Soul Trade

by Caitlin Kittredge

  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 bee
n 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.”