She hadn’t felt good about coming to Manchester, but she had allowed herself to think it might work in her favor—clearly the Prometheans didn’t want her dead, just obedient. If she did what they asked, or at least heard them out, she’d be able to get out clean.
Now, though, she wasn’t sure. Not of her plan, or of anything, including the Prometheus Club’s true intentions. But she couldn’t break the geas, Jack couldn’t break the geas, and she wasn’t naive enough to think anyone they went to in Manchester about the problem wouldn’t run straight to the Prometheus Club with the news that Pete Caldecott was trying to skip out on their invitation.
So she’d go. She’d be a good little soldier, at least for now. But she wouldn’t trust the bastards who’d forced her to come here one bloody inch.
She let Jack hold on to her as they walked a block over and down, then hailed a cab. Nobody followed them, and Pete forced herself to relax until they were away from the center of the city and heading into Jack’s old stomping grounds.
6.
Pete hadn’t grown up on a council estate, but she’d had plenty of school friends who had, and she knew the drill. Suspicious of outsiders, and angry at their lot in life, and they didn’t give a fuck about much of anything.
Council estates in London were mostly cut from the same cloth—tower blocks where her friends lived stacked on top of one another like past-date merchandise, filled with noise, cigarette smoke, and older boys who leered at them any time they had to pass by in the stairwells or the garden.
The cabbie who drove them sped away, his taillights smears of red in the pools of dark created by broken streetlamps. Pete looked up and down the street, but they were the only souls about. The sun was still setting over the Beetham Tower in the center of the city, but the shadows here were already long. Alexandra Park, Jack’s old estate, contained squat brown semi-detached houses, rusty iron gates, and windows covered with tatty curtains that twitched in sequence as the residents of the estate scrutinized the outsiders. It was as if a child who was shit at taking care of his toys had discarded a model town and left it to moulder and rot.
“Feels like home already,” Pete said, staring down a particularly cheeky bitch who peered at her from her front garden, glaring as if Pete had just kicked her pets.
“Lot better than it was,” Jack muttered, lighting a cigarette. “Back then, someone would’ve chucked a bottle at you and someone else would’ve pulled a piece and demanded all your worldly goods.”
He pointed to a corner shop, windows bright with fresh vegetables and hand-lettered signs in Farsi. “That place burned down in eighty-eight or eighty-nine, ’cos of some hooligans. Mum was too stoned to keep me inside, so I watched the whole thing from the pavement until the fire brigade shooed me away.”
“Dare I ask what greasy friend of yours we’re bunking with in this charming hamlet?” Pete said. Alexandra Park wasn’t any worse than wandering down the wrong street in Peckham, but there was an undercurrent of hostility that she’d never felt in her hometown. They weren’t wanted, and both the residents of the estate and the currents of the Black drifting through like oily water made sure that Pete knew it.
Jack kicked his boot over the broken pavement, all at once unable to meet her eyes. Pete pursed her lips. “What? What about this am I not going to like?”
He sighed. “Tried a few numbers. One’s dead, one’s a guest of Her Majesty for the next five to seven years, so if we want to stay off the screen, this is our only choice.”
Pete cocked her eyebrow, letting Jack know she didn’t appreciate the ultimatum. “Spit it out. What’s wrong with the bloke?”
Jack stamped out his fag. “Nothing’s wrong with her. Not all me friends have some inherent character flaw.”
“Oh” was all Pete said. She’d been prepared for most anything, except that. It wasn’t as if she shouldn’t have guessed. It wasn’t as if she could explode, stamp her foot, and demand to go home. Jack had slept with other women—she’d slept with other men, too. She’d just smile, be calm, and put up with whatever ex or former fling he’d dragged her to with the style and grace befitting a fucking grown-up.
“It’s just up there,” Jack said, sidling away from Pete as if she might bite him. She forced herself to put a smile on her face and pretend her stomach wasn’t in a knot. It wasn’t the woman—it was coming face to face with Jack’s history, the part of his life he’d never spoken about for more than two sentences.
This woman would know it all, far more than Pete. She’d have memories that Pete could never share.
Which was far more of a reason to be flamingly jealous than sex. Pete breathed deep as Jack hopped the steps of one of the dingy council houses and pounded on the door with the flat of his hand. She could be gracious for however long they were stuck here.
The door burst open, and a blonde wearing a bright red top and fitted jeans exploded from within the house. “Jackie!” she cried, and threw her arms around Jack, nearly knocking him off his feet. “Come here, you bastard!” the woman cried. “Let me get a look at that mug!”
Or she could try not to kick the woman’s teeth in, Pete revised. Graciousness might be a peak she couldn’t summit.
“Fuck me,” Jack said, patting the blonde on the back while trying to wriggle free. “’M not fifteen any longer. Be gentle with me.”
“Can’t believe you’re still standing, much less walking and talking,” the blonde said, slugging Jack on the arm. “The way we all went back then, thought you’d be six feet down for sure.”
“What can I say?” Jack said. “The bad pennies always turn up.” He stepped back and held the blonde at arm’s length. “It’s good to see you too, luv.”
Before the blonde replied, she finally noticed Pete was there. Her expression narrowed, and Pete felt as if a bright and critical spotlight had been turned directly in her eyes. Jack’s friend might be a chavvy blonde with a big grin on her face, but her eyes were the same as Jack’s—those of a suvivor who’d seen and absorbed too much in their lifespan. Pete decided then and there that she wasn’t turning her back on Jack’s childhood sweetheart, not for a split second.
But it didn’t mean she had to be a cunt, either, so she stepped up and extended her hand. “I’m Pete.”
If the blonde thought the name was odd, she didn’t let on, just crushed Pete’s small fingers in a dockworker’s grip. “Wendy.”
“Good to meet someone Jack was mates with back in the day,” Pete said, leaving off the snide implication that they’d been far more than that. She didn’t want to start up with the pissing contest before they were even in the door.
“Oh, Christ!” Wendy barked a laugh. “Mates from further back than I care to admit.” She elbowed Jack. “You’d be a wanker to tell this cute little thing me real age.”
Jack grinned back at her, the genuine smile he reserved for people and situations he trusted. “Your secret’s safe with me, luv.”
Pete removed the uncertainty from that equation. Wendy and Jack had definitely slept together. She might grit her teeth until they were nubs, but she wouldn’t get territorial. Wendy was doing them a favor, and Pete was going to take the high road if it killed her.
“Should we step inside?” she suggested. “Lot of eyes around here.”
“Good idea,” Jack said. To Wendy, he flashed another charming grin. “Appreciate you helping us lie low, darling. We’re in a bit of a spot.”
“An’ none of your noncey little mage friends would help you out?” Wendy clicked her tongue against her teeth. “For shame.” She gestured them inside. “C’mon. Nosy old bint across the street’s got nothing better to do than poke in my business, and the rest of them are just waiting to paint rude things on me front door when I’m not around.”
Pete followed Jack, kicking the door shut behind her with a hollow thump that she tried not to compare to a coffin lid.
Wendy’s council flat crouched on the shoulders of an empty one below it. Narrow as the stairs wer
e to the flat in London, these were half the size, shadowed and perfumed with decades of smoke, cooking oil, and stale piss. All council flats of a certain age smelled the same. Pete had been to enough of them on welfare visits for the Met to know what lay beyond the door—gray carpet, a rusty radiator, leaky windows, and a kitchen that smelled constantly of damp rot.
Wendy’s flat didn’t disappoint, although it was snug and dry, and rife with protection hexes. Pete felt them skitter across her face like a welter of tiny spiders when she stepped over the threshold. That was rude—one waited to be invited in when entering a mage’s dwelling—but she wasn’t in a polite sort of mood, so she shoved through the hexes, not particularly caring if she left the ends in tatters.
“Not a lot of room,” Wendy said. “But what’s mine is yours and all.”
“Thank you, luv,” Jack said, touching the back of her hand. “I mean it. Most mages aren’t mad enough to take on the Prometheus Club.”
Wendy laughed again, the husky bark endemic to chain smokers. “You could always convince a girl to be a bit mad, luv.” She winked at Pete. “This one’s got a touch of the devil about him. Drove me mum mad, us seeing one another.”
“Where is your scary old hag of a mother?” Jack asked. “Terrorizing old men down the rest home?”
“Christ, no,” Wendy said. “She kicked off near ten years ago. About time, too—if I’d had to see her into her twilight years, all her screeching about Jesus and his seven fucking dwarves or what have you, I’d’ve topped meself.”
“And not a soul would blame you,” Jack said, setting his bag down and looking about the place. “I’m going to wash up, luv,” he said, and then left Pete alone in the sitting room with Wendy.
Pete stood in the center of Wendy’s stained Ikea rug like a knob, waiting for an invitation to sit, smoke, or even fuck off, but Wendy went back to ignoring her until she’d lit a fresh fag from a pack lying on the sofa.
“Still the same old Jack,” she said. Pete felt the sharp craving penetrate her skull at the hit of smoke, but she bit it back. She’d quit when she’d gotten pregnant, and she wasn’t about to let Wendy and her sad little council flat drive her back into the habit.
“I wouldn’t know,” Pete said. “We met later on.”
Wendy appraised Pete, with a good deal less friendliness than she’d displayed in front of Jack. “Oh yeah. You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”
“I’m thirty-one,” Pete said, keeping her voice low and calm. She wasn’t going to do this—she wasn’t going to play some silly game that had started between Jack and Wendy before she’d even been born.
“’Course you are, sweetheart,” Wendy said. “But younger when you met, I’d wager.” She grinned. Her teeth were the same color as her stained plaster walls. “Jack always did like to get ’em young and willing.”
“All right, look,” Pete said. “I appreciate that you’re put out helping us like this, and that you might think you have some kind of claim to Jack, being there first and all, but I’m a grown woman, not a teenage girl, and seeing as he and I have a baby back in London, I really doubt he’s going anywhere. Sweetheart.”
Wendy glared at her through the fog of smoke, but she stayed quiet. Pete didn’t feel any better—she actually felt worse. She hated the reminder that there was an entire life Jack had lived before her. Friends and enemies, love and heartbreak. She could know about it, but she’d never be part of it. She’d always be the one that came after, the younger woman, the one who’d sent Jack down a spiral he nearly hadn’t climbed out of.
If she were being honest, she knew she wasn’t Jack’s first love, or even his second. Not by a long shot. Wendy might not be either, but she was a reminder of the Before, and the other Jack, the one Pete had never known and never would.
“Not like he ever made an effort to look me up after he took off,” Wendy sighed at last. “Broke my heart one day when I went ’round to his flat and he was just gone. His mum was stoned off her arse, as usual, and I didn’t hear from him for near ten years.”
“That’s Jack now, too,” Pete said, feeling herself soften toward Wendy just a bit. “Good at flash, not big on follow-through.”
Wendy sucked on her fag and gave Pete a wry smile. “That’s us.” She gestured at a shabby photo in filmy glass sitting on her end table next to the ashtray. Pete extended her hand.
“May I?”
Wendy nodded, and Pete ran her thumb over the glass to clear the dust away. Jack, young and skinny, stood next to Wendy on the stoop of her council flat. They couldn’t have been more than twelve, Wendy’s hair in an eighties perm that looked like it could support its own weather system, and Jack slouched in a shirt and tie that both had clearly been borrowed from someone who was much larger and a fan of bold paisley prints.
“What was the occasion?” she asked Wendy.
“I had a part in the school play,” Wendy murmured. “The Music Man. Jack and his da came to see me, since me mum was always at work.”
Pete focused on the tall figure standing behind Jack and Wendy. Wendy squinted at her through the smoke from her fag. “What?”
“Nothing.” Pete swallowed the dozen questions that exploded into her brain. “Jack never said much about his dad. I always thought he was dead.”
Wendy shrugged. “Probably is, now. Showed up once in a blue moon, threw cash around, left. Never gave a fuck one way or the other what poor Jackie was actually going through at home.”
Before Pete could contemplate the photo any further, Jack returned from the loo, swiping his hands across his jeans. “Everything all right, then?” he asked, darting a look between Pete and Wendy.
“Tip-top,” Wendy said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’ll just go down and get something for tea, yeah?”
She left, and Jack paced the flat, four steps to each wall, until he finally scrubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t take this,” he muttered, heading for the door.
Pete ran after him, nearly falling down the broken front steps. “You can’t just go running about Manchester by yourself,” she said. “Not after what happened at the train station.”
Jack ignored her, walking for a good minute in silence. “You’d think it’d be easier,” he sighed at last.
“What?” Pete asked, though she knew.
“Coming back here,” Jack said. “I haven’t been back to Manchester since I was fifteen, Pete. I didn’t even come back for me mum’s funeral.”
“I wouldn’t worry over it,” Pete said quietly. They walked another block, until they stopped in front of a flat, same as all the other flats in the row, with empty windows peering into a sad, floral-papered sitting room.
“I wouldn’t have ever come back if I had it my way,” Jack said. “But I’d do it for you, no question.”
Pete opened her mouth, then shut it again. What the hell did you say to that? Jack might be the sort of fuckwit who’d look up an ex-girlfriend and expect everything to go swimmingly, but he had never left her. Never let her down, never done anything less than all he could to protect her. Even at the cost of his sanity and almost his life.
“I know,” she said at last, reaching for his hand, but Jack wasn’t beside her any longer.
“This is it,” he said, stopping at the semi-detached on the corner. “Good old number seven. Every time the council was ready to kick my mum out for fighting and keeping her shady boyfriends here on the sly, she’d cry and make me come with her to the hearing, look sad and skinny and pathetic.”
Pete thought back to the photo, to the small dark-haired boy who held only the barest hints of the Jack she knew. She would have felt sorry for that boy. She did feel sorry for that boy.
Jack conjured a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke at the darkened windows. “Can’t believe we ended up spending fourteen years here. No wonder my dad bolted as soon as he saw an opening.”
“You ever see him after you lit out?” Pete asked cautiously. “Your dad?”
“Never since t
he day I packed a kit and shut the door behind me,” Jack said. “He crops up, he’s asking for a kick in both the teeth and the arse.”
“Fair enough,” Pete said. He didn’t want to talk about it, and that was his choice. The questions she had were just going to have to keep waiting, as they always had.
She and Jack reached the end of the road, which ended abruptly in a pit of gravel, mud, and leftover rainwater, green scum floating on top. The residents had been using the place as a makeshift tip, and an icebox of some indeterminate vintage lay on its side, doors gaping open.
A number of small children ran in circles amid the garbage, shrieking and giggling. They weren’t playing the cruel games that Pete remembered from the council kids around her neighborhood growing up, nor were they smashing things for the Hell of it. The game seemed to involve one kid who was a dragon, who shot the others with some kind of foam dart launcher, slowly turning each to his side when they got hit. It was an innocent game, without any sharp edges. They seemed happy.
“You think Lily will ever be that?” she said.
Jack snorted. “Raggedy little council rat? Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Come on,” Pete said sharply. “It’s not like they’re running about setting small dogs on fire. I meant do you think she’ll ever be like that, right this moment?” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. “Happy, with nothing troubling her?”
“’Course I do,” Jack said, surprising Pete by twining his fingers with hers. “She’s got you, doesn’t she?”
Pete looked at her feet. Better modesty than letting Jack know she was hiding a prickle of tears in the corners of her eyes. “Right” was all she said.
“Pub’s down the way, used to be decent,” Jack said. “’Course, that was 1984. Care to chance it?”
“Would I ever,” Pete said. She let Jack lead her back up the road and into the high street, the lights of Alexandra Park coming on around them one by one, like stars filling a darkened sky, remote and frozen as outer space.
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