack alone, with his flesh crawling.

The crow took flight, cawing, and disappeared as well, swallowed by the mist.