Devil's Business

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Jack picked up the pistol and stepped over the body, into the back room.

  Levi looked up at him, docile face quivering around the edges. “You.”

  “Not the fucking tooth fairy,” Jack agreed. “Where’s Pete?”

  Levi narrowed his eyes. “This isn’t over, you know. You can’t kill things like us. You can’t kill your future, Jack. Sooner or later your little world is going to get devoured, just like the one before it and the one before that. I’m the one doing the devouring. I am the leviathan, and I eat the world.”

  Jack put the pistol barrel against Levi’s temple and pressed it in just a bit, until it left a depression in his fatty flesh. “You know what the problem is with all of you ancient types? All the gods and demons and whatever the fuck you are?”

  Levi’s labored breathing increased, sounding a bit like a small saw inside his chest. “You can’t kill me. You can’t…”

  “The problem is you talk too fucking much,” Jack said, then squeezed the trigger.

  There wasn’t as much gore as films had led him to believe. A little blood and a few bits of skull and brain covered the fuzzy telly screen, but the rest matted in Levi’s hair as he slumped sideways in his scooter chair.

  Jack left him there and stepped down the hall. Only Teddy left. The best and the worst of the four. Something that could get inside your head didn’t leave you with a lot of options. You couldn’t shoot something that could convince you that you were holding a teddy bear rather than a pistol. You couldn’t reason with something that wanted more than anything to live.

  He pushed the door open gently. A child’s mobile lamp sat in the corner, projecting images of carousel horses and clowns onto the stained walls. Teddy still hung in state, hooked up to his IVs and machines.

  Pete crouched at his feet, and she looked up at him. He wasn’t the cold Jack in that moment, the Jack who had it all figured out. He dropped the pistol and crouched beside her, cupping her face in his hands. “Have they hurt you?”

  Pete shook her head mutely. Her face was streaked with grime and twin rivulets where tears had cut through, but her eyes were dry. “I feel so fucking stupid,” she muttered. “Didn’t even see the bastards who snatched me.”

  Jack wrapped his arms around her. She let him, pressing her face against his leather. “You’re all right,” he said.

  “I am,” Pete said. She gave a small gasp, just an intake of air. “The baby…”

  Jack felt the cold grow in him again. Of course. The baby. The fucking baby. How could he not have seen it? Kim had never been Abbadon’s real plan, not since he and Pete had landed on their patch.

  “What did they do to the baby?” he said.

  Nothing yet. Teddy’s voice sliced into him, and it still hurt. It bypassed his sight and cut straight to the part of his brain where his talent lived, hollowed it out and echoed there. Abbadon had plans, though. Great plans, and they’re in motion, and you can’t stop them. A thin giggle punctuated the sentence.

  Jack looked up at Teddy. “Don’t think I won’t waste you in just a moment, you piece of shit.”

  “Abbadon said…” Pete sucked in a breath and steadied her voice. “He said that the baby was his now … that he’d done something … to me.” She dug her fingers into Jack’s wrists. “I can feel it. I can feel what he put in my kid, Jack. It’s going to be his. I’m going to be just like those stupid cows that he sliced apart.”

  She’s right, you know, Teddy purred. Don never was happy with that raggedy meat bag he was riding. He had big plans. Big plans to live forever in that brave new world he was gonna open up.

  Kim hadn’t been carrying a body for Teddy. Pete hadn’t been snatched as leverage. Sanford had never intended to give her back. He’d traded Pete to Abbadon in exchange for his help with Locke’s doorway. A brand new infant body, with talented blood pumping through it to sustain Abbadon’s power. A body that wouldn’t burn out like a regular meatbag, as Teddy had put it. A body that he could ride forever, while he ushered the fires of Hell into downtown LA.

  “I’ve got some news for you,” Jack told Teddy. “Abbadon is dead. He’s gone. This baby isn’t his and it isn’t going to be.”

  He’s not dead, Teddy said. You know how many times Azrael did him in, down there in the Pit? Only for the fun of it? Thousands. We can’t cease to exist, Jack. Not forever. We’re the beginning and the end.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. “The Alpha and the fucking Omega. He’s still not getting my kid.”

  “He already has,” Pete whispered. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t even shaking. The world could end and Pete would hold it together. “I can feel it, Jack. We were alone a long time, and he put his mark on the baby, the same as he did those other poor children, who got turned into things like…” She pointed at Teddy, gulping back a sob. “Like him.”

  There’s a process. Teddy chuckled. A seed to be planted. The child will be Abbadon. Poetic, if you think about it. The phoenix and the ashes.

  “You shut up,” Jack told him. He pulled Pete to her feet. “They didn’t touch you, yeah? Didn’t hurt you?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Jack, no,” Pete said. “Nobody molested me, and honestly, when they snatched me that was the least of my worries.” She laced her hands across her stomach. “That thing is right. He did a ritual, and his magic was so strong. When this kid is born, it’s going to become Abbadon. There’s no help for it.” Her tears did start then, and she bit her lip savagely, causing a trickle of blood. “You’re going to have to do it. I don’t think I can.”

  Jack stared at Pete. Her stomach was barely showing—he thought she might have put on a stone, at worst. In all of his ramblings about the kid, he’d never imagined there not being a kid at all. Head so far up your own arse you never even realized what Abbadon really wanted, the new Jack whispered. That Jack was pragmatic. He saw the whole picture. Abbadon couldn’t be allowed near the daylight world, never again. Pete was resilient. She could have more children, when she was ready, with someone who wouldn’t be a complete cock-up as a parent. And he’d keep the first evil the universe had known at bay for a bit longer, and could go through life knowing he hadn’t contributed to anyone else’s fucking up.

  It made sense. In every way that mattered.

  Jack dropped his hands to his side. He was hot now, the air in Teddy’s room stuffy and stinking of a hospital ward, and massively tired. He could curl up between the IV stands and sleep for a week.

  “I can’t.”

  Pete let out a single, desperate sob. “You have to…”

  “No,” Jack said. “No, we’re going to make this right, all right?” He grabbed Pete’s shoulders, and squeezed hard enough that she whimpered. “All right?”

  She licked the blood from her lip, and finally met his eyes. Don’t be scared, he prayed. He needed one of them to not be scared, because the new Jack had deserted him, along with the cold singlemindedness, and he was only himself again, shit plans and shit luck and all.

  “All right,” Pete said softly. “Fuck him, anyway. Who the hell does he think he is?”

  Jack pulled her against him, felt the hard swell of her stomach against his torso, and nothing else mattered. “A bastard,” he said in her ear.

  “The worst sort of cunt,” Pete said. “I fucking hate this, Jack. It’s never going to be over, is it? This kid is like a beacon for all the shit and evil of the Black, and it’s all going to come down on the poor thing.”

  Jack pressed his face into Pete’s neck, into the curve behind her ear. “Worry about it when you need to worry, luv. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He brushed his lips over her forehead, tasted the sweat there. “Either of you.”

  Pete’s mouth curled down. “Promise?”

  “On my fucking life,” Jack said.

  This is all very touching, Teddy said. But you’re not leaving here.

  “No,” Jack told him. He pulled the paper he’d taken from Lucinda’s coffin from his pocket. It was wrinkled and smea
red in blood, but legible. “You are,” Jack said.

  From the next room, he heard stirring and skittering through the walls. Levi and the girl were awake. He turned to Pete. “We don’t have a lot of time. No time, really.”

  She nodded. “What do you need from me?”

  Jack handed her the gun. It was a relief to get rid of the thing, if he was honest. “Shoot anything that comes through that door right in the fucking face, and that includes adorable little girls.”

  “Right,” Pete said. Jack pulled out his knife and she cocked her eyebrow. “And what are you going to do?”

  She gave a small gasp when Jack jammed the knife into Teddy’s neck. It wasn’t demon blood, but it would do.

  Teddy screamed. This isn’t going to save you, Jack. Not you or your whore or your brat.

  “Let me tell you something,” Jack said. “She is not a whore. She’s a good woman and I don’t deserve her, and that attitude of yours is exactly why you’re hanging from a wall in this shit-trap.” He twisted the knife in deep, and felt Teddy’s heart give its last misshapen tremble. “Try to be less of a twat in your next life, yeah?”

  He drew Locke’s sigil in the blood pooling on the warped floorboards. He stood in the center of it and recited the words that Sanford had intoned, although he liked to think he sounded like less of a pretentious gobshite while doing it. As a last thought, he picked up a discarded bottle of cheap Mexican beer—probably Levi’s doing—and tucked it inside his jacket.

  He’d thought a portal straight to Hell would be more dramatic, but instead a thin line of white smoke rose from the circle, and the sigil fell away. The real world started to ash away little by little as the physical laws of space bent, burned up, and blew away.

  Jack grabbed Pete by the hand and pulled her into the circle. The Black here was strong. He was the Black, inside Locke’s doorway, atoms spread from one end of the universe to the other. Pete’s Weir talent flowed through him, except this time it wasn’t an onrushing storm, a flood that could drown him. Here they were two halves, and they fit together. Weir and mage, floating on the time stream of magic, outside the realm of anything usual.

  Jack put one hand on Pete’s stomach, used the Weir to widen his sight. His skull didn’t hurt—it merely felt as if the top had come off and an avalanche of foreign sensation had poured in.

  The child was vague—not really thoughts so much as impulses, impulses of hunger and curiosity and fright. It wasn’t formed yet, didn’t really exist in the psychic space.

  Abbadon’s magic rode it like a caul over its psychic presence, like an oil spill in cool water. He’d slipped inside Pete’s talent, inside her physical body, and planted a seed amid the psychic DNA of his child so that when it formed, it would form in his image.

  Jack drew the darkness out, drew out the spark of Abbadon that still lived, inside Pete.

  He saw the glass sands of Hell and smelled the hot wind. It wasn’t a dream, now. He was here, could taste the ashes, hear the screams and the clink of the soul bottles, smell the acrid roast of human flesh borne on the air.

  Pete stared, turning in a slow circle. “This is Hell.”

  “You are smart, luv,” Jack said. “I do love that about you.”

  Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Another time, Jack.”

  Abbadon stood there. He wasn’t the dragon that Jack had faced in the graveyard, not the slick-faced human. He was a shadow, all teeth and screams. “You think you’re so fucking smart,” he snarled.

  “Smarter than you,” Jack said. “You decided to use my fucking child as your next ride into the daylight world. Not your brightest move, mate. Not even on a slow day.”

  “You think you put me in Hell and I’ll stay?” Abbadon snapped. “I got out of this place once, Jack. I can do it again.”

  “About that,” Jack said. “See, I don’t peg old Nergal as the generous sort. He may have weakened the bars, but I think you had help crawling out the first time. Whether it was a general, or one of the Princes, or a rat you trained to gnaw through the bars—it doesn’t matter. Belial knows your tricks now. I think this time, you’ll stay right where I put you.”

  He pulled the bottle from his coat and held it up to Abbadon. “You’re bound, by the laws of Hell and by my will, Abbadon. Bound to stay in this place, until Hell ends or you do. So fuck off, and leave us alone.”

  Abbadon’s shadow flickered once, twice, like faulty film, and then he disappeared, a curl of black smoke at the bottom of a manky bottle, sharing space with a half-centimeter of beer and two dead fag-ends.

  Jack shook the bottle a bit, watched the smoke swirl. “Reckon he’s very angry?”

  “Who bloody cares?” Pete said. “Trying to get at my kid. Twat.”

  “You said it, luv,” Jack said. He walked to where the world dropped off, at the edge of the iron ravine. “Oi!” he shouted. “The prodigal son returns. Enjoy it, you coldblooded sons of bitches.”

  Pete caught his arm. “Let me,” she said. Jack handed her the bottle. Just a sad scrap of soul. Just like everyone, no matter how evil or how much they wanted to stay alive, ended up eventually.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Pete cocked her arm back and flung the bottle hard as she could. It arced out over the ravine and flashed in the harsh white light before it fell from sight and disappeared.

  She looked up at Jack. “That’s done, then?”

  Jack looked down into the ravine. “For now.” Without Abbadon, Belial and his ilk would make short work of the other three. Jack stepped back, let go of the threads of Locke’s gateway spell, and watched as the daylight world slowly blended back together, and the laws of physics righted themselves.

  Pete grimaced. “Awful. Feel like I’m going to puke now.”

  “I’ll join you,” Jack said. Nothing else stirred in the farmhouse. Teddy’s corpse hung silently, bloodless and still. In the hallway, the little girl lay staring at the water-spot continents on the ceiling, unblinking.

  Pete flinched. “Christ, she was creepy, wasn’t she?”

  Jack shivered. “Adorable ones usually are.”

  Outside, he saw a line of light on the horizon. It was nearly dawn. Pete sat down on the steps, inhaling a deep breath of air. “Don’t suppose we’ve got a ride out of here.”

  “I came with that twat Mayhew and with Sliver,” Jack said. “But I imagine after that light show, Sliver got smart and fucked off back to Angel City. And Mayhew is just fucking useless.”

  “He really was a twat,” Pete said. “I’m sorry, you know. You told me it was bad business and I went anyway.”

  “Luv, if you lined up all the bad business I’ve followed up on in me life, you’d circle the earth,” Jack said. “Possibly twice.” He tapped a fag out of his pack and offered the last to Pete.

  “I’m pregnant, you tit,” she said. “What exactly am I supposed to do with that?”

  Jack touched his finger to the end of the fag. It took a few tries, in this zone where the Black twisted back on itself, but he got the fag lit and took a long drag. “I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, Pete,” he said. Once it was out, it seemed silly he hadn’t said it sooner. Nothing caught on fire. No one slapped him. The sun was up, and he heard some sort of wild bird scream, off in the brush.

  “You think I do?” she said.

  Jack watched the end of his fag, smoke curling. “I’m not going to be a decent sort of father,” he said. “I’ll try, yeah, but I’ll cock up, and you were right. This kid has no idea what it’s in for. Everyone will want it, both sides. And if it has a talent … I can’t quit, Pete. I can try, but it’ll always find me, so it’s best if I just bow out now, because I can’t be what you need or want.”

  “It’s a girl,” Pete said. “I had a new ultrasound right before we left the UK.” She exhaled, as if she’d just confessed something. “So not an it. A girl.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” Jack said. Christ, a girl. This was going to be even worse than he’d imagined. He did
n’t know what the fuck he’d do with a baby girl.

  “I didn’t know if I should,” Pete said. “Didn’t think you’d be sticking around.”

  “About that,” Jack said. “It’s pretty fucking clear that I need to. For the kid.”

  “I don’t want you to stick around because of some cockeyed obligation,” Pete said. “I can stay with Lawrence, with Ian Mosswood. Hell, even with my mum and the fucking Order. They can keep her safe.”

  “Why not?” Jack snapped. Suddenly he was fed up. Through dancing. If he stepped on feet, so be it, but he was too tired to be subtle any longer. “Why can’t I be obligated to stay around? ’S more than my fucking father ever offered.”

  “Because I don’t want you to hate me,” Pete said softly. “Jack, I don’t want you retired, but I don’t want you gone, either. You were gone for so long, and when you were in Hell … but I won’t trap you. I won’t be that woman. I just fucking won’t.”

  The sunrises in California were magnificent. Jack had heard somewhere that it was from all the pollution. A pink rind of cloud sat below the glowing half-orb, white flashes chasing away the velvety night sky, while the moon and stars clung, far off beyond the mountains.

  “You’re not,” he said at last. He could be scared—could be fucking terrified—but that didn’t mean he had to run. “I can’t see hating you, luv,” he said. “Thought I did, for a long while, but I don’t, and I won’t, and I won’t be my fucking cunt of a father, either. I’ll be there for the girl, until you won’t have me.”

  Pete placed her hand over his knee, gave a squeeze. Her touch set off a series of aches and pains, and Jack grimaced.

  “You all right?” Pete said.

  “I’m old, luv,” Jack said. “This baby is going to run me fucking ragged, I hope you know.”

  Pete leaned her head against his shoulder. “I think you’ll manage. We will, somehow.”

  Jack sat quietly with Pete for some time, while the sun rose. He could tell her later about the Morrigan’s marks, her visitation, the strange new thing living under his skin. About the Princes of Hell and how Belial had picked him, all those years ago, to be one of their legion. About how the slow fracture and dissolution of the Black hadn’t stopped with Nergal, would never stop, and things back in London would likely never be all right for the crow-mage and the Weir again. He could tell her all that later, Jack thought as he slipped his arm around Pete’s thin shoulders.