Soul Trade

by Caitlin Kittredge

Pete braced herself. There was going to be a shitstorm when Donovan ran, but Morwenna had to take them out of here. She simply had to. Pete didn’t allow herself to worry that Morwenna might be vindictive enough to go back on her word. Or might figure out Donovan escaping was part of Pete’s plan. At least Margaret would be safe. She was innocent. Morwenna had to see that.

  “Miss Caldecott!” Margaret hissed urgently, grabbing at her arm. Pete turned.

  “I said it’ll be fine, Margaret. You’ll be on your way back to Manchester soon enough.”

  “That woman is dangerous,” Margaret whispered.

  “Miss Morgenstern leaves something to be desired in personality,” Pete said. “But she’s not a bad sort, Margaret. Calm down.”

  “No,” Margaret hissed. “I know her.”

  Pete blinked. The cold was back, curling around the base of her spine. Morwenna was less than ten steps away. Pete crouched, looking at Margaret’s thin face, her eyes almost impossibly large with fear.

  “How do you know Morwenna?” she said quietly. “Tell me exactly.”

  “I saw her,” Margaret mumbled. “When that Crotherton bloke came round, she was with him. She waited in the car, but I saw her. She was staring up at my window.”

  Pete felt a stone drop into her guts, the weight of knowing she’d been wrong smashing into her like a lorry. Wrong, stupid, and decieved.

  “Pete…” Jack said, and when she looked up he had his hands raised, fingers spread as if he were waving to her.

  “Stand up,” Donovan told her. “Don’t make me force Jackie to harm himself, because that’d be a real heartbreak on my part.”

  Donovan wasn’t just chattering—Pete looked at his fist and saw a slim black pistol there. “I guess when your only hex is so limp, that’s necessary, yeah?” she said.

  “It does the trick,” Donovan said, giving Jack a gentle prod. “Stand still, Jackie. This isn’t going to get ugly if I can help it.”

  Pete straightened up slowly, keeping her movements easy and calm. She put one hand on Margaret’s shoulder and stretched the other out to Donovan. “There’s no need for that.”

  “There’s a very great need,” Morwenna said. She folded her arms, the smug curl of her lip just begging to be smacked out of existence. “We’re not going to rough you up, Pete, but you are slippery. So forgive the harsh treatment.”

  Get it under control, the part of her that sounded like Connor snarled. Stop staring and start thinking.

  “Got to hand it to you, Morwenna,” Pete said out loud. “Getting Donovan to flip—that was pretty tricky.”

  “Oh,” Morwenna said, patting Jack down with efficient movements, “not at all.”

  Jack grinned at her, showing all his teeth. “Little higher and to the left, luv.”

  Morwenna sent him a disgusted look and then stood, brushing off her hands. “Spare me, Mr. Winter. You’re not nearly as charming as you think.”

  “A Prospero goon in your pocket,” Pete persisted. “It’s like you didn’t need me at all.” There was a lot about this she didn’t understand, but the machinations of the Prometheans didn’t interest her. All that mattered was that she’d been set up, and their ride out of Overton had vanished.

  “Pete, Pete,” Morwenna sighed, performing the same patdown on Pete as she had on Jack. “There is no Prospero Society. That was just to get you out here.”

  It felt like a punch. Of course—she should have seen it from the very start. One secret mage clubhouse strained credulity; two was a stupid plot from a bad movie.

  “Sorry,” Donovan said with a shrug. “They needed someone to play the villain, and let’s face it—for you two, I fit the bill.”

  Morwenna stood up again. “Who better than Jack’s estranged father to get you on the right track?”

  “I know that Crotherton’s not the point of all this, then.” Pete seized on the chance to slot in the missing pieces. Morwenna wasn’t a Dr. Doom type, but she was chatty, and anything Pete could learn would help them get out of this mess.

  “It’s very simple,” Morwenna said. “You’re a wild card, Petunia, wherever you go. You never listen to anyone but yourself, and in this case I knew you’d find me what Preston killed himself to avoid giving up. But only if I told you not to—only if I sent you here with some utterly mundane task that you’d rebel against.”

  Pete felt her teeth grind. “You used me to find the soul well.” She resented being tricked—being used was beyond the pale.

  “Will use,” Morwenna said. “None of us can stand to be in close proximity. The only reason we’re not already shambling is because we’re all mages. But none of us are Weirs.” There was the smile again, cold and satisfied. Morwenna thought she was very smart indeed.

  “Well, you’re shite out of luck, then,” Pete said. “Because I don’t know where it is. So do your worst, because that won’t change anything.”

  “Fine by me,” Morwenna said. “You’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass since the day I realized we needed you and Jack to pull this off.”

  “Pull what off?” Jack scoffed. “The soul well ain’t going to make you immortal, luv. It’s going to drain you dry and fill you up with something blank and evil and that’ll be the end of you.”

  “If I want ignorant prattle, I can get it from the telly,” Morwenna snapped. “I don’t need the live show. And if you’d stuck with anything long enough to learn about the Black, Mr. Winter, you’d know that the soul well can grant power to the mage who knows the proper ritual steps, which I do.”

  “So that line about Jack being the Merlin?” Pete said. “Just something to string me along?”

  “I fully believe Mr. Winter is the Merlin,” Morwenna said, as Jack’s eyes went wide. “It’s just a shame he’ll never get a chance to realize his potential. There’s no room for mavericks or loose ends in what’s coming, and sadly you’re both.”

  Pete shook her head again, drawing Margaret closer to her. “We’re not helping you.”

  “I understand you want safety for this child,” Morwenna said. “And for your own. If you don’t help, I can guarantee they’ll die screaming.”

  Margaret flinched under Pete’s hand, and Pete had to admit Morwenna had thought up an answer for every angle.

  She thought about the raven, when she’d woken up from the dream. This is a place of death. Run and never look back.

  “I don’t know how to get back there,” she admitted. “My talent got drawn in, not me. I woke up and I was there.”

  “Not a problem,” Morwenna said. “Donovan, might I borrow you for a moment?”

  Victor took up Donovan’s position behind Jack, while Donovan approached Pete. “Don’t worry, luv,” he said. “This’ll only hurt for a minute.”

  Pete tried to shy away, tried to pull back, but Donovan caught her, his powers sweeping away her own talent like so much flotsam under a flood. His talent drowned Pete, and when she opened her eyes, everything had vanished.

  24.

  Pete saw nothing but the mist, the slivery shapes of the wraiths darting through it like fish above a reef. Her feet were bare, and she dug her fingers into the graveyard earth to see if she was awake. Pebbles dug into her flesh and dirt crept under her nails.

  The graveyard was empty, and she was colder than the air would suggest. So maybe not dreaming, but not awake, either. The mausoleum was tumbled down, covered in black lichen, and the village beyond, what she could see, was ravaged by fire and time. Tendrils of smoke, the same gunmetal color as the sky, wafted upward like the tentacles of some great creature, reaching for the last vestiges of light sinking in the west.

  This time, there wouldn’t be any sudden awakening at her destination. This time, Pete followed the flight of the ravens, dark ink blots on the dirty paper of the sky, and walked. The gravel bit into her feet. She was dressed only in her sleep clothes, one of Jack’s T-shirts, underwear, and little else, same as last time.

  The landscape wasn’t entirely unexpected. She’d seen a l
ot of strange things, and a slice of the in-between bleeding into the real would could bring visions of the future. Or the possible future. Or just her own fears.

  She decided to keep her head down as she passed a pile of bodies—the villagers, now naked and bloated with a week’s worth of rot, rivulets of black and green working their way under the skin where veins used to lie.

  It wasn’t real, she reminded herself. It was just power acting on her frail human neurons, her fear center, electricity dancing through her cerebral cortex. It wasn’t a real future, it was just Donovan shredding through her memories and making her see things.

  Pete tried to push back, to see things as they really were, but her vision skewed and pain cut her from head to toe.

  Donovan’s power felt like a net of barbs over her talent and consciousness, and Pete knew that pushing harder would only make her catatonic. There wasn’t much she could do when a mind-control spell had its hooks in her. And now, Donovan wanted her to show him the soul well, the place her talent had been so drawn to she’d walked there in her sleep.

  She had to play along or see Margaret and Lily and everyone she cared about hurt. So Pete pressed on through the memories, tainted by the proximity of the soul well, showing her all the things she feared most.

  It felt like eternity, the walk over rocky paths and rough-grassed hills that cut at her feet and snatched at her ankles. She’d begun to despair of ever seeing the spot, but she kept walking, kept following the ravens. They stopped occasionally, to perch on the corpse of a dead cow or peck at the eyeball of a fallen villager, but they moved west. Always west.

  The power in the earth swelled and groaned, a thrumming like buried cables that Pete could discern through the soles of her feet. The sound reached her ears like the entire world was breathing, sleeping, but not for long. When she came over the hill and saw the twisted tree and the pile of stones, she felt almost an anticlimax, as if the strangest part of the journey were over.

  I told you to go away, the raven croaked at her. Why did you not heed? It stretched its neck and wings, staring at her with its stone eyes.

  “I’m not the Morrigan’s bitch,” Pete said. “You don’t get to order me about.”

  The raven opened its beak wide, and Pete thought if it were a person, it would laugh in her face. The Morrigan’s desires and those of your allies will never match, Weir, it said. My lady makes no secret of what she wants.

  “War, apocalypse, and Jack leading the way,” Pete snapped. “I know exactly what she wants. And by the way, these aren’t my allies. This dream state I’m in right now was forced on me.”

  And why do you think what men and demons want is so very different? said the raven. What has given you the illusion that you and the other humans have disparate desires? You are all grasping for a little more life, a little more power.

  “I don’t want power the way Morwenna Morgenstern means to get it,” Pete told the raven, itching to pick up one of the rocks from the cairn and whip it at bird’s smug black bulk. “I’m not a psychopath.”

  When the day comes that Jack stands at the head of the Hag’s army, Morwenna Morgenstern will be prepared, said the raven. Not you. Does that not trouble you?

  “I don’t want immortality,” Pete said. “I don’t give a toss about anything except shutting up the soul well, keeping this infection from spreading, and keeping my family out of harm’s way.”

  That’s all? The raven sounded genuinely puzzled. Not even the faintest thought of immortality?

  “Nothing lives forever,” Pete told it. “Not me, not Morwenna. Not even the Hag.”

  Then I wish you well, the raven said, since I couldn’t sway you. The Hag will see you if you attempt to close the well or to stall the reckoning a little longer. She sees everything.

  Pete wrapped her arms around herself. Standing here, the power of the soul well leaking into her mind, she felt small and frail. She was small and frail, in the face of this thing. Humans in the Black didn’t last long. They were specks compared to the lifespan of a Fae, or a demon, or a thing like the Morrigan.

  But she was here now, and she needed to wake up before Donovan’s zeal to see what she saw blew out the circuits of her mind for good.

  The stones piled in a cairn over the well were sharp, lava glass, nothing that could be dug out of the earth of Herefordshire. Pete stretched out her fingers, touched them, and felt the feedback of power. She sensed a vast space, full of white vapors, gibbous bodies, sharp edges. Emptiness, more complete than anything she’d experienced. And always, a screaming. Echoing endlessly, because the place was as infinite as the pain it induced.

  Biting down on her lip, Pete closed her fist around the rock and gave a sharp tug. There was no pain for a long moment, even though blood flowed freely. Then she heard voices. She felt someone shaking her and the sharp, hot sting of broken skin on her fingers.

  “Come on, luv, wake up!” Jack’s rough hands slapped her lightly on the cheek. “What did you do to her?” he demanded.

  “I told you, she’ll be all right,” Donovan said. “No worse than taking a couple of sleeping pills.”

  “This is clearly not the same thing,” Jack snarled.

  “Instead of second-guessing me, why don’t you say thank you?” Donovan growled. “We got what we needed without any bloodshed. Your little tartlet came through.”

  Morwenna gave a slight twitch of her head. “I wish you wouldn’t make it so theatrical, Donovan. Eyes rolling back in the head and all.”

  Margaret stared at her as well, and Pete guessed she’d been babbling like some kind of streetcorner nutter. “I’m sorry, luv,” she said quietly, “but it’s for the best. Need to keep you safe, don’t I?” She turned on Morwenna, putting steel in her voice even though her head throbbed so from Donovan’s invasion that she was seeing double. “A bargain’s a bargain. Get her out of here, now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Morwenna said with a shrug. “But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, deception is a necessary part of this endeavor. We can’t have any witnesses to what we’re attempting.”

  She gestured to Victor. “Please dispose of the girl. The rest of you, fan out through the village. Start looking for what Preston took from me.”

  “No!” Margaret cried, jumping behind Pete. Jack gave a snarl.

  “This is what you’re about, you slag? Murdering kids?”

  “I’m about saving England,” Morwenna snapped. “What do you think will happen if the soul well is not controlled? If it is not channeled into a mage? It will spread, Jack, and what’s happened in Overton will look like a low-budget zombie film compared to what’s coming.”

  Pete felt the whirling in her head redouble. The immediate panic of Morwenna’s order lapped up against the sinking in her gut when she realized that the soul cage was still in her jacket pocket. In the jacket that Margaret was currently wearing.

  “Victor!” Morwenna snapped as a complement of Prometheans started down the side streets of the village. “Are you deaf?”

  Victor drew back, frowning. “I don’t kill children. I’m not an assassin.”

  “You are precisely what I tell you to be, Victor,” she hissed. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Margaret started to shake behind Pete, and Jack moved in, gripping her arm. “Pete…” he said, low. “Do something.”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” she hissed as Morwenna went to Victor and shook him by the lapels of his expensive suit.

  “Do as I say!” she shouted. “She’s one girl! Take care of it.”

  Victor drew back, wresting himself from her grip. “No. It’s not going to happen, Morwenna. Find someone else.”

  “Idiot,” she spat at Victor, then turned on her heel toward Pete and Jack. “Donovan,” Morwenna snapped, and Pete’s heart skipped in time with the sound of him checking the chamber on his pistol.

  “Sorry, Jackie,” he said. “We all do things we don’t want to because we must.”

  “For the greater good?�
� Jack growled at his father. “Or just because you’ve bought into the lies this bitch has fed you?”

  “I’m beginning to sense that you can’t or won’t see the bigger picture,” Donovan said. He aimed the pistol between Margaret’s eyes, and the girl let out a strangled little cry that Pete mirrored involuntarily.

  From the corner of her eye, Pete saw the shadow descend, gliding above the rooftops before it turned on the breeze and bore directly toward her. She ducked at the last second, pulling Margaret with her as the raven fell on Donovan, black wings frenzied as it raked and pecked at his face.

  Donovan screamed, and in the sky Pete saw a dozen dark shadows, the rest of the ravens she’d seen in the village, watching over the people and the graveyard.

  Pete took the opportunity. She hooked Donovan’s leg with her foot and shoved, sending him tumbling into the loamy earth. The ravens covered him, black and shiny, rippling backs like oily water. One looked Pete in the eye.

  Go. Find the edge of the village.

  “What about Jack and Margaret?” she asked.

  Jack is the Morrigan’s favored son, the raven said. He and the girl have the same protection offered to you. Now run.

  “Bitch,” Donovan gasped from the ground, but Pete ran without looking back. She couldn’t care less what sort of fate befell Donovan.

  “Go,” she snapped at Margaret as more and more ravens descended, alighting on Morwenna and Victor as well, spreading out to follow the other agents of the Prometheus Club, who shouted and ran for cover as the fog filled up with black bodies and the birds’ guttural cries.

  Jack paused at the edge of the square, watching the rippling mass of birds that covered Donovan. Pete grabbed his arm and yanked, not being gentle. “Don’t tell me this is the time you pick to get sentimental,” she said.

  “No,” Jack said after a heartbeat. “Fuck ’im.”

  They ran, all three, and Pete didn’t look back again until the low cottages of Overton were out of sight in the fog.

  Part Three

  Wasteland