Huntress

by Christine Warren, Marjorie Liu, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclaine

  “That girl in the Crucifixion Club,” Jack said. “She’s got a gig for me. Just me.”

  “Fuck off, you’re not that good. Or handsome.” Rich took an irritated sip of his beer.

  “Not a Bastards gig, you git. The other sort.”

  Dix just nodded gravely. Gavin chewed a hangnail, and Rich rolled his eyes. “Not more of your spooks and specters shite, Winter. Those Goths always pay in bent pennies and mournful stares. We need you in London. For real work.”

  “I’m serious as a tombstone,” Jack said. “And I’m also staying. You can whinge about it all you want. Get it out of your system. Cry if you have to.”

  Dix grunted. “Bad idea, this.”

  Rich pushed back from the table. “He’s right. And if you feel that it’s a bright one, you can bugger yourself sideways with a lager bottle. I’m going back to London. Shall we audition a new singer tomorrow, or after we cancel our engagement and can’t pay the electric or the phone?”

  Gavin watched him go, and then sighed. “I can’t disagree with him, Jack. I’ve got my job, and my mum isn’t well … This rock star shite doesn’t fly in my life as it is.”

  Jack dropped his fist down. All of the glasses jumped. “Fine. Go skip on back to London in your pinafore, you great girl. Not like I could expect a little backup from my friends.”

  Gavin pursed his lips. “No need to be that way, Jack …”

  “You’ve made yourself clear,” Jack said. “Go on, get lost. And tell Rich he can use that lager bottle on himself, if he’s so keen.”

  Dix nudged him before the tiff with Gavin could dissolve into a real John-and-Yoko slugfest. “Ey. That your bird?”

  Ava stepped in, pausing to unwind a crimson scarf from her sausage-curled hair. There was a light mist on the gray day, and droplets of moisture gleamed on her skin.

  She glided over to the table, sliding into Rich’s empty stool and running her fingers down Jack’s arm, over the Celtic knot tattooed on his bicep—the triple insignia, done in plain blue ink, by hand, signifying that he’d been trained in magic by the Fiach Dubh. Jack had never met a villain yet on either side of the Black who was impressed by the mark.

  “You weren’t where I told you to be. Aren’t you going to give me a kiss hello?” Ava inquired. Dix raised his eyebrows an inch, the equivalent of shouting, for most. Gavin just rolled his eyes.

  “Sorry, luv, but you’re not very popular among my mates at the moment,” Jack told her. Ava pressed her lips to his cheek. Jack felt the hot wax and wet of her lipstick mark his skin sure as the tattoo.

  “Hello,” she said. “And hello to you, Jack’s mates. What’s a girl have to do to get in your graces?”

  “Scratch,” said Dix. “Or tits.”

  “A man of few words.” Ava smiled, just this side of mockery. “I’m entranced.”

  “They were just buggering off back to London,” Jack said. “I guess I’m at your service, milady.”

  Ava smiled, all teeth. “You bet your ass you are.” She turned to Gavin and Dix. “Nice meeting you. Run along. Drive safely.”

  “Go fuck yourself, slag,” Gavin said sweetly. “Our mate may be fooled by you, but I know cheap damaged goods when I see them.”

  “My, my,” Ava said. “You’ve got some grit behind that limp wrist, boy.”

  Jack turned a glare on her. “Leave them out of this or I swear I’ll slit me own throat with the cutlery before I go another step with you.”

  Ava and Gavin traded simmering glares for a moment, before Gavin pushed his chair back with a shriek. “Just don’t come crying to me when you get fucked, Winter.”

  “Don’t you worry.” Ava’s hand slid over the black denim up Jack’s thigh and into coastal waters. Jack tightened his jaw and cast her a pained look. “He’s in good hands.”

  Jack briefly saw stars under her ministrations as the sex magic ran fingers and tendrils of sweetly scented power over his face. “Gavin,” he ground out, “stop being a nonce. I’m fine.”

  Dix shrugged. “No, you’re not.” He scraped back his stool and pulled on his shredded denim jacket. “Happy trails, mate.” They left, and Jack squeezed his eyes shut. The Bastards barely tolerated the other half of his existence as it was. And if Jack was honest, he liked the easy time they had making the music come together. Ava had burned all that down with a few words, a touch.

  She stopped her hand moving and stood up. She was wearing a black satin pencil skirt now, and a red cardigan with cherries for buttons. Her hair was pinned back in a waterfall of curls. She looked like the pouty-lipped American birds that Jack’s uncle Ned had collected on the walls of his locksmith shop in Manchester. Uncle Ned had been a good bloke for the few years that Jack knew him before his liver said Bugger this and gave out under an onslaught of off-license vodka.

  “Let’s go,” Ava said. “With friends like those …”

  “If you had any friends,” Jack said, following her as the geas pulled on him like a sharp hook through the flesh of his spirit, “you wouldn’t say that.”

  “Look who’s got a mouth on him,” Ava said. She gave his arse a squeeze. “Cheer up, Jack. I’m very good company, if you let me be.”

  “Need the loo,” he said. “I won’t be a minute, mistress.”

  Ava’s mouth turned down at the sardonic tone. “Jack, I told you this wasn’t how I wanted things.”

  “And yet you don’t seem to be shedding any tears over having your very own mage in sexual bondage.” Jack stepped away from her, experimentally, and she let him. None of the white-hot need to rip her blouse open and savage her, teach her the wrongness of making a man like him her pet, reared its head.

  “Go pee,” Ava said, an impatient click of her pump heels on the pub floor. “We don’t have all day.”

  Jack turned his back to her, and she let him walk. He knew the part of himself that responded to her geas. It usually manifested as temper, or as the row of paper-thin white scars on his forearms, rather than a savagery toward a woman.

  But Ava was no usual woman, and Jack didn’t have perfect control.

  He locked himself in the bog and pulled the frayed light chain. Shadows danced and settled into all of the corners. Jack splashed rusty water on his face and dried off on the tail of his shirt.

  Even though she’d shown herself to be colder than stone, he could almost fancy Ava. She had balls, and she wasn’t afraid, of him or the demon. Not to mention that she was a regular talent in the sack.

  Which had gotten him into this, hadn’t it?

  A snuffling from the corner broke Jack’s concentration, on a cracked mirror hung crooked over the basin. Cold ran up and down his neck, like sleet melting on his skin.

  “Please …” A whisper came from all directions, higher than a dog whistle, and skated across Jack’s skull, and he flinched. He didn’t want to turn and see. He never truly wanted to see, and never had, but he always looked, eventually.

  The ghosts wouldn’t allow otherwise.

  “Please,” the ghost snuffled. He was a sad scrap of spirit, a skin-and-bones teenage boy in life with raggedy hair in his eyes. A crooked star, drawn around the left with eye pencil, scrubbed off as his tears slid down his glitter-pocked cheeks. His silk shirt was open to the waist, and his pants were worn away at the knees. “Please, don’t tell them where I am,” he begged Jack, worrying a glass vial around his neck.

  Jack pressed his thumb between his eyes, the pounding inside his skull threatening to send him to his knees. The sight took everything away, sound and sensation—everything except the sucking, screaming void where spirits lived.

  “Fuck off,” he told the ghost. “I can’t help you.”

  “Can’t help me,” the ghost singsonged. “Can’t help yourself.”

  “Oi, shut it,” Jack warned. “I don’t need your second-rate prophesizing.”

  “They found me.” The ghost sighed. “They kicked me and hit my skull against the sink. They beat my queer face in.”

  “And I’m
sorry,” Jack gritted as warm blood worked its way out of his nose. Ghosts always wanted help. Always wanted to let go and never could. And the harder they fought to be seen, the more it hurt.

  “Not sorry,” the ghost whispered. “Not like you will be.” The boy jerked up straight, his coke vial bouncing against his wasted chest, rife with bruises from the beating that had ended him on the scarred tile floor. “Turn back, Jack Winter. The demon city waits for you like the open mouth of the beast, and will swallow you.”

  Jack smeared the blood away from his face. “That’s not a ghost talking.”

  The boy’s eyes shone, white as headlamps in a fog. “Leave Edinburgh, Jack Winter. Before you go down under the ground. Forever.”

  “Bugger off, Nazaraphael,” Jack said wearily. He was upright, barely, by grace of clutching the sink basin. “Leave that poor spirit be.”

  “It’s a fair warning, mage, and the last you’ll get,” the boy-ghost growled, before the glow died from his eyes and he went back to sobbing.

  Jack shut his eyes and willed to see only a filthy pub loo when he opened them. The sight burned him up from the inside when it truly took hold, made him sick and dizzy as a lifetime of hangovers. It never slept, never stopped.

  But finally, it retreated enough for Jack to stumble back into the pub and take hold of Ava. She blinked at him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he grumbled. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”

  “You don’t look good … Are you bleeding?” Ava demanded.

  Jack squeezed her arm hard enough to feel the bone under the skin. “Sodding walk. I need fresh air.”

  Ava went silent, and after a time, Jack’s vision cleared and his heart stopped hammering and the earth stopped churning under him. Ava smiled, leaning her head against his shoulder.

  “Better now?”

  Jack swiped greasy sweat from his forehead. “Still a bit sick. No one really wants a demon manifesting to them in the bog.”

  Ava went on tiptoe and licked his ear. “Believe me, after this is over … I’ll make you forget all about big bad Nazaraphael.” She turned and led Jack into the train station, the slow sway of her hips like the passage of a ship.

  Jack shoved his hands into his pockets and looked anywhere but her admittedly pristine rear bumper. On the opposite side of the street, shadows moved in concert, as if the sun were setting in cadence with his footsteps.

  Trackers. Maybe ghosts, maybe demons. Certainly employed by that white-suited ponce Nazaraphael. Jack flipped two fingers at the shadows and turned into the cavernous innards of the train station, feeling like a man walking the last mile to his death.

  Ava stopped on the train platform like a flickering spirit from a movie about love, and loss, and wartime, done up in black and white.

  Jack found a fag, lit it with his finger, and wrinkled his nose. “Stinks down here.”

  Ava cast a nervous look back over her shoulder, and Jack didn’t doubt her instincts. This was a good place for an ambush. Not from ghosts or the Fae—too much iron—but demons—or fuck it, humans—could be three feet from him, tucked back in the dark places, and he’d never see it coming.

  Jack muttered under his breath, felt the ambient magic of the Black pluck at him, and sent a small tendril outward, searching, feeding back. Ava was a hot spot, her humanity and the spell that bound them, but otherwise the tunnel was blank and cool, devoid of feeling.

  Lots of people could keep themselves under wraps against an inelegant finger of mage spellcasting. Every demon could. Cold comfort was better than no comfort.

  “We’re alone,” Ava said, and he coughed.

  “No offense, luv, but I already got jumped by a great bloody demon wanker today and I’m not keen on a repeat. Not to mention that you, yourself, qualify as a hazard to me health.”

  “Whatever makes you feel better, lover.” Ava jerked a thumb at the mouth of the tunnel, ringed with lamp-teeth and wires. “Come on. I’ll brief you on my plan on the way down.”

  “Down where?” Jack asked, but Ava shook her head.

  “Good things come to those who wait,” she teased.

  Jack watched Ava duck under the barrier at the end of the platform and push free a small service door. It tugged at him, that primal urge not to stray from the campfire, but Jack hadn’t spent his life being part of the pack. He knew the things that lived outside the circle of light, knew them by name.

  Because he knew, knew why ordinary people were afraid of the dark. And rightly so. He flicked his fag away and followed Ava. Nothing nasty leaped out at him, and the geas eased a bit, lessened the shrieking in his brain, if he stayed close. She’d probably planned it that way. Clever little bint.

  They walked through a curved service tunnel with yellowed tiles cracked and leaking from the Blitz. Jack saw a little girl in a car coat, clutching a doll to her chest as she crouched against the wall. She flickered, one moment staring at the floor, the next at him. Black pools of eyes. Lips curled back from pointed teeth, hands sprouting claw-nails.

  “Can’t help you, luv,” he said quietly. “No sense in rattling your chains at me, is there?”

  Ava looked back when he stopped walking. “Problem?”

  “Not in the least,” he said. The angry little ghost faded from existence as quickly as her life had been snuffed by the Luftwaffe. Jack brushed off the chill from his neck and walked on.

  The tunnel was long, lit with bulbs in steel cages that flickered and fluttered like a spirit trapped under glass.

  Ava’s hair gleamed like oil under the light. Jack ran his hand over his own peroxided bristles, felt dampness from the aboveground world clinging to his skin.

  “How far are we going?” he said.

  Ava smiled over her shoulder, teeth bright.

  “As far as we need to.”

  Jack’s hand flashed out and wrapped around her arm. “That’s not much of an answer, luv.”

  Ava twisted, like a snake in his grasp, and Jack felt her small hand close at his throat and his head slam into the tile, sending grout and grime loose and clattering to the floor.

  “I am being nice, Jack,” she whispered. Jack felt her breath, she was so close. “Don’t make me be naughty.”

  “Are we having a lovers’ quarrel?” he rasped.

  Ava’s lips trembled. “I am not screwing this up,” she said, her voice like steel. “I have waited too damn long for my shot at Areshko.”

  “What’s your epic love with this Daniel bloke?” Jack said. “Areshko snatch his soul away before you could have the white wedding? He go rushing in to defend your honor? Or was he a stupid git, like all the others a demon kills, and you think you can make it not so by avenging him?”

  “You shut your mouth,” Ava spat. There was something in her look, in her touch that sent a peculiar heat all through him. Not the heat of her magic, skin-on-skin, sweat and release. This was the kind of heat that warned a bloke that he was about to catch on fire.

  “You haven’t told me anything close to a whole truth, and I haven’t pressed,” he said. “But when I can’t help you no matter how hard you push or how much you beg, remember you had the chance of help from the goodness of me fucking heart, and you chose to be cryptic.”

  After an interminable second, her grip eased enough that he could breathe again. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

  “Fine,” Jack said. “You had your chance.”

  “And you are a bastard if I ever saw one,” Ava snapped. “With your lectures and your holier-than-thous.”

  “Holier? Hardly.” Jack snorted. “I never had a problem with a lady taking the lead. It’s a bit sexy, really.”

  Ava brushed her hands over the front of her skirt, like touching his skin had dirtied her, and moved on.

  Jack was left to trail again, and wonder what the bloody hell she was lying to him about when she had no reason to keep secrets at all. She had the cards. Every last bloody one.

 
; Ava stopped at a metal fire door, long rusted shut, the warnings that no one except employees of the city of Edinburgh were allowed beyond this point obscured with graffiti endorsing a variety of gangs, ethnic groups, and bands. PAKIS GO HOME warred with SKINHEADS FANCY BLACK COCKS and the eternal sentiment FUCK THATCHER.

  “I’ll take a pass on that last,” Jack said.

  Ava pressed on the door and there was a grumbling of wheels and gears from beyond the wall. The door swung back with a great tomb-creak that would have done Count Dracula—the Lugosi version, of course—proud.

  Beyond was a flight of stairs, and the dank breath of underground. “Down here,” Ava said. “This is the fastest way to Catacomb City.”

  “Isn’t that precious and twee. Catacomb City.” Jack let witchfire blossom around his palm, the blue glow lighting the stairway in sharp relief.

  “A demon city, in the catacombs,” Ava said, her heels clicking on the damp concrete. There was moss, and rot, and water dripping invisibly. No one had come this way in a long while.

  Jack itched for a fag as they descended. His wasn’t sight tweaking, like it had in the old railway tunnel, but there was something else here, some eidolon waiting in the dark that whispered and clawed at him from the Black.

  The curving stairs and the geas made him stick so close to Ava that he was practically in her pocket, and she smiled back at him like they were on a lovers’ walk. Jack saw lamps clipped to the pipes overhead, so old they were just rust lace in great spreading patches. A utility tunnel, in its previous life. The ceiling jogged lower and he ducked, the very top of his hair flattening out against the slimy surface.

  Ava turned back, her cheeks dimpling. “A little close, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a bloody grave,” Jack said, bending over and flexing his palm. The flames of witchfire leaped higher, a wreath of slow-motion flame enclosing his hand, showing all the bones. Just ambient magic burning off in the world of the solid and real, but the effect usually kept people at a distance.

  Ava sighed. “Put it back in your pants, Jack. Areshko’s buddies won’t be pleased if you come in with guns blazing.”