Soul Trade

by Caitlin Kittredge

  She felt bad for Jeremy Crotherton, just doing his shit job like any street-level plod. His lips had pulled away from his gums, and even though Pete knew it was just an effect of decomposition, she put the canvas back over his face. She didn’t need to think about how his last expression looked like he’d been screaming.

  So the hikers had disappeared, then the bird-watching couple, and now Crotherton. Had they been early victims, before the demon had found a perfect host body? Sacrifices required to complete the summoning? Demons were varied as people and required everything from catsup to still-beating hearts as tribute.

  Or was she sneaking around a house that wasn’t her own with a dead man in the cellar, just asking to be fitted for something she hadn’t done by the local coppers?

  Honestly, Pete decided, she didn’t care. She’d found Crotherton, and now she had to get Margaret Smythe out of here. Morwenna and her little shell game with the Prospero Society could go piss up a rope.

  “Have you come to play with us?”

  Pete whipped toward the support arch, raising the lighter.

  A small white face stared back at her, half-buried in the earth. Bridget Killigan had carved herself an alcove in the cellar wall, and she and Patrick and Diana were pressed into their individual dirt dens, staring at Pete with unblinking eyes.

  “I think you’ve all had enough time to play.” Pete advanced toward the three figures, trying to get a better look at them. Maybe if she was lucky, the thing inside the children would be in a chatty mood.

  She’d ignore the nauseating fact that she was talking to something living inside the bodies of three children she’d tried and failed to save. Ignore that this was a nightmare she’d had more than once.

  This bastard was going to learn Pete Caldecott was made of sterner stuff than falling apart when faced with living nightmares.

  Her foot bumped against something else yielding, and she glanced down to see Dexter Killigan lying face down on the cellar floor. A tray lay just north of his outstretched hand, and a shattered plate next to it. Flies had already massed on the raw meat the plate had carried, and maggots wriggled under the lighter’s glare.

  This time she wasn’t surprised at the corpse. The poor sod was likely much happier wherever he was than he had been here, serving the whim of something he had to know wasn’t actually his Bridget.

  Pete looked back up at the three figures and frowned her most disappointed and motherly frown. “I don’t know what kind of fuckwit takes over children’s bodies, but it wasn’t your smartest move. You’re small and fragile. Easily handled.”

  Bridget laughed. It was low, rough. Her throat distended as she spoke, as if something were trying to claw its way free of her skin. “Jeremy thought so, too. Big boy that he was. He actually tried to exorcise us.”

  The others laughed, bullfrog throats throbbing, and Pete fought to keep from turning around and running until she was out of air. “I can’t do that,” Pete said. “But what’s waiting for you upstairs sure can.”

  “The crow-mage doesn’t scare us,” Bridget snarled. “You don’t scare us.”

  Pete stepped over Dexter’s body, holding the lighter within snuffing distance of Bridget’s face. “You don’t scare me either,” she said. “So I guess we’re even.”

  “Lies,” Patrick hissed, turning the upper half of his body to face Pete. She winced as she heard his vertebrae crack, spine unhinging. Even if she and Jack pulled off an exorcism, these poor kids weren’t going to be long for the world. And maybe that’s for the best, she thought.

  “We scare you all right,” said Diana. “You used to be the fearless one, but everything scares you now. You think about her every waking moment. Your blood given form. Your Lily.”

  Bridget started laughing again. “She has dreams about Lily being like us. Dreams about the demons who want to possess her.”

  Pete didn’t usually give in to temper—that was Jack’s problem, not hers. She could hold herself together past the point of screaming. But not this time. This time, she wasn’t even aware she was moving until she’d dropped the lighter and wrapped her hands around Bridget Killigan’s throat in the dark. Until the laughter choked to a stop. Until their talents clashed.

  “Don’t you ever,” Pete snarled, in a voice so grating and enraged she couldn’t believe it sprang from her, “use your filthy Hell-spawned mouth to say my daughter’s name.”

  Not even her voice—Connor’s voice, as if he were reaching out to lend her every last ounce of rage she could pour into the words.

  Bridget gave a choking gasp, but she was still laughing. “There’s your first mistake, Weir,” she croaked. “We’re not from Hell.”

  Pete started, but she couldn’t have let go if she tried. She was lost in the demon’s power, as her talent opened up and drank it down. The Weir was hungry, denied the power of the hex, and now it wasn’t letting go until it had its fill.

  “Stop … stop…” Bridget vomited up bile, the green of the bottom of a pond. Pete felt her palms burn, nerves screaming as if she’d thrust them into an oven, but she couldn’t let go. Wouldn’t let go, until the thing grinning at her from Bridget Killigan’s face burned, too.

  As the Black surged around them, a tidal wave smashing on rocks, the shape of the thing inside Bridget—the true thing, which gave life and speech to the little girl’s body—began to show itself. It was cold and slithering, a thing that dwelled in the dark of the earth, driven by a hunger only sated by wholly consuming its hosts. They would sicken and die, withered husks of what they had been. Bridget was such a host—entirely hollow, left to be filled by this presence, this thing that wormed its way through vast empty expanses Pete only caught a glimpse of, ashy gray earth topped by a sky the color of pus and blood, triple suns oozing endlessly from one side to the other. Three children were enough for the thing and its companions, three of them escaping that miserable place to come here, to this breathing and fertile and verdant place.

  Not from Hell.

  Not a demon.

  Shit, Pete thought, even as Patrick and Diana set up keening screams to go along with Bridget’s wail.

  “Your name,” she bellowed at Bridget. “Tell me your name or I’ll burn you out of her!”

  “You can’t finish us off!” Bridget screamed, though by rights Pete’s grip should have crushed her vocal cords. It didn’t matter any longer. Bridget Killigan was dead, had probably been dead the moment this crawling, slithering madness had taken up residence in her flesh.

  Pete put her face as close as she dared to Bridget’s ear, as the Weir howled at the power it drank down.

  “Watch me.”

  “We are not of earth, not of Hell,” Bridget hissed back, and Patrick and Diana took up the chant. “Not of the Black, not of magic. We are the nothing, the endless.”

  Bridget stared at Pete, white eyes bulging and turning slowly crimson as tiny veins popped one by one. “We are the end.”

  Pete loosened her grip a fraction at that, but the Weir had taken hold now and there was no letting go until it had its fill of this strange power that felt as old as the earth and rock itself. Pete’s talent flashed that endless white place, that desperate scrabbling, the emptiness of being completely alone in the universe.

  The Weir didn’t care what it showed Pete, though. It just wanted power, and Pete heard herself scream as the pain that followed the euphoria rushed up at her and hit like a freight lorry.

  All three children screamed along with her, but before Pete could finish draining the thing riding Bridget, heavy arms grabbed her from behind and yanked her away, tossing her into the wall. Earth clods rained down on Pete’s head, and she went to her knees, the cloying power of the thing inside Bridget coursing through her. It was like drowning in shallow mud, cold and unyielding and so, so hungry.

  She managed to roll and get a look at the shape looming above her, just before Dexter Killigan’s boot hit her in the face. Lightning struck inside her skull, and she tasted dirt and blood w
hen she hit the floor.

  The power was still there, still scrabbling to be let out, but the more imminent danger helped Pete get a handle on her talent, if only for a few seconds.

  “Kill her, Dexter,” Diana said, voice flat. “Kick her ’til her brains come out.”

  Pete rolled away from Dexter, curling around her vital organs, while he loped after her. There was a black indent in the side of his head. Old blood had dried on his cheek and around his eye, and the flesh around the wound had festered to the color of old moss. He was a little fresher than Crotherton, but not by much. Dexter Killigan shouldn’t be up and walking around, never mind kicking seven kinds of Hell out of her. Should and were rarely intersected in the Black, though, so Pete concentrated on not getting beaten to death by a zombie. She could figure out how Dexter Killigan had joined the ranks of the recently alive once she’d gotten out of the cellar.

  And once she’d figured out what the thing riding Bridget had been.

  Dexter lunged for her again, and Pete grabbed his ankle and yanked as hard as she could. Dexter stumbled off balance, crashing into the dirt wall, and Pete made it to her feet and made a beeline for the ladder. Her skull rang, and everything blurred at the edges as if she were underwater. Splinters bit into her palms, and she felt the wet sting of the blood she was leaving behind.

  She screamed again when she crashed into Jack coming down, and he caught her, looking past her at Dexter, the children, and Jeremy Crotherton’s shroud, which was starting to twitch and ripple as the corpse within moved of its own accord.

  “Don’t let them go!” Bridget snarled. “Kill them, Daddy! Kill them for me.”

  Jack’s eyes went wide. “The fuck is all this, then?”

  Dexter managed to grab at Pete again, but she knocked him off balance and he went down, scrabbling in the dirt for her legs, snarling and baring his teeth. “Zombie, you bloody idiot. What’s it look like?”

  “That’s not a zombie,” Jack said. His eyes were as wide as a child who’s just discovered that Santa Claus is real, and he eats brains. “Zombies are bespelled, red thread and voodoo and shit, not … this.”

  “Call ’em whatever you want,” Pete gasped, kicking at Dexter. “They’re the walking fucking dead, and I’d like to get out of here.” The steel toe of her boot dislodged Dexter’s nose, turning it to the side, but he paid less attention than if a mosquito had bitten him.

  Jack grabbed up a brick from the cellar floor and smashed it across Dexter’s face. The rotten flesh collapsed, revealing the skull beneath. For somebody who’d been alive less than a day ago, Dexter was going quick. Whatever magic kept him slavering after them like an undead guard dog was rapidly turning him to compost.

  Dexter fell back, one of his milky eyes dangling out of the bony socket, and Jack shoved Pete. “Go.”

  She scaled the ladder and yanked him up after her, adrenaline making him weigh no more than a heavy sack. Pete collapsed, panting, as Dexter moaned and snarled in the cellar, lacking the motor skills to chase them.

  After he went quiet, and the blood roaring through her head was the only sound Pete heard, the three children came to the edge of the ladder, turning their faces up, and bared their teeth. Their gums were starting to go black, and they hissed in the language that Pete had heard inside her head when she’d touched Bridget.

  “Never seen a demon that can reanimate the dead,” Jack panted. “Clever little bastards, aren’t they?”

  “They’re not…” Pete started, but before she could say more Dexter Killigan crested the cellar ledge with a single leap, staggering toward them. He snatched up a carving knife from the block on the countertop and came for Pete.

  “Shit!” Jack yelped, yanking her out of the way. Pete still felt muzzy—the smack on the head had definitely slowed her down, and that wasn’t acceptable in this situation. She dashed through the kitchen door and shut it, hearing Dexter’s body hit the other side. She threw the bolt and stumbled after Jack to the front door.

  “This way,” Jack panted, pushing her toward the hill. “We can find some cover up here.”

  “You know how to kill a zombie?” Pete asked. She wanted to vomit, or possibly just lie down on the ground and curl up in a ball, but she kept moving.

  “’Course I know how to kill a zombie,” Jack growled. “I told you: that back there ain’t a fuckin’ zombie, any more than I’m a ballet dancer.”

  Pete tried to catch her breath, beyond the ragged panting that sawed at her lungs. Dexter’s kick had knocked the wind from her as well as the sense.

  At least the magic she’d pulled down had dissipated a bit. It was still there, vibrating in her, but she wouldn’t know how to release it now without killing someone innocent. She was crap at offensive magic, and always had been. The spell-slinging was Jack’s thing.

  Glass shattered behind her, and Dexter Killigan burst from his home’s sunroom window, landing on the grass, finding his feet, and charging after them with his knife. He was fast, faster than they could move, and his lips drew back in a feral grin, the kind Pete had only seen on PCP addicts or the profoundly insane.

  “Shit!” Jack said. They ran, but Pete could already see it would have the same effect as trying to outrun a pack of wolves. Sooner or later they’d get tired, and slow, and Killigan was so bloody fast …

  He was going to catch them, and he was going to kill them unless she came up with a plan.

  You know you want to, the Weir cackled. Burn it down, Petunia. What’s the worst that could happen?

  Beside her, Jack caught his foot in a rabbit hole hidden by dry grass and went down, cursing. Pete swayed, but she forced herself to stay up. She braced herself against the muddy ground, watched the blade of the knife, impossibly sharp and shiny for something that had come from the filthy house, grow larger and larger in her vision. She was going to take the knife, either by disarming Dexter or getting him to stab her instead of Jack, but just before he drew back his arm to make the kill shot, a voice rang across the hillside.

  “Sciotha!”

  Dexter lurched and jerked to one side, falling in a heap as his legs became useless logs. Pete swayed uncertainly, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  Dexter Killigan moaned and squirmed, reaching for his knife and shimmying across the grass toward her like a snake.

  Pete let the spell fly before she even realized it had left her lips, the only flashy spell she knew.

  “Aithinne.” Such a simple word, not shouted or cried out but whispered. Still, the Weir heard, and her talent responded. Bright white flames engulfed Dexter Killigan and the grass around him, then rushed in a gout toward the house. Windows shattered and anything not brick went up with a roar of displaced air.

  The rose bushes were ash, drifting through the damp air like snow.

  Almost as if the land around her, the Black itself, were responding to the inferno, it began to rain.

  Pete collapsed to her knees in the mud, her heart thudding. The insidious whisper of her talent was gone, and in its place was just a ragged hole.

  In the flames, she saw three small white figures, untouched, emerge from the hulk of the Killigan house and start toward them across the scorched grass. Pete was having a hard time seeing straight through the heat, but she perceived a tall figure in front of her, dressed in a dark coat and holding out his hand. “Now that was damn impressive,” he said. “But it’s not quite pie-and-a-pint time yet. Let’s get out of here before those worms get their hooks into you.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said, ignoring the hand and levering herself to her feet. Just because she’d cast a spell that would normally take four mages and a quart of whiskey to accomplish didn’t mean she was going to get sloppy about touching strangers. “Let’s go, Jack. I don’t want to get near those things again if I can help it.”

  He didn’t answer, and she turned to look at him. You burned him up, her traitorous inner voice screamed before she really got a look at him in all the smoke and ash. You burned up everythi
ng, including Jack!

  But he was fine, only still. Jack stared at the man in black, eyes fixed and mouth slightly open, as if the man were more terrifying than anything the three children could do to him. “Is it really you?” he finally rasped. “You’re really fucking here after all this time?”

  The man in black canted his head, as if the question puzzled him. “Of course it’s me, Jackie. Who else would I be?”

  “Jack?” Pete said again. The expression on Jack’s face had gone from shocked, the only bit of vulnerability she’d ever seen him display in public, to something hard and carved from ice. Pete knew that face, too. It meant things with Jack were about to get ugly.

  She shifted away from the man in black, regarding him now through her pounding headache as an interloper. “What’s going on here?” she asked. “Who is this bloke, Jack?”

  “Petunia,” Jack said with a weary sigh, passing a hand across his face. “This is Donovan Winter. My father.”

  18.

  Pete stared at Donovan, unable to think of a single thing to say, while he nodded to her. “Good to meet you. Now can we get the fuck away from the worms before they turn us into more of what your bird here just burnt up?”

  That seemed to stir Jack into motion. He got up, though he grunted when he put weight on his ankle.

  “Here.” Donovan grabbed Jack under one arm. “Double time, boy. Make me proud.”

  Jack grunted. “Fuck off.”

  “That’s no way to talk to your old man,” Donovan said, veering to the side of the hill. Pete percieved a path, nearly overgrown, worn into the skin of the earth. Stones caused her to stumble. Even with short children’s legs, it wouldn’t take the three things long to close the distance. Panic climbed her throat, burning and sour.

  “Just over this ridge,” said Donovan. “Come on, luv, you can manage it.”

  A low stone wall grew out of the mist like the spine of a lizard, and Donovan hopped over it at a set of rotted wooden steps. On the other side, held in the hollow of the valley, Pete saw a collection of small stone buildings, scattered and leaning as if a hand had dropped them on the grass.