“World’s dangerous these days,” Naughton told her. “Can’t trust a bloody soul. Looks like your friend McCorkle discovered that rather more abruptly than most.” He held out his hand, beckoned with his palm. “I’ll have what you took from his flat.”
“Fuck you,” Pete said. It came out quite loud that time.
Naughton set his fag down with precision on the edge of the ashtray, and then walked up to Pete and kicked her hard, once, in the stomach. “Don’t think you fool me,” he said, patting her down efficiently and finding the bag. “You’re so scared your poor little breast is heaving.” He sat back on his heels, unrolled the crumpled plastic, and dropped the object wrapped in red thread into his palm.
Feathers and a bundle of black herb protruded, and Pete felt a thin spike find purchase behind her eyes, just a flit of power, a solar flare that died quickly as it rose.
“Not much juice left in it,” Naughton said. “Still, would be awkward if the police put it in one of those neat little baggies and eventually, by dint of the thin gleam of light making it up to their head through the crack of their arse, discovered what this little beauty is for.” He retreated, picked up his fag again.
Pete tried putting a little weight on her arms and found she could sit up, though everything swam into trim more slowly than she had. No heroic kung fu moves, then. “You knew McCorkle?”
“Only as a thief and a brigand,” said Naughton, tossing the little bundle in his hand.
“Jesus Christ, who says brigand anymore?” Pete said. She drew her legs under her, pulled herself to sit on the low table, and got her own fag. Kept everything slow and easy, not because she didn’t want Naughton getting the wrong idea but because she still felt as if she might pitch face-first into the carpet if she went too quickly.
“Freddy McCorkle bought something from Gerard Carver, something that belonged to me,” Naughton said. “He was as dirty as a fucking ha’penny whore’s twat, a bent copper, whatever you want to say. You think it’s fate he attached himself to Ollie Heath like a barnacle? With Heath comes you, dear Petunia, and occult artifacts would have bought Mr. McCorkle a lovely terrace in Highgate to live out his days.”
“You kill him?” Pete dragged. Breathed. Watched Naughton’s every twitch.
“I planted the seed,” Naughton said. He tapped the bundle once against Pete’s nose. “It’s just a bit of hoodoo magic, whispers in your ear, makes you think perhaps this life is a bit too much to take.” He shoved the thing into his pocket. “Peasant shit, but I thought I was rather clever. And before you ask, I had no direct hand in the untimely death of Gerard fucking Carver.”
“Wasn’t going to ask that,” Pete said. “Just wondering if you were going to be leaving any time soon, or should I call for some takeaway?”
“Did the police find something in McCorkle’s flat?” Naughton asked.
“They found a lot of somethings,” Pete said. “Mainly blood, from where poor Freddy decided to carve himself a new smile with a bread knife.” She stubbed her fag out, put weight on the balls of her feet. She could be up and moving if she had to, and that would have to be good enough. “You wouldn’t be thinking of a Babylonian funerary tablet, would you? The kind Carver was nicking from the museum?”
Naughton clapped his hands together. “Oh, very good. Always the detective, even when she’s not. No, my dear. That was not precisely what I meant. But I do thank you for not stalling and trying for doelike innocence. I’d hate to have to take a hand to that sweet little face.”
“I’d hate to see you after you tried,” Pete said. “Anything else?”
“We’re finished, I think,” Naughton said. “Obligatory advice: Stop poking at my business. Gerard got exactly what was coming to him. Next time, it won’t be one lousy zombie.”
“I’m not scared of you,” Pete told him. She waved the pack of Parliaments at him. “You owe me fags. And a new protection hex.”
“Get somebody who halfway knows what they’re doing in next time,” Naughton said. “That one was a bit embarrassing.”
“Leave,” Pete told him. “You can come in any time you want, I’m not safe in my own home. Point fucking made. Kindly let me be.”
Naughton picked up his leather coat and slid into it like a snake retaking its skin, broad shoulders flexing under oily black. “Just this, Petunia: You’re quick and brave and all the things a Weir should be, but when it comes right down to it, you’re a receptacle for mages. Not even a magical pussy, or any sort of that feminist claptrap. A rubber lying in the gutter. You catch the leavings of magic. And your mage is dead, and the Black isn’t the place of heroes and cowboys any longer.” He opened her door and fished a pair of sunglasses from his coat. “Don’t push me. I’ll fucking gut you.”
Pete didn’t move for ten minutes after the door shut, and when she did, all of her blood equalized with a feeling like plunging off the first drop in a roller coaster. Her muscles felt weak, kittenish, and she stumbled to the front door, throwing the deadbolt, the second lock, and the hasp at the top of the jamb, which she didn’t think Jack had bothered to lock, ever.
She watched her fingers shake for a moment, clasping the old iron. The curse was gone but the cold was still with her. Nick Naughton had come into her home, into her fucking flat, and he’d paralyzed her without so much as a word. He could have done anything—raped her, killed her, made her rise again as one of his spirits like his brother, Danny.
He hadn’t, but he’d known she’d think of it later, and know he could have. And that would be worse.
Pete checked the locks on all the windows, especially the kitchen window that looked out onto the fire stairs, and then she got the bottle from the cupboard and poured herself three fingers of whiskey, which she gulped down with two fast, hard swallows.
Her hands still rattled the glass as she set it down, and pulled her knees up to her chest on the sofa. Her heart continued to thrum until she’d poured another inch of whiskey into herself. She was scared of Naughton—anyone in their right mind would be scared by an unstable necromancer breaking into their flat—but she wasn’t afraid of him. Petty thug-level threats meant she’d scared him, too.
At the very least, his line about Gerard Carver was a load of crap. If Naughton hadn’t held the knife, he knew who did. He’d set up McCorkle, and he knew what spell Carver had been meant to work. He knew it all.
Pete went and put her glass in the kitchen sink, working her fingers on the porcelain edge until she was sure all the feeling had returned. Lawrence and probably even Jack would tell her to leave it, let Naughton think he’d won, and back the fuck off before she found herself with a sliced throat or worse.
But he’d come into her home, threatened her. She doubted Morningstar would be dissuaded by the tale, either. And if Pete was honest with herself, Nick Naughton had royally trampled on her toes, and she’d relish the opportunity to do a bit of stomping in return.
She wrote down the number Lawrence had given her for Motor, and then went to bed, burrowing under the coverlet until the last of the cold disappeared.
CHAPTER 17
Her first stop that evening, after she’d dealt with her new crop of bruises and cuts and found clothes that covered the worst ones, was a council block in Peckham, some of the new construction, very neat and tidy, with a geranium sprouting in the front window of number thirteen. Pete knocked with the flat of her fist. “Denny!”
A curtain twitched, and a moment later the door was thrown open. “Fuck off!” Denny Pendergast told her. “I’m clean, and you ain’t even a cop any longer.”
Pete folded her arms. “At least half of that is bullshit, and anyway, I’m not here in my former professional capacity.”
“I should fucking hope not.” He sniffed. “Considering the only job you’d have nowadays that’d allow you to knock on my door would be mail girl or prozzie.”
“I’m a private citizen and that means I can put a steel-toed boot in your crotch with very little repercussion,” Pete
told him. “Let me in, unless you want to conduct business in the breezeway, all smiling for the CCTVs. Somehow I don’t think you’ve been out of Pentonville long enough to show off.”
Denny grumbled and pulled the door wide. He knew she couldn’t do fuck-all about anything she saw inside, and he was grinning as her eyes roved over the stacks of newspapers, the broken-down sofa facing the high-end gaming system and LCD television, and the pair of plain black gun safes that comprised Denny’s sitting room.
“I need a pistol,” she told him. Denny’s skinny sharp-boned face split in a wary grin.
“You’re pulling my leg.”
Pete pointed at the cut on her face, which had gone from bloody gash to angry red line. She wasn’t sure which was worse. “Do I look like I’m pulling your bony leg, you tosser?”
Denny considered, and then went to the safe on the left and punched in a combination. “What sort you need?”
“Sig Sauer?”
He snorted. “In your fucking dreams. Copper wants a copper’s gun. There’s a shock.” He gestured at the safes. “I’ve revolvers from the stone age, Steyer knockoffs out of Russia, and if you’re considering an upgrade, couple of fucking pristine Winchester Model Sevens. For you, I give the civil-service discount. Cash up front, no refunds, no exchanges.”
“I just need something small I can shove in my jeans,” Pete sighed. “And that takes ammo enough to do some real damage with the first shot.”
Denny raised a finger. “My stock’s not classy enough for your kind of person, Former Detective Inspector Caldecott, but I did take something in trade last week. Wait here.”
He returned with a pistol wrapped in cloth. “It’s a fucking antique but it’ll get the job done.”
Pete hefted the little Walther and tucked it into the waistband of her denim, smoothing her jacket over it. She might as well have been concealing nothing at all. It wasn’t slick and nickle plated like James Bond’s, but she wasn’t about to get picky over aesthetics. “It shoots?”
“ ’Course it shoots.” Denny pulled an offended face. “I’d be out of business pretty fucking quick if I sold ornamental shooters.”
“Fine,” Pete said, taking the gun out and testing the weight and balance. It was a good little piece, and deceptively heavy. “How much?”
“On the house, provided you never, ever come back here again,” Denny said. “It’s a showy piece, high-end. I sell it to some fucking street hustler, he shoots some fucking boy over some drunken fight, the cops find the original owner and through that whiny little ponce find me. Doing me a favor.” He handed her a box of bullets. “Hollow point. You’ll tear a bloke up with those.”
“Cheers.” Pete secreted the box in her bag and the Walther back in her waistband. “Bye, Denny.”
“Oi,” Denny said, when she was on the stoop. “You never did tell me what you want an untraceable piece for, Caldecott. Always figured you were a regular straight arrow. Charged into battle with your baton and a prayer.”
“Me?” Pete smoothed her shirt over the gun. “No. Straight arrow is something I don’t have the luxury of being any longer.”
Denny started to say something, but he changed it midstream to, “Where you off to?”
Pete stepped into the breezeway and zipped her coat against the chill that came with sunset. “I’m off to see a man about a corpse.”
CHAPTER 18
Whatever else happened, Pete felt calmer having decided on one thing—if Nicholas Naughton came near her again, she was going to put two bullets between his eyes. The sick stomach and itch on the back of her neck she’d felt since Naughton had broken into her flat finally calmed a little.
She saw the owl sitting on a lightpost soon after she got off the tube in Southwark. It stared at her, unblinking. Pete flicked it off and approached a boy on the corner, shiny red and gold windcheater and iPod marking him as the kind of hustler she needed. “Oi.”
He looked up at her with bright, speed-contracted pupils. “Wot?”
“You know a club called Motor?”
The hustler blinked rapidly at her. “Sure I do, but it ain’t the kind of place you want.”
Pete had dressed the part, black army jacket, boots, black denim. No copper signals from her. The hustler’s reluctance was, as far as she was concerned, just being contrary. “Why not?”
“Ain’t for straight folks,” the hustler said. “Now, you want something to taste, I gots crystal, hash, pills, morphine…”
“Regular little underground Boots, aren’t you?” Pete said. She pulled out a tenner and folded it between her fingers. When the hustler grabbed for it, she snatched it back. “Motor. Where?”
“Your funeral, ain’t it?” the hustler sighed. He pointed to an abandoned building at the end of the block. “Down in the cellar. You won’t get in, though. Need a password, like one of them skeevy sex clubs.”
“Thanks for that,” Pete said. “Time Out should come ’round and interview you, really.”
The hustler dialed his iPod back up. Pete walked, and the shadow of the owl flicked over her face as it glided away beneath the streetlamps.
The Hecate could send all the omens she wanted. Pete wasn’t biting. She had far more pressing issues, like how she was going to talk her way into Motor. And trying to ignore the nerves, telling her it was a bad fucking idea in the first place, that she wouldn’t learn anything new, and might get the shit kicked out of her besides.
A cross faced her when she reached the door the hustler had pointed at, covered over with several layers of racist graffiti and concert posters advertising bands that had last come through London several years previous. OUR LADY OF GOOD COUNSEL had been painted across the facade, but the letters been defaced to GOOD CO N.
The neon underneath the facade crunched beneath her boots, shattered, and the burn marks spelled out REPENT TO THE LORD, FOR ONLY IN HIM WILL YOU FIND SALVATION.
The basement level, at the bottom of a narrow set of brick steps, appeared to have staved off vandalism, in the form of a heavy fire door that looked as if it could withstand an IRA bomb. Pete pressed the buzzer. The Black was thick here, gathering in what had once been a sacred place, profane as a swastika across the face of the Virgin Mary. The energy wasn’t friendly, as much as the Black was ever friendly. Pete felt it tighten against her skull, trying to worm its way inside and fill up her reservoirs. She shut her eyes and breathed short and sharp through her nose. Pressed the buzzer again.
Thunder cracked somewhere close, and a smattering of rain fell on Pete before a slot in the door slid open, and an eye regarded her. “Yeah?”
“I’m…” Pete started, ready to flirt, threaten, or lie her way inside as the occasion called for. She knew enough names to chat a good game, at least until someone more intelligent than a door minder got involved.
“Pete Caldecott,” said the eye’s owner. “Hang on.”
Pete composed herself in the few seconds it took the fire door to unlock itself and roll open. She’d never thought her name would get her anything in the Black except grief.
The eye belonged to a bouncer, and the bouncer was, contrary to gravelly growl and shaved head, a woman, half a foot taller and probably twice as wide as Pete. “You’re not much, are you?” she asked Pete.
“You look like enough for both of us,” Pete said. The bouncer stepped aside and clapped her on the back hard enough to realign her vertebrae.
“Have fun, little girl.”
Motor started out in a long, oppressive hall that seemed to vanish into an event horizon, painted as it was in jet black with white, light-reactive graffiti over the entire length that faded as the dark encroached again with the slamming of the door.
Music flowed through the walls, up through the soles of her boots and into her bones. Hard, percussive, post-apocalyptic music that made you want to put a fist through someone’s face. She caught the tail end of “Ace of Spades” before it switched over to an old track by Slayer.
A beaded curtain par
ted before her, and a couple stumbled out, girl and boy attired almost identically in studs, denim, and blunt, face-breaking boots. Pete gave them a berth, as their clothes were already starting to come off.
She pushed the curtain, sticky with nicotine residue, aside, and stepped into the club proper. There had been plenty of shady dives in her days following Jack’s band around, but none made her feel quite so much as if she’d stepped into the Wild West.
The music emanated from an ancient, scarred Wurlitzer that dominated one wall, red lights rotating over the gathering of faces in a gibbous, arhythmic pattern, like living blood spatter. PA speakers grew from snaking cables and sprouted over the pit like cubist flowers.
Gleaming white paintings continued over all the walls, flaring and fading as light hit. Giant eyes, inverted pentagrams, all of it just a bit too sharp and real to be random graffiti. Motor might have been a club on the daylight side, but Naughton’s fleshcrafters had been busy decorating.
The club consisted of a bar, blocked in with razor wire except for a few small gaps through which a bartender roughly the size and shape of a lorry pushed pints, the pit, and a stage. The stage was empty, but the pit was full, flashing metal and flowing ink over skin, the crunch and thud of flesh and bone connecting, hard.
Pete joined the crowd around the bar, taking an inventory of the locals before she did anything foolish, like open her mouth. If Naughton had really been serious, somebody would find her and scold her soon enough. The song changed again, and the rhythm of the pit increased, bodies heaving like corpses on a tide.
Arms shoved her, and a bloke with a mohawk held stiff by orange spray-paint knocked into her, moving her away from the bar and toward the edge of the pit. Pete turned around and shouted “Oi!” but the mass had their backs to her, focused on shouting orders at the bartenders. “Fucking Hell,” Pete said. Her bruises reminded her to be more careful about being shoved while she studied the crowd. No faces popped out. What had she been expecting? A sinister backroom where all of Naughton’s secrets would be revealed? Dark rites conducted in the VIP lounge? The reality was a grungy, passé club full of metalheads and smells she could just as well do without.
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