St. Michael and All Angels crouched on a hillock staring down upon the hulk of Dartmoor Prison. The mica in the cell house stones gleamed in the sunlight after the rain, and Jack squinted and turned his back on the grim edifice. He’d heard that they’d faced the windows toward the moor deliberately, so that a prisoner could contemplate the great heather-choked nothingness and despair of ever leaving the place alive.
The church itself was disused, friendly plaques posted by the Anglicans explaining that services were now held in the next town due to budgetary concerns.
Jack wasn’t interested in churches. There hadn’t been a time, even a sliver of a second, when he’d truly believed a benevolent God would lift him out of Manchester, away from his mother, her pills, and the endless parade of dingy council flats and dingier boyfriends. What could an invisible man in the sky do against thrown bottles, drunken rages, fists and words and touches that did their level best to reduce him to a shadow?
Bloody nothing, that was what. And all the while the church charities that came to the Winter flat wearing their good hats and shoes, carrying their boxes of musty hand-me-downs, had told him, God helps those who help themselves. A grand fucking joke if he’d ever heard one.
The graveyard around the church was what drew Jack to the place. Overgrown with shaggy weeds, toothy gravestones poking every which way from the dirt, right up to the edges of the church wall, the place seethed with spirit energy. A grotesque of life, a mockery of the feeling he got in a crowded tube or shoving along Oxford Street at holiday time.
Teeming ghosts meant at least one chatty soul in the mix, and Jack drew out his spirit heart over a likely-looking grave. The name was nearly washed from the limestone from forty years of winter rain and year-round wind howling off the moor, but Jack brushed the moss away and spoke it loud.
“Jonathan Lovett.”
The spirit heart began to spin instantly. The ghosts in the churchyard, bound by the iron fence, were bored and restless and any hint of magic drew them in like flies on flayed skin.
Jonathan Lovett, plump and serious in life, appeared in a blue uniform and peaked cap that didn’t entirely hide a gaping black dent full of hair and brains in his ethereal skull. “Yes? You want something, boy?”
Jack grimaced. A bloody prison guard. Just his luck.
“Thought maybe you could help a bloke with a bit of knowledge,” Jack said. Lovett’s face crinkled.
“I’ll have you know I don’t care for Northerners. One of ’em stove my skull in, winter of 1966. A thrice-damned Geordie.”
“Can’t imagine why he’d want to go and do a thing like that,” Jack muttered. “Anyway, I hail from Manchester, so we’ve nothing to fuss about.”
Lovett huffed. His cheeks rippled, like he was made out of sail cloth. “I suppose. Get on with it.”
Jack let the chain of the spirit heart twine in his fingers, but he kept it between himself and the spirit. Even cordial ghosts could turn. The mage who thought they couldn’t was the mage who had a spirit reach into his chest and stop his heart like a cheap watch.
“You know a house, about twelve miles from here as the crow flies?” Jack asked Lovett. “The Naughton estate?”
Lovett shivered. “I certainly do, and I wouldn’t go up that lane if you paid me.”
“Oh?” Jack feigned disinterest. “And why is that?”
“When I was . . . how d’you say . . .” The spirit chewed on its lower lip.
“Alive?” Jack prompted.
Lovett twitched his cuffs in irritation. “Yes, well. All sorts of stories about the place back then. Sacrifices, naked dancing about bonfires, screams in the night. Old women around town said Aleister Crowley himself came and stayed for a summer, long way back. Said the crops died and the virgins of the village got themselves in a family way, down to the girl. Not to be crude, you understand.”
“I think me heart can take it,” Jack said. Aside from the tick of the spirit heart and the whistle of the wind, the only sound was his breath and the rustle and hiss of ghosts at the edges of his mind. They didn’t like Lovett getting all the attention. Jack had to finish with Lovett before their attention turned to demands.
“After . . .” Lovett shivered, tucking his several chins down into the collar of his uniform. “After I got into this state, I didn’t wander far from the churchyard. That Naughton place is cold, and the moors will blow you all to pieces, scatter you every which way. There’s a bad thing in those groomed gardens and fancy turrets, my son. Hungry, howling, and cold.”
“Cold?” Jack thought of the sucking quiet that surrounded the house—when it wasn’t trying to drown him in a wellspring of the Black. “Second time you’ve said cold. Cold how?”
“Ice cold and rotten,” Lovett murmured. “Spreading out black fingers, feeling in the dark for anything it can catch. All knotted up in the bones of that house, that cold. Such an awful feeling. Burns, it’s so cold.”
Jack’s skin prickled in sympathy, even though he was shielded from the wind by the wall of the church.
“Didn’t used to be this way.” Lovett sighed, his form flickering like dirt on celluloid. “But now there’s badness gathered there, and blackness. And the cold, always the cold.”
Jack stopped the spirit heart, metal running cool and dimpled under his fingertip. “Much obliged, Officer Lovett.”
“Wait!” Lovett wavered, losing cohesion as Jack’s spell spun to a stop. “My wife . . . she never found the necklace. My mother’s necklace. It was Valentine’s Day.” Lovett reached for Jack and Jack took a fast step, nearly tumbling over another headstone. “The day I died . . .”
“Sorry, mate.” Jack snapped the spirit heart shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Guess us Northerners are all the same.”
Lovett faded with a sigh, just another formless silver shade drifting among the tombstones and weeds, and Jack made his way back to the iron gate, which hung open at an angle that imitated a cheap paperback gothic.
“Shame on you, Jack Winter.” The voice was far too smug and solid to come from a spirit throat. “Leaving that poor soul with his noncey unfinished business.”
Jack turned sharply, saw nothing. “Leave off your games,” he snarled. “If you’ve got something to say, look at me face. If not, bloody well fuck off. I still have time.”
“Do you really?” the demon purred. He was there, in the slice of shadow cast by the gate, same suit but sporting white on black this time and the same black, black eyes. “Or do you only have as much time as I give you?”
Jack jerked his chin. “This how all you gits dress in the Pit? Or did you lose your way en route to the Clockwork Orange fancy-dress party?”
The demon narrowed its eyes. “You should take care how you’re speaking to me, Jack Winter. What’s that the little black book says? As above, so below? Show me fealty now and I could perhaps find some little time to spare you. Time with Miss Caldecott, just for instance.”
“You’re not screwing me with that particular dildo, not again,” Jack snapped. He turned to walk away, because he knew it would slag the demon off. Demons were creatures of ritual and respect to the point of compulsion. Jack tipped a salute over his shoulder. “Do give my regards to the other droogs.”
“You don’t want her?”
Jack stopped in the middle of the road that ran by the church, looked back. The demon smirked, rocking back and forth on the balls of its feet like it was waiting for the punchline of a joke. Jack sneered in return, contempt he didn’t feel except as a nervous boil in his guts.
“You know exactly what I want, you bastard.”
The demon smiled, tongue flicking out between its teeth. “I suppose that’s why we’re here, isn’t it, Jack?”
“It is,” Jack agreed. “But the difference between you and me is that me, I don’t care about my moth-eaten old soul. But I’ll be thrice-damned if I drag Pete down with me, so if you show your face again before it’s my time, I’ll exorcise you so far back into Hell you won’t
even have a name.”
“Ohhh.” The demon shut its eyes and breathed deep, nostrils flaring, as if Jack’s belly-deep, sweaty fear was a heady perfume. “Jack, Jack. You shouldn’t threaten me so, old son. You know that I can visit you any time I like. Can do anything to you that might come into my little head.”
“Fuck. Off,” Jack said plainly, putting the rest of the road between the demon’s grin and his person.
The demon raised its hand as if to say farewell, and Jack felt the breathless, vertiginous sensation of magic, demon magic, too late as it gripped hold of his mind and dug its claws in deep.
Pete shivered in the night air, the rain causing the torches at the edge of the stones to spit and smoke. Her hands tugged against the iron restraints, small delicate fingers begging to return the gesture as Jack’s hands searched over her stomach, her ribs, coming to rest on her breasts. His finger pads stroked her nipples, smearing the blue paint in time with his thrusts.
This was raw magic, how it had always been, since the first druid and the first Weir long ago. Layers of power wrapped Jack, sweat grown cold against his skin. Pete circled her legs about his waist. Her heels dug into his thighs and her lips parted, panting wordless cries that urged him on to finish, to bind the spell their bodies wove, to take her magic as his own, by force. . . .
Jack raised his face from the pavement, feeling small pockmarks where grit had wormed its way into the flesh of his jaw. A car horn sounded from somewhere far off.
“Jack?” Pete’s voice drew closer and small hands felt his pulse, checked his pupils, and then sat him up.
“’M all right, luv,” he managed. “Just wanting tea, I expect. Low blood sugar.”
Pete favored him with her Don’t pull my bloody leg eye-brow.
“Alien abduction?” Jack offered. “Over eager and/or amorous sheep?”
“Don’t think we won’t discuss this when you’re not sprawled in the dirt,” Pete said, offering him a hand up.
After what the demon showed him, Jack knew better this time than to take it and expose himself to her talent. Even so, he swayed like he’d downed six pints when he managed to pull his shivery legs under him and stand. “But?” he said as Pete climbed back into the Mini.
“But I found something at the council that you need to hear about,” she said. “So loosen your corset and try not to swoon again, Mr. Darcy.”
Jack collapsed into the passenger seat with a grateful sound, rather like someone had punctured him and let the air out. “That’s hurtful, that is. I’m far better looking than Colin Firth.”
Pete steered them back toward the estate, even though it was the second-to-last place in England and the Black that Jack wanted to go at that moment. He kept that to himself. He had pride.
“I looked at old newspapers and provincial records, trying to find any deaths that might be our four,” Pete said. “And fended off a sweet old thing who kept trying to give me a biscuit and send me out on a date with her grandson.”
“Oh yeah?” Jack leaned his head back. “Any potential there?”
“He stuffs lamb sausages for a living, so no.”
Jack grinned with his eyes closed. He didn’t have to look at Pete to make her blush. “You know you could never give me up, luv. I’m in your blood like the Black.”
“The hell you are.” Pete snorted. “Like cheap vodka, maybe. Give me a fag and a coffee and I’m well rid of you.”
Jack opened his eyes then. Wanted to say, I could be. If you let me. But he’d just told off a demon, claimed he was the white knight who wanted for no strength or nobility.
It was a fucking nightmare, being the knight. No small wonder white witches always looked like they had poles up their bums.
Pete stayed quiet while they rode back to the estate, and she handed him a sheaf of photocopies when they were in the kitchen. She plugged in the ancient and calcified electric kettle and found two mugs, as well as a box of loose tea. “I’m thinking eating anything in this kitchen is asking for us to join the ranks of the gloopy dead upstairs,” she said.
Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.
“Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”
Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.
The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed Ten fine head of horse flesh.
The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.
June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.
Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”
Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”
“Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”
“What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.
Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache returned, swift and vicious as a Staffordshire terrier latching on to a postman.
“I can undo the necromancer’s bindings. But to get the ghosts out of the house, I have to find their gravesites and set them to rest and if I can’t find little Creepy June’s remains I can’t bloody do that, can I?”
Pete sighed. “Let me see if I can call in a favor with Ollie at the Met. They’ve got some toys for sniffing out cadavers that are quite good.”
“Cadavers that have been under a log for seventy years?” Jack said. Pete sighed.
“Must you shoot down everything I say?”
Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”
Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”
He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.
“Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”
“Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.
Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.
“Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”<
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“And the binding?” Pete said. “We need something to show Nicholas, otherwise we won’t get a bloody shilling out of him. It’ll be the Pooles on repeat.”
Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”
He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”
Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”
“Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”
“We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”
“I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.
“If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.
Jack sobered. “I think after that cu sith showed its lumpy face we’d be safer together, luv.”
Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . . locked up in here. It’s not a good place to be.”
“You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”
She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”
“Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”
Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”
Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”
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