Soul Trade

by Caitlin Kittredge

  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 s
uppose 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 f
or 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.”