by P. N. Elrod
Pete fell on her knees in the aft of the launch when Donovan shoved her. "Not so chatty now, are ye?"
"I'll set a badger on your bollocks," Pete muttered. Donovan kicked her and she felt something give, low down near her stomach. She bit the insides of her cheeks. She wouldn't get Donovan off by yelling.
"Knock that off," Gerry commanded as he wrestled Jack into the launch. "You remember what happened last time you bruised the sacrifices, surely."
Donovan grunted, and Jack raised his eyebrows. "So you two are the silly gits playing doctor with creatures of the Black. Have to say I'm a bit let down."
"Shut up," Gerry said. "This is older and larger than you, mage, and I don't expect you to understand." He pushed Jack down next to Pete, and cast off the line. Donovan poled the skiff into the channel and they drifted toward the sea.
"You all right?" Jack muttered without moving his mouth too much. Pete sucked in a breath. A dull shiv of pain slid between her broken bones.
"Hurt, but I can run for it if I need to."
"Quiet, you two," Donovan warned.
"Go bugger yourself," said Jack loudly. "If you hurt us, you'll be stuck sacrificing that bloody overcooked roast you served me last night." To Pete, he murmured, "Sorry."
Pete blinked. Never mind creatures in the suite and the thick dark magic that lived in the air around Blackpool—Jack apologizing was truly a phenomenon. "You are?"
"Should have listened to you," he said. "This is a dodgy place."
"Yeah, and the time for guilt has cruised past like a missed bus," Pete said. "So what are we going to do?"
The launch drifted through connected channels and the salt tang told Pete they were near the bog, moonlit mist curling away from the prow. Were it not for the pain in her ribs and the thrumming of darkness in the waters, they could have been on the hidden path to Avalon.
"We wait, for now," said Jack. "Until we get where we're going. I want to see what these sods are on about."
"That's a terrible plan," Pete hissed. "We need to swim for it. Where we're going to is an untimely death!"
"No…" said Jack slowly, his head swiveling as the skiff began to slow. Pete struggled up and followed his eyes. Jack tilted his head. "That's where we're going."
Something massive and hunched rose out of the water, taller than the windbroken trees along the shore. It was stone and moss, slimy and shining as if it had just woken from under the mud. Columns held a crooked roofpiece made of insectoid carapaces and steps covered in algae led to the round opening, jagged pieces of broken stone lining it like rotted teeth.
The skiff bumped against the bottom stones and Donovan hauled her up, nearly dislocating her arm.
"Any tricks from ye," he told Jack, "and she breaks like a matchstick."
"I'll enjoy feeding you your still-beating heart, you bastard," Jack said pleasantly as Gerry pushed him out of the boat.
"Hear that, Donnie-boy?" Gerry said. "That's a sentiment born of true love." They laughed as Pete and Jack were herded up the steps to the temple door.
It was a temple. That was the best way Pete could describe it. The stones were massive and hand cut, carved with curling tentacles and lidless eyes and the great humped backs of creatures rolling through deep waves. Gaseous fumes tinged the air of the single open chamber yellow. The temple wasn't Roman and it wasn't Celtic or Saxon—the place was slightly out of focus, as if built by something with an idea of human shapes but no practice.
Moss and algae covered almost every surface and Pete slipped, going down hard. Donovan dragged her the rest of the way by her scruff, locking her next to Jack into the neck cuff and a pair of iron shackles, chains bolted to a collapsing column.
Jack winced. "Iron's cold," he said by way of explanation.
"You better have a bloody good plan," Pete whispered. Witch-light flamed up in alcoves along the walls, and Pete saw the chamber was larger than it appeared, stretching to a massive fallen-in piece of the floor leaking bubbling marsh water. Tiny waves sloshed at her bare feet.
"Trust me, I'll be thinking of one right quickly," said Jack. "Interesting place, though. Appears to be some kind of death cult, chaos worshippers."
"Two pathetic sods without girlfriends," Pete muttered. "Not much of a cult."
Gerry hit a bronze gong mounted near the edge of the water pit, and with a low moan and a shuffling of feet a row of robed figures shuffled in. Their tattered black garments bore the tridach mark. Pete recognized the doorman from the hotel, and a friendly clerk at the petrol station where she and Jack had stopped on their way into the city.
"Bugger all. Look at them."
"Patience," Jack sighed. "I'm sure they'll eventually free us for the sacrifice, and then you can kick them, and I'll send up a little smoke, and we'll be off in the bloody boat."
"That's about as well-planned as this holiday was," Pete snapped.
"Listen!" Jack shouted. A few of the cultists glanced at them. "You didn't have to come along, but I was trying to do something for you because I felt bloody guilty about what happened in London and now that we've managed to end up like this, I just feel bloody stupid, neither of which is improving my mood, and on top of it all I feel a hangover coming on, so you can just bugger the bloody hell off, Petunia!"
Pete blinked, fury for just a moment overriding her fear. Then she hissed, "You are a selfish, self-absorbed git, Jack, and if you'd bothered to check on me after you almost died and I had to kill a ghost that sucks out people's souls—and do you know how hard it is to kill a ghost, Jack? Sodding hard!—if you'd just thought for one second about doing what I needed instead of what was easy, we wouldn't be in this mess!"
"Silence!" Gerry bellowed. He had donned his own robe, as had Donovan. "That's better," he said when Pete just glared at Jack in mute rage. He turned to the assembled cultists and raised his arms. "Brethren, we have joined thrice on this, the feast cycle of St. Gummarus the hunter, to bring prey and offerings to our lord, the immovable and towering Lord of Rage, Mnarhoteph."
"Mnarhoteph, fear his Name," the cultists chorused unevenly.
Pete met Jack's eyes, and even though she wanted to loose her chains and wrap them around his skinny tattooed neck, she felt a bubble of laughter when she saw he was trying to bite back a grin.
"Every cycle of the seasons we feed the unending and bottomless anger of Mnarhoteph, and when his hunger has been satiated, he grants us the power of his hatred."
"Mnarhoteph, praise his Fury," the cultists droned.
Gerry hit the gong again, three times, and it reverberated inside Pete's skull like a rusted dull blade scraping bone. "Mnarhoteph, the moon is high! Arise!"
The waters in the pit began to boil and heave and then in a vast sigh of fetid air and a groaning of chains, a massive body filled the pit, reaching for the temple roof. Mnarhoteph had row upon row of eyes, tentacles the size of tree trunks, suckers and feelers rimmed with teeth all studding a gleaming black hide. Pete felt his magic hit her, felt as if her sanity and her skull had split by gazing upon Mnarhoteph's silently shrieking edifice. "He's the source… the source of what I feel here…" And she lost the ability to speak, mesmerized by the awful beauty of the creature.
Jack went paler than usual, making him look dead. "Bollocks. I thought these gits were just playing at chaos worship." He began to jerk his chains frantically. "Pete, we need…" His eyes roamed over the witchfires in the alcoves and the poisonous yellow air, over Mnarhoteph and the great salt-bitten chains studded to his skin with harpoon spikes that held him in the pit. "We need a spark," said Jack finally.
"Thrice we have brought you sacrifices to fuel your towering hatred!" Gerry cried. "A female, a male, and now both aspects of the human filth lie before you in offering. Feed, master, and be strong!"
"A spark," Pete repeated, clinging to Jack's voice as her breadcrumb trail of sanity. Her words were lost as Mnarhoteph opened its maw and roared, a sound of pain that shook the temple to the stone bones.
Pete sobbed as Mnarhoteph's cry wen
t through her and wrapped around her heart, filling her with agony heavy as iron.
"Pete," Jack muttered urgently as Mnarhoteph's tentacles snaked across the floor, bleeding black ichor from the piercing iron bonds. "Pete, make a spark. Small, large, in-between, just hurry!"
Her mind still raged with Mnarhoteph's cry—trapped, alone and in pain—but Pete gathered herself, just as she had when the sorcerer's ghost took Jack's face, and banged her wrist against the stone column she was shackled against. The wet stone elicited nothing but pain in her hand.
Jack's eyes went milky and rolled back in his head, and he murmured wordlessly as Mnarhoteph moved inexorably out of the pit. His chains shrieked against the rock.
Pete made a fist and banged the shackle against stone again, and again. Purple bruising and crimson blood sprouted around the edges of the band, but she kept hitting stone, chipping off centuries of muck until, sure her hand was pulp, she hit dry rock.
A bright orange spark flew off the iron and Jack's eyes snapped back, twin flames replacing the color. "Aithinne," he breathed. A wind sucked the air from Pete's lungs and then with Jack's magic fire—real, crimson fire—sprouted from her spark and the gaseous air all around them began to burn. The initial explosion cracked the pillar Pete was chained to and drove Mnarhoteph's rubbery tentacles back.
Tracers of fire floated through the air, catching cultists as they attempted to run and roiling a bluish smoke from the burning algae. Donovan, robe and hands aflame, slid in the burning muck and cracked his head against broken rock, falling still.
Pete slipped her shackle with her blood-slicked hand and went to Jack. He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead and lying still, but breathing.
Pete turned to watch the fleeing cultists as the fumes burned away, leaving the air damp and salty as it had always been. "I guess that was a plan, all right. A bloody stupid plan, but a plan nonetheless."
From the pit, Mnarhoteph groaned. In a voice bottomless and liquid as the sea, he said, "Please."
Pete's heart thudded as she walked ankle-deep into the water pit and stood, close enough to touch Mnarhoteph's hide. "What did you say?"
"Please…" he grumbled. "Hurt…"
Jack stirred and pulled himself up, freeing himself now that his shackles were loosed. "What the bloody hell are you doing, Pete? Get away from that thing!"
"It's hurt," Pete said. Jack's sight let him perceive the dead, but Weirs were the conduits for the old gods, shapers of magic who spoke to all of the Black. Jack couldn't hear the creature's pain.
Pete placed a hand on Mnarhoteph and this close, the dark churning of magic was loneliness, not evil. "What do you want?" she whispered.
He pulled against the massive chains and harpoons that held him. "Home…"
Pete looked at the carvings along the temple walls, the deep waves and open seas—not a shallow and polluted bog on the edge of civilization.
Jack came to her side. "Guess he's not such a nasty chaos beastie, after all. Some ancestor of those blithering idiots in the robes must've summoned and trapped him here."
"How long, do you think?" said Pete. Jack shrugged.
"Centuries, at least."
To be trapped and forced to feed power into these small, grasping people… Pete met Jack's eyes. "Could you—?"
He sighed and she felt the crackling of air as his magic took hold. So different from the bottomless darkness of Mnarhoteph's power, but just as strong. The chains fell away from their bolts in the stone, and Mnarhoteph shuddered, the harpoon spikes falling away from scarred and rendered flesh.
"Go," said Pete, stepping back. "We don't mean you any more harm."
Mnarhoteph's nearest row of eyes focused on her, and he trumpeted. "Home."
Pete and Jack followed in the shining trail Mnarhoteph's body left as he slithered down the temple steps and splashed into the water. The light was the gray of a nearing sun, and the mist had disappeared so that Pete could watch him swim, all the way to the sea.
AFTER PETE HAD CALLED THE BLACKPOOL POLICE FROM a cultist's unmelted mobile, she sat next to Jack on the steps of the temple. He produced a lit Parliament. "Fag?"
"I'd murder one."
Jack handed it to her, and then exhaled before he said, "You really meant what you said before the bloody creature from the black lagoon showed up, didn't you."
Pete bit her lip. Jack's eyes weren't fiery or glacial or masked. They were just hurt. "Bits of it, yes," she said finally.
Jack started to say, "I guess that means…" but he was knocked into the water by a flying, charred shape in a black robe.
"Infidels… usurpers!" Gerry groaned. Burns covered one side of his face and head, and his eye was a leaking pit. His lips were twisted and swollen, most of the tender flesh gone. "Down into the black pit with you!" he growled, grabbing Jack by the neck and pushing his face into the bog. Jack clawed at Gerry's burnt hands, raking away long strips of flesh, and came up sputtering.
"Leggo, you git!"
"Die!" Gerry howled, hitting Jack with his good hand. Jack spat blood and swamp water.
"If I'm allowed last words, I'd say look behind you."
Pete slammed a mossy chunk of rock into Gerry's bald, roasted skull. The cultist folded like a puppet with his strings cut. She grabbed Jack's hand and pulled him out of the water. He collapsed next to her, shivering.
"I win."
Pete blinked. "Pardon me?"
"I win," said Jack with a wide grin. "Did I not tell you you'd have a bit of fun?"
Pete looked at him, looked at Gerry's still form, and contemplated telling Jack he was incurably deranged. Then she started to laugh. "Smacking that arsehole was the most fun I've had in months."
"Forty quid," Jack reminded her.
"I'll write you a check when we get out of this bloody swamp," she promised.
"Am I right you'll be finding your own flat, then, when we get home?" Jack said. He went on before she could answer. "Pete, for what it's worth, those bits you meant—I am a bastard and a selfish git, but I kept alive this long because of it. I'm sorry I can't undergo a miraculous transformation for you, luv. Truly I am."
Pete reached and took Jack's hand. He started, then squeezed her fingers and didn't loosen his grip. "I'm quitting," Pete said.
"The Metropolitan Police. I can't do that and be this." She gestured at the bog and the temple.
Jack's forehead crinkled. "But you love your job."
"I did," said Pete. "But you taught me that you're part of the Black first and a member of society second. And…" She almost swallowed down the words, jumped up and ran far away as she could, "I'd like you to teach me more."
Jack looked down on her, for a long time, smoke trailing out of one nostril. "You're bloody mad, Caldecott. You honestly think I'm any kind of qualified to take an apprentice? Bloody buggering fuck, you've seen what happens when things go bad with me. You'd sign on willingly for that?"
Pete nodded once, and was telling the truth.
"I'll be hard," Jack warned. "I won't let you be because you're my friend or because I care for you. It won't be any sort of pleasant and if you work with me there's a good chance you'll be buried in an early grave. So quit being so bloody stupid, go back to the Yard, and forget it, Pete, because if you take me as a teacher, I'll make bloody sure you regret it." He glared at her, but there was an expression in his eyes that was entirely new to Pete. She'd call it hope, if it were anyone but Jack.
"You're right, Jack Winter," she said. "You are a git."
"I told you," Jack started, but Pete leaned up and over and kissed him firmly, until he stopped trying to talk.
"I knew what I was getting into the first moment we met," she said. "And I don't want a transformation. I knew what I got the day I met you and you don't frighten me. Never did and never bloody will."
He grinned at her, but his eyes were calm cold glaciers in a choppy sea. "We'll see, luv."
Pete put her head on Jack's shoulder and they sat on the steps of the o
ld temple in the bog, waiting to be rescued and watching the neon spires of Blackpool fade into daylight, skeletons of a nightshade world that crumbled away under the sun.
Caitlin Kittredge is the author of the Nocturne City series, featuring werewolf detective Luna Wilder, and is currently hard at work on the first full-length volume of Pete and Jack's adventures in Black London. By day, her mild-mannered alter ego works as a video game designer. Hobbies include listening to old-school punk rock, collecting comic books, and mocking bad films. She enjoys a nice cup of tea. Find her online at www.caitlinkittredge.com.
WHERE THE HEART LIVES
Marjorie M. Liu
The Dirk & Steele series is set in contemporary times, but in a world where magic rubs elbows with science, where men and women with more-than-human powers secretly risk their lives to help others.
This story, however, takes place long before the events of the series, and is a glimpse into the lives of those who influenced the creation of the Dirk & Steele detective agency.
WHEN MISS LINDSAY FINALLY DEPARTED FOR THE WORLD beyond the wood, it meant that Lucy and Barnabus were the only people left to care for her house and land, as well as the fine cemetery she had kept for nearly twenty years outside the little town of Cuzco, Indiana. It was an important job, not just for Lucy and Barnabus, but for others, as well, who for years after would come and go, for rest or sanctuary. Bodies needed homes, after all—whether dead or living.
Lucy was only seventeen, and had come to the cemetery in the spring, not one month before Miss Lindsay went away. The girl's father was a cutter at the limestone quarry. Her brothers drove the team that hauled the stones to the masons. The men had no use for a sister, or any reminder of the fairer sex; their mother had run away that previous summer with a gypsy fortune-teller, though Lucy's father insisted his absent wife was off visiting relatives and would return. Eventually.
When word reached the old cutter that a woman named Miss Lindsay needed a girl to tend house, he made his daughter pack a bag with lunch, her comb, and one good dress from her mother's closet—then set her on the first wagon heading toward Cuzco. No good-byes, no messages sent ahead. Just chancing on fate that the woman would want his daughter.