“No,” said Jack. “No, a demon free in the world would be wearing human skin. This is…” He sighed and brushed the dampness from his hair, leaving it wild like a Celt’s. “Bugger all, Pete. I don’t know what this is.” For Jack to admit ignorance made the situation bad, bad in the way that had ended in blood once before. Pete bit her lower lip hard to blot out memories of London that had no place.
“Knew this place was wrong,” she muttered, retracing Roy’s footstep. Knew that something sinister was lurking under the tacky cheerfulness of the Paradise Palace. Knew it, and doubted, and kept her mouth shut. Now Roy had been killed by it.
“Oi, where’re you going?” Jack shouted when she started to walk away. Pete stopped, not looking back.
“I’m following it,” she said. “Coming?”
PETE WALKED, UNTIL SHE WAS SURE THE WIND and wet had sunken into her bones and she would become soft and gibbous, a waterlogged shade who would never be warm again. Roy’s footprints led down the beach, past casinos blinking their promise of free bingo weekly out to sea, past a boarded-up boat rental shack and finally into the wild, scrubby little trees and the phantom bones of driftwood clustered where the tide had left them.
The tracks took a turn inland, and Pete and Jack crested a hillock and descended into the bogs. The sound of the sea was muffled by winter-blackened dead trees and the salt air became clammy and sour. Roy’s reversed tracks deepened, running for his life.
Pete slipped in the mud, but Jack, in his workman’s boots, tromped along merrily champing on a cigarette like he was taking a turn through Regent’s Park.
“Bloody kill you,” Pete muttered.
“Here,” said Jack from ahead of her, gesturing with the lit end of his Parliament.
Pete examined the spot where the web-foot tracks dragged themselves out of the peat muck and began to follow Roy’s shaky strides. His ended a few meters farther on, seemingly in the flat marsh water that reflected Pete’s frown back at her.
“This can’t be where he came from.”
“Maybe he swam,” Jack shrugged. He did a slow circle, looking out over the brackish-colored marshland visible through the fog, and then flicked his cigarette butt into the water.
“That’s a cartload of bollocks,” Pete told him. She crouched and dipped her fingers into the marsh, recoiling as sinuous underwater plants grasped at her skin. “The water’s no more than a couple of degrees. And he wasn’t wet on the beach.”
Jack sighed. “Pete, it’s bloody strange, yeah, but what do you want me to do about it, grab a ruddy iron hook and drag the bottom? I’m on holiday!”
“That Charlotte girl could still be alive!” Pete cried. “Can’t you call up an imp and offer it Roy’s blood or something to reveal her true location?”
“Doesn’t work that way and you know it,” said Jack. “Magic isn’t tricks and forcing it to do what you want. It’s the fabric of the Black and it has its limitations.”
“And by limitations, you’re meaning that you’re a lazy git,” Pete snapped. “This place is doing something to the people in the hotel. You know it is.” A bird screamed from somewhere invisible. She shuddered. Her skull felt like it was splitting apart from the inside the longer they stayed out here in the fog and if she stared at the water, she swore that glimmering ebony tendrils moved underneath the tiny ripples stirred by the wind. “I can feel it,” Pete muttered. “I’m not imagining things and neither was Henrietta.”
“There might be something evil here,” said Jack, in what for him was a gentle tone. He clasped her on the shoulder, fingers knobby as a skeleton. “It’s not ours to rush in with flaming swords, Pete. Charlotte’s gone, probably dead. ‘S what I saw for her last night, anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’m wet and tired. Let’s go back to the hotel, sleep, and go back to London, right?” He rubbed both hands up and down Pete’s arms when she shivered. “Charlotte will either turn up or she won’t. Dead, or not. It’s not in your hands, luv.”
“And when we get back to London,” Pete said quietly. “Everything will be safe and nice and normal? Is that what you think, Jack? You think a cheap hotel suite and lies to get a free dinner made me forget you nearly being killed, or being left alone with that sorcerer’s spirit to fight off?” She shook her head, venom coursing in her veins. For just a moment, the air was breathy with corpse-dust and the glowing eyes of the spirit Jack had released shone down on her with the light of damnation.
“You’re pathetic,” Pete spat at Jack. “You fob off problems and expect the world to flow around you and everyone to forget what a bastard you really are. Well I won’t forget, Jack, so you and your holiday can go bugger yourselves.”
His face clamped shut over the flicker of pain Pete saw, and his lip curled. “You aim for the killing cut, luv. Well done.” He pushed past her and walked back down the path. After a moment more staring into the fog, trying not to sob from sheer frustration, Pete followed him because there was nothing else she could do.
THE SKY WAS THE GRAY OF A DEAD WOMAN’S hair when they finally reached the hotel. The light was moving on toward evening, if there was such a thing in this endlessly fogbound place. Jack made a beeline for the hotel bar and Pete stormed over to the lift and punched the button to take her back to the room.
“You’ve left mud on the carpet, Miss,” Gerry the maître d’ sneered, creeping up at her elbow. Pete hit the button again.
“Ask me if I bloody care. Isn’t it your job to clean these things?”
“You’re fighting with the other half, then?” Gerry said, his smile growing wider. Pete glared at him as the lift dinged open.
“Poke your shiny head into someone else’s business.”
“That’s a yes, then,” said Gerry as the door rolled closed. Just for a second, her Weir gift flared and Gerry had pointed teeth and a frog’s webbed hands. He laughed, flicking a forked tongue.
Pete leaned her head back against the satin wall and the tears did come, unstoppable against the tide of the Black. The city and the bog and the hotel were dark places, evil, and she just wanted to get away… Pete clutched at her head as a flood of whispers engulfed her, sliding into a crouch against the pain and the unbearable pressure of magic. “Stop it,” she begged. “Stop it, stop it… I see. I understand.”
Hissing, the whispers faded away, slowly, and she realized that the lift doors were standing open on the top floor. Everything was normal—cheesy gilt wallpaper, kissing-swan mirrors and the plastic carved paneling on the suite’s door.
The thought that she might be going mad crossed Pete’s mind.
She slammed the door to the suite behind her and locked the chain bolt, not that it would stop Jack, when and if he came upstairs. If he’d lived a hundred years ago, he could have easily plied a trade as a sneak-thief in the alleys of London.
Pete threw off her shoes and collapsed on the bed, sundown darkening the room to velvety gray-black. Jack came in after a time, stumbled in the dark, smelled of whiskey and too many Parliaments, and then Pete slept, fitfully and with dreams of dark things rolling beneath marsh water.
PETE WOKE WITH A GASP AND THE SOFTLY glowing face of the bedside clock staring at her. Twelve midnight. She breathed deeply and put a hand over her heart, which was thumping the way it did when she had the nightmare that Jack had died, and she’d been too late to save him. The sorcerer spirit touched him and stole his magic. And then Pete killed the ghost wearing Jack’s face.
Jack let out a soft drunken snore from the sofa and Pete relaxed, using the still rush of waves and the cool touch of the utterly black night to calm herself.
In the darkness by the wardrobe, something slithered.
Pete bolted upright, out of the satin sheets and over the edge of the bed, scrabbling away from the sound toward the balcony. “Jack!” she hissed.
The sounds were all around her, not half-imagined offshoots of ambient magic but real, wet squelching of misshapen limbs over the carpet and gibbering moans. For a dreadful instant, the
fog parted and moonshine struck the room. Pete saw hundreds of wet black-green bodies gleaming, while triple rows of eyes lolled in protuberant exoskeletons and bone teeth with razor points dribbled ichor from misshapen mouths.
In her lifetime, Pete had faced too many of her fears without flinching, because it was what was required. Gang members with guns. Jack, alive and dead. The bottomless cold power of the Black that burned you from inside your skull when your magic took hold.
The nearest marsh-creature’s tentacle wrapped around Pete’s ankle with a cold so icy, it burned, and Pete decided Bugger all that for a lark. She screamed to wake the dead. “JACK!”
For a horrible second nothing happened, and then witchfire flamed to life in the vicinity of the sofa and Jack’s tousled platinum hair and face coalesced, hollow-eyed in the blue light. “Bloody hell, can’t a bloke get a decent night’s—?” He saw the things, then, although they hissed and drew back from the witch-fire into the dark.
Pete grabbed the digit around her ankle and pulled, but it only contracted harder, squashy and palpable like a muscle with no bones inside. “Do something! Get rid of these fucking things!” she screamed at Jack. More feelers attached to her wrists, her legs, snaking up from the floor to bind her, or worse.
Jack stomped on the creatures underfoot. The witchfire in his palm matched by twin flames in his eyes. “Saighid!” he bellowed. The chalk warding on the door flared to life like a flashbulb, and then just as quickly threw violent blue sparks and went out.
“Well, bugger me sideways with a barbell,” Jack mused. “That should have worked.”
Pete snatched the cut-glass candy dish Jack used as an ashtray off the wardrobe and began beating away the beasts, some of which looked like many-legged octopods, some just gaping mouths with three or four eyes supported by flimsy nets of tissue. She was nearly free when a pair of crushingly strong arms wrapped around her torso and lifted her off the ground.
“It didn’t work, Mr. Winter,” said Gerry the maître d’, now attired in a black sweater and slacks, a watchcap covering the sheen of his bald head. He appeared from out of the loo, the long kitchen knife in his hand catching light like the tooth of a great wolf. “Innocent blood spilled is piss-poor for warding hexes. Degrades their magic right down to nothing.”
Jack gaped at him, looking more outraged that his hex had failed than at the fact his hotel room was full of bog-spawned horrors. “Innocent blood?” he managed. “What sodding blood? I cut meself shaving, but in case it escaped your attention, I’m far from innocent as Leicestershire is from Los Angeles.”
“The creature,” Pete managed, although the person holding her was doing it tightly enough to crack ribs. “The dead thing, in the bath. Innocent blood.”
“Oh, you have got to be jerking me!” Jack shouted. “The bloody hell is wrong with you freaks? Drink too much swamp water on the job?”
A small five-legged octopod with a sucker mouth crawled up Pete’s leg, and she kicked it away. It gave a high squeak as it bounced off the opposite wall. The man holding her grabbed her hair with one hand and jerked her neck back almost to breaking. “I’ll thank ye to leave my creatures alone, miss.”
“Donovan?” Pete rasped.
He grinned. “The same.”
“Let go of her,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing to fiery slits. “You’ve made me ask you twice now, and I’m all out of patience for it.”
“You’re coming along quietly,” said Gerry. “Or my servant is going to snap your wife’s neck. We’d hate for an accident to occur on hotel grounds, but some things are simply unavoidable.”
“It’s all right, Jack,” said Pete. An involuntary tear worked out of her eye when Donovan twisted her neck. “Just go with him.”
Jack looked from her to Gerry, then slowly lowered his hands. The witchfire nickered out of existence. “You’ve got me,” he muttered quietly. “I’ll do anything you sodding want. Just don’t hurt her.”
Pete slumped. Jack wasn’t supposed to surrender—he was supposed to bloody get away and help her escape when the opportunity presented. Noble gestures were so contrary that she almost started crying again.
“Unfortunately,” said Gerry with a wide smile. “I’m not sure I can fulfill that promise, Mr. Winter. You and the missus make a pair, you see.” He jerked his head at Donovan. “Get her to the boat.”
DONOVAN AND GERRY TOOK THEM THROUGH A BASEMENT service door that backed onto a canal filled with garbage and brown sludge that looked more like intestinal distress than water. A pole launch bumped gently against a pier made of old plastic drums sealed with tar.
Pete fell on her knees in the aft of the launch when Donovan shoved her. “Not so chatty now, are ye?”
“I’ll set a badger on your bollocks,” Pete muttered. Donovan kicked her and she felt something give, low down near her stomach. She bit the insides of her cheeks. She wouldn’t get Donovan off by yelling.
“Knock that off,” Gerry commanded as he wrestled Jack into the launch. “You remember what happened last time you bruised the sacrifices, surely.”
Donovan grunted, and Jack raised his eyebrows. “So you two are the silly gits playing doctor with creatures of the Black. Have to say I’m a bit let down.”
“Shut up,” Gerry said. “This is older and larger than you, mage, and I don’t expect you to understand.” He pushed Jack down next to Pete, and cast off the line. Donovan poled the skiff into the channel and they drifted toward the sea.
“You all right?” Jack muttered without moving his mouth too much. Pete sucked in a breath. A dull shiv of pain slid between her broken bones.
“Hurt, but I can run for it if I need to.”
“Quiet, you two,” Donovan warned.
“Go bugger yourself,” said Jack loudly. “If you hurt us, you’ll be stuck sacrificing that bloody overcooked roast you served me last night.” To Pete, he murmured, “Sorry.”
Pete blinked. Never mind creatures in the suite and the thick dark magic that lived in the air around Blackpool—Jack apologizing was truly a phenomenon. “You are?”
“Should have listened to you,” he said. “This is a dodgy place.”
“Yeah, and the time for guilt has cruised past like a missed bus,” Pete said. “So what are we going to do?”
The launch drifted through connected channels and the salt tang told Pete they were near the bog, moonlit mist curling away from the prow. Were it not for the pain in her ribs and the thrumming of darkness in the waters, they could have been on the hidden path to Avalon.
“We wait, for now,” said Jack. “Until we get where we’re going. I want to see what these sods are on about.”
“That’s a terrible plan,” Pete hissed. “We need to swim for it. Where we’re going to is an untimely death!”
“No…” said Jack slowly, his head swiveling as the skiff began to slow. Pete struggled up and followed his eyes. Jack tilted his head. “That’s where we’re going.”
Something massive and hunched rose out of the water, taller than the windbroken trees along the shore. It was stone and moss, slimy and shining as if it had just woken from under the mud. Columns held a crooked roofpiece made of insectoid carapaces and steps covered in algae led to the round opening, jagged pieces of broken stone lining it like rotted teeth.
The skiff bumped against the bottom stones and Donovan hauled her up, nearly dislocating her arm.
“Any tricks from ye,” he told Jack, “and she breaks like a matchstick.”
“I’ll enjoy feeding you your still-beating heart, you bastard,” Jack said pleasantly as Gerry pushed him out of the boat.
“Hear that, Donnie-boy?” Gerry said. “That’s a sentiment born of true love.” They laughed as Pete and Jack were herded up the steps to the temple door.
It was a temple. That was the best way Pete could describe it. The stones were massive and hand cut, carved with curling tentacles and lidless eyes and the great humped backs of creatures rolling through deep waves. Gaseous fumes ting
ed the air of the single open chamber yellow. The temple wasn’t Roman and it wasn’t Celtic or Saxon—the place was slightly out of focus, as if built by something with an idea of human shapes but no practice.
Moss and algae covered almost every surface and Pete slipped, going down hard. Donovan dragged her the rest of the way by her scruff, locking her next to Jack into the neck cuff and a pair of iron shackles, chains bolted to a collapsing column.
Jack winced. “Iron’s cold,” he said by way of explanation.
“You better have a bloody good plan,” Pete whispered. Witch-light flamed up in alcoves along the walls, and Pete saw the chamber was larger than it appeared, stretching to a massive fallen-in piece of the floor leaking bubbling marsh water. Tiny waves sloshed at her bare feet.
“Trust me, I’ll be thinking of one right quickly,” said Jack. “Interesting place, though. Appears to be some kind of death cult, chaos worshippers.”
“Two pathetic sods without girlfriends,” Pete muttered. “Not much of a cult.”
Gerry hit a bronze gong mounted near the edge of the water pit, and with a low moan and a shuffling of feet a row of robed figures shuffled in. Their tattered black garments bore the tridach mark. Pete recognized the doorman from the hotel, and a friendly clerk at the petrol station where she and Jack had stopped on their way into the city.
“Bugger all. Look at them.”
“Patience,” Jack sighed. “I’m sure they’ll eventually free us for the sacrifice, and then you can kick them, and I’ll send up a little smoke, and we’ll be off in the bloody boat.”
“That’s about as well-planned as this holiday was,” Pete snapped.
“Listen!” Jack shouted. A few of the cultists glanced at them. “You didn’t have to come along, but I was trying to do something for you because I felt bloody guilty about what happened in London and now that we’ve managed to end up like this, I just feel bloody stupid, neither of which is improving my mood, and on top of it all I feel a hangover coming on, so you can just bugger the bloody hell off, Petunia!”
My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon Page 18
