Huntress

Jack returned her smile with a snakelike grin of his own. “You’re not getting out of this free and easy. Don’t think you are.”

“That sounds like a promise.” Ava waggled her fingers at him. “Noon. Don’t be late.”

Jack found a pub. It was the natural thing to do when you were fucked, and English.

He stared at his pint, the bubbles slowly working their way from bottom to top.

Ava had him over a barrel. Even if Jack could assemble the workings to break a geas in a few hours, he wasn’t sure it would work, whether it would snap back and kill him outright. Dying of lust wasn’t the worst way to kick it, but it wasn’t on his top ten list, either.

Damn the bitch. She’d zeroed in on his weakness and his arrogance, that he was Jack fucking Winter, untouchable, and she’d slipped inside his armor as neatly as a serpent. Now she wanted him to be party to the assassination of a demon.

“Not bloody likely,” Jack said to his pint, and drained half of it in a go. Ava wanted his help badly, that much was plain, and equally plain was that she wasn’t giving him the whole story, playing the cryptic woman who comes out of the rain into the private dick’s office, asking for help, poison on her red lips. Playing it to the hilt.

Jack drank the rest of his pint and didn’t taste it, turned over the question some more. Could he afford to believe Ava was simply an arrogant sorcerer with an inflated sense of her own superiority on a half-cocked revenge drive? That she couldn’t dent Areshko, this boogeyman demon?

Devious as the bint had shown herself to be, Jack doubted he’d get off that easily.

A fresh pint banged on the wood in front of him. Rich, Gavin, and Dix joined the table, drinks in hand. “Now that you’ve kept us here far past the freshness date, what’re you banging on about staying?” Rich demanded.

“Yeah,” said Gavin. “We’ve got a gig Thursday, mate. Sort of need our lead singer. I can’t swap—I already took the personal day.” Gavin worked in a chain record store on Oxford Street, the sort that made you wear a colored shirt and a name badge. Jack and Dix gave him endless shit about it.

“That girl in the Crucifixion Club,” Jack said. “She’s got a gig for me. Just me.”

“Fuck off, you’re not that good. Or handsome.” Rich took an irritated sip of his beer.

“Not a Bastards gig, you git. The other sort.”

Dix just nodded gravely. Gavin chewed a hangnail, and Rich rolled his eyes. “Not more of your spooks and specters shite, Winter. Those Goths always pay in bent pennies and mournful stares. We need you in London. For real work.”

“I’m serious as a tombstone,” Jack said. “And I’m also staying. You can whinge about it all you want. Get it out of your system. Cry if you have to.”

Dix grunted. “Bad idea, this.”

Rich pushed back from the table. “He’s right. And if you feel that it’s a bright one, you can bugger yourself sideways with a lager bottle. I’m going back to London. Shall we audition a new singer tomorrow, or after we cancel our engagement and can’t pay the electric or the phone?”

Gavin watched him go, and then sighed. “I can’t disagree with him, Jack. I’ve got my job, and my mum isn’t well … This rock star shite doesn’t fly in my life as it is.”

Jack dropped his fist down. All of the glasses jumped. “Fine. Go skip on back to London in your pinafore, you great girl. Not like I could expect a little backup from my friends.”

Gavin pursed his lips. “No need to be that way, Jack …”

“You’ve made yourself clear,” Jack said. “Go on, get lost. And tell Rich he can use that lager bottle on himself, if he’s so keen.”

Dix nudged him before the tiff with Gavin could dissolve into a real John-and-Yoko slugfest. “Ey. That your bird?”

Ava stepped in, pausing to unwind a crimson scarf from her sausage-curled hair. There was a light mist on the gray day, and droplets of moisture gleamed on her skin.

She glided over to the table, sliding into Rich’s empty stool and running her fingers down Jack’s arm, over the Celtic knot tattooed on his bicep—the triple insignia, done in plain blue ink, by hand, signifying that he’d been trained in magic by the Fiach Dubh. Jack had never met a villain yet on either side of the Black who was impressed by the mark.

“You weren’t where I told you to be. Aren’t you going to give me a kiss hello?” Ava inquired. Dix raised his eyebrows an inch, the equivalent of shouting, for most. Gavin just rolled his eyes.

“Sorry, luv, but you’re not very popular among my mates at the moment,” Jack told her. Ava pressed her lips to his cheek. Jack felt the hot wax and wet of her lipstick mark his skin sure as the tattoo.

“Hello,” she said. “And hello to you, Jack’s mates. What’s a girl have to do to get in your graces?”

“Scratch,” said Dix. “Or tits.”

“A man of few words.” Ava smiled, just this side of mockery. “I’m entranced.”

“They were just buggering off back to London,” Jack said. “I guess I’m at your service, milady.”

Ava smiled, all teeth. “You bet your ass you are.” She turned to Gavin and Dix. “Nice meeting you. Run along. Drive safely.”

“Go fuck yourself, slag,” Gavin said sweetly. “Our mate may be fooled by you, but I know cheap damaged goods when I see them.”

“My, my,” Ava said. “You’ve got some grit behind that limp wrist, boy.”

Jack turned a glare on her. “Leave them out of this or I swear I’ll slit me own throat with the cutlery before I go another step with you.”

Ava and Gavin traded simmering glares for a moment, before Gavin pushed his chair back with a shriek. “Just don’t come crying to me when you get fucked, Winter.”

“Don’t you worry.” Ava’s hand slid over the black denim up Jack’s thigh and into coastal waters. Jack tightened his jaw and cast her a pained look. “He’s in good hands.”

Jack briefly saw stars under her ministrations as the sex magic ran fingers and tendrils of sweetly scented power over his face. “Gavin,” he ground out, “stop being a nonce. I’m fine.”

Dix shrugged. “No, you’re not.” He scraped back his stool and pulled on his shredded denim jacket. “Happy trails, mate.” They left, and Jack squeezed his eyes shut. The Bastards barely tolerated the other half of his existence as it was. And if Jack was honest, he liked the easy time they had making the music come together. Ava had burned all that down with a few words, a touch.

She stopped her hand moving and stood up. She was wearing a black satin pencil skirt now, and a red cardigan with cherries for buttons. Her hair was pinned back in a waterfall of curls. She looked like the pouty-lipped American birds that Jack’s uncle Ned had collected on the walls of his locksmith shop in Manchester. Uncle Ned had been a good bloke for the few years that Jack knew him before his liver said Bugger this and gave out under an onslaught of off-license vodka.

“Let’s go,” Ava said. “With friends like those …”

“If you had any friends,” Jack said, following her as the geas pulled on him like a sharp hook through the flesh of his spirit, “you wouldn’t say that.”

“Look who’s got a mouth on him,” Ava said. She gave his arse a squeeze. “Cheer up, Jack. I’m very good company, if you let me be.”

“Need the loo,” he said. “I won’t be a minute, mistress.”

Ava’s mouth turned down at the sardonic tone. “Jack, I told you this wasn’t how I wanted things.”

“And yet you don’t seem to be shedding any tears over having your very own mage in sexual bondage.” Jack stepped away from her, experimentally, and she let him. None of the white-hot need to rip her blouse open and savage her, teach her the wrongness of making a man like him her pet, reared its head.

“Go pee,” Ava said, an impatient click of her pump heels on the pub floor. “We don’t have all day.”

Jack turned his back to her, and she let him walk. He knew the part of himself that responded to her geas. It usually manifested as temper, or as the row of paper-thin white scars on his forearms, rather than a savagery toward a woman.

But Ava was no usual woman, and Jack didn’t have perfect control.

He locked himself in the bog and pulled the frayed light chain. Shadows danced and settled into all of the corners. Jack splashed rusty water on his face and dried off on the tail of his shirt.

Even though she’d shown herself to be colder than stone, he could almost fancy Ava. She had balls, and she wasn’t afraid, of him or the demon. Not to mention that she was a regular talent in the sack.

Which had gotten him into this, hadn’t it?

A snuffling from the corner broke Jack’s concentration, on a cracked mirror hung crooked over the basin. Cold ran up and down his neck, like sleet melting on his skin.

“Please …” A whisper came from all directions, higher than a dog whistle, and skated across Jack’s skull, and he flinched. He didn’t want to turn and see. He never truly wanted to see, and never had, but he always looked, eventually.

The ghosts wouldn’t allow otherwise.

“Please,” the ghost snuffled. He was a sad scrap of spirit, a skin-and-bones teenage boy in life with raggedy hair in his eyes. A crooked star, drawn around the left with eye pencil, scrubbed off as his tears slid down his glitter-pocked cheeks. His silk shirt was open to the waist, and his pants were worn away at the knees. “Please, don’t tell them where I am,” he begged Jack, worrying a glass vial around his neck.

Jack pressed his thumb between his eyes, the pounding inside his skull threatening to send him to his knees. The sight took everything away, sound and sensation—everything except the sucking, screaming void where spirits lived.

“Fuck off,” he told the ghost. “I can’t help you.”

“Can’t help me,” the ghost singsonged. “Can’t help yourself.”

“Oi, shut it,” Jack warned. “I don’t need your second-rate prophesizing.”

“They found me.” The ghost sighed. “They kicked me and hit my skull against the sink. They beat my queer face in.”

“And I’m sorry,” Jack gritted as warm blood worked its way out of his nose. Ghosts always wanted help. Always wanted to let go and never could. And the harder they fought to be seen, the more it hurt.

“Not sorry,” the ghost whispered. “Not like you will be.” The boy jerked up straight, his coke vial bouncing against his wasted chest, rife with bruises from the beating that had ended him on the scarred tile floor. “Turn back, Jack Winter. The demon city waits for you like the open mouth of the beast, and will swallow you.”

Jack smeared the blood away from his face. “That’s not a ghost talking.”

The boy’s eyes shone, white as headlamps in a fog. “Leave Edinburgh, Jack Winter. Before you go down under the ground. Forever.”

“Bugger off, Nazaraphael,” Jack said wearily. He was upright, barely, by grace of clutching the sink basin. “Leave that poor spirit be.”

“It’s a fair warning, mage, and the last you’ll get,” the boy-ghost growled, before the glow died from his eyes and he went back to sobbing.

Jack shut his eyes and willed to see only a filthy pub loo when he opened them. The sight burned him up from the inside when it truly took hold, made him sick and dizzy as a lifetime of hangovers. It never slept, never stopped.

But finally, it retreated enough for Jack to stumble back into the pub and take hold of Ava. She blinked at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he grumbled. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”

“You don’t look good … Are you bleeding?” Ava demanded.