Devil's Business

by Caitlin Kittredge

  A pair of junkies crouched by the elevator, a gated type with a hand-scribbled sign reading OUT OF ORDER. The pasteboard was yellowed and a variety of creative and obscene graffiti covered the black letters.

  The girl, one half of her head shaved and one covered in blue dreadlocks, stretched out her hand. “Got any change, brother?”

  “None you could spend in this country, sorry,” Jack told her.

  “Oh, you’re British,” she said, and gave him a dreamy smile. “That’s cool.”

  The boy nodded, skinny arms quivering as they wrapped around his knees. The bare flesh poking through his pants was scraped raw, concentric lines making hash marks in the skin. His arms were in the same condition. Ice could make you scratch that way, think there were insects and demons crawling in and out of your flesh.

  “Down here.” Pete fitted a key into the last flat in the hall and stepped inside.

  Jack paused on the threshold, but there were no hexes on the flat, just the swirling ankle-deep tide of the Black. He’d need to fix that.

  The flat smelled of ammonia and stale fag smoke. A roach scuttled along the back of the kitchen sink, and the walls were the yellow of stained teeth. A broken shade let in a little light, but otherwise, except for a stained mattress, the single room was empty.

  “Home sweet fucking home,” Jack muttered. Pete sat down on the mattress and put her head between her knees. Jack dropped the box and sat next to her.

  “All right, luv?” he said. He weighed his risk, and then put a hand on the center of her back. Touching Pete was usually like putting your hand in something warm and sweet, a blissful hit of the best narcotic his brain could imagine. Now it was like grabbing a high-voltage wire with his bare hand. A rush of her talent fed into his and tried to convince him to expel the cloud of power as a hex or a spell that could blow a hole through the flat’s wall.

  He hadn’t really touched her since the pregnancy—he’d brushed her hands, sure, or put his arm around her while they watched telly if she was in a good mood, but there hadn’t been any close contact, and he certainly hadn’t tried to fuck her. That would be a fast ticket to the A&E, considering Pete’s usual mood. He hadn’t expected to feel the touch of the Weir so strongly—stronger than it had ever been.

  Stronger than before the Morrigan touched you, you mean, his treacherous inner voice whispered. Jack fucking hated the voice. It always told him the truth.

  Pete surprised him by leaning her weight on his chest, nestling her head in the crook of his shoulder. “We ever going to make it back?” she said.

  “Don’t know.” Jack didn’t have the heart to lie to her. She would’ve known, anyway. “Doesn’t look good,” he said.

  “You going to tell me what happened now?” Pete said.

  He should move his hand. Move it before Pete’s talent overwhelmed him, made him drunk on the rush of the Black through his brain, and he did something stupid. But she was warm, and small under his hand, and he could feel her ribs move when she breathed.

  Jack kept his hand on Pete while he gave her the short version of meeting Abbadon. “Fucking nutter,” he finished. “Thinks he can take on Belial and the rest of Hell. Probably wants to grab his He-Man sword and go toe to toe with the Princes, stupid git.”

  “Why is that so stupid?” Pete got up and ran water into her hand from the rusted tap. She swiped the sweat from her face and drank another fistful.

  “Because he’s talking about destroying Hell?” Jack spread his hands. “Nobody can go up against demons, Pete. A demon, maybe. But not all of them. Besides the six hundred and sixty-six, there’s their legions. Berserkers, Phantoms, Fenris. Millions of them, Pete. It’s like a hobo shouting at taxis—funny to watch, but completely ineffective.”

  “I don’t think you’d need to take on millions,” Pete shrugged. “Just the ones who control the millons. Even the Named would fall into line. They’re demons, Jack. You told me they follow the leader. They value the rank and file. If someone were to knock down the Princes, I bet all but a few would fall in.”

  Jack massaged his forehead. If he was honest, he’d had the same thought. “Abbadon’s too crazy to be organized,” he said. “Too much time in solitary. His mind is porridge.”

  “He was the first thing in Hell, Jack,” Pete said. “To be only one of four survivors, over countless millennia—he might be crazy, but he’s a hard man. If he was a human, he’d be the worst kind of bastard. Seen them time and again in the prisons when I was on the Met.”

  “Even so,” Jack said. “’M not being his errand boy. I got enough of that with Belial.”

  Pete sat back beside him, mattress bowing under her weight. Her shirt was loose—one of his; he recognized the faded SUSPECT DEVICE lettering across the front—and if he hadn’t known, he wouldn’t have been able to detect the slight swell of her stomach. It was there, though, and she let out a small sound as she sat back down.

  “Can’t wait to swell up and have to visit the loo every ten seconds,” she said. “My mum was all, ‘childbirth is a miracle and a beautiful gift from the unicorn faeries,’ but all my sister could talk about was how big Mum’s feet got when she was ready to pop with me.”

  “Your feet look fine to me,” Jack said. “You’re not your mum.”

  “Thank fuck for small favors,” Pete muttered. She flipped open the top of the cardboard box. “So, Abbadon. You manage to figure out why he’s after these families?”

  Jack had been actively trying not to think about that, but after seeing things like Teddy, he couldn’t very well ignore what his eyes and his logical mind were both shouting at him. “Got an idea, yeah.”

  Pete pulled out the stack of files Jack had first seen on Mayhew’s desk. “Good, because I’ve gone over these fucking police reports ten times apiece and I still can’t see any reason behind the murders.”

  “I think Abbadon and his pals are trying to grow themselves new bodies,” Jack said. “Saw one out at his little ranch of horrors that had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.”

  “But they’re corporeal creatures,” Pete said. “Don’t they have flesh of their own?”

  “I think they can’t pass out of Hell,” Jack said. “When they were born, there was no here. There was just Hell, and a void. At least if I understand his ramblings correctly.”

  Abbadon’s flesh was working all right, but the others were falling apart. Teddy was the worst, but there was nothing normal about the way Levi’s and the girl’s flesh had reacted to the intrusion of something ancient and malicious beyond measure.

  “The kids,” Pete said. Jack nodded.

  “I don’t think either the Case baby or this recent one are dead,” he said. “I think they’re being used as vessels.”

  Pete’s face went pale, and she swallowed hard. “Christ.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Not exactly an acceptable hobby.”

  “To have something like that, randomly deciding to slaughter you to get at your kid…” Pete trailed off, and paged through the pictures again.

  Jack patted himself down for fags and found his pack partially crushed in his pocket. He lit one, dragged. He didn’t want to tell Pete that he had a feeling the Cases’ and the Herreras’ slaughter wasn’t all that random. Ancient creatures of Hell didn’t simply latch on to you because they liked the cut of your jib.

  Abbadon had escaped the great iron prison Jack had found while in Hell. Had escaped a full ten years before Nicholas Naughton had tried to awaken Nergal and sent the rest of the domino tiles flying.

  Abbadon had had help. Nobody escaped Hell without it. Jack sure as fuck hadn’t.

  “I need to see Mrs. Herrera’s body,” he said. “It’d still be on ice, yeah?”

  “They keep unsolveds for as long as there’s room and they don’t go ripe, ’least they do back home,” Pete said. “I imagine she’d still be about. File said they had no family to claim the remains anyway.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Let me put up some hexes on this shithole, a
nd then we’re going to go find out exactly what the fuck Belial has gotten me into.”

  He dug through his kit bag and found chalk and a few of his dried baggies of herbs. He didn’t put much stock in kitchen witchery—that was the provenance of white magic, the sort of person who believed nailing a few twigs and a twist of colored thread above the doorjamb would keep out anything that meant you harm.

  Only the Black could do that, and bending the Black to your will wasn’t something a white witch would ever truck with.

  He chalked the barrier marks around the doorjamb and across the threshold, something to focus the hex. Protection hexes, good ones, took time, but Jack could pull a quick and dirty barrier together in a few heartbeats. That was important—if something was clawing at the other side of your door, speed trumped elegance every time.

  He laid a line of salt from his ancient tin and followed it up with a line of herbs. He reached out, touched the electric swirl of the Black just beyond sight, and pulled it into the chalk, into the salt, tugging and weaving it into a crackling barrier across all the thresholds of the flat. A twinge in the front of his skull, and it was done. Anyone trying to come at him would get enough of a jolt to reconsider their life choices.

  “Let’s get this done,” he told Pete. “I’m ready to be out of this miserable city.”

  Pete collected her mobile and her bag, but before Jack could stow his kit, fists pounded on the door. Pete rolled her eyes. “Probably just some crackhead.”

  Jack touched the door with splayed fingers, but nothing spiked his sight. “Yeah? What?”

  “Hey, dude.” The female junkie’s voice was thin and papery through the water-stained door. “You got a place we could maybe piss? The gas station is like half a mile away.”

  “Fuck off,” Pete said. “This isn’t a hotel.”

  Jack sighed. “What’s the harm?” A girl couldn’t just find a convenient alley, like he had when he was a junkie. He could practically feel the grimy film that built up on your skin when you were concerned with showering maybe once or twice in a month. The stale taste in your mouth of fags and the bite of bile, because you hadn’t eaten in recent memory and didn’t want to. Your veins burned you from the inside out, burned out hunger and everything except the need to chase the fire, reignite it when it got low.

  Pete threw up her hands. “Whatever. Just be quick.”

  Jack undid the deadbolt and opened the door a crack. Saw the girl’s bloodshot eyes and rigid face, and tried to slam it again, but she thrust her steel-toed boot into the gap and then threw the door off its hinges with a boom.

  He went down hard, the door landing on top of him. If it hadn’t been half-disintegrated with dry rot, it would’ve crushed his ribs, but instead the junkie girl landing on top of him finished that job. She crouched atop Jack and leaned down, nostrils flaring wide. She wore a piercing, a ring with a jewel bead that shimmered in the low light as she inhaled his scent.

  Jack thrust against her with his whole weight, but she wrapped a hand around his neck. “You really think you can just run from me? You think Belial can protect you?” The voice was low and masculine, and as it twisted out of her narrow throat it sounded like a creature trapped far below ground.

  Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Pete moving—she held a thin metal tube he recognized as her collapsible baton that she’d carried as a detective, and still kept in her bag for rough spots.

  Jack looked back at the girl. Blood vessels had erupted across the surface of her eyes from the strain of Abbadon’s magic, and her breathing was sawing in and out of her throat. “What part of no don’t you understand, Donny boy?” he said. “I’m not interested in your jailbreak. I have to live in this world same as everyone else. Don’t particularly want to destroy it.”

  “Then you’ll burn like the rest,” the girl hissed. “Like all the other sons of bitches who stood up to be counted against me.”

  Pete raised her baton, but on the downswing the shape of the male junkie slammed into her, knocking Pete into the wall hard enough to leave indents in the stained plaster.

  “Shit…” she gasped, as the boy straddled her, wrapping his fingers in her hair. He had a knife, a rusty little Swiss Army number like a boy playing at wilderness adventures would carry, but he jammed it into the fold of Pete’s jaw.

  “Stay down, whore,” he rumbled. Levi. Jack would know the wet, smothered gasp of the voice anywhere.

  “I’d hoped you’d be one of us,” Abbadon snarled, “but now you’re useless to me. Loose ends get cut, Winter. Your little demon boyfriend can’t protect you now.”

  Jack felt the cool metal of Pete’s baton brush against his fingers, and he struggled under the door and the weight of the girl, batting it back toward Pete. Her fingers closed around it and she whipped it up and across the boy’s face. A welt of bruise blossomed up one cheek and Jack saw a tooth fly, borne on a spray of blood.

  The girl turned her head for a split second, and Jack braced his hands against the blistered paint of the door and shoved. She tumbled off him, and Jack scrambled onto her back, grabbing her by the hair and slamming her head once into the floor, short and sharp.

  The girl went still, but the boy was less tractable. Pete was up now, and hit him again with her baton, and again, until he fell, twitching and bleeding. Jack scrambled for his kit bag. Exorcisms, unlike barrier hexes, were not something he could perform on the fly, but it wasn’t like a demon had actually crawled inside the junkie. Levi was just riding him, using him like a puppet.

  He flipped the top off his salt tin and dumped the full contents over the junkie’s body, watching the flakes turn pink as they stuck in the runnels of blood across the boy’s face. “Get the fuck out,” Jack snarled, and pushed, with his talent, as hard as he could. He contacted the expanse of Levi’s power—sticky, dark, endlessly hungry. A vast maw, a thing that could devour the world and never be sated.

  Jack shoved, using the salt as his vessel, and thin green flames rose from the junkie’s body as the Black clashed with Levi’s talent. The junkie spasmed, then rolled on his side and vomited a thin stream of sticky bile laced with blood.

  Jack grabbed Pete by the hand, slinging his kit bag with the other. Abbadon knew where they were, and his hexes had done precisely shit. Keep moving—that was the only way to defeat a predator. Run until your feet are bloody and then run some more.

  “You all right?” he said. Pete was pale, the only spots of color high in her cheeks.

  “I’m fine,” she said tightly. “Fucking go.”

  They made the reverse journey down the stairs and into the Fury. Pete let out a small sound as she lowered herself into the seat, and Jack tossed his kit to the floor, taking her chin between his fingers. He knew that sound, had made it himself when he thought everyone, his mum and Kevin and the rest, had stopped listening. The sound came after beatings, after falls, after you’d swallowed the blood and the bruises had flowered fully on your skin.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Pete snapped. “Just took a hit from that fucking junkie, is all. I told you not to let them in.” She sucked in a breath, and passed a hand across her abdomen before shoving the key into the Fury’s ignition. “Stupid,” she told Jack. “So stupid.”

  Jack couldn’t disagree with her as they drove away, but he at least had the comfort of knowing he was going to make Abbadon answer for this, and for everything else. Belial couldn’t threaten him and Abbadon couldn’t scare him, but now he’d fucked himself. Jack could take a beating, take a knife in his own back, but Pete was a different thing. Abbadon didn’t know that yet, but he would.

  CHAPTER 19

  By the time they pulled off the freeway at North Mission Road and took the turns that brought them to a complex of brick buildings that looked more like an old-fashioned movie studio than a mortuary, Pete had gotten some of her color back and she’d stopped wincing every time she took a breath. Jack felt his own chest unknot.

  Pete parke
d in the visitor’s area and turned to him. “It’d take more than that to hurt me and the kid,” she said to Jack. “Don’t worry, all right?”

  “Can’t make any promises,” Jack said. “I’m never going to not care if you’re getting hurt, Petunia. You know that.”

  She winced at her full name. “You leave off calling me that. Know how much I bloody hate it.” She shoved the door open and perched a pair of sunglasses on her nose. “Tell you one thing, I’m not saddling this child with a name that’ll follow them through life, giving them endless shite. Been wondering even more lately what the hell my mum was thinking.”

  “You given it any thought? A name, I mean, not your mum,” Jack said. The mortuary started at one of the brick buildings, with a peaked roof covered in red clay tiles, and continued in a modern gray box that told Jack in no uncertain terms via several signs that visitors were not allowed.

  Pete shrugged. “I’m not much good at names. Figure I should stick my Da’s given name in there somewhere if it’s a boy. What about you? Your mum? Lawrence?”

  “Lawrence, maybe,” Jack said. “My mum … are you mad? I’d never do that to a kid. Fucking bitch is dead and she’s going to stay that way, not live on forever saddling some poor offspring of mine with her name.”

  “Well, excuse me very fucking much,” Pete muttered. “Just thought I’d ask.”

  Jack was saved from having to think about what his mother’s reaction would be to him naming a living being after her by Detective Shavers, who came from the low gray building. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he told Jack. “I’m not happy about this.”

  “You don’t have to be happy,” Jack said. “I’m not thrilled to see you either, mate.”

  Pete jabbed him sharply in the ribs. “Thanks very much for setting this up,” she said.