Pete lit a fag for herself. “You’ve been gone awhile, Jack.”
“True enough,” he said.
“So, are we going to talk about this?” Pete said. “Or am I supposed to accept coming back from the dead as a part of your inscrutable mystique?”
“You just found yourself agreeing to steal a corpse from the police at the behest of a circle jerk of bastard necromancers, and you’re worried about a little resurrection?” Jack tsked. “Priorities, Petunia.”
Pete fetched him a punch on the arm, hard. He yelped and lost his cigarette. “Are you bloody five? That hurt.”
“You’re going to tell me the truth,” Pete warned. “As soon as we have this sorted. You get me?”
Jack rubbed his arm. “Never said I wouldn’t. Fuck me, you’ve got bony hands.”
Pete pointed herself in the general direction of the tube station. “Mortuary’s closed this time of night. Station’s running a light crew.”
Jack shoved his hands into his pockets. “Really think that fool’s errand Nancy Naughton gave you will be that easy?”
“Of course not,” Pete agreed. “But it’s not as if I have a choice, so let’s get on with it.”
CHAPTER 20
Southwark to Wapping was a long ride, longer when you were trying not to shout everything that came into your head at the person who was taking the trip with you. Pete tried not to stare at Jack under the harsh fluorescent light of the train car, either, but she admitted by the time they rattled past Bermondsey station it was a lost cause. They were alone, this late in the evening, except for a few sleepy wage workers and a bored transit officer looking off into space.
Under light, Jack didn’t look as good as he had in the club. His skin was pallid. She could see veins, how his blood moved through his body, the stark, shining whiteness of the scar on his cheek. Twin half moons had taken up residence under his eyes, as if they’d always lived there, deep and purple, fading away into the lines she remembered.
She voiced the least offensive thing she could think of. “You look tired.”
“Yeah.” Jack rolled his neck back and forth. Small bones popped. “Being alive will do that to you.”
The train ground to a stop at Wapping, and the doors hissed open. They walked in silence the rest of the way to the mortuary. Pete couldn’t think of another topic that didn’t involve So, Hell. Hear it’s lovely this time of year.
“Right,” Jack said, when they reached the stern brick edifice of the mortuary, boats hooting on the Thames as if warning of their approach. “So I assume you’ve got a plan all worked out.”
“Of course not,” Pete said. “It’s a city works building, and there’s CCTV all over the bloody place, not to mention, you know, police officers.”
Jack grimaced. “Fuck. Stealing corpses in Thailand was much easier.”
“Unfortunately, Naughton seems set on this particular corpse,” Pete said. “Any actual helpful idea would be shockingly appreciated.”
“Whole thing stinks,” Jack said. His entire body was wire-tight, and if Pete didn’t know better she’d swear he was back on smack and jonesing hard, from the way his fingers played the air and his eyes darted from side to side. Pools of dark beyond the lamps in front of the station revealed nothing.
“Cheers, Captain Obvious,” Pete said. “Necromancers demanding you steal a corpse is rarely a harbinger of unicorns, rainbows, and candy-filled shopping trolleys.”
Jack laughed. “So sharp, luv. Don’t tell me our brief separation has turned you into a bitter spinster.”
“Not in the least,” Pete said, “though our brief reunion has caused me to entertain the notion of shoving my boot up your arse.” She discarded the idea of the main door at once. It was locked at this hour, requiring a desk officer to buzz you in, and a camera across the street pointed directly at it. She walked down the close between the mortuary and the next building, back toward the museum on the history of the Thames patrol and the modern marine support building. Jack followed her.
“Are we actually going to give this dead bloke to Naughton? Because I have to say, I don’t fancy it.”
Pete jiggled the handle of the delivery entrance, keeping her face shy of the CCTV camera. Locked. “You’re actually asking for my opinion? You really have changed.”
“Heath’s your friend,” Jack said. “And in spite of being a rotten, nasty pig, he’s not a bad sort. I won’t kick up a fuss if you do exactly as Naughton asks, but I’m on record as saying it’s a shite idea. Your call, Petunia.”
“We’ll have a better chance during the day,” Pete said. Ollie wasn’t going to stay in one piece if she got rash and found herself locked up by Patel, who’d think Christmas had come bloody early if he nicked her absconding with evidence.
Jack nodded. “Morning, then.”
“Don’t be too overjoyed,” Pete warned. “Because when we get home you’re going to tell me why you’re really back here.”
CHAPTER 21
When he stepped into the flat, Jack paused with one toe over the threshold and one still in the hall. “Protection hex is shot. Lawrence should have laid it again.”
“He’s not on call for me.” Pete tried taking off her jacket and immediately regretted the attempt, all the way down to her bones. Her shoulder throbbed and there were ink-blot bruises already turning purple up and down her arm. She’d have them on her stomach, too, and felt a dull twinge every time she breathed. Her cracked rib chimed in with a gleeful jab.
“Fucking layabout, is what he is,” Jack muttered. He went into the kitchen and rattled around in drawers, returning with a black zip-up bag. “Where’s me chalk? Used to have enough to run a school.”
Pete spread her hands. “Do we really have to do this now?”
“In case you haven’t noticed…,” Jack said, curling his lip in the way Pete hated. It meant he was about to impart Great Knowledge to her, the mundane who knew fuck-all about magic. “The Black isn’t the friendliest of places these days.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pete said. “Since you’ve been gone, it’s been a regular tea party.”
Jack flopped down on the sofa, dropping the bag. “I’m done in, Pete. Fucking wrung out. I don’t want to argue or have a meaningful conversation. I just want to clean up the mess and then get pissed and go to sleep for about a month.”
“Oh, it’s my mess, is it?” Pete said. “All of this shit cropped up like flowers in horse manure after you made your little devil’s bargain and left me to fend for myself?”
“Pete…” Jack warned, but she cut him off.
“Sod you, Jack. It’s your flat, and you’re welcome to stay here, but you can sleep on the sofa and I don’t need your fucking condescension disguised as a helping hand.”
She slammed and latched the bedroom door, but the force wasn’t enough. Pete unlaced her boots and chucked them against the far wall. They chipped the plaster with a satisfying crash, but the noise didn’t lessen the aches in Pete’s chest. At least not the ache that wasn’t from a boot landing in her flesh.
Jack was the one person who could assure her that everything was going to be all right. Except he wasn’t doing it, and Pete wouldn’t have believed him now if he did. She dropped backward on the bed and pressed a pillow over her face, letting out a scream. She couldn’t give Naughton Carver’s body, in spite of Ollie’s bind, and she couldn’t expect Jack to pull her out of the oncoming freight train’s path. Not this time.
He had to be finishing the spell. That was the only reason. Carver had tried to go freelance, and now Naughton was back in the game. He couldn’t have Carver’s corpse. Nicholas Naughton was an evil man, and evil from men was the most insidious sort. Whatever Naughton was playing at, she couldn’t let him get to the endgame. She had to at least try and pretend she had a spine and a plan to make everyone and everything she’d set into the sights of Naughton’s wrath all right.
The owl landed outside the bedroom window with a thump, staring at
her with gold, unblinking eyes. Pete shoved the pillow under her head and turned her back on it. “Leave me alone,” she muttered.
You know I can’t do that, Weir.
Pete felt her breath stop. In the place of the owl sat the woman, small and clad in white, gold eyes and dark hair, skin the same shade as moonlight. She put her hand on the glass, pointed black nails leaving score marks on the pane.
“I don’t want this,” Pete said. “I don’t want you.”
Still you have me, Weir. You who are marked as a servant of the crossroads. Whether you desire my ministrations is irrelevant.
Pete sat up, deciding that if the Hecate wasn’t going to shut up it was just silly to pretend she wasn’t there. The woman watched her. Like the owl, she never blinked. You allow that abomination to slumber one room away. I told you what to do.
“I think you’re forgetting we’re not on the orders given and received system, you and I,” Pete told her. “Whatever your problem is with Jack—it’s not my problem. Far as I’m concerned, you can float away back to whatever musty corner of my dreams you came from and give me some bloody peace, because I’m not doing it.”
You’re wrong, you know, the girl whispered. The crow-mage rides at the head of a bone army, borne on a river of red death. Forget your memory of the man, Weir. The thing he has become must die, or the world dies, and wind will scatter its ashes.
“I’ve lost Jack once and it was bloody enough for this lifetime,” Pete said. “I won’t hurt him. He’s not a threat to you, and if you’ve got a grievance with his patron goddess, maybe you two ladies should hash it out over a cup of tea and stop bothering humans with your spats.”
He’s not the Jack you know, the Hecate whispered. The Jack you know could not crawl from Hell unscathed, no matter your faith in him. And you know this is the truth, even if you will not speak it. What has returned in Jack Winter’s skin and bones is not Jack Winter as you knew him.
Fingers of cold spread away from where the Hecate touched the glass, creeping over Pete’s skin, down her throat, choking off her air, and the glowing gold eyes filled up her vision, until all she could see was the flame burning at the center, flame that spread out and consumed the walls and the bed, until everything around her was ashes.
She came awake gasping, and it took her a moment to realize she could breathe, she wasn’t freezing or burning, and she’d fallen asleep with the pillow jammed at an awkward angle under her neck.
Pete swiped a hand over her forehead. It came away with a sheen of sweat. Her shirt was damp as well, even though the air in the room was cool enough to catch her breath and turn it white. Shivering, she burrowed under the duvet and lay very still, trying to calm her throbbing heartbeat.
She’d had apocalyptic dreams for as long as she could remember—of Jack, when she’d thought he’d died the first time; of the Morrigan, his spectral, dark-winged goddess; and now of the owl-eyed woman. It was part and parcel of being the Weir. She was an antenna for disturbances in the unseen, and her brain was a projection screen for any and all signals slithering their way through the Black.
This was different, though. Before, she’d known they were dreams. The visions of the Hecate, though—she couldn’t pick out the dream from the waking. Those with a talent who couldn’t see the Black and the daylight world for what they were had a nasty habit of going insane, or simply chucking themselves into the path of an express train to end the constant, blurring carnival of horrors the Black paraded before them.
The bedroom latch clicked and the door swung ajar after she’d lain there for twenty-four minutes by the glowing clock numerals on the bedstand, and weight settled on the other side of the mattress. “You awake?” Jack said, voice faded to a rough whisper.
“Yeah,” Pete said, not bothering to complain at him for using his talent with locks on her privacy. She didn’t turn toward him as he settled, but the dire cold finally shook off her bones.
A lighter snapped and flared in the dark, and she listened to Jack drag and exhale before he spoke again. “I think I was a bit of a cunt back there.”
“A bit?” Pete did face him then. “That’s kind.”
“It’s so … cold … here,” Jack said. “I feel like I’m in my skin, behind a glass wall. Everything’s rushing around me, too fast, and I’m out of step. I…” He inhaled on the fag sharply, and Pete watched the ember flare. “I want to tell you. I want to spill my fucking guts, but I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Pete said.
“Can’t as in can’t bloody remember,” Jack said. “I remember…” He trailed off, coughed harshly, and stubbed out his fag. “I remember snapshots. Ends of film reels, a few frames here and there. And then I’m waking up next to some bins near Aldgate, and an Iranian fellow is shouting at me to get away from his restaurant. I found you, I followed you when I realized you were in fucking deep shit, as you usually are, and you know it from there.”
She wanted to scream at him, hit him with the pillow and say that was no sort of fucking answer, and if he was going to keep dying and reappearing he might as well just flit off permanently. But she swallowed down the scream and reached out, brushing her fingers down his bicep. She swallowed all of the whispers that the Hecate was right and that Jack coming back and not remembering how wasn’t a boon, it was a warning, and simply held on to Jack, because he was warm and there and she couldn’t bear to have him gone again. “I guess that’s enough for now.”
He stubbed his cigarette out in a saucer on the bedside table. “Cheers.” He started to rise, but Pete tightened her hand on his arm. All at once, she didn’t want him out of her sight. If he was close, she’d know he was really there. And her dreams would stay quiet. Jack acted as sort of a psychic buffer, and if she touched him while she was asleep and her defenses were down, he soothed her talent so that it would allow her to rest.
“Stay,” she said. Jack sat back down, the line between his eyes deepening.
“You sure?”
Pete nodded and yawned at once. She hadn’t really slept in days, and what sleep she’d gotten since Jack had gone had been fitful and fleeting. Plus, she’d had the piss kicked out of her and couldn’t have shifted Jack off the bed even if she’d wanted to.
Jack kicked out of his boots and undid his belt, dropping the pyramid-studded strap to the floor. When he swung his feet onto the mattress, Pete saw his socks had holes in both big toes. “Landed in the same clothes I left in,” he said. “You’d think Belial would have at least fitted me up with one of those posh three-button jobs he’s always gadding around in.”
“So you think it was him?” Pete said. “Belial?” A demon who let the soul he’d chased the longest simply stroll back from the jaws of death. Not very demonlike. And certainly not like Belial, who reminded Pete of an obsessive bloke who might spend years chasing a rare stamp. So Belial had sought Jack. And found him. And pinned him to the fucking page. “Jack?” she said, when he didn’t answer.
“I told you everything I know, Pete,” he mumbled. “When I know more, I’ll pass it along.”
Pete edged toward the window to give him room, but he stayed close to her. Jack had nearly a foot on her, and his frame easily curled around her body. His arm, with its new weight, lay across her waist.
Breathing against the back of her ear, his words tickled. “All right?”
Pete nodded, and let herself relax against Jack, back to his chest. Whatever else happened, Jack was here. And she knew, even when the Hecate and Pete’s own meager knowledge of Hell and all the senses her talent gifted her with said differently, that this was the way it should be.
Jack stroked his fingers down her back, over the thin material of her shirt. “Been raiding my wardrobe.”
“Didn’t think you’d mind,” Pete mumbled, squirming as Jack’s fingers slipped between her denim and the hem.
“Not a bit,” Jack said. His finger slalomed between the bones of her spine, until he reached her rib cage and found the side curve of her
breast. “All right?” Jack said. Pete bit her lip as the callused tips of his fingers skated against her skin, raising gooseflesh.
“I’m not…” Pete shivered as Jack ran his hand down her bruised stomach, gently enough that he just grazed her skin, and found the button on her jeans. “I’m not really in shape for that, Jack.”
“Relax, luv,” he said, wriggling her jeans over her hips. “I’ll be gentle.”
“Jack…” Pete gasped when his hand dipped into the crevice between her thighs, Jack letting out a contented sigh as his fingers found purchase against her clit.
She didn’t need flashing neon to tell her that this was a bad idea. Jack popping back up from Hell with no memory and no marks, fresh and new as if he’d been remade, wasn’t a miracle or even, likely, a good thing. The last thing she should be doing, Pete told herself in her stern, Inner-Connor voice, was letting him stick his hand inside her panties.
Jack licked the line of her shoulder, up her neck, and landed back against her ear. “Pete, don’t tell me that. Please.”
If she told him no, he’d stop. He wasn’t a bastard. But he made an excellent point, Pete thought, as he rubbed her more insistently, his other hand sliding under her ribs to bring his shirt over her head. She didn’t want to tell him no. She could explain it any way she liked—in the copper way, that told her they’d both suffered a trauma, and were projecting, or even in the plain common sense way, that said hopping back into bed with Jack would net her nothing but headaches. Jack wasn’t reliable under the best of circumstances, and these were far from them.
Pete knew she wouldn’t throw him out. After six months of thinking she’d never smell him or see him or touch her hand to his skin again, he was here. How and why could be saved for a few hours.
She rolled over, dislodging Jack’s hand and fumbling at the fly of his pants. He made a gravelly sound in the back of his throat when she drew out his cock, stroking with both hands between their bodies. “Thank you.…” Jack muttered, face in her hair, but Pete shook her head.
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