Devil's Business

by Caitlin Kittredge

  He wasn’t all right. Blood loss had made a black border around his vision, and his ribs were on fire.

  “I’ll get somebody,” Sliver said. “Just hang in there, all right?”

  He left, and Jack passed in and out of consciousness for what could have been hours or weeks. The single bare bulb in the pub’s back room swung back and forth, light and dark. Usually, this was when the Morrigan would show her face, when he was in the shadow land between the daylight world and the Land of the Dead. But she knew she had him now. There was no reason to attend his last hours when he’d be delivered to her at the end.

  He couldn’t help Pete. He couldn’t even help himself.

  “Shit,” somebody said. “This guy is hamburger. Why the hell didn’t you take him to a hospital?”

  “Like I could explain this to somebody in a hospital,” Sliver snapped. “I thought you said you could help him.”

  “Look,” the second voice said, “this guy is beyond help.” Chubby fingers gouged against Jack’s neck. “His pulse is barely even there.”

  “Do what you can.” A desperate edge crept into Sliver’s voice. “I can’t have a dead fucking body in my bar, Mayhew.”

  “Really, you of all people are more equipped to deal with a corpse than most,” Mayhew said.

  “Fuck you,” Sliver said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Clear my tab, and I’ll see if I can keep him breathing,” Mayhew said.

  “Are you shitting me? You owe me four hundred bucks.”

  Mayhew’s fingers went away. “Hey, you want to put this fucker out with the trash after last call, you can argue with me. You want my help and expertise, clear my fucking tab.”

  “Fine.” Shiver sighed. “I think his ribs are busted. He keeps making these wheezes when he tries to breathe.”

  A cold stethoscope pressed against Jack’s chest, and Mayhew made a disapproving sound. “He’s got fluid in his lungs. Probably internal bleeding.” Jack’s leather was stripped away, and a bandage went around his ribs. The pain intensified tenfold, and he cried out.

  “Good sign,” Mayhew said. He peeled back Jack’s eyelid and Jack was blinded by a pocket torch. “Hello in there,” Mayhew said, and Jack swiped at the light.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Listen,” Mayhew said. “You’ve got cracked ribs and a nasty head wound. Probably a concussion too. I’m going to give you something for the pain, but you need to stay still, all right?”

  “No needles,” Jack said. “No drugs.”

  Mayhew ignored him, fitting a sterile needle onto a syringe and drawing from a bottle of clear liquid that proclaimed SALINAS VET SUPPLY across the label in broad letters.

  “No…” Jack tried. If he was doped, he had no chance. Pete would die, the baby would die. Hell, he’d probably die in the bargain, since Mayhew seemed to have learned first aid while drunk and standing on his head.

  The needle slid in, small and cold, and the cold soon spread across all his limbs. Jack felt his heartbeat slow down, and he drifted on the opiate tide, the familiar fuzzy sensation of the high unfurling its wings and lifting him toward the ceiling.

  He looked down, at the top of Sliver’s head and Mayhew’s orange Hawaiian shirt.

  “I think you gave him too much,” Sliver said. Mayhew zipped up his case and shoved the rest of his supplies back into a duffel bag.

  “You want to do this?”

  Sliver shook his head. Mayhew stood up and brushed off his knees. “I’ll hang out in the front. Call me if anything changes.”

  “Don’t you dare drink all the good shit,” Sliver called after him, and then crouched beside Jack’s body again. From this vantage, he really did look like shit. His face was gray, and the dried blood and the cut on his forehead made him look like some kind of film zombie. His bare chest, wrapped in bandages, was covered in old bruises and new cuts from where Abbadon had flung him into the tomb.

  He’d come close to dying before—and had, when Belial took him. He knew the detachment, the gentle untethering of soul from flesh. But he couldn’t die, not now. Pete needed him. More importantly, he needed her. The only kindness if he kicked now would be to the kid. Better to have a dead father you could idolize than a living one who was shit.

  “You don’t have to let it end like this, you know.”

  Jack looked up at the shadows near the ceiling, cast by the swaying bulb. “Oh,” he said. “Now you show up.” He wasn’t sure if he was really speaking, or just echoing his thoughts, but the crow woman glided down from the ceiling and put her hands on either side of his face.

  “You have the ability to make this stop right now, Jack. You have the means to help the little Weir. If you really want to.”

  Jack looked down at his body. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m already dead. We’re just waiting out the formalities now.”

  The Morrigan dug her claws into his cheeks. She could be extraordinarily beautiful, pale skin and eyes like drowning pools, long hair drifting on spectral wind, body encased in a diaphanous black shroud. And then her face could change, could become the face of the crow woman, or the Hag, and she was the most terrifying thing he’d ever clapped eyes on.

  “I gave you the gift, Jack. I pulled you back from the Bleak Gates, and all you’ve done is deny me. I’m getting very tired of it, Jack. I won’t save you this time. Either you save yourself and use what I gave you, or you’ll never see your little Weir again.”

  She pressed her lips against his, and her teeth sliced into his lip, their blood mingling. “You’re mine, Jack. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. Now do what you know you want to. Take control of this.”

  She retreated, and Jack had to wonder if she’d ever been there. It wouldn’t be even close to the first time he’d hallucinated the Morrigan. Bad enough when she actually did visit him.

  He felt the cold, even from the vantage point of his stoned dream. It started in his hands again, and as he watched his body he saw his tattoos begin to writhe. He could try to hold it back, try to deny that the Morrigan had changed him, made him into what he’d tried not to be ever since he’d seen her the first time, back when she was just the lady in black who dogged his dreams night after night, when he finally drifted off after his mum and Kevin had stopped fighting or fucking in the other room.

  He could try, but he didn’t want to any more. He wasn’t going to let Pete die. He wasn’t going to let Abbadon steal her. And if that meant giving in to the Morrigan, than so be it. She’d changed him. Without her he’d be dead. Whatever he dealt with later, well. He’d cross that bridge when he got there.

  He didn’t fight the cold this time, like he had when he’d killed Parker. He embraced it, let it rush through him like a freight train, and felt the Black spasm as his soul reeled back from the Land of the Dead.

  Waking up felt like knives, or like he’d just been smacked with a defibrillator. He bolted upright, the cold expelling from his lungs in a rush of air, and then he promptly vomited, even though there was nothing in his stomach except a little bile.

  “Fuck!” Sliver bellowed. “What the fuck, man!”

  Jack felt himself jerked sharply to one side as his ribs snapped back into place. Vague, dull pain in his guts told him that whatever blood had been leaking was sealed. Even his forehead was smooth when he touched it.

  His tattoos came to rest in a new configuration, no longer aimless swirls but feathers, boldly up each arm and reaching across his back and chest. Sliver stared, unblinking. “You, uh … you okay, man?”

  Jack stood. The painkiller was gone along with the pain, but he had a new sense of detachment now, and it was nothing to do with the Morrigan or the Black or anything except the fact that Abbadon, that bastard, had taken Pete. “Never better,” he said to Sliver. He grabbed a T-shirt off a shelf, advertising the pub, and shrugged into it. It was too large by half, but it covered him and that was all that mattered.

  Jack banged the door to the pub open, garneri
ng a stare from everyone in the place. Sliver’s tinny sound system, pumping out the Marshall Tucker Band, was the only sound. Jack walked over to Mayhew, took away the whiskey bottle the fat arse was cradling like a baby, and took a long pull. The whiskey felt good, warmed him up a bit, and Jack slammed the bottle back down and pointed his finger in Mayhew’s face.

  “You need to get me a gun.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Mayhew’s gun wasn’t nearly as large or penislike as Jack would have expected. It was a small Sig-Sauer, or so Mayhew told him. Jack had never found much use for guns. That was Pete’s department. She was the one who could take aim and shoot.

  “You know how to use one of these?” Mayhew asked. Jack took it, ejected the clip, checked the chamber, and then slid the clip home again and flipped the safety off. Pete had made him learn that much. Almost like she’d known one day he’d be on the other end of the rescue, being the knight on the steed. He’d already slain a dragon. How difficult could this be?

  “Guess you do,” Mayhew said. “You got any idea where she is?”

  “That’s your department, isn’t it?” Jack said. “Come on, Mayhew. Prove you’re something more than a sad old drunk.”

  Mayhew shook his head immediately. “Oh no. I don’t mess with this shit. Scrying for what tagged you is going to get me a melted brain and a bed at Cedars.”

  “County nuthouse, is more like it,” Sliver muttered. Mayhew flushed, but he still shook his head.

  “This is your mess, man.”

  “Listen,” Jack said. “It’s been ten years. The thing that killed Mrs. Case and stole her baby to ride in its skin is right here, and his friends have got Pete. You brought her here—you owe her, even if you don’t give a fuck about me. And you owe the Cases, and the Herreras, and all the other dozens of unfortunate souls who got in Abbadon’s way.”

  Mayhew drummed his fingers on the bar, then poured himself a shot of something clear and knocked it back. “Fine. I’m going to need something of hers.”

  Jack sent Sliver to retrieve Pete’s Stiff Little Fingers shirt from her bag, then handed it to Mayhew. “It’s her favorite,” he said. “Don’t ruin it.”

  Mayhew spread the shirt out on the bar, took another shot.

  “Oi,” Jack said. “Don’t get pissed. We need you able to perform.”

  “Being hammered is how I perform,” Mayhew said. “So shut the fuck up and let me do this, all right?”

  Jack watched Mayhew pass his hands back and forth across the shirt, watched his eyes roll back in his head. Seeing somebody in a trance was always a bit unnerving—their eyes went white, and they tended to twitch and drool. It was why Jack had never put himself under in front of an audience. Simply wasn’t dignified.

  Mayhew’s eyes crawled with black, and a tendril, then a second, of black smoke leaked from his mouth and nostrils. He exhaled, and the smoke formed a miasma above his head, drifting in lazy circles.

  “I see her…” Mayhew rasped, and more smoke trickled from his mouth.

  “Okay, that is just weird,” Sliver said. “And I say that as a wraith and a bartender.”

  “Shut it,” Jack said, as Mayhew shoved back from the bar and walked stiff-legged for the door. “He got that beast of a car still?”

  “Far as I know,” Sliver said. Jack snatched Mayhew’s keys and tossed them to Sliver.

  “Then you’re driving.”

  The old him, the him who didn’t have the marks, who hadn’t healed himself and been through the fight with Abbadon, would have doubted himself and the wisdom of following Mayhew into the jaws of the beast, but he didn’t. Abbadon could be as cryptic as he liked, but there was only one place in the daylight world where his brood would feel really safe.

  Jack had strength now, had focus, had the tunnel vision that would mow down anything that got in his way. He realized, in the same small part of his brain that had known he was on the way out, that he was dangerous. Off the track, spinning toward a confrontation he had no hope of winning.

  “Where is he going?” Sliver asked as they left the bar.

  “Drive,” Jack told him, climbing into the passenger side of Mayhew’s car. “He’ll tell us where to go.”

  Mayhew guided them onto the freeway with guttural grunts, and they headed north of downtown. Like Jack thought, there was only one place they could be going.

  The journey toward Abbadon’s ranch passed by in slices of headlamp illuminating road signs leading to places Jack had never heard of. Folsom. Lodi. Barstow. Desolate names for desolate towns, off the map of where he had to go tonight.

  Mayhew came back to himself by degrees and sat up, choking. “The ranch…” he rasped. “The dead…”

  “It’s all right, mate,” Jack said. “We got the gist.”

  Sliver turned to look at them in the light of the dash. “No offense, but I’m not toeing off against whatever it is that has you two spooked. I’ll be the getaway driver, but you’re on your own.”

  “No,” Jack said, trying to settle back against the seat. His skin was vibrating, and his mind was as clear as if he’d just taken a hit of pure crystal. “These bastards are mine.”

  “Listen,” Mayhew said after a time, when the radio had faded to nothing but static, country music, and late-night preachers telling them how the world would end, “I know you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye…”

  “You tried your best to fuck me,” Jack said. “But don’t worry, Benji. I’m not going to test your manhood tonight.”

  The turn for the ranch loomed up in the cone of the Buick’s headlights and Jack tapped Sliver on the arm. “Just there. Park on this side of the ridge and stay out of sight.”

  Mayhew leaned out his window as Jack walked away, boots crunching on the gravel. “What are you going to do?”

  A single window was lit in the ranch house, and Jack saw the blue glow of a television through the tattered curtains. He lifted the Sig from his waistband and felt the weight in his hand. It was solid and real, probably the last piece of iron he’d ever touch.

  “I’m going to kill every one of those sons of bitches,” he said, then started toward the ranch house.

  The void in the Black still existed, but it didn’t cause a spike in his brain. That was Jack before, the Jack who was weak, who felt things and wanted heroin and wished for all of the sights and sounds of the Black to just stop from time to time, so he could rest. This Jack knew there could be no rest until he’d done what he came for.

  If he couldn’t use his talent, he’d gamble that Levi and the others couldn’t either. Abbadon was clearly the bright bulb of the group. The others were simply insects attracted to the light.

  He mounted the steps, mindful of the loose boards. This part had to go just right, because there were no second chances, and plenty of regrets waiting if he fucked up.

  Trying the door, he found the knob locked tight.

  He leaned back against the porch rail, bracing himself. Levi would be by the television, and he was too much of a fat fuck to move quickly. Teddy was immobile. That left the little girl as his primary problem—not that he was discounting her. Not that she was actually a little girl.

  Jack swung his boot at the door, smashing it so that it banged against the farmhouse wall and tore a chunk from the rotting plaster.

  “Hello, you bastards!” he bellowed. “Daddy’s come home at last!”

  There was no sound, only the burble of a TV game show from Levi’s room. Jack lifted the Sig and fired a shot into the ceiling, causing more plaster to rain down. “Come on!” he screamed. “You wanted it, so let’s get dirty! Show your ugly fucking faces, cunts!”

  A shadow appeared at the top step, and resolved itself into the little girl. She’d traded in her shorts and tee for a dress, blue with small pink sprigs of flowers. Blood streaked the front. Whatever little girl had originally worn that dress was long gone. “Will you keep it down?” she said. “Some of us are trying to get our rest.”

  Jack raised the pistol
, drew a bead, and fired. His shot went far wide and shattered an old-style lamp bolted to the wall of the upstairs hallway. He was a crap shot, but he didn’t let it bother him. The gun served its purpose.

  The little girl didn’t even flinch. “Abbadon said you’d come. With or without him. He told us what to do.”

  “Did he, now?” Jack said. The old him would be pissing himself. This him was calculating lines and angles, force and velocity. The Morrigan’s marks didn’t change the fact he was a shit shot, but they were keeping his panic at bay. “Did he happen to tell you to let me have my girlfriend and walk out of here?”

  “He said if he didn’t come home we were to kill whoever walked through that door,” the girl said. “Bad luck for you, nasty man.”

  She launched herself at Jack, knifelike claws and teeth bared, the black hair she’d kept braided into a rope at her back turning into a riot of bodies, tiny mouths and sharp, lava-glass blades. Jack brought the gun up, swiped it across the side of her head, and knocked her into the banister and then to the hall floor.

  She snapped at him, and he whipped her with the gun barrel again, causing a trio of her black blade teeth to fly free.

  The girl cowered, howling, and then launched at him again. Jack slipped his hand inside his leather and used it to wrap his fist around her living, writhing hair. He yanked. The girl screamed.

  “Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Jack said. “Perhaps if you were a bit nicer, we wouldn’t have to go through this.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” she whined. “I’m only a baby. Compared to the rest, I haven’t even done anything really terrible. I’m just a child, and I like to play with things. Live things.” She blinked at him. “Is that so wrong?”

  “I’m not going to debate with you, luv,” Jack said. “If it makes you feel better, chalk it up to wrong place, wrong time.” He mimicked Belial’s move at the graveyard and jerked her head to the left by her braid. It was a clean break, quick and fast, her neck going just a bit too far and the gleam of bloodlust fading from her eyes. She wouldn’t wake up quickly here, not on this ground that twisted and corrupted talent and the Black almost beyond recognition.