Devil's Business

CHAPTER 1

When the checkout girl at Sainsbury’s tried to murder him with her bare hands, Jack Winter decided he should probably get out of London for a while.

He’d joined her queue with a fistful of crisp packets, chocolate, and a few wrapped sandwiches. The woman ahead of him wanted to argue about her change, and Jack simply wanted to get outside so he could smoke.

The Sainsbury’s on Fenchurch Street was crammed into a dingy granite shopfront above a 1960s brick box that tried to blend in with the older, more ornate row buildings around it and did a piss-poor job. The two front windows were planked over with plywood and caution tape, and Jack still detected the sandy crunch of glass fragments under his boots.

The area around Aldgate had gotten a hard hit from the rioting and general chaos of the weeks before, and the Sainsbury’s was one of the few shops within striking distance of his flat that was open late, or open at all.

He shoved his food onto the belt and felt in his pockets for spare coins, few and far between these days. Any residual jobs he might have had as an exorcist or clearing homes and workplaces of the dead, or the undead, dried up with the chaos. When you’re responsible for releasing an old god like Nergal from his prison to devour the psyches of London’s inhabitants, people tended to hold it against you.

Even if you’d promptly helped put him back again.

Jack supposed that was fair. If he were a hearth witch, ghost finder, or anyone else who knew what’d really happened to cause half of London to lose their minds and take to the streets, he’d tell him to fuck off right along with them.

The checkout girl ran his food listlessly over the scanner, staring directly at a buzzing light tube behind Jack’s head. His total popped up, and she just kept staring.

“’Scuse me, luv,” he said, thrusting his mess of lint-encrusted coins and a crumpled fiver at her. “I don’t mean to be that bloke, but I wasn’t planning on spending the entire night in your shop, edgy and deconstructed as it is in its present state.”

He expected a sneer, or possibly a muttered curse—she looked the type, riot of blue hair and chain necklaces under her uniform shirt, in sharp contrast to most of her colleagues, who ran more along the lines of hijabs and sensible shoes.

She turned her dull gaze from the light fixture to his face, and Jack took a step back. Her eyes were entirely blank, and filmed over with the first stages of decomposition.

“You did this,” she said, before she launched herself over the till at him.

His step back wasn’t enough, and her fingernails caught Jack’s neck. He fell into a display of tea mugs and digestive biscuits and slammed the floor hard. The checkout girl couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos, but she wrapped her hands around Jack’s throat with the strength and rage of a much larger and more predatory creature.

She was screaming, and black blood-infused spittle flecked her lips and chin and landed on his cheeks. She slammed Jack’s head into the vinyl floor in time with each cry.

It wasn’t the most alarming situation Jack had found himself in by a long shot, but it was worrisome enough. Deranged types were the worst—there was no reasoning with them, and usually the only way to end the scuffle was to knock them out or chop off their heads, depending on their level of deadness.

He gathered his legs under him and tried to buck the girl off, which worked in the sense that she flopped to one side but didn’t detach her fingers from his throat. Hitting her with a paralysis hex at this range would be dangerous—the thing could bounce back and smack him in the nose, and then he’d be easy pickings for this crazy twat.

Jack decided on the next best thing—he balled up his fist and punched the girl under the eye, glancing the blow off her cheekbone. He’d more intended to startle than hurt her, but she hissed as if his fist were made of hot iron, falling back on her arse and scuttling through the broken glass. She paid no more mind to her cuts than if she were crawling through a bed of custard cake.

Hauling himself to his feet, Jack got out two breaths before the checkout girl was back up. “You did this,” she repeated in a guttural, ragged snarl. Her movements weren’t her own, her next attempt to tackle him resulting in Jack sidestepping and the girl falling into the sandwich case, more glass slicing at her skinny arms as it shattered.

Not a zombie—she was breathing like a chainsaw, pulse throbbing in her neck, plus she wasn’t sewed up with red thread and encased in hoodoo magic. Not a demonic possession, either—his psychic sight wasn’t pinging off the charts trying to tell him something from Hell was wearing a nice punk girl’s skin.

Human magic then. That narrowed his options to fight back considerably.

Jack grabbed a mop from where the janitor had abandoned it and snapped the head off, holding the pointy end in front of him. “Stop,” he ordered when the girl came at him again. She was fading rapidly, blood flowing freely from her nose and mouth, black stuff oozing out of her tear ducts as her brain strained to contend with the violation of a compulsion spell.

Whoever was running the spell had to be nearby—and that was who interested Jack.

The girl ignored his ultimatum and sprang again. She was as agile as a shapeshifter with the accuracy of a predator. Whoever had hit her with the compulsion had juiced her with a few enhancements. No wonder her body was shutting down one system at a time. Soon her brain would pop and she’d be a blue-topped carrot on the floor of Sainsbury’s.

Jack gripped the mop handle like a nightstick and whipped it up and across her temple as she came. He’d gotten hit by enough members of London’s finest to know it was the quickest way to put someone down.

The girl dropped straight down, knees folding up. A thin line of blood ran across the tiles from her nose, and Jack swiped it onto his palm as he joined the exodus of panicking customers into the street.

He stopped, tried to catch more than a lungful of air, and cast his eyes up and down the pools of light illuminating Fenchurch Street. Most of the nearby cars were parked and empty, but a Peugeot sitting in a loading zone contained a passenger. Said passenger was trying to turn over the engine as the whoop of police klaxons closed in.

Jack darted into traffic, causing the driver of a small hybrid to swerve up onto the pavement. He ignored the cursing and horns, reaching the Peugeot just as the engine caught at last. There wasn’t time to be delicate and ask leading questions, so he drew back his elbow and drove it through the driver’s window.

The man inside started to shift into gear to run him over, but Jack grabbed him by the jaw with his blood-stained hand. “Shut it off.”

His victim squirmed and twisted, but he didn’t scream for help or shout for the police, like a normal person should when a crazed man covered in blood smashed into their car on a public street. Jack gave the driver a shake. “Shut it off or I’ll lay a blood hex on you that’ll have your eyeballs dripping out your arse.”

The man considered him for a few seconds more, and then took his hand off the gearshift and foot off the clutch. The car stalled out, but Jack didn’t relax his grip. “Why are you after me?”

The man glared, trying to swallow under Jack’s grip. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it. My soul is right with my gods.”

Jack wiped his hand clean on the man’s wrinkled yellow shirt and opened the door. “Get out.”

He did, and stood with his hands dangling at his sides, lip poking out like a sullen teenager. “What’s the matter, Winter? Never thought you’d be the type who needed to look someone in the eye before you topped them. Way I heard, you’re more the kind to creep up with a knife in the dark and put it in a bloke’s kidney.”

“What the fuck are you on about, me killing you?” Jack demanded. He had a reputation as a wanker, certainly—shifty, disreputable, untrustworthy. Americans would probably sum it all up with asshole. But going about East London doing people in wasn’t usually in his repertoire, even by reputation.

“You almost killed every single person this side of the Black and the other,” the man spat. “Wouldn’t think one more would matter.”

It all made sense then. “Ah, you’re miffed I almost let Nergal out to play,” Jack said. “Well, I’ve got news. You’re not the first and you’re miles from the last. You want a shot at me? Take a fucking number, mate, and join the queue.”

The driver drew himself up. Balding and barrel-chested, he wouldn’t have rated a second glance if Jack had passed him on the street, but the fury in his eyes belonged to a much younger, angrier man. “You don’t get to nearly destroy the world as we know it and laugh it off, Winter.” He jabbed his finger into Jack’s chest. “You’ve seen it now. We can find you anywhere, at any time, outside the Black or in it. The Stygian Brothers remember their enemies, and the mark will never fade.”

Jack felt the point between his eyes begin to throb. “Seriously, mate? You expect me to believe you’re a Stygian? Somebody’s creepy uncle, maybe, but that’s as far as I’d go.”

The Brother rolled up his sleeve in response, and exposed the many-lined tattoo all initiates received after they’d had what the Brotherhood called the Dream—the prophetic vision, brought on by hallucinogenic compounds rubbed into the skin—of the Stygian’s many-eyed, tentacled Nameless Ones that stood as an excuse for their adventures in flesh-crafting, self-mutilation rituals, and mind-control spells. A Stygian’s idea of a fun night out.

“Fuck,” Jack muttered. He’d been hoping the bloke was a lone outlier, a nutter who’d gotten a flowerpot smashed during the riots and taken it out on him at the expense of the poor checkout girl, but he was a Stygian, true enough.

“It’s not just us,” said the Brother. “It’s everyone, Winter.” He smirked, revealing a mouthful of missing molars. Jack couldn’t be sure if they were a result of ritual mutilation or NHS dentistry. “Our bounty will never expire. The sorcerers, the white magic cabals, even the fucking kitchen witches—they know what you did. It doesn’t matter that you decided you’d rather play hero at the eleventh hour. What’s to stop you from changing your mind, the next time that pea-sized brain of yours decides to go Hulk smash? You destroyed half the city, and you ripped holes in the Black, and nobody is safe while you’re about.” He stabbed Jack in the chest again. “I may not be able to toe up to you one on one, but soon enough somebody will. And that’ll solve the problem.”

The man got back into his car and slammed the door. More glass fell to the pavement while he revved the engine. “You want to stay breathing, stay out of London. You are no longer welcome.”

He pulled away into traffic, and Jack cut through an alley when he saw the blue lights of a police car swing around the corner.

The Stygian Brothers. And more, from the sound of it. Nobody could keep track of every sect and small-time group of magic users that proliferated around London like a particularly stubborn venereal disease, but if the Stygians had marked Jack as an undesirable, he was in enough trouble.

He kept to side streets until he came out at the Aldgate East tube station, and waited in the shadows for another ten minutes, until he was sure with both his eyes and his second sight that he hadn’t been followed. Nobody and nothing was watching him.

The cuts on his neck and all of the assorted bruises had begun to ache and sting while he’d been walking. Not to mention his fucking midnight snack was lying crushed on the floor of Sainsbury’s.

Nobody followed him on the tube, and nobody followed him down the Mile End Road to his flat, but Jack didn’t allow himself to relax until the door was shut and locked behind him. The flat was layered in hexes, cobwebs of spellcraft that floated in front of his sight and then flickered and disappeared. He’d shored them up nearly every other day since the riots had died down—not because he was afraid of looters or marauding packs of hoodie teenagers, but because of the exact thing that had just happened at the shop. It hadn’t done one fucking bit of good, though—they’d just waited until he’d left the safety of his flat, like properly smart vengeful psychopaths.

He couldn’t stay shut up in Whitechapel for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t risk another incident like tonight. If the Stygian Brothers had made a move on him in public, outside the Black, then it’d only be a matter of time before somebody with their shit together and their brain clear of low-grade peyote finished the job. It could be necromancers (although the ones who’d tried to wake up Nergal were mostly little bits of flesh and bone in a London mortuary) or it could be the light side—druids or Wiccans or just a pack of particularly slagged-off hippies. And how humiliating would that be?

“Jack?” Pete Caldecott appeared in the hallway from the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. They fell on his empty hands. “Where’s the food?”

“About that,” Jack said. “Anyone been by while I was out? Anything unusual?”

Pete’s gazed closed up and became calculating. “What did you do now?”

“Me? I’ll have you know I’m the victim here,” Jack muttered. “For once.” He got his bottle of Jameson from the old record cabinet that served as a liquor stash, because all at once that seemed like an excellent idea.

“You’re bleeding.” Pete came into the light and tilted his head with a finger, examining the scratches on his neck.

“Not the first time, likely not the last,” Jack said. He tried to keep it lighthearted, but Pete just sighed and went into the kitchen to fetch her first-aid kit. She was silent while she disinfected the scratches and put a large plaster over the spot on his neck. She was silent entirely too much since they’d put Nergal back where he belonged.

“What’s my diagnosis, doctor?” he tried.

Pete shut the metal lid of the kit. “You’re an idiot, but you’ll live.”

She got up and went back into the bedroom without another word. Jack spread out on the sofa, after swallowing a handful of aspirin with his whiskey. It was easier than going to bed and listening to more of the silence.

It hadn’t happened all at once—after the rioting had mostly died down and it was safe for Jack to leave the hospital, where he’d checked himself into the psychiatric unit to set up a psychic buffer between himself and various types who wanted inside his head—things had been rather normal.

No, they hadn’t. That was a comfortable lie, as was the fact that he’d only committed himself to use the psychic static of the other nutters in the place to block out both Nicholas Naughton, necromancer and cunt of the first order, and other, darker, less human things that wanted him. Wanted him to awaken Nergal, wanted him to order the oldest of the old gods to wash the world clean, and leave it slick and bloody for her advance.

Jack mashed his thumbs into the center of his forehead, massaging the point between his eyes. He hadn’t seen her, or dreamed of her, since he’d refused to do what she asked. But it was only a matter of time—she couldn’t die, and she wouldn’t be put off forever. She was the maiden of death, the bride of war, and the hag of the ashes and dust that came after. The Morrigan had marked him when he was only a teenager, and eventually, she’d get her pound of flesh. The fact he’d disobeyed her and her mad plan to cleanse the Black of all but her faithful would only make it a far longer and more painful carving.

But he had more important things to worry about than some bitch and her army of the dead, so he drained the whiskey and shut the light off. Pete had gone quiet by degrees, first about the baby and then about everything else. She was only a few months along, but Jack could already see the endgame. She was realizing that despite her own talents, she couldn’t raise a kid in their lifestyle. Would be mad to try.

Jack agreed—nobody deserved to grow up in the sort of life he’d found himself in. Pete was being practical, letting him down by degrees, slowly cutting off circulation to each part of them rather than throwing crockery in a spectacular breakup. She’d move out in another month or two, go live with her sister, and that would be that. Weekends, alternate bank holidays, and carefully e-mailed pictures to mark each waypoint of the spawn’s growing up. If he was lucky. If he wasn’t, he’d be exactly like his own father—ignorant and happy to stay that way.

Maybe happy wasn’t the word. But he wasn’t fit to be a father, and any daydreams of trying were just his conscience poking him. He didn’t even have to be an actual deadbeat—once Pete made up her mind, that was that. She was immovable as a standing stone. The kid would be better off without him. The world would be, really. But until Pete actually threw him out, he’d be damned if some Universal horror mob bent on revenge was going to do anything to her or the kid to get at him.

The Stygian Brother had been right about that much—he needed out of London. And he needed to convince Pete to come with him.

CHAPTER 2

“I don’t understand,” Pete said at breakfast. She insisted on cooking for them unless she was vomiting so much from morning sickness she couldn’t lift her head off the loo tiles. It was as if she was insistent that Jack would find no fault with her, when she finally broke it off officially, and for good. He wouldn’t have anything to recriminate with. Not that he would have, even if she’d lain about all day shouting at him to bring her chocolate. He was the one at fault here, not Pete.

“Not much to understand, is there?” Jack said. “Pretty much everyone in the greater London area who can sling a spell is clamoring for me blood, and we need to lie low until they find something else shiny to hold their attention.”

“No,” Pete said, “I mean I don’t understand why I have to go.”

“Because like it or not, they think you and I are in this together,” Jack said. “A matched pair.”

Pete’s fingers twitched as she picked up their plates, but that was all she betrayed. Jack hopped up from his chair. “Let me. Need a smoke anyway.”

He carried the plates into the kitchen, dumping them in the sink with soap and hot water. He slid open the window and blew his smoke in that general direction.

“I don’t want to do it,” Pete said, so quietly he nearly didn’t hear her over traffic. She stood at the arched entryway to the kitchen, hands folded protectively over her stomach. “It’d be one thing if it was just me, but the little one isn’t paying for your mistakes, Jack. I think this is enough.”

When he thought about Pete chucking him, Jack felt nothing—just the same numbness that cropped up when most people decided they’d had enough of him. Non-feeling. It didn’t matter one way or the other, because it was always going to be this way. But now, he felt something, and it wasn’t a feeling he enjoyed. It was all the things he didn’t let in—anger, because Pete, in his eyes, wouldn’t even give him a chance, and disgust because she was right not to, and the big nasty monster, guilt, because as usual Pete was right. She’d been paying for his mistakes, in one manner or another, for over a decade. He’d already decided to let her go. These feelings cropping up like weeds would die back eventually. He was just doing the decent thing, that was all—keeping an innocent kid and its mother safe.

“Please,” he said, flicking the fag out the window and coming to Pete. She flinched when he took her by the shoulders, but didn’t let herself lean away. Pete was tough. Tougher, in a lot of ways, than he’d ever be. “Look, Pete, I know that you didn’t want this, and that it was a stupid thing for both of us to get into, but it happened. You can think whatever you want of me and when this blows over you can light out and never look back, but until then I’m not letting anything happen to you. Or the kid. It’s my mess, and for once I’m cleaning it the fuck up.” He realized he was squeezing her hard enough to feel bone. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Pete stared at the stained vinyl, pocked with clusters of yellow flowers and cigarette burns, rather than look at him. “Are we really in danger?” she said.

“Believe it,” Jack said. “Fucking Stygian Brothers almost took me head off last night, and they’re far from the most organized outfit I’ve slagged off.”

Pete tightened her jaw, and then pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket. “I was planning to do this on my own,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you until my flight had lifted off from Heathrow.”

Jack took the scrap, tried to summon the non-feeling again and not let Pete’s words sting him. The paper bore Pete’s neat, round Catholic school handwriting. Benjamin Mayhew Investigations, Venice Beach Blvd., Los Angeles. An American phone number was scribbled beneath.

“Who’s this?” he said.

“Used to be a cop in Los Angeles,” Pete said. “We met at a seminar a while back. He’s gone private, now, and I guess he was always in the life, because he heard about me from someone around a month ago and e-mailed our business address. Said he had a problem only I could help with.”

“Wait.” Jack waved the scrap, not believing that Pete of all people could fall for such shit. “You were going to fuck off without telling anyone, never mind me, and wander into an obvious trap?” He felt a throb start at his temples that could be from the bottle he’d killed last night, or from pure irritation.

Pete put her hands on her hips. “I’m quite capable of getting into and out of my own trouble, Jack. I managed it nicely before I met you, and after, too. Besides, Mayhew is an all-right bloke. American, but, you know. Not one of those types.”

“Even his name makes him sound like a git,” Jack said. “And what’s this problem only you can help him with?”

Pete snatched the paper back. “First of all, you’re far more of a git than Mayhew ever was, and I don’t know. I figured I’d ask when I got to Los Angeles.”

“No,” Jack said. “Over my dead, cold, and possibly violated corpse. This is just more shite drummed up by somebody who wants to explain to me the error of my ways, and use your dead body to do it.”

“You’re not in charge of me, Jack,” Pete said. “Just because you managed to reproduce with me doesn’t automatically make you smarter. So fuck you, stay here and play your little revenge games with your ridiculous friends. I’m leaving.”

Well, he’d handled that brilliantly. Pete wriggled free of him and slammed into the closet, emerging with her battered Samsonite.

“Pete…” he started, but she held up a finger.

“It won’t work, Jack. I tried, but it won’t. I’m not pointing blame—this is as much me as it is you, but I will say that if you didn’t have the pathological need to be the hero, and to protect me when I don’t fucking need it, none of this would’ve ever happened.”

He tried to keep his mouth shut, but self-control had never been one of his strong points. Hell, if he was honest, it’d never even been a point at all. “Your getting knocked up has very little to do with me being a hero,” he snapped. Pete stopped short, boring holes in him with her glare.

“You’re right about that,” she said. “But I wasn’t talking about that, was I? The fact that you happen to be my sperm donor has very little to do with what’s happening now.”

He picked up the whiskey bottle and threw it. Not at Pete, because he didn’t want to hurt her. He just needed to break something, to hear the crash and feel the glass fragments bite into the soles of his boots when he crossed the room to the front door. Break something or break himself, and he couldn’t allow himself that luxury right now.

At least it was out in the open. She’d never even considered that they’d do it together. And that was fine by him. Like he needed a brat on top of all the other problems in his life. Maybe if he said that line enough times he’d start to believe it.

Jack almost missed the BMW idling across from his flat. His pulse was throbbing, and his lungs were constricted down to fist size. She wanted a fucking absent father, he’d show her one. He could be on a boat to Ireland in forty minutes, cadge a passport from a bloke he knew in Belfast, and from there make his way anywhere he pleased. Sooner or later someone would come looking for him via Pete, and she’d wish she’d listened to him then, wouldn’t she? But you couldn’t tell Pete anything, and Jack almost wished he’d be there to see her face when necromancers showed up on the front stoop.

He tried to let the anger flow, and the lies with it. Hoped they would eventually be true too, because the alternative was that he was alone again, and it was remarkable how quickly that had become the worst fate imaginable.

“Mr. Winter.” The car window rolled down and with it, out rolled black magic, rendolent and velvety against his senses. Jack nearly flipped the occupant of the car the bird and kept walking, but then he saw the face, craggy and nearly the same color as stone, topped by a wide-brimmed hat.

“Oh, fuck me,” he said.

Ethan Morningstar egressed his poncey ride with surprising grace for a man of his size and bulk, and gave Jack a smile that held all the warmth of a tombstone in January. “You’re more eloquent than usual, Jack. Been taking your vitamins? Men of your age need to start considering these things, you know.”

Jack set his feet and let a tendril of power uncurl inside his head. Morningstar was a dangerous, unpredictable snake of a man, and it wouldn’t surprise Jack if he tried to open him like a Christmas pudding just for the fun of it. “Get the hell out of my patch, Ethan,” he said. “We don’t want what you’re selling.”

“I’m here informally,” Morningstar said. “A friendly gesture, if you will.”

That made Jack laugh. The Order of the Malleus was never friendly, not to people like him. With mages, they tended more to thumbscrews and waterboards. “Whatever you say, Ethan. I’m still telling you to fuck off.”

Morningstar leaned against the fender of his motor, which creaked and shifted under his weight. He might look like somebody’s surly headmaster, but every bit of his bulk was muscle—muscle he knew how to use. Jack had to admit, so far the witchfinder was being remarkably civil. That in and of itself bothered him.

“I was hoping after you failed to set Nergal on the waking world like a hungry dog, somebody would do my job for me,” Morningstar said. “One of the other mud-grazers would creep up on you in the dark and put a knife in your ribs, and that’d be the end of it. But like the man says, we can’t always get what we want.”

“I’ve got another one,” Jack said. “‘Oh bondage, up yours.’”

Ethan sucked his teeth, then folded his arms. “This can’t go on, Jack.”

Here it was. The nightstick, the Taser, the needle full of dream-time. Waking up in a dank basement tied to a chair whose wood was already soaked with other men’s blood. Tortured and prodded until the Malleus had extracted all of his useful information, then fed into a crematory furnace by a discreet and sympathetic mortuary worker. Fascists, magical or not, didn’t employ a lot of variety.

Jack braced himself. “I’m not going to go quietly.”

“I don’t care how you go,” Ethan said. “Just that you do. Get out of my sight, get out of my city, and don’t come back.” He stood up and moved into Jack’s space, so that they could’ve kissed if Jack had been remotely interested. “How did you put it? If I see you on my patch again, I will kill you. You’re spreading chaos, making the other spell-dabblers nervous, and somebody innocent is going to be hurt. I won’t allow that.”

Jack felt his heartbeat peak and recede, like a tide smashing on a rock. “That’s it?”

“What did you think I was going to do, stuff you in the boot and take you away to a secret prison?” Morningstar chuffed. “Not hardly. Maybe I’m soft in my old age. Maybe I just remember that your little girlfriend did give us Nergal’s reliquary when it was all said and done. Maybe I think you’re not worth the time it’ll take to clean the blood off my boots.” Morningstar opened his door and got back into his car. “You’ll just have to wonder, won’t you?”

He started to pull away from the curb, then tapped the brakes. “Speaking of Petunia, take her with you. The same rules apply, and she’s a lot more dangerous than you. She comes back here and sows more trouble for London, the Malleus will be forced to take steps.” He tipped his head, grinning wide for the first time, then gunned the engine. The BMW roared away into Mile End traffic like a black shark, but not half as beastlike as the driver.

Pete was standing on the stoop of their flat, watching him with folded arms while he crossed the road again. “Was that who I think it is?”

“None other,” Jack said. “And it looks like I’m coming with you, whether you want it or not.” He held up a hand when Pete started to object. “Look, I’ll stay out of this thing with your friend Mayhew. But I can’t stay in London and I’d just as soon go someplace that’s not pissing down rain.” Los Angeles was as good a place as any. He could look up some old mates from his band days, have a laugh, and get away from London and all of the memories it implied. And if he was closer to Pete until she had the kid, so much the better. She’d made her feelings clear, but Jack wasn’t prepared to be that much of a shit father. Letting your kid and its mother get murdered because you two had a spat wasn’t parent of the year material in anyone’s book.

Pete flapped her hands. “Fine. But it’s not a bloody comic book team-up. You’ll let me conduct my business with Mayhew and you’ll stop dragging me into this ridiculous feud of yours.”

“Fine,” Jack agreed. “Consider me a ghost, luv. You won’t even know I exist.” Pete went inside without another word.

It took Jack remarkably little time to pack up what he needed from the flat. He’d have thought that after nearly twenty years, he’d have more essentials. But the books, aside from a few rare grimoires that he could hock for cash if he needed it, the vinyl, the odds and ends that one collected after twenty years of living half in and half out of the Black … they suddenly seemed like so much junk, piled up in all the corners and crevices. Whoever eventually broke in here wouldn’t find anything worth salvaging, unless they were into moldy takeaway or vintage porn.

Jack packed up a few changes of clothes, his leather, his least disreputable pair of boots, and the master reel of his band’s first and only album. The Poor Dead Bastards had something of a cult following, and maybe he could trade it for something, if he needed to. He hadn’t been to Los Angeles since the early 1990s and what he remembered didn’t exactly inspire fits of joy. He’d need money, and he’d need to make a good impression on the locals. American mages tended toward pompous and territorial, instilled with the idea that they were special, as if there weren’t tens of thousands just like them the world over.

Pete had allowed them to get on their flight together, since it was her charge card that was financing the venture. They took the fast train to Heathrow, found the Virgin flight to LAX, and Pete proceeded to ignore him again. She took the window seat and fell asleep, or at least pretended to, as soon as they were in the air.

Jack decided the only antidote for his hatred of being locked inside a large metal lipstick tube suspended above the earth was to get as drunk as the twenty quid in his wallet would allow, and flagged down a flight attendant.

He drifted in and out, and when he woke for good, the plane had touched down and they were on the tarmac at LAX.

Pete climbed over him and got her carry-on bag. “Been fun,” she said, and got ahead of him, cutting herself off with a herd of slow-moving passengers.

“Yeah,” Jack muttered, shouldering his own bag. “Like getting teeth pulled in the middle ages.”

CHAPTER 3

LAX was interminable, moving walkways shunting along herds of people, most of whom were wearing sunglasses. Coming from a place where the sun was a luxury, if not an outright oddity, and if you wore shades you never wore them indoors, Jack decided they were all cunts.

He got through customs, got out to the curb, and found himself facing a wasteland that went on as far as the eye could see. Palm trees poked above the landscape here and there, and the roar of jets competed with the drone of the nearby freeway.

“Christ,” Pete said at his elbow. “It’s a bit 1984, isn’t it?”

“I think you’d need a few more government billboards and few less birds in midriff tops for that,” Jack said. He looked down at her. “You ditching me, then?”

Pete kicked the dirty concrete. “Look, Jack. I was really angry, and I still am, but…” She drew a deep breath, and then made a face. “Even the air here tastes dirty. Anyway, I think the thing to do is stick together. At least until great swaths of the UK don’t want us dead any longer.”

“I really am sorry,” he said quietly. He was, too. He wasn’t sorry often. Sorry was for people who lived their lives looking for something to regret, and when you’d gotten as many friends killed as he had, you could be sorry straight down to the bottom of a whiskey bottle or the point of a needle full of smack. There was no future in being sorry for every fucking thing.

But this was Pete. And he was sorry, for both of them.

“Save it,” she said. “I don’t want you to pity me. I just want you to stop walking around like a kicked puppy.”

“Then stop kicking me,” Jack snapped. “I know your life plan didn’t include a kid, Pete. I know it didn’t include me, and I know you’re slagged off that you have to put up with either of us. I know you blame me. Fuck it, I blame me. I know it all, that you’re done with me soon as the sprog makes an appearance. So until then, can we just agree that’s how it is and leave off kicking a dead horse in the balls?”

Pete blinked, and Jack let himself imagine that for a moment, she’d wanted to deny what he was saying, but then she nodded. “Sounds good. We’re colleagues, nothing more.”

“Fantastic,” Jack agreed. He’d protect Pete until the baby came, and then he’d go his way and she’d go hers. And that would be that. No need for crying or hair-pulling on either end.

He knew he’d never believe that one, but Pete wasn’t leaving him much of a choice.

A long, low convertible, in a shade of yellow Jack would describe as “violent sunshine,” pulled up in front of them, and Pete took up her bag. “That’ll be Mayhew,” she said. “I told him to meet us here.”

“Christ,” Jack said. “If I’d’ve known he was bringing a boat, I would’ve worn a life vest.”

“Behave,” Pete muttered, moving to shake hands with the car’s driver. Mayhew was short, but not too short; fat, but not too fat; with a smile that was sincere, but only just. Completely average and utterly unremarkable. He must’ve made a hell of a cop.

“Pete, great to see you,” he said, although the words didn’t match his face, which was sweaty and pinched.

“Yes, same,” she said. “Shall we?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mayhew said. He chugged around the car and picked up Pete’s bag, noticing Jack for the first time. “Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks for coming, both of you.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jack said. He held out his rucksack until Mayhew took it. “Cheers,” Jack said, and slid into the back seat. Pete shot him the look, the one that meant he was being a cunt, but Jack ignored it.

The interior of the car smelled slightly sour, whether from Mayhew’s sweat or the plethora of fast food wrappers crushed under Jack’s boots, he didn’t care to speculate. Plush dice dangled from the rearview mirror and a small plastic hula dancer undulated her hips from the dash when Mayhew pulled away from the curb.

“So,” he said to Pete, “first time in LA?”

“For me,” Pete said. “Jack’s been.”

“Oh yeah?” Mayhew hooked a look back at him in the mirror. “You like it?”

“Not particularly,” Jack said, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket.

“Oh, sorry,” Mayhew said. “Can’t have you smoking in Lucille. The upholstery is original.”

“You can’t be serious,” Jack said, and got the look from Pete again.

“’Fraid so,” Mayhew said. “Believe me, I understand. I polished off a pack a day when I was LAPD. Quit a year ago and I’ve never felt better.”

As they drove past warehouses, used car lots, and cheap airport motels and merged onto a freeway roughly the width of the Thames, Jack felt a marked urge to reach over the seat and bang Mayhew’s head against the steering wheel.

He stabbed his fag out against the car’s door panel instead, then rubbed the sooty mark in with his finger. Small and petty, yes, but Mayhew was already up his nose and he’d barely spent ten minutes with the man. Jack bet with himself that Mayhew’s “problem” would involve teenage Satanists in store-bought robes and missing neighborhood pets.

“You named your car?” Pete said, sliding closer to Mayhew on the sofa-sized front seat. Mayhew immediately forgot about Jack’s existence.

“Sure did. This is my baby Lucille. Sixty-five LeSabre—restored her myself.” He ran his hand across the dash in the proprietary manner with which most men touch women’s thighs.

“Really,” Jack said. “You pick out the color?”

“Hey, this is LA,” Mayhew said. “Land of big tits, good teeth, and primary colors. Takes some getting used to if you’re from a place like London.”

Pete twitched but she jumped in front of the bullet again. “It take long? Fixing this thing up?”

Mayhew shrugged, an aw-shucks gesture that clearly implied yes, normally, but not when you were a special sort like him. “A while. Supposed to do it when I retired in twenty years, but what the hell? Being a PI is a lot of waiting around, and I like to keep busy.”

Jack slid down on Lucille’s slippery plastic seat and shut his eyes. Mayhew was trying to do the civilized equivalent of pissing a circle—his car, his city, his eyes all over Pete’s tits. Jack wished him good luck with the last one. Pete didn’t need white knighting—Mayhew would find out soon enough, with a knee in his balls if he was especially unlucky.

As to LA, he could have it. The sun penetrated Jack’s eyelids and made his head throb, and he threw his arm up as Lucille crested a rise and revealed a glimpse of the downtown before Mayhew veered off onto another freeway. Who needed a concrete-covered, haze-choked hellhole full of women with silicone sacks in their chests and men like Mayhew, whose biggest concern was his motor and getting into a dick-measuring contest with everyone he met?

“You’ll need a car,” Mayhew said to Pete. “I set it up with a friend of mine who runs a garage—you can drive American-style, right?”

“I’ll manage,” Pete said.

“Great,” Mayhew said. “We’ll go back to my office and talk business. I really am glad you’re here.”

There it was, the hook. Jack had no doubt that Mayhew’s real reason for gladness was that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t immediately peel his skin off his fat form and put it on toast. He’d actually gotten Pete to show up and proven himself a useful underling. Jack could put up with the git just as long as it took to see the big picture, the puppeteer rather than the puppet, and then he was going to give Mayhew a real reason to be glad for American dentistry.

He dozed on the drive, the rank air doing little to replace his need for a fag. When they finally bumped to a stop, he realized he’d been somewhere else, the freeway turning into a long, black road made of smooth obsidian, and the smog cloud becoming the ashes of things burnt alive, drifting down to catch in his hair and eyelashes like charnel snow.

Jack didn’t have many memories of his time in Hell. When the Morrigan had led him back from the Bleak Gates, she’d smoothed his mind over, picked out with her beak all of the time that Jack had lost when he went down to the Pit, and left plain gray nothing in its place.

He’d seen a few flashes in dreams, which was par for the course for a psychic who couldn’t shut out the feed on his best days. But nothing concrete. No flashbacks, no coming awake and screaming.

He still didn’t know the extent of what the Morrigan had done to him, besides the markings. He felt better than he had before he went to the Pit, but that wasn’t saying much. He’d been sick, using whiskey as a food group, and battered by his sight. It wasn’t as if he could suddenly lift cars and run five kilometers without hacking.

Pete stuck her head in his window. “You coming?”

Jack shook off the dream. That was what you did with dreams—his weren’t prophetic, as Pete’s had a tendency to be, and they certainly weren’t worth remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “Right along the yellow brick road.”

CHAPTER 4

Mayhew lived in Venice, so named by its city fathers in a startling fit of originality because Venice, California, also had canals. “You know, just like Italian Venice. Was a big tourist spot in the fifties.”

Jack could hear the swish of the ocean when he stepped out of the car, and the air was sticky with salt and carbon monoxide. Mayhew had parked in an alley, and he let them in a side door. “One of the guys on the force owned this pad and let it go for a song,” he said, flicking a light to life. “Got the hell out of the city, moved to Montana. I guess he’s a sheriff now or something.” Mayhew shrugged. “Miserable fucking existence, if you ask me, but some people can’t hack LA.”

Not feeling any hexes or other sort of protection on the place, Jack stepped in after Mayhew. The “pad” ended in a T-shaped hall, one end leading to an office that looked out onto a street full of similar small bungalows and semi-detached flats, the other leading back into a living room done up in rattan with bright cushions, tiki idols on most surfaces, and a sort of 1950s clock above a bubble-shaped telly with rabbit ears. A small fireplace was crowned with a glamor shot of Jayne Mansfield and an array of framed movie posters for flicks like The Hellcats and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

“Fuck me,” Jack muttered. “Did Dean Martin’s corpse projectile vomit this shit into his sitting room?”

Mayhew continued through a kitchen done entirely in powder blue, including appliances, and showed them into a small back bedroom.

“You can crash here,” he said. “Sorry about the one bed situation. Maybe Jack would be more comfortable on the sofa?”

“Being stared at by a headless movie star and fifteen tiki idols?” Jack said. “Yeah, don’t think so.”

Mayhew’s neck swelled a little, but he wouldn’t take it up with him. Not in front of Pete. “You’re not a fan of kitsch, I take it.”

Jack dumped out his rucksack on the bed. “What gave me away?”

“Anyway,” Pete said. “I think we’re both interested to hear what’s got you in such a lather, Benjamin.”

“Call me Ben.” Smile, smile, smile. “Everyone does.”

Pete did not call him Ben, just went into his office space and plopped herself in the visitor’s chair. Jack made sure Benjamin-now-Ben walked ahead of him. There was more than the obvious convenience of Mayhew’s timing. He stank of flop sweat, and he kept shooting nervous glances at all the doors and windows. It could be that whoever had convinced him to set Pete up wasn’t the type to take tea and biscuits, or it could be something else. It was the off chance of “something else” that had Jack’s teeth grinding.

Mayhew’s office was a far cry from his frenetic tribute to tacky acid trips of a flat. The furniture was from the same vintage, but it was dull metal painted in varying colors of Piss, Vomit, and Hairball. Papers crowded every surface and the blinds were broken over a painted front window. Mayhew & Co. Investigations, Jack read backward. The letters were bisected by spider cracks where somebody had chucked a small, heavy object at the glass.

“‘And Co.’?” Jack said, taking the second client seat. The vinyl was sticky with some long-ago spill. Dust motes flew up in a flock when he sat.

“Yeah, that’s just to make me sound more trustworthy,” Mayhew said.

Jack rubbed the dust from the arm of his chair between thumb and forefinger. “Does it work?”

Mayhew kept that slightly nauseous smile on his face. “Most of the time.”

“Your problem,” Pete reminded Mayhew. “The sooner you tell us, the sooner we can get to solving it.”

Mayhew got up and dug through a file cabinet, dislodging a stack of duplicate forms and old gun magazines from the top.

Jack sat and rubbed the grit between his fingers. You could learn a lot from dust. Places picked up the psychic leak of whoever’d stood in them, glass and iron and stone and wood. Mayhew’s dust stank of magic. Not a human, not the kind of residue left by a talent or even by black magic. It was dry and harsh and tasted of ash and hot wind in the back of his throat.

He rubbed his hand on the leg of his jeans. The dust scattered, and the sensation faded.

“I was a homicide cop for ten years,” Mayhew said, dumping a bulging file of photocopies and blurry photographs onto his desk. He nudged a container of takeaway into the trash and spread the photos out. “This was my last case.”

Pete obligingly drew the photos closer, handed them to Jack one by one. They were gruesome, he supposed, but nothing that garden-variety humans couldn’t do to one another. Four people, in various stages of defenestration, lay on a tile floor. A door stood open to the outside, and blood dribbled over walls and various other surfaces.

“Somebody decided to redecorate?” Jack said, holding up a close shot of a woman who’d been opened from sternum to pelvis, her blood feathering across the tile under her in a spidery, winglike halo.

“That was Mary Kay Case, the homeowner,” Mayhew said. “She was eight and a half months pregnant.” He sat back, and waited for Jack’s scrabbling apology.

Jack tossed the photo back on the desk. “Yeah? Unless the baby was a flesh-chewing mutant Hellspawn that ate its way out, grew tentacles, and joined a traveling circus, what’s this got to do with the Black?”

“Jesus, man,” Mayhew said. “You really are a block of ice, aren’t you?”

“Look,” Jack said. “You were a cop. You know that perfectly plain human beings are capable of doing this and worse to each other. So I can sit here and wring me hands, or you can stop wasting our time with the suspenseful fucking buildup.”

Mayhew pointed at the photo in Pete’s hands. “Recognize that?”

Pete displayed a close-up of the door. The word PIG had been scrawled with a fingertip, in blood. “Copycat?” she asked Mayhew.

“I wish,” Mayhew said. “Manson family fanboys would’ve been a lot easier to close up than whatever I’ve got.”

“Manson’s people murdered a pregnant woman, too,” Pete said. “This one—her baby didn’t make it, did it?” She shifted in her seat, and Jack reached out without thinking and put his hand over hers.

“Honestly, we don’t know,” Mayhew said. He rubbed his thumb across his forehead, drawing beads of sweat. It was claustraphobically hot in the little office, and Jack itched to get up and throw open a window.

Pete laced her fingers with his, though, so he stayed where he was. “How can you not know?” she said. “It’s not as if you can lose an infant down the cracks in your sofa cushions.”

“We don’t know because when the first responders came on the scene, the Case baby was gone,” Mayhew said. He sat back, digging in an overflowing drawer and bringing out a bottle of bourbon. “Snort?” he said, dashing a bit into a glass.

“None for me,” Pete said. Mayhew tossed the drink back without offering Jack.

“The medical examiner said the kid could have survived,” he murmured. “You know, if they cut it out instead of just cutting. But I could never think that. Why take a baby and murder its parents and their dinner guests? What the hell would the point be of keeping that baby alive?”

“And you think they were involved in the Black?” Jack cut in. “The doers, I mean?”

Mayhew collected the photos, keeping his hand on top of the one of Mary Kay Case’s dead body. “We found evidence that the Cases were in the life, yes,” he said. “More than that, they didn’t have a single enemy on the daylight side. Larry Case was a tax accountant and Mary Kay was a real estate agent. Good people. Good people don’t deserve this shit.”

“So naturally you assume it’s some baby-stealing nutter from beyond the beyond,” Pete said.

“It’s not that,” Mayhew said. “I could never close this one. It’s not easy to tell your captain that you can find the murderer based on a load of horseshit that most people think went out with the Salem trials, if they believe it at all. But the Case murders aren’t why you’re here.”

He pulled a fax off the machine and thrust it at Pete. “My buddy in the ME’s office sent this to me. They caught the bodies last night.”

Pete shared the fax with Jack. The photo was of bad quality, but he could make out the same rough outline as the Case bird. A pregnant woman, missing the center of herself, on a steel table under harsh light.

“Almost identical to the Case murders,” Mayhew said. He poured himself another shaky measure of bourbon. “It’s been ten years, and whoever did this is back in LA.”

CHAPTER 5

Jack excused himself to smoke. The street Mayhew’s bungalow occupied ended at a cement embankment, and from there it was just beach and ocean. The sun had set, and the memory of it was crimson contrails streaked across the sickly yellow sky.

Pete joined him after a few drags. “What do you think?” she said, looking at his cigarette longingly before Jack stubbed it out.

“I think it’s a sad story, but there’s nothing here to do with you, or us, or the Black at all,” Jack said. Sure, it was awful that some nutter was ripping babies out of their mothers. But no more awful than the usual sort of awful people could be.

“Oh, come on,” Pete said. “At the very least, somebody thinks they’re doing black magic with those bodies.”

“Thinking and doing aren’t the same thing,” Jack said. “Also, Mayhew’s about as twitchy as a rat on an electric fence. For all we know that case could not even be his. Just a lure to get you where he wants you.”

Pete folded her arms. “Just because you don’t like him, you’re saying there’s nothing to this. That’s a shit way to conduct business.”

“What business?” Jack demanded. He should know better by now than to try and fool Pete. “Pete, at the very least he’s a sad old lush who can’t let go of his big failure. At the worst he’s setting us up to be a snack for something we’ve pissed off that’s been biding its time.”

“Fine,” Pete said. “You can go on, then. I’m going to look into it.”

Jack blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

“I think by now you know the answer to that,” Pete said. “You want to stick your head under a rock until you can crawl back to London, go right ahead. No skin off of me.”

“Well, luv, if we’re shouting uncomfortable truths: You want to take on this stupid errand for Mayhew because you’re pregnant,” Jack said. “I saw your face when that picture came up.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Pete snarled. “Just because I’m knocked up, I suddenly have a deeper understanding of the feminine mysteries of motherhood?” She shoved Mayhew’s file at Jack, hard enough to knock him off balance. “Wanting to catch some depraved bastard who preys on helpless kids is not some flighty side effect of my owning a vagina, Jack. Not wanting to says a hell of a lot more about you than my having a baby bump says about me.”

“Wait!” Jack said when Pete turned to storm inside. The file fell between them and Mayhew’s slaughter porn scattered across his stoop.

Pete threw up her hands. “Why should I? You’re not going to be one bit of help. As usual.”

Stupid. He was stupid, and why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut? Now Pete was looking at him like he was less than dog shit on her boot, and he deserved it. “It’s not that I’m unwilling to look into this,” Jack said. “I mean, I still don’t think we should be here, but you can’t run on back to Mayhew on your own.”

“Why not?” Pete snapped. “You afraid I might get used to a man with a job who doesn’t constantly have childish fits at me?”

“He’s a liar, for one,” Jack said. Pete laughed, short and sharp.

“If being a liar was a disqualification, I’d’ve chucked you out years ago.”

“I know you’re angry at me now,” Jack said. “But Mayhew is not on the level, Pete. His office stank of demon.”

Pete stopped with her hand on the door. “You wouldn’t just be saying that to sway me into leaving, would you? Because then I’d have to hit you in the balls.”

“I’m not going to lie about something like that,” Jack said. Lying about demons was just inviting them to show up and make a truth-teller out of you. Anyone who said Hellspawn didn’t have a sense of humor had never met one.

“Why would Mayhew be having anything to do with demons?” Pete said.

“That,” said Jack, “is an excellent fucking question.”

“I still think he’s got something with these dead folks,” Pete said. “Assuming he didn’t just make it up out of whole cloth.”

Jack shrugged. “Easy enough to find out. We can go ask somebody who’s not arse-deep in black magic, for a start.”

“So you’re staying?” Pete said.

Also an excellent question. Pete didn’t want his help, and Mayhew sure as shit didn’t want him around. He practically puffed his chest out like a frog whenever Jack was within ten feet. He should do exactly as Pete expected—go hide somewhere until it was safe to go home. But separating made them both vulnerable. He’d stay—and keep up the line that he was only there until the kid was out, which Pete seemed to have no problem believing. She could take care of herself, then, and the baby, and he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone except himself.

“Yeah,” Jack said aloud. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

CHAPTER 6

In the morning, Jack found Pete and Mayhew drinking orange juice on his small balcony. Mayhew offered him a glass. “Sorry, man. Pete said to let you sleep. Jet lag and all that.”

Jack ignored his offer and pulled up a chair. “Got any food?”

“Yeah, I called out for some breakfast,” Mayhew said. “Didn’t think Pete here would feel like going out.”

He brought Jack a bowl of cereal, sickly sweet with bits of pink marshmallow floating in milk that had just turned. Jack ignored the civilized bachelor’s version of a Fuck You and took the time to size up Mayhew while the detective chattered at Pete about what an absolutely tip-top sort of place Venice was.

If Mayhew was a practitioner, he wasn’t much of one. His talent was barely a flutter, and he didn’t seem to realize that a mage could size him up and ferret out his demon-soaked aura like smelling a dead mouse in your vents.

Aside from his questionable grasp on magic, Mayhew was a sad sight. He’d probably been a big, strong man around ten years ago, but now his ridiculous Hawaiian shirt was taxed to capacity with a round stomach, and his hair was starting to get more salt than pepper, like dirty snow covering dirtier ground. His jowls hung heavy, and when he talked to Pete he stared at her intently with his slightly too-small eyes, a look that Jack recognized well enough. Most straight men looked at Pete that way.

Altogether, Mayhew didn’t inspire any more confidence in Jack that he wasn’t out to bugger them thoroughly and completely, without the benefit of Astroglide.

“My buddy called and said you can pick up your car,” Mayhew told Pete. “Any ideas about the case?”

Pete shoved back from the table. “None I’d care to share. Come on, Jack.”

Mayhew blinked, clearly having expected that their little duo of Bogart and Bacall would continue for as long as he kept grinning and pouring orange juice. “But you’ll need a ride.”

“You said it was nearby,” Pete said. “We’ll manage. People in London walk.”

“Nobody walks in LA,” Mayhew said, and then barked a laugh at his own questionable cleverness in quoting an old-as-the-hills pop song.

Jack followed Pete. “You should try it sometime,” he said. “Your shirt landscape might get a little less hilly.”

“I wish you’d stop that,” Pete said, when they were walking up the hill away from the beach, the address of Mayhew’s mechanic friend tucked into Pete’s pocket.

“What?” He was shit at playing innocent, but he could always try.

“Your life would be much easier if you just quit taking the piss for no good reason,” Pete told him.

“I have a good reason,” Jack said. “Mayhew’s a slimy git. If that’s not a reason I don’t know what is.”

The mechanic’s shop was tucked into a side street a few blocks beyond the top of the hill. Here, the ocean was a sound, not a sight, and the glaring green-yellow sunlight was even more revealing, giving unfavorable clarity to the faded boards and the sad, sagging sign proclaiming SAL’S AUTO R PAIR.

The garage door was open to emit exhaust fumes, Black Sabbath playing on a tinny radio propped on top of a toolbox, and the shriek of metal on metal. Sal was bent over a fender, sanding off blue paint to reveal the primer beneath.

Jack didn’t care much about cars—they got you from point A to point B and beyond that, blokes used them as a way to extend their cocks, or to fuss over them incessantly, the way people more in line with his way of thinking obsessed over original pressings of the Sex Pistols’ EMI release.

“Oi!” he shouted, and Sal shut off the sander, raising his goggles.

“Hey,” he said. “You Benji’s buddy?”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Jack said. Sal grinned. His teeth were even and startlingly white, considering how ugly the rest of his face was. Sal looked as if his features had been dumped into a sack, and then his maker had slammed the sack sharply against a cement wall a few times before letting things settle. His nose was a monument to how not to take a punch, and his cheekbones were uneven. A slick black pompadour, dented by the band of his goggles, topped off the look and added a touch of absurdity.

“Benji doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal skills,” Sal said. “Probably why he’s shit broke most of the time.” He winked at Pete. “Only giving you the car because he did me a favor a few months back. Some fuck rented one of my gals and returned her with the grill and bumper banged all to hell. Come to find out, asshole was in a hit and run out on Hollywood Boulevard, put some wannabe actress slash hooker in the hospital, all kinds of crap. I could’ve been liable.”

“Sounds like he’s a veritable superhero,” Pete said.

Sal’s grin widened until it was practically pornographic. “Love your accent, doll.” The grin abruptly ceased. “You do know what side of the road we drive on in the USA, right?”

“I’ll manage, although being a woman, the very idea of a combustion-operated vehicle frightens and confuses me,” Pete said. Sal laughed, and then coughed, and then pulled a Marlboro from a pack and lit it.

Jack took it out of his mouth. “Not in front of the lady,” he said. Sal sized him up for a second, and Jack stared right back. Sal considered for a minute longer, then shrugged.

“Sorry. Anyway, she’s out back.”

He led them down a narrow hall lit by a single bulb, and back into the hard-hitting sun, which now gleamed on a host of finned, chromed, detailed beasts that looked like nothing so much as a flight of especially decorative UFOs.

“Wow,” Pete said. Jack had to admit, the collection was impressive. Cherry red, powder blue, wasp yellow, the cars were all perfect, and all different. He recognized a few that aped famous sorts from films—James Bond’s Aston Martin, Steve McQueen’s Mustang, and the white Challenger from Vanishing Point, which was one of his friend Lawrence’s favorite films.

“I was going to sling you into whatever I didn’t have rented out today,” Sal said. “Paramount is eating up most of the fleet for this period movie they’re shooting over by the boardwalk. But you two need something special.” He considered, tapping one sausage finger against his troll jaw. His hands could have easily palmed Jack’s head, and Jack was glad he hadn’t pressed the cigarette issue. Too early in the day to get his face broken. You needed to at least have lunch and a proper drink first.

Sal led them between the rows until he came to the far back corner of the lot. “This one’s my baby,” he said. “Great gal, she’ll do whatever you need her to do. She’s famous, too—she was in Christine.”

“Great,” Jack said to Pete. “Fucking demon car to find a nonexistent demon spree killer.” That sounded about right.

Sal handed Pete a keyring with a grinning Dia de Los Muertos skull for a fob. “Be nice to her, and she’ll be nice to you,” he told Pete.

Jack looked at the crimson Plymouth Fury. “Fuck me,” he muttered, sliding into the leather bench seat.

Pete took it slowly until they were headed away from the beach. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “Handles nicely. It’s not the Mini Cooper but it’ll do.” Jack saw the huge grin on her face, and even though the windows were open and the LA air made him even more short of breath than inhaling an actual lungful of smoke, he had to return it.

“So, what’s your mad plan?” he said.

“Mayhew’s old partner from the LAPD agreed to meet with me and show me the crime scene,” Pete said. Jack whistled.

“How’d you manage that?”

“I think it’s my accent,” Pete said. “People around here listen to it and practically fall over their own feet.”

“I don’t think it’s just your accent,” Jack told her. Pete stopped smiling.

“You have anything to add? Anything you thought of?”

“I think this is all bullshit and that there’s nothing spooky going on,” Jack said. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes against the sun. “I’m just along for the ride, luv. Go where you will.”

CHAPTER 7

The hot wind was back, reaching right down his throat and clawing away all the good air. Replacing it bit by bit with tinders and ash. What he’d taken to be the howling of the air was in fact screams, his own and others. Screams as the vast plain before them shifted and changed, the red sands shifting and forming faces, which stared at him with lidless eyes before vanishing under the next gust.

He tried to shut his eyes and shut out the grit, close his mouth and gulp down a breath, but his eyes and lips were pinned back, fine hooks through his flesh. His blood turned to crystal the moment it hit the air, and all he could do was scream until he suffocated.

This was the first part of his time in Hell, the torture before the demon who’d pulled him into the Pit got down to the real business.

He was dead, and in Hell, and never going free.

“Jack.” Something poked him hard in his biceps. “I swear, you could sleep through a missile raid,” Pete muttered. The Fury sat at the foot of a driveway that snaked up a landscaped hill and ended at a small imitation castle.

“We here?” Jack stretched and consciously did not run his hands over his face. His old face, needing a shave, broken bottle–induced scar down his cheek, no flayed flesh or flowing blood.

“No, I liked the view and thought I’d sit a while.” Pete withered him with a glance and got out, slamming the door. Jack took his time.

If he was starting to remember Hell, that would just be one more fuck you from the Morrigan. One more bit of shit to heap onto his psyche. Well, he already had a mountain of it. What were a few more bad dreams?

That’s all they were. Dreams or, at the worst, faded memories he couldn’t be sure were ever real, or had happened at all.

Pete had made it halfway up the drive, and he followed. The house was, up close, even more of a horror. They were up in the hills now, looking down at the bowl of smog shot through with the tops of skyscrapers populating downtown LA. Plaster gargoyles glared down at Jack from every available flat surface, and the door had been made to look like the entrance to a particularly upscale sex dungeon. The knocker was a demon head, and you grabbed the tongue to shove the door to and fro.

A flash black car, the kind favored by plainclothes policemen, was parked in the circle drive, nose pointing toward the hillside. The demon door opened, and the selfsame policeman stepped out. His suit was cheap and his eyes were hard as the rock that made up the facade of the fake Gothic mansion.

“Ms. Caldecott?” he said.

“One and the same,” Pete told him, accepting his handshake.

“Detective Shavers,” he said. “Ben’s partner. Well. Used to be.”

He ignored Jack, and Jack mentally subtracted good detective from his mental checklist of Shavers. If he were a copper, he’d be all over shifty gits like himself.

“So Ben’s told you about his pet serial killer theory?” Shavers asked.

“He certainly has,” Pete said. “With visual aids and everything.”

Shavers flinched. “Sorry about that. You know, I don’t normally allow civilians to just wander around an active crime scene, but I want to make something clear to you, Ms. Caldecott.” He stood aside and gestured them inside.

The front hall was done in black tile, inlaid with the head of Bahopmet. The goat’s heads, except for horns, had been covered with a cheery rug, and paintings and photographs covered the burgundy walls, in stark contrast to the aggressively dark décor. Evil Chic, Jack thought. Early Gothic Trying Too Hard.

“House belonged to some cult rocker in the 80s,” Shavers said. “Been a rental since, with the condition that nobody change the decoration. They shoot movies in here sometimes—that’s a real good way to make some cash in this town.”

“Never would have guessed,” Pete said, but Shavers didn’t pick up on her attitude. “What did you want to make clear to me?”

“That Ben is retired for a reason,” Shavers said. “That there’s nothing to this case to connect it to his old murders. Yes, they’re similar. But that’s it.”

“They’re a little more than similar, if Mayhew’s photos are to be believed,” Pete told him.

Jack caught sight of a stairway leading to an upper level, a loft ringed in ornate iron railings. He slid down the hall, Shaver’s and Pete’s voices echoing off the two-story cathedral ceiling. His sight screamed the moment he mounted the stairs, vibrating and red-rimmed. Shavers was giving Pete the brush off, but there had, at the very least, been a real murder here.

“Listen,” Shavers was saying. “You have to understand something about this town—it’s almost as obsessed with death as it is with movie stars doing each other up the ass. You know how much James Dean’s Ferrari wreckage went for at auction? Point is, every tabloid and sleazy blog has sources in the ME’s office and in the LAPD. The details could’ve gotten out through a dozen pinholes. At worst, we’ve got a very dedicated copycat. But not a serial. Not ten years apart, with no activity anywhere in VICAP in between.”

“You seem very sure,” Pete said.

“I am sure,” Shavers rumbled. “I’m sorry you came all this way, but this is just going to be another cold case. Only difference is it’s in my file instead of Ben’s this time, and I’m a lot better at letting things go.”

“I understand, believe me,” Pete said. “I used to be on the job. Can you just walk me through the scene, so I can tell Ben something?”

“Yeah, sure,” Shavers said. “Not like I got anything better to do, like pursue cases I can actually close, right?”

Jack pushed open the first door, keeping his ear tuned to Shavers and Pete. An office, done in bloodred wallpaper and black carpet, a layer of dust thick enough to draw in over it all. Not here.

“There was no forced entry,” Shavers said. “But we didn’t think too much of it at the time. Rental properties, the gate code never changes and a dozen staff have it, plus the family that lived here. The Herreras,” he added. “Mom, dad, son, and unborn daughter. Just in town for a few months while he produced a film.”

Jack tried the next door. A kid’s room, baseball memorabilia pasted up over the rock ’n’ roll walls, toys scattered across the floor.

“They killed the boy first.” Shaver’s voice echoed. “I say they, because we decided there had to be at least two. One to subdue the parents and one to go after the kid.”

The tile floor of the bedroom was stained, old blood trickling along the grout like vines breaking through stone.

“Cut his throat,” said Shavers. “Quick and clean. He bled out in a matter of minutes.”

“And the parents?” Pete’s boots clacked on the tile.

The last door was really just an iron lattice with more of the demon head motif. The pulse of his sight got worse when he pushed it open, and Jack ground his teeth against the sensation of a spike being driven through his skull sideways.

“They killed and mutilated the father in their bed,” Shavers said. “Knocked the mother over the head and dragged her down here.”

The mattress was bare, and marks of a crime scene team were still in place. There was much more blood this time—almost all the blood that a person’s body held, Jack wagered.

The psychic feedback was strong and bloody, but it wasn’t anything unusual for a murder scene. He backed out and looked down at the top of Shaver’s bald head as he bent over the Bahopmet rug. “She was here. They, uh … they did the final mutilation here on the tiles.”

“And the fact that her unborn baby was cut out of her on an image that’s been widely co-opted by Satanists the world over didn’t trigger any alarms?” Pete said.

“Come on, Ms. Caldecott,” Shavers said. “You were on the job. You know the shadowy Satanic cabal is just a myth fundamentalists and shrinks looking to make a buck conjured up to amuse themselves. Satanic Panic in this country is not something the LAPD is ever going to buy into.”

“Yeah, fine, the Satanist angle is bollocks,” Pete said. “But there was no sign of the child?”

“No,” Shavers said. “The baby was gone, along with whoever did this.”

“And nothing about two unborn babies being stolen, ten years apart, strikes you as a little strange?” Pete said.

Jack looked down at the bloody tiles. It was almost too trite to be believed. Home invasion mutilation inside a house that would give any weekend Satanist a hard-on, missing baby, all the hallmarks of a ritual murder—if all you knew about ritual murder came from television.

“Strange?” Shavers said. “No. Depraved, yeah. But not that strange. People are capable of sick shit, Ms. Caldecott. We get copycat murders all the time.” He opened the front door. “Now if you don’t mind, please ask your buddy to come downstairs, and go on back to England. There’s nothing for you here.”

“I think Ben would be a lot more willing to let it go if I could take a look around myself,” Pete said.

Shavers threw up his hands. “Fine. You got five minutes, and then I have real police work to get back to.”

Pete joined Jack on the landing. “This is weird, yeah?” she murmured. Shaver’s mobile rang, and he stepped outside.

“Maybe if I couldn’t see ghosts and demons, yeah,” Jack said. “As it is, no. Not really. Kind of cliché, actually.”

“I meant Shavers,” Pete said. “He seems very happy to write this off.”

“Suppose it could be just what he says,” Jack said. “Two blokes, ten years apart, decide it’d be a laugh to hack up a pregnant lady and her family.”

“Or Shavers could be giving us the broom,” Pete said. “Trust me—no copper wants a case like this. Messy and unsolvable, drives your whole average down. Never mind that if it’s a serial job, you’re seen as lazy as well as incompetent.”

Jack leaned on the rail. “I hate to say I told you so…”

“Oh, please,” Pete snorted. “You love saying it.”

Jack massaged his forehead. His sight heralded a headache that would only be knocked out with a lot of booze or a little bit of something stronger. Time was, he’d have his shooting kit in his pocket, but that time wasn’t now. The cravings had gone along with all of his scars and tattoos, as if the Morrigan had remade the fire in his blood into glass. “Still,” he said. “There’s not actually anything supernatural afoot, unless you count the supernaturally horrible state of this place.”

“Then I guess we’re done here,” Pete said. “I’ll tell Mayhew what we found and we can go our separate ways.”

Jack nodded. “Yup. Have fun disappointing Mayhew.” Just walk away, he told himself. Let her think you’re the one to leave.

He’d put his foot on the first stair when he felt the wind. The ashes choked his throat and his sight spiked, and blood trickled out of his nose.

He wasn’t in Hell. He was here, in this hideous death-rock palace, and he was alive. For better or worse.

“Glad I caught you,” the demon said from behind him. “You are a slippery one these days, Jack.”

He swallowed the taste of blood and ashes. “You can put aside the dramatic entrances, Belial. I’ve seen all your tricks.”

Belial grinned at Jack. “Oh, you haven’t seen my best ones, boy. You haven’t even peeked up my sleeve.”

“What do you want?” Pete appeared at his side. She was never one to engage in small talk with spawn of the Pit.

“For you to pull your heads out of each other’s arses and do what I sent you here to do,” Belial said. He favored a small form, natty black suits, narrow ties, and flashy ruby jewelry. Aside from his lava-glass eyes, he could’ve been any ponce in a throwback getup on the street.

“The fuck are you on about?” Pete demanded. “You didn’t do a bloody thing.”

“Getting knocked up’s made you downright unobservant,” Belial told her. “I’ve been with you all along, my dear, along your winding trail to this spot.”

Jack massaged his forehead. “You were the demon in Mayhew’s office.”

“’Course I was,” Belial said. “You think a stain like Ben Mayhew’s capable of getting in touch with your caliber of mage and…” he flicked a black nail at Pete, “whatever you are?”

“I’ll ask once more before I stop being nice,” Pete told him. “What do you want?”

“The same thing you do, I expect,” Belial said. “To find the villains who hacked up this nice little family. I may be a demon, but I do have feelings. All right, not feelings, but desires. And I desire them caught and delivered to me.”

This was rotten. Demons didn’t just pop up and start demanding favors. They hung back until you were bloody and desperate, and then they showed up to listen to your screams for mercy. That was how it had worked last time, between Belial and him.

“Forget it,” Jack said. “If this whole trip was your doing, then piss off. We’re done, and I’m not your rent boy any longer.”

“You’re not,” Belial said when he turned his back. “But your little woman is.”

Pete grimaced when he turned on her. “It happened when you were … away,” Pete muttered. “I needed his help to get you out of the nuthouse and shut down Nergal.”

“For fuck’s sake, Pete!” Jack shouted, because shouting was the only thing he could do. He couldn’t very well haul off and punch Belial in the face, not unless he wanted his limbs in new and different configurations.

“Don’t scold her,” Belial purred. “She did right to cut the bargain she did. Saved the world, properly, because of it. And she—and you—do this for me, and we’ll be square.”

“I know what you are,” Jack snarled. He didn’t know who to rage at—Pete for being so monumentally stupid or Belial for the smug look on his face. “I know demons. She’ll never be free of you.”

Belial moved like ink through water—one fluid second and his hand was around Jack’s throat, Jack’s skull making a dent in the dark wall. “I honor my bargains,” Belial snarled. His teeth were pointed, each filed to a perfect razor point, and a little blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as he bit his own tongue. “I am a Named demon of Hell and I do not deceive, lie, or employ trickery.”

Jack’s feet were off the floor, and a black border encroached rapidly on his vision. A smug demon was bad enough. A slagged-off demon was lights out for all humans concerned. He should just learn to keep his trap shut, but it was never a life lesson that had sunk in.

“Yeah,” he choked. “You’re just a warm fuzzy life coach, ain’t you?”

“I am something much, much higher in the food chain than you,” Belial said. “And you’ll live a lot longer if you learn to show me a little fucking respect.”

He dropped Jack, and Jack didn’t bother to try and stay upright. He sucked in air, tile digging into his knees.

“Supposing we do pretend to trust you at face value,” Pete said. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“Excellent question,” Belial said. “Suffice to say that you’re the hunting dog, and your man here is holding the leash.” He nudged Jack’s side with the toe of his shoe. “Come on, Winter. Where’s that fighting spirit I saw in Hell?”

Pete took a step. “Don’t touch him.”

“Be a luv and give us a moment alone,” Belial told her. Pete started to protest, but Jack waved her off.

“Go. Nothing he can do to me he hasn’t already.”

“Wrong again,” Belial said, crouching next to Jack. “Now, I’d hoped you’d cling to your dignity, but I can see I was setting my hopes much too high.”

Pete clearly wanted to stand over him, but Shavers shouted at her from the front hall, and she worried her lip. “I’ll deal with him. If you hurt Jack…”

“I assure you,” Belial said. “I only hurt Jack for the fun of it. This is serious.”

Her footsteps retreated and Belial stared after her, shaking his head. “Going to be a crying shame when she bulks up and loses that rear bumper.” He hauled Jack up by the front of his shirt. “So, you picked out names and wee little booties yet?”

“You say another word about my fucking kid and I don’t care who you are or how many Named demons you hobnob with,” Jack said. “I’ll send you back to the fucking Pit in a shoebox.” Pete could shove him off and tell him she wanted him out of the baby’s life, but a demon didn’t get to talk about any offspring of his. The kid would be raised to know that Hell was never the answer, and demons were never your friends. If somebody had drummed that into Jack a bit harder, he wouldn’t be here.

Belial held up his hands. “All right, then, Papa Bear. Calm yourself.” He walked through the blood-spattered master bedroom and out onto the balcony, which looked down the back side of a canyon, scrub and loose dirt fading back to green on the upswing. Across the canyon, another miniature replica of a mansion from some other sort of place stared back at them with blank, shuttered windows.

Belial breathed in and leaned on the railing. “Air’s good up here. The rich swim in their infinity pools and the masses suffocate.” He tapped his pointed nail against the iron. “Remind you of anywhere, Jackie?”

Hot wind, sand, and glass in the bleeding cuts and patches of missing skin. Watching carrion demons creep among the dead, their red stone nails pricking distended abdomens.

Jack lit a cigarette. “Nope.”

“You know this place is neutral ground?” Belial said. “The City of fucking Angels. No demon of the city, no Named putting his feet up. A cesspit built on top of a faultline, rimmed with mountains and eroded by a poison sea. If I could never go home again, I’d go here. Fucking paradise, this is.” He held out his hand. “Let’s have one, then. Don’t be greedy.”

Jack handed the demon a fag and offered him his lighter. Belial inhaled and studied him through the resulting cloud. “You’re looking fit. Not cutting back on vice, are you? That’d make me cry.”

“Never felt better,” Jack said. “Been eating my spinach.”

Belial blew smoke from his nose. “Nice ink,” he said, before flicking his fag into the dry scrub below the deck. “You know in sixty-nine the fires in Malibu burned so close to the beach the rock stars and big-titted third-rate actresses were standing in the fucking ocean, praying their condominiums didn’t go up? And then a few weeks later, Charlie Manson creeps down from the hills and hacks up their friends. Must’ve been a run on mother’s little helpers that summer.”

“Manson didn’t actually hack anyone,” Jack muttered. “What are you, some kind of groupie? You and he going to be best friends when he goes down the stairs?”

“Oh, Charlie’s not one of ours,” Belial said. “What demon would deal with a deranged midget who can’t carry a tune? Useless.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that under my hat for the next pub quiz,” Jack said. “Did you really come here to give me the dirty history of Los Angeles?”

Belial jerked his thumb in the direction of the bedroom. “This was one of ours. Well, I’m simplifying. More than one. Not really ours.”

“Jesus, could you dance around a bit more?” Jack muttered. “Put on some tap shoes. They’d suit you.”

Belial tugged his tie loose and ran a nail under his collar. Jack didn’t think demons could sweat, but if they could, Belial would be damp. If he didn’t know it was a ridiculous notion, on par with thinking a turnip had feelings, he’d say that Belial was scared. Demons understood fear, but they didn’t feel it. They didn’t feel anything. They worshiped bargains and they fed on the fear and blood of other things.

“I made a fair deal, you know,” Belial told him. “You agreed to it.”

“Yeah, I agreed to the Pit in exchange for not bleeding to death on a cold floor,” Jack said. “Some fucking choice.”

“You’re a coward, Jack,” Belial said. “Not my fault you took the coward’s deal rather than going into the light.”

“I am this close to chucking you over this fucking railing,” Jack said, holding his fingers apart. “I’m beginning to think you crawled up out of that living sewer you call a home just to chat.”

“Demons aren’t the only things in Hell,” Belial said. “We’re not even the first things.” He looked back out over the canyon. A helicopter puttered across the white-blue sky, and Jack could hear Pete and Shavers talking downstairs. And still, the murder house screamed at him, sight knifing his head.

“Is this going to be a long story?” Jack asked. “Because if it is, ’m going to need a drink and a sitdown.”

“When Nergal cracked open his prison,” Belial murmured, as if he hadn’t heard, “it sent shocks through all of the Pit. Through the Underworld, through the Black, even through the daylight world. You saw it.”

“Painfully close up,” Jack agreed. This wasn’t the Belial he knew—the smirking, insufferable cunt who delighted in pulling the legs off of human flies. Belial looked almost human. Even his form was tired and rumpled. Whatever could make a demon this nervous was firmly in the realm of Not Fucking Good.

“You ever think about what else might have slipped the locks?” Belial said. Jack folded his arms.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Before there were demons, there were other things,” Belial told him. “Things that crawled in the dark, things that made us what we are. Spawned us out of mud and shit and blood. Things that we realized we could never let free of the Pit.”

“And I’m guessing I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t fall down on the job,” Jack said.

Belial twitched inside his human skin. “This isn’t my mess, but I’m cleaning it sure enough.”

“Ten years isn’t exactly a weekend in time outside the Pit,” Jack said. “One of these bastards has been free a while, hasn’t he?”

“One, we could manage,” Belial said. “Hunt him with our own blokes. But the tears Nergal caused gave him the chance to let loose all of his little friends.”

“And what do they hope to accomplish by running around up here, slashing families to death?” Jack said.

“That’d be your job to figure out, wouldn’t it?” Belial said. “LA is a safe haven for things like that, but outside we could track them. You bring them to me, and I’ll be done with you and your little bit of sunshine.”

Jack pushed back from the rail. “I still don’t trust you.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Belial said as Jack walked away. “You know I’m a demon of my word.”

CHAPTER 8

Pete stayed silent until they were nearly back to Venice. “You hate me?” she said finally, pulling the Fury to the curb by Mayhew’s office.

Jack lit a cigarette and sat on the Fury’s fender. Did he? Have to be the world’s largest hypocrite if he did, one for the record books. “No.”

“I think you can understand why I didn’t tell you,” Pete said.

“It’s all a bit moot now,” Jack told her. “Belial always has a way of getting what he wants, and apparently he wants us to do his little errand.”

Pete plucked a note from Mayhew’s door. “Says he’s down the road in a bar.”

“Shocking, that.” Jack dropped his butt and stamped out the ember. “We’re going to have a little chat.”

“Be nice,” Pete called after him.

Jack thought about the likelihood of that, considering the whopper Mayhew had told to get them into this morass of Hell politics. “’M always nice,” he told Pete.

The bar fronted the beach—not the tony bit near the boardwalk, which wafted pot smoke down the sand all hours of the day and night and called out with bright lights, frying food, and pretty girls with tan lines, but the bit where all the buildings turned into cinderblock boxes. The Shanty, the place was called, and somebody had tacked driftwood and net to the front in an attempt to disguise the fact that the place was a hovel in practice as well as name.

Peanut shells and other crunchy bits crushed under his boots as he came in, giving his eyes a moment to adjust. The usual sad bastards had bellied up to the bar—a pair of old men in Bermuda shorts, the bleary-eyed, Rudolph-nosed drunk working on his glass of whatever was cheap and plentiful, and a couple of hungover gits sporting Wayfarers, even in the near-subterranean dark of the bar. Musicians, Jack guessed, although not decent ones. If they were, they would’ve known to keep hair of the dog on hand, roll out of bed, and go back to practice with a bottle of whiskey and a fistful of aspirin. Who had time to be pissing about in old man pubs?

Mayhew was at the end of the bar, the short leg, where he could keep an eye on the gents and the front door simultaneously. It’d be a good vantage if he wasn’t piss-drunk, head dipping over his glass, which was clear and slippery with ice cubes. Jack could smell the juniper when he got within a few feet.

“Hello again, Ben,” he said, sliding onto the stool next to Mayhew, blocking the view of the rest of the patrons while appearing to simply be having a friendly drink.

Mayhew looked up at him, eyes sliding blearily in and out of focus. “Oh,” he said. “Back already?”

“Too right,” Jack said. He leaned in, keeping one elbow on the sticky vinyl of the bar top and snaking his other hand out to grab Mayhew’s balls. It wasn’t the most delicate or dignified way to get somebody’s attention, but it had the bonus effect of sobering Mayhew up while inflicting the kind of tight, hot pain that inclined the subject to the truth. “What exactly,” Jack growled, leaning close enough to lick Mayhew’s ear, “did you think was going to happen when Belial showed up in your tacky little horror of an office?”

“I didn’t know,” Mayhew gasped. “A demon asks you to do something, you do it.”

“Now, I can feel you’ve got balls,” Jack said. “So unless he owns your arse, why’re you helping a Hellspawn reel me in?”

“He came to me and he said he needed to get you here,” Mayhew said. “Said if I did, I’d find out who killed the Case family. It was a good deal.” Beads of moisture worked their way down Mayhew’s glass, and down his face, and the stench of his breath enveloped Jack in a furnace of fear and desperation. “I’m not like you,” Mayhew whispered. “I’m just a scryer—I find things, people, and I’m not even very good at it. I can’t find out who killed those people and I…” He gulped. “I promised Mrs. Case I would.”

“Here’s a tip,” Jack said. “Don’t make promises to the dead. It never ends well for the living.”

“I swear I didn’t think he’d hurt you,” Mayhew said. “Did he? Hurt you?”

Jack released Mayhew’s crotch. “You’re a fucking idiot,” he said. “What do you know about the things Belial has me looking for?”

“Nothing,” Mayhew muttered, dipping back into his gin. “Less than nothing. If I knew, don’t you think I would’ve gone after them myself by now?” He gave Jack a grin, loose and pink with gums. “I wasn’t always a lush who calls himself a PI, you know. I used to be a good cop.”

“I used to be a dead man,” Jack said. “We all used to be something, Ben.”

“And now you’re the demon’s bitch.” Mayhew chuckled to himself. “Better you than me, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Jack told himself Mayhew was a drunk, a washout, and a fringe practitioner who didn’t have the sense of a gnat, but he still found himself standing up, fisting a handful of Mayhew’s Hawaiian shirt, and shoving him against the nearest wall. “You have no bloody idea who you’re talking to,” Jack snarled. “Or what you’re talking about.”

“You’re some big-shot badass where you come from,” Mayhew muttered. “I get that. But this isn’t London, and I’m not fucking impressed. I did what I had to do to get you here and put a stop to these murders. You don’t scare me.”

That was the problem with losing your temper—you didn’t think beyond the violence, and now Jack had the choice of propping Mayhew back on his bar stool or beating the shit out of him, neither of which particularly filled him with joy.

“Hey, man.” One of the hungover hipsters tapped him on the arm. “Gonna have to ask you to cut that out.”

“Fuck off,” Jack said. “This ain’t your business.”

“Actually, I think it is,” the git said. He flicked his sunglasses down, and Jack caught a flash of pure white eye.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered.

“You can leave now, or you can go through the wall,” the creature said. “Either way, let go of Ben.”

Jack let Mayhew drop. He hadn’t clocked the creature coming through the door. Not human, not dead. That didn’t narrow it down a whole hell of a lot.

“You let any sloppy drunkard who’ll deal with a demon into your pub?” Jack asked it. “Bad for business.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.” The creature gripped Jack’s forearm. “I do know strangers busting in and starting fights isn’t something we allow. Now are you going to move, or do I move you?”

The touch spread cold through his entire body, and Jack placed the sightless eyes and the pale corpse-colored skin. “All right, all right,” he told the wraith. “’M not here to cause you trouble.”

He knocked open the door to the alley behind the bar, and stepped out, patting himself down for a cigarette.

The wraith came after him, shutting the door. “Sorry about that. For what it’s worth, Mayhew had that coming, but nobody causes trouble in my bar.”

“Your bar? Monsters Incorporated, is it?”

The wraith shrugged its narrow shoulders. “Not a lot of safe havens for us. Even in this city.”

“Might have something to do with the whole draining people of their blood and leaving them frozen to death bit,” Jack said. “Humans tend to get upset about that.”

The wraith grinned. “You don’t seem to be afraid of me, Mr. Winter.”

“Ah, my reputation precedes me,” Jack said. “Tell me, did it piss on the carpet or just pass out in the corner?”

“Somebody like Jack Winter, the man who nearly ripped Europe in half over a pissing contest with necromancers,” the wraith said. “He lands in your city, you hear about it.”

“Seems unfair,” Jack said. “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

“People call me Sliver,” the wraith said. “I don’t have a name where I come from.”

“Sliver.” Jack held out his hand. He didn’t relish touching the inhuman thing, but he also didn’t relish Sliver thinking he was some kind of racist prick. “Pleased to meet you, I suppose.”

“Not surprised Mayhew’s mixed up with demons now,” Sliver said. “He always had his head up his ass in one way or another.”

“Yeah, well,” Jack said. “My problem now, isn’t it?” Not that Belial had been any help at all. The demon loved being cryptic almost as much as he loved his poncey black suits.

“You looking for his phantom killer?” Sliver chuckled. “I’ve heard that sad story so many times I could tell it myself.”

“The demon thinks there’s something to it,” Jack muttered.

“Yeah, well,” Sliver said. “That’s a demon for you.”

CHAPTER 9

“So you went ’round the pub, tried to beat seven colors of shit out of Mayhew, and wonder why this whole thing isn’t working in your favor?” Pete said. She sat crosslegged on the bed in Mayhew’s spare room, the photos from the case file spread around her.

“It’s not my favor,” Jack muttered. “It’s not working at all.”

“It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pete said. “Because you’re hopeless.” She held out a photo to him. “Look at this.”

Jack took the photo, showing a back door bookended by blood spatter. A small dark rectangle in one corner was marked with a yellow ruler. “What am I looking at?” he said.

“It’s a pet door,” Pete said. “The Cases had a dog, which was also never found.”

Jack tossed the photo back into the pile. “The dog did it. Mystery solved in time for tea. Agatha Christie’s ghost should tongue-kiss me.”

“You are such a bloody idiot, it’s amazing you can walk and talk at the same time,” Pete said. “Whatever came into those houses had a physical form, yeah?”

Jack shrugged. “A poltergeist doesn’t usually hack women open.” Or steal their babies. Or get a Named demon of Hell in such a lather he was recruiting human mages to go after his mistakes, contract-killer style.

“So, both of the houses had security systems,” Pete said. “On, and not compromised. Neither alarm company reported any pings the night of the murders.” She waved the photo. “This is the only way into the house that’s not alarmed.”

Jack took the photo again. The door was small, undoubtedly for one of those miniscule, hairy yapping things that rich women carried in purses. “You’d have to be a fucking midget to get through that thing,” Jack said. “And I’ve seen a lot of strange shite in my time, but murderous demonic dwarves is stretching even my credulity.”

“It’s a start,” Pete said. “There was a way in, and that means at some point, whoever did this had a body.” She gathered the photos into a stack. “If they have a body, somebody saw them.”

Jack doubted that Belial’s boogeymen would let themselves be seen unless they wanted it, but Pete’s idea was better than any he’d managed to come up with. How he’d hunt these things—well, he wouldn’t. He’d leave them the fuck alone, like any sensible person. Something bad enough to spook Belial wasn’t anything he wanted to meet face to face. He couldn’t tell the demon to go fuck himself, for Pete’s sake, but neither did he have to toe the line like a good boy. Chances were, whatever Belial was after could be convinced to move along from Los Angeles if Jack offered not to snitch to the demon. Belial wasn’t the only one who could make deals.

“The old crime scene’s address,” Pete said, waving one of Mayhew’s files. “Have a look around, talk to any neighbors that are still about—what do you say?”

“Haven’t got a better idea.” Jack shrugged. “Let’s go to it.”

CHAPTER 10

The Cases’ home was in Westwood, a tony spot populated by shiny, beetlelike cars and nice-looking white people. The UCLA campus kept the bars along the main drag hopping, even at the late hour. Pete rolled slowly with the ever-present molasseslike slog of traffic, guiding the Fury onto side streets, along a row of gates and low-hanging trees. Each home was more brightly spotlit than the last, security systems gleaming like the metal teeth of cybernetic dogs. Look, the neighborhood whispered, but don’t think you can ever be a part of what’s behind these gates.

The Cases’ home was dark, and an estate agent’s sign sat crookedly on the fence, faded by sun and wind.

Jack wasn’t surprised—even if you weren’t psychic, who wanted to live in a murder house? The Black had an effect on mundane sorts, too, except they wrote it off to “intuition,” or bad dreams, or Jesus appearing in their cereal.

Pete eased the Fury to the curb and shut off the lights. Jack got out and examined the gate. The alarm was a good one, but the estate agent’s key box gave him an in. He passed his fingers across the slot and whispered a few words of persuasion he’d picked up long ago, when his talent was primarily aimed at breaking into places and nicking things. The box popped, and he found the alarm code and a front door key in his palm.

Locks were his faithful lady—he and locks understood one another, and they understood his talent. Now if he could just get his sight to mind, he’d be ahead of the game. But you were never really ahead—look over your shoulder and you’d see the hounds snapping at your heels.

Sprinklers hissed on as he and Pete crested the walk, wafting the scent of something sweet and earthbound through the air. The Case house wasn’t a screaming void like the Herreras’, but there was a dome of oppressive air over the low, rambling stucco palace, a prick of chill in the warm night that warned anyone with a modicum of talent to turn the fuck around and run.

Pete wriggled her shoulders inside her cotton jacket. “Spooky, isn’t it?” she said.

“That’s one word for it,” Jack said. He tried the key, and after a bit of a struggle the door popped open. The air inside was stale, recycled by central air. The crime scene cleaners had done a good job of scrubbing blood out of the marble entry, but it wavered as silver film on Jack’s sight, luminous over the walls and floors.

He let the silver streaks guide them, through a media room with a giant blank screen taking up an entire wall, and into a kitchen roughly the size of two of his flat back to back. The pain and misery were much more ingrained here, in the walls and wood and bones of the house. Nobody who lived here would ever feel truly settled again.

The largest streak of psychic residue lay across the counters and floor, a great swath where Mrs. Case had met her end.

“There’s the pet door,” Pete said. The door led to a patio, which ended at a swimming pool lit from beneath the water. With Jack’s sight, the water turned black and bottomless, the light shading to orange and then red. A trail wandered from the back fence, across the patio, to the door, and when he looked it was gone.

Jack blinked. Something that could erase its psychic trail—that sounded like the sort of thing Belial was after. He took a breath in, and let his sight open up, and allowed the oppressive atmosphere of the murder house to overwhelm him.

He saw the blood, saw the wavering lines of pain from where the Case woman and her child had lain in their last moments, but he shoved it aside like cobwebs. The trail wavered, through the pet door and across the tiles, stopping over the silvery pool of spectral blood.

It blinked in and out, a line of white little more than smoke, curling and wavering back on itself. Jack tried to focus his eyes, but doing so produced the familiar spike between his eyes. Look too hard, and the sight would pulverize the parts of his brain that he cared about, leaving him a turnip with interesting dreams.

Just a little more, he begged. The smoke wafted over the back wall of the Case house, down into the light-studded blackness of a canyon. Jack heard a faint whisper, nothing he could make out, and then his sight flared, the smoke twirling into a spiral, swirling around him and down his throat, choking him.

He came back to himself to find that his nose was dripping blood, gleaming black droplets on the Cases’ countertop. Pete sighed and wiped it up with her sleeve. “You think you could manage not to leave your DNA all over everything, genius?”

“Sorry,” he muttered. For the moment, he left aside thinking about what could set a trap for any psychic who might try to follow it, keep it on for years after the fact, and burn out every trace of its presence. Right then, breathing was enough of a headache. “You were right,” he told Pete.

“What is it?” Pete said. Jack thought about the smoke, trailing through his sinuses, burning with that ashes-and-dust scent that he recognized from his dreams. The scent of the wind in Hell. Belial’s missing nightmare was definitely the nasty git who’d hacked up the Case family.

Jack rubbed his forehead. His headache in the morning was going to be a thing of epics. “Something that doesn’t appreciate me sniffing after it, that much is certain.”

The creature had done a good job—it had left only a burn scar on the Black around the Case house. Nothing Jack could probe further, unless he relished his brain leaking out. But it hadn’t disappeared into thin air. It was a thing, with a form and a body, a thing that had to hide its passage, because otherwise any psychic worth his bad dreams would know it for what it was.

Pete tensed as a car passed on the street, headlights sweeping down the hall from the foyer. “Our luck’s probably up,” she said. “We should get out of here.”

Jack waited until he was back in the Fury to punch the dash, leaving a crack in the veneer.

“Oi!” Pete said. “I have to return this in pristine condition, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, my fault,” Jack muttered. “You can tell Sal that Christine did it.”

“What’s your problem all of a sudden?” Pete demanded. “Throwing a tantrum isn’t going to get anything done.”

His knuckles were bleeding, and Jack swiped them against his jeans. Pete made a fair point. “With a ghost or a demon, I can track it or summon it, find its true name and compel it to appear. But all I’ve got now is ashes.” Belial’s boogeyman thought it was smarter than him, and Jack didn’t like creatures that thought that.

“I’m just a little frustrated, and I very much want to nail this bastard to the wall and be free to be on my way,” he told Pete.

“We, you mean,” Pete said. “Belial can act like I’m some shrinking flower, but I made that deal and this is as much my mess as yours.” She started the Fury with a rumble and pulled away. “We’ll nail him, and then you can go right back to your sordid little magic lifestyle and we’ll no longer be a bother for you.”

“You know it won’t matter if I give it all up,” Jack said quietly. “Something will still come knocking.” He wished he could force Pete to believe him, by screaming or shaking her or any other way, but he couldn’t, and trying to do so now was just burning daylight he could be using to finish Belial’s latest exercise in ant-farm sadism.

So he stayed quiet, and she stayed quiet, and things went on exactly as they’d been for months. Pete drove for a bit, until Jack couldn’t take the confined space and the wanting of a cigarette any longer. “Let me out here, yeah?” he asked Pete. She braked and gave him a stare.

“Why?”

“Need to walk a bit,” Jack said.

“Right,” Pete said, but she let him get out of the car without anything further. “See you back at Mayhew’s?” she called.

“Maybe,” Jack said. Dealing with Mayhew again was somewhere on his list of activities after letting a ferret chew on his balls, but he didn’t want to give Pete more problems.

She followed him for a few feet before pulling back into traffic. Jack stopped on a corner and lit a cigarette. He was on Hollywood Boulevard, near an on-ramp to the 101 freeway. At night, the low cinderblock buildings were mostly dark and gated. A pair of hobos dozed in a doorway, cradling their paper-wrapped bottles close. “Hey, brother,” one said. “How about a few bucks?”

“Sorry,” Jack told him. “Not from around here.”

“Then how ’bout a smoke?” the other said. Jack sighed and handed over the rest of his pack.

“God bless you,” the hobo said, snaking the fags inside his jacket faster than a stage magician.

“He’s got fuck-all to do with this, hasn’t he?” Jack said, walking on. He clocked the shadow half a block down, along a dark section of unoccupied storefront. Cars swooped past, but the streetlamp above was burnt out, creating a slice of dark perfect to pull someone close and stick a knife in their kidney.

Jack slowed his steps a little at a time, then stopped and dropped his cigarette, crushing it under the toe of his boot.

The shadow was silent, just a ripple in the psychic airflow, but it was there, hanging back and taking its time. Jack spread his arms. “I haven’t got all night,” he said. “Come on out, then.”

Sliver melted from the shadow of the storefront. “They said you were good. That’s just spooky, though.”

“Says the shadow-walking wraith to the mage with bad knees,” Jack said. “’M not that good. Maybe you’re just crap at this spy gig, you ever think of that?”

Sliver looked at his feet. “I wasn’t going to actually kill you.”

“What a comfort,” Jack said. He didn’t try to throw a curse on the wraith. That would only slag Sliver off. He could turn tail and run, or cut down the alley to the next street, but if a wraith really wanted to catch up with you, it could have a hand inside your ribcage before you could draw your last breath.

“This is all Mayhew’s fault,” Sliver said. “He brought you here.”

“Yeah, it was pretty fucking convenient that you wanted to be my best friend back at your bar,” Jack said. “But I thought maybe you just fancied me.”

Sliver looked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, studying each pool of light and neon sign, silver eyes reflecting like pools of oil. “I don’t know who wants you dead, Jack, but they reached out.”

“Lots of folks want that,” Jack said. “Too many to list.”

“Nobody has that kind of influence in this city,” Sliver said. “Not anyone who followed you. But these people do. They’re tossing around threats and cash like it’s Mardi Gras.”

“How mysterious,” Jack said. Sliver fell into step beside him when he started walking again.

“I was just keeping an eye on you,” the wraith said. “There’s a lot of mean and hungry bastards in this city who wouldn’t think twice about erasing you for the kind of things these dudes are offering.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I banged a stick against somebody’s cage,” Jack shrugged.

Sliver blended with the shadows for a moment, then reemerged. “You need to watch your ass,” he said. “This isn’t merry England. The Black here, this is the Wild fucking West. And you’re stomping around in those big boots of yours across the top of everyone’s bridge.”

Jack thought about what Pete’s father, a detective inspector with bad lungs and a worse temper, had once told her. “When somebody tries to kill you, means you’re getting somewhere,” Jack said to Sliver.

“And are you?” the wraith said. “Getting anywhere?”

“No, not really,” Jack said. The missing trail of the thing that had murdered the Cases dogged at him, though he tried to ignore the obvious solution. That would open him up to all kinds of nasty things, lay his mind bare and at the mercy of his sight. He could go catatonic and never come back if he did what most psychics would do in this situation. But he wasn’t most. A mage with the sight was a time bomb as it was, without inviting the entire world of the dead inside his skull.

“Then what?” the wraith asked. “You’re going to wander around Hollywood waiting to get offed?”

Jack shook his head. “No, I do have one idea.” A stupid idea, but the only one, as was usually the way with him. “You know where I can find somebody who deals esoterica around here?” he said.

“Yeah,” Shiver said. “There’s a shop on Cahuenga that I’d trust to sell, and not drop a dime on you after you leave.”

“You want to get off me bad side, take me there,” Jack said, and tried to ignore the prickle on the back of his neck while Sliver walked them to his car. The feeling that he might have just had his last stupid idea, and the fear of what he was going to have to see. When he’d been shooting heroin, it had kept the fear at bay, along with everything else. Now there was nothing—a few tattoos to keep him from going completely around the bend when his visions kicked in, but beyond that, there was his sight and the void it looked into.

Sliver’s car was roughly the same vintage as Pete’s loaner, but dented on every sharp edge and pocked with rusted continents floating in a primer-colored sea. “It’s a piece of shit, I know,” Sliver said, “but who’d steal it?”

“Fair enough,” Jack said. A spring poked out from the upholstery and into the small of his back. They drove east, and Shiver pointed out a bridge across a concrete trough. “That’s the LA river,” he said. “Site of one million movie car chases.” He jerked his thumb at the ironworks lamps flashing by. “The bridge is famous too. Fourth Street Bridge. Look it up.”

“What is this city’s obsession with the movies?” Jack demanded. “Every bloody person I’ve met had some precious anecdote about the silver fucking screen.”

“Before the movies, this place was mostly orange groves, train tracks, and a few shitty apartment buildings,” Sliver said. “Not a lot of real history, so we take ours from films.” The shadows under the bridge rippled as they passed, and Sliver pointed ahead. “This is East LA. Badass neighborhood, my girl lives in, too. Don’t wander around here on your own.”

A few more turns, and Sliver pulled up in front of a bodega, saints’ candles lining the window. “Just tell the old lady I sent you,” he said.

“Cheers,” Jack said. The shop wasn’t anything special—graffiti covered one of the front windows and the door was bright red, but he could feel the protection hexes vibrating from the sidewalk. Somebody who knew what they were doing had put a tight net over the whole building, and Jack got the distinct feeling he wasn’t welcome. Not that it had ever stopped him. He pushed open the door and a bell jangled to announce him.

The front of the shop was crammed with dusty junk, rosaries and bundles of sage, more candles, prayer cards, and plaques of the Virgin and the crucifixion dangling from the ceiling. Most esoterica dealers had this sort of window dressing, to discourage the daylight world in general from looking too closely. What was true in porn shops was also true for magic shops—the good stuff was behind the curtain.

Jack pushed the red glass beads aside, setting up a clatter, and found himself in an even more claustrophobic back room. A small circle on the floor was painted with a veve, to a loa Jack wasn’t familiar with, but the white paint was far less engaging than the woman behind the pile of wooden crates serving as a counter.

“Well,” she said, setting down her magazine. “Look at you.”

Jack flashed her a smile. Charming women wasn’t any harder than picking a recalcitrant lock—it just took a little time and a light touch. And working on the assumption that his mark went for scars, leather, and tattoos. The girl behind the counter returned his smile.

“Don’t get offended, but how the fuck did you get in here? This shop is reserved for select customers.”

“Didn’t see a doorman,” Jack said. He leaned on the counter, pulling her into the radius of his smile while skimming the surface of her talent. It was there, strong and bloodred. “So explain something to me,” he said, gesturing around the room. “Your select customers, they all vaudaun, into Santeria, and advocates of Santa Muerte at the same time? Because that’d get a touch confusing, speaking for myself.”

“We specialize,” said the girl. “We don’t discriminate.”

“Brilliant,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “And you are?”

She looked at his hand, looked at him, smiled with an expression that could razor flesh. “Out of your league.”

Jack retracted the hand. “My favorite kind.” She wasn’t touching him, so she was either being smart or really did think she was too gorgeous to be believed. She was, at that—long dark hair twisted in a rope with red ribbon, gleaming skin. She could be one of the saints pasted onto the sides of the candle holders, lit from within by a flame.

“Bloke who sent me here said you’d be old,” Jack said. “Glad to see he was wrong.”

“Maybe I am old,” the girl said. “Maybe I’m a wicked witch, sent to lure you into my candy house before I show you my true face.”

Jack shrugged. “There are worse ways to go.”

“Well, you’re not Santeria or vaudaun,” said the girl, abruptly shifting from smiling shopkeeper to sharp-eyed avatar. “Death worshipper? Following the saint of killers?”

“Death more sticks out its foot and trips me if I try and follow it,” Jack said. The girl tilted her head, and then she reached across the counter and snatched his hand in a parody of their aborted handshake.

Jack got a strong, dark pulse, from his throat down to his cock—bodies piled in trenches, blood running through dirty gutters while wild dogs fought over meat, hollow-eyed men walking dusty streets with guns in their hands and speed in their blood. Skinless corpses dangling from balcony rails while the crows gathered on the roofline. Always the crows, their caws echoing in his skull.

“You don’t worship death,” the girl said. “But it sticks to you all the same. It’s under your skin.”

Jack yanked his hand away. His heart and his head both throbbed. “I’m spoken for, luv,” he said. “Death already has her claws in me, so get in line.”

The girl laughed. “I don’t want you, crow-mage. I’m Death from the dirt and the desert, not some rainy little shithole of an island.” She settled back on her stool. “Now, what can I do for you?”

Jack decided not to ask why a death avatar was running a shitty bodega in a bad part of LA. He’d seen stranger things—and in the last day, at that. “I need to read a crime scene,” he said. “Psychically. I suppose I need a censer, and the stuff to put me under.”

“Trancing out at a murder site,” said the girl, and grinned. “All you psychics decide to live on the edge lately?”

“All?” Jack said. She hopped off her stool and hurried around the room, getting an iron pot and tossing packets of herbs into it, along with a few candles, a bindle of red thread, and a packet of children’s blackboard chalk.

“There was another pendejo in here about a week ago, wanted to trance at a crime scene.” She set the pot on the counter and rang Jack up on a cash register so old it had a crank handle.

“This wouldn’t happen to be a fat bastard in a Hawaiian shirt, would it?” Jack said.

“Nah,” said the girl. “We don’t get many white boys in here. I’d remember that.” She shoved the pot at him. “Six bucks for the candles and the chalk. Consider the rest a gift.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. The one thing he wanted even less than to owe a demon was to owe one of the Morrigan’s sisters in death and blood debts. “I’ll pay.”

“Oh, you will,” she agreed. “Just not today.”

Jack handed her a ten dollar bill—American money all looked like scraps of dishrag to him—and she made change. “Have fun,” the dead girl told him, before picking her magazine back up.

CHAPTER 11

Pete thought he was insane, and told him so, and he didn’t disagree with her. Jack told her she didn’t have to go back to the Case house, and didn’t have to be a part of it at all.

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Pete snapped. “You swallow your tongue, who’s there to roll you on your side?”

The street was the same when they returned the next evening—quiet shadows broken up with barking dogs and hissing sprinklers. Jack set himself up in the kitchen, in the center of the bloodstain where Mrs. Case had kicked it. If he was going to be mad, he might as well go straight over the top.

“Need me for anything?” Pete said.

“Not unless I start choking on my own fluids,” Jack said. Pete peered out the windows.

“I see a private security car,” Pete said, as headlamps swept the room. “Haven’t seen any cops.”

Jack wasn’t worried about the police—all they could do was arrest you, whack you a few times in the skull with a stick, and send you on your way. He wasn’t at all worried about anything human that might happen.

He touched his lighter to the candles and drew a chalk sigil on the tiles—a sort of all-purpose Hey, let’s have a look sigil that psychics and seers used to boost the signal.

A trance reading wasn’t dangerous to a run-of-the-mill ghost-peeper. A psychic went under, they witnessed the murder via the psychic echoes, saw the dead’s sonar picture recorded for posterity on the site of their passing. They were just an observer, and when they came up they were able to tell the family that Aunt Mabel loved them and had skipped merrily into the light. Except his sight didn’t let him be only a observer. The dead were a tide, determined to suck him under and make him one of them, sooner or later. His gift from the Morrigan showed him death in vivid, screaming reality, and this would be no different.

He’d done a few trance readings when he was much younger and stupider, one of which had cumulated in the dead girl he’d called up sitting in the corner of a cheap hotel room in Dublin, watching him slice his wrists to finally, once and for all, make the visions and the whispers stop.

Permanently trapped in the replay of the Case murders, or Pete, and by extension the kid, on the wrong end of a deal with Belial? It wasn’t a hard fucking choice. Jack figured he was already half-crazy anyway.

“Find some matches.” he told Pete. He dumped the herbs into the iron pot and sat in front of them, rolling his jacket for his head in case he keeled over.

Pete handed him a blue box, and Jack lit a pair of matches, dropping them into the dry herbs. They lit with a crackle, curling into blackened ash, and smoke curled up, fragrant and overpowering. The back of Jack’s throat went sticky, but he forced himself to breathe the cloying stuff and let it fill his lungs.

Trances felt like a shitty high at first—none of the warm pool of smack, not even the pleasant fuzziness of pot. You floated, dizzy and sick to your stomach, and then out of the corner of your eyes, you noticed that you were no longer part of the world.

Jack’s head throbbed once as the smoke filtered into his brain, his sight opening wide and straining to all corners of the Cases’ kitchen.

It was night, but not the same kind of soft night he’d come from. This was dark, lights glittering through the darkened door higher on the hill. One by one, the faraway lights blinked out, until only the glow of the pool and the digital clock on the Cases’ oven gave light.

Jack stood up, although the small, remote part of his mind that wasn’t fucked up beyond recognition knew that he was likely sprawled on the tile floor.

The darkness became absolute, rolling through the crystal water of the pool like a cloud of blood.

Jack kept his eyes on the back wall, where the trail had been, the erasure of something ripping through the Black that floated over the Case house like a bleak fog. Even before the murders, this hadn’t been a happy home.

After a time, a figure appeared at the back wall. It was human, Jack supposed, if you were loose about the definition. The limbs were long, ragged with extra skin, sores popping out all over wrinkled skin. A pair of tattered suit pants were barely holding on to starved hip bones. The thing had a beard, long and hiding a hollow-cheeked face, and burning eyes fixed on the pet door.

The thing wriggled through like a worm, bones rippling under the sagging skin. It turned and stared directly at him, but Jack held his ground. It wasn’t real, just an echo, replaying for his sight like a tattoo needle going over and over a piece of skin.

He watched as the man—it had been a man, once, before whatever was inside the skin had hollowed it out—went to the knife block sitting on the kitchen island. It pulled out the largest blade, silver-handled and gleaming in the low light, and then reached out and grabbed a bowl of oranges and lemons with a hand ragged and bleeding, nails cracked and brown. It flung the bowl at the tiles, and then it stood, ragged chest rising and falling, until a light flared from the hallway and Mrs. Case appeared.

In the trance, she flickered, almost transparent. Her echo was much fainter, and with a few decades or a good cleansing of the house by a practitioner, it’d be gone entirely.

She didn’t see the thing waiting for her. Never saw Death spread its wings and dive. She waddled into the kitchen and saw the bowl. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Underwater whispers, barely a voice. “Badger, did you get on the counter again?”

Badger must be the mutt. Jack hoped for the furry rat’s own sake he’d clocked the thing waiting for his mistress as something not to be fucked with, and stayed away.

“Badger?” Mrs. Case bent her knees with difficulty, pregnant belly swelling under her robe, and started picking up the glass shards. “Goddamn dog,” she muttered.

The thing moved then, behind her, pressing the knife against her neck and wrapping its free arm across her breasts. It whispered something to her that Jack didn’t catch, but Mrs. Case went limp, and the thing laid her out in the spot that Jack’s body occupied in real time.

It pointed the knife at Mrs. Case. “Tape.”

She was shaking, eyes filling with tears. “Drawer by the sink. Please don’t…”

“Shut up, bitch.” The thing had an ancient smoker’s rasp for a voice, gravel and phlegm rattling in its chest. It hacked and spat a gob of something on the tiles.

Mrs. Case’s eyes roved around the dark kitchen, lighting on the glass shards. While the thing turned its back, she reached for one, but it lay out of her grasp. She clasped her hands over her stomach again, shaking uncontrollably. “What do you want?”

The thing turned back with a roll of packing tape. It bound her wrists and slapped a piece over her mouth. “I told you to shut up.”

It finished taping up Mrs. Case and then turned, nostrils flaring and burning eyes widening.

“Honey?” It’d be Mr. Case, coming to save the day.

Jack watched, following in the wake of the thing, as it met Mr. Case just over the threshold. Quick, brutal jabs, knife angled up, piercing vital things like lungs and heart and stomach. Mr. Case gurgled, and the thing stepped back and drew the knife across his throat in a slash. Blood hit the walls and floor, and pooled with startling speed.

The thing’s bare, knobby feet slicked in Mr. Case’s blood as it turned and focused its attention back on Mrs. Case. Her wide, marble-like eyes watched its every move. Jack did too. This was a predator wearing human skin. Belial’s vague scary story aside, Jack could see when something was not of the daylight world, when it crawled from the shadows to hunt and feed.

It crouched above Mrs. Case, and pulled her robe away with its half-rotted hands. She mewled under the tape, and thrashed as best she could, and Jack wanted to tell her not to bother. Mrs. Case was dead. She just hadn’t caught on yet.

Pushing up her pale blue nightgown, the thing let its palm rest on Mrs. Case’s belly. It grinned, and Jack saw teeth that were black and gums that oozed rot. He couldn’t begin to guess what shape the body had been in before the passenger had climbed inside, but it was falling apart faster than an imitation handbag.

“You had to know it would be this way,” the thing told Mrs. Case. “You had to know you don’t turn your back on something like this once you’ve agreed to it.” He peeled back the tape and cocked his head. “Got anything to say for yourself, you lying whore?”

“I didn’t agree to this,” Mrs. Case gasped. “I didn’t agree to … you…” She trailed off, sobbing too hard to get any words out. The thing slapped the tape back over her mouth, and even though he was less than a ghost here, Jack crouched by her head. He needed to look into the thing’s face, try to see what was behind the eyes.

Mrs. Case jerked as the thing placed the knife against her stomach, screaming behind the tape, strangled and animal-like. She sounded like a pig hanging in a slaughterhouse rather than a person, and the thing laughed. “We all pay our debts, kiddo,” it said. “One way or another, blood or money, we all pay. You, me, everyone.”

Mrs. Case tried to speak through the tape, but the knife went in, and the thing drew the blade across the curve of her belly in one economical motion. Jack watched, not wanting to blink, as the thing went about its work, cutting the child from Mrs. Case and holding the slick, still body in its palms.

Mrs. Case’s eyelids fluttered, but her fingers flexed as she reached for the child. Jack gave her full credit—even hacked to bits, she was a tough bird.

The thing wiped the blood and amniotic fluids away from the baby’s mouth and nose with a ragged fingertip, and then breathed into the tiny mouth until the child wailed.

Jack reached out reflexively, but it was like being stuck in one of those dreams where you couldn’t move your own limbs. The Case baby wasn’t dead—the thing had cut it out of its mother and breathed life into it. “Why?” Jack said. “What could you possibly want with a fucking baby?”

The thing wrapped the baby in Mrs. Case’s bathrobe while it squalled, setting it almost gently on the tile floor, and then stood over Mrs. Case while she stared at it, her eyes glassy and fixed.

“Consider us squared,” it said, and then leaned down and jabbed the knife into the hollow of Mrs. Case’s throat, twisting until blood flowed in small rivers down her neck. Her body was a ruin, and she lasted not even one more sucking breath before she went still.

The thing picked up the baby, and Jack waited. He’d been prepared for a dead kid, something small that could be left in a canyon for coyotes and other scavengers to devour. He’d been prepared for the sort of thing that considered child-flesh a rarified taste, or your basic sick human bastard who got his rocks off on killing a mother and her unborn baby.

But if it was keeping the child alive, that opened up a host of worse things. There were far blacker fates for children who stayed alive in the grasp of something like this creature. Jack felt his stomach knot, even though he didn’t really have a stomach in the vision. He was at the end—the smoke was wearing off and soon he’d be back, vomiting his guts into the Cases’ kitchen sink.

He tried to follow the thing, but the cold-water feeling was still there, and every step was agony.

At the door, the thing turned back to Jack, and locked eyes with him for the first time. “I see you,” it rasped. “But you don’t see me. Not really. You don’t have any idea what I am.” It laughed, and Jack couldn’t do a damn thing. He watched the creature, with the Cases’ child, disappear back over the wall. It laughed the entire time.

The eyes were bottomless. Demons riding human bodies had glassy, flat eyes—dead man’s eyes. These were alive, horribly so, a forest fire ravaging its human shell.

I see you.

A tremor went through Jack, unbidden, as he started to back himself off the vision, shut down the ebb and flow of the Black that washed across his mind, and try and make reentry into the real world.

They were just echoes, a memory that lived and breathed. The creature couldn’t see Jack any more than he could reach out and touch it, ten years past. Couldn’t. But had.

“Jack?”

Pete helped him sit up, and Jack tried to push down the wave of nausea. He’d managed to shoot smack for close to a dozen years without puking on everything. He could handle one bad trip.

“Fuck,” he said. His head was throbbing like a skinhead had taken a brick to it, and his upper lip was slick with cooled blood. The echos still vibrated in the Case house, like listening to faraway klaxons.

“You all right?” Pete handed him a wad of paper towels, and Jack shoved it under his nose.

“’M fine.” It came out muffled. His tongue was thick and dry from inhaling the smoke, and his chest felt like he had sucked down a tongue of flame.

“You’re a blood-coated mess, is what you are,” Pete said. She dumped the herbs from the pot into the sink and ran water on them.

“I’m a blood-coated mess who saw some real interesting stuff while he was under,” Jack said. The sky outside was creeping toward pink-gray, and he rubbed his face. “How long was I under?”

“A while,” Pete said. “I think we should go. Been here long enough to make people suspicious.”

Jack collected his kit and shoved it back into his sack, then followed Pete out the front door. On the sidewalk, a female jogger wearing tight hot pink leggings slowed down to stare at them. Jack nodded and flashed her a smile. “Morning, luv.”

She didn’t return it, but she sped up again and didn’t reach for her mobile to call the police down on the freakish British axe murderer squatting in the vacant mansion next door.

Jack watched her pert pink ass bounce away around the corner, and then tossed his kit into the back seat of the Fury. “Can we get some breakfast? I’m knackered.”

“Yeah, and I’m constantly starved,” Pete said. “Always thought that eating for two was crap, but I’d lick the paint off the bloody car, at the moment.”

They drove south along the 405 freeway. Traffic was already packed in, but it moved, and Pete jumped off near Venice. Jack saw the black sport utility vehicle come behind them, neither too close nor too far away, lights off even though it was barely light enough to read street signs.

“Pete,” he said, and pointed into his side mirror.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I see ’em.”

The van followed them through a pair of turns and onto Venice Beach Boulevard, the only light coming from a coffee stand. Nobody was on the street except for dozing bums. No witnesses to bother whoever was following them around.

“All right,” Pete said. “Hold on.” She jerked the wheel and the Fury fishtailed onto a side street, laying a thick strip of rubber.

Jack slammed against the passenger door. The handle caught him sharply in the ribs, and he grabbed it to avoid being tossed around like a doll.

The SUV came screeching after them, and Pete cursed. “They know what they’re doing. And I don’t know these fucking streets.”

In London, Pete would be able to lose a tail, either in the maze of pre-automobile streets in the city center or in the myriad one-way roads of Hampstead. Here, though, she wasn’t able to shake the black car. Jack winced as the Fury nipped a curb, undercarriage scraping.

“Slow down up here,” he said, as Pete steered them into a back alley behind a row of bungalows. She gripped the wheel, knuckles pale.

“What are you going to do?”

“Just don’t worry about me,” Jack told her. “I’ll be fine.”

“Jack…” she started, but he shoved open the door and dropped out, pavement rushing up.

The trick was to let yourself fall—ball up your head to protect it, and let yourself go limp. Your body will absorb the impact. You tense up, you try to fight the falling, and you’ll break, smash your bones against the pavement, and end up roadkill.

Jack tucked his head down, gravel and shards of broken bottles raking his arms, and rolled to a stop amid a collection of bins. The SUV jerked to a stop, and a pair of legs emerged. Jack stayed where he was, letting his heart slow down and feeling himself over to make sure nothing vital had broken in the fall. He could still wiggle all his fingers and toes. The road rash would heal. All in all, not the worst landing he’d experienced.

One pair of legs was clad in black denim and boots with flat, rounded toes, the kind specifically made for kicking seven kinds of shit out of a person. A second joined them, sporting a pair of alligator shoes and blue slacks that came to a stop above knobby ankles.

“Nice tuck and roll, brother,” said Alligator. “Didn’t need it, though. Just wanted to talk at you for a minute.”

“You always chase down blokes you want to speak with in a spook car?” Jack asked.

Shitkicker drew back his foot and drove it once into Jack’s abdomen. It was a strong, enthusiastic kick delivered by a man who enjoyed his work. Jack jerked, folding around the knot of bruise, and fought hard not to vomit. He had a feeling Alligator wouldn’t appreciate him redecorating his shoes.

“He said he talks, not you,” said Shitkicker, and drew back.

“Jesus, Parker,” said Alligator. “We need him not pissing his own blood, you stupid piece a’ shit. Slow your roll, all right?”

There was a click as Parker lit a cigarette, and Alligator leaned down into Jack’s vision. “Howdy,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“Piss off.” Jack sat up. His guts rolled back and forth. The seasick throbbing in his skull would fade, eventually, but it wasn’t helping him any.

“’Fraid not, partner,” said Alligator. “We all need to have a chat.”

Jack tried sitting up, which wasn’t a day at the park, but he managed it. Standing was a little easier. “I don’t talk to flash gits who chase me down and knock me around,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint, but you’ll be deprived of my sparkling wit and charm.”

Parker, the big one, snorted. He blew smoke from his butt into Jack’s face and looked at Alligator. “We gotta listen to him yap?”

“We’re not kidnapping him, for fuck’s sake,” Alligator said. “He’s a guest.”

“A guest of what?” Jack calculated that there was no way he could break for the end of the alley, not unless he wanted the bulge under Parker’s leather jacket to materialize into a pistol. For now, he’d have to have Alligator’s little chat.

“Come on, now,” Alligator said. “Get in the car.”

“Sure,” Jack said. “Got nothing better to do than run off with strangers on mysterious errands.”

Jack had to admit he was curious—the person who’d bought the trance herbs from the dead girl in the bodega would be the one wanting to talk, he’d wager, and he wanted to see exactly what they were about. He wouldn’t put it past Belial to use competing mages to get his job done, not one bit. And if Jack failed, Belial would have an excuse to void his bargain with Pete, and keep his claws in her for who knew how long. These two didn’t seem to want to bash his skull in just yet, so he could play their game and see what they really had in store for him.

“You ain’t what I expected,” Alligator said, sliding into the back seat of the idling SUV after Jack and boxing him against the door. “Heard you was a USDA Grade-A choice badass, and look at you. You couldn’t hardly swat a fly.”

Parker gunned the engine into a U-turn and Jack watched the morning, tinted by the SUV’s black glass, roll past. “So now that I’ve disappointed you, where are we going?”

Alligator grinned, displaying one front tooth rimmed in gold, and the rest a startling shade of two-pack-a-day brown. “Now, Jackie. If I told you that, it wouldn’t be a surprise.”