Soul Trade

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Just wish I could have gotten here sooner,” Pete said. “It looks like you’re holding up well. All of you.”

  “Mr. Killigan started a support group back in London so we could all find each other and share our stories,” Mrs. Leroy said. “That man, he’s a saint. So patient. Helped us so much with our poor child.”

  “And all of this? The tent and whatnot?” Pete asked. “His idea?”

  “Oh heavens, no,” Mrs. Leroy said with a laugh that sounded more like a scream. “That was Mr. Smythe’s idea. Said we had an obligation to share our girl’s gift with the world, and he’s right. What Diana can do comes from a higher place.”

  “An obligation, eh?” Pete said. She eyed Philip Smythe, holding court in the corner with two men she assumed were Mr. Leroy and Patrick Dumbershall’s father. They were laughing, grins wide as shark mouths.

  “Mrs. Leroy…” Pete started, but the woman cut her off.

  “Carrie, please.”

  “Carrie,” Pete said. “This isn’t easy to ask, but have you noticed anything … odd about Diana since all this started?”

  Carrie Leroy gave a start, as if Pete had reached over and stuck a pin in her arse. She swiveled her head slowly, smile still in place, clocking the other parents in the room. “Not here,” she murmured through clenched teeth. “Meet me in the kitchen.”

  Then she pitched forward into Pete, knocking her drink down her shirt. “Oh, no!” Carrie exclaimed. “I’m just too clumsy for words. Do come with me, Miss Caldecott, and I’ll take that stain out.”

  Jack gave Pete a look over Margaret Smythe’s head. He’d been talking with her the entire time, laughing and showing her sleight of hand tricks with quarters and cigarettes. Margaret was smiling for the first time since Pete had arrived in Overton, slowly and nervously, but she was acting less dopey than she had been in the morning.

  If Margaret was with Jack, she was safe for the time being, so Pete let herself be tugged into the kitchen.

  “Sorry about your blouse,” Carrie Leroy said. “I couldn’t … I had to…” She started to shake, and she buried her face in her hands.

  “Hey,” Pete said. “It’s all right. Really.”

  “No, it is not,” Carrie said. “It hasn’t been all right since we came here.” She sniffed deeply, then looked Pete in the eye. “You have a spare cigarette?”

  “Sorry, no,” Pete said. She wondered if there was such a thing as quitter’s guilt.

  “Out here,” Carried said, pushing open the back door. It opened onto an alley barely wide enough for the bins sitting against the brick wall. Carrie lit the butt of a fag from a chipped ceramic dish on the ground and wrapped her arms around herself. “My husband’d knock my teeth in if he caught me smoking.”

  “I have a theory about what’s going on, if you don’t mind,” Pete said. Carrie Leroy didn’t stop her, so she rolled it out.

  “Diana isn’t the child you remember. She started acting strange not long after you all moved to Overton, and things just got worse. She doesn’t act like a child. And when people started disappearing, you suspected things were off the rails, but it wasn’t until Jeremy Crotherton poked around that you really knew.”

  Carrie looked at her askance, one penciled-in eyebrow up. “Those people were just hikers,” she said. “Stupid gits. But you’re right … Diana…” She sucked the last life out of the fag, then scraped it out against the back wall of her house.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” Carrie said. She wasn’t shaking now, just cold and flat as an expanse of roadway. “To have your child snatched away from you. But you get used to it, you go on, even when your marriage falls apart and your daughter sits staring out the window day after day even though she can’t see.” She coughed, deep and rattling, a sound that spoke to damp cellars and too many cigarettes. “You move to the country because your husband worships at the altar of Dexter bloody Killigan, as if that man knows everything. You stay trapped in this shitebox with a husband who can’t stand you, and then one morning your child looks up at you and her eyes focus and she says “‘Mummy, I’m hungry.’”

  Pete chewed her lip, wishing it was a fag. “You know it’s not Diana.”

  “’Course I do,” Carrie snorted. “I saw her MRIs. I know there’s nothing in her brain except dust. Whatever’s walking and talking through her skin, it’s not my Diana.”

  “Can I ask you why you didn’t leave?” Pete said. “Or call someone like Jack and me? Hell, you could even have talked to Crotherton when he showed up.”

  “I don’t know who that is,” Carrie said, her voice thick with weariness. “And I can’t leave or call for help because she knows. She and the other two see everything. They watch us even when they can’t see us. It’s like we’re prisoners. Prisoners of those things that took our children.” Her whole body quivered, and Pete put a hand on Carrie’s shoulder to steady her. No prickle of the Black there either. Just a tangle of wrath and sadness that threatened to explode into Pete’s mind. She let go after a quick squeeze.

  “The only reason they don’t know I’m talking to you now is that they’re resting,” Carrie whispered. “They like saying those horrible things to people, but it takes the fight out of them. It’s the only time we get any peace.”

  Pete looked back at the lit kitchen door. “Where are they?”

  “Dexter Killigan keeps them at his place,” Carrie said. “He took it the worst. Wanted his girl back so bad he can’t see what’s become of them. They don’t like to be apart, and he does whatever they want. Acts like all of this is fucking business as usual.”

  Pete remembered the stricken face, cheeks sunken and eyes impossibly dark, of Dexter Killigan beside Bridget’s hospital bed. “It’ll be all right,” she lied. “Jack and I are here to help you.”

  Carrie sucked in a deep breath and shook her head. “No one can help me now, Miss Caldecott.”

  “Carol Anne!” Mr. Leroy bellowed from the kitchen. “Where’d you get to? I need a refill!”

  “Coming, dearie!” Carrie shouted. “Just running the bin bag outside!” She looked at Pete, eyes wide and animal. “We’d better get back before they realize what we’re doing. My husband’s too stupid, the Dumbershalls are too terrified, and that chavvy bastard Philip Smythe is too greedy to realize what we’ve really gotten involved in.”

  It was quite a scam Philip Smythe had going, Pete thought. Convince the other parents that his own kid had similar abilities. Watch the cash roll in with absolutely no regard for what might really be happening.

  “I need you to keep Margaret someplace out of the way,” Pete said to Carrie. “Jack and I are going to the Killigans’ to look around.”

  Carrie chewed on her lower lip. “You don’t know what they’re capable of, Miss Caldecott. They’ll be so angry that you’ve interfered…”

  “It’s all right,” Pete told her. “At this point, I guarantee I’m angrier than they are.”

  17.

  The Killigan house sat at the end of a road at the top of the village, tucked among the hills. A wide yard full of trimmed rosebushes put the scent of rotting flowers and manure into the air. The house was shut up tight, windows blindfolded with thick blackout curtains, and a shiny new top-end deadbolt sat in the mildewed wood of the front door.

  Jack crouched and examined the lock. “Bad news,” he said, grimacing.

  Pete sighed. “Hoped you wouldn’t say that, given your talent for unlocking locked doors whether they like it or not. Can’t you pick it?”

  “This thing?” Jack yelped a laugh. “Not on me best day. This is designed to knock out professional thieves. I can’t even hex it open. It’s got protection charms on it. The whole house does.”

  Pete regarded the white-painted brick, flaked and chipping like cheap makeup on the tail end of a long night. “So Killigan knows enough to protect his house. More than the others can manage,” she said.

  “Not exactly A-level work,” Jack said. “But they’ll do for anything this si
de of a demon.”

  “That’s the problem,” Pete said, regarding the Killigan house as the moon slipped from behind a cloud and made the white hulk glow. “A demon is what Killigan’s dealing with.”

  “About that,” Jack said. He sat on the stoop and lit a fag, carefully blowing the smoke away from her. “This Crotherton fella was all hot that demon summoning was going on in the back of beyond, but none of these cunts have the talent the gods gave a stray cat.”

  “So what are you saying?” Pete said. “They didn’t summon the demon, they were just victims? Figured that much out for myself, thanks.” She nudged his arm. “I used to be a cop, you know.”

  “If you do it right, your demon doesn’t go fleeing into the extras from Village of the Damned,” Jack said. “It stays right where you put it and does your bidding, until you fuck up and it eats your face whole. So either whoever summoned this thing fucked up…”

  “Or this is the summoner’s bidding,” Pete said. All at once the low-level craving for a fag vanished. She’d seen sorcerers do plenty of sick and twisted shite in her time with Jack, but siccing a demon on kids was a new low.

  “I think it’s a possiblity we have to consider,” Jack said. “What they have to gain by making spooky soothsaying kidlets, I have no fucking idea. But this sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. I think Crotherton was half right, about the summoning. I just think his nose was so far up Morwenna Morgenstern’s shapely arse he couldn’t look for bits of the bigger picture.”

  “Oi,” Pete said, turning her nudge into a jab. “You’re not supposed to look at anyone’s arse but mine.”

  “And yours is definitely tip-top in my book, darling,” he said. “This does leave us with the matter of being exactly where Crotherton was before he buggered off—nowhere.”

  Morwenna wasn’t going to like nowhere. Pete was fairly sure she’d have a fit, one that ended with more threats and more shite tossed on Pete’s doorstep.

  She stood up, regarding the Killigans’ door. “Then we go inside. I’m fairly sure Crotherton never got this far.”

  Jack shrugged. “I’m all for a bit of B and E, luv, but unless you’re going to shimmy up the drain pipe like Catwoman, we’re out of luck.”

  Pete sucked in a breath as the wild energy of the Black surged around her. Here, on the outskirts of Overton, it was less tainted and strangled. The farther from town she got, the easier the magic came.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  Before Jack could protest or even question, Pete stepped into the Killigans’ ragged rose bushes, the thorns grabbing at her jacket, flesh, and hair. Pete levered herself up onto the raised bed next to the front window, then turned her back and smashed her elbow through the glass. The wavy single pane shattered on impact, and Pete felt the charms Dexter Killigan had set about the place grab hold of her.

  The magic slithered over her hands, across all of her bare skin. It felt like the slick underbellies of dirt-dwelling things, smelled like leaf rot and mildew. She held on, gripping the frame of the window, small pearls of leftover glass slicing her palm. The hex groaned in pleasure at her blood, and the power covered her, trying to find ingress via her eyes and mouth.

  She’d only done this once before, with a hex designed to kill rather than merely shoo away, but back then she’d had the advantage of being a complete bloody idiot with no idea that using her talent to siphon something so powerful could kill her.

  Now, she was aware with every atom of her being as the Weir woke up, snarling and hungry, feeding on the slippery marsh magic of the hex. It fed with an alacrity that alarmed even Pete, and she felt the Black flow into her as if she were completely hollow, only a vessel.

  Which she would be, if the Weir had its way.

  Pete was aware of Jack shouting, but she couldn’t understand the words. She pulled the hex to her and refused to let go, even when it began to struggle.

  The rush hit as the hex withered and died, the euphoric high of pulling in power not her own. Just as quickly the sick burning developed in Pete’s guts, the knowledge that her mere flesh could not contain a carefully woven spell.

  She screamed and dropped to her knees, the thorns cutting at her. The pain brought her back, let her expel the magic of the hex and feel it dissipate. Only frayed ends of the spell were left now, nothing that could hurt them.

  When she came back to herself, she was looking up at scaly rainclouds and the glow of the hidden moon. Jack stood over her, hands gripping her coat, face pale as a corpse. “I’m all right,” she said. Her voice came out choked and raspy. That fit—she felt as if someone had wrung her neck, shaken her, and dropped her to the ground.

  “Are you crazy?” Jack demanded. “I mean, are you completely off your nut? You could have really hurt yourself.”

  Pete let herself be still for a moment. She ached like she’d run miles, but that was usual. Her scratches stung in the cold, wet air, but other than her cut palm and the redoubled ache in her arm from Mickey Martin’s attack, she was in one piece, and that was about the best one could hope for.

  “I’m all right,” she said again.

  “Stupid,” Jack said. His expression hurt Pete more than the slight. It was the one he reserved for people he thought beneath him, who weren’t clever enough to circumvent anything that hurt or was unpleasant.

  “What else are we supposed to do?” Pete asked, standing up. All around her, the rosebushes hung black and ashy, flowers reduced to nubs. The ground itself was dead, the grass and dirt ravaged from the magic that had flowed back into the ground.

  Jack glared at her, but he didn’t have an answer. Pete waved him off. “Just stand back.”

  She put her boot against the deadbolt, gauging the distance. She didn’t want to kick in the door itself, but the doorjamb. Bust apart the housing of the lock, and even the strongest door wouldn’t have anything to hold it shut. The trick was hitting right, and not breaking your foot off in the process.

  Pete took a breath, willing herself to stay upright, and drove her boot into the apex of the door and the jamb. The wood splintered, and another kick dislodged the door entirely. Musty air breathed out, air that hadn’t touched the outside in months, coated with the faint, sweet odor of decomposition. The hair on the back of Pete’s neck, trained by a hundred crime scenes, prickled as she stepped inside.

  “Fuck me,” Jack said, voice echoing in the empty room. “Smells like something crawled up a bum’s arse and died.”

  Pete shushed him with a gesture. There were times—not many—when she missed her pistol, and this was one of them. Not that bullets were much use against demons. She could punch holes in their host body, but she couldn’t kill a demon. Not unless she burned them from the inside out with pure magic, and that could just as easily kill you as them.

  Inside the Killigans’ home, things were bare and dusty. A few spare pieces of furniture were shoved in one corner of the sitting room. The kitchen held only a table and a single chair, and dishes rimed with spoiled food were piled on every surface. The drone of flies hung heavy in the room, even in the chill of the darkened house.

  Trying not to breathe too deeply of the stench, Pete moved on to a back parlor fitted with windows that would usually look over the back lawn and out to the hills. Now they’d been covered in spray paint, hasty frantic marks in a splash of colors that looked like the inside of a particularly bad acid hit.

  Pete backed out. “Nobody here.”

  “There’s a cellar,” Jack said. The door was thin, barely the width of a person, and when Pete opened it, she saw a ladder leading down into darkness.

  “Of course,” she grumbled, putting her foot on the first rung.

  “Oi,” Jack said, and Pete prepared to scream if he tried to stop her, but he only handed over his lighter.

  “Thanks,” she said softly. Jack could surprise her. He was too stubborn for his own good, taciturn and unreliable and everything she should run from, especially w
hen she had Lily to consider. But there was this side, too. The Jack she’d first met, the Jack she loved, the Jack who’d never leave her.

  Dirt met her boots when she reached the bottom of the ladder. It was an old cellar, older than the house above it, from a time when food rotted slowly in the dark, and the dead who passed in winter stayed down there until the ground wasn’t frozen any longer.

  Pete flicked the lighter wheel and examined her surroundings. There was a small brick arch leading to an antechamber across the dirt space from her, and Pete picked her way toward it. The lighter flickered, and she thought she heard a low sound. Laughter, maybe.

  Just keep walking, she told herself. Not the worst place you’ve ever been. Not even close.

  Before she reached the support arch that framed the larger cellar, her foot caught on something firm but yielding.

  Pete pitched into the dirt with a grunt, the impact knocking most of the fear out of her. What good was she if she went on her arse the moment someone turned out the lights?

  She rekindled the lighter and illuminated a canvas-wrapped bundle, crawling with more of the blowflies she’d seen upstairs. Pete drew back the canvas gingerly and winced at what she found, then scrambled up and went to the ladder.

  “Jack,” she said. “Remember when I said I thought Crotherton hadn’t made it here?”

  “Yeah?” he said, brows drawing together.

  Pete tried to breathe through her mouth, to cut out some of the putrefaction scent rising from the open canvas. “I was wrong,” she said. “I just found him.”

  “Do you need me to come down?” Jack asked. He tried to make the question casual, but she knew that any time there was a dead body, there was the chance of an associated angry ghost, one that would hook on to Jack’s sight like a hawk striking a rabbit.

  “No,” Pete said. “Stay put and keep watch.”

  She went back to Crotherton, crouching. He was turning colors, the gentle blooms of green and black mold under his skin telling Pete he’d been moldering in the basement for at least a week.