Pete did as she said, and when the curtain clacked closed, she took the opportunity to look around the room. Aside from the tarot spread—in no particular order, just all of the most terrifying of the Major Arcana arranged to scare customers—there was the usual jumble Pete would expect from a second-rate magic shop. But it seemed like so much clutter carefully obscuring the face of something else, like a stage set. Irina’s outrageous costume alone would tip off any respectable mage that the place wasn’t worth their time.
She went to the shelves, moving things aside until she could see the wall. The plaster was scarred and carved with black markings, and Pete moved more boxes and clutter. A cigar box full of gris-gris, resplendent with beads and feathers, bounced off her foot and scattered its contents across the boards.
“Shit,” Pete muttered. The markings were clear now. They weren’t the harsh symbols that covered Gerard Carver, but they weren’t pleasant to stare at either. Pete couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen the swooping marks and lettering somewhere before. They matched a silver-tongued language, one that humans in the Black steered well clear of.
“It’s Fae.” Irina came out of the back room holding a bell jar, within which rested soil and a tangle of green stems topped by one perfect silver flower.
“Is it?” Pete said. Of course. She’d read in one of Jack’s books that Fae language was never spoken aloud by men, in hopes of avoiding the sort of curse that got you a donkey’s head or napping for a hundred years.
“If you’re looking for Fae orchids, you knew that already,” Irina said.
“I’ve seen it before,” Pete admitted. “Not quite this much. What is it?”
“You ask a lot of bloody questions,” Irina fussed. “You a cop?”
“Used to be,” Pete said. “Now, I just want to take my silly plant and go.”
Irina went to a set of apothecary drawers behind the shop counter and gestured her over. “You sure you know what you’re about, tripping on this shit, little woman? You really think you can swim back out of whatever dark cave it is you’re diving into, when you’re done?”
Pete spread her hands. “What I do with it is my business.”
“And I suppose you being tangled up with Jack Winter hasn’t got any bearing on you wanting this little darling whatsoever,” Irina said. It was casual, but there was bite behind the words. She drew out a baggie, the sort expensive markets kept out for measuring spices into, and a pair of delicate surgical scissors with tips like silver fangs.
“Jack is also my business,” Pete said. She knew it was bad form to smack an old woman, but she had a feeling perhaps this time she’d get a pass.
“I am indentured to a Fae,” Irina said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I traffic their plants and whatever else they care to have humans imbibe, and in return they protect the shop and its neutral ground for anything nasty. Really, a very snug arrangement. I wish I’d had it when I was a girl living in Dolgoprudny. The monsters there were men, but monsters all the same.”
“This is fascinating,” Pete said, “really, but I’m in a bit of a rush.”
Irina handed her a pair of sound-dampening earphones, the sort you’d wear to stand by a jet engine. “The song can drive you insane,” she said. “If you’re not someone it knows.”
“It knows us?” Pete looked suspiciously at the orchid under the bell jar.
“Knows me,” Irina said. Pete clamped the apparatus around her ears and watched Irina coo as she lifted the jar off. Pete didn’t hear anything, just the beat of her heart, but she smelled the scent, far too sweet with an undertone of something rotten. She could choke on it, as Irina stroked the stamens of the orchid, lips moving, almost as if she were distracting the thing before she put the scissors against the stem and lopped the flower neatly off.
She waved at Pete, and Pete removed the headgear. She was glad to see Irina package the flower with the acumen of a chemist, taping it shut and cutting off the scent before Pete passed out. “There,” she said. “I’ll even give you the police discount.”
“How kind,” Pete said, as Irina accepted her wad of notes and rooted below the counter for change.
“Not really,” she said. Pete watched her rise with a pistol in her petite, knotty fist.
Pete lifted her hands slowly, so that Irina wouldn’t get the wrong idea. “Something I said?”
“If you think,” Irina gritted, “that I’m letting you walk out of here and give the crow-mage the power to walk between worlds, then you’re sorely fucking mistaken, miss.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea,” Pete said quietly. “Jack isn’t the one…”
“Winter is an obscenity,” said Irina. “A whore of the blood gods that would tear the Black to shreds and suck the marrow from its bones. I might serve the Fae but I would never serve them, and never allow him the power this holds.”
Pete had always been crap at negotiations. The whole diffuse the situation, calm the hostage taker, win/win situation shite had never been her forté. If she wanted insanity and confused rambling, she’d call her sister.
“Gun’s a bit pedestrian, don’t you think?” she said to Irina. The old woman grinned at her.
“You’re not made of stone. Or Kevlar.”
“That I’m not,” Pete had to agree. “Look, why don’t we just back this up, you’ll listen this time when I tell you this orchid is not Jack’s doing, and we’ll part ways with no harm done?”
Irina sneered. Her wrinkled forearm was bare from holding out the gun, and Pete saw an Orthodox cross tattooed to the inside. It rippled when her wasted muscles flexed. “The harm’s already done.” She took the safety off the pistol. It was a nickle-plated .22 with a mother of pearl grip, a lady’s gun. Exactly the sort of piece Pete would expect from a crazy old woman running a magic shop.
“I don’t know what you think you know,” she told Irina, keeping her voice calm and steady, just like in her training. “But it was my idea to get the orchid, and my idea to go to the Underworld. Jack’s innocent.”
“Jack Winter is not innocent,” Irina told her. She looked as if a gust of wind would snap her in half, but her grip on the gun never slackened and her aim never wavered.
“Who among us is?” Pete said. This had all gone pear-shaped. Irina wasn’t budging, and the utter lack of feeling in her face told Pete she’d shoot her if it came to that. Irina was a hard old bitch, and whatever dusty Russian mafia uncle had taught her had done a bang-up job.
Pete made the decision to finish this at almost the same moment the hex was on her lips, and she felt the peculiar tug in her gut as it sprang across the space between her and Irina. “Sciotha.”
It didn’t work like it had with the zombie. Nor like when Jack did it, flinging his talent in a wide, sharp arc to wrap around his target and take them to ground. Irina’s own magic, or perhaps the Fae writing all around them, caused the hex to run wild, smashing a row of the apothecary jars behind Irina’s head. It did snatch at the woman’s gun arm, though, and Pete relied on the fact that she wasn’t eighty and a raving nutter to do the rest.
She jumped the counter, knocked the pistol down to Irina’s side, and put her fist hard into the old woman’s face. Cartilage crushed under her knuckles and the small, gravelly crunch was nearly drowned out by Irina’s scream.
Pete tried to shake the pain from her fist as she watched Irina roll around on the floor behind the counter. She went for the pistol again, but Pete kicked it out of the way. “Give me the fucking orchid,” she said. “And I’ll be going.”
Irina stopped thrashing about and went limp. Blood dribbled from her nose. Pete crouched and twisted her head to the left. “Don’t choke on your own blood, you stupid bitch,” she sighed. Irina curled into a ball, spitting more Russian curses. Pete left her where she was and plucked the orchid from the countertop, shoving it inside her jacket. Ollie better appreciate what she was going through for him. Punching old ladies in the face was above and beyond the fucking
call of friendship and cameraderie.
She was nearly to the door when Irina spoke up. “His living again has made things so much worse. We thought we might be safe when Belial took him, but now … you have no idea.”
Pete rubbed her forehead. The stuffy shop and the flower smell were coming at her in waves, urging her to simply lie down and sleep for about a decade. “And what are you? Fucking Batman?”
“The Fae see things that mortals never will,” Irina rasped. “I keep my company with them, with other things older and wiser than humans, and all said the same—it’s a blessing the crow-mage is dead. And when he came back they told me something else.”
“What did they tell you?” Pete asked, though the knot in her stomach knew the answer.
“They told me that the end times are coming,” Irina said, voice thick with blood. “And that the crow-mage and his Weir the cause.”
CHAPTER 26
Pete shut the door softly behind her when she exited Irina’s shop. Her fist hurt, and her head was throbbing. How many hours had she been awake? Too bloody many to bother counting. It would only depress her.
Jack flicked away his fag when he saw her and lifted himself from the spot where he’d leaned against the derelict flats, the half-wall behind him showing a little bit of pinkish London night sky. “Old woman talk your ear off?” he said.
“We had a difference of opinion,” Pete told him. She shoved her scraped knuckles into her pocket.
“We should go,” Mosswood said. “Having that bag of Fae foulness is like having a duffle full of hundred-pound notes. Every thieving thing in the Black will be down on us.” He walked to the end of the close and ducked through a ruined doorway.
They emerged from the Black across the road from the Smithfield Market, its ornate tri-colored iron gates shut, streetlamps on either side spitting in the mist. The Smithfield Market was a working meat market, and if you were an early riser or a tourist, you could wander among the bloody slabs of beef and barking vendors in the predawn light, the scent of blood and flesh curling up in your nose along with fog and damp. Pete saw a shadow detach from the gates as she, Jack, and Mosswood turned toward the Farringdon tube station, long coat and slouched hat making him little more than a memory of a shape in the fog. She flicked two fingers at the Order thug and kept walking.
Jack and Mosswood had two topics of conversation on the tube ride and the walk to the flat—whether Mosswood was a twat and whether Jack knew what he was doing. “You’re really going through with this?” Mosswood asked Jack for what had to be the tenth time.
“Fuck me, again?” Jack said. “Ian, I’ve had experience with both tripping and dying, so please, just sit yourself over there and make sure nothing hideously violates my comatose body.”
Mosswood settled himself on the sofa with a grunt. “For the one who dragged me into this, you’re not being very hospitable.”
Pete caught Jack’s eye over Mosswood’s head and said, “Tea, Ian?” When Mosswood nodded, Pete gestured Jack into the kitchen. He wasn’t going to like her question, had dismissed her before, but Pete had begun to feel a weight on her, the sort she’d get at the Met when a case was about to go sideways. She’d spent enough time among liars to realize when she was being lied to, and she lit the burner under the kettle and then faced Jack. “Aren’t you going to ask me what’s wrong?”
Jack shrugged. “Is something?”
Pete slammed the mugs onto the countertop. “You know damn well, Jack. Ever since you rose from the fucking grave my life has been nothing except death threats and sinister figures nipping at my heels.” She met his eyes. Jack’s eyes were devoid of life, flat as a stagnant pond, as they’d been ever since he had returned. They were victim’s eyes, soldier’s eyes, witnessing the same trauma over and over again, knowing it was coming but unable to look away.
“What happened?” Pete said. “I know I said I wouldn’t ask, but if we’re doing this, we might not make it back. At least not me. I need to know if you really don’t remember, Jack. How you came back.” Why you came back. What happened in Hell to make the Hecate order me to murder you on sight.
“I’m not talking about this.” Jack picked up a mug and rooted in the cabinets for the tea. “Not now and not ever. Not with you.”
Pete grabbed his arm, and turned him to face her. “No. You tell me what the fuck is going on.” She voiced what she’d seen in his face. “Something that you’re not telling me is under there, and whatever it is, I want to know. Now, please.”
Jack looked down at her hand, back at her face. “Unless you’re planning a quick jerk before the festivities, get your hands off me.”
His voice was cold, and Pete felt a stab low in her gut at the fact that his expression never even changed. Jack Winter is not the man you knew.
“What happened to you, Jack?” Pete whispered. “Who are you?”
He put his hand against her face, tender for a split second and then his thumb and fingers tightened along her jaw, pulled her close enough to almost brush his lips with hers, and Pete felt her flesh twinge where his finger-pads would leave marks come the morning. “You don’t want to know,” Jack whispered, as the shriek of the kettle overtook Pete’s senses. “So for your own continued good health, stop asking.”
After a moment of sharing breath, Pete brought her hand up and smacked Jack hard on the cheek. “You arse. Let go of me.” He did, and Pete felt her cheek where she’d have finger-shaped marks. “That really hurt.”
“Life hurts,” Jack said. “Surprised you haven’t figured that out by now. Or do you save your brilliant insights for things you know nothing about, like my time in Hell?”
“Oh, very well, fuck you,” Pete snapped. “When I’ve gotten Ollie out of harm’s way, you can just pack up and move along. I don’t want your shit piled on me.”
“Then maybe you should stop opening your legs and pining after me,” Jack said. Pete grabbed the mug from his hand, resisting the urge to spill it on his crotch, and dunked a teabag for Mosswood.
“Don’t worry. As soon as I’ve got Ollie back from Naughton, you and I are done.” She moved to take the tea to the sitting room. “You’re not the same. You never would have said that to me six months ago.”
“I’ve been to Hell, Pete,” Jack said. “You try it, and see if you’re still a ray of fucking sunshine.”
Pete took Ian his tea rather than respond. Jack had a lot of enemies in the Black, people who’d breathed easier when he was secreted away in the pit. They couldn’t be happy he was back, and they would spread any rumor that would get more of the Black wanting him gone all over again. Like Irina, with her stone expression, and the Hecate, with her incessant, unchanging order. Pete couldn’t ignore the signs, no matter how badly she might want to.
Something was wrong about Jack, and his coming back hadn’t been a reprieve. His appearing back in her life wasn’t fortune. Quite the opposite. Jack’s secret, whatever it was, had the Black in an uproar, and because of that, Pete knew it could only be a few things. Not possession, but perhaps something else. Belial wouldn’t need Jack’s body if Jack gave his soul over voluntarily.
Had he cut a deal with Belial? Here on a demon’s errand, tempered and remade in the fires of Hell into the one thing the old Jack would have spit on without a second thought? Jack as a sorcerer was a terrifying enough thought. Jack as a sorcerer with powers gifted to him by one of the generals of Hell didn’t even bear contemplating.
But right now, Ollie came first. He couldn’t defend himself. Pete could handle Jack Winter. And if she couldn’t, at least nobody else would be dead because of it.
“You should probably lie down,” Jack said, coming in behind her, as if nothing had happened in the kitchen. Pete’s face was still hot where his fingers had gouged her, as if she’d stood too close to a fireplace.
“On the floor?” she said. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d swept the sitting room.
“Either that or keel over where you stand once you�
��ve dosed yourself.” Jack stretched out on the carpet. “Your choice.”
Pete stripped off her jacket and lay down next to him on the threadbare Persian, foot to head. Jack sat up and chalked a crooked circle around them, into the pile. “Bit of binding, he said. “So our souls don’t fly straight up the fucking chimney.” He handed the chalk to Mosswood. “Anything dodgy happens, you close that bastard and pull us straight back. Not more than a few hours in any case. This shit will eat holes in your brain.”
“I have done a ritual before, you know.” Ian crouched stiffly next to Pete. He pressed a clump of the sticky silver flower into her palm. “Chew, and spit it out before you go under,” he said. “Don’t choke.”
“You do realize this is completely fucking mad,” Jack said, before he shoved a clump of the stuff into his own mouth and chewed.
Pete bit down on her share of the orchid. It didn’t taste like much at first, as if she were outside on Guy Fawkes and had breathed in a taste of cordite from the fireworks. A cold tingle stole over her tongue, and Pete tasted rusty iron that spilled over into the taste of blood, and down her throat with a grasp like freezing water. She managed to turn her head and retch the vile thing out, as Mosswood had instructed, before blackness crawled across her vision, and her heart roared in her ears like a tube train passing by.
Pete felt as if she were stripped of skin and muscle and bone and only her nerves were left, throbbing. Her heart thudded like she was still running suicides at Hendon with the other PCs. She could almost smell the mud, her own sweat, breath razoring in and out in time with the thump-thump-thump of her heart as her boots dug into the peat and her own cold sweat wet down her clothes. Could almost see the weak dawn light that cast everything cold and blue while she and the other recruits ran the course. Could feel the sharp stab of exhaustion in her side, letting her know she’d vomit the moment she stopped running.
Pete felt every inch of her body begin to turn numb. It started in her fingertips, as if she’d gone outside on a cold day and forgotten mittens. The numbness crawled straight to her heart, and Pete felt her pulse slow to nearly nil.
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