She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.
“Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.
“That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”
“You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.
“Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”
Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”
“Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”
“So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”
Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”
He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”
Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”
Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”
Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”
Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”
“It just bloody is!” Pete snapped. She shoved the box back at him. “I can’t do fancy tricks. I just have this awful, deep, dark hole inside of me and sometimes the monster inside it wakes up. I can’t control it, Jack. I’m not touched with magic like you. I’m stained with it and it doesn’t wash off.”
“Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”
“Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”
Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?
“Just try it?” he said finally, softening his frown and giving Pete one of his smiles. “For my humor, luv?”
When Jack had nothing else, he still had his snake’s charm, even if it made him feel like a low-down hustler to use it on Pete. He reverted back to the clever animal he’d been on the streets, fixing, with the false face and the predator’s smile.
And Pete finally nodded, and touched the music box again. “I feel stupid as anything.”
“Don’t think about that. Don’t trouble yourself over anything,” Jack said. “Just feel. Bend the lock to your will, and say the words. Tell it oscail.”
Pete’s lips pursed and she shut her eyes. In the curious void that the necromancer’s magic left around the house, her power sent out waves like a stone in a pool, like a bell in misty dawn air. It played across his skin like the light drag of fingers and Jack shivered.
After a moment, Pete blew out a breath. “It’s no good. I feel it but every time it gets away from me. Like trying to grab a greased cat.”
Jack set his hand next to hers. But not touching. Not when her magic was up. He didn’t fancy sending either of them into a coma. “Try it again. It takes doing but if you can open a lock, you can call flame and if you can call a flame you can . . . well . . . do practically anything.”
“Make someone spit toads?” Pete’s lips parted in a smile but her eyes stayed shut.
“I suppose, if that’s what gets you off,” Jack said.
“I’ve a few old schoolmates who deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.
Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”
Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”
“So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the Fiach Dubh. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.
“When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”
“I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”
“Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”
“Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”
“More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.
Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was beginning to set behind the moor, and soon enough it would be time to go to work. For now, all he could do was sit and think about Pete, his wicked, wild Pete, and the running hourglass of time ticking off his moments with her.
Chapter Seventeen
After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.
There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.
He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”
“Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.
Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.
Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London, stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and crannies where he could see it coming. Not to mention there wasn’t a decent pub or curry stand for miles in any direction.
Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”
“Coffee and a pain au chocolat,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.
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He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”
“No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.
“You take care of Pete, you hear?” Ollie’s Midlands brogue reminded Jack of a council worker who’d sneaked about in the dead of night and shagged his mother for a reduction in their electric bill. “Lord knows, she deserves better than you.”
Jack didn’t know if he disliked Ollie because the man was a prick or because he was right. Most likely both.
He pulled out the crinkled tourist map of the Dartmoor that Pete had procured on her visit to the archives and breathed onto his palm.
Witchfire blossomed, blue and spectral, from his skin, the gentle burn-off of extra magic against the night air. The flames drifted lazily into the twilit sky, the silvery glow lighting the map, just. Jack turned west. “Not much farther.”
“What are we looking for?” Pete asked. Wind swept down from the crest of the hill and lifted her hair like a flight of black feathers against her cheek. Rain followed it, in a soft ice-cold sheet, and Jack cursed as it dribbled into his eyes.
“A road.”
“Jack,” Pete grumbled, “there’s a bloody road running right in front of the bloody house. Fuck me.”
“Not that road.” Jack felt his feet sink into mud as his boots found another ditch, and then gained a roadbed that was little more than gravel and dirt turning rapidly to sludge.
Pete cursed and stumbled against him. Between the witchfire gently bathing them in a bubble of blue and the sideways rain, Jack was none too balanced, but he caught her. She didn’t weigh much, but she was undeniably present.
Pete looked up at him, skin translucent and eyes black pebbles in the light. “Thanks.”
“Just up here,” Jack said, as the moor whispered to him, licked at him with teasing tongues of power. It wanted him to join in the wild celebration, in the mud and the rain. The Black here teased him with memories of what the demon had made him see. Such a place as this was made for the oldest rituals of the Fiach Dubh. The deep magic, the old magic that had fallen to the wayside as the people and their power hid in cities, curled up behind iron walls, in front of tellys instead of bonfires, and no longer needed to spill blood into the good soil to procure crops, children, and rebirth.
“This feels wrong,” Pete said, dropping her voice so that it blended with the rain. Jack also felt the urge to be silent, creep like a mouse under floorboards. The wild magic around him rose, gathered, and in the back of his consciousness he sensed the prickle of warning that had kept him alive as long as he’d managed the trick thus far.
“We should go back,” Pete said, more forcefully. She’d stopped walking, her gaze roving beyond the confines of the witchfire, too much white about the pupil. Fear-white. Her hands clutched her jacket at the neck, knuckles tight.
Jack’s heart sped up, warned him that they should go back, that they weren’t wanted here, that whatever was hunting on the moor tonight was bigger, older, and hungrier than he.
Cold, Jonathan Lovett’s ghost hissed. Always the cold.
“Fuck off,” Jack growled under his breath. The day he turned tail was the day he might as well take a razor to his own wrists. It was the single quality that he could lay claim to as a mage—he might not be as strong or quick as a sorcerer but he’d fight. And the fight he gave would be dirty and mean.
The crossroad loomed out of the rain and the gathering mist, a road sign knocked onto its side in the dying grass the only signal of human occupation.
Jack knelt and opened his bag, pulling out a battered tin and unscrewing the top. He pulled out his flick-knife and scraped up a layer of damp dirt, another. He filled the tin halfway, more than enough for the unwinding spell, but proper crossroads dirt, touched by no human hand, was difficult to come by and he could sell it. When he was back in London. Home.
Pete shivered and she hadn’t stopped looking around, but she crouched and watched him. “MG said once that you bury things at the crossroads and a demon comes to grant you a wish.”
“They buried murderers at a crossroads,” Jack said. “Couldn’t have them in a consecrated cemetery. The demon story is a load of shit.” Like so much of what MG said. Just enough truth in the lie to be destructive.
“Demons exist, though,” Pete murmured. Jack slapped the lid back on the tin with more force than he needed.
“Yes, they do. And calling them is much, much simpler than burying some ruddy box in a crossroads at the dark of the moon.”
He shoved the dirt into his bag and folded up the knife. They were walking a dangerous edge, and he needed to steer Pete away. “Now if we’re done talking about it, may I suggest you don’t try to summon anything from the crossroad, and that we get the unwinding over with so we can find June Kemp?”
Pete sighed. “My sister said a lot of things. I’m not messing about with Hell, Jack. You don’t need to worry.”
He breathed in, out, tried to get the panicky tremors in his hands to stop. This deception deep under his skin was like detoxing all over again, shaking and stuttering and freezing to death even in a warm bed. “I’m not worried for you, luv. You’re much brighter than me and mine.”
Pete smiled, but even that couldn’t warm him. “I’m soaked. Let’s get back and get this nasty business done so we can go home.”
Jack’s witchfire faded as his concentration stuttered and they were swept up into the blue-black of moonless night and rain. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he watched and tried to keep the rain off, not succeeding. Mud worked its way into his boots, water between his toes, rain down the sides of his face.
Pete stumbled and cursed. “Hold on.” She felt in her pockets. “I’ve got my light here somewhere.”
Jack looked back to the crossroads as a thin beam of weak gold sprang to life from Pete’s penlight. In the witch-fire, which gave everything deceptive sharp edges, he might have missed a section of shadow peeling off its fellows and padding forward into the roadbed, but he didn’t miss it now.
“Fuck,” he hissed, as the wild magic rose to a roar in his head, drowning out even the rain.
“Jack?” Pete spun around, training her light on the spot where something moved.
“Pete,” he said softly. “You need to listen to me now.” His brain clicked over like he’d just snorted a straight hit of crystal—it was too far to the house, they’d never make it in time. Not both of them, at any rate. His bag just held herbs and the odd tin of dirt, not salt, not iron.
All he had was his flick-knife. He was fucked.
“It’s . . . it’s that thing from this afternoon,” Pete whispered as the cu sith advanced on them, inexorably, the limpid glow of its eyes like a lamprey floating through the soft sheets of mist and rain. “The black dog.”
“Caught our scent,” Jack muttered. The black dog drew back its lip to reveal blade-sized teeth. “Pete,” Jack said. “When I tell you, you have to run. Really run, this time. For your life, and don’t look back. Get inside the house. Salt the doors and windows—every entrance.”
Pete’s fingers clutched his arm as the black dog snarled, a sound that vibrated through the soles of Jack’s boots. “Why the fuck are you telling me all of this?”
“The same reason I taught you the lockpicking charm,” Jack said, prising her grip off his jacket. “Because I might not be there when you need it.”
Pete tried to grab for him again but he held her at arm’s length. He hated letting go of her, hated the expression of utter bone-deep betrayal on her face. But he had practice calling whatever outward expression he needed in the moment to his face, too much practice, and he kept his features calm. “Go, Pete. Salt the doors.”
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She hesitated for an instant, and Jack pushed her. “I said run, you stupid bint!”
Pete ran, her footsteps crunching on gravel and fading as they joined the grass of the moor.
Jack faced the black dog.
The thing stopped a few meters from him, scenting the air. It chuffed, large head swinging from side to side.
“You’re too late,” Jack told it. “Too late for anything except scraps. She’s gone.”
He squared up his shoulders. This wasn’t what he’d imagined—a creature of the Black doing the demon’s work—but he supposed it was fitting as anything. “Get on with it, then. Lock your jaws on me and drag me down under the hill, if you would.”
The black dog cocked its head. It took another step and Jack’s body, the traitorous thing that craved a fix and Pete and life, took a jerky step back in return.
“You heard me!” Jack shouted, dropping his bag and spreading his arms. “What are you waiting for? Come the fuck on!”
He waited for the cold, deathless sensation of a Fae creature sinking its teeth into his magic, into his very soul, but it didn’t come. The dog just snarled, swiping at the air with a paw. Its claws looked like carving knives.
Jack held his ground, heart slamming fit to break his ribs. He stared into the black dog’s soft candle-flame eyes, and the black dog stared back. For a shred of eternity, Jack and the Fae creature shared the moor, the wild magic flowing around them, over and through Jack, filling him up with the desire to let go of his earthly burdens and step into the grasp of the cu sith, to give in to the inexorable pull of the Bleak Gates and admit that unless he found a way to get free of the demon, Death waited beyond every breath.
We don’t want the crow-mage, the black dog purred in the sibilant bell-voice endemic to the Fae.
“I’m what you’re getting,” Jack gritted, but desperation was birthing a frantic plan in his hindbrain. The black dog was hunting, not feeding. It wanted something.
Creatures that wanted something could be bargained with.
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