by P. N. Elrod
Something about the cant of the figure wasn't right, he moved like a drunk or someone who'd been dealt a blow. "Jack," she called. He didn't stir himself. "Jack!" Pete shouted to make herself heard over the popcorn guns of a black and white Western film.
"What!" he bellowed irritably. "Can't a bloke eat breakfast in peace?"
The figure emerged into the slice of vision granted by the sun, and Pete saw Roy the American staggering along the beach. Blood ran down his face, tributaries and deltas along the stark lines of his mouth and neck, and he held his hands in front of his body. His fingers and palms were crimson too. As Pete watched, rooted like an ancient oak, Roy shuddered and then fell over, curling into the fetal position and growing still.
"Bloody hell," Pete muttered, whirling and making a dash for the front door of the suite. Jack watched her go.
"What's the matter, then?"
"That American bloke from last night," she panted, jerking on her shoes. "I think someone's killed him."
ROY'S BODY LAY IN THE SAND LIKE A broken marionette, blood patching the earth a darker brown. Pete skidded down the half-rotted wooden steps the hotel provided as access, and felt the wet sand suck at her feet as she dashed for Roy. Jack appeared behind her, like he sometimes did, panting like he'd just run a hundred meters.
"Call an ambulance!" Pete yelled over her shoulder. The ever-present fog dampened her shout, thinned it so that it remained trapped beside her. The hotel and the rest of the beach disappeared as the wind picked up and it was just herself and Roy's mangled form.
Jack appeared, hair like a spiked sun. "Pete. Don't touch him!"
Pete skidded to a stop, going to her knees next to the body. Seawater soaked through her trousers. The tide was coming in, and a crab with an extra claw protruding from its back scuttled through the mushy pool Roy's blood made. Jack dropped beside her and pulled back her wrist just before she felt for Roy's pulse. "Look."
An iron shackle was locked around Roy's neck, dug deep and sharp enough into the skin to form a necklace of blood droplets. The shackle was like nothing Pete had ever seen, metal holding a shine, forged with curling, roiling designs that caused the point between her eyes to ache. The broken end of an equally foreign chain link dangled from the collar.
"Bloody hell," said Pete, because anything else would have been insufficient. Jack wrapped the end of his t-shirt around his hand and flipped Roy's body over onto its back. What Pete had taken for cuts on his cheeks were more like burns, like something thin and coated in acid had taken Roy's face in its hands. But not hands. Diamond-shaped markings bubbled where the… where whatever it was had touched him. "He's been kissed by the Black, luv," said Jack, brushing his hand off. "Touch might transfer it. Just looking out for you."
Pete swallowed as she met Roy's open eyes. The magic was so thick around him, it choked the air out of her, and she let Jack pull her away. "All right?"
Laughing, Pete shook her head. "How would I bloody be all right? He was alive not twelve hours ago. Him and his silly bint of a wife." Her gut twisted, nothing to do with the dark energy around them. "Oh, God. Where's the wife?"
Jack conjured a Parliament and lit it, drawing deep before he said, "That thing you feel, like congealed grease on skin, is sacrificial blood magic. Old Roy's soul is half out of his body, waiting to be called as power in someone's ritual. Poor sod."
Pete looked down at Roy again, thought of dark wet things and mist-hidden shadows. "Who would do something like this?"
"A sorcerer," said Jack, flicking his cigarette away. The wind brought it back and spread embers across the sand. "A practitioner of black arts attempting to call something from the otherworld. Unusual that they'd just take two, even if this bloke did manage to get away. Usually sacrifices are threes, or sevens. Darkness loves the prime numbers, you know."
"Henrietta," said Pete, the woman's shattered eyes and disconnected ramblings jumping back to forefront. "That crazy bird from the restaurant last night. She said that something had stolen her husband."
Jack rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound against his morning shadow. "Three bodies needed, then, and they used old Roy's soul as kindling for the fire." He paced around the body, muttering. "Not phases of the moon. Not a demon. Might be amateurs. Chanting naked, bathing in blood. Some stupid shite like that."
"This is not an amateur anything," said Pete, pointing at Roy. "We have to call the police. Then we have to find Charlotte."
"What are you on about? What sodding we?" Jack asked. " 'M staying right here, in me honeymoon suite. Let the coppers sort it out. Always fun to watch you lot try and figure out creatures of the Black."
Pete seized Jack by his upper arm and jerked him to her. "Take my mobile. Call the police. I'm going to try and find Charlotte before something in this freaky place eats her insides." She pressed her mobile into Jack's palm. "Hurry."
"Can't, luv," said Jack. Pete turned on him, ready to scream, and he held up her mobile, NO SVC blinked in the center of the screen.
"Bollocks." Pete kicked a lump of sand, pacing away from Roy's body. She couldn't stand to feel the displaced magic any longer—it hurt, like a boil under the skin.
Roy's footprints came out of the fog, and just behind and to the left of him, twin webbed tracks moved, taking one step for Roy's four. They were like gull's feet, but human-sized and with far too many toes. A thin miasma of slime coated each track, sending the smell of overripe mud to Pete's nose. "Jack." She pointed numbly when he came to her side. "It followed him. All the way back. And then it just vanishes."
"Watched him die," said Jack. "Made sure he couldn't babble like that Henrietta bird."
"A demon?" Pete wrapped her arms around her torso, suddenly chilled beyond measure.
"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, r
ecoiling 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 fr
om 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.
