“A veritable bundle of joy,” Jack said. “Anna, she’s like your mum?”
“Oh, no.” The girl shook her head. “Anna leads the rituals. She’s the one who shares the power with us, and who showed me how I can use my body to communicate with it.” She gave a small shiver. “Anna’s so much more than a mother.”
A female sex magician. Well, he’d heard of stranger things. Jack took the girl by the arm. “What’s your name?” Her talent was barely a flutter, just enough that she’d feel disconnected from the daylight world, a vague feeling of unease she could never identify. It made her a thick piece of juicy meat to people like Anna.
“Kim,” she said. “My ritual name is…”
“I don’t give a fuck,” Jack said. He turned them around and aimed them at the glowing red sign showing the exceptionally stupid where they should go in case there was a fire. “You’re the only pregnant one here, yeah?”
“Yes, for now…” Kim twisted in his hand. “You’re hurting me.”
“We’re going,” Jack said. “Come with me.”
“No!” Kim said, jerking free. “I’m not a whore, dude. If you’re here for a ritual, then talk to Anna. You can’t just drag me off to fuck any time you want.”
“Listen, you brainwashed twit,” Jack said. “If you don’t leave this place right now, then you are going to end up dead and your child is going to be a vessel for something so horrible your tiny mind can’t comprehend. Look at my face and see if I’m lying to you.”
Kim stared at him, catching her lip between her teeth. “My baby?” she said. “Anna wouldn’t hurt my baby. Children are a gift, a product of the most sacred kind of union…”
“What utter shit have they been feeding you?” Jack said. She was letting him walk her, at least, and he shoved the door open with his free arm.
A klaxon began whooping, and Jack resisted the urge to ram his head into the wall. “Listen to me, Kim. Your little circle-jerk here has been targeted by a predator who is much bigger and hungrier than your Anna. She might think she’s struck a bargain with him, but she can’t stop what he wants to do with your kid and any others who come into the fold. Nothing can. If you care about the kid at all, you’ll come with me now.”
Kim swallowed hard, lacing her fingers across her stomach. “Who are you?”
At the far end of the hall, Anna and Sanford appeared, Parker in tow. “Stop him!” Anna shrieked. “He’s got a girl with him!”
“I’m Jack,” Jack told Kim. “Nice to meet you. Now kindly get yourself together and fucking run.”
Parker reached under his coat, hand coming up. Anna raised her hands, and Jack saw purple witchfire crackle around her fists. “Fuck,” he muttered, throwing a shield hex to bounce Anna’s spell back at her. His head throbbed, and Anna’s power jittered through the light sockets and across the walls, throwing sparks.
Kim stared at Anna, then back at him. “You’re crazy,” she whispered.
Jack watched Parker bring up his pistol, work the slide. The hex might hold; it might not. Bullets were iron projectiles, and they were decent at punching through spells even when the mage throwing them wasn’t beat to shite and working on half power. “Look,” he said to Kim. “You’ve got no reason to trust me, but I don’t want anything from you. I’ve got a kid of my own, and I know you’d die before you let anything happen to yours. I’m just here to see that you don’t have to.”
Kim looked back at him and didn’t say anything else, just started moving, down the stairs, as fast as she could with her extra weight.
Jack slammed the fire door, twisted the deadbolt, and, for good measure, sent a burning curse into the lock that turned the works to slag. It wouldn’t hold a sorcerer like Anna for long, but it’d give them what he hoped was enough of a head start.
“Are you some kind of psycho?” Kim asked as they reached the bottom level. Jack worked his lock-pick charm on the padlock and chain keeping the door to the next building shut, then hustled Kim through.
“There’s some debate about that,” he said. “But right now, I’m the sanest person you know.”
A shadow loomed up in front of him, and Jack didn’t have time to move before Parker slammed a fist into his face. “Bad luck, pretty boy,” he told Jack, taking Kim by the arm and pulling her behind him. “The bitch doesn’t belong to you.”
“I doubt she belongs to you either,” Jack said. “Unless you’re the proud father.”
Kim’s eyes went wide at the idea. “I don’t know this asshole!” she exclaimed.
“Not someone you want to know, either,” Jack said. His cheekbone felt flat and numb—Parker hit like a hammer. Trying to hit back would just end with him in an emergency ward pissing into a tube.
He hit with a curse instead, the leg-locker flinging Parker to one side of the tunnel and chipping a dent out of the cinder block wall. Jack grabbed Kim’s hand and jerked her along. She couldn’t run very well, more of a waddle, but Jack jerked her up the steps and burst into the foyer of the building next door, coming face to face with a surprised Japanese man holding a long-lensed camera.
“’Scuse me,” Jack said. After the claustrophobia of Anna’s lair, the light made him squint.
Kim pressed close to him. “What’s going on?” she whispered. “Who was that guy?”
“An arsehole,” Jack said. “Somebody who doesn’t have your kid’s best interest in mind.”
“Excuse me.” A heavyset woman in a blue blazer tapped Jack on the shoulder. “The lower level is strictly off limits to visitors.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Jack said. Sunlight dappled the red tiled floor, and a spike of pain went through his forehead when he looked up. He was surrounded by cold iron—run under the water of a free-flowing stream—iron rails, iron decoration, iron elevators running up and down on iron chains. The entire building was seamed with iron, a box designed to kill anything magic that crossed its threshold.
“Well,” Jack muttered to himself. “Shit.”
Kim blanched, putting one hand on her stomach and one on her mouth. “Oh my god. This place sucks.”
A tour group, consisting of a pod of tanned twenty-somethings chattering in German, entered the lobby, and Jack pulled Kim into the midst of the crowd. He couldn’t throw hexes in here, but nobody could find them from the outside, either. Sanford and Parker could watch the street, but with the steady flow of tourists and bored-looking office workers that Jack guessed were cops, he’d have to spot them first. A little luck, and he could have Kim on a bus back to Bum Fun, Kansas, or wherever the hell she’d come to this city from by nightfall.
“This is the Bradbury Building,” intoned the tour guide. “Built in 1934.” A translator repeated, and the Germans cooed appreciatively.
Parker burst out of the cellar door, and the security guard started for him. He hit her, one jab straight into the throat, and she collapsed to her knees on the tile, choking.
“Dammit,” Jack muttered. There went his plan to slip out unnoticed when the Germans returned to the filth, noise, and vomiting hobos of downtown LA.
Parker made a beeline for them, and Jack did what came naturally, ran like hell, up the stairs and past a cord blocking the unwashed masses from the second floor. He pelted down the landing, and against a normal bloke he and Kim would have had a head start. Parker, however, eschewed the stairs entirely, leaping straight from the lobby to the first balcony, landing on a floor with a crash that cracked tiles. His knobby muscles rippled under his black shirt and he dropped into a crouch, nostrils flaring at Jack as he used his body to make a barrier between him and Kim.
“Holy shit,” she squeaked from behind him.
A demon would never be able to form-shift amid all this iron, which left Jack with several distinctly unpleasant possibilities as to what, exactly, Parker was. Not a werewolf—the enchantment would have been obvious during all the contact they’d had, in the form of Parker kicking the hell out of him.
Something organic, something in the blood. Somet
hing that was causing black claws to erupt from Parker’s hands and his teeth to overshoot the bounds of his mouth.
He crouched on his haunches and hissed at Jack, the back of his coat splitting to allow two long, leathery wings to erupt, covered in effluvia from his shift from ugly man to fuck-ugly bat-creature.
“Freeze!” One of the cops—anyone anywhere could tell he was one, rumpled suit and cheap shoes and all—aimed his pistol at Parker’s back. When Parker let out a screech, the copper fired. Two rounds caught Parker between the shoulder blades. He jerked and turned on the man, closing the space and his teeth around the copper’s throat. A spray of arterial blood hit the wall and washed the tiles. Jack shoved Kim.
“Move your arse.” There was a second landing, a set of stairs near the rear door of the building. They had to move, before Parker realized he’d lost track of them. Before Sanford showed up. Before the LAPD decided to ventilate his torso just for the fun of it.
Parker gave a great flap of wings, and with a screech leaped over Jack and Kim and landed in front of them. Kim let out a moan. “What the fuck is he?”
Parker’s ears had elongated, and a patch of ugly, wire-brush fur had grown across his face like the world’s most unfortunate set of mutton chops.
“I said the bitch wasn’t yours,” he hissed. “She’s going to whelp, and the kid is Abbadon’s. You promised the boss Abbadon. This is the quickest way and fair’s fair, Winter.”
“Fuck off, bat boy,” Jack told him. “Go back to sucking on diseased goats.” He moved a step to the right, experimentally, and Parker matched his move. Jack pulled Kim close, so he could feel her swollen stomach against his back. “When I move you run like fuck for those stairs and don’t stop until you’re in broad daylight. Find a cop in a uniform and stick to them like glue.”
Kim shook her head, her eyes going wide. “No…”
“Don’t give it a thought, luv,” Jack told her. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He let go of her hand and put his attention on Parker. Try to avoid a stand-up fight, and fate saw that you got exactly that. Bitch that she was. “About the teeth-kicking,” Jack said to Parker. “Now seems as good a time as any.”
Parker grinned at him. “Big words for a little man.”
“Words at all coming from your ugly mug,” Jack told him. “Amazing, really.” He cocked his head, put the weight on the balls of his feet. Prepared himself to take the hit. He was used to that, at least. Sometimes you just had to take it, taste the blood, spit out your ruined teeth, and get on. “Tell me,” he said to Parker. “Are you mean because you’re ugly? Or are you ugly because your mum sucked the cock of a rabid werewolf and vomited you out afterward?”
Parker launched at him. Kim screamed, but she ran, caroming off the wall, digging her feet in and heading for the stairs.
Jack went over on his back, slamming into the rail with Parker on top of him. The lobby below was in chaos, some tourists screaming, some snapping away with their cameras. The coppers were rushing about, but after what had happened to their mate, none seemed anxious to get close to Jack and Parker.
Parker’s breath smelled like a sewer in the height of summer and was as hot as an oven on Jack’s face as Parker snapped his black teeth. Jack threw up his arm, and Parker clamped down on his leather, and through it to flesh. The pain took a moment to come, but it did, hot as coals and deep as marrow. The only bright spot was that it wasn’t his neck.
Jack jammed his boots into Parker’s belly, the steel toes meeting soft flesh, and shoved with all his strength. Something gave out in his back, but Parker went flying over his head, slamming into the cage that blocked the elevator shaft. The car was on the top floor, and he fell, hitting the bottom of the shaft with a scream.
Getting his feet under him was a trial. Jack felt the sting of cold air on his arm, and saw a half-moon of bloody, rent flesh under his shredded leather. He could deal with it later. If there was a later.
The elevator shaft rattled, and Jack went to the edge. Parker was climbing. One wing was twisted and broken, leaking brackish-colored fluid, but his claws still worked, and he scaled the shaft, snarling and screeching with each movement.
Jack shot a glance over his shoulder. Kim was nowhere to be seen. Good. One less thing he had to worry about.
“You son of a bitch,” Parker rasped. He wasn’t moving fast, but like a high tide, he’d inevitably reach Jack. “You fucked up now. You should’ve killed me.”
Jack looked upward into the lift shaft. The car hung above his head, near the peaked roof of the shaft. It was suspended from the three landings of the building like a cage, and the chains that raised and lowered the car rattled as Parker climbed.
Jack tried a hex, even though the answering echo of emptiness told him that in this place, the Black did not exist.
Parker’s claws grabbed at his boot, but they couldn’t get through the steel and pin him in place. Jack wrapped his arm through the chain and kicked with his free foot, cracking Parker in his elongated jaw. Parker slipped a little, but kept his hold.
Jack tried the curse again, as reflex more than anything. Magic was his armor, his sword, all he had. He wasn’t strong, and wits alone weren’t going to take a pissed-off chupacabra off his arse.
The cold started in his fingertips, as if he’d gone outside on a snowy day in Manchester and forgotten his gloves. It spread up his arms, down his back, deep into his chest, and around his heart. His blood roared through his ears like a freight train. Parker stopped struggling, his rheumy yellow animal eyes going wide.
Jack watched the ink of the tattoos, the Morrigan’s marks, shift and wriggle under his skin, giving birth to new shapes that moved with a life of their own. Feathers sprouted on his skin, covering every inch of him from scalp to sole.
The word sprang to his lips unbidden, the cold spreading to his mind and killing the panic and the scrabbling fear, everything except the dead-eyed logic that lived in the lizard part of his brain.
“Aithinne.”
The cables holding the lift car glowed, and turned to slag, in the space of a breath. Parker jerked his head up, but the iron car fell too fast, and it took him to the bottom of the shaft, pinning him under its crushing iron weight.
Jack fell back on the tiles, slamming his bad arm hard and starting the flow of blood afresh.
The cold retreated, and when he came back to himself he picked his arse up off the floor and ran. The chaos inside the Bradbury Building served him well, and he ducked across 4th Avenue and into the lobby of the Million Dollar Theater as a herd of cop cars screeched to a stop, jamming up traffic and starting a cavalcade of horns.
He caught a flash of blond hair and saw Kim peeking at him from the women’s loo. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said.
“You’re all right, luv,” Jack said. Kim pointed at his arm.
“Your jacket is all torn up.”
“Arm, too,” Jack said. He looked down. Time to assess the damage, see if he’d make it as far as somebody who’d stitch him without asking too many questions.
His arm was smooth and bloodless. A thin line of scars, narrow and square as standing stones, was all that remained to show his arm had once been torn to hamburger.
Kim leaned in to examine his arm, and then shrugged. “Seems all right to me.”
“It does, at that,” Jack told her. He could think about it later. Figure out how it had happened later. Decide what the fuck had gone on back in the Bradbury Building with Parker. Later. All later.
He guided Kim to the back exit and out onto the street. The safehouse Sliver had given Pete was out of the question—Abbadon had found it and walked through his hexes without a second thought.
“You got a mobile?” he asked Kim. She tilted her head at him, pale brows drawn together. “A mobile phone,” Jack snapped. “You got one?”
“Oh, yeah.” Kim passed him a bright pink hunk of plastic, the screen displaying a photo of herself and another, equally blond and vacant-
eyed girl with their cheeks pressed together. Jack handed it back.
“I can’t work something that doesn’t have buttons. Dial the number I give you.”
Kim did as he said and Jack explained, in as few words as he could and with as little detail as possible, where to find them.
Pete arrived about half an hour later, and Jack put Kim in the back seat of the Fury. Pete looked her over and cocked one eyebrow at him.
“I know,” he told her. “Just … don’t make a big deal of it, all right?”
“Bigger deal is where we’re going to hole up,” Pete said. “Considering this bastard apparently has a live feed of where you are at all times.”
“There’s a couple of motels on Sunset,” Kim piped up. “My girlfriends and I used to crash there. Nobody pays attention to who’s in and out, and if you slip the night clerk a fifty he’ll say he hasn’t seen you.”
“Fine,” Pete said. She turned the Fury toward Hollywood, and dealt with the clerk at the Sunrise Motel while Jack took Kim to her room.
“Why’re you doing this?” Kim said. “You’re just going to piss them off, you know. And then I’ll be right back where I started.”
“You wouldn’t have come with me if you believed that,” Jack said. “You know Sanford and those gits back there want to take your kid and you know what would happen when they did. You’re not like them, at least not all the way.”
Kim sat on the bed, rotating her spine so it popped. “Fuckin’ kid weighs a ton,” she said. “They don’t tell you when you get pregnant it’s like having that thing from Alien growing inside you. Making everything swell up, making you puke nonstop, kicking you in the ribs all night.”
Pete came in and shut the door. “This place is about as lovely as a sewage treatment plant in Aberdeen,” she said, “but I don’t think anyone human followed us. Most of these people wouldn’t know if Jesus Christ himself was riding down Sunset on a pony at the head of a zombie parade.”
“Is she your wife?” Kim said.
“No,” Jack said, in concert with Pete. Pete shot him a look, then turned her attention to Kim.
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