by P. N. Elrod
"Oh, yeah," he said slowly. "I hear stories about you. You don't go spreadin' that one, punk."
I raised both hands in a "not me" gesture. "It stays right here, pal. Like the lady said, we're in a church."
He grunted and, with more care than I'd have given him credit for, helped get the luckless Becker to his unsteady feet.
P. N. Elrod has sold more than twenty novels, at least as many short stories, and edited several collections, including My Big, Fat Supernatural Wedding. She's best known for her Vampire Files series, featuring Jack Fleming, and would write books more quickly but for being hampered by an incurable chocolate addiction.
Information on her toothy titles may be found at www.vampwriter.com.
NEWLYDEADS
A Tale of Black London
Caitlin Kittredge
This story takes place in the world of the Black, place of fae, demons, and magic-users that hides in the nooks and crannies of the real. As far as human denizens go, Pete Caldecott and her friend Jack Winter are by far the most notorious…
BLACKPOOL APPEARED OUT OF THE FOG, A THOUSAND neon eyes winking from a hunched and gleaming body.
Pete Caldecott stood in the swirling salt-scented mist and glowered at the edifice of the Paradise Palace Casino & Resort. The pink neon letters blinked lethargically, a beacon to middle-aged couples, poor young families, and gamblers on their last shilling. Not so common were detective inspectors, like herself, and sneaky gits like her companion.
Pete turned her head to glare at Jack Winter, the titular companion. "This is not my idea of a bloody holiday."
Jack shrugged, producing a Parliament from the thin air between his fingers. "You said you needed a change. This is a change. Chin up, lip stiff or some rot. Besides, you love the seaside." He clicked his fingernails together and an ember flared on the Parliament's tip.
Pete ignored him. Jack used magic on her only when he was trying to weasel out of an apology. "Get the bags, then," she said. "Can't wait to relax in the confines of a double-twin between the lift and the ice machine."
Jack grabbed up their suitcases from the back of Pete's Mini and jogged after her. "Oi! Come back here!"
Pete quickened her pace in retaliatory spite. The carpark was silent and empty except for the Mini's red beede-backed shape, pavement slick and slimy in the descending twilight. The mist gathered behind her, obscuring Jack's bowed platinum head for a moment, and a wind brought the scent of rotting sea things. No bird cries carried from the Irish Sea and no drunken holiday chatter, which there should surely be in Blackpool of all places, reached her ears.
Just for a moment, she could be anywhere, trapped in fog ancient as the marshes around the city, lost to the Black like the women of fireside stories.
A doorman in a crumpled pink coat slumbered at the lobby doors when Pete reached them. Moisture dripped from the brim of his cap. The doors were frosted glass, etched with the image of kissing swans.
Jack caught up to her, wheezing equal parts wet air and smoke, his jackboots raising a clatter. The doorman did not stir.
"You going to be in a mood for the entire weekend?" Jack demanded, dragging deeply on the end of his Parliament before flicking it into a puddle. It hissed and sparked out with a little question mark of smoke.
"Very probably," said Pete. Jack got his smile, the curled ends pushing at the early lines in his face and the little spark of imp-light in his eyes. Pete always thought of it as the devil-smile.
"I promise you—no, I wager you, Pete Caldecott, that before this holiday is over you'll admit that you've had a bit of fun."
Pete opened the lobby door. "Never happen. Ten quid?"
Jack hefted the suitcases. "I'm a confident bloke. Make it twenty."
The swans whooshed shut behind them, kissing once more. The Paradise Palace's lobby was done in bloodred carpet and pink satin chairs, walls the color of a poisoned tide washing sand.
Pete said, "I'm surprised you have that much to bet, after the horrendous expense of dragging me to a family casino resort done entirely in swans." The motif repeated through the lobby, the only relief a gilt-edged oil painting over a fake fireplace that depicted a marsh scene, a deep swirl of blacks and fleshy greens.
"They're having a special," said Jack smugly, shoving Pete's suitcase back into her arms. "St. Gummarus's Feast rates for all of the week. Get ready to pay out on Monday, Miss I'm-So-Sure."
Jack Winter had many vices, not the least of which was usually being right. Pete pointed at the black marble reception rather than admit she was out of retorts. "Go check us in. I'm tired and I'd like to go claim my glorified broom closet so I can lie down."
"You wait, Caldecott," Jack assured her, strutting over to the reception. The clerk eyed his black denim, jackboots, and nicotine-tinged Dead Kennedys shirt with something approaching stark horror. "You wait. You'll have the time of your life. Mark my words."
JACK GRINNED SILENTLY THE ENTIRE TIME THEY WAITED for the lift, and practically cackled when he reached across Pete and punched the button for the top floor of the hotel.
"All right, what?" she finally demanded. Jack burst out into laughter, which quickly turned to a cough.
"Bollocks, is it sodding damp enough in this place? My insides are growing mold."
"You chose it, you don't get to complain," Pete said, punctuating her speech with her best I'm-going-to-fetch-you-a-bloody-smack glare. "What's so bloody amusing?"
Jack rummaged about the inside pocket of his tatty black longcoat and pulled out two plastic cards emblazoned with—what else—the kissing swans. The cards were gilt-edged, like some sort of psychotically romanticized Golden Ticket. "Here, you look at this," Jack said, still barely containing his mirth, "and you try telling me that this won't be the best bloody holiday in the history of Britain."
The plastic card read Honeymoon Getaway—Suite Access Key in flamboyant red script.
Pete felt as if the lift had abruptly reversed direction. "Jack, what did you do?"
"I told that sad bloke at the counter we were married," said Jack, eyes alight. "And it being our honeymoon, and us having so little money with the baby on the way, it might be nice if he offered us a sort of upgrade…"
Pete dropped her suitcase and moved for Jack's throat. Height advantage he may have, but she was a trained inspector with the Metropolitan Police. She'd faced down demons and rampaging ghosts, and more important, she was angry.
"Oi!" Jack shouted, her blow glancing off his shoulder as he ducked. "Settle down! The honeymooner's suite gets free room service! And a whirlpool bath. You bloody women love that sort of thing."
"Jack," said Pete, pitching her tone to cut steel. "We are not married. We are not sleeping together. Right at this moment in time, I don't even like you."
"It was just a lie, Pete," he sighed, leaning back against the satin-draped wall of the lift. "Lies don't draw blood. And besides, we got free liquor and a big fancy hotel suite out of it."
"You did," Pete hissed, jabbing him in the chest. " You did all of this. Dragged me along off the bloody cliff, as usual."
The lift doors rolled back with a soft chime. Jack threw up his hands. "I give up," he snapped. "I thought if I took you away like you wanted, maybe you'd stop being so bloody serious, but I was wrong."
Pete bit the inside of her lower lip and looked at her shoes. Jack didn't complete the thought, didn't say took you away from what happened in London. But then, he needn't. Pete dreamed it, every night, cinematically and vividly and with the same gut-ripping terror of the real event. As a Weir, she dreamed colors, smells, letters and sounds, and always had. Once upon a time, she'd dreamed about the day when they were young that Jack had nearly died the first time.
Now, it was all ghosts and blood.
The lift started to close and Pete slipped out, following Jack down the muffled hallway of bleeding floor and medium rare walls. "I'm sorry," she said when he could hear her. He was trying to jam the keycard into the reader slot to the side of their
suite's double doors.
"Yeah, well, me too," Jack muttered. "Let's just get through the weekend and forget this whole event, right? Chalk another win on the board for me and my brilliant bloody ideas."
Pete looked at the doors of the suite. They were black, carved with a swirling symbol that evoked the painting in the lobby, artful strands curling around the central point. Circles were supposed to be safe, for mages. Jack never went anywhere without odd ends of chalk in his pockets. "It could be worse," she said finally. Jack ripped the card out of the reader. "Bollocks!" Pete took it from him. "Just let me." He backed up, glaring. "There better be a sodding lake of free booze in there. I need a bloody drink."
INSIDE, ALL WAS BLACKNESS, PETE CLICKED THE SWITCH next to the door, with no response. "That's odd."
Blue shine blazed behind her, illuminating overstuffed and gilded furniture and a bed the size of a football pitch on an elevated dais at the far side of the room. Jack shuffled past her, the witchlight flickering in the curve of his palm, and turned on a floor lamp. "Bad wiring. Not surprised. This whole city is sinking back into the fucking marshes."
He fished in his jacket pocket and found chalk, and drew a sloppy warding hex on the inside of the door.
"Jack, no," Pete protested. He jabbed the stubby end of the chalk at her.
"When some bloody beastie from beyond the beyond is on the other side, you'll thank me." He dropped his bag, his coat, and his boots in a heap in the center of the hearts-chamber carpet, emptied the gold-painted bar of its supply of tiny whiskey bottles, and went into the bathroom. The door slammed in Pete's face.
"Oh, of course," she muttered. "Because I don't need a shower after four bloody hours of M-55 Saturday traffic. Tosser."
At least he hadn't claimed the bed. Pete smiled grimly and laid her suitcase on the satin duvet, the color of bone mellowed by centuries. Except for this white, the whole suite repeated the rest of the hotel. The colors and slippery fabrics gave Pete the uncomfortable feeling of being inside something huge and crimson and beating.
She shivered the feeling away, and opened her case. The file inside, on top of her weekend's worth of holiday clothing, was accusing as a murdered man's open eyes.
Pete knew that nothing would have changed since the last time she'd read the file's contents, but she opened it anyway and scanned the first line.
Detective Chief Inspector Geoffrey Newell
SO5, Metropolitan Police Service, London
Dear Sir,
I regretfully tender my resignation from the position of Detective Inspector…
It went on, with the required platitudes. Invaluable experience. Due to recent events… Do not feel able to discharge my duties…
The memo didn't give her room for much more than that, just the entrails of a promising career that, thanks to Jack, she was considering chucking. And on cue, Jack had turned into an absolute wanker.
"Should have told him," Pete castigated herself out loud, pulling a jersey and sleep pants out of the case. She shoved the file to the very bottom, crumpling the edges. Jack would tell her she was bloody stupid—bloody fucking stupid, if he were actually talking. That it wasn't his fault. She hadn't had to go looking for him four months ago, and her slippage into the Black, her awakened but not controlled Weir talents and her entree into magic was entirely her own doing.
Jack would tell her all of that and then turn around, with his self-satisfied smile, and leave all over again. Jack was good at leaving—twelve years long the last time he and Pete had parted. If she admitted she needed his help now, he'd be off again. Jack Winter was not a fan of commitment, to anything except his own skin.
How do I ignore it? How did she go on chasing shoplifters and prosecuting hooligans who got pissed and went Paki-bashing once she'd looked on the face of ghosts hungry for a living heart's essence and seen what crawled away into the shadowy places of London when the light hit its scaly hide?
Jack yelped, from the bathroom, "Bloody buggering fuck!"
Pete's skin leapt as she jerked back into herself, and she cleared the dais and the distance to the door in two steps. If there was one thing her time with Jack had taught hard and surely, it was that screams of terror were never to be ignored.
She hit the door with her shoulder, popping the gilt latch off its hinges, and nearly skidded into Jack. He had his shirt off, half-empty mini-bottle in one hand and an expression traveling the road from shock to revulsion on his face.
"What is it?" Pete demanded, expecting to see a shade, those angry howling scraps of a human soul stranded after death, or something worse, like the slime-mold demons Jack claimed lived under London Bridge.
Jack tossed down the rest of the whiskey and set the bottle with its empty brothers on the vanity. "Look," he said, pointing into the basin of the whirlpool tub. Pete stepped around him and peered in, then clapped a hand over her nose to shield against the smell of rotted seaweed and sundered guts that rolled out to meet her.
"Bloody hell." A dead thing lay in the basin, and Pete thought thing because that's exactly what it was—it could have been a gull, or some other waterfowl at some point, but instead of legs it had sadly curling feelers, rubbery and yellow, and a beak that hooked like the letter C, black and scarred. Its eyes bulged out and its neck had been twisted around. The thing's greenish blood, a color like absinthe mixed with motor oil, smeared the pale porcelain.
Pete stared for a long two heartbeats. The ripples in her head, the pulse of the magic wound through everything, gave an unpleasant twinge, as if just for a second she'd brushed her hand against something still and slimy. The dead thing's bulging eyes took on a shine, and Pete turned away.
"Just a thought," she said to Jack, as she got an armful of pink towels from the rack and threw them over the corpse, "but perhaps we shouldn't indulge in a sea swim anywhere in the greater Blackpool vicinity."
"Most bloody disgusting thing I've ever seen," Jack muttered. His shoulders twitched and he started on a fourth bottle of whiskey, emptying it in a swallow. Jack was heavily tattooed and at the moment the ink and his old track-mark scars stood stark against his skin. He looked like his body was engaging him in debate about whether to vomit.
"Who could have done it, is the question," Pete murmured. "If it's someone in the hotel, they've got a bloody twisted sense of humor." She gathered the towels into a bundle and lifted the dead creature out of the bath, sadness pricking her. "Poor thing."
"Poor thing?" Jack demanded. "No, not poor thing—what about poor me? My nerves are utterly shot! I'm from the city—we don't find dead wildlife in the loo very often!"
"Yes, poor thing," Pete said sharply. "It was ugly and smelly, but it was defective too—defenseless. It couldn't run or fly from whatever human wrapped hands around its neck. If I meet the tosser, I'll kick him in the sodding bollocks."
"Just get it out of here," said Jack. "And ask room service if they can bring about ten liters of bleach for the bath."
Pete found a spare garbage bag in the outer suite and slid it around the mass of towels. Jack would just have to pay for them. A few oily gray-green feathers slid loose and stained the carpet at her feet, and Pete felt that lap of discomfort again, the faintest pinprick of the disturbance against the smooth surface of the Black. An experienced Weir, a shaper of magic, would probably know what it meant, but all Pete knew was that it made her head hurt like she'd just woken up hungover.
She shoved the feathers into a desk drawer so she wouldn't have to look at them, and put the corpse outside the suite's front doors, locking them firmly behind it.
"I'M HUNGRY," JACK ANNOUNCED WHEN HE CAME OUT of the bath. A towel sat low on his skinny hips, and he padded about on bare feet.
Pete threw his jeans at him from the bed, where she'd ensconced herself under the satin sheets with a novel. "Put some bloody clothes on."
"Easy, luv—we are married, after all." Jack grinned at her and fished a cigarette out of the pocket of his pants before tossing them aside in favor of a
pair of slim suit trousers.
"I'm going to bloody murder you, Jack Winter," Pete muttered. It was a threat she delivered often, and usually hollow, but she was in no mood. "I mean it. Don't sleep tonight."
"Well, there'll be no sleeping when I'm dead of bloody starvation," Jack said, exhaling smoke through his nose. He pulled on the trousers and shucked the towel. "There's a restaurant downstairs. Romantic dinner for two included in the package. What do you say?"
"I say that I'm comfortable where I am," said Pete. "You and your prodigious talent for ticking me off are welcome to the restaurant."
Jack sighed, dumping the candy out of a china dish on the wardrobe and putting out his Parliament in it. He came over to the bed and sat next to Pete. She scooted away, but he trapped her wrist with wire-strung fingers. "Pete. I know you're unhappy and bloody angry at me, but it's just dinner. Come eat and raise up your blood sugar and I wager you'll be a deal less cranky."
"More wagers?" Pete arched her eyebrow. "We're up to forty quid. You can't play in these leagues, Jack." She was hungry, and Jack's sincere blue gaze was very hard to ignore. His eyes were changeable, like a sky, glacial and bright when he was intent, the burning base of a candle flame when he was angry. Mage's eyes, flaring and settling depending on mood and magic.
"I'll match it if you can." Jack grinned. Inwardly, Pete felt the lump of resentment toward Jack's arrogant, bugger-all decision about this stupid holiday like a malignancy. Whatever else he'd done, Jack was trying.
Pete sighed. She didn't want to look at him. Jack pleading or discomfited was out of order. She settled her stare on the twin Eyes of Horus tattooed on his collarbones, touching one to change the subject. "The ink's holding up?"
Jack lifted a shoulder. "Better than nothing." The black Eye tingled under Pete's fingers. The light Eye looked toward the world of the living. The dark saw the land of the dead. Both served to take the edge from Jack's psychic sight, so it couldn't catch him unaware.
