Been down with the devil in the Dalling Road
One place I don’t want to go
—
The Crucifixion Club smelled like whiskey, smoke, and piss. The Poor Dead Bastards were on the downside of their second set, and the crowd had thinned to the diehards, the drunks, and the groupies.
Jack Winter leaned on his mike stand, feeling sweat droplets lick their way down his spine. Thank fuck for the groupies. They were the only thing that made some nights worthwhile.
Brown glass from a lager bottle crunched under Jack’s boots as he grabbed the mike again, Gavin’s drumming, like a heart in fibrillation, signaled the start of “Lockstep,” the big finish, the big ending that should have them on their feet in the pit, at one another’s throats—punks throwing elbows into skinheads, blood washed out by the janitor’s mop at the night’s end.
No one in the Crucifixion Club got the message. Jack shot a glance to the right, Rich the guitar player, to the left, Dix on bass. Then he threw the microphone down, into the pit. “You know what? Fuck it. You can piss off, the lot of you kilt-lifting wank-sacks.”
A pint glass sailed past his head and shattered on the backdrop, a garish neon Jesus with purple blacklit blood spilling from his wounds. Jesus’s eyes rolled up into his head, in a way that made him look like there was a weasel chewing on his privates.
Rich shucked his Fender and hopped down into the pit, retrieving the mike. He covered it with his long, spidery fingers, the calluses on the ends making rough noise against the PA. “Jack, the fuck are you on about?”
Jack wiped sweat off his face with the back of his arm, the salt blurring his eyes, making the shapes and shadows of the Crucifixion Club into a fever dream, just for a moment. “Come on, Rich. Let’s get a drink and end the evening with our dignity intact. No one in this piss-miserable city wants to hear us play.”
Gavin stopped drumming, the heartbeat bleeding away to flatline as he sensed the ugly black knot between guitarist and vocalist. Dix thumped his thumb on his bass in a discordant rhythm, his tattooed knuckles fluttering under the stage lights.
“Right or not, we have a contract,” Rich said, gesturing with his head at the owner of the Crucifixion Club, an intractable Scot with a thatch of white hair and a face like a lorry wreck during rush hour. “Somehow, I don’t think the old goat over there is going to be overjoyed if we cut out before finishing two hours.” Rich shifted his weight, hid his next words with his back to the pit.
Jack scanned the crowd, more with his magic than his eyes, to make sure no skinhead was taking the golden opportunity to shank his guitar player in the kidney. Rich might be a pain in the arse, but he could make six strings sound like wailing bansidhe or angel tears, you just had to tell him which.
“We need the money, mate,” Rich said. “I’m skint, and you know Ella is counting on me to make rent on the flat this month.”
“Fine,” Jack said. “Do ‘Falling Down,’ and I swear if another one of these kilt-lifters chucks a bottle at me fucking head, it’s curtains.”
Dix beat out the baseline, Rich hit the first chord, and Jack sang. He felt the smoke, raw in his throat. Most of all, he felt tired.
The night ended without a bang, without even a whimper. Jack helped Rich pack up his amps while Dix carried equipment back to the van, an arthritic Peugeot that oozed smoke and rust like a pustule on wheels.
“Hey, you. Boyo, with the Billy Idol up top.” The Scot jabbed his cigar stub at Jack.
“Yeah?” Jack crossed his arms. He was half the Scot’s breadth, but he had a good head on him. The old bastard would be trying to dick around with their payment, and it fell to Jack to deal with him, since they hadn’t a manager, not even a proper roadie since Lefty Nottingham got pinched for passing bad checks.
“You got a girl out front.” The Scot leered. “Nice gear, too. Real top of the pops.”
“Jack.” Rich glared warningly. “We have to start the drive back.”
Jack went to the rat-eaten curtain and gestured to the Scot. “Point her out to me.” Rich was engaged to Ella. He’d never dipped his pen in even when he hadn’t been. Dix would go for anything that breathed, and Jack had a fair notion that Gavin was a poof, although it made no difference. Good drummers were worth their weight.
The girl sat alone at a table dead-center in the empty club. She was all black—black bob, black sweater, black pencil skirt that showed of a bit of Snow White leg in black fishnet stockings.
“Yeah?” said the Scot.
Jack stepped out from the curtain. “Yeah.”
“Oh, fuck off!” Gavin shouted. “I want to be driving
Jack flipped him the bird and walked over to the table. Pulled a chair and sat on it backwards. “You wanted to perform sexual favors for me, luv?”
She exhaled from a black cigarette with a gold band, blue smoke. Her face was heart-shaped, like a black-and-white film starlet’s. Her severe bob and straight fringe made Jack feel as if he were looking at someone who might have conjured herself off celluloid, too refined for the likes of the Crucifixion Club.
Or Jack Winter himself, if Jack were being honest.
“Meet,” she corrected coolly, the low throaty American voice sending gooseflesh over not-unpleasant parts of Jack’s skin. “I wanted to meet you, Mr. Winter.”
“Fuck,” he choked out, losing himself in laughter. “
“Ava,” she said, and killed the ember of her fag in a Jesus-shaped ashtray. Even her name was posh and fantasy. Jack put his chin on his forearms and smiled at her.
“Pleasure’s all mine, Ava. Or will be.”
“Mr. Winter—Jack—if you’d stop for one moment, you’d discern I’m not interested in you. At all.”
Jack felt his hard-on die a quick death underneath his ripped denim. “Ah,” he said. “Then why’re you wasting me time, exactly, luv?”
“Like I said”—Ava produced a pack of Turkish cigarettes and a silver lighter engraved with the initials DVB—“I wanted to meet you.”
“And why’s that, if not for a quick roll?” Jack demanded. “Any bloke can see you’re not here for the music. If the outfit weren’t a tipoff, the fact you’ve had a bath is. Bloody Scotland.”
Ava’s lips twitched. Jack consoled his loss of a fine, taut piece of groupie with the fact that she was at least pretty, and he’d at least made her smile.
“My friends in the city told me you were a mage. One who’s good at what he does,” said Ava. “And when I found out you were playing a gig here in Edinburgh, well …” She lit the fag with a hiss and pursed her full lips, full like fruit bursting with juice. “I figured you were just the man for the job.”
“Someone’s been speaking out of school,” Jack said. It was probably Lawrence, that chatty bastard. He was only too happy to brag of his association with Jack fucking Winter to his little sewing circle of white witch mates, who in turn spread hideous rumors all over the fucking isle like they were some magic edition of
“Don’t be angry with your friends,” Ava said.
He snorted. “You’re assuming I have any.”
Ava narrowed her eyes. Jack saw when she turned the lighter that her nails matched her lips, both kissed with false blood. She blew smoke out through her nose. “I can be very persuasive.”
Jack looked her up and down obviously, taking in the breasts pushing at the sweater, the rear bumper that some would consider generous, but he considered fully serviceable. “I’ll just bet you can, sweetheart.”
“Do you ever pull yourself out of the gutter?” she demanded. Her brown gaze flashed daggers at him.
“No,” Jack said, helping himself to one of the fags. When he reached for the lighter, Ava’s hand shot out like an arrow off a longbow and closed on his wrist before he could touch it. “I rather like my gutter,” Jack said softly, meeting those melting eyes. “I know all of the rats that live in it.”
“I can give you money,” Ava said. “I can give you anything you want. I need someone who won’t fuck up, someone who’ll do a sensitive task for me.”
Jack got up at that. “Sorry, luv. I’m not a hire car.”
“Wait,” Ava said. “Don’t you even want to hear my terms?” She leaned forward, a move that told Jack he very much wanted to hear her terms.
“I’m not an idiot, Ava,” he said. “It’s going to take more than a smile and a flash of the goods. I’m nobody’s rent boy.”
Rich came to the curtain and jerked his head,
Ava trailed her finger down Jack’s arm, past the line of razor cuts, road map to the twin cigarette burns on his wrist. “Been meaning to get a new tattoo,” Jack said. He pulled his arm away.
“I’ll make you a very good deal,” Ava said. “For a very easy job. I promise.”
“Demons deal in promises,” Jack told her. “I don’t like deals. In my experience, somebody always ends up fucked.”
Ava stood. She was taller than Jack had imagined, tall enough to look him in the eye. “Funny you should mention demons.” Her mouth curled, a little more blue smoke escaping.
“Not much about those buggers that calls forth a laugh,” Jack said. Ava grinned at him—sly, and full of secrets, like an old fortune teller.
“Despite that, demons are exactly why I need your help.”
Ava took them to a pub, a hole in the ground in a basement suite where water dripped from exposed pipes and you could smell the bog no matter where you sat.
Dix grunted as a droplet of condensation splashed into his pint. “You take us to the nicest places.”
Gavin was sitting ramrod-straight, trying to avoid touching anything in the pub, including his glass. Rich was in the van, sulking.
Ava tilted her head. “Not to your liking, Gavin?”
“I’m going to get a disease, I know it,” he muttered, and sunk into his army jacket up to the chin.
“Give us some privacy, lads,” said Jack. “Won’t be a moment to straighten this out.”
Dix hit Gavin in the shoulder. “Come on, you great pair of girl’s knickers. I fancy a smoke.”
They left, and Ava let the door shut against the cool past-midnight air before she spoke. “You haven’t tried to exorcise me, so you must have dealt with demon problems before.”
“No,” Jack said. “Haven’t tried because it wouldn’t do any bloody good. You’re as human as they come, luv. The flesh is weak, through and through.”
“You don’t know that.” Ava didn’t have a drink, just a smug grin. Jack was reminded of a fat and well-groomed black moggy.
“You stay around the Black long enough, you learn to tell,” Jack said. “Not knowing for sure can mean your skin. Your soul.”
It was a pat excuse, a weak one at that, but Jack rubbed his forehead and gave Ava a wan smile. It was better than admitting to possessing the sight. Psychics were freaks, deranged and babbling at you in the entrance to the tube station. Mages, by comparison, were pillars of society.
By comparison.
Ava’s aura furled back from her, red shot through with jet, like a solar storm or a sunrise that sailors would abjure. There was something dark riding with her, something curled on her shoulder to be sure, but she didn’t make Jack dizzy as a two-day bender just to look at her. Definitely human.
“Fine, maybe I am,” she said. “But my … problem isn’t. I guarantee you she’s as demon as they come.”
