Soul Trade

1.

Pete Caldecott sat on a tombstone, watching fog curl soft fingers against the graveyard earth and waiting for Mickey Martin’s ghost to appear.

Mickey Martin hadn’t always been a ghost, and before a hail of constable’s bullets had snuffed out his life in the winter of 1844, he’d managed to slit the throats of thirteen women.

Murderers weren’t supposed to be buried on consecrated ground, but with a bribe to the right vicar, Mickey Martin’s admirers made sure he got a proper burial. Even razor-wielding serial killers had their fans.

Mickey Martin professed to be a man of God, ridding the earth of wickedness, and in the poverty-stricken world of Victorian London, a bloke who went about slashing prostitutes and charwomen was looked on not as a monster, but as an avenging angel, cleaning the mud-choked streets of the East End of their filth.

Pete wasn’t usually the one who sat in chilly graveyards, waiting for the dead. Usually, that was Jack’s job. But Jack, the one who could see the dead with his second sight, the one who had all the talent when it came to disposing of the unnatural that crawled under cover of night in London, wanted nothing to do with the Mickey Martin business. Or, if Pete was honest, with much of anything lately.

She could have put her foot down, demanded that Jack be the one to take this on, but that would bring on a row, and she’d had her fill of those for this lifetime and possibly the next. Sitting alone in a graveyard at nearly midnight didn’t bother her overmuch. It wasn’t like she’d be getting any sleep at home, between Lily’s erratic schedule and Jack’s ever-present foul mood.

Still, she wished she could chuck it in and go home, sit down in front of the telly with Lily and Jack, and pretend just for the span of a program or two that they were a regular sort of family. The sort where Mum and Dad occasionally got along, and neither of them had any special connection to the ghosts and magic that wound around the city as surely as the river and the rail lines.

Jack had said this job wasn’t worth their time when it had come in, but he said that about every routine exorcism. They weren’t flashy, but they usually paid, the victims too terrified to even consider stiffing the person who had made the big bad ghost go poof. And something had to put food on Pete and Jack’s table, to pay for Lily’s nappies and the expenses involved with living in London, which were considerable. If that was boring, shopworn exorcisms, so be it.

It wasn’t as if this particular ghost job had come from a disreputable source. PC Brandi Wolcott was a member of Pete’s old squad when she’d been on the Met, smart and hardworking, ambitious and driven. And now terrified, after a routine call had turned into a brush with Mickey Martin.

Pete had a reputation with such matters, whether she liked it or not. Everyone at her old squad in Camden knew she’d quit to go chase spooks and vapors. Or at least those were the rumors. The truth was a little more complicated. But trying to explain to coppers like PC Wolcott that if they just cared to look, from the corner of their eye, a part of London would reveal itself—a part made of magic and shadows, harboring creatures like Mickey Martin and far, far worse—would end with leather straps and lithium, and that wouldn’t help anyone.

“Caldecott.” Pete’s Bluetooth headset came to life, and she jumped. She cleared her throat before fishing her mobile from her overcoat. She didn’t want PC Wolcott to know she’d been drifting and not holding up her end of their two-person search team.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I’ve finished my perimeter sweep. Heading back your way.” Wolcott was out here on her own time, which Pete gave her credit for—though not more credit than she gave PC Wolcott for calling her in the first place. Ghost attacks against the living were rare and could usually be written off as muggings or bad trips, but something about this one had shaken Brandi Wolcott badly enough that she quietly went searching for an exorcist, and found Pete. Beyond that, she hadn’t said all that much, and Pete got the sense she was having second thoughts about the whole thing. You didn’t want to be the only PC who believed in ghosts.

Pete shoved her mobile back into her pocket and let her hands follow. October nights brought on the chill and the threat of winter to come, and the damp crept through her hair and her clothes, all the way to her skin. She could feel the gentle pulse of the Black, the other side that people like Wolcott chose not to see, like the vibration of a subterranean train under her feet. She was mostly used to it by now, but on nights like tonight, when it was silent and the hum of the city seemed miles away, it seeped in and knocked around her skull, almost as palpable as the fog.

Wolcott’s blonde head appeared, bobbing between the monuments. The churchyard was only a hundred meters from end to end, but it was crammed full of headstones and obelisks, with far more bodies than there were stones below Pete’s boots. London suffered from too many dead and too little space, and before great swaths of green were cordoned off for burying by the later Victorians, the dead resided wherever there was room—in churchyards, under the church floorboards, in shallow pits that fouled the air and drew in the Black like a magnetic field.

“Christ, this weather,” Wolcott said. Her bronze skin, painted on rather than earned under the sun, was as brassy as her hair. In her off-hours, Wolcott favored skintight satin pants, loud prints, earrings large enough to use as handcuffs, and makeup by the pound. But she was bright and had nerves of steel, and Pete was glad she’d agreed to come.

“It’s going to piss down rain any moment,” Pete agreed. She gestured toward a large winged angel, the biggest monument in the churchyard. “Can you take me through it again? What happened the other night?”

“Sure.” Wolcott shrugged. “Station got a call from the vicar about half-twelve and I came around. Said there were lights out in the churchyard. Figured it was some hoodies pissing about, thought nothing of it.” She walked a few paces, staring up at the angel. Its stone eyes were blacked over with moss, and the ghostly marks of old graffiti wrapped like white vines around its base.

“I got about halfway into the yard when I heard this sound,” Wolcott said softly. “This low sound, like a moaning. Still thought it were kids, so I pulled out my light and gave the order to show their smart little faces.”

The wind picked up, pushing leaves against Pete’s feet, and the fog flowed and rippled across the uneven ground as if it were alive and making a mad dash for the safety of the church. “But it wasn’t,” Pete encouraged the other woman. Wolcott flinched, as if she expected Pete to accuse her of making it all up, or simply laugh in her face.

“Brandi,” Pete said. She laid a hand on Wolcott’s nylon-clad arm. “I believe you. The more I know, the easier it’ll be for us to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The PC hunched inside her navy blue windcheater, and Pete saw then, up close under the sodium lights, that what she’d taken for reluctance was actually fear. Wolcott’s entire body was strung with it, as if she were a puppet on wires. Pete sucked in a deep lungful of damp, cold air. Whatever had happened here, it had been a lot worse than a ghost popping out of a mirror or a poltergeist flinging crockery.

Not for the first time that night, she cursed Jack and his stubborn refusal to do anything that wasn’t exactly in line with what he wanted.

Wolcott spoke again in a rush, voice rattling like the dead leaves all around. “I seen this shape hunched on the ground, and he were mumbling, over and over. It were Bible talk, I don’t know. I never did pay attention in church.”

“‘Behold, I am coming soon. I have my reward with me and I shall give to everyone according to what he has done,’” Pete said. That had been Mickey Martin’s favorite passage to quote in his letters to the various tabloids and one-sheets of the day.

Wolcott’s nose wrinkled. “Yeah, that. Street-corner nutter ramblings, I thought.”

“It’s Revelation,” Pete said. “The handbook of all street-corner nutters.”

“You some kind of brain, then?” Wolcott asked, clearly glad to have the subject diverted from what she’d seen.

“No,” Pete said. “Just a very poor sort of Catholic.”

“Was about to ask,” said Wolcott. “Don’t see many Catholics mucking about with the dark arts.”

“You saw the man and then what?” Pete prompted, deciding that the lecture on black magic versus exorcism could wait for another day.

“I told him the churchyard was closed and he’d have to move along,” said Wolcott, “and then he just … he looked at me, and I can’t describe it. Had dead black eyes, bleeding onto his face. Such deep holes. Felt like I was falling, and then the cold was all around, and he…” Wolcott swallowed, her voice trembling along with the rising energies of the Black.

Pete scratched at the back of her neck. The feelings picking at the part of her mind connected to magic were bloody active, even for a graveyard. Then again, not all graveyards boasted their very own serial killer.

“He came for me,” Wolcott said. “Straight through the headstones, like he were made of smoke. And he grabbed for me, his hand went through my stab vest, and it was as if…” She shuddered. “He knew me. Could see every wicked thing I’d done, and was going to burn me up from the inside.”

“I know it must have been terrible for you,” Pete said. “If it makes you feel better—six other people have had the same thing happen over the last six months.”

“Shit,” Wolcott muttered, but her shoulders relaxed a fraction. Pete figured knowing it wasn’t just her might help settle Wolcott’s nerves—not that it did much for her own tingling hands and jumping heart. The churchyard had been silent for decades until the first terrified woman had called 999 from the pub across the road, and Pete had an idea why Mickey Martin was up and about again—when she and Jack had stopped the primordial demon, Nergal, from ripping his way into the daylight world, it had rippled out and touched everything in the city. Every ghost, every lesser demon, every scrap and snip of magic-having life in London had felt the effects. And now they were awake, and hungry.

At least Pete could put Mickey Martin in his place. The larger aftermath of Nergal and his brethren would just have to sort itself out.

“You’re nicer about it than my DCI, but you still probably think I’m crazy,” Wolcott mumbled, leaning against the monument. “Everybody else does.”

“Crazy’s not the word I’d use,” Pete said. Wolcott, too, represented a problem—when the Black echoed like a rung bell as Nergal and the other four primordial demons tried to break out of the prison the Princes of Hell had erected for them millennia ago, all of the citizens of both daylight London and the Black beneath with the slightest bit of sensitivity got a jolt like grabbing a high-tension cable.

For psychics like Jack it meant more sleepless nights, more waking visions, and more barrages from the dead and the living alike. For people like Wolcott, who would have never known she possessed the slightest bit of talent under normal circumstances, it led to nights like this.

It wasn’t Pete’s problem. Her problem was Mickey Martin and his recently reacquired hobby of murdering those he considered wicked.

“You don’t seem so looney,” Wolcott observed. “From what they say around the station, I was expecting Stevie Nicks.”

“I thought I’d leave my scarves and tarot at home, yeah,” Pete agreed. She ignored the implication that apparently the longer she was gone from the Met, the more of a moony-eyed hippie type she became in common legend.

“Never liked stakeouts,” Wolcott said. “Bloody boredom sets in quick, don’t it?” She scraped a fingernail against the moss on the monument. “How’d you cope, when you was a DI?”

Pete’s head started to throb, though she didn’t know if it was from a lack of coffee, the cold, or Wolcott’s persistent questions. She shouldn’t be mad at the PC—Wolcott was just trying to distract herself from her nerves.

She did the same, counting headstones, listening to the faint thump of music from the far-off pub, feeling the droplets of fog collect on her face and hair. The whispers of the graveyard had stilled, and even the mist held its place, covering the ground, the headstones, and the dead beneath. For a moment, it was as if the entire city of London held its breath—no music, no cars, no trains, not even the heartbeat of the rushing Thames.

Then the pain in Pete’s head spiked, and she knew the silence had only been a lull, not a finale.

From the stone behind Wolcott, the shadows began to seep and merge, moving of their own accord, against the light that gleamed from the vestry windows and the streetlamps beyond the confines of the churchyard. The monument gave birth to a dripping black shape that wavered from cohesive to vapor and back again, sliding through the pocked limestone like oil through water.

“Wolcott!” Pete shouted, but it was too late. The thing had Brandi by the throat and engulfed her, pouring into her eyes and nostrils and down her open gullet, choking her scream before it had a chance to be born.

“Shit,” Pete said, only able to watch as the ghost of Mickey Martin poured itself like black, oily water into a brand-new body. She’d only met a few ghosts that could do that, and none of them had anyone’s best interest in mind. Exorcisms were hard enough when you were only dealing with a vapor.

And yet, Pete thought as Brandi’s eyes clouded over with silver and she let out a choked moan, her limbs jerking and spasming as the ghost took control, it didn’t feel like a ghost. Pete wasn’t a psychic—that was Jack’s game—but ghosts felt like electricity, like lightning striking too close for comfort, like every ion in the room was awake and slamming against her skin. This was cold, and black, and bottomless, giving no sense that the thing inside Brandi Wolcott had ever been alive, never mind human.

The one thought pounding through her head over and over was that Jack would never have let this happen. He’d have known something was off, and been ready for this thing that was not a ghost.

Pete sidestepped as Brandi came for her, acrylic fingernails catching and ripping at the front of Pete’s overcoat. Jack would never have let this happen, but he wasn’t here, so she was just going to have to make do with her own wits. They’d served her well enough for thirty-one odd years; they’d do for a few more minutes.

Brandi came for her again. She was as fast and mean as a PCP addict, an inhuman sight with black energy spilling out of her eyes and her mouth, her face twisted in a grimace of perpetual agony.

Pete amended that. If she managed to survive the next few minutes, then she could figure out how to end this.

A headstone caught Pete at the knees and she fell, feeling her left arm twist under her, the ugly crunch of bone on stone resonating over Brandi’s ragged breathing and Pete’s own heartbeat.

“Aren’t you pretty,” Brandi growled in the guttural tones of East London. The voice of Mickey Martin, made rough and hot with hatred. “Pretty enough to turn heads.” Brandi crouched over Pete, inhaling deeply at the nexus of Pete’s neck and shoulder. “I can smell it on you,” Brandi intoned. “Wickedness. Sin. The filth of the streets dripping off your skin.” She grinned, black spilling over her tongue and down across Pete’s cheek. “Going to enjoy slicing you open and watching it all bleed out.”

Pete was glad Mickey Martin was a talker. It gave her time to plunge her hand into her opposite coat pocket and bring out her metal police baton. She tried to snap it open, but the bolt of lightning up her left arm told her that the plan was dead before it began. Her arm was sprained, at best. Shattered, at worst. Later. She could fix her arm later, when she was alive and away from here. Otherwise, they could arrange it in her casket so nobody would know. Either way, she had a more pressing problem.

Instead, she wrapped her good hand around Brandi Wolcott’s neck and squeezed. Ghosts riding bodies needed life, breath. They weren’t zombies, hunks of corpse revived by a necromancer. So Pete squeezed, with every ounce of strength left in her.

She expected that Mickey Martin would vacate Wolcott’s skin, and then she’d have a fighting chance to send him back to the Bleak Gates and the land of the dead beyond. She never expected the smoke pouring from Wolcott to wrap itself around her wrist and begin the slow crawl up her own arm.

Not again, Pete’s mind screamed. Not this.

She didn’t allow herself to give voice to the scream she felt bubbling up in her throat. When a nasty from beyond the beyond was bent on her flesh, panic was a luxury she didn’t have. She let the onslaught of the ghost’s form come, because it was better for her to be Mickey Martin’s victim than Wolcott. Wolcott didn’t know how to save herself.

“You think this’ll end well for you?” Brandi growled as the black smoke overtook Pete’s hands, her arms, crept toward her mouth and throat.

“Better than it will for you,” Pete rasped, as the first fingers of cold found their way over her tongue.

The ghost of Mickey Martin didn’t feel right, as it bled out of Brandi Wolcott in a flood and rushed up at Pete’s consciousness. It didn’t feel like a ghost; it just felt hungry, and cold.

This is wrong. Pete didn’t have to be a psychic or a professional exorcist to know when things had gone pear-shaped. She’d had a ghost try to take up residence in her skin once before, and it hadn’t felt like this, this … nothing, howling and trying to swallow her.

Brandi collapsed on top of Pete, choking, and Pete managed to wriggle out from under her and get herself upright. She was still tangled with Mickey Martin’s ghost—or the thing that had been his ghost. Pete knew that the regular exorcism that she’d planned would do less than shit. It might tickle this thing that had grown out of the ghost, or ruffle a few hairs, but that would be about it.

Then it would just be a matter of how many pieces she and Wolcott were found in, once someone noticed they were missing.

What would Jack do? Something stupid, likely, but as Pete felt the chill air against her face, felt the smoke creeping into her nostrils, she decided stupid was better than nothing.

Rather than fight the smoke any longer, she let it come. She might not have the sort of talent that let her throw fireballs or read minds, but she did have one. She felt the thing trying to move into her flesh, overpower her mind, and she welcomed it. Let it in until it touched her talent, and reared back with a scream.

“Oh no,” Pete told it, as the thing coalesced into a form, tall and skinnier than any man, with a mouth as wide as Pete’s two hands put together. “You wanted me, you have me.” She felt her talent wake up, begin to drain the cold from the thing, the malice and the hunger. It thrashed like a fish on a line, screaming now in pain rather than anticipation.

Pete recognized the thing now—a wraith, a personification of the hunger and the rage that were the dregs of a spirit. Wraiths consumed ghosts, fed until they’d burned through the spirit’s energy like a bad battery, and then moved on. Any humans that happened along would be found by an unfortunate passerby after they’d been wholly consumed, desiccated and frozen from the inside out.

This wraith, though, would never escape to feed on any of the other spirits that haunted the churchyard. This wraith belonged to her now, and she felt its cold magic seeping into her, as her talent drank the wraith down. It gave one final spasm before it detached from the battered shell of Mickey Martin’s ghost and scattered on the cold wind, wisps and faint trails and finally only the echo of its last howl against the headstones.

Pete felt her legs give out, and she sank to her knees in the rough dead grass at the base of the obelisk. Her fingers were blue, and her breath when she blew it out was frosty and opaque white. She could feel the wraith’s magic fluttering inside her like a dying bird, and she let it go. If she held it in too long, her talent would burn her from the inside out. It hadn’t been easy, to learn to let go of that dizzying high that came with sucking another being dry. That high was the ostensible upside of being a Weir, a channel for the darkest and oldest powers in the Black. Unlimited power, as much as you could steal—if you could hold it. Otherwise, you went insane when you hit the threshold and took too much of another’s power. Or simply burst a blood vessel and keeled over dead, because magic was more powerful than any narcotic, and your lust for it had eaten you alive.

Weirs didn’t usually last long. To make it to thirty-one was a feat, according to Jack. Most days, Pete wasn’t sure it was something to be proud of.

“Fuck, my head,” Brandi Wolcott groaned. “What happened, Pete? What was that?”

“Mickey Martin,” Pete said quietly. “Or what was left of him.” Wraiths were rare; it took a clever predator to survive by eating the innards out of ghosts, and London, while rife with spirits, was also rife with mages, exorcists, and psychics who ensured that predators like wraiths stayed where they belonged—in the vast screaming nothing where unfortunate lost souls could be consumed by any number of hungry things. They couldn’t usually fight their way out to attempt to make a meal out of flesh-and-blood people.

Pete supposed she was just lucky she’d been the one to get the full brunt of this wraith, rather than poor Wolcott or some unsuspecting priest or church worker.

“So it’s over?” Wolcott looked a bit mussed, but none the worse for wear. Most victims of possession never even knew it had happened. The mind glossed it over, a horror a regular person couldn’t contemplate.

“Yeah,” Pete said. Wolcott came and helped her up, and Pete bit down hard enough to draw blood when her arm spasmed again. “Fuck,” she hissed. She simply couldn’t be laid up right now—not only did she have more jobs booked over the coming weeks, but it was also going to be impossible to hold, feed, and change a baby with one working arm.

“You all right?” Wolcott’s alarmingly orange brow furrowed.

“I’ll manage,” Pete said. Wolcott considered for a moment, and then nodded.

“Right. I’m parked up on the high street. Should get on home, probably.” She started to walk away, then turned back. “He’s … it’s … that thing’s not … coming back, is it?”

“No,” Pete said. “That’s done with.”

“And those things he said to me … they’re not true.”

Pete shrugged, the last of her ability to sugarcoat gone. “I don’t know what he said to you, Wolcott. I can’t know if any of it was true.”

The constable’s mouth turned down at the edges, and she glared at Pete. “You know, them up in the squad was right about you.”

“What, that I’m a nutter?” Pete shrugged and immediately regretted it, feeling the twinge of battered tendons.

“No,” Wolcott said. “That you can be a bit of a bitch.” She made her way through the churchyard and out the gate, not looking back.

“No argument from me on that score,” Pete muttered, feeling for the keys to her battered red Mini Cooper. They’d fallen from her pocket in the struggle, along with her wallet and her mobile, scattered across the grass. Pete collected everything, and then gave a fresh yelp as she straightened up and almost bumped foreheads with a tall figure in a black coat and hat.

Her first thought was Shit, shit, shit as she braced herself to come face to face with a squad of witchfinders, the only sort of gits who favored the “Orson Welles circa The Third Man” look.

When the figures merely stood impassively, however, she got a second look. Their hat brims were pulled low, and what faces she could see had the corpselike pallor and waxy, unhealthy skin that normally only cropped up on zombies. Their mouths were free of red stitching, though, and the way they’d appeared out of thin air wasn’t terribly zombielike. Zombies were brutes, and they were generally no good at sneaking about.

“Petunia Caldecott,” said the leader. His voice didn’t make her name a question. The other four stared at her, motionless as the headstones all around.

Pete figured there was no point in arguing. “Yeah?”

The figure extended a hand. His fingers were long, the nails nonexistent, pulled out by the root, gnarled scar tissue in their place. Pete gingerly took the black envelope offered, being careful not to touch the thing. Skin-to-skin contact in the Black was often worse than grabbing a live wire—and there was plenty of black magic that could be passed with only a touch. After the scene with the wraith that ate Mickey Martin, she wasn’t about to take any more stupid chances tonight.

“You are cordially invited to attend the tenth full gathering of the Prometheus Club,” said the figure. His voice was oddly high and reedy, as if he were on the verge of having his vocal cords wriggle their way out through his throat.

“I … have no clue what you’re on about,” Pete said, holding the envelope by the corner. In any other place, on any other night, this would smack of bad live theater, but she was rattled enough not to antagonize the waxen men. There was something about their mannerisms and the way they’d just appeared out of thin air that hinted to Pete that they were dead serious.

“The patrons of the Prometheus Club do hope you will choose to attend, Weir,” said the lead figure.

“It took five of you to tell me that?” Pete asked, flicking her gaze quickly between the pale men. It wasn’t exactly a secret that she was a Weir, but those in the Black were usually a bit more circumspect about saying it to her face. She scared people, and she wished she didn’t, but the Weir was something to be afraid of. Hell, she was afraid of it.

“We are messengers,” said the lead figure. “We have delivered our message.”

“Yeah, well,” Pete said. “Tell your club to shove it. I don’t particularly cotton to shadowy errands, especially ones that come with an implied threat.”

“That is a pity,” said the figure, and he tilted his head so that Pete caught a bit more of his face and a flash of his eyes. Or where his eyes should have been. The thing didn’t have any sockets, just divots in the skull, covered over with that same waxy, unnatural flesh. Pete swallowed a roll of nausea. She’d seen worse. Crime scenes had been worse. She kept her face still. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t come face to face before with things that weren’t strictly human. Or strictly alive.

“I never considered it a pity to miss a fancy party full of twats who think scenes like this are funny,” she said.

“The penalty for refusing the Prometheus Club is dire,” said the figure. He gestured woodenly at the envelope still pinched between Pete’s fingers. “Would you care to reconsider?”

“No,” Pete said instantly. The type who’d send heavies for a simple invite were the type you wanted to avoid. “No, I will not reconsider. And now I’m tired, so kindly fuck off and let me go on home.”

“Your choice,” said the figure, and all five turned and marched, single file, through the churchyard gate and into the inscrutable fog.

2.

The midnight streets were as deserted as they ever got in central London, and Pete made it home on autopilot, still trying to take off the chill engendered by the wraith. The church bells on Bow Street were tolling half-twelve when she parked the Mini in the alley behind Jack’s flat.

Each step up the four flights to the flat hurt, and she leaned against the wall inside the door, collecting herself before she saw Jack and Lily. She didn’t want him kicking up a fuss about her going on jobs alone. The prewar light fixture in the hall buzzed, and Pete made a mental note for the dozenth time that they needed to get the wiring in the place checked out.

Before she’d had to look at the flat through the eyes of a responsible parent, it had been more than fine. Now, though, she couldn’t help but see the nicotine stains on the ceiling and the lead paint on the windowsills, the stove that emitted strange and dizzying odors anytime she or Jack tried to do more than heat up takeaway, and she realized that they’d never make enough money to move someplace more conducive to raising Lily. Not that Jack would go for it, if she suddenly found thousands of pounds lying in the street. He’d been living in Whitechapel since the eighties, and Pete couldn’t imagine someone like him moving to the country, surrounded by flat motorways, flatter fields, Tesco superstores, and normal people.

The protection hexes that wrapped the flat like spider silk slithered away from her as she advanced into the sitting room. There might be a pile of clean clothes on the floor and a sink full of filthy dishes, but at least Jack hadn’t let the hexes slide.

He sat on the sofa, Lily cradled in one arm, watching a film with no sound on Pete’s laptop. He’d never kick in for a TV, but he’d finally given in to the allure of the internet. Lots of mages were technophobes—and lots tended to fry whatever electronics were in their range—so Pete counted herself lucky that she didn’t live with a walking electromagnet, and that Jack had decided having an endless supply of Lucio Fulci films and spaghetti westerns was worth the extra bill.

“She’s been asleep for a few hours,” Jack said softly. He shifted, almost imperceptibly, and reached for his glass of whiskey. “I was afraid to move her.”

Pete let herself drop down beside him, coat, bag and all. She was weary from top to bottom and still chilled to the bone. “I’ll put her down in a few minutes.”

Jack regarded her in the blue light of the screen. Clint Eastwood stalked across a dusty town square, merciless sun beating down on cheap plaster sets. “You look like shit,” he said presently.

“I love you, too,” Pete grumbled. Her attempt to pull herself together had been useless. Why did she even try to hide things from a psychic?

Jack tilted his head. “Did something happen?” he said. Pete scooped Lily into her arms.

“You might say that,” she murmured. The baby grizzled a bit but settled down. Pete got up and put her in her cot in the corner of the sitting room near the disused fireplace, then switched on the baby monitor.

“You and Clint finishing up?” she asked Jack. Usually he stayed awake until near sunrise, which meant they rarely slept at the same time, but then again, it meant he was the one awake for Lily’s dawn feedings. The part of Pete that wanted to spend time with Jack like they used to hated it, but the sleep-deprived mother in her thought it was a fantastic idea, and these days, sleep always won.

“Yeah, it’s almost through with,” he said. He caught her hand as she started for the bedroom. “You swear you’re all right?”

“Sure,” Pete said, fighting a grimace as her arm flared up. “Never better, luv.”

Jack, at least, had the decency not to call out her lying.

Pete dropped her clothes on top of the ever-growing pile next to their bed, then collapsed on it in her jersey and underwear. She was tired—too tired to change, too tired to tuck herself under the duvet, too tired to do anything except stare at the ceiling, tracing the familiar stains, continents of cracks and water damage amid a plaster sea.

Still, she couldn’t convince herself to shut her eyes and fall asleep. When Jack shuffled in from the bathroom and added his denim and his moth-chewed sweater to the pile of laundry, she sat up and decided she had to ask. “Jack, you ever hear of the Prometheus Club?”

He froze, for just a heartbeat, before he shrugged. “Might’ve heard some chatter, but nothing much.” His glacial eyes focused on her with an intensity that made the cold in her bones return with a rush. “Why?”

Pete shrugged in turn. “No reason,” she said. “Heard of them somewhere.”

Jack got under the duvet and offered her half, and Pete curled on her side facing him. He wasn’t telling her everything. After years of seeing him lie in every conceivable way, catching him was almost a reflex, an instinct for detecting the deception Jack used as an invisible shield. If you didn’t know him, you couldn’t hurt him. The first line of defense for paranoids everywhere.

Whether or not his paranoia was justified in this case, she could find out in the morning.

“Seen many wraiths around London lately?” she asked him, changing the subject. Trying to pry the truth out of Jack when he didn’t want to give it was like trying to reroute the Thames—messy, difficult, and not happening.

“Wraiths? Not unless the sad old men are telling stories down the pub.” Jack snorted. “Why, you see one?”

“Saw it, talked to it, felt it try to rip my soul out,” Pete confirmed. She peeked under the duvet, checking out her injuries. Her leg was a solid parade of bruises on the side where she’d caught the gravestone, and she’d be feeling them even worse in the morning. If Lily weren’t a consideration, she’d down a handful of the Vicodin Jack kept in the medicine cabinet, but instead she tried to shift the pillows around to support her sorest bits and switched off the light.

After a moment, Jack’s arm snaked gingerly around her waist, and she let his warmth and smell of soap, leather, and tobacco envelop her. It was a scent that could smooth all her rough edges and calm her instantly, but it wasn’t working tonight.

“Wraith moving into a churchyard around here’s not a good sign,” Jack muttered into her hair. “What’d it say to you?”

“Usual rot,” Pete said. “It was riding Mickey Martin’s ghost—what it hadn’t already drained—trying its hand at the living. Almost turned poor Brandi Wolcott into a milkshake.”

“Hmm,” Jack said, but that was all. He didn’t offer an opinion, didn’t give voice to the fears knocking around Pete’s brain since she’d gotten in her car at the churchyard. Pete listened as his breathing smoothed into sleep, but her own thoughts wouldn’t quiet.

They whispered that she should be afraid, and if Jack had any sense he would be, too. That the talented—latent mages, unwitting psychics, and nascent sorcerers—were awake all over London because of what Jack had done. That the incidents of ghosts and the Black spilling into daylight had multiplied by orders of magnitude since Nergal had tried to break free. They weren’t stopping; they were increasing, like a flood tide rising to swallow everything in its path. Monsters thought to be only stories had once again appeared, and the fractious and scattered human magicians in London were no match for any of them.

The whisper of her own fears told Pete that the Black and the daylight world were wounded, ruptured and bleeding into one another, and nobody had the faintest idea what to do.

The thought kept Pete awake for what remained of the night, and her eyes were still open when the first gray whispers of dawn crept through the dirty panes and across the threadbare carpet of the bedroom.

3.

Neither Pete nor Jack had any jobs booked for the rest of the week—then again, Jack never had any jobs booked of late. Nobody in the Black trusted him, and nobody wanted him anywhere near them, especially after word had got round of what happened in Los Angeles. Personally, Pete thought that returning four of the worst things the Black had to offer to their iron prison in Hell was an accomplishment, not a liability, but mages were only human. They got scared, they got paranoid, they closed ranks. Jack might be more talented than most, and a damn good exorcist, but nobody in London would consider him worth the risk. Not for years to come.

Possibly not ever.

Pete herself, not being in direct contact with the four primordial demons or Nergal, was less of a risk, but nobody trusted her because she was the Weir. Only mundanes would hire her, and the work she’d done for Wolcott would barely cover their bills.

She scooped up dirty clothes from the bedroom floor, determined to do at least one thing today that would actually yield a tangible result. Lily was in her bounce chair watching children’s programs on Pete’s laptop. Jack was out on the fire stairs smoking. Pete figured she could take a few loads of clothes down to the wash, then do the sweeping and washing up before both Jack and Lily got bored and demanded her attention.

The black envelope given to her by the pale men fluttered to the floor from inside her jeans. Pete considered it for a moment, a square black stain on her floor, then decided she was being ridiculous. It was just paper—nobody was afraid of paper. She picked it up, sitting on the edge of the bed and sliding her thumbnail under the edge of the envelope.

She’d been inclined to ignore the sort of buffoonery that resulted in a bunch of gits accosting her in a graveyard, but Jack’s reaction to her question hadn’t been what she’d expected. If this Prometheus Club scared him so much, didn’t she owe it to herself and Lily to at least see what they wanted from her? To be prepared for the worst?

The invitation was all one sheet, folded in on itself like a puzzle box, and Pete watched as black ink flowed across the white paper, spelling out a formal script before her eyes.

Miss Petunia Caldecott

The Prometheus Club requests your presence

10th full gathering of Members

Manchester, England

One week hence

Pete blinked, logically knowing that it was only a small enchantment on the paper, but transfixed all the same. How could they know she’d even open the envelope, not toss it in the bin?

Because they knew her, Pete realized, and knew she’d be too curious to not at least look.

She felt the same flash of worry and panic she’d caught in Jack’s face take up residence in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t like strangers knowing her this well. Where to find her, how to manipulate her.

She was about to crumple the thick paper and toss it into the bin when she felt a stab of pain in the hand not already aching from her tussle with the wraith.

“Shit!” Pete gasped, leaping up and dropping the invitation to the floor. Too late, she saw the ink had raced from the letters, through the paper, and into her hand, piercing her skin like a barb. The ink massed into a circle within a circle in the center of her palm, and Pete hissed, scraping at it but only making the pain worse. It burned and stung, like being tattooed with a hot iron.

On the floor, one final phrase bled across the thick white card.

Attend or die. The choice is yours.

“Shit,” Pete said again, feeling her blood drain with all haste toward her feet. She swayed from the pain, catching the wall, which only made the mark hurt more.

“Luv?” Pete heard the sitting room window open and shut as Jack came in from his smoke.

“I’m fine,” she managed. “Just … scraped a bit.”

Her shaking voice gave her away, and Jack came running. “What’s happened?”

Pete held out her palm wordlessly. The pain had largely ceased, but she still felt the intrusion of the ink under her skin, and foreign, unfriendly magic along with it.

Jack picked up her palm and turned it, brushing his finger over the ink.

“Stop!” Pete shouted through gritted teeth, as the hot poker feeling flared again. “Dammit, Jack, that hurts.”

He whistled, removing his callused fingers from the ink. “That’s a bloody strong one,” he whispered.

“Strong what?” Pete demanded, trying to pull her hand from Jack’s grasp. The ink was agitated at his touch, turning and twisting under her skin like a living serpent, trying to escape its confines. The pain made her a bit dizzy, the magic warring with her Weir as it tried to absorb the spell and was rebuffed. Pete coughed as a wave of nausea swept through her. That had never happened before, and it didn’t improve her outlook on what might happen next.

“Strong geas,” Jack said. “It’s a compulsion spell. What did you do?”

“Why are you assuming I did anything?” Pete snapped. “All I did was open that stupid envelope.” She stayed upright despite the vertigo and the sick feeling running all through her like a fever. She wasn’t going to give whoever had cast the thing the satisfaction of passing out.

Jack cast his glance down at the envelope and then shut his eyes tight before meeting her gaze. “You didn’t,” he sighed. “You didn’t get involved with the Prometheus Club.”

“I knew you had more on them than you were telling,” Pete said, pulling her hand free.

“’Course I did, but you didn’t say you’d been contacted by them,” Jack growled. He picked up the invitation between his thumb and forefinger and whispered a word of power.

Pete watched the paper curl up, eaten by blue flames. She hoped the ink on her hand would disappear with it, but it stayed under her skin, throbbing and hot. “Would it kill you not to snap at me?” she asked Jack. “I didn’t exactly do this on purpose, you know.”

He stayed silent, in his maddening Jack way, until the letter was only ash drifting to the carpet. Then he sat on the bed and gestured for Pete to sit next to him. She did it, mostly glad to have an excuse to sit down and quiet her spinning head.

“You better tell me, from beginning to end, what happened last night,” he said. His voice was still harsh and clinical, and Pete flinched.

“I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave off behaving as if all of this were my fault. I didn’t ask for them to show up and thrust that silly envelope at me.”

Jack sighed and ran his hands through his hair, then put one around her. He was wiry but strong, and Pete leaned into the warmth of his chest.

After a moment he spoke, his voice vibrating through her. “I’m sorry, luv. I just … I thought we’d be under their radar. The Prommies are a bunch of snobs, wouldn’t deign to come down our level unless it was life or death.”

“Is this gathering of theirs that?” Pete said, staring at her palm. “Life or death?”

Jack nodded, his angular jaw tightening. “They wouldn’t have called you and made sure you’d come if there weren’t something big on the horizon, big and bad enough to get them pissing themselves.”

“What could that be? Who are these people?” Pete asked, rolling over some of the things she’d seen in her time with Jack. Demons, black magicians, the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell—even the first beings of Hell themselves, the veritable Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What could possibly be worse than that?

“To the first, I have no idea, and to the second, they’re twats,” Jack grumbled. “A secret society in the worst way you could imagine. Bunch of magicians more concerned with standing around patting each other on the back for being special than with actually doing anything useful. Holdover from the days of corsets, servants, and landed gentry.”

“Like you said,” Pete murmured. “Twats.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. He kissed the top of her head and covered her injured hand with his, softly this time. “Got no idea what they want with us. We’re emphatically not Their Kind.”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Pete said. “When we go to Manchester.”

Jack raised one eyebrow as if she’d lost her mind.

“We can’t very well not go,” she said. “I’ve got a compulsion spell on me, and I’m not chopping off my hand. We’ll go, we’ll be civil, and we’ll figure out what they want from us, then find a way to graciously decline.”

Jack sighed, then nodded. “Fucking Manchester. Could’ve been anywhere, and they chose Manchester.”

Pete twined her fingers with Jack’s. The pain had cooled some, and his touch soothed the burn of the ink. The back of his hand, pale as a corpse, was covered in his own black ink, feathers and thorns twining in a pattern that could make you dizzy if you stared at it long enough. Jack’s tattoos used to be haphazard, but now they covered nearly his entire torso in the same pattern.

Something else she’d been ignoring—the change that Jack had undergone when he’d stopped Nergal. He’d had to make a bargain with the Morrigan, the patron goddess of his talent, and when Pete couldn’t sleep, she often thought about how some day, the Hag would be back to collect.

But for now, there was this mess. Her mess. At least this time it was something she’d done herself and not something Jack had walked into. That was oddly comforting. Her problem, her solution, no collateral damage.

“How bad could it possibly be?” Pete whispered, turning to plant a kiss on Jack’s jawline. His stubble rubbed her skin, and she concentrated for just a moment on the feel of him and not on all of the myriad shitstorms that swirled around them like a rotating crop of nightmares.

“You say that now,” he said, with a laugh as dry as old bones, “but just you wait. It’s the dirty North, luv, not a weekend in the country.”

“Perhaps,” Pete said, settling back against Jack’s chest, listening to his heartbeat and Lily burbling in the other room. Jack was real, solid, the only thing she could count on to be real and solid now. “But it’s not as if I have a choice.”

Go to Manchester, into who knew what sort of situation with hostile mages, or stay in London and perish under the geas if she couldn’t figure out a way to reverse it in time. It was the story of her life: shit choices, but the only ones available to her.

4.

As the train raced toward Manchester the next morning, Pete watched the fields and towns slip by, punctuated by trees and arials. She tried to keep her eyes open, but no sleep combined with the little she’d managed to snatch in the previous weeks meant the rocking of the train put her under.

It felt strange to be going somewhere without Lily. She’d gotten used to taking the pram, the diaper bag, and everything else any time she and Jack attempted anything more complicated than a quick trip downstairs to the small off-license next door.

“Don’t you worry,” Jack’s friend Lawrence had said when Pete dropped off Lily at his doorstep earlier in the morning. “I got three little sisters, changed more diapers than I wanna remember. She and me, we’ll have a good time.” He bounced Lily in his massive arms and she cooed, trying to reach up and grab his dreadlocks. Lawrence chuckled, then fixed Pete with an unsmiling gaze. “What should I do if you don’t come back?”

Pete felt as if somebody had kicked her legs out. “Excuse me?” she’d said, hating the wobble in her voice. Jack had disappeared on one of his errands to one of his many shady mates, saying there were things he needed before they went to Manchester, so she was on her own, the only one who could answer. She’d never wanted to smack Jack in the head more than at that moment.

“Clear you two are mixed up in some badness.” Lawrence shrugged. “Don’t think it’s a crazy question.”

“I…” Pete swallowed the hard stone that had grown in her throat. “My mum, I suppose,” she said at last. “She’s, um … she’s prickly, but she’ll look after Lily just fine.”

That was more than she could say for her older sister MG, or any of Jack’s crop of degenerate friends who weren’t Lawrence. Her mother, the one person in her family who hated magic and those who had anything to do with it, was the only one she could trust. Pete swiped a hand over her face and tried to look at Lawrence like everything was all right.

“Right then,” Lawrence said, and she saw from his expression she’d failed miserably. “See you in a week or so. And Pete?” He stopped her with his free hand on her arm. Pete chewed on her lip, which was as raw as her nerves at that moment.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Take care of Jack for me,” Lawrence said. “He ain’t been himself since, well. Since he got himself that new ink, and that new bargain with the dark lady.”

“I always bloody take care of him, don’t I?” Pete snapped. Lawrence didn’t deserve being yelled at, but she didn’t have the reserves to be civil any longer.

Take care of Jack. As if anyone else would want that thankless job. She’d been taking care of Jack since the moment they’d crossed back into each other’s lives. She’d gotten him clean of drugs. She’d chased him into every godforsaken corner of the Black as the Morrigan’s hold on him got tighter and tighter. And likely she’d chase him into the fire of Hell itself when he finally went down for good.

She could lie to herself and pretend that wouldn’t happen, but she’d made her decision. Left her life, left everything normal, and thrown in her lot with Jack. Had a child with him, for fuck’s sake.

That was as entwined as it got. And if she were honest, it wasn’t as if he’d trapped her like a princess in a maze of thorns. She cared about Jack, and had for most of her life. She loved Jack, despite all his bad mistakes and bad choices. He was the only one who’d been there for her since her father died. Jack would walk through fire for her, and even when things were as bad as they were right now, she recognized the rarity of that.

When she’d met Jack at Victoria, they hadn’t spoken much until they were on the train, and even less after they were in motion, rolling slowly through North London and picking up speed in the Midlands.

Lawrence’s comment wouldn’t leave her alone. She cared about Jack, knew he wasn’t perfect and would never be. She wasn’t perfect either. She had ghosts and scars. But the fact was, her ghosts didn’t have teeth, and her scars weren’t inflicted by a thing like the Morrigan. Those were facts, and much as she wanted to ignore them they remained, permanent as Jack’s tattoos. He shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be drawing breath, shouldn’t be walking around. He had died. Pete had watched it happen. The demon that Jack had bargained his soul to had collected and taken him to Hell. He should never have escaped, but he had, and when he’d died again, that should have been that. People died. Eight months visiting her da’s cancer ward had drilled that home to Pete hard and fast.

But that hadn’t been the end, either, and when he’d escaped the clutches of the Morrigan and sent Nergal back where the demon belonged, he’d come back different.

He wasn’t her Jack. She could pretend everything had gone on as usual, but her Jack, the one she’d known since she was sixteen, the one with the devilish grin and the absolute disregard for anything after the next moment—that Jack had died when the demon collected his soul. When he’d returned to her after Nergal had been vanquished, he’d been different. Not someone else entirely, but as if he’d turned up with pieces missing. Part of Jack was still with the Morrigan, and part of the Hag rode his body in place of everything that had made him truly human.

Pete had tried to ask him about it, once, but she’d gotten such a look from him, of murderous rage and loss and grief and fear all at once, that she’d never brought it up again. Jack didn’t remember what had happened with the Morrigan, or so he claimed, and Pete figured it was best for all if it stayed that way.

She felt the train grind to a halt, and her eyes popped open. Jack was snoring beside her, but when she turned back to the window nothing but green greeted her. The trees stretched away on either side, moss covered and ancient. She’d never seen trees like this, so gnarled and close in.

Pete waited for a moment for an announcement from the conductor, but none came. The tube lights in the ceiling of the car hummed, and she fidgeted until a flash of movement caught her eye.

The raven landed on the closest branch, impossibly large and stony-eyed. It tilted its head this way and that, and then it leaned toward her.

“You should go home, Weir,” it croaked.

Pete started, but she didn’t react otherwise. “Oh, really,” she said. “And why is that?”

The raven hopped a bit closer, the moss-covered branch bending dangerously under its weight. “You know this isn’t going to end well. You are not a meddler, Weir. Leave the mages to their schemes and the gods to their plans.”

“I’m not,” Pete agreed. “And for that reason, I don’t appreciate the Hag sticking her nose in my business.”

“The crow woman shares your sentiment,” said the raven. “This is no place for you, Weir. Your presence will only make matters worse. Destruction walks in your wake, and you should stay away … for Jack’s sake as well as yours.”

“That’s all very menacing and portentous,” Pete said, faking. “But I’ve got a better idea—how about you fuck off, and I’ll get on with my day?” Bravado was the only thing that worked on things like the Morrigan’s messengers. It was that or scream, and she would never give the Hag the satisfaction.

The raven shifted, head tilting to the side. “You are not afraid of us.”

Pete snorted. “You think you’re the first old god to visit me in my dreams? I am the Weir. It’s practically commonplace.”

She’d never get used to the dreams. Weirs had the power to dream the truth, which also made them a handy conduit for any entity that wanted to speak its piece to the daylight world.

“The warning remains,” the raven said. “The Morrigan will not be denied. She is death, she is—”

“She is eternal,” Pete said. “Second verse, same as the first. Here’s a tip—if you want me to pay attention to anything that raggedy old crow has to say, tell her to change her fucking record.”

The raven twitched, and then abruptly it took flight, a black shadow flicking across the sun, gone in the blink of an eye. Pete exhaled. Fucking gods and monsters were all the same, thinking they could just tune in on you any time they liked.

The train window, rimed with a thin layer of raindrops, cracked in a spider web pattern directly in front of Pete’s face, with a force that pasted her back in her seat. This time, when Pete looked, it wasn’t a raven staring back at her, but the glowing gold eyes of the Morrigan herself. Her face was pale, chased with black veins, and her hair was feathery and black, flying around her head as wind and rain lashed the train car.

Pete felt the vibration of the Black down to her bones as the Morrigan manifested herself, placing one taloned hand against the glass, leaving deep furrows as they screeched across the cracks she’d made.

Jack can’t deny me, she hissed. What makes you think you can?

“I helped you,” Pete said. She was quivering, and there was no hiding it, but she wasn’t going to start having a fit. “I helped you put Nergal down. And you got what you wanted—you left your mark on Jack.”

What I wanted was my birthright, the Morrigan screeched. Lightning split the nearest tree, and Pete was momentarily blinded. When she could see again the Morrigan was inside the train car, standing before her. Her dress was a tattered shroud, stained with the blood of a hundred dead, and black blood dribbled from her lips when she spoke.

You denied me my war, Weir. The march on the daylight world that my army will have, at the end of all things. You think you’ve saved your pathetic little slice of the cosmos, but you’ve merely granted it a stay of execution.

Cold took over Pete’s body inch by inch—not the chill of outside air, but the final cold of death, as her body shut down and her heart ceased to beat. She could see her breath when she whispered, “You might have Jack, but you’ll never have me. You’ll never have the end of my world that you want. Not while I’m alive.”

The Morrigan snarled. “Then perhaps we should do something about that, since you’re Hell-bent on being the heroine of this story.”

She reached for Pete, bloody talons wrapping around her throat, searing Pete with her cold touch, talons ripping through her skin, into her jugular vein. Pete felt hot blood gush forth, and the last thought she had was that she wouldn’t even have time to scream, wouldn’t have time to tell Lily one last time that she loved her …

She woke up with a thrash and a scream, and Jack turned to stare at her, taking off his padded headphones and narrowing his eyes. From his MP3 player, Pete heard the strains of the Runaways.

“Sorry,” she said. Her heart thudded so violently that her breastbone ached. “Bad dream.”

Jack grimaced. “That sounded like a little more than a nightmare.”

People were staring, and Pete shrank back into her seat, looking out again at the low gray land passing all around them.

“You really can’t tell me anything else about these Prometheus Club bastards?” she asked. Jack huffed at her abrupt change of subject, but there was no way in any Hell that Pete was telling him what she’d seen.

The Morrigan could try to scare her, but she could only reach Pete in her dreams. In the daylight world, at least for now, she was powerless.

Jack shifted in his seat, and Pete caught sight of the tattoos along his wrist. She wondered just how long the Morrigan would remain in her dreams.

She realized she was glad for the more pressing problem of the geas. The Morrigan able to reach into the larger world via Jack was a horror that didn’t bear contemplation.

“I’m not holding out on you, if that’s what you mean to say,” Jack said. “Nobody knows about the club except the members of the club, and nobody knows the members.” He shoved his MP3 player back into his bag and leaned his head back against the seat, rubbing his forehead.

“Supposedly,” he said, “they’re a sort of ruling council of the UK, all the big muckety-mucks from this side of the Black and the other gathering together to rule from the shadows, punish the little people who get out of line, all sorts of fun activities for the rich and wanky.” He played with the cord of his headphones. “I could tell you the exact weight and measure of the load of bollocks I think that is, but I bet you can guess.”

It sounded like a load to Pete, too. Nobody could hope to control the Black. Nobody could even hope to control the mages and other magic-workers of the UK, never mind the demons, Fae, and other, less visible creatures skulking around the Black.

If the Prometheus Club thought they were going to control her, they were in for a rude surprise.

5.

The train ride to Manchester was only a bit over two hours, but when Pete stepped off the carriage she felt as if she’d stepped onto the surface of another planet. The ever-present tide of the Black was gone, replaced by something that felt more akin to a brick wall, something you could scrape the back of your knuckles against and leave skin behind.

Jack massaged the spot between his eyes. “Fucking hate this place,” he grumbled.

Pete hefted her bag and joined the tide of people heading for the taxis and public transport. Jack lagged a few steps behind, squinting as if he’d just stepped into bright sun from total darkness. “I don’t think we should check into a hotel,” she said, falling back to walk with him. “Too easy to track us that way. Besides, we’re broke.”

“Yeah. If you’re interested, I do know a couple of viaducts that are decent to sleep under,” Jack said. He tried to smile, but the expression looked like it hurt, and Pete winced.

It was easy to forget, with the flat and Lily and the normal life they had when they weren’t doing this sort of thing, that Jack had started life as a poor kid from a bad council estate in the worst part of Thatcher’s Manchester. He’d slept rough, done drugs, and fought tooth and nail to survive on the streets before one of the Morrigan’s other shadows, Seth McBride, had recognized what he was and trained him to be a mage.

Pete could have slapped herself for making Jack bring that part of his life up again. He never talked about it, beyond the vaguest generalities. What little Pete knew had all come from other people or the one dip she’d taken inside Jack’s memories via her talent, which had been enough for ten lifetimes.

“I don’t think we’ve resorted to a carboard box just yet,” she said. Trying to keep up the smile, keep it light. Pretend it would all be fine. If she had no other skills, she had that one.

“I’ll look up a few old friends, if they’re still aboveground,” Jack said. “’Least there are plenty of holes to crawl into in this town, if you need to stay low.”

Pete nodded, deciding that even though Jack’s “friends” usually turned out to be lowlifes of the highest order, staying unseen was definitely top of her list.

“I’ll make a call,” Jack said, heading for a bank of payphones.

While he fished for change and dialed, Pete scanned the crowd. She’d felt the prick of eyes on her back since they’d left the train. Not a magical feeling, a copper feeling. The crowds weren’t as thick as they had been in Victoria, and her tail didn’t have many places to hide.

A few likely suspects—a young kid with a backpacking kit, an Indian woman in a business suit—passed her by when she stopped in the center of the sidewalk and pretended to check out her mobile.

An older gent, chubby and balding, stumbled when she stopped short and cut an abrupt left to the newsagent’s stand, pretending that had been his destination the entire time. Amateur hour, for sure. Probably not the Prometheans, then. They could at least afford a tail who wasn’t fifty pounds overweight and wearing an eggplant purple windcheater, red-faced and panting with his attempt to keep her in sight.

Pete took a step toward him, and they locked eyes. Purple Coat surprised her then—rather than look away and pretend to be busy buying a newspaper, he nodded to her and then gestured with his chin for her to come over.

Pete cast a look back at Jack, who was chatting away on a pay telephone. She caught a snatch of conversation, including “Fuck off, you old bastard.” He was within screaming distance if she needed him, so she cut through the new stream of people coming off a Cardiff train and approached the fat man.

“You’re Petunia Caldecott,” he said without preamble. “The Weir.”

“On my better days,” Pete agreed. “Nobody calls me Petunia, by the way. It’s Pete.”

“I need to ask you something,” said Purple Coat. He shifted, fists shoved into his pockets, and Pete tensed again. This gent could very well be a nutter. He certainly looked the part. She and Jack didn’t have many fans in the UK these days, though assassins usually went directly for their target.

Mentally, she cataloged her options. She could run, thump him with her police baton, scream, or try to sling a hex, which was about as reliable as closing your eyes and hoping the other bloke missed. Physical magic was Jack’s game. She was just a beginner.

Purple Coat drew out a crumpled object wrapped in newspaper, and Pete started breathing again. “Ask, then,” she said. “Haven’t got all day, have I? We’ve somewhere to be.”

“I know,” he said. “The Prometheus Club.”

Of course you do, Pete thought, because nothing since those odd, pale creatures had shown up in the graveyard had been a coincidence.

“You going to warn me away?” she asked Purple Coat. “Threaten me? Whatever it is, kick on.”

“From what I’ve heard, neither of those will have any discernible effect on you,” said Purple Coat. “I just needed to reach you. To talk to you before you disappeared into that den of vipers.”

Pete held up her hand, exposing the twin circles of the geas. “It’s a little late for that, mate. They’ve got their hooks in good and tight.” She cocked her head, taking his measure. He was dirty, up close, and had the sour smell of the infrequent bather. His eyes were bloodshot and even though he was still a fat bastard, his skin sagged from weight loss. He looked sick, and exhausted, and his eyes kept roaming the train station even as he bit back a yawn. “Who are you, anyway?” Pete asked him. “When was the last time you slept?”

“My name is Preston, Preston Mayflower,” he said. “I used to be a Member.” Pete could hear the capital letter in his voice. “I’m sorry for the state I’m in, Miss Caldecott, but I can’t rest. They have members who can reach you in your dreams, get inside your head. I can’t allow that to happen.”

He twitched as a businessman passed too close and tucked himself inside his windcheater. Pete had dealt with plenty of paranoids as a copper, and she knew the difference between drug-induced insanity, genuine mental illness, and fear.

This was the latter. “What’s wrong, Preston?” she asked, employing her best soothing tone. “What’s so important that you came here?”

“Listen.” Preston grabbed her wrist, abruptly, and Pete jerked in reflex. She didn’t get much feedback from Preston, though, just a jumbled buzz of magic, like the last bit of static electricity when she brushed against metal in winter. The raw nerve of Manchester’s Black was stifling her ability to sense anything more.

“Please don’t touch me,” she said gently, removing Preston’s hand from her. “I don’t want Jack to get the wrong idea.”

The threat of Jack Winter made Preston recoil like a spring, which would have amused Pete if the poor man hadn’t looked so terrified. “I’m sorry, it’s just…” He swiped a hand across his eyes. “I used to have a normal life, Miss Caldecott. They’re going to say things about me—that I’m a nutter, that I went off the rails and betrayed them, that I’ve always been crazy and unstable. But I’m not.” He shuddered. “I was a geomancer—someone who could consecrate and bind the earth, find holy sites, tears between the Black and the daylight, that sort of thing. Made a nice living as an estate agent, when I wasn’t searching out trouble spots and places of power for them.”

“Okay,” Pete said. “I believe you, Preston.” She didn’t know what she actually believed, but he needed to hear it and she needed him to get to the point.

“When I found it, they tried to take it, tried to lock me up,” said Preston. “They tried to take it for themselves. I saw it then, what the tenth gathering was really about, and I’m here to warn you, Miss Caldecott. Break the geas. Don’t get anywhere near the Prometheans, and if you must do so…” Preston shot a bug-eyed glance into the crowd, eyes roving over every face as his sallow cheeks flushed. “Don’t take the crow-mage with you.”

Pete started at that. “I don’t know what you mean, Preston. I want to understand, but you’re not making much sense, luv.” To warn her away was one thing, but to suggest that the Prometheans had unsavory designs on Jack was much worse. Nobody who wanted to use him for their own ends was on the side of good, justice, and happy kittens.

“They’ll pour honey in your ear,” Preston whispered. “They’ll make me out to be the villain, and they’ll send you in my stead. But they’re ignorant at best, and liars at worst. They don’t realize how things have changed because of what Nergal did.” He swallowed and coughed—a wet, contagious sound that came from deep in his lungs.

“If I had a pound for every time somebody told me that,” Pete said. She didn’t mean to be flip, but Preston looked near tears at the thought that she wasn’t taking his rant at face value. He thrust the bundle at her with a sharp, violent motion.

“I know you don’t believe me, and I wouldn’t either, but you have to take this. Take it and don’t show it to them.” When Pete took a step back, Preston snatched her hand and pressed the paper-wrapped object into it. “Take it,” he said. “Keep it safe. Maybe it can help you where it couldn’t help me.”

Jack came up behind her, and Pete nearly jumped out of her skin when he spoke. “This fuckwit bothering you?”

“No…” Pete started, but Preston was already off and running toward the taxi line and the street beyond.

“Who was that?” Jack said.

“He was … I don’t know. Random nutter, I think,” Pete said, though the thought nagged at her that Preston had been entirely too frightened to have made what he said up out of the ether. “Told me the Prometheans weren’t what they seem.”

Jack snorted. “In other news, water is wet, Arsenal’s defence is shit, and the Pope wears a silly hat.”

“That’s how I felt,” Pete agreed. She told herself to shake the vague feeling of unease as they made their way to the end of the taxi line. Preston Mayflower didn’t have to be a portent of certain doom. He could be crazy or, worse, he could have been sent by the Prometheans themselves as a test, to see if Pete would be a good little soldier if faced with an excuse to try to slip her geas and get away.

Whatever the reason, she didn’t have the energy to play games with yet another set of shadowy intrigues. She barely had the energy to drag her bag along the curb.

The ache of exhaustion was the excuse she gave herself afterward for seeing a streak of purple from the corner of her eye but not realizing what was happening until it was far too late. Preston Mayflower shoved his way through the throng at the curb, broke through the taxi line ahead of them, and cast a frantic look over his shoulder. His face was nearly the same color as his windcheater, and sweat flew in a sparkling arc from his balding head.

Pete followed his line of sight, her mouth forming into a shout, and saw two people pressing through the crowd behind him, the sort of nondescript that usually lent itself to undercover cops. One man and one woman, beige coats, dark hair, nothing remarkable about them. Except the look of fear they elicited from Preston Mayflower.

A taxi slammed on its brakes, tires screeching, and the driver leaned out his window to scream a curse. The woman of the pair got nearly close enough to touch Preston as he dodged into traffic, but he took another loping step forward, eyes bugging out in terror and seeing nothing in front of him.

All of it happened in the space of two heartbeats, from her first view of Preston to the squeal of hydraulic brakes and the sickening, final impact of a body making contact with a Manchester city bus.

Cries went up from the taxi line and the bystanders. A transit copper came running, yelling into his radio, while the bus driver dismounted his vehicle, face ashen and hands shaking.

“He was just there…” the driver cried. “Nothing and then there…”

The woman of the pair reached Preston’s body and bent down, rolling him onto his back. One leg and one arm were twisted behind him, and the body made a sound like a sack of apples being tossed about. To any casual observer, the woman was administering aid, checking a pulse and pulling at Preston’s eyelid, but Pete watched her other hand creep across the windcheater, inside the pockets, and feel around the waistband of his stained trousers. She looked at her companion and shook her head imperceptibly, and by the time the copper reached the scene, they had melted into the crowd, two beige vapors gone on the wind.

Pete swallowed the scream that had never gotten further than the back of her throat as Jack stared at the body. He asked, “Holy Hell, did you see that bastard leap?” but she didn’t really hear him.

She felt the weight of the wrapped parcel Preston had forced on her inside her own pocket, and a chill crept over her exposed skin, all the way down to her bones.

Whatever was inside the parcel, Preston Mayflower had just died to give it to her.

Jack gripped her arm before she could pull out the object and open the paper. His touch created a warm spot on her frozen skin. “Come on,” he said in her ear. “Rest of the cavalry’ll be here soon. No point in still hanging about when they show up.”

Pete allowed herself to be led away, and soon the crowd had shut them off from the scene in the street. She could still hear the sick impact of the body and the squeal of tires, though, and see the panicked expression in Preston Mayflower’s eyes. If that had even been his real name.

She hadn’t felt good about coming to Manchester, but she had allowed herself to think it might work in her favor—clearly the Prometheans didn’t want her dead, just obedient. If she did what they asked, or at least heard them out, she’d be able to get out clean.

Now, though, she wasn’t sure. Not of her plan, or of anything, including the Prometheus Club’s true intentions. But she couldn’t break the geas, Jack couldn’t break the geas, and she wasn’t naive enough to think anyone they went to in Manchester about the problem wouldn’t run straight to the Prometheus Club with the news that Pete Caldecott was trying to skip out on their invitation.

So she’d go. She’d be a good little soldier, at least for now. But she wouldn’t trust the bastards who’d forced her to come here one bloody inch.

She let Jack hold on to her as they walked a block over and down, then hailed a cab. Nobody followed them, and Pete forced herself to relax until they were away from the center of the city and heading into Jack’s old stomping grounds.

6.

Pete hadn’t grown up on a council estate, but she’d had plenty of school friends who had, and she knew the drill. Suspicious of outsiders, and angry at their lot in life, and they didn’t give a fuck about much of anything.

Council estates in London were mostly cut from the same cloth—tower blocks where her friends lived stacked on top of one another like past-date merchandise, filled with noise, cigarette smoke, and older boys who leered at them any time they had to pass by in the stairwells or the garden.

The cabbie who drove them sped away, his taillights smears of red in the pools of dark created by broken streetlamps. Pete looked up and down the street, but they were the only souls about. The sun was still setting over the Beetham Tower in the center of the city, but the shadows here were already long. Alexandra Park, Jack’s old estate, contained squat brown semi-detached houses, rusty iron gates, and windows covered with tatty curtains that twitched in sequence as the residents of the estate scrutinized the outsiders. It was as if a child who was shit at taking care of his toys had discarded a model town and left it to moulder and rot.

“Feels like home already,” Pete said, staring down a particularly cheeky bitch who peered at her from her front garden, glaring as if Pete had just kicked her pets.

“Lot better than it was,” Jack muttered, lighting a cigarette. “Back then, someone would’ve chucked a bottle at you and someone else would’ve pulled a piece and demanded all your worldly goods.”

He pointed to a corner shop, windows bright with fresh vegetables and hand-lettered signs in Farsi. “That place burned down in eighty-eight or eighty-nine, ’cos of some hooligans. Mum was too stoned to keep me inside, so I watched the whole thing from the pavement until the fire brigade shooed me away.”

“Dare I ask what greasy friend of yours we’re bunking with in this charming hamlet?” Pete said. Alexandra Park wasn’t any worse than wandering down the wrong street in Peckham, but there was an undercurrent of hostility that she’d never felt in her hometown. They weren’t wanted, and both the residents of the estate and the currents of the Black drifting through like oily water made sure that Pete knew it.

Jack kicked his boot over the broken pavement, all at once unable to meet her eyes. Pete pursed her lips. “What? What about this am I not going to like?”

He sighed. “Tried a few numbers. One’s dead, one’s a guest of Her Majesty for the next five to seven years, so if we want to stay off the screen, this is our only choice.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow, letting Jack know she didn’t appreciate the ultimatum. “Spit it out. What’s wrong with the bloke?”

Jack stamped out his fag. “Nothing’s wrong with her. Not all me friends have some inherent character flaw.”

“Oh” was all Pete said. She’d been prepared for most anything, except that. It wasn’t as if she shouldn’t have guessed. It wasn’t as if she could explode, stamp her foot, and demand to go home. Jack had slept with other women—she’d slept with other men, too. She’d just smile, be calm, and put up with whatever ex or former fling he’d dragged her to with the style and grace befitting a fucking grown-up.

“It’s just up there,” Jack said, sidling away from Pete as if she might bite him. She forced herself to put a smile on her face and pretend her stomach wasn’t in a knot. It wasn’t the woman—it was coming face to face with Jack’s history, the part of his life he’d never spoken about for more than two sentences.

This woman would know it all, far more than Pete. She’d have memories that Pete could never share.

Which was far more of a reason to be flamingly jealous than sex. Pete breathed deep as Jack hopped the steps of one of the dingy council houses and pounded on the door with the flat of his hand. She could be gracious for however long they were stuck here.

The door burst open, and a blonde wearing a bright red top and fitted jeans exploded from within the house. “Jackie!” she cried, and threw her arms around Jack, nearly knocking him off his feet. “Come here, you bastard!” the woman cried. “Let me get a look at that mug!”

Or she could try not to kick the woman’s teeth in, Pete revised. Graciousness might be a peak she couldn’t summit.

“Fuck me,” Jack said, patting the blonde on the back while trying to wriggle free. “’M not fifteen any longer. Be gentle with me.”

“Can’t believe you’re still standing, much less walking and talking,” the blonde said, slugging Jack on the arm. “The way we all went back then, thought you’d be six feet down for sure.”

“What can I say?” Jack said. “The bad pennies always turn up.” He stepped back and held the blonde at arm’s length. “It’s good to see you too, luv.”

Before the blonde replied, she finally noticed Pete was there. Her expression narrowed, and Pete felt as if a bright and critical spotlight had been turned directly in her eyes. Jack’s friend might be a chavvy blonde with a big grin on her face, but her eyes were the same as Jack’s—those of a suvivor who’d seen and absorbed too much in their lifespan. Pete decided then and there that she wasn’t turning her back on Jack’s childhood sweetheart, not for a split second.

But it didn’t mean she had to be a cunt, either, so she stepped up and extended her hand. “I’m Pete.”

If the blonde thought the name was odd, she didn’t let on, just crushed Pete’s small fingers in a dockworker’s grip. “Wendy.”

“Good to meet someone Jack was mates with back in the day,” Pete said, leaving off the snide implication that they’d been far more than that. She didn’t want to start up with the pissing contest before they were even in the door.

“Oh, Christ!” Wendy barked a laugh. “Mates from further back than I care to admit.” She elbowed Jack. “You’d be a wanker to tell this cute little thing me real age.”

Jack grinned back at her, the genuine smile he reserved for people and situations he trusted. “Your secret’s safe with me, luv.”

Pete removed the uncertainty from that equation. Wendy and Jack had definitely slept together. She might grit her teeth until they were nubs, but she wouldn’t get territorial. Wendy was doing them a favor, and Pete was going to take the high road if it killed her.

“Should we step inside?” she suggested. “Lot of eyes around here.”

“Good idea,” Jack said. To Wendy, he flashed another charming grin. “Appreciate you helping us lie low, darling. We’re in a bit of a spot.”

“An’ none of your noncey little mage friends would help you out?” Wendy clicked her tongue against her teeth. “For shame.” She gestured them inside. “C’mon. Nosy old bint across the street’s got nothing better to do than poke in my business, and the rest of them are just waiting to paint rude things on me front door when I’m not around.”

Pete followed Jack, kicking the door shut behind her with a hollow thump that she tried not to compare to a coffin lid.

Wendy’s council flat crouched on the shoulders of an empty one below it. Narrow as the stairs were to the flat in London, these were half the size, shadowed and perfumed with decades of smoke, cooking oil, and stale piss. All council flats of a certain age smelled the same. Pete had been to enough of them on welfare visits for the Met to know what lay beyond the door—gray carpet, a rusty radiator, leaky windows, and a kitchen that smelled constantly of damp rot.

Wendy’s flat didn’t disappoint, although it was snug and dry, and rife with protection hexes. Pete felt them skitter across her face like a welter of tiny spiders when she stepped over the threshold. That was rude—one waited to be invited in when entering a mage’s dwelling—but she wasn’t in a polite sort of mood, so she shoved through the hexes, not particularly caring if she left the ends in tatters.

“Not a lot of room,” Wendy said. “But what’s mine is yours and all.”

“Thank you, luv,” Jack said, touching the back of her hand. “I mean it. Most mages aren’t mad enough to take on the Prometheus Club.”

Wendy laughed again, the husky bark endemic to chain smokers. “You could always convince a girl to be a bit mad, luv.” She winked at Pete. “This one’s got a touch of the devil about him. Drove me mum mad, us seeing one another.”

“Where is your scary old hag of a mother?” Jack asked. “Terrorizing old men down the rest home?”

“Christ, no,” Wendy said. “She kicked off near ten years ago. About time, too—if I’d had to see her into her twilight years, all her screeching about Jesus and his seven fucking dwarves or what have you, I’d’ve topped meself.”

“And not a soul would blame you,” Jack said, setting his bag down and looking about the place. “I’m going to wash up, luv,” he said, and then left Pete alone in the sitting room with Wendy.

Pete stood in the center of Wendy’s stained Ikea rug like a knob, waiting for an invitation to sit, smoke, or even fuck off, but Wendy went back to ignoring her until she’d lit a fresh fag from a pack lying on the sofa.

“Still the same old Jack,” she said. Pete felt the sharp craving penetrate her skull at the hit of smoke, but she bit it back. She’d quit when she’d gotten pregnant, and she wasn’t about to let Wendy and her sad little council flat drive her back into the habit.

“I wouldn’t know,” Pete said. “We met later on.”

Wendy appraised Pete, with a good deal less friendliness than she’d displayed in front of Jack. “Oh yeah. You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”

“I’m thirty-one,” Pete said, keeping her voice low and calm. She wasn’t going to do this—she wasn’t going to play some silly game that had started between Jack and Wendy before she’d even been born.

“’Course you are, sweetheart,” Wendy said. “But younger when you met, I’d wager.” She grinned. Her teeth were the same color as her stained plaster walls. “Jack always did like to get ’em young and willing.”

“All right, look,” Pete said. “I appreciate that you’re put out helping us like this, and that you might think you have some kind of claim to Jack, being there first and all, but I’m a grown woman, not a teenage girl, and seeing as he and I have a baby back in London, I really doubt he’s going anywhere. Sweetheart.”

Wendy glared at her through the fog of smoke, but she stayed quiet. Pete didn’t feel any better—she actually felt worse. She hated the reminder that there was an entire life Jack had lived before her. Friends and enemies, love and heartbreak. She could know about it, but she’d never be part of it. She’d always be the one that came after, the younger woman, the one who’d sent Jack down a spiral he nearly hadn’t climbed out of.

If she were being honest, she knew she wasn’t Jack’s first love, or even his second. Not by a long shot. Wendy might not be either, but she was a reminder of the Before, and the other Jack, the one Pete had never known and never would.

“Not like he ever made an effort to look me up after he took off,” Wendy sighed at last. “Broke my heart one day when I went ’round to his flat and he was just gone. His mum was stoned off her arse, as usual, and I didn’t hear from him for near ten years.”

“That’s Jack now, too,” Pete said, feeling herself soften toward Wendy just a bit. “Good at flash, not big on follow-through.”

Wendy sucked on her fag and gave Pete a wry smile. “That’s us.” She gestured at a shabby photo in filmy glass sitting on her end table next to the ashtray. Pete extended her hand.

“May I?”

Wendy nodded, and Pete ran her thumb over the glass to clear the dust away. Jack, young and skinny, stood next to Wendy on the stoop of her council flat. They couldn’t have been more than twelve, Wendy’s hair in an eighties perm that looked like it could support its own weather system, and Jack slouched in a shirt and tie that both had clearly been borrowed from someone who was much larger and a fan of bold paisley prints.

“What was the occasion?” she asked Wendy.

“I had a part in the school play,” Wendy murmured. “The Music Man. Jack and his da came to see me, since me mum was always at work.”

Pete focused on the tall figure standing behind Jack and Wendy. Wendy squinted at her through the smoke from her fag. “What?”

“Nothing.” Pete swallowed the dozen questions that exploded into her brain. “Jack never said much about his dad. I always thought he was dead.”

Wendy shrugged. “Probably is, now. Showed up once in a blue moon, threw cash around, left. Never gave a fuck one way or the other what poor Jackie was actually going through at home.”

Before Pete could contemplate the photo any further, Jack returned from the loo, swiping his hands across his jeans. “Everything all right, then?” he asked, darting a look between Pete and Wendy.

“Tip-top,” Wendy said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’ll just go down and get something for tea, yeah?”

She left, and Jack paced the flat, four steps to each wall, until he finally scrubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t take this,” he muttered, heading for the door.

Pete ran after him, nearly falling down the broken front steps. “You can’t just go running about Manchester by yourself,” she said. “Not after what happened at the train station.”

Jack ignored her, walking for a good minute in silence. “You’d think it’d be easier,” he sighed at last.

“What?” Pete asked, though she knew.

“Coming back here,” Jack said. “I haven’t been back to Manchester since I was fifteen, Pete. I didn’t even come back for me mum’s funeral.”

“I wouldn’t worry over it,” Pete said quietly. They walked another block, until they stopped in front of a flat, same as all the other flats in the row, with empty windows peering into a sad, floral-papered sitting room.

“I wouldn’t have ever come back if I had it my way,” Jack said. “But I’d do it for you, no question.”

Pete opened her mouth, then shut it again. What the hell did you say to that? Jack might be the sort of fuckwit who’d look up an ex-girlfriend and expect everything to go swimmingly, but he had never left her. Never let her down, never done anything less than all he could to protect her. Even at the cost of his sanity and almost his life.

“I know,” she said at last, reaching for his hand, but Jack wasn’t beside her any longer.

“This is it,” he said, stopping at the semi-detached on the corner. “Good old number seven. Every time the council was ready to kick my mum out for fighting and keeping her shady boyfriends here on the sly, she’d cry and make me come with her to the hearing, look sad and skinny and pathetic.”

Pete thought back to the photo, to the small dark-haired boy who held only the barest hints of the Jack she knew. She would have felt sorry for that boy. She did feel sorry for that boy.

Jack conjured a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke at the darkened windows. “Can’t believe we ended up spending fourteen years here. No wonder my dad bolted as soon as he saw an opening.”

“You ever see him after you lit out?” Pete asked cautiously. “Your dad?”

“Never since the day I packed a kit and shut the door behind me,” Jack said. “He crops up, he’s asking for a kick in both the teeth and the arse.”

“Fair enough,” Pete said. He didn’t want to talk about it, and that was his choice. The questions she had were just going to have to keep waiting, as they always had.

She and Jack reached the end of the road, which ended abruptly in a pit of gravel, mud, and leftover rainwater, green scum floating on top. The residents had been using the place as a makeshift tip, and an icebox of some indeterminate vintage lay on its side, doors gaping open.

A number of small children ran in circles amid the garbage, shrieking and giggling. They weren’t playing the cruel games that Pete remembered from the council kids around her neighborhood growing up, nor were they smashing things for the Hell of it. The game seemed to involve one kid who was a dragon, who shot the others with some kind of foam dart launcher, slowly turning each to his side when they got hit. It was an innocent game, without any sharp edges. They seemed happy.

“You think Lily will ever be that?” she said.

Jack snorted. “Raggedy little council rat? Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“Come on,” Pete said sharply. “It’s not like they’re running about setting small dogs on fire. I meant do you think she’ll ever be like that, right this moment?” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. “Happy, with nothing troubling her?”

“’Course I do,” Jack said, surprising Pete by twining his fingers with hers. “She’s got you, doesn’t she?”

Pete looked at her feet. Better modesty than letting Jack know she was hiding a prickle of tears in the corners of her eyes. “Right” was all she said.

“Pub’s down the way, used to be decent,” Jack said. “’Course, that was 1984. Care to chance it?”

“Would I ever,” Pete said. She let Jack lead her back up the road and into the high street, the lights of Alexandra Park coming on around them one by one, like stars filling a darkened sky, remote and frozen as outer space.

7.

The residents of the Dodger’s Arms—and Pete used the term on purpose, since the men at the bar looked as if they’d been sitting there since at least before Thatcher came to office—glared at her when she and Jack came in out of the twilight, but Jack ordered for them at the bar, and at the sound of his ever-thickening Manchester burr, the punters turned back to their sudsy pints and let Jack and Pete be.

The weight of the packet Preston Mayflower had given her knocked against her chair when she hung her jacket, and she pulled it out, turning it in her hands. Jack examined the dirty paper object over the lip of his pint glass. “What’ve you got there?”

“Mayflower slipped it to me,” Pete said. She picked at the edge of the paper, which was greasy—she wagered from the many times Preston had performed this exact motion. “I’d really like to know what could possibly be enough to throw yourself into traffic over.”

“Could be nothing,” Jack said. “Bloke did fling himself in front of a bus for no fucking reason.”

Pete thought about telling him what she’d seen, the two figures chasing Mayflower, the real fear driving the madness-tinged exchange they’d had.

But Jack had enough to worry about being back home, and she didn’t know the figures came from the Prometheus Club. She had her suspicions, sure, but she wasn’t going to get Jack up in arms until she was certain. The Proemetheans hadn’t been after her, anyway. They wanted her with them.

Unless they know you have this grimy little trinket, her logic whispered. Preston had been scared enough to try and warn her away from the Gathering, and now he was dead for his trouble.

Then again, Preston could be a complete frothing nutter. The only thing Pete could figure was that she couldn’t trust anyone in Manchester—not the Prometheans, not Wendy, and not Mayflower.

So decided, she took a long swig of her pint. Sooner or later, she’d tell Jack the whole story, but not tonight. Not with the ghosts of his past looming so large that he’d already downed a pint and a shot and ordered a repeat.

Though the pub was dingy, it had been a long time since she’d just been able to go out and relax—at least since before she left the Met. She and Ollie Heath, her partner, used to go out a few times a week with some other DIs from the squad, drink and laugh at horrible jokes and unwind. Take their minds off life on the murder squad, which was bleaker than most and less rewarding than nearly all.

She fingered the packet for a moment longer. “Suppose you’re right,” she told Jack. “It’s probably nothing.”

He extended his palm. “Let’s see it, then. Strange men slip you gifts, I think I deserve to know.”

As she unwound the soft, worn paper, Pete felt a frission of anticipation, the barest finger of the Black scraping over her talent, leaving the slightest bloody scratch. It vanished as the paper fell apart and the small, hard object Mayflower had passed her thunked onto the sticky pub table.

“Shit,” Jack breathed, as the small stone caught the light. To Pete it looked rather ordinary—something like those crystals you bought in museum shops, leftover pieces of larger geodes—pretty and sharp-edged but ultimately unremarkable.

“I’m just glad it’s not a severed ear, really,” she said, mindful of Jack’s ashen expression. The crystal was cool to her touch—too cold, as if it had been out in the void of space. She pulled back her fingers as the tips turned blue.

“An ear would be a fifty-quid note compared to what that is,” Jack muttered. He grabbed his second shot and knocked it back with a shudder, making all the ink up and down his arms ripple.

“You all right?” Pete asked. She cast a quick look around the pub, but they were still relatively incognito. Nobody spared them a glance of more than a few seconds.

“Not really,” Jack said. “You say the train station nutter gave you this?”

Pete rubbed the spot between her eyes where a fierce headache bloomed. “Just give me the bad news. What is it—a bomb? A cursed object? Am I going to start vomiting toads?”

“That’s a soul cage,” Jack said softly. When he was really worried, his voice dropped to just above a whisper, rough and tight as dragging his palm over gravel. “I’ve only seen a few, and ones this compact are extremely rare.”

Pete flinched. She’d encountered a soul cage when she’d been attempting to undo their mistake with Nergal, and they were nasty pieces of work. “But don’t they take up whole rooms?” she protested. “And aren’t they used on the living?”

The soul cage as she knew it had been writ with magic sigils and used to trap the soul of a victim eternally, in the space between the Black and the Land of the Dead. At the base, they were torture chambers, and usually only necromancers could construct them. Nergal had deserved no less, but Pete had a feeling that whoever had their soul encased in the cold crystal was merely unlucky.

“Not this one,” Jack said, gingerly taking the crystal and turning it in its cloth without touching it. “This one … this is a masterful piece of work, I’ll tell you. Made with care, for somebody this mage really and truly hated.”

Pete caught a flash from the crystal in the low light, and for just a moment it seemed something moved beneath the lava-glass surface, oily and alive. She drew back in her chair, as far from the soul cage as possible. She didn’t even want to think about what it would be like, soul ripped from her body, trapped in a tiny sliver of the in-between caught in the cage. A miniature Purgatory for a single soul, entrapped for eternity.

“Can you tell what sort of thing is in there?” she asked in a whisper.

Jack laid his finger carefully against the side of the crystal. “Human,” he said. “Beyond that, I’m not poking around.” He swiped his fingers across his jeans, brushing off the invisible psychic residue of whomever the soul cage contained.

“So what do we do with this?” Pete asked. Jack’s eyebrow went up.

“What d’you think?” he demanded. “We don’t know what sort of sod is cooped up in there. At best, he’ll be a mightily pissed off ghost when he comes out. At worst, he got his soul caged for all eternity for a reason. You do not mess with magic this strong.” He lowered his voice, looking around. “Not to mention that whoever made that is mucking in dark stuff of the highest order. Not a bastard whose careful work you want to undo. So we’re not doing a damn thing except wrapping it back up so it can’t give me frostbite.”

There’s no doubt of that, Pete thought as she looked at the crystal, watching the soul within move beneath the surface. “Preston didn’t exactly strike me as the type to work with necromancy and black magic,” she said. “Though I admit he did come across as completely off the wall.”

“The real question is, why you? Why pass on something so rare to a complete stranger?” He fixed his gaze on Pete. The full power of Jack’s gaze, with blue fire magic dancing behind it, was something to behold. It could pin her to the spot, for good or for ill, and she knew without a doubt that she was being looked through, inside and out. He didn’t use it often, but now Pete felt her breath catch. His eyes were one of the things that had made Pete fall for him in the first place. She’d been young and dumb, for sure, but even now she couldn’t deny that Jack’s gaze still mesmerized and drew her in.

“I don’t know,” she said in a whisper, and left it at that. She never understood why other people expected her to rescue them, to save the world and avert disaster. She was just Petunia Caldecott. An ordinary woman who happened to be able to do one extraordinary thing. She certainly wasn’t a mage of Jack’s caliber.

Jack sat back and sucked on his lower lip. “Damned if I know why, either.”

“I know you didn’t want to come back here,” Pete said. “And I’m sorry about this stupid geas, and I’m so grateful that you’re here with me.”

The soul cage couldn’t lead to anything good. Prometheus Club or not, why the fuck had Preston given it to her? How could he be sure she wouldn’t simply flip it back to the Prometheans to get on their good side?

Not that she would. She didn’t like people who assumed she’d toe the line just because they put on a good show of force. Her da had taught her better than to knuckle down to bullies.

And there was Jack to consider. Preston’s own words were on a repeat she couldn’t stop: If you must go, don’t take the crow-mage with you.

But the Prometheus Club hadn’t given her a choice. Attend or die. It didn’t get more clear-cut than that.

So she’d have to do what she always did when life in the Black threatened to eat her alive—she’d keep her eyes open and her instincts sharp, and whoever wanted to do Jack harm or use him for their own ends would have to go through her.

She put the soul cage back into her coat, deep in a zippered pocket, and let Jack pay the check. “Let’s go,” he sighed. “Maybe Manchester will seem a little more hospitable now that ’m pissed.”

He leaned on her on the way out of the bar, and Pete let them walk in silence, enjoying the closeness and the warmth of his body. It lasted for half a block, until Pete heard echoing footsteps and felt a prickle in the Black, one that wasn’t hard to decipher.

“Someone’s following us,” she told Jack. “Keep walking, don’t look back, don’t act different.”

He tensed, some of the muzziness disappearing from his expression. “Black’s going crazy,” he said. He gave a shiver, and Pete could only imagine what he was seeing.

“I know,” she said as Jack gave a low grunt of pain, the assault on his sight making him shiver against the length of Pete’s body. “I know, but just keep walking when I let go of you. Get back to Wendy’s and I’ll meet you there.”

“Why?” Jack demanded, balking. “What are you going to do?”

Pete let go of him, taking advantage of his slowed reactions to shove him forward. She wheeled around. “I have no idea,” she said, mostly to herself.

Jack, to his credit, didn’t try to white-knight it. He just kept going, melting into the shadows quick as a black cat.

Alone in the street, Pete was only half surprised to see the man and woman from the train station. The woman pointed a crimson-nailed finger at her. “Petunia Caldecott,” she said. “You’ve been avoiding us.”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Pete said. She swiveled to the left and to the right. Alexandra Park had plenty of nooks and crannies for more assassins to hide in, but it appeared to be just the three of them.

“Not yet,” said the woman, “but I know you. And I know what that ink stain on your hand means.”

The geas flared, and the pain returned tenfold when the woman spoke. Pete forced herself to keep her expression neutral and not flinch. She was good at not flinching, no matter how much it hurt. The Prometheans looked far more ordinary than she would have expected, a bit posh, even. Magicians weren’t supposed to be posh. The ones with actual talent usually looked more like either vagrants or escapees from an old Dracula film. Even Nicholas Naughton, the necromancer whose help nearly wiped London off the map with Nergal, had looked like a slightly scruffy country gent, all turtleneck sweaters and scuffed boots.

“I should have known you two were Prometheans, what with all the skulking and talking in circles,” Pete told her. “Is this the part where you threaten me with car batteries and pliers?”

“Of course not!” The woman looked genuinely offended. “If you’d just alerted us you were reaching the gathering early, Miss Caldecott, we could have arranged rooms for you and Mr. Winter at our headquarters in the city center.”

“Maybe I’m happy where I am.” Pete folded her arms. The woman gave her a smile that suggested the very idea was adorable.

“Because a tip in Alexandra Park is your idea of a vacation?” The woman tsked. “Manchester is so much more, Miss Caldecott. You don’t need to shack up with Wendy Macintosh and try to hide from us. We want you here.”

“Yeah,” Pete told her. “That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it?” She felt a complete lack of surprise that Wendy and the woman from the Prometheus Club had talked. Wendy was the type who’d look after her own arse. A survivor in all the ways that mattered.

Pete figured she’d been planning to meet the Prometheans eventually. But not like this, not when everything was on their terms. If she ever saw Wendy again, she was going to fetch the woman a smack that would shake those yellow teeth out of her head.

“You can try to keep running,” said the woman, evidently seeing the flash in Pete’s eyes. “But I’ll have a leg locker hex on you before you can take two steps. I don’t want us to start off on this sort of ground, Miss Caldecott. I want us to get along.” She stepped forward and extended her hand, gesturing to a long black car that pulled up to the curb.

Pete thought of Preston Mayflower, the expression of panic and despair etched on his face just before the bus hit.

“Fine,” she said, pasting her best faux-civil smile on her face. “We can be friends, if that’s what you want.”

The woman grinned back at her as she ushered Pete into the car. “I’d like nothing better.”

8.

The ride was, by Pete’s count, less than five minutes, but it felt like an eternity. The woman touched one hand across the back of Pete’s neck as soon as they sat down in the rear seat, and a veil of blackness dropped over Pete’s eyes. She gave a start. “What the fuck is this?”

“Shh,” said the woman. “Just a little obfuscation hex. Procedure for all visitors not formally inducted into the club.”

“Well, I’ve already seen you,” Pete snarled. “And what you did to Preston.” She waited, hoping that she’d provoke something out of her companion other than smooth platitudes.

“Poor Preston,” the woman purred. “He was a wayward soul. The type you really wish you could help, but alas, even we can’t save everyone.”

“And Wendy?” Pete asked. “You got a whole network of sad sacks keeping eyes on the city for you?”

“Wendy doesn’t deserve any of your ire,” she said. “Aside from her inability to keep her mouth shut the moment she clapped eyes on Mr. Winter, she didn’t do a thing. We have our own ears on the … grittier side of things here in the city.”

Pete felt a touch on her shoulder. “Hush, now,” the woman said. “You’ll get answers as soon as I’m allowed to give them.”

Pete went quiet, not because the woman had ordered it but because she knew she wouldn’t get anything else useful. She was talking to the Prometheus Club’s PR—somebody who had a glib answer for everything, and who unpleasant truths slid off of like oil skated across water. If she wanted real answers, she was going to have to play.

She just hoped Jack had gotten out of trouble’s way, although knowing him, it was more likely he’d run into it head first. To pass the time, Pete counted—turns the car took, seconds that ticked by. They circled the same route twice, and Pete knew she wouldn’t be able to find the place by walking if she tried. So far, the Prometheans were beating her soundly at the game of being clever.

She didn’t like it, not at all, but she swallowed her resentment as the car purred to a stop.

“Here we are,” said the woman. “We’ll get you and Mr. Winter settled in rooms, and then we can all have a chat.”

“Jack?” Pete’s voice sounded strangled, and she silently kicked herself for betraying her nerves. “He’s here?”

“Mr. Winter is not as sneaky as he might like to imagine.” The woman’s voice swelled with amusement. “He gave my partner quite a talking-to on the ride over, in language I would not repeat.”

“Trust me,” Pete said. “I’ve heard it all. I want to see him. And I want you to take off the magic blindfold—I’m through with cloak-and-dagger shite.”

“I told you,” said the woman. “Patience. You’ll see Jack soon enough, and we’ll be inside momentarily.”

“If you’ve done anything to hurt Jack…,” Pete started, but the woman cut her off with laughter.

“Hurt? That’s the absolute last thing on my mind, trust me.” She leaned close enough so that Pete could feel her breath, smell the cloying orchid reek of her perfume. “Even if he is a degenerate demon follower with a black mark on his soul.” She drew back, and the perky false note was back in her voice. “That’s not my concern.”

Pete felt the air change, dry and recycled against her face, and she was marched down a long hall—approximately fifty-seven steps—before going through a door and being sat on a bed.

“And here we are,” the woman said. “You’re free to come and go in the club, but know your geas is still active. It’ll lay you flat if you try and cross the threshold to the outside.” Her heels clacked, and Pete heard the moan of ancient hinges. “I am sorry about that,” the woman said, after a moment. “But it’s necessary. You must understand that we can’t fully trust you.”

The door slammed, shaking the floor under Pete’s feet, and as she heard a latch click the hex cleared from her eyes. Pete screwed up her face in the wash of bright light from the chandelier above her head, before she fumbled at the switch to dim it.

“Of course,” she grumbled as she checked out the room. “You toss me in the back of a car, threaten me, and on top of it force me to come to Manchester, and it’s me who has the problem with trusthworthiness.”

The room wasn’t new or nearly as posh as she would have expected from the fancy motor and the woman’s outfit. Plaster cracked at all the edges of the windows and doors, and the floor was nearly black with old varnish and wear. The windows, leaded and wavy so she couldn’t see out, were painted shut. Pete heard an echo of a car horn from far below—too far to drop, even if she could have gotten the casement to open.

Escape options rapidly dwindling, she forced herself to keep examining everything. Even if she wasn’t going to bolt straightaway, she might as well figure out as much as she could about the Prometheus Club. It always paid to know exactly what sort of wankers you were dealing with, especially in the Black.

She touched the door and didn’t sense any protection hexes. The door itself was hewn from heavy oak and iron, banded three times to keep out Fae. The door wasn’t locked, and the hinges screeched again as Pete pulled it open, using small and cautious movements as she stepped into the hall. She checked for cameras, and found nothing obvious, but she figured a group like the Prometheans wouldn’t need to nip out for a microphone and recorder if they wanted to listen in on her.

Still painfully aware of the geas, Pete moved slowly down the hall, trying to act as if she were just going for a stroll. No hexes snatched at her, no curses bit into her flesh.

The Prometheus Club wasn’t just devoid of spells, it was devoid of magic, full stop. She’d rarely sensed a place that was such a dead space in the invisible tides of the Black. It felt like there was a tiny empty spot in her skull, setting up an echo and throb.

This would all be right in the end, she told herself. Lied, was more like it, but she needed to stop herself from doing anything rash while the Prometheans could still hurt her or, worse, hurt Jack. This wasn’t the first time she’d been on the wrong side of magic, with just her wits and whatever she happened to have in her pockets.

She kept going, walking through hallway after hallway done in the same monastic dark wood and plaster. The Prometheus Club was kitted out with flourescent lights and ugly, dank carpeting, but otherwise was very much as it must have been when the mages took up residence. She navigated narrow hallways that doubled back on one another and locked doors that slowed her down every time she had to use her bank card to slip the antique latches. There was a complete absence of other people.

She hadn’t thought this out before leaving her room to wander about like a simpleton trying to find Jack. And then what was she going to do? Stroll out the front door? There was no way that bint in the good suit was letting her go until she’d had her say.

Desperation breeds sloppiness, Connor Caldecott would have told her. She’d learned that before she was even aware of it, watching her father get ready for work every day, double and triple check his gun and his kit, make sure his warrant card was in full view, the simple laminated slip displaying his narrow face and combed-back hair, raven black above a brow that she couldn’t remember ever not being furrowed.

At last, Pete found a stairwell and felt her stomach unknot just a little. Stairs at least meant she was going somewhere. She took them two at a time, forcing herself to be slow and quiet as she opened the door at the bottom. A long, narrow hall greeted her, lit only by the flickering glow of candles set into notches in the wall. Pete reeled as all at once the magic absent from the upper floors launched at her like a flood tide. So much power it nearly took her feet out from under her, made her grab the wall to stay upright. Pete gagged. This wasn’t right. The Black here was too strong, too overwhelming. She’d crossed a barrier and triggered some kind of terrible drowning trap made of magic.

Forcing herself to stand and move, Pete kept walking. She wasn’t sure if it was the overwhelming pummeling of the Black on her talent or simply exhaustion and fear, but the hallway seemed to expand and narrow as she approached the far end. Though she knew it was only an optical illusion, Pete shivered. It was cold here, and damp, and the magic still howled and scraped at her talent, begging to be let in, be eaten up and absorbed and allowed to unleash whatever the Weir might desire.

Pete fell against the far door, which was mercifully unlocked, and stumbled through it. On the other side, the darkness was absolute, except for a thin beam of light from somewhere that reached the surface of the earth. Pete stared. There was no way—no way she could have descended one staircase from an upper-floor and suddenly be meters below the earth, in a basement.

She heard the click of stiletto heels on the stone floor. The beam of light illuminated a pool of water lapping at the edge of slate tiles, a black plinth rising from the depths, covered in centuries of moss and grime, but little else. Pete stayed still, tracking the sound, until the woman came into view. She’d changed her clothes and wore a smart gray blazer, denim, and pumps that would have set Pete back five or six exorcism jobs—and that was just if every client paid.

“I did tell you if you decided to play the clever game, you’d lose,” the woman said, cocking an eyebrow at Pete. She wasn’t pretty, but she had the sort of face you couldn’t look away from, and a few spun-copper curls had worked their way free from her pile of hair.

“Sorry,” Pete said, acutely aware of her slept-in clothes and the mess of tarry black hair falling in her eyes. “That’s a bit like asking water not to be wet.”

“You’re cute, aren’t you?” the woman said, with a twist of a frown. “How’s that worked out for you so far?”

Pete felt the hand with the geas prickle, cat claws scraping across her flesh, and forced a smile. “I’ve had better days.”

“I know you don’t believe me,” said the woman. “But we did bring you here for something other than locking you up and then watching you try to escape.” She closed the distance between them and extended her hand to Pete. “I’ll make you a bargain—you stay and listen like we asked, and I’ll take the geas off now. I’ll extend my trust to you, because I see our usual methods just won’t work, and I’m smart enough to adapt. Deal?”

Pete regarded the hand. Small and soft, nails done in a red just slightly more luminous than blood. Hands that had reached for Preston Mayflower as he flew into traffic, hands that had searched his pockets in the moments after, only to find nothing.

“Deal,” she said, and grasped the woman’s flesh. She got nothing. Not power, not an abscene of it. A brick wall—one, she was sure, carefully constructed to avoid the problem of skin contact with other mages. It was a good trick, one Pete freely admitted that she’d kick a sweet old pensioner to learn.

“I’m Morwenna,” said the woman. “The fellow who was with me last night is Victor. You’ll meet the others who’ve arrived tomorrow at supper.”

“You all just got first names?” Pete asked. “That part of being a Promethean—you all go the Cher route?”

“Being a Promethean is many things,” Morwenna said. “But no, I have a proper name.” She turned Pete’s palm over, caressing it with her fingers, and a hot pain seized Pete, making her gasp and grit her teeth. After a moment, the geas crawled up through the layers of her skin and into Morwenna’s flesh, where it vanished.

“There,” Morwenna said. “I’m a woman of my word. Are you a woman of yours?”

Pete regarded her. The Prometheans were rough in their methods, it was true, but her choice was to listen to Morwenna’s spiel or get trapped in here again. And there was Jack to consider, who’d undoubtedly do something boneheaded and guaranteed to slag off the Prometheans if left to his own devices.

So she smiled, and nodded, and told Morwenna, “I always am.”

“I’m relieved to know that,” Morwenna. “Come with me, then. We’ve a lot to talk about.”

9.

As Pete walked with Morwenna, halls straightened and doors appeared. When the two women reached a set of stairs, they behaved as they should, and Pete let out a deep breath when the pressure of the Black against her mind and body eased. Morwenna favored her with an amused glance. “Sorry about the hex. It’s for everyone’s protection.”

“If you want to protect your floors from puke, you might reconsider that one,” Pete muttered.

“We’re very proud of it,” Morwenna said. “The illusion will go on forever if you’re not welcome here. Why have cameras and thugs when you have magic? Anyone we don’t want to come in, or to leave…” She spread her hands. “They’re stuck in the loop, forever.”

Pete shivered, which Morwenna clearly mistook for awe. “I think it stands as a testament to the power of the Prometheans—each of us contributing our talent to keep our most sacred space safe.”

On the main floor, she led Pete into a music room hung with musty silk drapes. A piano sat dust-covered in one corner, and an assortment of staring, stony-eyed mages sat on an assortment of sofas, all their glares trained on Pete.

The one bright spot was Jack, slumped against the arm of the nearest sofa, holding a glass of scotch as if he wanted to choke the life out of it.

“You see why I didn’t want to come here?” he asked Pete. Morwenna went to a side table set with bottles and plates of tiny desserts and poured her own tumbler.

“You didn’t have to convince me,” she said. “Only here because they tricked me.”

The man Morwenna had identified as Victor grunted.

“Why are we pretending this is a dinner party? Morwenna, did you speak to her about Preston?”

“I’m getting to it,” Morwenna said, in a tone that could have formed ice across the top of her drink. “Miss Caldecott and Mr. Winter are not suspects that you are interrogating for the FSB, Victor. We do things differently here.”

Victor glared at Pete and Jack in turn, but he retreated to the table of food and sank his teeth into an apple tart. Pete kept her eyes on Morwenna, but she didn’t forget about Victor. He was definitely the one in the duo familiar with violence.

“How much do you both know about the Prometheus Club?” Morwenna asked, and Jack snorted.

“Is this where you tell the origin story and we get all wide-eyed and slack-jawed?”

“You know something, Mr. Winter,” Morwenna said, fixing him with a glare. “If you’d just joined with us the first time we approached you, all of this would be far easier to explain.”

“First time?” Pete’s stomach dropped. Then again, she didn’t know why she was so surprised. Jack wasn’t forthcoming about anything in his youth—why should he throw out the small detail that the Prometheans had approached him before?

If you must go, don’t take the crow-mage with you.

“Dammit, Jack,” Pete mumbled so only she could hear. Morwenna and Jack were still engaged in a staring contest.

“We would have loved to have had Jack from the start, when he first came into his talent,” Morwenna said. “But as it turns out, good things come to those who wait, because we were able to access Miss Caldecott as well.”

Pete gritted her teeth and pointed at Morwenna. “You. Stop talking about me like I’m a piece of fucking furniture. You.” She turned her finger on Jack. It shook a bit, the anger coursing through her like a fever. “How could you not tell me? I asked you, Jack, and you lied. To my face. That’s low even for you.”

“Luv,” Jack said, holding up his hand. “Listen, I was fifteen, and my answer to them’s going to be the same now as it was then: Fuck off and leave me alone.”

“I wish we had that luxury, believe me,” Morwenna sighed. She drained her coffee and set the cup down with a clack. “We’re not in the habit of coercing those who don’t carry the same values as the Prometheans.”

Pete gave a small, involuntary snort. “Yeah, I see how not in the habit you are.”

“I took the geas off,” Morwenna said. “And I promise you, this will be a lot easier for all of us to get through if we resolve to be civil.”

“Sorry,” Jack said, putting his feet on the table and knocking aside several small decorative figurines. “Civil’s never really been my bent.”

He was showing off, and in that moment Pete didn’t know who she was more irritated with. Morwenna made her choice swiftly, though, and moved to Jack, standing over him like a teacher catching a pupil texting dirty notes. She stared him down until he looked up at her and moved his feet off the table with an elaborate sigh.

“We’re wasting time,” Victor spoke up. “If you can’t lay it out, Morwenna, then I’m going to do what we should have done in the first place—compel them to do what needs to be done and dispose of them when it’s over.”

“Here’s a tip,” Pete said. “If you want my help, don’t imply that’d you’d rather murder me, all right?”

“Both of you shut up,” Morwenna snapped, never taking her eyes from Jack. Pete had to admire her intensity—she never blinked, like a shark in expensive shoes. “You know that the Black is in turmoil, Mr. Winter.”

He smiled up at her. “We’re trading threats, might as well call me Jack, luv.”

Pete watched the muscles of Morwenna’s face tighten and relax. She was good at hiding things—almost as good as Pete herself.

“Hell,” Morwenna continued, “most of it is turmoil you caused. Because of your inability to toe the line and play the role you’re going to fill, one way or another. Instead you fight it, and the rest of us suffer.”

“Got a question for you, luv,” Jack said, lacing his fingers behind his head. Only Pete saw the wire tension in his limbs. “What makes you think I give a shit about anyone but meself?”

“If not us, very well,” Morwenna shot back. “But somehow I think even a stone-hearted bastard like you might care when his daughter is a demon’s slave and his wife is a corpse roasting on a spit in Hell.”

Pete started to move, the reflexive rage at the mention of Lily moving her before her higher brain realized what was going on. The lizard one knew what it wanted to do, though—slap the smirk off Morwenna’s face.

Victor had his hands on her before she could blink, and she gasped as his hand closed around her throat, bony fingers digging into her windpipe as his other hand pulled her left wrist into a submission hold common to cops and soliders. Pete could feel that he was faster and stronger than she was, and in a pure physical match he’d shred her. Though her animal instinct rebelled when she did it, she relaxed under Victor’s grip.

“You’re a cunt,” she muttered.

“You have no idea,” Victor murmured against her hair. “Be still now, girl. I’d hate to have to hurt you.”

“Listen, miss,” Jack drawled, crossing one booted foot over his thigh and looking up at Morwenna, seemingly ignorant of the struggle going on between Pete and Victor. “You seem to have forgotten that I was the one put Abbadon back in the box, and Nergal, too, if we’re counting. Wasn’t my fault they got prison-broke in the first place, was it?”

“If you’re looking for a pat on the back, you’re barking up the wrong fucking tree,” Morwenna said. “You have a destiny, Jack, just like we all do, and the longer you fight it the more situations like Abbadon appear. You muck about with demons like they’ll protect you, but they can’t. Not from the Morrigan. Not from what you were born to do for her, and by extension for us.”

Pete saw Jack’s expression slip, just for a moment. If there was one thing he was afraid of, Morwenna had just ripped off the lid and exposed it to the light of day.

Jack met her eyes for a moment, and Pete raised her eyebrow. She’d toe up against Victor if he needed a distraction, odds be damned. But Jack shook his head minutely. He looked back at Morwenna and forced a smile that was as cheerful as rigor mortis.

“Don’t know if your memory is shoddy or just selective, luv, but the Hag was the reason for that whole mess with Nergal. Biting off more than she could chew, like the bitch she is. Trying to throw her weight about and start a war with the daylight world. Typical of her, really. Always did have a bit of a one-track mind, that broad.”

“I understand your reluctance, believe me,” Morwenna said. “But ask yourself, Jack, what would be better for our world: an infestation of demons and creatures like Abbadon, or the Morrigan continuing as she always has, as the bride of war? Doing what she has always done to balance the Black and the daylight world—muster her army of the dead and winnow the world when it becomes too crowded?”

“’Cept this time she’s going to cut down the whole world, not just the bits in the Black,” Jack said. “Need I mention that she was all for Nergal pillaging his way through the daylight side, creating enough souls for her to march against anyone else who stood in her way on her crawl to the top of the corpse heap?”

“Need I mention that if you had performed your duty as your station requires, you could have influenced the Morrigan to stay her hand against innocents?” Morwenna asked, low. “You fight so hard to stay in the mud, Jack—one would almost think you liked it there.” Piece said, she retreated to a wing chair, sitting and crossing her legs primly at the ankle.

Victor grunted a laugh at Jack’s gobsmacked expression, and Pete felt her desire to hit him in the throat redouble. Morwenna shot him a glance.

“Victor, for fuck’s sake. We’re not the mafia—let go of her.”

Victor released Pete, although his expression betrayed great disappointment. Pete rubbed her throat, feeling the tender lines where she’d sport bruises in a few hours. She owed Victor for that, but she filed it away for now. What would a dust-up accomplish, besides putting her in hospital? She could be patient.

“Next time,” she told Victor, “you and I are going to have a discussion about why you don’t put your hands on me.”

“Like there will be a next time.” He snorted and went back to the tray of pastries.

“So you actually think Jack can convince the Morrigan to flit around like a pet parakeet, doing just as you say?” Pete asked, turning her attention on Morwenna. That was pure mad talk. The Morrigan was a force, not a person, a thing that could not be bought or reasoned with.

“On the contrary,” Morwenna said. “You aren’t prisoners. You aren’t subjugated. We want Jack to join us of his free will. There’s a place for him at the head of our table.” She tapped her fingers against the chair arm and smiled dreamily. “The crow-mage and the Prometheans were one and the same, until that insufferable lowlife Seth McBride broke the chain.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “And every crow-mage before who died horribly because he couldn’t serve two masters, that had nothing to do with you lot.”

“Membership in the Prometheus Club offers great rewards, but those come with great risks,” Morwenna said. “We all assume them when we accept membership, but together, we are protected. Alone, Jack…” She sighed. “Your skin tells the story. She’s got your scent now. You know it’s only a matter of time. If you’d just gone with her willingly, you’d be in a position of unimaginable power. No demonic price on your head. No primordial monsters sniffing after your blood.” She stood and walked to a bell pull, yanking on it. Far away, a clang sounded. “Honestly, the fact that you’ve made it to forty is impressive,” Morwenna said.

Much as she had grown to hate the woman in the short time she’d known her, Pete had to admit Morwenna was right. Jack had chosen to stay human, stay away from the Morrigan, and ignore the fate his very birth had marked for him. And because of that, their lives were shit and Pete was constantly checking over her shoulder, waiting for the next stone to drop on their heads.

Still, it was a better life than being the dead general at the head of the Morrigan’s army of lost souls, devoid of any humanity, the puppet of the very thing that had brought forth war and death from primordial mud.

“This was inevitable, the moment you chose to turn your back on your purpose,” Morwenna continued. “And now you’ve left us no choice. Things have been set in motion that require the full brunt of the Prometheans’ intervention, and that includes you and Miss Caldecott.”

A moment later a man in a black suit appeared, the sort of cheap, boxy number favored by private bodyguards. He was carrying Pete’s and Jack’s bags, and he dropped them unceremoniously in front of Morwenna.

“Thank you, Bruce,” she said. To Pete, “Now that we’ve spoken and you understand that you will assist us, we’ll put you in a suite and return your things.” She held out Pete’s bag to her and had the audacity to smile. Pete snatched it roughly. Morwenna had worn out her self control. She felt snappish and dangerous, ready to bite the head off the next bastard who crossed her.

Morwenna offered Jack’s kit to him, but kept him at arm’s length. Whatever else she was, Pete conceded, she wasn’t stupid. “We don’t want to be your adversaries, Jack. You’re the one who set that dynamic, not us.”

Pete did a cursory check of her bag. Everything appeared to be there, minus her mobile and all the cash and plastic from her wallet. The Prometheans left nothing to chance.

“Let me ask you something,” she said to Morwenna, straightening up. Her baton was still in her bag, but if she was honest with herself, that wouldn’t net her anything except the chance to go down swinging. “If I said fuck off and we both walked out of here now, can you honestly tell me there’d be no repercussions?”

“No,” Morwenna said. “Honestly? The time for that passed when Jack turned us down the first time. You’ve seen it, Pete. The chaos, the wrongness of the Black when it whispers to you. Things are past the event horizon, and it’s how we come out the other side that matters now. We need Jack, and you, to solve the problem that’s cropped up before the ripples destroy everything you and I know.”

“Why me?” Pete sighed. “I can’t do anything useful. My talent just burns things down.”

Morwenna closed her hand around Pete’s shoulder. “Let’s talk, you and I.”

Jack moved closer to her, but Pete held him off with a glance. His jaw jumped, but he picked up his bag and turned to the guard. “All right, big’un,” he said. “Let’s see this suite you’ve got.”

Morwenna led Pete back into the room with the rock, the soft dripping of the water making Pete’s hair stand out in a frizzy halo. Morwenna appeared as polished as ever. “You really don’t know, do you?” she asked. “You don’t know the first thing about the Black, or about what you are.”

Pete took a few steps toward the plinth rising from the water. She’d seen plenty of Roman ruins as a schoolkid, taken a weekend to Bath when she’d been engaged to her ex-boyfriend Terry and seen the steam rising off the hot springs. Back in her old life, when things were simple. This seemed different though, carved from the living rock as it was, with the building constructed around it much later.

“I know enough,” she told Morwenna, but the other woman shook her head.

“You are a beginner, Pete, practically a white-robed virgin, offered up for sacrifice. It’s criminal what Jack let slip through his fingers. Seth McBride, for all his failings, at least taught him to take care of himself in this harsh realm we inhabit. You didn’t get any of that.”

“You don’t know him,” Pete said. “So kindly shut up about it before I do walk out of here and leave you in the lurch.”

Morwenna frowned, pretty face going pinched, but then she pointed at the rock. “Even you must know the story. The arm reaching from the lake, clutching the blade that would unite the warring tribes and give us England as we know it.”

“You can’t be serious,” Pete said. The rock could have held something long and straight, long ago. The groove had been nearly worn away by time and moisture. “That’s just a story,” she said. “And a silly one at that. Moist woman rises from lake, gives farmboy magic trinket, hijinks ensue? Please.”

“King Arthur and his knights? Yes, that’s a fairy tale,” Morwenna said. “But there was a man, not Arthur, but a mage, who many centuries past united the Black. Who protected men from Fae and showed the demons that our world wasn’t theirs for the taking. Who stopped the bloody battles between rival factions and made us see that we could work together, one man from each tribe, on a council that would protect all of us from the end times. He had no name anyone remembers, so Prometheans gave him the name of a hawk, both predator and guardian, watchman and warrior. The Merlin was the first one to shape the Black, Pete, and his is the only seat in the Prometheus Club that’s remained empty since he disappeared. Conditions now are ripe for his return, for a mage of immense power to claim his seat.”

“And you think Jack is this … person?” Pete said. It was a ludicrous idea. Jack wasn’t a chosen one of any stripe. He’d find the very idea hilarious.

“I have no idea who the Merlin might be,” Morwenna said. “Jack is filling his own seat, that of crow-mage. But our reliable texts say when the outlook is hopeless and the odds stand stacked against us, he will appear. Once in a thousand years, the Merlin will return to unite the Black against destruction. And I can tell you that this is the time, Pete. This is it.” Morwenna touched the rock with her fingertips, and then drew back. “Our darkest hour.”

Pete sighed. Morwenna might be well-dressed and not overtly insane, but she had delusions like members of the rest of the groups Pete and Jack had run across. “Fine, you’re looking for your Luke Skywalker. What’s this problem no one but Jack could possibly solve?”

“We’ll brief you both when the rest of the Members arrive in the morning,” Morwenna said. “I just wanted to impress on you how seriously we need Jack’s involvement.”

“And what about me?” Pete said, thinking that Morwenna had a lot of nerve acting as if Pete would take anything she said with any seriousness after that tale. She’d heard saner theories from deranged crack addicts on the streetcorners in Peckham.

“You’re the Weir,” Morwenna said, as if that explained everything. “We haven’t had one for nearly a hundred years. Not since my great-great grandmother sat at the arm of Queen Victoria. It’s a seat long empty, but trust me when I say you’re desperately needed.”

“I can’t be what you need,” Pete said. “You said it yourself—I’m a neophyte. My talent doesn’t listen to me, and I couldn’t care less about gods and monsters and how they want to end the world.”

“You are, because you’re the only one,” Morwenna said, giving Pete a look as if she were very stupid. “You’re the only Weir in Britain, Petunia. Maybe the world.”

That stopped Pete in her tracks. She felt a curious sick sensation, as if she’d fallen and her body hadn’t quite caught up with her plummeting stomach yet.

Of course she’d wondered, about all of it. Her gift, which seemed to be rare and peculiar. But she’d never thought she was the only one. Weirs were rare, but rare didn’t mean unique. She couldn’t be all alone with her talent. There had to be at least one other who knew the ever-present threat of the Black, the energy threatening to fill her and burn her from the inside out.

“I can’t be,” she whispered at last. She felt weak and fragile, out of control and dizzy, as if the floor had heaved under her feet.

“As far as we can tell, you are,” Morwenna said. “And our resources are vast, Pete.” She squeezed her shoulder, and this time Pete felt a pulse of power, deep and true as the blade of a broadsword. The kind of power that could cleave or heal with equal ease. Morwenna was easily the most powerful human mage she’d encountered, and would give some of the inhuman a run for their money. “You should be proud,” Morwenna said softly. “It’s a rare and wondrous gift you possess.”

“Yeah,” Pete said, as Morwenna walked away and left her staring at the plain gray rock. “Gift’s not the word I’d use.”

10.

The suite was a far cry from the bare room they’d put Pete in, and Jack was sitting on the bed smoking when she came in. She favored him with her worst copper look. “Must you?”

“What?” he said. “Not like I care if I yellow the Prometheans’ plaster.”

Pete slumped on the bed next to him. She realized she was incalculably tired. She could run on adrenaline for a while, but eventually she’d hit the wall. She’d usually been good for about forty-eight hours on the Met before she’d crash and have to take a rest on the bunks in the nap room. And that was when she was poring over leads and collating evidence, not running for her life, smacking goons in the head, and listening to Morwenna’s insane theories.

“You all right?” Jack asked. Pete laid her head on him as he leaned back against the pillow. She listened to his heartbeat, slow and thumping, a far-off train rolling over uneven track.

“No,” she said at last, looking up into his face. He had dark stubble along his jaw, and the vertical scar he’d gotten from the business end of a beer bottle glowed in the low light. His face was familiar to her, gave her a feeling that things were all right, even when they really weren’t. “Jack,” she said, “have you ever heard of another Weir?”

“Well, ’course I’d heard of them,” he said. “How else would I know what you were when you showed up?”

“I mean another person like me, alive as we speak,” she said. “Have you ever even heard of one?”

Jack considered for a moment, exhaling a stream of smoke before setting his fag in a saucer. “Heard, sure. Rumors and the like. Heard there was one in India. Maybe China.”

“Morwenna said I’m the only one,” Pete blurted.

Jack chuffed. “Morwenna’s a great idiot. She’s so blinded to the real world, all she can do is parrot that musty old legend about how the Prometheans are going to unite the Black under their banner.”

“What would it mean?” Pete said. “If I was the only person in the world who could do this?”

“It would make you very fucking sought after,” Jack said. “But you know that. You’re nobody’s puppet, Pete. ’M not worried about you.”

“They’re not as bad as I thought, honestly,” Pete murmured. “The Prometheans. Crazy, yeah, but I don’t get the sense they’d murder us in our beds.”

“You just say that because you didn’t grow up watching them snatch your friends off the street and manipulate mages they felt were beneath them. For fuck’s sake, Pete, they threw a bloke under a bus.”

“He threw himself,” Pete said softly, although the memory of Preston’s terrified face did a lot to throw the smiles and polite words of Morwenna into relief.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually thinking of taking them up on this asinine offer to join their little glee club?” Jack said, raising his eyebrow.

“No,” Pete said. “Of course not. We’ll do what we have to to placate them and get back home. Like we planned.”

“Good,” Jack said. “No place for us with people like them, Pete. They don’t have our best interest in mind. Whatever that ginger bitch Morwenna says, they just want to use us.”

Pete sat up, irritation swelling in her. “Then why are you still here?”

“You heard them,” Jack said. “Don’t fancy spending the rest of my life ducking into alleys to avoid a Promethean death squad, is all. Had a hard enough time avoiding them when I was a kid.”

“You don’t talk about it much,” Pete said. “Being a kid.”

“’Cause I wasn’t one,” Jack said. “I had a miserable, shitty childhood, and I’d just as soon leave it behind. All right?”

“Fine,” Pete said softly. She didn’t know why she’d expected Jack to suddenly open up. Perhaps because with Lily, he’d have a chance at a do-over. Or maybe because she’d known him since she was sixteen, but still didn’t really know him, beyond the moment they’d met. There were still gaping holes in Jack’s life that were entirely dark to her.

Not that she thought he kept secrets. Jack’s secrets were large and nasty and had teeth, and had a way of not staying secret for long. It was just that he knew nearly everything about her—her mother leaving, Connor dying, her engagement to her ex, Terry, everything in between. She knew Jack better than anyone, but his past was still almost wholly dark to her. It made for an odd relationship, the Jack she knew and the parts that remained hidden, an incomplete picture whose details she could never quite see.

“Luv, don’t be mad,” Jack said, and kissed the top of her head. “I just don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want to be here, but I don’t see as I have much of a choice. And that makes me itchy, and I’m sorry if I snapped at you.”

Pete started to tell him to forget it, they had bigger things to worry about, but she found herself nodding off, and before she realized anything, it was light out and there was a knock on the door. She opened it and found another black-suited guard, a woman this time, who gestured Pete into the hall. “Breakfast is served, Miss Caldecott,” she muttered.

Pete nodded and shut the door again, to find Jack slipping into his leather jacket. The thing was probably older than she was, and it was terribly battered, but Pete was glad Jack wore it. It was familiar and comforting. For her part, she felt for her mobile before she realized it was missing, then stepped out empty handed. It felt odd to be defenseless, but she wasn’t. She had Jack with her, and she had her gift. Morwenna, at least, seemed to be in awe of it, so that gave her some currency, at least until they realized she was a screwup who could barely keep herself from being incinerated.

“Lovely little breakfast,” Jack said as they walked. “Wonder how many babies they’ve roasted on spits.”

Pete gave him a sharp elbow. “Try to be nice, all right?”

“’M always nice, me,” Jack said. “You’re the one who’s not nice.”

Pete didn’t have time to retort. In the peculiar way of the club, they’d already arrived in a posh dining room replete with wood paneling, china cabinets, and a table long enough to seat a dozen more people than currently occupied it.

Everyone stopped talking and fixed their stares on Pete and Jack as they entered, and only Morwenna looked as if she didn’t want to rip their heads off and serve them as entrées.

Jack was right—she wasn’t particularly nice. But she could behave herself, a skill he sorely lacked. Social niceties would take one a long way. Suspects were much chattier when coppers got them a fag and a cuppa than when they began by shouting and beating them with telephone directories.

The guard gestured them into two seats at the end of the table, the farthest from Morwenna, who sat at the head. Pete was the buffer between Jack and the rest of the guests, even though the bloke next to her glared—or she thought it was a glare. She couldn’t be sure under the layers of flesh that compressed his face like a deflated balloon. He was easily the largest person she’d seen up close, and he regarded her with a slow, heavy gaze.

“Little slip of a thing, aren’t you?” he said. “I expected more from a Weir, especially one reputed to be such a great bloody bitch.”

“I won’t make any of the obvious retorts,” Pete said. “Because they’re all far too easy.”

“All right,” Morwenna said from the head of the table. “Let’s at least pretend we’re all adults for the duration of the meal. Make Miss Caldecott and Mr. Winter feel welcome.”

“I’d be happy to,” said the big bastard, grinning at Pete and brushing his finger over her forearm. “I’m a very welcoming sort.”

“Touch me again and after I break that finger off, it’s going up your arse,” Pete told him, beaming her sweetest smile at the assembled gathering. A few chuckled, but the majority still looked like they’d rather murder her than welcome her.

Jack shifted in his chair and took a sip of tea. “Now I know what a custard cake at a fat camp feels like,” he grumbled.

“I’d like to thank you all for coming,” Morwenna raised her voice above the chatter. “It’s always good to have everyone in the clubhouse.”

The big bastard gestured at the ten empty chairs. “I’d hardly say we’re fully assembled, Morwenna. If this is the showing you could get, I have to wonder if voting you into that seat was a hasty idea. You’re far too pretty for such heavy duties.”

“The gathering isn’t for five days yet, Gregor,” Morwenna shot back, cheeks heating and eyes shooting fire. “We’ve plenty of time to assemble the full complement of the club.”

Gregor snorted, a sound that may have been either an attempt at a laugh or the first signal of a cardiac arrest. “Whatever you say, dear.”

“I do say,” Morwenna said. “And seeing as how I’m the head of the council, why don’t you shut your fat fucking gob and show me a little bit of bloody respect?”

Pete worked hard to suppress the smile that bloomed on her face, but she did a poor job. Gregor snarled under his breath, the full-bodied growl of a bear or a lion rather than a human sound. Pete inched her chair away from him, closer to Jack.

“Shapeshifter,” he said by way of explanation, under his breath. “Smelly, bad-tempered arseholes with no manners.”

“And great hearing,” Gregor snarled. “You’re going to pay for that insult, crow-mage.”

“What are you going to do, sweetheart?” Jack spread his hands. “Sit on me?”

Morwenna slammed her palms onto the tabletop hard enough to rattle silver and china. “I said enough.”

The shapeshifter glared daggers at Pete, but she refused to look away, and after a moment he settled back, grumbling.

The breakfast proceeded in relative silence, Pete using the time to choke down poached eggs and toast and check out the other mages seated around her. They mostly regarded her as if she were something sticky on their shoe, and she finally pushed back when her stomach was in such a tight knot she couldn’t swallow another mouthful. “It’s been eventful,” she said to Morwenna. “But unless you’re going to tell me what we’re doing here among all these bastards who clearly want to light us on fire, I think we’re done.”

There was a general murmur of unease along the table and Victor slid up behind her, putting a hard hand on her shoulder. “Sit down, Miss Caldecott,” he growled.

Pete rotated her neck so their noses were almost touching. “Get your hand off me.”

Everyone was staring at her, including Jack. Pete could tell from their expressions that whatever she did next would likely mean the difference between walking out of the Prometheus Club and the Manchester police finding her body months hence, if they found it at all.

“Morwenna, I’ve had enough of this,” Victor said. “She’s not Promethean material. You want the crow-mage, fine, but we don’t need her.”

“Victor,” Morwenna said, narrowing her eyes. “Not now. Let Miss Caldecott alone.” She left her seat and gestured to Pete and Jack. “Let’s have a chat, the three of us.” She gave the rest of the Prometheans a dazzling smile. “Please enjoy your meal. There will be a general business meeting at noon in the conservatory.”

She took Pete by the elbow, smiling in a conciliatory fashion until they cleared the dining room, and then her grip tightened and her expression became stony. “What is wrong with you? Do you want to get both of us into the shit?”

“Hey!” Pete jerked her arm from Morwenna’s grasp. “You’re the one who wanted us here so badly you had to force us.”

“She doesn’t just want us,” Jack drawled. “She needs us.” He regarded Morwenna with a lip curl. “Got yourself into a tight spot, didn’t you, darling? Something you can’t handle in house.” He leaned past Pete and into Morwenna’s space. “I can smell it on you. You’re desperate.”

Morwenna gave Jack a hard shove through the door into the conservatory and slammed it behind them. “I’m not so desperate I won’t lay you on the floor if you cross me, Mr. Winter.”

Pete inserted herself between the two before Jack could do something stupid like get into a hex-slinging contest with Morwenna and whatever Prometheans were on the other side of the door.

“All right, all right. It’d help a lot if you’d stop being vague and tell us what the fuck is going on.” She felt jangled. The weight of so many mages who clearly wished her ill still pressed against her, making her heart beat faster and sweat trickle down the groove of her spine. “It’s clear we don’t fit in here, Morwenna, so I’m with Jack—what’s happened to bring us all together?”

Morwenna flopped on one of the sofas, and though it was barely ten in the morning snagged a decanter and poured herself a drink. “This is my first time at the head of the table. The gathering of the club only happens, in full complement, every hundred years or so,” Morwenna said. “The last time was during the early days of the Great War. My grandfather sat at the head, and he narrowly survived a poisoning attempt.” She flinched. “My great-uncle, his brother, wasn’t so lucky.”

She fished around in her pockets for a moment, then turned to Pete. “You couldn’t spare a cigarette, could you?”

Pete shrugged. “Gave it up. New mum and all.”

“Here,” Jack said, extending his pack of Parliaments. “Now tell us what somebody knocking off your relatives has to do with Pete and me.”

“The Prometheans aren’t perfect, but we do try to do right,” Morwenna said. “Not always what people outside think is right, but what maintains balance, harmony. What keeps people safe.” She lit the cigarette and inhaled, exhaling with a shudder. “There were, once upon a time, those who disagreed with our views. They formed a splinter group, and broke with us, around the time of the Hundred Years’ War. They named themselves, in typical arsehole fashion, after Prospero.”

“Bloke from The Tempest?” Jack muttered. “Cunts.”

“You don’t know half the story,” Morwenna said. “The Prospero Society is everything we’re not. They don’t want balance. They want power. They want to tear us down, and they count demons among their number. When the Black falls, it will be because a Prosperian kicked the stilts out from under it.” She leveled her gaze at Pete. “Preston Mayflower was a good man. He was invaluable to us.”

She went to a painting hanging over the piano, a bland landscape showcasing a few crookedly painted cows, and took it off the wall. Behind it, Pete saw a digital screen, and when Morwenna brought it to life a map of the UK appeared, covered with different symbols and bands of color. “These are all the known trouble spots in the Black, all instances of mages going rogue, hautings or possessions, and uses of black magic. We track areas where the Black and the daylight world mingle, too.”

“Thin spots,” Pete whispered. The map was so rife with color that it appeared to be diseased, and she shivered looking at it. If ever there was tangible proof things were sliding over the edge into chaos, this was it.

“Preston was able to locate them for us,” Morwenna said. “He was a geomancer—he detected unbalanced power in the earth, the Black poisoning the land, that sort of thing.”

Pete took a seat so her posture wouldn’t give her away. She kept her expression neutral, and thanked her lucky stars that Jack didn’t know any more than he did. He couldn’t trip her up.

“Preston was in Hereford, scouting out some unrest reported by the local mages. We thought it might be a case of a demon summoning gone wrong. But when Preston came back…”

Morwenna drained her glass and rolled it in her hands. Her cheeks flushed from the drink, and she screwed her eyes shut. “He was different. Before, he was my friend. But something happened to him. He became erratic, and he refused to come back to Manchester. We dispatched another mage, Jeremy Crotherton, to bring him back and find out what the Hell was going on, but…”

She sighed and rubbed her fingers across her temples, carving vicious red indents in the skin. “We think the Prosperians got to Preston. He started threatening to go public, to reveal us to the daylight world, and we haven’t heard from Jeremy since he went to Hereford. Poor Preston,” she said softly. “He didn’t deserve this.”

Morwenna drew out her mobile and scrolled through her voice messages. “This was the last message from Jeremy,” she said. “You can see why we’re concerned.”

A hiss of static emanated from Morwenna’s phone, and then a reedy voice came through. “Morwenna, it’s Jeremy. I can’t … I mean, I can’t keep this up for much longer. Preston’s off the rails, he’s…”

A scraping sound cut off the voice, and then there was a crash and a scream. Jeremy cut back in, panting so heavily Pete almost couldn’t make out the words. “I’m sorry, Morwenna,” he rasped. “I tried, but the soul cage is too strong. This place is too strong. For the love of all you hold dear, don’t send anyone else to—” Jeremy’s voice hitched, and then it was obvious he had dropped his mobile. “What are you doing here? You stay away from me! You stay—”

The message cut off with a screech of feedback. Morwenna thumbed her voicemail off and tucked her phone back into her pocket, resuming her defeated posture. “The next time I saw Preston, he was in ruins. Raving, completely mad. The Prospero Society got to him and they twisted him and they made him do things for them.”

She abruptly sat up and stared at Pete. Pete felt the gaze penetrate all the way to her core. This was the Morwenna she’d first seen—cold and devoid of feeling. “I know he reached out to you at the train station, Pete. It’s very important that you tell me what the two of you talked about. Preston was not a well man and he’d become paranoid, convinced we were out to harm him.”

Pete felt the weight of the soul cage in her pocket. If Morwenna knew she had it, there’d be no chance of her walking away from this. “What you said,” she shrugged. “He told me to stay away from you, and he rambled a bit. I got away as quickly as possible.”

“And the soul cage that Jeremy talked about,” Morwenna said. Pete could see the vein jumping in her neck. It mirrored Pete’s own heartbeat, and Jack’s. He was sitting perfectly still, wire-strung, ready to run or fight at a moment’s notice.

Pete met Morwenna’s gaze and didn’t blink. “I don’t know what that is,” she said evenly. “Sounds like a nasty bit of work, though. Preston’s doing?”

“Just something Jeremy thought might be useful intelligence,” Morwenna said, then sat back. Pete felt as if she might pass out. She looked at Jack instead, trying to reassure him silently that she had this under control.

“So Preston is on the side of the big bad evil and this Jeremy bloke is MIA?” she said. “After chasing demons in Hereford? What exactly are Jack and I supposed to do about all of that?”

“The Prospero society wants an insider among the Prometheans,” Morwenna said. “They tried for Preston, but he couldn’t stand up to their techniques and he went over, genuinely tried to help them get inside our organization. But you…” she smiled at Pete, and it was as if they hadn’t been ready to go at each other’s throat a moment ago. “You’re more used to this sort of thing. Down and dirty, in the trenches. You’ll be perfect.”

Pete was learning quickly that she preferred the sort of bastard who let you know flat out they hated you. Morwenna’s hot and cold act was going to give her a heart attack.

“Just hold up here,” Jack said. “Your whole purpose was for us to be fucking bait?”

“Think of it as an opportunity to do some good,” Morwenna said. “An actual insider would be far too dangerous—the Prospero Society clearly has no trouble reaching inside a mage’s mind. But you and Pete can go to Hereford, find Jeremy, and figure out who the Prosperians’ agent is. It’s the best way.”

“It’s a shit way!” Jack exclaimed. “Why should we do your bloody grunt work?”

“Because you don’t have a choice,” Morwenna said. “And neither do we. For the good of everyone in the Black who doesn’t want to see the world swallowed whole by something like Nergal, you’ll do as I say.”

Pete’s first impulse was to tell Morwenna to bend over and cram it straight up her own arse, but logic dictated the woman was right. Even if they could fight their way out of here, she and Jack already had too many enemies. They didn’t need a group as powerful as the Prometheans wanting a piece of their hides as well.

“Jack,” she said. “Let it be. She’s right.” She went and sat next to him, putting a hand on his knee, and favored Morwenna with the sort of look she usually reserved for the killers and rapists she ran across on the murder squad. “If you try and fuck me over, and more importantly if you harm one hair on Jack or our daughter’s head, there is going to be such fire rained down on you it will make the end of the world look like a chuch fete by comparison. You reading me, Morwenna?”

“The Prospero Society won’t be able to resist the two of you,” Morwenna said without missing a beat. “This isn’t a game, a tug of war, any longer. This is stock your pantry and batten down the hatches before the war comes to your doorstep.”

“So what, we swan around Hereford until a creepy bloke in a long coat makes overtures?” Pete said.

“Oh, didn’t I mention?” Morwenna said. “You’ll be among old friends in Hereford, Pete. When Jeremy arrived he found the place has become something of a mecca for those buffeted by the Black—ordinary folks who’ve seen things they don’t understand. It’s like they’ve got their own little social club, right there among the weekend Wiccans and those nutters who hunt the Loch Ness monster.”

Pete felt an uncomfortable frisson of regret crawl up her spine. “I don’t follow you,” she said.

“There were quite a few traumatized families after the Algernon Treadwell business back in London, I heard,” Morwenna said.

Pete tensed her hand on Jack’s leg until he grunted in pain, and she felt the words grit out of her as if she’d swallowed a handful of stones. “What are you saying, Morwenna?”

“The children you saved—or failed to save—are in the village in Hereford where we last heard from Jeremy,” Morwenna said. “He found it quite peculiar, so many survivors of a spirit attack in one place, but I imagine for you it’ll be like a reunion.”

“You knew,” Pete spat. She wanted to slap Morwenna in the face. Jack was holding her in place now as her body vibrated with fury. “You knew this whole time that I’d run into those people.”

“Consider it added incentive,” Morwenna said. “We have no inkling what Preston found in Hereford, but it was bad enough to spread like a virus through the community and utterly corrupt him. So if you want to save those innocent babes, I suggest you get moving.”

“I’ll do it,” Pete told her, standing. “Because I know when I’m beaten, and you’ve left me no choice. But don’t think we’re friends after this.”

“I have enough friends,” said Morwenna, also standing and smoothing her skirt. “What I need are allies.” The fleeting moment of vulnerability was gone and she gripped Pete’s hand, her fingers like warm iron bands around Pete’s small bones.

“You’ve got them,” Pete said, squeezing back, not wanting to be the first one to let go. “By dint of being a devious bitch.”

“Welcome to the fold,” Morwenna said with a thin, razor-sharp smile. “You’re a Promethean now.”

11.

Jack stayed quiet until the Prometheans had deposited them, their mobiles and IDs, and their luggage on the sidewalk, and he glowered as the cab wound back toward the train station. Pete sighed as they pulled to the curb and the taxi driver waved away her cash. “It’s taken care of, luv.”

“You going to pout much longer?” she asked Jack.

Jack’s lip curled. “This is a little beyond pouting.”

“Look,” Pete said. “By rights, I should be the one in a snit. She tricked me, and she’s a damned liar. At least we’re out of there.”

“Yeah, and thank Christ and his fleet of rowboats for that,” Jack said. His whole frame twitched, unease evident with every breath. He looked like he had in the bad old days, when he was looking for his next fix of either magic or heroin. Pete felt the uncomfortable sensation of memories that she’d rather stayed drowned breaking the surface.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said softly, hefting her suitcase. She felt uncomfortable looking back at the spot where Preston had died. Was what Morwenna said true? Had he been dipping into black magic that drove him crazy?

Or would the Prometheans would have done worse to her if they’d found the soul cage? “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said again. “I was trying to do what wouldn’t get us killed or put on yet another hit list. Forgive me if I’m not sufficiently guns a-blazing for your taste.”

“Petunia, it is not just you anymore!” Jack burst out, his voice echoing off the broken brick fronts of the nearby flats. “It’s me, and it’s Lily, too. You call me irresponsible, but you’ve never once thought about yourself in all this. You have an obligation to stay in one piece now. We need you.” He gripped her by the hands, harder than Morwenna ever had, so hard she inhaled a sharp breath. “I need you.”

Pete looked at her boots, willing her tears not to spill. “I know, Jack. I’m doing this for you.” She looked at him. “How much longer do you think either of us can avoid the Hag? What will happen to Lily then?”

Jack wasn’t given to demonstrations, so Pete was surprised when he wrapped his arms around her hard enough to drive the air from her lungs. She returned the gesture, patting his back, hands caressing the rough leather. “I’d never let that happen,” he muttered against Pete’s neck. “I’d never let her hurt you.”

“Jack,” Pete sighed. She drew back at arm’s length. “You can’t promise that. I can’t promise that nothing will happen to me during this little stunt Morwenna cooked up, but I can promise that if I don’t do it, eventually things will go past the point of no return, and that’ll be in. End reel, roll credits. And seeing as I like things the way they are, I’m going to do my damndest to make sure the Morrigan never gets her Hell on earth.” She squeezed Jack’s hand. “I’m not afraid. Not of this. I’m more afraid you won’t be with me.”

Jack looked at the floor sighed heavily. “’Course I will,” he said. “You’re the only person I stick me neck out for. You know that. Anyone else would be shite out of luck.”

“You’re so romantic,” Pete said.

“That’s me,” Jack agreed, pulling her close again. “Man of the fuckin’ year.”

The loudspeaker was blatting that their train was about to depart, so Pete bought two rushed and hideously expensive tickets from the machine and jogged onboard with Jack. Once she’d sat, the last thing Morwenna had said really hit her, almost pressing her physically into her seat.

It had been a long time since the Treadwell case—not in years, but certainly in experience. She hadn’t kept in contact with the families of any of the children Algernon Treadwell had drained of soul and feeling to sustain his spirit, and she’d gotten the distinct feeling they wanted it that way.

Now, though, she was going in blind, and she didn’t like it. She brought her mobile to life, flipping through numbers to find the only name from her days on the Met still in her directory. Though it was long after his shift ended, he answered on the second ring.

“This better be the world endin’, Pete.”

“Isn’t it always, Ollie?” Pete said, steadied a bit at the sound of his thick Yorkshire accent. Ollie was from a time when none of it—ghosts, demons, the collateral damage of people like the children Treadwell had fed on—existed for her. Just the usual atrocities, wrought by and on plain old humans.

Ollie Heath groused, and she heard bedsprings creak. “Why do I know you’re interrupting my beauty sleep for some illegal errand that’ll probably get me sacked?” he said.

“Because you know me too well,” Pete told him. “Look, Ollie, I don’t have a lot of time. I need you to track down a bloke for me. And then an address.”

Ollie sighed. One day, Pete knew, she was going to run out of credit, and he’d shut her account. She hoped not soon, though. She genuinely liked Ollie. He was a good copper and a decent bloke. Asking him to do something that could get him sacked wasn’t exactly fun for Pete, but she needed real information, not the carefully edited load of shit Morwenna had fed her back in Manchester.

“Right,” Ollie said. “Got a pen. Go ahead.”

Pete rattled off Jeremy Crotherton’s name and the details of his last known sighting. “An accident report, a John Doe turning up in a couple of pieces—according to his, uh, friends, he just vanished.” She chewed on her lip, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. Ollie wouldn’t help her if he thought anything was hinky about this request. “And I need to find an address for Margaret Smythe.”

Ollie sucked in a breath. “That kid what you helped out back in the day? What d’you need her for?”

“It’s important, Ollie,” Pete told him, her gut clenching with unease. If Margaret was in harm’s way, Pete had to do something. Warn her somehow.

“’Course it is,” Ollie said. “Even if it wasn’t, you know I’d do it. Call you back when I find something.”

He rang off, and Pete pressed her forehead against the cool train window as the twilight land sped by in a blur of fog, shadow and bursts of light. She wanted a fag, so badly she could already taste the harsh, dry filter paper on her tongue. Wanted a drink, wanted to scream. Wanted to go home.

But none of those things would help in the moment. Nothing she could do until she knew what she was really getting into.

“You know, I could throttle that bloody Wendy,” Jack said, snapping her out of the vast circle of rage and self pity in which she’d found herself rotating. “Everything we’ve been through, and she flips on me for a few quid and pat on the head from some bitch in a nice suit.”

“Old school friends are usually cunts,” Pete agreed. “I met with a girl I did A-levels with when I was engaged to Terry, and she spent the whole time trying to get me to invest in a pyramid scheme.”

Jack shook his head, mouth forming a bitter line. “Wendy and me was more than that. I saved her life, you know.”

Pete decided she was so glad they weren’t talking about where they were going, or the mess they were in, that she’d discuss Wendy until the cow came home, propped up its feet, and turned on the telly. “I didn’t,” she said. “She wasn’t exactly eager to chat with me, for obvious reasons.”

“That you don’t look like you were hit with a lorry full of bad decisions and aging poorly?” Jack snorted.

Pete laughed and fetched him a soft punch on his arm. “You’re a terrible slag. She wasn’t that bad.”

“She used to be me only real friend,” Jack said, abruptly sombering again. “After me da fucked off for the last time, Mum was in and out with a different man every week. Wendy used to make these fuck-awful beans on toast and steal lager from the downstairs neighbor, and we’d sit up in her room and have dinner because our parents were all too stoned to feed us.”

Pete stayed quiet, glad that the vise grip of Manchester’s Black had eased a bit and she could feel the thrum of power again, rather than drowning in it, as the train raced into the country.

“My da was a degenerate scum-coated wanker,” Jack said. “But Wendy’s was true horror. Put her head through a wall because he didn’t like her wearing makeup. Came for our usual beans and chatter, found her on the stoop looking like fucking Carrie. I took her to this old tip of a warehouse where me and my mates hung about, and just sat and talked with her all night, about shite I’ve never told anyone before or since. Just making sure she didn’t go to sleep. Walked her home at dawn because she ordered me to, even though I would’ve rather eaten nails then take her back there.”

Pete put her head on Jack’s shoulder, much as she imagined Wendy would have. She felt the spark of his talent against hers. There was a time when they had to be careful not even to touch skin to skin, because her talent would drink his down. At least they’d solved that problem.

Jack stroked her hair once, absently. His eyes were miles and decades away. “I wanted to kick the shit out of her da, but he was friends with my mum’s Kevin, and it would’ve gone bad for her mum besides if I’d interfered.”

“You did the best you could,” Pete said quietly. “You were just a kid, Jack.”

“I always told myself I’d be better,” he said, vicious against her ear. “That I wouldn’t fuck about with a bunch of whores or drink or beat my kids. That I’d be a rock, not a voice you hear on the wind or a tosser who comes around on your birthday, throws money at you and then fucks off again so some other bastard can beat seven shades of Hell out of you and keep your mum so stoned she doesn’t even know it’s happening. I told myself I’d be better.” He gave a shuddery breath, and Pete knew if she looked up she’d see his wet eyes, so she didn’t. Jack would never open up again if she witnessed that. “But I’m not,” he whispered, voice thick. “I’m shit.”

Pete slipped an arm across his chest, so close and warm they might have been at home in bed. “You’re a good man,” she said. “You’re a good man who makes shit choices. That’s different than being shit.” She slotted her fingers into the shallow spaces in between Jack’s ribs, spaces she’d memorized night after night and longed for when she’d been away. “Lily is going to remember you as that man. None of what came before matters to her, so that’s all that should matter to you.”

Jack said nothing, just breathed in time with the clack of the rails, and Pete started to wonder if she’d enraged him or saddened him beyond speaking. She let out a silent sigh of relief when her mobile buzzed with Ollie’s number.

“You never can stay away from trouble, can you?” Ollie said when she picked up.

“I bloody well can, thank you,” Pete said. “All I did was ask you to find one man who’s not even crooked as far as I know. What’s troubling about that?”

“I mean the Smythe bit,” Ollie said. “I got your address, and HOLMES kicked back five or six calls to the locals for fights between the Mr. and Mrs.” He didn’t need to elaborate. They both knew what that meant. “What’s happened, Pete?” Ollie said at last. “You’re the last person I’d peg to go nostalgic over an old case.”

The last case. The last one she’d ever worked for the Met. The one that showed her, irrevocably, that she couldn’t hide from the Black inside the mundane. Eventually it would always find her.

“Just give me the address,” she snapped. “I know what I’m doing, Ollie.”

“Never said you didn’t,” he said, mild as ever. Pete felt like shit for snarling at him.

“Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Here’s the rundown,” Ollie said. He wasn’t one to hold grudges, which Pete figured was why they’d stayed friends for so long. She could be hard to live with on the best of days.

“Looks like the Smythes picked up and moved soon after the Treadwell business. Dear old dad came home from Pentonville and the whole lot buggered off to a little map speck called Overton, in Herefordshire. Sheep and quaint cottages and all that.”

“Yeah, heard they moved away from London,” Pete said. “I wouldn’t blame them, honestly.”

“There’s something else about Overton you should know,” he said. “The families of the three other kids are all living within five miles of each other.” He took in Pete’s silence and then heaved a deep sigh. “But you already knew that.”

“I’d heard the news,” Pete said. The thought of coming face to face with the other families—the Killigans, the Leroys, and the Dumbershalls, the children she hadn’t been able to save—made her want to stick her head between her knees. “Tell me what you found, though,” she said. “I appreciate it, Ollie.”

“Property records say they all picked up and moved within a month of each other. Hell, the Dumbershalls and the Leroys live in the two halves of a semi-detached. If you can call it living, poor souls.”

“Anything else?” Pete asked. Memories of white eyes and mouths open to scream but producing no sound flooded up at her, and she dug her fingers into her own palm.

“Just a string of backpackers and dog walkers disappeared about three months ago. Locals think it’s some kind of Russian mafia deal, sex slaves or whatnot, which gives you an idea of exactly what kind of brain trust you’re dealing with out there.” Ollie gave a snort. “Probably nothing. It’s rough country—people do stupid things or they wander off.”

Or they got caught up in the supposed demon summoning Jeremy Crotherton had investigated, before he’d gone missing. “Thanks,” Pete said. “Call me if you run across anything else, Ollie.”

“You take care,” Ollie said, more concern roughening his voice that was usual for his unflappable soul. “You’ve got a little one now.” He rang off and Pete swiped a hand over her face. She wasn’t going to cry. Or scream. She was going to hold it together and do her bloody job, because that was what she did. She was cool under pressure. She wasn’t some fragile, birdlike thing that fell apart at the slightest hint of trouble.

Jack was staring at her, and when she blinked he spread his hands. “Come on, spit it out. The Met know where this Crotherton bloke fucked off to?”

“Ollie hasn’t found anything,” Pete said. “All I know is that all of Treadwell’s survivors are living down there, and sooner or later I’m going to have to talk to them.”

“Well, you don’t have to,” Jack said. “You don’t owe those people anything. You saved their kids.”

“Not soon enough,” Pete whispered. If she’d just believed Jack when he popped back into her life, if she’d just listened from moment one, she could have put Treadwell out of comission before three lives had been ruined and Margaret Smythe’s had nearly been snuffed out.

“You did every fucking thing you could for them,” Jack said in a tone that brooked no argument. “And now we’ll go down there, find out what soggy pub Crotherton is holed up in, put the demon back where it belongs, and go home. Spend a few days in the country in the bargain. Won’t that be lovely?”

Pete felt the weight of the soul cage in her pocket, saw the memory of the children’s blank white eyes after Treadwell had taken away everything that made them human. “Yeah,” she agreed, feeling the knot of fear twist tighter than ever in her gut. “It’ll be fucking wonderful.”

12.

The last train to Hereford arrived a few minutes after midnight, and a silent, empty station greeted them. Pete traded a look with Jack. “Got to love God’s country,” he said. “Everyone rolls up the streets at eight p.m. sharp.”

The front of the station was absent of vehicles, either buses or cabs. The street itself was quiet and empty, a light fog spinning under the streetlights like sand suspended in water.

“Shit,” she said. “You’d think if Morwenna wanted us here so bad, she could at least have sent us a bloody car.”

Jack pointed across the street, where a skinny kid slumped against the fender of an ancient Puegeot. “Our chariot awaits,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “Oi,” he called to the kid. “How much for a ride?”

He appraised them, sucking on gums high and white from some kind of speed. “For you, pervo? Not enough in the world. For the lady there? Could be free if she’s into the kinky stuff.”

“I’m into beating the shit out of smart little tossers with my bare hands,” Pete said sweetly, giving him a wide smile. She half hoped the kid would push the issue. She was wound so tightly violence would feel like a relief.

Then she got hold of herself and wondered what the fuck was wrong with her. She didn’t lose her mind and beat people up for no good reason. Being here, thinking about the Treadwell case, missing Lily—it was pushing her too far. She pressed her thumbs into the center of her forehead, feeling the whisper of her talent. Just let me go and we could burn him alive on the spot.

Sometimes it was like having a serial killer rooming in her head. Once she’d started to really understand her talent, she never questioned why Jack’s had turned him into a junkie and nearly driven him to suicide.

The kid regarded her, perhaps rightly thinking she was a madwoman, then shrugged. “Hundred quid.”

“I haven’t even told you where I want to go,” Pete said with a roll of her eyes. She needed to calm down and be steady, reliable copper Pete instead of deranged, magically inclined Pete. “Forty, and I don’t let my man here kick your teeth out and feed them back to you.”

Jack stood silent and unsmiling. His menacing glare did the trick, because the kid huffed in contempt and threw up his hands. “Fifty, and I ain’t carrying your bags.”

Pete slung her kit into the cab and got in after it. “Deal. But you better drive fast.”

Once out of Hereford, the cabbie drove as if he were being pursued by large, mutant weasels intent on mating with him. Pete thought that if this was what he’d do for fifty quid, she’d hate to see what happened when he was actually motivated.

“What’d you say the name of the town was?” he bellowed over the car’s distressed engine and whining transmission.

Pete told him, and he veered onto a B road before stopping abruptly by a sign in the middle of nowhere.

VILLAGE OF OVERTON, the sign proclaimed. POPULATION 271.

“Spooky, innit?” said the kid, smacking his gums. “Not keen on being turned into some fat farmer’s bum buddy, so I’ll let you out here, I think.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jack said. “It’s got to be two fucking miles at least into town.”

“Man, you ain’t heard about the backpackers that went poof up here month before this?” said the kid, making a disappearing motion with his fingers. “Not to mention those fuckin’ travelers in their tent city. Don’t trust gyppos. ’M not going another inch.”

“Your attitude is as charming as your breath,” Pete told him, thrusting a fifty at the kid and climbing out.

“Thanks, Mum,” he said with a grin that was begging to be smacked off his face. He screeched away, nearly before Jack was free of the door, and Jack flipped the bird at the red smears of the car’s taillights.

“It’ll be all right,” Pete said. “Like we really expected anything to be easy on this jaunt?”

“I’m not a fuckin’ backpacker,” Jack grumbled. “I don’t swan all over the country on foot.”

“Find your balls and let’s go,” Pete snapped. She could see lights ahead, and even though it was the middle of the night, they were also in the middle of nowhere. People had gone missing in recent memory, not to mention Jeremy Crotherton and his theory that a demon was running loose.

Pete walked close to Jack, swinging her eyes from side to side, seeking for anything hiding in the shadows. The moon was high and horned above them, and Pete could see the blue shadows of hills on either side of the road. She’d never been much for the country, preferring the eternal twilight of streetlamps and the buzz of motorways. Too much silence just made her think there was someone out there, watching.

Jack rolled his gaze from one side of the road to the other, and his step was short and hitched. “Waiting for the cannibals to break from the forest and carry us off to make attractive jumpers out of our skin,” he said.

“You’re acting as if you’re twelve,” Pete said. “Knock it off.”

“I’m not being spooky,” Jack insisted. “This fucking place is off. Do you hear anything? Anything at all?”

Pete listened. There was nothing. No dogs, no doors slamming, no car engines. Even the wind was quiet, the air still, as if the earth held its breath. “It’s a small place,” she said with a shrug. “Not like London.”

“There’s small villages, and there’s boneyards,” Jack said. “Last place I was in that was this quiet was a tomb.”

Pete reached into her pocket and brushed her baton. Just knowing it was still there let her keep walking.

When they reached Overton proper, the village was empty and silent. The high street consisted of a few blocks of semi-detached homes that had been made into snug storefronts, and a square with a statue in it of a Franciscan in a robe, his staring eyes weeping oxidized tears. A pair of ravens sat on his shoulders, the only movement in the whole square. Not crows—true ravens, like the one in her dream, with bodies as long as Pete’s arm and beaks sharp as pikes.

She stopped in the center of the cobblestone street, watching the birds. They paid her no mind, hunching against the chill and blinking their obsidian eyes. If the Hag cared that she and Jack were in the village, she wasn’t immediately tipping her hand.

Jack flicked a fag-end in the general direction of the birds. “Still think everything is right and good?”

“Of course not,” Pete said. The shadows and reflections on the glass were liquid, and the first real unease stirred, a flutter of her stomach that had nothing to do with the silent town. Nobody being in residence would be a much better outcome than something being there.

“Can’t do anything about Crotherton until morning,” Jack said. “So aside from bunking with the travelers, where are we sleeping?”

Pete had hoped that, as with most villages that attracted hikers and tourists, there’d be an inn or even a shoddy chain hotel, but there was nothing. Everything was dark and silent, and no signs on any of the storefronts promised lodging.

Pete sighed. “I can only think of one place, and you’re not going to like it.”

“Luv, I’d sleep cuddled up with a horny skinhead inside a roach-infested box at this point,” Jack said, punctuating his words with a wide yawn.

“All right, then,” Pete said, telling her mobile to give her a map to the address she’d gotten from Ollie. “Come with me.”

The Smythe house was only about half a mile from the square, but it was the most uncomfortable half mile Pete had ever walked. She could feel stares, hear whispers, and sense the rising crescendo of unearthly magic all around them. It was as if they’d tripped an alarm, and now the electric fence was on and charging the air itself to prick her skin.

Jack grimaced and rubbed his forehead. Pete glanced at him. “You going to make it?”

“It’s not even sight,” Jack said. “Something else. Whole damn place sets me teeth on edge.”

“If everything were all right, we wouldn’t be here,” Pete said. “Think it’s some residue from the summoning? Maybe that’s what made Crotherton bugger off.”

Maybe it’s what sent Preston over the edge.

Or maybe she was just tired and far too edgy. She stopped at the correct house number and looked up the walk, not sure what to expect.

The Smythe house looked normal from the street. White plaster, red tile roof, almost like an Italian villa plopped down in the middle of green England. A neat garden with a weathered fence containing late mums and lilies. It was a far cry from the dank council house the Smythes had occupied when Pete had first met Margaret’s mum, after Margaret had been kidnapped by Treadwell’s agents.

The lights were off, but she pushed through the gate and up the path. The gate springs gave a shriek, deafening in the quiet night. Jack stayed on the street, eyes roaming through the darkness. Just knowing he was behind her gave Pete the nerve to pound on the door.

After a minute of thumping, she started to hope that they weren’t home, or had moved, or anything that would save her from having to talk to Margaret’s parents. But then the lamp flared on above her head, and the door flew open.

“What!” a skinny man in an undershirt and pants barked. “It’s one in the fuckin’ morning! Did you lose your watch up your arse?”

“Mr. Smythe?” Pete said, purely as a formality. She recognized his craggy face and sad, rapidly retreating gray hairline from the family photos she’d seen in London.

“Who the fuck are you?” he shouted in response. “I told you lot, you wait for the morning like everyone else! Go camp on the green with the other freaks and stay off our personal property!”

Pete didn’t bother asking him what he was on about. “Sir, you don’t know me, but I worked your daughter’s kidnap case. I’m afraid my friend and I have come to Overton on business and we’re in a bit of a spot. Might we come in?” Honestly, she was glad it was Margaret’s father and not her gin-soaked, teary-eyed mother. Being shouted at by convicts was familiar ground, one she could navigate.

Mr. Smythe drew back visibly, as if she’d brandished a tire iron at his testicles. “You’re a copper?”

“May we come in?” Pete asked again. Let him think she still had a badge, if it made life easier. It wasn’t a crime not to correct an assumption.

“Well, this ain’t a fuckin’ B&B,” Mr. Smythe said. “My wife and kid are asleep, and whatever it is can wait until mornin’.”

“I’m afraid it can’t,” Pete said. “I’ve been asked to look into the disappearances in the area, and there was a mixup at our lodging.”

She tried a different tack, giving Mr. Smythe a warm smile. He curled his lip, as if a small dog had pissed on his shoe. “I know it’s a terrible imposition, but I and the investigation would certainly benefit from it.”

She kept smiling and put her foot over the threshold, closing in on Smythe’s personal space. Like any scrawny rat who’d been locked up, he shrank back instinctively, out of blade distance.

Pete stepped inside. The Smythe house smelled the same as their old one—stale cigarettes, overpowering floral cleaner, and the faint tang of rancid takeaway grease. Mr. Smythe gave her a dull glare. “Come in then, I guess,” he muttered.

“Thank you so much,” Pete said, borrowing the false cheer her mother often employed when she was trying to cajole Pete and her sister into doing something they didn’t want. She turned and gestured to Jack, who hopped up the steps and grinned at Philip Smythe.

“Really appreciate it, sir.”

Smythe regarded Jack with a slack jaw, eyes working over every inch of him. “You a copper too?”

“On Her Majesty’s secret service,” Jack said with a perfectly straight face, and Smythe blinked at him.

“I don’t know about this…” he started, but a door banged open and Pete watched Norma Smythe came stumbling down the hall, scrubbing at her face. Margaret’s mother was wearing a lavender nightgown that stopped far north of what Pete wanted to see, and yesterday’s makeup still lingered on her eyelids like bruises.

“The fuck is all this racket?” she muttered, before focusing on Pete. “I know you.”

“We’ve found ourselves in Overton without a place to stay,” Pete said, “and your husband was kind enough to offer the spare room.”

“Haven’t got a fucking spare room,” Norma grumbled. “Kid’s in it.” She fixed her gaze on Pete, and it was less bleary than Pete had hoped. The Norma she knew was an afternoon drinker and considered sobriety an untenable state. “Thought you’d left the Met. Tried to call you at the one-year of you finding my baby, and they said you’d left.”

“I’m investigating a private matter,” Pete said without missing a beat. “A man named Jeremy Crotherton who’s gone missing.”

“Crotherton one of them hippie hikers?” Philip said. “Good luck finding him, then. Probably got stoned and pitched down a ravine.”

“Mr. Crotherton’s … family is very concerned,” Pete said. She looked back at Norma, trying to come up with a way to make this more palatable, but she caught sight of movement at the top of the stairs and her heart nearly stopped. “Hello, Margaret,” she said softly. “How are you, sweetheart?”

“I’m very well, thank you,” Margaret said. Her tone was heavy, like she’d downed a fistful of painkillers. “Have you come to see me?”

“I’m sorry, luv, but I’m here for something else,” Pete said. “A man named Jeremy Crotherton. You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

“Oi,” Philip said. “You ain’t a copper, so don’t talk to my kid. You can sleep on the foldaway, but in the morning I want you gone.”

“That’s fine,” Pete murmured, her eyes still on Margaret. The girl’s gaze was wide and unblinking, and Pete could see her vibrating with panic from three meters away.

“Meg, get your arse back in bed,” Norma snapped at her daughter. “You’ve a huge appearance tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?” Pete kept her tone conversational. The Smythes weren’t going to catch on she knew they were full of shit. Not from any betrayal of her eyes or face, anyway. She might not be as good a liar as Jack, but she could fool two greedy, chavvy council rats for a few minutes.

“A meeting,” said Norma, lighting a cigarette from a pack on her end table and sucking on it like it dispensed champagne and Vicodin. “Tent meeting, what like they have over in America. You haven’t been following the news story?”

“She’s been busy putting her nose in other people’s lives,” said Philip. “You think London cares about the back of beyond?”

“Stop being a twat,” Norma shot back. “You were locked up, you didn’t see it—whatever else she is, this lady brought my little one back to me.” She lunged for Pete and enfolded her in a vodka-scented hug before Pete could dart away. She wondered how quickly you could suffocate against another woman’s tits while Norma Smythe mumbled into her ear, “I can never thank you. Never ever thank you enough.”

“It’s … it’s all right,” Pete said, wriggling free. “Just doing my job and all that.”

“My Margaret was so much better when she came back,” Norma said. “And the other parents were so lovely about what had happened. When we found all four of these poor children could do the same … sort of things, well. We’ve attracted quite a local following, and tomorrow’s our biggest ever. Someday we’ll be larger than Glastonbury, Philip reckons.”

“You should come,” Philip broke in. “See for yourself, then you can call the care workers off our arse. It ain’t like we’re auctioning off our kids to the highest bidder.”

“I’d love to see what you’ve been up to,” Pete said. “Tomorrow, you said?”

“Eight a.m. sharp,” Norma said. “But people are already camped on the green to get a good viewing spot.”

“Oh, for the great detective inspector, I’ll see we get her a front-row seat,” Philip said. Something slithered across his face that was malicious and unpleasant, the anticipation of seeing someone he hated in pain.

Pete looked to Jack, who grimaced at the magic that even now ran all over Pete like thorns against her bare skin. “Make it two spots,” she said. “We wouldn’t miss it.”

13.

Pete passed the night next to Jack on the Smythe’s spring-infested rollaway bed, pressed into him out of necessity as much as need. It lacked a lot of the glamour it had held when Pete was sixteen, and when she managed to fall asleep, she opened her eyes to find herself standing on a hillside, wearing only her underwear and one of Jack’s shirts. Dew coated the soles of her feet, and mist curled low amid lichen-crusted stone walls and a single tree that bent over a cairn of black stones.

She looked behind her and saw her footprints in the long grass, a silvery trail leading back over the hills, presumably toward the village. She didn’t know how far she’d come, just that she was here now.

She was only half-surprised to see the raven from her other dream. It lighted on a tree branch and croaked at her. Pete heaved a sigh. “Your mistress can creep around my mind all she likes. Doesn’t change my answer.”

She took a few steps forward, wet grass brushing her calves. Cold found her through the thin material of her shirt, and she wrapped her arms around her waist. She wasn’t usually cold in dreams.

“That’s because this isn’t a dream.”

She stared at the raven. She’d never heard an agent of the Morrigan speak to her so directly, not inside her mind. “It isn’t?”

The raven ruffled its pinion feathers and adjusted its grip on the branch. “You’re awake. Does this really feel like a dream?”

Talking bird and all, it was substantially less horrible than most of Pete’s prophetic dreams. “I don’t know.”

“You need to leave,” said the bird. “Right now.”

“Let me guess,” Pete said. “You and the Morrigan have your own plans for this place.” It would explain the magic wound through this place tightly as the rock met the earth, tightly as the roots of the tree in front of her.

“This place? No. This is not our place,” said the raven. “Nor the place of any living thing. Not of gods, or of men. It is a place of death, a place that will lead only to your destruction, Weir.”

The raven rotated its head to her, stared into her eyes. “Stop looking for Jeremy Crotherton and stop trying to appease the Prometheans. In the long run, it’s not going to matter anyway. Run,” it said. “Run and don’t look back.”

“Says the talking bird,” Pete grumbled. “Perched up there in his fancy little tree.”

“I can only talk to you in this place,” said the raven. “Only here, where it’s strongest.”

“I fucking hate you types and your talking in circles,” Pete said. “Do you know that?”

“It’s spreading,” said the raven. “And you need to get away from the heart of it before it infects you like…”

“Pete!”

The scream cut through the mist, and Pete turned, all at once feeling frozen, damp, and footsore. “Jack? What the fuck is going on?”

He came running, blond hair bobbing through the mist until he was fully in view. “The fuck are you doing?” he gasped, leaning over and bracing on his thighs. He fumbled a cigarette and lit it with the tip of his finger.

Pete looked to the raven, but it had flown. She was alone. “Sleepwalking, I guess,” she said.

“You scared me,” Jack said, regaining his breath. “I woke up and the window was open and you’d done a runner. We’re five fucking miles from the village.”

“Seriously?” Pete regarded the hillside with more scrutiny. “I thought I was dreaming…”

Jack grasped her by the arms and examined her face. “What happened, luv?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But I don’t feel well.” The longer she stood, the more sick and dizzy she felt, like when she’d had morning sickness with Lily to the power of ten.

This is not a place of gods or of men, the raven said, and Pete looked back at the cairn of stones. The entire place vibrated with power, as if what was in front of her was slightly out of focus. The vague unease she felt in the village had turned itself to full-blown panic.

“Yeah, I can’t say I fancy it,” Jack said. “I was too worried to really pay attention but now…” He flinched. “There’s bad mojo running through here.”

Pete let him put his jacket around her and his arm in turn, and lead her back to the road. “What time is it?” she said. She felt small, out of place, and sick to her stomach. She’d never sleepwalked, not even as a child. Never woken up like that, alone and vulnerable.

Get it together, Caldecott, she told herself. Strange shite had happened to Preston and Jeremy Crotherton, too. If anything, this meant she could finish the job and get away from the Prometheus Club all the quicker.

“Around seven, I think,” Jack said. “Took me a while to find you. Don’t worry, we’ll still make the Smythes’ freak show if we hurry.” He looked down at her as they walked, bumpy asphalt poking at Pete’s feet, and frowned. “What do you think is going on here, Petunia? Really?”

“You’re asking me?” Pete had to laugh. “You really must have no fucking idea.”

“Nope,” Jack said. “Never run into anyplace that felt like this. Not a mass grave, not a sacrificial site. This is new.”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Pete said, as the mist began to burn away under a pale and overworked sunrise. “But I know whatever it is, it can’t be good.”

14.

Pete might have spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what the fuck was happening, but there was Margaret to think of, and barely time to pull on real clothes and comb her hair before she and Jack were off again, moving toward the village green with a crowd clutching rucksacks and portable chairs, sporting a higher-than-average ratio of natural fibers and New Age bangles. Some were travelers, but some looked like ordinary folk, rumpled and red-eyed and not used to sleeping rough.

Pete didn’t tell Jack about the raven, or about what it had said. There was enough going on this morning—later, she could tell him the whole story and see if he had any idea what they might have stumbled into.

The green was just a flat space at the edge of the village, bounded on one side by a series of stone buildings and on the other by rolling open country. A hill fort looked down over the grassy expanse, blocking the light and trapping the mist in a low bowl of shadow and chill.

The crowd congregated under a white tent, the sort used for church fetes or picnics.

A plywood stage had been constructed at the edge of the green, and four small chairs sat across the length. Pete intended to slip in the back of the tent, but Norma Smythe spotted her and dragged her to the front of the crowd, to assorted grumbles from the surrounding hippies.

“Oh, shut it,” Jack said. “Smear some more patchouli on your nethers and calm down.”

Norma gave him a dirty look, and Pete tried to smooth her over with a smile. “Sorry. We’re just a bit tired.”

“Stay here,” Norma said. “We’ll find you when it’s over.”

Pete looked for Margaret, but when she found her, she was being held tightly by Philip, who gripped her arm as though it were a leash. Margaret had circles under her eyes even deeper than Pete’s, and she slumped in her father’s grip like a broken toy.

“Shit,” Pete muttered. She had to speak to Margaret alone and find out what was going on. She chewed on her lip and tried to look interested in what was happening onstage.

“All right, then. We’re starting.” Pete tried not to stare when she caught sight of Bridget Killigan’s father. The last time she’d seen Dexter, bent over his daughter’s hospital bed, he’d looked wrung out but still lively. Now he was gaunt and pale, looking close to keeling over but for the microphone he clutched to hold himself upright. “I’ll tell you how this works, then I’ll turn this over to Philip,” Dexter Killigan said. His voice, even amplified, was a thin shred of what Pete remembered. “You can ask one question. The children will answer. Their answers cannot be disputed or argued over. You may not ask another question.” He paused, staring out at the silent massing of people with unfocused eyes. “That’s it, then.” With a limp gesture, he passed the microphone to Philip and slumped offstage.

“This is great,” Jack said against her ear. “When do you think they’re going to start falling on the ground and jabbering at snakes?”

“Be quiet,” Pete snapped, not even pretending to indulge him. You didn’t even have to be observant to sense the wrongness. It was like watching a parade of mental patients try to convince you they were perfectly sane and really did hear space aliens transmitting in their fillings. They might have the right words and gestures, but something would be slightly blurred, slightly wrong.

“All right,” said Philip Smythe. “Those of you who’ve been here before, welcome back. Consider letting some new folks take a turn at the front. Also, consider pitching something in the bucket when it comes around, yeah? We’re running on your gas.”

“Bring on the kids!” someone shouted, and Philip glared into the crowd.

“You put that tongue back in your head. This isn’t a carnival sideshow.”

“Could have fooled me,” Jack grumbled.

“Be quiet and be fuckin’ respectful,” Philip continued. “This isn’t a trick. This is a gift to us all.” He gestured to the back of the stage, where thick plastic hung as a makeshift curtain. “Welcome the kids, please.”

As they came out, all Pete could do was stare. Margaret sat as far as she could from the others, folding in on herself. Bridget Killigan came forth, walking as if she were moving underwater, arms spread in front of her. Philip took her arm and guided her to her seat. “There, luv,” he said.

Pete’s mouth opened, and her air grew short. Bridget Killigan couldn’t walk. She couldn’t do anything. She was blind and catatonic, a victim of Algernon Treadwell’s hungry ghost. He’d drained everything that made her Bridget and left a shell, but he hadn’t filled it. He hadn’t been after a body, just her strength. Jack had been Treadwell’s end goal, and Pete had stopped him, but she hadn’t been fast enough. He’d taken three children, three children who should not be up and walking around.

Diana Leroy and Patrick Dumbershall walked out together, clutching hands. Patrick, who still had one eye that wasn’t completely clouded with cataracts, helped her into her seat before feeling his way to his own.

Jack leaned down and pressed his lips into her hair. “Do you have any idea what the hell is going on?”

“Less than none,” Pete said. She was almost afraid to keep watching, but any outburst now would just draw attention, and she didn’t think the rapt crowd would take too kindly to that. Self-proclaimed pacifists were the first ones to start throwing rocks at the riot police, that much she knew.

A pudgy woman with purple ribbons woven through her hair and a skirt swirling around her ample bottom stepped up, and Philip hopped off the stage, presenting her the mic. “Go ahead. Ask one question.”

The woman focused on the four children. Margaret dropped her gaze, foot kicking at the wood, but the other three stared serenely ahead, white gazes unblinking.

“Will I ever find someone to love me?” the woman asked, her voice wavering.

“Hey, now,” Philip said. “Before we hear the answer, let’s give this sweet lady a round of applause for being so brave.”

The crowd set up an earnest clapping that made Pete want to kick every one of them in the shins.

Bridget Killigan traced her hand against the air. “I see a man, but he will be taken from you before love blossoms. You will remember him, when you are alone.”

The woman stared for a moment, and then bowed her head. “Thank you. I know you speak the truth.” She crumpled a fiver in her fist and shoved it at Philip before pushing through the crowd and disappearing.

Pete reexamined the whole setup. The tent, the crowd of adoring followers, the patter from Philip … it was a confidence scam, but that didn’t explain how the children were up and talking. Faith healers relied on spectacle and giving people what they wanted, and Bridget’s answer had been the opposite.

Another woman, this one young and slender, sporting rainbow dreadlocks, took the mic, but a man in a nylon windcheater pushed her out of the way. “Excuse me…” Philip started, but the bloke shouted. Red-faced, he looked more like a farmer than someone who’d be in line to talk to fortune-tellers.

“Here’s the thing,” he shouted. “I think this is a load of shit. You lot ain’t no better than the gyppos, coming into our town and turning it into a circus. Can’t say anything useful. You want us not to run you out, tell me somethin’ I can use. Tell me the lotto numbers.”

There were murmurs of assent from the back of the tent, where a complement of four other similarly large and ale-bloated men lurked. “Nice to see the local racists are out in force,” Pete murmured.

“Eh, it’s been a while since I booted one of those in the balls,” Jack said. “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to your girl.”

Margaret was visibly shaking at the confrontation, but Diana Leroy cocked her head at the man. “You’re not nice,” she said, her voice singsong.

“What I thought,” the man said. “Fuck off back to your sideshow. Don’t want none of your shite around here.” He pushed a fat finger into Philip’s chest. “And if you don’t light out, we’ll make sure you leave.”

“Your wife doesn’t know.” Diana’s voice rang over the yells from the local yobs, and the grumbles from the hippie set. “She doesn’t know what you do when you go to Hereford first Saturday of the month.”

The punter’s lip curled as Pete watched, waiting for the moment she was going to have to save Philip Smythe from getting his arse handed to him. Maybe then at least he’d be civil to her.

“You’re guessin’,” the punter sneered. “You’re doing that shite from the telly where you guess at me until you get it right.”

“Your wife doesn’t know about Geoffrey, or that you like to force yourself on boys even younger than him,” Diana said. “And she doesn’t know you’re the one who gave her the clap. But she’ll find out, because you’re not smart enough to keep your stories straight. One night you’ll stumble home drunk, and she’ll be waiting for you with your rifle. She’s smarter than you think. It’ll look like suicide, and you’ll never hurt anyone, ever again.”

The silence endemic to Overton reigned with a heavy hand. Philip Smythe gave the punter a smug look, folding his arms. “You asked, mate.”

The punter dropped the mic and shoved his way through the crowd, violent and churning in his panic. He knocked aside one of his friends and kept going across the green, until he was just a speck.

Pete looked at Jack, feeling cold all over again, down to her bones. “Are they really doing it? Telling the future?” Divination wasn’t exact. It was a hard discipline to master, and not a talent that came naturally. You could get snatches, but the future was fluid. The Black could always change. Events were not immutable. Nobody could speak with the accuracy of Diana and Bridget, but they seemed so certain. And more importantly, so did their marks.

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. He rubbed the center of his forehead. “I think they’re reading what’s already there, not the timestream.”

“Mind reading’s not a first-year trick either,” Pete muttered.

“And what sort of nasty do we know that excels in picking apart your deepest fears for their own amusement?” Jack said, tensing up and staring at the stage with his glacial eyes unblinking.

Pete looked at the children onstage, save Margaret, in a new light. She might not have Jack’s vast store of knowledge, but this one was easy. She’d seen it before, firsthand, up close and far too personal. “Oh, fuck,” she breathed, turning back to Jack. His face went grim, and he didn’t take his eyes off Bridget, Patrick, and Diana.

“’Fraid so, luv. Those kids up there aren’t kids. Those are Crotherton’s demons.”