“Bugger off,” Jack muttered. “You want to be my mum, put on an apron and fix me a meat pie.”
Lawrence stood and went to the door, flipping the bolt and opening it enough for someone skinny as Jack to slip out. “I have sympathy for what you done, Jack. But now the truth be known, I can’t be your sanctuary.”
Jack stood. He didn’t feel angry or betrayed, or any of the things you were supposed to feel when one friend of only a few turned his back on you. In a lifetime of doors slamming in his face, the novelty wore off quickly. The stone in his chest just grew a bit heavier. “Thanks for not turning me in, at any rate.”
“I am a worthy witch,” Lawrence growled. “I bow to no demon’s order.”
“In a few months we’ll have a pint and a laugh about this,” Jack promised, stepping into the hallway. The Black rushed back, flowing around Lawrence’s flat like water around a bridge piling in the Thames.
“Jack.” Lawrence bowed his head. “You know you don’t go making promises you can’t keep. How bad is it?”
“I bargained for my life,” Jack said shortly. “And a life is what I owe it. It’s bad business, Lawrence. Bad all around, up, down, and sideways. But don’t worry your pretty head.” Jack dropped Lawrence a wink. “I’ll get it sorted. I’m still planning on being here at thirteen years and a day.”
“Don’t you take up no fortune-telling, boy,” Lawrence said. “The future, she not your strong point.”
Chapter Nine
The rain had started when Jack’s boots hit the pavement, the thin miserable midwinter rain that foreigners thought of when they thought of England. Jack hunched inside his leather, and felt ice slide down his shoulders into the curve of his spine.
He wound through side streets like a maze rat until the porticoes of Paddington loomed up, and the rain finally ceased.
Pete waited beside a ticket machine near the National Rail tracks, under the grimy iron braces and the blackened ceiling of the station’s top floor. Being inside Paddington was like being inside a giant lung, black and tarred over from decades of smoke and the resultant soot.
Pete stood still and watchful in the way that only coppers and psychopaths excelled at. Hands in pockets, head thrown back to give the appearance of indifference, eyes unblinking and sharp as they skipped from the kiosks selling pastries and noodles to the groups of anxious foreign travelers gathered under the bank of National Rail schedule boards to the heavily peroxided Londoner stuffed like an anemic sausage into her slim dungarees, designer boots, and fur jacket.
“It was awful, just awful,” the woman intoned into her mobile. “Not a proper vodka tonic anywhere in the hotel. That’s bloody France for you.”
Jack considered taking a dip inside her handbag, one of those enormous blue sharkskin types that a family of refugees could live inside comfortably for some months, but gave it up in favor of watching Pete.
She hadn’t seen him yet. One small hand went to her neck, worked the kinks free. Pete’s old gig with the Met had made her a hand at blending, but in recent weeks she’d scuttled her wool pea coat for the canvas army jacket and had begun wearing her hair down instead of in a practical knot at the back of her skull. Little touches—pink lip gloss rather than plain, black nails like the very first time Jack had seen her, a dozen years ago at an underground club in Soho.
Not a dozen. Nearly thirteen. The weight of the demon’s smile washed away the odd sort of calm Pete carried with her. She had the demeanor of a battlefield nurse, unyielding but a comfort nonetheless simply because she’d ventured into the corpses and laid a hand against your cheek.
She’s too good for the likes of you, the fix whispered. Come with me, luv. I’ll never tell you no.
The pressure of a rotten and magic-riddled day built up behind Jack’s eyes. At least Paddington was so crushed with life and strapped with iron that the sight was silent.
He took a step forward, raised a hand. “Pete.”
The woman with the mobile smacked into him, shoulder to shoulder. Hers was even bonier than Jack’s.
“Watch out,” she snarled. “I’ve a mind to call the policeman over here, you.”
“Eat a curry, luv, and cheer up,” Jack returned. “Unless you’re keeping so slim because your bloke fancies a bit of necrophilia.”
“Cretin!” the woman snapped, and stomped away, boot heels clacking like bones on the station’s tile floor.
“I think she likes you,” Pete said. “The two of you could share bleaching tips.”
“Sod off,” Jack said, and Pete rewarded him by smiling. No Naughton, this time. Just him.
The secret of the demon grew larger and sharper, pushing on Jack’s heart and his guts.
“What is it?” Pete said. “You look peaked.”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Just fancy a fag, is all.”
“Can it wait?” Pete worried the zip on her jacket. “We should get to driving if we want to make Naughton’s by midnight.”
“’Course.” Jack shrugged. He could do apathetic, do it well. He’d been a punk frontman, after all.
Pete slipped her arm through his and her sudden proximity, her smell of clean linen shampoo and perfume and a little sweat, nearly made him stagger. He rolled his eyes upward in an effort to stave off a word, or a touch, or fuck it, a thought that would betray him as nowhere near cool and in control, the diametric opposite of what Pete and the world at large thought him. He was nearly forty—he shouldn’t be fainting at a girl’s touch. But the problem came again: it wasn’t a girl. It was Pete.
When Jack opened his eyes, the crow sat on the cross-beams of the station roof, and flicked its beak behind Jack as if to say, Watch your arse, old son.
In the same moment, his sight flared, like someone had put a pipe across the back of his skull.
Jack spun back the way he’d come, so quickly that he dragged Pete around in a drunken dance with him.
Two figures moved through the crowd disgorged from a Bristol train, two men in workman’s coveralls when he looked straight on, and emaciated forms with black, bleeding holes for eyes when he blinked.
Jack skidded to a stop, Pete stumbling against him. “Fuck.”
Pete’s eyes widened. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“Those two.” Jack jerked his chin. The figures passed by and through travelers, and where they touched, faces fell and eyes narrowed in anger. Travelers shoved. Babies shrieked. A woman in a green wool coat slapped her lover and ran off in the direction of the loo, sobbing.
“Yeah?” Pete let go of him, dropping her shoulders and curling her fists, like a small but determined bulldog. Jack had witnessed her drop men twice her size, but these were not men. The cold encroachment of their energy prickled the hair on his arms, made the ink in his tattoos dance, made the Black spin in front of his eyes as his sight screamed to show him the true faces of the things before him.
“Sluagh,” he said.
“Gesundheit?” Pete said hopefully. Jack shook his head. An entry from one of Seth McBride’s diaries swam up into his mind. Sluagh. Restless spirits.
Seth may have been a wanker, the bastard child of con man, mage, and roaring Irish drunk, but he knew ghosts, knew them better than any man besides Jack himself. He’d taught Jack enough to stay alive for another nineteen-odd years, at least.
“The restless dead,” Jack said aloud. “Sent away from the Bleak Gates to trouble the living.”
The twinned ghosts opened their mouths in a single, silent scream, and in unison raised arms of dessicated flesh and bone tipped with black nails that curled over with graveyard growth. They pointed at Jack, eyes and teeth spilling black pollution across the psychic space of Paddington.
“I gather they’re not here to have a pint and a laugh?” Pete said.
“No,” Jack said. “The sluagh appear at the moment of a person’s death.” He turned in a slow circle, watching more and more of the silent, howling, and pointing figures appear in the crowd. “And they always travel
in packs.”
“They’re here for you?” Pete snugged close against his side, their arms touching along the length. She wasn’t asking him the question except as a courtesy, and Jack was relieved he didn’t have to answer. As a mage, whatever horrid thing crawled from under a rock was most likely there for you and your skin, and Pete had at least learned that much.
Jack watched the sluagh by turns, counted them, felt the chill abrasion of the dead against his sight.
They advanced, in flickers and slithers, leaving a black trail across the floor of Paddington. Cold stole across Jack’s cheeks and burned his lungs, and the sluagh watched, pointed, marked him as the death they’d come to claim.
“Jack!” He became aware of Pete shouting, in a harsh whisper to avoid passersby noticing her panic. Still tight against him, like they were twins sharing a heart. “Shield hex?” she mouthed.
The sluagh were close enough to touch now, if he’d been a madman with a death wish. “No,” Jack said tightly. “No bloody good.” The dead were not tempered or repelled by living magic. Unwanted, the memory of Algernon Treadwell and his overweening hunger came to Jack, borne on the cold air ruffled by the passage of the sluagh.
Don’t just stand there like a knob. Not the fix, now. A little of Seth, a little of Pete, a little of his own survival instinct, battered and bloodied as it was.
Only blood could sate a spirit, and only dead blood could sate the sluagh.
Jack snatched Pete’s hand, and the jolt of her magic, the sight, and his own talent nearly unbalanced him again. “Run,” he ordered. “Run and don’t look back.”
With his free hand, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled forth his flick knife. The blade popped, a gleam of quicksilver obscured by crimson as Jack turned the knife to slice through the back of his opposite hand.
Blood fell to the dirty, mud-crusted floor of the station. One drop, two, three.
“Go dtáthaí mé tú,” Jack muttered, and the gray tendrils of the spell feebly sought out the sluagh. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. Jack needed more blood and more time to keep the dead away.
But it was his spell, the ghost box, his strongest magic. As the blood fell, Jack wove the cage of power and sight, holding the spirits back, keeping the dead at bay for just a little longer. The ghost box was the first spell he’d learned, the first, desperate magic that he’d tried when he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t simply succumbing to the same kind of delusion that made his mother talk to her plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary. Jack had first felt the Black enter him alone on the floor of a filthy, leaking squat on the outskirts of Manchester. He’d poxed it up, and was lucky he hadn’t died then and there, but the ghost box, straight from a mouldering “ye olde chaos magicke” tome at the library, had held.
Jack hoped fervently, with a jump of nerves in his chest that hadn’t happened in years, that it held now.
The sluagh drew back from the entanglement of blood magic, their silent mouths growing long, ghostly white teeth.
Jack ducked through a gap in their ranks and ran, towing Pete behind him. She hadn’t obeyed his order to run, but he hadn’t expected her to. Pete was too stubborn to run even for her own bloody good.
Jack took the stairs to the Underground lines two at a time, shoving passengers out of the way. He let go of Pete and vaulted the fare gates, a transit worker shouting at him, just a blur of blue and life next to the overwhelming, encroaching flock of sluagh.
Jack veered into the tunnel for the Bakerloo Line, his heart pulsating like to break his ribs. He had a moment of This is it, you’ve blown your wad as his vision blacked, and then he was on the platform and a train was roaring into the tunnel and Pete snatched his arm and kept him from going over the edge onto the tracks.
The doors sprang open, disgorging their human load, and Jack shoved his way inside.
“Please stand clear of the doors,” the robot announced. “This is a Bakerloo Line train to Elephant and Castle.”
Jack slumped against the train window as the car pulled out of the station. The sluagh stood on the platform in a cluster of nightmares, hollowed-out eyes following him until the train rounded a corner and they were lost to blackness and reflection.
“Too much iron,” Jack rasped. The need for a fag was vicious, and had claws. “Even for them.”
“What did they want with you?” Pete said. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, palms making a soft hiss against the leather.
“Me dead, I suppose,” Jack said. “’S the only thing sluagh ever want.”
“Because they’re restless?” Pete stepped to the door as the train pulled into the next station, at Edgeware Road. “Unfinished business or some bollocks?”
“Not likely,” Jack said. “The restless dead are them too full of malice and hunger even for the Land of the Dead.” Sluagh were wild spirits, feral dogs feeding on the souls and deaths of the living. Picking spectral bones, until there was nothing left.
They came into the day, out of the tunnels at last, and Jack breathed in a lungful of cold, damp air. It was nearly as good as nicotine. “They’re hungry, plain and simple,” he told Pete. “And they’ve been pointed at me to feed themselves.”
“Maybe we should put off this job.” Pete worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “I could tell Naughton something’s come up.”
Jack hunched inside his leather. The rain had ceased, but the thick iron clouds crouched overhead promised a proper storm when they’d finished massing. “No,” he said. “We should take the fucking job.”
Pete cocked one eyebrow, and Jack spread his hands in return. “We need it, yeah?”
The scene in Paddington had cemented his resolve to leave London until he could figure out what to do with the demon. Lawrence was right, as Lawrence often was—the Smoke wasn’t his place now, not while he was marked so.
“Well, if you’re so keen all of a sudden,” Pete said, “the car’s this way.”
Chapter Ten
In Pete’s Mini, with the window down, Jack let the air wash over him, keep him awake. Keep him from drifting. His fag flared as the wind caught it, trailing ash along the M5.
“You’ve barely said a word since we left,” Pete said. “Long face for such a little person, my da would say.”
Jack crinkled his nose. “’M not little.”
“Something’s on your mind all the same,” Pete replied. “What is it?”
“Not a thing, luv,” Jack lied. Lying was easy when only your own reflection was staring back.
The Black rippled and churned as they drew farther and farther from the tangled and teeming knot of energies, ghosts, and monsters that was London. City of plague pits and cemeteries, of iron, smoke, and bells. All of it faded, like a radio station under the shadow of a hill.
“All right.” Pete hit the flat of her hand against the wheel. “You don’t want to talk to me, suit yourself. Don’t come whingeing to me when your dark magely secrecy bites you in the arse, all right?”
“Believe me,” Jack snapped, “You’re the last person I’ll be whingeing to.”
“Good,” Pete said, and turned the dial on the Mini’s ancient stereo. “Good Times Bad Times” floated around Jack and closed him off in a wall of sound.
“Good,” he agreed, unheard.
He’d had a 78 turntable when he was ten or twelve, from a jumble sale at the church his mum sometimes stumbled into. His Uncle Ned took it when no one wanted it, and gave it to Jack. No one wanted records, either—it was all bootleg Walkman tapes and CDs if you didn’t live in the rotting council flats beside the church, as Jack did. Jack took custody of his mother’s few albums that she hadn’t pawned, and played them over and over until Kev, the pimp boyfriend and man of the house—as he never tired of telling Jack—took them out in the car park and smashed them.
Jack had owned albums since, master tapes for the Bastards, free CDs from friends with recording contracts, but he never forgot the hiss and scratch of the needle on the vinyl, the partic
ular magic of wringing sound from a thin slice of nothing.
He touched his head to the now-cool glass of the Mini’s window, looked into the depths of the passing darkness. Something loped beside the car, long and lean with teeth that caught the moonlight. Jack’s skin went cold, needles and pins all over like it should have with the sluagh, in the station.
That wasn’t his fault. Too much iron and distraction. A desire not to see or think about what waited for him making him careless. Didn’t mean he was slipping loose from his power as the thirteen years came closer, that using magic was agony as his talent shut down and that even his sight was giving him up for dead.
The demon wasn’t waiting. It would drag Jack to its side by any means. And Pete would be there when it came to collect him, and she’d know. She’d see his sins, count them by turns, and cast him out.
Or the demon would kill her, drain her, use her like Algernon Treadwell had tried to use her, the ancient and terrible talent of the Weirs and their line to the old gods a sweet too tempting to resist.
Jack slid a fingernail under the plaster on his cut, scratched. Wished for a fag. Looked over at Pete. She hid a yawn as the motorway unfurled in the Mini’s headlamps.
“I could drive for a bit,” he suggested. “Let you catch some kip.”
“Jack, you haven’t a license,” Pete protested. “What was the last thing you drove?”
“A Maserati,” Jack said. “For nearly six blocks.”
Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You had a Maserati?”
“Nah, it belonged to some Italian bloke. Wasn’t using it at the time.”
Lefty Nottingham, the Bastards’ roadie and later—much later—Jack’s first smack connection, had bet him he wouldn’t. He’d flashed the flat roll of foil, eyed the sports car idling at the curb like an eager beast, and rumbled in his smoker’s basso, like the selfsame needle dropping onto a 78, “Bet you wouldn’t for a day’s worth of hits, Winter.”
The Maserati ended its life with a post box in the bonnet and Jack walked away with that flat roll of foil in his pocket. And a concussion, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you worried over when there was half a gram of skag burning a hole in your denim.
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