Pete pulled him back against her instead, small body warming his skin. “No.” She ran her thumb down the scar on his cheek. “I don’t want you to go.”
Jack slid his hands across her waist, pressing his fingers into her hip bones. If he had the chance to look back, he supposed, he would call himself an idiot for spending time with musty books when he could be with Pete. “I suppose it can wait. For a bit.”
Pete pressed her lips against his, firm and warm and insistent. “I suppose it can. Just for a bit.”
Chapter Forty-nine
Jack’s eyes snapped open, and he snatched up Pete’s mobile from the bedside table. Pete stirred next to him, groaning and pulling her pillow over her face.
The numerals spelled out 10:13, and Jack slumped back, forcing his heart to stop pounding.
He had hours. Hours until he faced the demon in Hell.
“Jack?” Pete curled into him, her leg sliding up his thigh to drape across his waist. “Don’t leave yet.” Her hands brushed down his abdomen. “Haven’t had a chance to say a proper good morning.”
Jack’s cock jumped as Pete’s hand wandered into unsafe territory, and her lips brushed over his earlobe. He rolled over and pinned her frame beneath his weight, causing Pete to yelp. Jack grinned. “Good morning, Petunia.”
“I called Ollie Heath while you were sleeping,” she said.
“Ohh, yeah. Nothing’s more erotic than talking about your work mates,” Jack said, nuzzling into her neck.
Pete slapped him on the back of his head. “Don’t be awful.”
Jack sighed, coming up for air. “What did he say?”
“Nicholas Naughton’s done a runner,” Pete murmured. “Cleaned out his flat and his accounts and he’s gone.”
Jack levered himself onto his elbows. “I’m sorry, luv. Looks like he’s not quite the idiot I thought.”
Pete lifted one bare shoulder. “It’s a problem for another day, Jack.” She pulled his face down, and Jack followed willingly.
He kissed her for a long moment, letting his fingers roam over her, memorize her. If it was the last touch he had, it needed to count. Memory was all that mattered, in the Black.
Pete pushed him off gently after a moment, rolling her face to the window. “Jack, there’s a bird watching us.”
Jack followed her eyes and saw the crow nestled on the sill, staring at him.
“Creepy thing,” Pete muttered. Jack rolled over on his back, throwing a hand over his eyes.
“It’s a fetch. A psychopomp.”
Pete quirked her eyebrow. “What’s it fetching?”
Jack laughed. “My soul, if I’m lucky. Everybody has a fetch. All the citizens of the Black.”
Pete shrugged. “I don’t.”
Jack put his feet on the floor, winced at the chill, and reached for his pants. “’Course you do.”
“No,” Pete insisted. “Never had anything like the crow in my life. I don’t have anything that’s stayed with me.” She propped herself up on her elbow and ran her free fingers down Jack’s spine. “Except you.”
Jack shuddered when her fingers, her magic, made contact with his skin. “I can’t say I’ve been that great about sticking around,” he told Pete. “In fact, I’ve been shite.”
“If anyone is going to take my soul down into the Land,” Pete said softly, “I’d rather it be you.”
Jack looked at the crow again. Its eyes gleamed, and it stared back at him, unblinking, piercing him down to the core of his magic.
You know what’s coming, the Hecate whispered. The fires of war.
Jack raised his hand, staring at the crow through splayed fingers, an inkblot on the pristine dawn.
Something uncurled in his chest, behind his sight. It didn’t ache and pound against his mind as it had in recent weeks, it just stayed in his head, heavy and present.
“I meant it, you know,” Pete said. She sat up and wrapped her arms around him, her bare breasts pressing into his ribs.
“I know, luv . . . ,” Jack murmured.
You’re gonna die, Jack, Lawrence whispered. Best you can do is go with your head held high.
Jack stared at the crow. The crow stared at him. Watching, the way it always watched him. Waiting for his soul to float free of his body, so it could carry it to the Land. The way he’d watched Pete, since the first night they’d laid eyes on each other.
“Jack?” Pete said as he got out of bed and pulled on his shorts. “You’re quiet. What is it?”
Jack put a fag in his mouth and started for his books. “ Don’t you worry. I think I may not be going anywhere.”
Chapter Fifty
The demon was on time.
Jack stood under the tree in bare feet, denim, and his tattered Supersuckers shirt. He smoked a fag slowly, letting the burn travel all the way down his throat and warm him against the cool air.
“You ready, Winter?” the demon said. The grass under its polished shoes withered and died, fading away to bare salted ground. “No more excuses. No more tricks. You and I, down into Hell.”
“If you’re that eager to give up your name,” Jack said, flicking his fag away, “then let’s get on with it, mate.”
The demon’s smile twitched into life like a worm on a hook. “Why do I sense another card up your sleeve, Jack?”
Jack lifted his shoulder. “Maybe ’cause I’ve got one.”
Pete stood on the stoop of the Naughton house, watching. Far enough away not to get caught in the edge of a hex. Close enough for what Jack had thought of as he sat with her in bed, watching the crow.
The demon let out an irritated huff. “Let’s see it then, Winter. I’ll kill you that much quicker.”
Jack gave Pete a small smile of reassurance, and she lifted her hand in return. She trusted him, though he hadn’t told her what he intended to do. On the off chance it didn’t work, and the demon peeled his skin off.
Fuck off chance. There was a very good bloody chance it would all go pear-shaped. But Jack wasn’t going to hold his head high. He didn’t have the dignity left to accept his fate, so he might as well fucking fight.
He might live.
And Margaret Thatcher might hop on a broom and do a lap around the Houses of Parliament.
The demon grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulling them close enough to kiss, if Jack were that sort of man. “What the fuck are you grinning at, Winter?”
Jack turned his smile on the demon, and let the spell that he held in his mind unfurl. No kit this time, no salt or iron. Just his talent, coiled in his mind starving and stinging, like a snake.
Jack stared into the demon’s eyes, at the flame dancing there.
“Everyone has a fetch,” he said.
The spell unfolded, caught the wild magic of the moor, and faster—far, far faster than he expected—Jack and the demon tumbled into the whirl pool of his sight.
Everything is black. Everything is pain. Jack is aware that the screams echoing are his.
Light burns through his eyelids, light blotted out by a man’s shadow, and when he opens his eyes, he’s in Ireland. Seth is leaning over him. He’s fallen asleep on the grass, trying to read one of the interminable Latin diaries the older mage foisted on him. He throws the mouldering thing at Seth.
“This is a great load of shit.”
“’Course it’s shit,” Seth tells him. “But it’s shit that might save your wee arse one day, boy, so you best read on. Conjugate some verbs if that will break up the monotony.”
Jack watches a crow land on Seth’s roof, and stare at them. Seth sees it, and his smile grows sly. “You’ve got a fetch, Jackie boy.”
Fetches aren’t something Jack believes in. Jack believes in what he can see, touch—the magic in him that responds to liquor and rage and cigarette burns. The sweet taste of a fag and the sweeter taste of skin under his lips. “Old wives’ tale,” he tells Seth. “It’s probably seen something dead in the field.”
“Old wives could learn you a thing or two, as well,
” Seth tells him, and retreats indoors.
Jack shuts his eyes against the sun and he’s on his knees in a circle of stones, wearing the white raiments for the first and last time in his career as a Fiach Dubh. In a few weeks, Seth will catch him with the grimoire. This is the first nail in his coffin.
Seth and his brothers stare in horror, Seth’s athame held at half-mast, as the crows land one by one, on the top of each stone, and before Jack the crow woman stands with her hair made from feathers and her face spattered in blood.
Stare as she touches his forehead, where the white witch gits say the third eye lives.
Stare as she whispers to him, in a language that Jack should not be able to understand, “My mage. Crow-mage.”
Nausea and dizziness grip him as he sees bonfires in her gaze, smells the smoke of funeral pyres, and hears the clash and scream of battles fought up and down the length of the land on which he now kneels. He smells blood and decay, smoke and char, and he sees the spires of the Bleak Gates piercing the fire-lit night.
Jack shuts his eyes as his dinner of mediocre bangers and mash has its revenge while the brotherhood reviles him with whispers and fearful stares.
Opens them, and sees Pete Caldecott. She’s skinny, and hides inside a school uniform that’s at least a size too large. She has her sister’s eyes and hair, but both her face and her gaze are sharper. She looks far more like Inspector Caldecott than the woman Jack supposes was their mother, the one who gave MG the soft face and generous tits. Pete is sixteen, and she’s still all planes and angles. Her eyes are decades older, and they don’t miss much.
When he touches her, he smells the night of the initiation, the scent of battle-wracked earth. The calling card of the crow woman.
Jack Winter vows to stay away from Pete Caldecott, until he’s tempted beyond resistance, breaks his vow, and he’s in the tomb, the cold stone at his back, the demon looking down at him, lips curling back from pointed teeth.
The demon speaks. “Wake up, Jack.”
But Jack holds on to Pete. Holds on to the feeling of the first time he touched her, across the circle in High-gate Cemetery. When Pete has called out to him, Jack has come.
When Pete lay dying on the graveyard earth, Jack was with her. As long as Jack has Pete, nothing can steal his soul away. Jack is bound to her surely as the crow is bound to him. Jack Winter, fetch of the Hecate’s Weir.
Jack presses his face into Pete’s hair, smells the sharp smoky scent of autumn in the graveyard, the penny tang of her blood.
Jack will never leave her, and so he moves in the memory, even though he didn’t on the day, nearly dead from blood loss himself, and takes her face in his hands. “Body and soul,” Jack tells Pete. “I’m yours. I’m the fetch you never had. You and I are bound, by blood and by stone. Bound for all the turns of the earth.”
Pete smiles at him. Reaches up.
Wraps a clawed hand around his throat.
Pete’s face is full of fang and malice. Pete’s smile is the demon.
“Nice try,” the demon hisses. “But you should have woken up when you had the chance, boy.”
Its hand closes down, and Jack can no longer breathe. The demon draws him close, the demon that looks like Pete, and presses its lips against his. “By the by,” it whispers. “The name’s Belial. And you, Jack Winter . . . you’ve tricked me for the last time.”
It releases him, the places where it touched burning Jack up from the inside.
He falls.
And is awake.
Jack thrashed up from the visions of the Black, gasping for air and clawing at his throat. The demon stood over him while Jack lay on the grass. It folded its arms and shook its head. “You failed, Jack. You tried, and you failed.”
It picked his chin up with the toe of its shoe. “You tried to bind yourself to a living soul. Cheat me. That’s trickery, and your challenge is void under those laws you’re so fond of.” The demon grinned, a smile of pure pleasure splitting its waxy face. “So that’s the end for you, bright lad.”
Jack stared up into the demon’s face. Its tongue flicked over crimson lips. Somewhere in the distance, Pete was shouting, and the demon moved its gaze to her.
“She’s trying to save you, Winter. She’s going to throw herself on your pyre, surely enough.”
“I’m her fetch,” Jack said. “Spell or not, I’m hers. You can’t take me if my soul is bound to an innocent’s. It’s the rules.”
“Jack.” Belial crouched, elbows on knees, genuine confusion on his face. “I’m a fucking demon. What makes you think I play by any bloody rules but my own?”
Pete reached them, panting, and launched herself at Belial. The demon spun, caught her about the neck, and shoved her against the tree, lifting her feet off the earth.
“Look what I’ve caught,” he murmured. “A little Weir, very far from hearth and home.”
Jack got to his feet, even though the breaking of his fetch spell had chewed him up and spit him out. With nowhere to go, the wild magic pounded in his head, expelled itself like poison into his muscle and bone. “Let her go,” he warned.
Belial glanced back at him. “I could, Jack. I could let her go and take you instead, as you’re bound by the bargain.” He turned back to Pete, leaning close and scenting her, running his nose and lips up and down her neck. “Or you could try to break the bargain, and I could kill you and take my time with your sweet, sweet piece of meat.”
He dropped Pete to the ground, where she choked. Belial straightened his tie and cuffs. “Your choice, Jack. What do you say?”
Jack looked down at Pete, tears of rage hovering in her eyes. He looked down at his own hands, pale and veined from the feedback of broken magic.
You burn things down, Seth said. Wherever Jack Winter goes, death follows.
Thirteen years to agonize over his shit decision, and suddenly it was no decision at all.
“Pete,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But I’ll see you again.”
“No, Jack!” she screamed, scrabbling to her feet. “No! You promised!”
Jack looked at Belial. “I go with you and you never, ever come to her or anyone I care about again. Clear?”
Belial snorted. “I couldn’t bear less interest toward your little found family, mage. I care about you.”
“Jack!” Pete’s shriek rang against the moor. “What are you doing?”
Jack stepped up and faced Belial.
You can’t cheat Death, boy. You just got to go with your head up high.
No escape. Not for you.
You know it’s coming, mage. The fires of war.
He smiled at Pete. That was the only kind of knight he was—beaten and broken, lying in the mud. “What I should’ve done thirteen years ago,” Jack said to Pete. “You be good to yourself, luv. And don’t waste one moment crying over me.”
Belial put his hand on Jack’s cheek, and leaned close to his ear, whispering the ways and words of the secret passages into Hell. Jack didn’t flinch, as his sight screamed and the magic around them flared. He watched Pete, on her knees by the great tree, arms wrapped around herself, face slick as glass with her tears. He watched her scream, wordless and lost, into the air.
Jack wished he could speak to her, tell her the truth, but before he could do more than raise his hand in farewell, the Dartmoor vanished under an onslaught of the sight.
When his eyes opened, Jack found himself looking up at three triple spires crowned with a lightning-etched sky. Hot wind snaked across his face and brought with it the smell of charnel fields. In the distance, across a blackened marching ground, a thousand pyres burned under the watchful eye of the spires. Thorns tangled around Jack’s bare feet and cinders landed on his skin, leaving fresh red burns.
Next to him, Belial took a deep breath of his native air. “Welcome to Hell, Winter,” the demon said. “We’ve missed you.”
EPILOGUE
Hell
The places I see in my nightmare
Ain’t nothing
compared to what I see each day
—The Poor Dead Bastards
“Strange Days and Nightmares”
Chapter Fifty-three
Jack lay on a damp concrete floor, the floor of his flat in Manchester, the council flat where he and his mum had lived until he’d lit out for London.
He spat a little blood. His jaw wasn’t broken, or maybe it had been. Here in Hell—or Manchester—time lengthened and bent and folded back on itself. What was true today would not be true tomorrow and could be true yesterday. He wouldn’t know until he got there.
Belial made him see. All of the guilt, all of the lies. The beatings and the bar scuffles and the betrayals, from Seth down the line to Pete.
The demon showed it all to him, like a movie reel, and when it was over Belial wound the reel and showed him again.
The pain was physical. It wouldn’t last. Belial was tenderizing his meat, softening Jack for the main event. The memories were what would continue, for all the term of his bargain.
Jack rolled onto his back, stared up at the stained ceiling. He’d memorized the maps of past residents, the water stains, leaks, and billowing clouds of petrified nicotine in the plaster.
He would stay here for a while, curled on the floor with blood dribbling across his vision.
Then the workings of Hell’s clock would wind backward, and Belial would start over.
A shadow fell across Jack’s gaze, changing the landscape of the ceiling. The familiar whispers crept in around the edges of his sight.
He didn’t shy away from the crow woman as she crouched above him. Even if he’d wanted to move, he couldn’t. His ribs were broken, at least one of his hands. Head swimming with concussion. Her touch was, for once, the least painful thing about his body.
So far you’ve fallen, the crow woman intoned. Has this torment salved your conscience, Jack? Has it saved your soul?
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