“Yes.” Pete drew back and eyed him seriously. “I may faint from sheer awe.”
“You slag,” Jack growled, hooking his fingers in her panties and jerking them down to mid-thigh.
Pete let out a gasp as his hand found her, parting the thin stripe of black hair at her pelvis and sliding from her clit to her opening.
Jack felt wet against his fingers, enough of it to tell him that Pete wasn’t waiting. A rub of his thumb against her clit confirmed his theory, as she gasped, her back going rigid and pushing her bare tits against him.
“Fuck. Jack.”
He pushed into her with his fingers. She was still tight, soaking wet but not quite ready for him. Any other time, with any other woman, Jack would have been happy to give the assist, but he felt that if he didn’t put himself inside her in the next few seconds he was going to combust.
The tip of his cock had stroked the outer fold of her when she stopped him.
“My overnight bag,” Pete murmured thickly, palms against his hips. “The outside pocket.”
Jack braced himself on his arms, looked down at her. “You have got to be sodding kidding me, Petunia.”
“Jack,” she said, still panting. Mussed and flushed as she was, Jack knew she wouldn’t stop him if he simply fucked her with no further chatter.
“Now who doesn’t trust who?” he said peevishly as he snagged the bag and found the packet of rubbers where Pete said it would be.
“Not you,” Pete said, grabbing them from him. “Just all of the other women you’ve been fucking.”
She tore the packet and flung it to the side, and although her movements were frenetic they were still too slow. “Pete,” Jack said, the hoarse note in his voice entirely involuntary. “Do you want to drive a bloke into cardiac arrest?”
She took his cock and slid the rubber over it, biting her lip in such a fashion that Jack was nearly blinded by the urge to make her come, so she’d repeat the gesture while she screamed his name.
“There,” she said. “Was that so . . .”
The last word lost as Jack shoved her thighs akimbo and drove himself into her, Pete let out a gasp, half pain. Jack gave a groan of his own as she closed around him, and even though he’d resolved to make it last, to lose himself, he kept moving, hard and rhythmic as the drum line of a Bastards song.
Pete, for her part, arched her back upward, digging her nails into his back and meeting his thrusts. It was nothing like his vision—it was hot and frantic and present, and their magic wasn’t colliding but combining and nearly sending Jack off-balance as he edged closer to the finish.
He watched as Pete dropped one of her hands between her own legs while Jack drove himself faster as the telltale heat waves spread across his vision.
“Oh, Petunia,” he growled, the sight nearly sending him over then and there. “The things I’m going to do to you.”
“Do it, then,” Pete dared him, her cheeks flaming. “I want to come, Jack. Make me.”
Even though his base instinct snarled in protest, Jack pulled out of her, and Pete gave a cry of protest. He grabbed her hips and flipped her easily onto her stomach on the carpet—one of the benefits of fucking such a petite little thing.
His left hand dug into the firm, yielding flesh of her arse. His right reached down into her curls and found her clit as he re-entered her, his cock finding its deepest purchase yet.
Pete gave a small scream, shocked and hoarse, and Jack fingered her in time with his thrusts, her cries driving him harder and faster with every movement of his hips.
“Jack,” Pete whispered. “Jack . . . Jack . . . ”
She shuddered around him, the first hint of release, and her breath was little more than ragged sounds. “Stop,” Pete begged. “Stop it . . . I can’t . . .”
“No,” Jack said. “No, my sweet, I’m not done yet.”
But Pete was, and with the next stroke of his fingers she lost herself, her pussy closing around him and fluttering along the length of his cock as he moved.
“Oh, fuck!” Pete screamed out, trembling as another wave took her. Jack pushed her back down as she started to rise, gripping her shoulder and using it to lever himself for one last thrust.
Jack felt himself come, and it bent him over, gasping, as he spent himself and spent himself again inside Pete. When he’d finished he stayed still for a moment, the two of them crouched, his chest touching her back and his arms around her waist.
Pete moved at last, gently distancing herself and rolling over to pull up her panties. Jack sat back on his heels, his sight roiling and his heart speeding along at two hundred kilometers.
“Fuck me,” he said finally. “I’d murder a fag.”
Pete let out a shaky laugh. “Here.” She fished in her bag and handed him a new pack. Jack lit one for himself and offered one to Pete. She took it, her hand still shaking.
“That was . . .” She inhaled too deep, coughed, exhaled a cloud of blue. “I never know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” Jack said, unkinking his legs and stretching out in front of the fire. He shot Pete a grin. “I’m just getting started, luv.”
Pete’s lips parted, and her next draw on her fag was positively pornographic. “Are you?”
“Do I ever make a promise I don’t keep?” Jack asked her. For just a moment, the length of his burning cigarette, he allowed himself to believe he hadn’t made a royal mess of his good intentions, that Pete was still safe and that he could stay with her long as he pleased.
Then Pete flicked away her fag and moved into his lap again, and it didn’t matter any longer.
Chapter Nineteen
Thin gray morning light lay across his face when Jack woke, fingerlets of silver reaching through the moth-eaten drapes. His neck was stiff from passing out against the hard feather pillows, but the rest of him was warm and content to float between sleep and waking.
Slowly, so he wouldn’t wake her, Jack twisted to look at Pete. She slept curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek and her bare shoulder exposed where the coverlet slid off.
Jack pressed his lips to the spot and then levered himself out of bed, grabbing Pete’s pack of fags on his way to the loo. He lit one, took a piss, and looked out the uncurtained window at the morning. Mist hugged the grass and moisture filmed the windows of the Mini. He couldn’t see beyond the gates. The moor had vanished in the fog.
A reflection moved behind him in the window glass and Jack looked sharply at the bathroom door. Smoke stung his eyes as it drifted.
The demon grinned at him. “Caught you with your knickers down, Winter.” It held Jack’s denim on the crook of its index finger.
Jack tugged on the rusty chain of the ancient loo and flicked his fag butt into the water. “See something you like, mate?”
“Don’t play the happy sod with me, Winter,” the demon purred. “Your lady-love is asleep in the next room, after all.”
“If you touch her you’ll be dust before you draw your next breath,” Jack promised. The fear had fled with the light and left in its place a flat, hard resolve. The detritus of a retreating tide, sitting jagged in his chest.
Jack Winter wasn’t a man who got dragged to Hell and tortured. Not when the Black was trying to devour a friend, because friends were a rare enough commodity in his life as to be practically mythic.
“You think you stand a chance?” the demon asked, head tilting to catch the beam of morning on its waxy skin, like sunlight touching the face of a corpse with a torn shroud.
“I may not beat you,” Jack said, pulling a little magic to him from the bones of the house. “But I’ll fight you, tooth and nail.” The magic slithered and thrashed, unwilling to be caught. Jack grimaced. It might be a short fight. Many poor sods had the idea just before the end to fight, to cheat, to wriggle free of their bonds, but Jack wagered that none of them were quite as desperate as he. Desperation counted for much, when you dealt with demons.
“You’re a bit peevish, aren’t you?
” the demon said. “Not even a proper hello, just moaning and whingeing as usual.” Its gaze drifted past Jack and landed on Pete’s form in the bed, her bare skin pale as the morning light and hair dark as ink spilled on it. The demon’s lips parted. “Was the little Weir slut not everything you hoped for?”
“I’m only going to say this once,” Jack told the demon. Posturing with citizens of Hell never ended well, but acting the hard man was natural camouflage when he was backed against a wall. “Your business is with me, not with Pete. Stop threatening her, and stop sending your fucking Fae emissaries to chase me all over creation. I’m not some bare-breasted twit in a B-grade horror movie, so don’t think you can frighten me with a few loose ghosties in a train station and some chatty cunt of a cu sith on the moor.”
The demon frowned. The expression was unnatural on its face, like watching a dead body try to frown once its muscles had seized in rigor mortis. “I have no idea what you’re babbling about.” It tossed the denim at him. “Put your pants on, mage. You and I have matters to discuss.”
The demon stared out the window, breath making wing-shaped patterns on the glass, while Jack dressed and splashed water on his face. Post-coital warm fuzzies lasted exactly as long as it took him to either realize his girl of the night was three pints south of shaggable or for a boyfriend to burst in.
Or demon, as the case might be.
“This place,” the demon murmured. “It’s a dead place. How do you stand it?”
“Not planning on being here much longer,” Jack said. “Doing what needs doing and going home to London.”
“Enjoying what time you have,” the demon murmured. “Most people would call you a bright lad.”
“Why are you here?” Jack leaned against the sink but he didn’t relax. “You appear to me in the loo to have an idle chat, or, let me guess—you’re lonely.”
“I wanted to speak with you, Jack,” the demon said. “Not as an adversary but as a mage. Can you do that? Put our dealing aside for the moment and listen?”
“You prepared to rescind your claim on me?” Jack asked. “Because I’m not putting anything aside, and if you’re not prepared to offer something, you can fuck right off back to the Pit.”
“Jack.” The demon sighed. It folded its arms, and back-lit against the glass it looked almost angelic, if angels had existed. “I could have left you to die that day when you called for me, and instead I reached out my hand. So I think maybe, just maybe, you should leave off your complaints and show me a bit of fucking respect.”
The air around the demon’s form flared with power, and Jack grabbed his forehead. The demon stretched and grew, a black shadow robed in smoke, the same black stone eyes boring into him like drill bits.
Jack shut his eyes. He let the old mantra pound through his skull. Not there. Not real. Not real. Not real.
The demon gave a soft chuckle. “Just remember who you’re dealing with, boy. Do you want to hear my proposition or not?”
Jack massaged at the throb in his temples, ineffectually. “All right, then,” he said. “Talk. Thrill me.”
“When we met,” the demon said, “I chose to bind a bargain with you because I sensed something of the demon in your nasty, soot-stained little soul.”
“I think your crystal ball needs adjusting, mate,” Jack said. “I’m just plain old flesh and blood.”
“Mostly blood, as I recall.” The demon chuckled. “Jack, in spite of your mouth and that sullen mien, I do like you, boy.”
Jack braced himself on the sink. “So you came to me for a lift, is that it?” The door was only two feet from him—if he needed, he could be through it and to his bag of tricks before the demon had time to worm its way past his shield hex.
“I know that even though you’ve got a weakness for flesh and a bigger one for drugs, you’re one of mine, boy.” The demon regurgitated the phrase with a sneer. “You’re a liar and a cheat and you think you’re far cleverer than you actually are—”
“And I am, really,” Jack interjected. “Quite clever. Cause of and solution to all me problems, cleverness.”
The demon gave him the blade edge of a smile. “If you were that clever, Jack, we wouldn’t be talking.”
“If you didn’t have the pressing need to hear your own voice, we wouldn’t be talking either,” Jack muttered.
“Don’t think I don’t know you would wriggle out of my bargain in a moment if you were clever enough,” the demon purred. “Or that I don’t know your little mind is whirring away even now, wondering, How can I flip and flop and squirm out of yet another tight spot?” It reached out and patted Jack on the cheek. “You can’t. And the fact that you haven’t openly tried any foolishness is the only reason you’re still taking up oxygen, Jackie boy. Believe me.”
Jack fished another fag out of the pack. He could only take so much inane chatter from Hell’s denizens before the craving for nicotine made him more than a shade rude. He sucked in smoke, relished the burn as something real to cling to while the demon’s smoky, musky aura swirled around him, poisoning the air breath by breath.
“I sense this is going somewhere,” he said. “In the slow and meandering manner of a London bus in rush hour. Care to cut the journey short? I’ve better things to do, like go downstairs and drop a tire iron on me foot.”
“There’s another,” the demon said. “Another man. Equally desperate when we met.” The demon bared its teeth. “But he fancies himself far, far cleverer than you, Jack Winter, in the most odious way possible.” The demon gave its tie an irritable stroke, smoothing out all its wrinkled edges and glaring at nothing.
Jack grinned around his fag. “I don’t believe it. This bloke found a way to cheat you?”
“That’s a bloody lie!” The demon flared, and the witch-fire in his eyes moved, slick and oily like ripples across a pool of runoff.
“All right, he didn’t.” Jack shrugged. “No skin off me that you’re in denial.”
“Oh, but it will be,” the demon said. “If I lose one of my charges, I will lose all of my charges, and the one who takes them from my cold, lifeless hand will not be a sweet forgiving old sot, like me.”
“I’d hate to see who’s unforgiving in the Pit,” Jack said. “If you’re the nice old granny of the lot.”
“Someone must go among the pagans of his hiding place,” the demon said. “Someone must return him to my patch to face his trial.”
“And this someone can’t be yourself . . . why, exactly?” Jack exhaled. He’d swear, if demons could look put out, his would at that moment.
“It’s not my land,” the demon said stiffly. “It’s not mine to trespass on.”
“Someone bigger ’n’ badder than you runs the patch!” Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough when he sucked smoke down the wrong pipe. He hacked for a moment, eyes watering. One of these days, he should really slap on some of those patches Pete was always buying and abandoning around his flat.
“You’re treading on thin fucking ice, mage,” the demon hissed. “Be mindful of the next step.”
Jack watched his fag ash for a moment. He could smart off all day long but it didn’t change the fact that he would have to give the demon an answer. A yes would bring him that much closer to the bosom of Hell. A no would only start his clock unwinding again, the number growing alarmingly low as the days passed.
“Maybe you should abandon this cryptic shite and tell me what you want,” he said finally. “Because I’m bored, mate. Dead bored, of your mysterious appearing and your riddles and your fucking Saturday Night Fever wardrobe.”
“What an apt choice of words,” said the demon. “You always had a facility, didn’t you?” It scratched its chin and then said, “Go to the pagan city and bring this man home. That’s all you have to do, Jack. He’s a mage, like you. He even plays a bit of music. You two lads should get on famously.”
Jack shifted his posture, only a little. Shoulders forward, arms folded. Every smallish boy turned skinny bloke learns how-to-m
ake themselves look bigger, if they don’t want an arse-pounding or worse. Jack had the advantage of height on the demon, but he still felt its magic like a boot on his chest. Made him defensive, like the demon had come in and pissed all over his belongings. “And if I bring your little lost lamb to the fold? What then?”
“I suppose I’ll owe you a favor, won’t I?” The demon showed its teeth.
Jack returned the gesture. “Not good enough. I want your word. I want something tangible.”
“Oh?” The demon raised its eyebrows. “Conditions. And specifics. The little Weir’s taught you well, my son.”
“I’m not your fucking anything,” Jack snarled. “Let’s get that straight, at the outset. I’m not your rent boy, I’m your hired gun. Condition the first.”
The demon’s eyes barely flickered. “Accepted.”
“Condition the second,” Jack said. “I agree to fetch this arse-monkey for you, I get something for it. Something I choose.”
The demon’s posture stiffened and it licked its lips. It liked Jack setting the pace far less than simply invading his head with visions of Pete. Jack watched its face carefully, even though looking the thing in the eye hurt at the bottom of his forehead, the space where hippie gits said your third eye rode.
This was the litmus test. If the demon agreed, it needed him badly. And it wasn’t telling him the whole truth. If demons even understood the concept.
Finally, the demon exhaled, a sharp irritated huff of air. “All right. Agreed.” It sneered. “State your grand terms.”
Jack felt a cold snatch of excitement in his belly. The bloke who’d slagged off the demon must really be on to something, and the thing guarding his hideout must have sharp fucking teeth indeed. Two things in his favor. It might as well have been fucking Yuletide.
“If I find him and bring him back,” Jack said, stubbing out his fag on the edge of the sink. “I get your name.”
The demon hissed, sucking the breath back through its razory teeth. “Impossible.”
“Suits me,” Jack said, making for the door. “Have a fine time getting your naughty boy back home, and while you’re at it, go stick a cactus in your bum, you great tight-arsed poof.”
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