“What sort of tea did you get?” Jack slipped the new subject in like he’d dip into an unwary pocket for a wallet.
Pete favored him with a look that said she wasn’t put off in the least by his bullshit. “Cranberry sandwiches, and I popped by the off-license for some good Belgian lager. Thought we both deserved a treat after that wretched scene at the Pooles’.”
“I’ve half a mind to go back and curse that woman so her ugly teeth fall out,” Jack said, glad she’d let the matter drop where it was. Pete couldn’t know about the demon. Not yet, at least. If Jack failed at great swaths of life, he could at least keep a fucking secret. It was a point of mage pride—the good ones became paranoid bastards in short order, so that no one learned their tricks.
“Mm-hmm,” Pete said. They walked into the stairwell of Jack’s flat. “And wouldn’t that be brilliant for business, what little of it we have.”
“Oi,” Jack said, slinging his arm over her shoulders. “It was your brilliant idea that we become a bloody ITV special made flesh, so don’t give me any of your sass.”
Pete favored him with a half smile. “However much you complain, Jack, us exorcising spirits and raising the same put this tea on the table, and if you’ve got a better solution for both of us being skint broke and nigh unemployable, I’d love to hear it.”
“No dice, Petunia,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re the brains of this little operation.” They mounted the narrow stairs, the tread shifting under Jack’s weight. The lift was unreliable at best and Jack preferred the narrow, dim stairway even with lifelong smoker’s lungs. The lift was closed, gated, trapped. If an entity manifested, he’d have nowhere to go, no recourse to banish it, trapped within four walls of iron.
Living with the sight taught you quickly and with great finality what sorts of places to avoid if you expected to live to next week. At least, to live in the sorts of places that didn’t have bars on the windows and serve Thorazine smoothies.
“Stop calling me Petunia,” Pete said. She shrugged off his arm as they reached the second-floor landing. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about that display in the alley.”
Jack finished the climb to his flat in silence and waited while Pete unlocked the door. “I told you, it weren’t nothing.” He could shrug off one incident as his own jumpiness now that only tenuous ink, flesh, and a pinch of magic held back his sight. He’d have to be more careful when the demon came back.
Because it was most definitely fucking when, not if.
Pete slammed the doors of the kitchen cabinets as she brought out plates, glasses, and napkins. “You have to talk to me sooner or later, Jack. Are you seeing things again? Have you been lying to me since we did the ink?”
“I’m not bothered by the sight,” Jack said honestly. Just bedeviled by a demon . . .
Pete let out a small humph. “I was a copper. I know when you’re lying to me, Jack Winter.” She ripped the packaging off her sandwich and sat down, gesturing for him to join her.
What Jack really wanted was a smoke, needed it with every jangling nerve at the ends of his body, but he forced himself to sit at the dinette table across from Pete, open his tea, and take a bite. He consumed the sandwich in less time than he could have counted. Casting the hex had left him drained. It was a new sensation to be hungry—before, he just wandered the streets nerve-jangled and sleepless until he found a hit and a bed to take it in. His body was like a wrung sponge, magic soaking up his every reserve. And yet now, when he’d kicked, gained weight, and even had someone feeding him, the magic hurt more.
It was a problem, but not the one set to rip his head off at the moment, so Jack pushed it to the back of his mind.
“I’m not, luv,” he said after he’d wiped away bits of Brie and cranberry with the back of his hand. “Lying to you. I swear it.” He needed a shave, needed to sleep.
Needed a fix, needed it like a drowning man needs oxygen . . .
“All right,” Pete said, lighting a cigarette and tapping ash onto her sandwich crust, “if you want to shut me out it’s your own bloody funeral.”
“Isn’t that the bloody truth.” Jack shoved the last of the sandwich into his mouth so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. No magic let Pete detect untruths—just a life as a copper and a copper’s daughter before it.
“If you feel like talking about it, I’ll listen,” she said at length, her cigarette growing a long crown of ash as she failed to draw on it.
Jack heard the need to keep pulling, keep interrogating in her voice, but Pete merely reached across the table and slid her hand over his, small and warm. “You know I would, about anything. The truth, heavens forfend. You haven’t scared me off yet, Jack.”
Jack shut his eyes, pulled his hand from under Pete’s, and pushed back from the table. “I’m going to catch some kip,” he told her. “Been a long day already.”
Pete whipped her hand back to her side as if she’d only intended to brush away crumbs. “I’ll leave you the washing up, then, since I got the tea.”
“As long as you don’t mind it taking place at some future date,” Jack said, as he retreated to the flat’s only bedroom. His and Pete’s sleep was cyclical enough that one bed was all they needed, even if she hadn’t agreed to share with him yet. Her last words were lost to the door slamming.
Jack leaned against the backside, an ancient Poor Dead Bastards poster crinkling against his head. He felt sick, the sandwich having its revenge on him, sight chipping in with a throb at the center of his forehead. His heart accelerated as he remembered the pop of the Black, the way the demon was just there with nary a warning whisper in his mind.
That could have meant he was dead. That was a serious problem for the longevity of Jack Winter, cock-up mage.
Sweat broke out along Jack’s spine, his shoulders, all of the lines of his bones, and he grabbed for a fag, lit it with his finger with a savage snap, and inhaled so deeply that he started to choke.
He sat on the bed and lay back, setting the smoke in the ashtray, where a thin trail of blue curled toward the stained ceiling, yellow flakes of plaster hanging on like scales.
Pain in his head redoubled. His magic curled and howled inside his head, clawing for release, and perhaps it was a memory or perhaps it was a whisper, but again Jack heard and felt the wings of the crows, the inexorable wings and eyes of Death.
The memory of being cold, bloodless, immobile, with stone digging into his back and pain through every inch of him, hit Jack like a boot in the mouth. He pressed his hands over his face, breathing shallowly. It didn’t help. Not one bit.
Jack banged open the bedroom door and made a beeline for the loo, dropping his head over the toilet and vomiting until his throat burned and his abdomen ached like he’d just taken a fist to the belly.
“Jack?” Pete’s feet rumbled up beside him, her hands went to his neck, his shoulder, fingers grazing through the bleached and ragged edges of his hair. “Luv, are you all right?”
Gasping, Jack swiped his hand across his mouth. He should push Pete away, tell her there was nothing wrong with him past a bad sandwich. Should, and didn’t. Story of his bloody life.
“I . . .” He looked up and caught sight of them in the mirror. Pete pressed her forehead against his temple, stroking the back of his neck. Jack’s own eyes stared accusingly back at him even as he turned into her touch.
The demon had come back to him. Jack’s thirteen years were nearly up.
Bent over the bog, he considered facts. It was as good a spot as any to do so. He owed the demon a demon’s bargain, and when Pete found out the particulars she’d try to work him out of it. She was stubborn, and clever, and still thought that counted for more than it did in a place like the Black. She’d convince Jack he could find his way out of his entanglement, that Hell could be tricked, wheedled, or softened.
And because it was a creature of Hell, and cruel, the demon would end her without a second thought when Jack tried. Or take her as his very own curiosity,
the soft, supple, willing Petunia Caldecott, with her talent that let her talk to the Black and to the worlds beyond, to the Land of the Dead and even Hell itself.
As Pete murmured in his ear, her breath warm and her hands cool, her presence bringing him equilibrium like he was the wheel and she was the spoke, Jack’s own eyes in the mirror told him that Pete could never know the truth.
Chapter Five
Pounding on the front door of the flat broke the spell. Pete heaved a sigh. “Bollocks, if it’s that neighbor brat from 402 again, I’m going to feed him his Transformer toys.” She grabbed a rag, ran water over it, and placed it on the back of Jack’s neck. “Stay put. Back in two ticks.”
That was Pete, quick and commanding and certain. Never wavered, never doubted that she’d solve everything and set it right side up again.
Jack pressed his forehead against the rim of the toilet bowl. He’d been low when he was shooting junk, but never as low as this. His lies had been small lies, of survival, cowardice, or necessity. The black dog treading in his footprints had never mattered, because no one else had ever been in range of its jaws. And now, just when the dog was close enough that Jack could feel breath on his neck, it mattered. Pete was an innocent, someone who hadn’t come to the Black willingly and borne the terrible price it exacted from anyone human. All the scars she bore were dream-scars, a set of nightmares about him and their time together, when she’d been barely sixteen. About the visitation of Algernon Treadwell and the hunger of Talshebeth, but the Black had left her relatively untouched. She was its child, a speaker for magic. She wasn’t a citizen of its bleak, hungry streets and alleys on sufferance, like Jack.
Pete hadn’t paid the price Jack and his brethren had, and she wasn’t going to if he could still draw a breath into his useless lungs. Jack was skilled at lying to himself as he was to anyone else, but he admitted that Pete being here, being close enough for the demon to use against him, was his fault. Entirely his.
His stomach clenched again, but nothing came up. He was empty, hollowed out, ready to be filled by the demon’s bargain.
But not yet. He had time. Enough time to put things right and to keep the one who’d pulled him from the Pit from harm. He owed a second debt, an unspoken one, to Pete. He owed her at least the decency of staying alive to teach her to survive the vagaries of a life with a talent. They’d barely begun. He couldn’t leave yet.
“Pete,” he called, standing up and slinging the cloth into the basin. No reply echoed from the front of the flat. “Pete!” he said again, padding into the narrow hallway. “Petunia, where’ve you gone to?”
She turned away from the flat’s front door, beyond which Jack could see, standing, the sort of man who would have told Jack to Find a job, you miserable cunt when he was sleeping on the streets, shaking in the dead of winter and thirty pounds underweight. The visitor wore a black sport coat, black sweater, and soft heather trousers. His hair was trimmed over his ears, expensively, and his eyes were soft brown. A trustworthy soft, a grasping, sinking soft. Jack disliked him instantly.
“What sod’s this, then?” he demanded, letting the full burr of a Manchester childhood creep into his voice. Nothing like a reminder of factories, dirty hands, and steel boots to warn off a ponce at the door.
“Mr. Naughton,” Pete said, shooting Jack her customary Shut up afore I kill you look, “this is my associate, Jack Winter. Please, come in.”
Naughton smiled at Pete, and she smiled back. Jack felt his jaw twitch. He didn’t get tetchy or jealous easily, because birds were the cause of nearly all of life’s avoidable ills, but this was Pete, and she was giving the nonce her real smile, the one that curled up one side of her mouth more than the other, that spread into her eyes.
“Thank you, miss,” Naughton said. He looked between Jack and Pete, feigning polite confusion. “It is Miss Caldecott?”
“You can call me Pete,” she said. “Would you like a cuppa? We were just having tea.”
Naughton nodded his assent and then stuck out his hand to Jack. “Nicholas Naughton, Mr. Winter.”
Jack watched his eyes follow Pete’s rear end, showcased in black denim as it was, into the kitchen, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t shake hands,” he explained. “Might get a look at something both you and me don’t want eyes on.”
It was a better class of rudeness than Jack’s first impulse, which was to pull the smarmy git close and kick him in the balls.
But Pete’d rip his tackle off if Jack insinuated her honor needed defending, and so he settled for staring at Naughton until the other man backed up a step. And then another. Sweat worked in a fat drop down his neck, into the collar of his cashmere.
Staring was a vastly underrated talent to Jack’s mind—fix a bloke with a dead man’s stare, put the full force of your magic behind it, and watch him piss his pants for reasons even he can’t entirely explain.
Naughton had practically climbed up into the crown molding of the front hall by the time Pete returned with tea. “Jack,” she scolded, “at least offer him a place to sit down.” She gestured at Naughton. “In the front room, please, sir. We can discuss your problem there.”
“Call me Nicholas,” he said, the charm crawling back into play like a rodent curling up in a warm place. He shot a glance back at Jack, who’d brought up the rear. Jack dropped him a wink, and put some power behind it. Nothing fancy, just nightmare fodder for the next few weeks. Eyes, fire, secret black places, perhaps a touch of the old Oedipal complex.
It was petty, but after the day he’d had, Jack felt he’d behaved with remarkable restraint.
Chapter Six
Naughton sat on the sofa and Pete took the armchair, leaving Jack to perch on the wide windowsill. He nudged it open and lit a cigarette to cover the taste of vomit in the back of his throat.
“I’ll get to the point,” Naughton said, fidgeting as he cast an eye at the peeling plaster and meager furniture. The only thing Jack spent any hard cash on was books, and they were in evidence, in multitude, where furniture and objets d’art should be. “My family home is experiencing some extremely . . . unusual phenomena, and I need it stopped.”
“ ‘Unusual.’ ’S a bit general—care to expand on that?” Pete said. She reached into the pile of books and papers on the end table and withdrew a pad and pen. Pete, for all her crispness, was as much a pack rat as Jack when it came to books and notes. If Jack were the sort of teacher who put store in memorizing spells and conjury by rote, he and Pete could have had a fine time ensconced in his library. Unfortunately, a book could never prepare one for the first sight of a ghost. Or a demon. Or hell, a ruddy tanuki with its bollocks swinging free. Jack knew more than one mage who’d pissed himself at the sight of the Black’s citizens in flesh and blood. Or ichor. Or vapor.
Words couldn’t prepare you for the embrace of magic. Only magic could do it, and sometimes a mind wasn’t meant to see. Those who couldn’t handle it lost their grip, became the screaming psychotics in state hospitals or gibbering madmen on street corners. The junkies with the needles and the hollowed-out eyes.
Naughton sighed, in the seat that should be Jack’s, and took an irritable sip of his tea.
“I have to admit, this isn’t what I expected when I came calling on a couple of ghost hunters.”
Jack exhaled, flicking ash onto the fire escape. “What were you expecting, then? Foot rub to go along with your tea? Happy ending with the sandwiches and cakes?”
“Jack,” Pete hissed at him, and then gave Naughton another one of the smiles that Jack knew were to be hoarded like treasures, but that Naughton lapped up as if they were his due. “You’ll have to excuse my colleague.”
“It’s no matter,” said Naughton, moving closer to her. “I’ve heard Jack Winter could help me, and you’re just a pleasant surprise.”
Pete cocked an eyebrow, and crossed her legs primly at the ankle. “What seems to be your problem, Mr. Naughton?”
“Please,” he said. “It’s Nicho
las, or Nick.”
“Nick, then,” Pete said, tapping her pen irritably against her chin. “The question stands.”
Jack pinched out the end of his smoke and disappeared it back into a pocket. “Here’s how it works, Nicky boy,” he told Naughton. “You give us your story of old Gran knocking about up in the attic, waking the baby and frightening the missus, we take care of the problem, if you’re not just jerking us off, and you pay. If you are jerking us off, well . . .”
“What Mr. Winter is trying to say,” Pete said, reaching over and whacking Jack on the knee with her notepad, “is that we take this seriously and we expect you to as well.”
“My family owns a country home in the Dartmoor forest,” Nick said. “It’s always been a spooky, dank old place since my brother Danny and I would summer there as children, but lately . . .” He sighed. “It’s not right there, Miss Caldecott. I live in the city home, taking care of Mother, and Danny . . . well. Danny was in charge of the estate.”
Jack watched Nick Naughton’s mask peel away in layers as he talked, the charm and the breeding and the manners stripping back to reveal something thin and desperate, the kind of deep fear that only people who had touched the Black and not understood it possessed. Naughton may be a ponce, but he wasn’t lying.
Pete’s pen scratched away, ever the Detective Inspector. “And you and your brother each witnessed phenomena at your estate?”
“Voices,” Nick said quietly, as if he were relaying bad news. “Cold spots, writing on the wall, sooty handprints that appear and disappear. Laughing. Danny’s always been the drinker, the odd party drug or two, so at first I thought he was getting worse. Then I saw and heard it—them—too.”
“Right,” Pete said, scratching notes absently along the margins of the pad. “This is how we conduct an investigation, Nick: we’ll need access to your estate to do some research, and we discuss payment when we’ve determined what we’re dealing with. Should you want us to proceed with an exorcism, or if more investigation is needed, payment is half up front and half when the case is . . . resolved. Plus a retainer now.”
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