7.
The residents of the Dodger’s Arms—and Pete used the term on purpose, since the men at the bar looked as if they’d been sitting there since at least before Thatcher came to office—glared at her when she and Jack came in out of the twilight, but Jack ordered for them at the bar, and at the sound of his ever-thickening Manchester burr, the punters turned back to their sudsy pints and let Jack and Pete be.
The weight of the packet Preston Mayflower had given her knocked against her chair when she hung her jacket, and she pulled it out, turning it in her hands. Jack examined the dirty paper object over the lip of his pint glass. “What’ve you got there?”
“Mayflower slipped it to me,” Pete said. She picked at the edge of the paper, which was greasy—she wagered from the many times Preston had performed this exact motion. “I’d really like to know what could possibly be enough to throw yourself into traffic over.”
“Could be nothing,” Jack said. “Bloke did fling himself in front of a bus for no fucking reason.”
Pete thought about telling him what she’d seen, the two figures chasing Mayflower, the real fear driving the madness-tinged exchange they’d had.
But Jack had enough to worry about being back home, and she didn’t know the figures came from the Prometheus Club. She had her suspicions, sure, but she wasn’t going to get Jack up in arms until she was certain. The Proemetheans hadn’t been after her, anyway. They wanted her with them.
Unless they know you have this grimy little trinket, her logic whispered. Preston had been scared enough to try and warn her away from the Gathering, and now he was dead for his trouble.
Then again, Preston could be a complete frothing nutter. The only thing Pete could figure was that she couldn’t trust anyone in Manchester—not the Prometheans, not Wendy, and not Mayflower.
So decided, she took a long swig of her pint. Sooner or later, she’d tell Jack the whole story, but not tonight. Not with the ghosts of his past looming so large that he’d already downed a pint and a shot and ordered a repeat.
Though the pub was dingy, it had been a long time since she’d just been able to go out and relax—at least since before she left the Met. She and Ollie Heath, her partner, used to go out a few times a week with some other DIs from the squad, drink and laugh at horrible jokes and unwind. Take their minds off life on the murder squad, which was bleaker than most and less rewarding than nearly all.
She fingered the packet for a moment longer. “Suppose you’re right,” she told Jack. “It’s probably nothing.”
He extended his palm. “Let’s see it, then. Strange men slip you gifts, I think I deserve to know.”
As she unwound the soft, worn paper, Pete felt a frission of anticipation, the barest finger of the Black scraping over her talent, leaving the slightest bloody scratch. It vanished as the paper fell apart and the small, hard object Mayflower had passed her thunked onto the sticky pub table.
“Shit,” Jack breathed, as the small stone caught the light. To Pete it looked rather ordinary—something like those crystals you bought in museum shops, leftover pieces of larger geodes—pretty and sharp-edged but ultimately unremarkable.
“I’m just glad it’s not a severed ear, really,” she said, mindful of Jack’s ashen expression. The crystal was cool to her touch—too cold, as if it had been out in the void of space. She pulled back her fingers as the tips turned blue.
“An ear would be a fifty-quid note compared to what that is,” Jack muttered. He grabbed his second shot and knocked it back with a shudder, making all the ink up and down his arms ripple.
“You all right?” Pete asked. She cast a quick look around the pub, but they were still relatively incognito. Nobody spared them a glance of more than a few seconds.
“Not really,” Jack said. “You say the train station nutter gave you this?”
Pete rubbed the spot between her eyes where a fierce headache bloomed. “Just give me the bad news. What is it—a bomb? A cursed object? Am I going to start vomiting toads?”
“That’s a soul cage,” Jack said softly. When he was really worried, his voice dropped to just above a whisper, rough and tight as dragging his palm over gravel. “I’ve only seen a few, and ones this compact are extremely rare.”
Pete flinched. She’d encountered a soul cage when she’d been attempting to undo their mistake with Nergal, and they were nasty pieces of work. “But don’t they take up whole rooms?” she protested. “And aren’t they used on the living?”
The soul cage as she knew it had been writ with magic sigils and used to trap the soul of a victim eternally, in the space between the Black and the Land of the Dead. At the base, they were torture chambers, and usually only necromancers could construct them. Nergal had deserved no less, but Pete had a feeling that whoever had their soul encased in the cold crystal was merely unlucky.
“Not this one,” Jack said, gingerly taking the crystal and turning it in its cloth without touching it. “This one … this is a masterful piece of work, I’ll tell you. Made with care, for somebody this mage really and truly hated.”
Pete caught a flash from the crystal in the low light, and for just a moment it seemed something moved beneath the lava-glass surface, oily and alive. She drew back in her chair, as far from the soul cage as possible. She didn’t even want to think about what it would be like, soul ripped from her body, trapped in a tiny sliver of the in-between caught in the cage. A miniature Purgatory for a single soul, entrapped for eternity.
“Can you tell what sort of thing is in there?” she asked in a whisper.
Jack laid his finger carefully against the side of the crystal. “Human,” he said. “Beyond that, I’m not poking around.” He swiped his fingers across his jeans, brushing off the invisible psychic residue of whomever the soul cage contained.
“So what do we do with this?” Pete asked. Jack’s eyebrow went up.
“What d’you think?” he demanded. “We don’t know what sort of sod is cooped up in there. At best, he’ll be a mightily pissed off ghost when he comes out. At worst, he got his soul caged for all eternity for a reason. You do not mess with magic this strong.” He lowered his voice, looking around. “Not to mention that whoever made that is mucking in dark stuff of the highest order. Not a bastard whose careful work you want to undo. So we’re not doing a damn thing except wrapping it back up so it can’t give me frostbite.”
There’s no doubt of that, Pete thought as she looked at the crystal, watching the soul within move beneath the surface. “Preston didn’t exactly strike me as the type to work with necromancy and black magic,” she said. “Though I admit he did come across as completely off the wall.”
“The real question is, why you? Why pass on something so rare to a complete stranger?” He fixed his gaze on Pete. The full power of Jack’s gaze, with blue fire magic dancing behind it, was something to behold. It could pin her to the spot, for good or for ill, and she knew without a doubt that she was being looked through, inside and out. He didn’t use it often, but now Pete felt her breath catch. His eyes were one of the things that had made Pete fall for him in the first place. She’d been young and dumb, for sure, but even now she couldn’t deny that Jack’s gaze still mesmerized and drew her in.
“I don’t know,” she said in a whisper, and left it at that. She never understood why other people expected her to rescue them, to save the world and avert disaster. She was just Petunia Caldecott. An ordinary woman who happened to be able to do one extraordinary thing. She certainly wasn’t a mage of Jack’s caliber.
Jack sat back and sucked on his lower lip. “Damned if I know why, either.”
“I know you didn’t want to come back here,” Pete said. “And I’m sorry about this stupid geas, and I’m so grateful that you’re here with me.”
The soul cage couldn’t lead to anything good. Prometheus Club or not, why the fuck had Preston given it to her? How could he be sure she wouldn’t simply flip it back to the Prometheans to get on their good side?
Not that she would. She didn’t like people who assumed she’d toe the line just because they put on a good show of force. Her da had taught her better than to knuckle down to bullies.
And there was Jack to consider. Preston’s own words were on a repeat she couldn’t stop: If you must go, don’t take the crow-mage with you.
But the Prometheus Club hadn’t given her a choice. Attend or die. It didn’t get more clear-cut than that.
So she’d have to do what she always did when life in the Black threatened to eat her alive—she’d keep her eyes open and her instincts sharp, and whoever wanted to do Jack harm or use him for their own ends would have to go through her.
She put the soul cage back into her coat, deep in a zippered pocket, and let Jack pay the check. “Let’s go,” he sighed. “Maybe Manchester will seem a little more hospitable now that ’m pissed.”
He leaned on her on the way out of the bar, and Pete let them walk in silence, enjoying the closeness and the warmth of his body. It lasted for half a block, until Pete heard echoing footsteps and felt a prickle in the Black, one that wasn’t hard to decipher.
“Someone’s following us,” she told Jack. “Keep walking, don’t look back, don’t act different.”
He tensed, some of the muzziness disappearing from his expression. “Black’s going crazy,” he said. He gave a shiver, and Pete could only imagine what he was seeing.
“I know,” she said as Jack gave a low grunt of pain, the assault on his sight making him shiver against the length of Pete’s body. “I know, but just keep walking when I let go of you. Get back to Wendy’s and I’ll meet you there.”
“Why?” Jack demanded, balking. “What are you going to do?”
Pete let go of him, taking advantage of his slowed reactions to shove him forward. She wheeled around. “I have no idea,” she said, mostly to herself.
Jack, to his credit, didn’t try to white-knight it. He just kept going, melting into the shadows quick as a black cat.
Alone in the street, Pete was only half surprised to see the man and woman from the train station. The woman pointed a crimson-nailed finger at her. “Petunia Caldecott,” she said. “You’ve been avoiding us.”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?” Pete said. She swiveled to the left and to the right. Alexandra Park had plenty of nooks and crannies for more assassins to hide in, but it appeared to be just the three of them.
“Not yet,” said the woman, “but I know you. And I know what that ink stain on your hand means.”
The geas flared, and the pain returned tenfold when the woman spoke. Pete forced herself to keep her expression neutral and not flinch. She was good at not flinching, no matter how much it hurt. The Prometheans looked far more ordinary than she would have expected, a bit posh, even. Magicians weren’t supposed to be posh. The ones with actual talent usually looked more like either vagrants or escapees from an old Dracula film. Even Nicholas Naughton, the necromancer whose help nearly wiped London off the map with Nergal, had looked like a slightly scruffy country gent, all turtleneck sweaters and scuffed boots.
“I should have known you two were Prometheans, what with all the skulking and talking in circles,” Pete told her. “Is this the part where you threaten me with car batteries and pliers?”
“Of course not!” The woman looked genuinely offended. “If you’d just alerted us you were reaching the gathering early, Miss Caldecott, we could have arranged rooms for you and Mr. Winter at our headquarters in the city center.”
“Maybe I’m happy where I am.” Pete folded her arms. The woman gave her a smile that suggested the very idea was adorable.
“Because a tip in Alexandra Park is your idea of a vacation?” The woman tsked. “Manchester is so much more, Miss Caldecott. You don’t need to shack up with Wendy Macintosh and try to hide from us. We want you here.”
“Yeah,” Pete told her. “That’s sort of the problem, isn’t it?” She felt a complete lack of surprise that Wendy and the woman from the Prometheus Club had talked. Wendy was the type who’d look after her own arse. A survivor in all the ways that mattered.
Pete figured she’d been planning to meet the Prometheans eventually. But not like this, not when everything was on their terms. If she ever saw Wendy again, she was going to fetch the woman a smack that would shake those yellow teeth out of her head.
“You can try to keep running,” said the woman, evidently seeing the flash in Pete’s eyes. “But I’ll have a leg locker hex on you before you can take two steps. I don’t want us to start off on this sort of ground, Miss Caldecott. I want us to get along.” She stepped forward and extended her hand, gesturing to a long black car that pulled up to the curb.
Pete thought of Preston Mayflower, the expression of panic and despair etched on his face just before the bus hit.
“Fine,” she said, pasting her best faux-civil smile on her face. “We can be friends, if that’s what you want.”
The woman grinned back at her as she ushered Pete into the car. “I’d like nothing better.”
8.
The ride was, by Pete’s count, less than five minutes, but it felt like an eternity. The woman touched one hand across the back of Pete’s neck as soon as they sat down in the rear seat, and a veil of blackness dropped over Pete’s eyes. She gave a start. “What the fuck is this?”
“Shh,” said the woman. “Just a little obfuscation hex. Procedure for all visitors not formally inducted into the club.”
“Well, I’ve already seen you,” Pete snarled. “And what you did to Preston.” She waited, hoping that she’d provoke something out of her companion other than smooth platitudes.
“Poor Preston,” the woman purred. “He was a wayward soul. The type you really wish you could help, but alas, even we can’t save everyone.”
“And Wendy?” Pete asked. “You got a whole network of sad sacks keeping eyes on the city for you?”
“Wendy doesn’t deserve any of your ire,” she said. “Aside from her inability to keep her mouth shut the moment she clapped eyes on Mr. Winter, she didn’t do a thing. We have our own ears on the … grittier side of things here in the city.”
Pete felt a touch on her shoulder. “Hush, now,” the woman said. “You’ll get answers as soon as I’m allowed to give them.”
Pete went quiet, not because the woman had ordered it but because she knew she wouldn’t get anything else useful. She was talking to the Prometheus Club’s PR—somebody who had a glib answer for everything, and who unpleasant truths slid off of like oil skated across water. If she wanted real answers, she was going to have to play.
She just hoped Jack had gotten out of trouble’s way, although knowing him, it was more likely he’d run into it head first. To pass the time, Pete counted—turns the car took, seconds that ticked by. They circled the same route twice, and Pete knew she wouldn’t be able to find the place by walking if she tried. So far, the Prometheans were beating her soundly at the game of being clever.
She didn’t like it, not at all, but she swallowed her resentment as the car purred to a stop.
“Here we are,” said the woman. “We’ll get you and Mr. Winter settled in rooms, and then we can all have a chat.”
“Jack?” Pete’s voice sounded strangled, and she silently kicked herself for betraying her nerves. “He’s here?”
“Mr. Winter is not as sneaky as he might like to imagine.” The woman’s voice swelled with amusement. “He gave my partner quite a talking-to on the ride over, in language I would not repeat.”
“Trust me,” Pete said. “I’ve heard it all. I want to see him. And I want you to take off the magic blindfold—I’m through with cloak-and-dagger shite.”
“I told you,” said the woman. “Patience. You’ll see Jack soon enough, and we’ll be inside momentarily.”
“If you’ve done anything to hurt Jack…,” Pete started, but the woman cut her off with laughter.
“Hurt? That’s the absolute last thing on my mind, trust me.” She leane
d close enough so that Pete could feel her breath, smell the cloying orchid reek of her perfume. “Even if he is a degenerate demon follower with a black mark on his soul.” She drew back, and the perky false note was back in her voice. “That’s not my concern.”
Pete felt the air change, dry and recycled against her face, and she was marched down a long hall—approximately fifty-seven steps—before going through a door and being sat on a bed.
“And here we are,” the woman said. “You’re free to come and go in the club, but know your geas is still active. It’ll lay you flat if you try and cross the threshold to the outside.” Her heels clacked, and Pete heard the moan of ancient hinges. “I am sorry about that,” the woman said, after a moment. “But it’s necessary. You must understand that we can’t fully trust you.”
The door slammed, shaking the floor under Pete’s feet, and as she heard a latch click the hex cleared from her eyes. Pete screwed up her face in the wash of bright light from the chandelier above her head, before she fumbled at the switch to dim it.
“Of course,” she grumbled as she checked out the room. “You toss me in the back of a car, threaten me, and on top of it force me to come to Manchester, and it’s me who has the problem with trusthworthiness.”
The room wasn’t new or nearly as posh as she would have expected from the fancy motor and the woman’s outfit. Plaster cracked at all the edges of the windows and doors, and the floor was nearly black with old varnish and wear. The windows, leaded and wavy so she couldn’t see out, were painted shut. Pete heard an echo of a car horn from far below—too far to drop, even if she could have gotten the casement to open.
Escape options rapidly dwindling, she forced herself to keep examining everything. Even if she wasn’t going to bolt straightaway, she might as well figure out as much as she could about the Prometheus Club. It always paid to know exactly what sort of wankers you were dealing with, especially in the Black.
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