“Stop.” The demon’s voice rattled the mirror and the windowpanes, although it didn’t raise it.
Jack put his hand on the doorknob. Small acts of defiance let them know they weren’t in control, not fully. It sent them off, made them stupid and grasping. “Those are my terms,” he told the demon softly. “Take them or leave them.”
During the long moment of silence that followed the words, Jack watched a fat crow land on the windowsill and peer inside, at him, at the demon.
The crow preened and then stared at Jack, head cocked as if to ask him what exactly Jack thought he was on about.
“It seems I have no choice,” the demon said, at last. “And how you’ll chew over that bit of victory, Winter, I’m sure. Savor it. You won’t have another.”
“I don’t care about you,” Jack said, and had never meant anything more. “If there’s a chance for me to get your name, I’m taking that chance, mate.”
The demon felt inside its coat pocket and Jack felt the rotten snap of its magic. It produced a small blue folder, stamped with red.
“This will get you where you need to go,” it said. Jack took the ticket, inspected the destination. BANGKOK stared back at him, the ink blurred and off center on the line.
“I haven’t a passport,” he said.
“Explain to me how, exactly, that’s my problem?” the demon said mildly.
Jack spread his hands. “You want me to go fetch, you give me the ball, mate.”
The demon sighed and produced the square red wallet from another pocket. Jack found his likeness inside, and his vitals. The passport photo was even hideous and badly lit.
“Think of everything, do you?” he grumbled.
“You have a week, Winter,” the demon warned him. “The time of your bargain. After that . . . we go back to spinning the same old records until the lights go down.”
Jack turned his back, yanked open the door. “Yeah, don’t twist your knickers. I’ll find him.”
“His name is Miles Hornby,” said the demon. “He’s white, American, he’s twenty-seven years old, and he disappeared into Bangkok after he got the notion he could fuck me about.” The demon pressed its finger into Jack’s bare chest, over one of his eye tattoos. The ink lit up like a house fire under the demon’s touch. “He can’t. And neither can you, so be the good boy and bring our Miles home to me.”
With a puff of displaced air, the demon blinked out, leaving Jack alone, with his flesh crawling.
The crow took flight, cawing, and disappeared as well, swallowed by the mist.
PART II
Dead Men
Sing me a song of the winding road
Sing me a song of the dying day
Rivers of tears down from my eyes
And miles to go before dead I lay
—The Poor Dead Bastards
“Stygian Road”
Chapter Twenty
Jack crammed his few clothes, his lighter and fags, and an ancient Bastards master tape that he carried for luck into his bag, and slipped out of the Naughton house before the sun roused itself.
He’d left plenty of women abed, women with whom he was on varying terms of civility, but he’d never felt quite so much like a fucking cunt about it as he did walking down the muddy lane to the B road.
Leaving Pete a note had nearly been his undoing—he could have sat for hours at the sticky kitchen table holding the pen, trying to find just the right way to say, Sorry I’m a fuckwit in language that wouldn’t make his darling Petunia borrow a pistol from her good friend Inspector Heath and blow Jack’s balls off.
In the end, he’d settled for simplicity—Don’t worry. I’ll be back. He wasn’t sure yet if it was a lie or not.
The road was deserted in the early morning, and Jack walked, listening to the peculiar stillness of a winter dawn, water flowing in some hidden culvert, things rustling in the hedgerow but not seen, the slow sleepy twine of magic around his senses as the sun came up and the moor retreated into itself in the face of the witch’s domain, the sun and the hare and the deer, the psychopomps of what little was pure and good about the Black.
A lorry rumbled in the distance, silver grille flashing intermittently as it dipped behind the curves of the road and found the sun again.
Jack waved the driver down, had to jump aside as the lorry rumbled to a stop with a swish-hiss of air brakes.
“You fancy giving me a ride, mate?” he called.
The youth behind the wheel eyed him with an air of great distaste. “Sure, man. I pick up riders all the time in the arse-end of nowhere in my company truck.”
“I’ll make sure you get taken care of,” Jack assured him. Just a little push, just a little tickle of magic to make him sound truthful, to convince the surly bloke that what he wanted—be it ass, cash, or grass—would be waiting for him at the end of the line. Jack was a gifted liar, and gifts that came naturally were easy to turn into magic.
“I’m going down into Tiverton,” the driver grunted. “After that, you’re shite out of luck, friend.”
“Close enough,” Jack said. He climbed aboard and the lorry driver examined him more closely.
“What are you running away from, then?”
Jack leaned his throbbing forehead against the passenger window as the lorry pulled away.
“Nothing you need to worry about, friend.” He didn’t want to imagine Pete waking up alone, dressing, finding the note. “Nothing at all,” Jack repeated. They left the moor behind, the wild magic with it, and the road smoothed out, taking Jack back to what he supposed was some version of civilization.
Chapter Twenty-one
London bustled and howled and rumbled underfoot like an old friend when Jack got off the train at Paddington. The rustle and caress of the city’s magic felt awkward to Jack’s mind, like a lover you hadn’t seen in weeks, with the perfume of the bird you’d been cheating with still clinging to your collar. After the assault of the ghosts, the primal scream of the moor, the feeling of his and Pete’s magics touching so close and hot they could kindle flame . . .
Jack kicked traitorous thoughts from his head and found a pay phone near the taxi line at the station.
“Yeah, Jack.” Lawrence sounded resigned, like one did when their skint uncle called asking for a loan, again.
“Stop answering the phone like a bloody clairvoyant,” Jack told him. “It’s just showing off, isn’t it?”
“You back already, then?” Lawrence said. “Thought you had a big bad exorcism afoot out there in God’s country.”
“God has a sick fucking sense of humor,” Jack said. “Listen, Lawrence. Cancel your stitch-and-bitch or whatever you have on for today and meet me at Paddington.”
“No. ’M busy, Jack,” Lawrence said. “Got me own life, shocking as I know it be for you to hear.”
“Make it now,” Jack snarled into the phone. “Move your arse. I don’t have a lot of time.”
While he waited for Lawrence, Jack paced back and forth in front of the National Rail boards, and he paced to the ticket machines opposite, and he paced from the Boots to the coffee stand and back, until the transit copper began to look at him like Jack might be contemplating his chances of blowing something up.
Jack sat down and stared at the stains on the floor, islands and peninsulas attesting to the passage of human glaciers. His sight showed him old ghosts, older bodies, flickering in and out of sight as Paddington flowed around him. The Blitz, the bad old days of Thatcher and New Labour, muggings and murders, blood snaking black and gray across the tiles under his feet. Always, the dead came to be with him, just out of sight but never gone.
At length, Lawrence loped up the steps from the tube lines on the lower levels, dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap and his long form encased in a navy coat. He stalked over to Jack and stood, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “All right, man. Here I am. What’s got you so twisted you drag me away from a payin’ client?”
Jack stood up, casting an eye around the crow
d out of habit. No one immediately averted their gaze, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. “Not here,” Jack murmured. “Loo.”
“Fuck off,” Lawrence said. “You want them train cops to think we a pair of rent boys?”
“They can think I hail from Suffragette bloody City for all I care,” Jack said, snatching his friend by the arm. “Now come along.”
The men’s loo in Paddington smelled like bleach and was only half lit, fluorescent tubes spitting when Jack passed under them. He locked the door to the outside and faced Lawrence. “I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen and not give me any of your usually granny nonsense, all right?”
Lawrence blinked at him. “What happened since I saw you last, Jack? This shifty business ain’t like you.”
Jack ignored the question, casting about in his leather for a key to his flat. He pressed it into Lawrence’s hand. “My grimoire is on the mantle in the sitting room. Everything I bothered to write down, every spell, every spirit, it’s there.” His pulse pounded, feverish against his temples, and the lights flickered again, casting Lawrence into shadow for a split second. “I have about fifty pounds in a sock in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. You should give that to Pete. Haven’t anything else, except the flat, and I suppose you and she can decide what to do with that.”
Lawrence held up his hands. “Jack. I know you think the devil’s bargain be pulling you down into the Pit, but it ain’t sure yet. You’re scarin’ me, true.”
“It could be. You know that, too.” Jack fixed Lawrence with a stare that he hoped was penetrating enough to prick his friend’s denial that Jack Winter was fucked, indeed. “Lawrence, if I don’t see you again, I trust you to do what needs to be done. It’s that bloody simple.”
When mages kicked off, there were rules. Rituals, and incantations. A thousand small assurances that your dearly departed friend would not become a plaything of the creatures in the thin spaces, things that were neither Fae or ghost. The mourners of a mage ushered the spirit through the Bleak Gates, locked it up tight where it could never trouble the living.
So if Jack didn’t return, and he admitted it was wholly possible, Lawrence would burn his grimoire, dispose of his assets, and take his body—if there was one—to its final rest, in the tradition of the crow.
Lawrence started shaking his head immediately when Jack stopped speaking, his eyes panicked. “Won’t do it, Jack. You ain’t going through with whatever foolishness you think you up to . . .”
“It’s not foolishness,” Jack snarled, perhaps more harshly than he needed to. His voice echoed off the tile of the loo. “And you’re the only person I fucking trust to do right by me if it is, so shut your gob, take the key, and say you’ll look after Pete if I don’t come back.”
Lawrence screwed up his face, but he tucked the key into his coat pocket. “I don’t like this, Jack. You still thinking you can beat that demon, aren’t you? Still thinking you the wickedest man in the world.”
Jack faced his gaze to Lawrence, staring a hole in the other man until Lawrence squirmed. “I’m fucking rubbish at a lot of it,” Jack said quietly, “but I am the crow-mage and it wouldn’t kill you to have a little fucking faith, Lawrence.”
Lawrence dropped his eyes, giving the small victory to Jack. “I save me faith for the devils and the saints, man.”
Jack felt his fists curl. An ego was something a man of his age and situation could ill afford, but there was still a bit of the flame left in his chest, enough to burn small holes in other people’s good intentions. “You want to say different? Want us to have a little mage’s duel right here in the loo?” Jack set his feet. Lawrence had height and weight on him, but he was a white witch with white witch charms and spells in his arsenal, and Jack wagered he could knock Lawrence on his arse before the magic ever started flying.
“I don’t want to fight wit’ you, Jack,” Lawrence sighed. “I want me best friend in the world not to be dragged into Hell. But me a day late and a pound short on that score.”
“Too right,” Jack said. He left off his planted feet and solid fists, and went to unlock the door and leave. Lawrence could piss and moan the hind legs off of a horse, but he’d do what Jack asked. He always had, from the first day they’d met, in a squat straddling the edges of the Black and a horrid dump in Peckham. Lawrence was a deejay from Birmingham. Jack was a skinny nineteen-year-old git still wearing a Dublin hospital bracelet around his wrist, no more possessions than that and an outsize ability to slag the wrong people off. They’d gotten along immediately.
“You can’t cheat a demon,” Lawrence said softly. “No living soul can manage that. You going to die, Jack, and the best you can hope for is to go with your head up.”
Jack’s guts twisted up. “Thanks. Nothing like knowing my mates are expecting me to come marching home with a smile on my ruddy face.”
“You’re good, Jack,” Lawrence said quietly. “But you’re not that good. I’ll say my farewells, and if you come to your senses . . .” He flashed the flat key, made it disappear again. “You know where to find me.”
“Cheers. And fuck you, Lawrence.” Jack shoved the door open, let the sound and light of the station engulf him once more, like dropping into an ocean of bodies and sound. High above him, on the same rafter, the crow watched. Jack stilled, glaring at it. He’d been seeing entirely too many nosy birds of late. It was like being trapped in one of those insipid talking-animal films, laced with a hit of bad acid.
Lawrence came to his shoulder. “You got a fetch on you, boy.”
Jack rolled his eyes toward the crow. “That animal companion shite is for your type, Lawrence. I call it a bloody obnoxious pest.”
The crow hopped from one foot to the other, flexing its wings to their full length. It stared at Jack. Jack flipped it two fingers.
“Treat your fetch better, Jack.” Lawrence clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Never know when you need that old boy to carry your soul home.”
“Like you said,” Jack told Lawrence. “Too little, too late.”
Lawrence knocked one booted toe against the ground. “Take care of yourself, Jack.”
Jack lifted one corner of his mouth. “You going to miss me, you great pair of knickers? Going to have yourself a cry once I’m gone on my way?”
“I ain’t saying good-bye,” Lawrence told him hotly. “It is what it is. You don’t listen to no demon’s lies and you don’t get yourself in more trouble than you already carrying.”
Jack threw Lawrence a salute. “Just as you say, guv.”
Lawrence gave a nod. “Then I see you later, Jack.”
“Yeah,” Jack told him as Lawrence joined the line of people descending back into the tube. “Much later.”
A garbled call for the Heathrow Express echoed over the PA, and Jack’s headache joined his nervous stomach. He joined the line of people boarding the sleek dove gray train car, passing his fingers over the ticket machine to open the gate to the platform.
The magic tingled, ran through him from head to toe like he’d just grabbed a live socket. Such a small trick shouldn’t send pain up and down his nerves, but then his sight shouldn’t be going haywire and he shouldn’t be dreaming of a ritual that had gone out of fashion with painting yourself blue and chopping the heads off of Picts.
Shouldn’t be feeling the pull of Pete’s Weir talent even when she was miles away. Shouldn’t be going to bloody Thailand on a fool’s errand. Jack would have traded with a demon all over again in that moment to be back in Naughton’s smelly, lumpy bed with his arm over Pete’s waist and her slender leg wrapped around his.
Pete’s leg dug into his thighs, urging him harder, urging him to take what he wanted, needed.
“Oh, fuck off,” Jack gritted as the Heathrow train rolled out of Paddington, gathering speed as it slid through the junkyards and council estates of south London. Not that any vision he’d ever been subjected to had been chased off with a bit of bad language.
“Jack . . . ,” Pe
te gasped, back arching, body stiffening around him, driving him to the edge. “Jack, stop . . .”
He wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop as the chanting crested, the onlookers watching the pair on the stone, faces blank and eyes glistening with desire.
“Jack.” Pete stilled herself and looked into his eyes. “You have to stop, Jack.”
The chanting fell away and the circle closed in, and Jack saw for the first time the white robes, the silver masks, and the crowns of horn hiding the circle of mages from his view.
Not the Fiach Dubh. Not his brothers. These were strangers, and all at once, the rain and the mist froze against Jack’s skin. Cold. Always the cold. Pete tried to put her hand against his cheek, stopped at the end of the shackle, and sank back to the stone. Jack saw the bruises blossoming under the woad, saw Pete’s starvation thinness and the chafe marks at her wrists from her time on the stone. “Stop, Jack,” she whispered. “Stop running. Stop fighting.”
Jack placed his hand against her cheek. “Can’t, luv. I’m doing it for you.”
She shook her head, a bitter smile thin as a line cut on broken mirror growing on her face. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Jack Winter. And you don’t know me. Not really.”
The circle of mages closed in, their hands snatching at Jack, trying to drag him away, and Pete strained to hold him. “Wake up, Jack,” she whispered. “Open your eyes.”
“We are now arriving at Heathrow, Terminal Three,” the train robot announced. The train jolted, and the doors slid open. “Please mind the gap as you exit the train.”
Jack managed to rise, collect his kit, and leave the car with the rest of the foreigners and travelers shuffling through the dank gray tunnel with their luggage. Then he took a quick turn around the rear of the train, leaned over the edge of the platform, and vomited his guts out. There wasn’t much, just coffee and a few biscuits he’d nicked from the dining car of the Tiverton train.
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