Jack squeezed her arm hard enough to feel the bone under the skin. “Sodding walk. I need fresh air.”
Ava went silent, and after a time, Jack’s vision cleared and his heart stopped hammering and the earth stopped churning under him. Ava smiled, leaning her head against his shoulder.
“Better now?”
Jack swiped greasy sweat from his forehead. “Still a bit sick. No one really wants a demon manifesting to them in the bog.”
Ava went on tiptoe and licked his ear. “Believe me, after this is over … I’ll make you forget
Jack shoved his hands into his pockets and looked anywhere but her admittedly pristine rear bumper. On the opposite side of the street, shadows moved in concert, as if the sun were setting in cadence with his footsteps.
Trackers. Maybe ghosts, maybe demons. Certainly employed by that white-suited ponce Nazaraphael. Jack flipped two fingers at the shadows and turned into the cavernous innards of the train station, feeling like a man walking the last mile to his death.
Ava stopped on the train platform like a flickering spirit from a movie about love, and loss, and wartime, done up in black and white.
Jack found a fag, lit it with his finger, and wrinkled his nose. “Stinks down here.”
Ava cast a nervous look back over her shoulder, and Jack didn’t doubt her instincts. This was a good place for an ambush. Not from ghosts or the Fae—too much iron—but demons—or fuck it, humans—could be three feet from him, tucked back in the dark places, and he’d never see it coming.
Jack muttered under his breath, felt the ambient magic of the Black pluck at him, and sent a small tendril outward, searching, feeding back. Ava was a hot spot, her humanity and the spell that bound them, but otherwise the tunnel was blank and cool, devoid of feeling.
Lots of people could keep themselves under wraps against an inelegant finger of mage spellcasting. Every demon could. Cold comfort was better than no comfort.
“We’re alone,” Ava said, and he coughed.
“No offense, luv, but I already got jumped by a great bloody demon wanker today and I’m not keen on a repeat. Not to mention that you, yourself, qualify as a hazard to me health.”
“Whatever makes you feel better, lover.” Ava jerked a thumb at the mouth of the tunnel, ringed with lamp-teeth and wires. “Come on. I’ll brief you on my plan on the way down.”
“Down where?” Jack asked, but Ava shook her head.
“Good things come to those who wait,” she teased.
Jack watched Ava duck under the barrier at the end of the platform and push free a small service door. It tugged at him, that primal urge not to stray from the campfire, but Jack hadn’t spent his life being part of the pack. He knew the things that lived outside the circle of light, knew them by name.
Because he knew, knew why ordinary people were afraid of the dark. And rightly so. He flicked his fag away and followed Ava. Nothing nasty leaped out at him, and the geas eased a bit, lessened the shrieking in his brain, if he stayed close. She’d probably planned it that way. Clever little bint.
They walked through a curved service tunnel with yellowed tiles cracked and leaking from the Blitz. Jack saw a little girl in a car coat, clutching a doll to her chest as she crouched against the wall. She flickered, one moment staring at the floor, the next at him. Black pools of eyes. Lips curled back from pointed teeth, hands sprouting claw-nails.
“Can’t help you, luv,” he said quietly. “No sense in rattling your chains at me, is there?”
Ava looked back when he stopped walking. “Problem?”
“Not in the least,” he said. The angry little ghost faded from existence as quickly as her life had been snuffed by the Luftwaffe. Jack brushed off the chill from his neck and walked on.
The tunnel was long, lit with bulbs in steel cages that flickered and fluttered like a spirit trapped under glass.
Ava’s hair gleamed like oil under the light. Jack ran his hand over his own peroxided bristles, felt dampness from the aboveground world clinging to his skin.
“How far are we going?” he said.
Ava smiled over her shoulder, teeth bright.
“As far as we need to.”
Jack’s hand flashed out and wrapped around her arm. “That’s not much of an answer, luv.”
Ava twisted, like a snake in his grasp, and Jack felt her small hand close at his throat and his head slam into the tile, sending grout and grime loose and clattering to the floor.
“I am being nice, Jack,” she whispered. Jack felt her breath, she was so close. “Don’t make me be naughty.”
“Are we having a lovers’ quarrel?” he rasped.
Ava’s lips trembled. “I am not screwing this up,” she said, her voice like steel. “I have waited too damn long for my shot at Areshko.”
“What’s your epic love with this Daniel bloke?” Jack said. “Areshko snatch his soul away before you could have the white wedding? He go rushing in to defend your honor? Or was he a stupid git, like all the others a demon kills, and you think you can make it not so by avenging him?”
“You shut your mouth,” Ava spat. There was something in her look, in her touch that sent a peculiar heat all through him. Not the heat of her magic, skin-on-skin, sweat and release. This was the kind of heat that warned a bloke that he was about to catch on fire.
“You haven’t told me anything close to a whole truth, and I haven’t pressed,” he said. “But when I can’t help you no matter how hard you push or how much you beg, remember you had the chance of help from the goodness of me fucking heart, and you chose to be cryptic.”
After an interminable second, her grip eased enough that he could breathe again. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
“Fine,” Jack said. “You had your chance.”
“And you are a bastard if I ever saw one,” Ava snapped. “With your lectures and your holier-than-thous.”
“Holier? Hardly.” Jack snorted. “I never had a problem with a lady taking the lead. It’s a bit sexy, really.”
Ava brushed her hands over the front of her skirt, like touching his skin had dirtied her, and moved on.
Jack was left to trail again, and wonder what the bloody hell she was lying to him about when she had no reason to keep secrets at all. She had the cards. Every last bloody one.
Ava stopped at a metal fire door, long rusted shut, the warnings that no one except employees of the city of Edinburgh were allowed beyond this point obscured with graffiti endorsing a variety of gangs, ethnic groups, and bands.
“I’ll take a pass on that last,” Jack said.
Ava pressed on the door and there was a grumbling of wheels and gears from beyond the wall. The door swung back with a great tomb-creak that would have done Count Dracula—the Lugosi version, of course—proud.
Beyond was a flight of stairs, and the dank breath of underground. “Down here,” Ava said. “This is the fastest way to Catacomb City.”
“Isn’t that precious and twee. Catacomb City.” Jack let witchfire blossom around his palm, the blue glow lighting the stairway in sharp relief.
“A demon city, in the catacombs,” Ava said, her heels clicking on the damp concrete. There was moss, and rot, and water dripping invisibly. No one had come this way in a long while.
Jack itched for a fag as they descended. His wasn’t sight tweaking, like it had in the old railway tunnel, but there was something else here, some eidolon waiting in the dark that whispered and clawed at him from the Black.
The curving stairs and the geas made him stick so close to Ava that he was practically in her pocket, and she smiled back at him like they were on a lovers’ walk. Jack saw lamps clipped to the pipes overhead, so old they were just rust lace in great spreading patches. A utility tunnel, in its previous life. The ceiling jogged lower and he ducked, the very top of his hair flattening out against the slimy surface.
Ava turned back, her cheeks dimpling. “A little close, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bloody grave,” Jack said, bending over and flexing his palm. The flames of witchfire leaped higher, a wreath of slow-motion flame enclosing his hand, showing all the bones. Just ambient magic burning off in the world of the solid and real, but the effect usually kept people at a distance.
Ava sighed. “Put it back in your pants, Jack. Areshko’s buddies won’t be pleased if you come in with guns blazing.”
“Thought that was why you bloody tricked me into this,” Jack said.
“Yes, but we’re trying to make love, not war, if you can wrap your mind around that,” said Ava. “Until I’m ready, Areshko needs to think I’m one of hers.”
“What am I, then?” Jack regretfully let go of the slip of Black that allowed his witchfire to burn, and the light went out. It got colder, and he shivered in his leather.
“Look at that.” Ava smirked. “The bad nasty mage is afraid of the dark.”
“Anyone with sense is afraid of the dark,” Jack told her. He felt for his lighter and found instead a leftover glow stick from a music festival in Brighton—frightful new-wave synth-pop, lots of girls in baggy pants and flannel; all around, a wasted weekend.
Jack cracked the stick and alien green flared, making Ava blue-tinted where she walked beside him. His own flesh just went a little paler, ghost pale, and he could see all of his veins, the road map of the skin.
“So here’s how we work it,” Ava said, loud enough to carry along the length of the tunnel. The pipes petered out, and it was brick now, the mortar hollowed out and rats skipping in and out of gaps in the stone. A Victorian sewer, with the smell to match. The fetid river trickling through the dip in the floor splashed on Jack’s boots and promptly soaked his socks.
“Bloody hell. This Catacomb City better have plumbing, luv.”
“Don’t worry,” Ava said. “Your delicate sensibilities won’t be tested for long.”
“ ‘Delicate,’ hell. You can
“I’m going to tell Areshko I want to make a deal with her.” Ava slipped her arm through Jack’s. “For something or other—I think best on the fly. When she brings me in to her private chamber to seal the bargain, I’m going to kill her.”
“Just another day as a demon hunter, yeah?” Jack muttered. “You can’t kill a demon, Ava.”
“Don’t start with me,” she said. “I’ve done it. Believe it or not, Jack, not everyone lives in fear of hellfire. Some of us have learned to fight, and if you cared a little bit more about your fellow mages and a little bit less about yourself—”
“You don’t finish that thought, if you know what’s good for you,” Jack snarled. His heartbeat overshadowed the sound of their steps. “You know
“And you don’t know me, either,” Ava said. “Demons don’t come out on top with me, Jack.”
“Let’s hope so,” Jack muttered.
Ava’s heart was pounding, those extraordinarily statuesque breasts rising and falling fast.
“You were trained by the crow monks,” she said. “I saw the ink and I know what it means.
“Not a vice I make a habit of, trust,” Jack said. “I find it allows treacherous little bitches with sad eyes entirely too close.”
Ava rolled her eyes. “I like you, Winter, but this is getting …”
