She dropped, pulling her knees up to her chest, and Jack felt the revenant pass over them, her feet trailing through his back, the chilling shock of this making his heart skip.
The revenant fell on the two men in the tunnel, hungry and moaning, her hands spreading frost over their skin.
Nina’s eyes widened. “That really was a mistake, you know.”
“Likely. Never let a mistake steal any sleep from me yet.” Jack extended his hand. “I need fresh air, and a pint. What do you say?”
“I say you’re an odd sort,” said Nina. “But all right.”
Jack squinted in the sun as they emerged from a utility hatch. He hadn’t expected it to be morning, the world looking as usual as it ever had.
Nina jerked her chin across the small cobble street. “Pub.”
Jack followed her. “Hallelujah. The gods
“Not particularly,” said Nina. Jack snorted.
“Woman after my own heart.”
He ordered a whiskey instead of a pint, drained the tongue of liquid fire down his throat, and ordered another.
“You want your Ava back, yeah?” said Nina. “You’re going to have to challenge Areshko to do it.”
Jack shook his head. “Not something I fancy.” Ava’s face, just before she vanished, wasn’t leaving his eyes, even as he got a third glass of whiskey.
Nina snorted. “Yeah. I’d worry about you a bit, if you did.” She sucked on the straw in her tonic water. “The things some blokes do for love.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say love?”
She snorted. “Please. I saw her tits. It’s love.”
“Barely know her,” said Jack. “But I did like her, and I don’t like demons. Not at all.”
“So, demon killer”—Nina grinned at him over her drink—“how will you slay the dragon this time?”
“I’m thinking that there’s another bloke in this city who doesn’t have any love for Areshko,” Jack said. “And that he might be interested in what I’ve got to tell him.”
Nina drained her drink. “Do I know this person?”
Jack tossed back the last of his whiskey and gave her the rakish grin it inspired. “I don’t think so, nice little girl like you.”
“I may be little,” Nina retorted, “but I’m no little girl.”
Jack thought of the gray, grasping sorcery that she commanded, the sort of power that could pull a spirit back from beyond the Bleak Gates, out of the City and into its own dead flesh. “I suppose not,” he agreed. Lighting a fag, he ran a hand over his hair. It was hopeless, a rat’s nest of lopsided spikes. “Poor choice of words. You with me, or going to slap my face and storm off?”
Nina sighed. “Depends. Are you always so arrogant?”
“On me good days. And on days when a demon kills a friend and I nearly get chewed to death by Hell’s mistakes.” He gave Nina a grin, from the wicked spot inside his heart. “You fancy shagging me cheerful again? Might work.” Dimly, he realized he was drunk and exhausted, which was the only reason to be such a chav, but he didn’t stop.
Nina slapped his hand away. “I have a dirty talent but I’m a nice girl. Fuck you, Jack Winter.”
Jack pulled out his sharpest razor of charm—his smile. “That’s the general idea.”
Nina shook her head. “Just because I helped you, just because I owe you something for helping me get out of Catacomb City, doesn’t mean you can be a wanker and put your hands anywhere you bloody please!”
“Could just be a hummer round back,” Jack muttered, feeling the venom on his tongue. Or maybe that was just stale whiskey. “That’s how the last one got me, you know.” He was being exactly the kind of cunt he despised when he was in clubs or out drinking, and he cursed the whiskey that he could feel rising in his throat.
“You’re drunk,” Nina said. “And you did get me shut of Areshko, so I’m going to forgive you.” Her eyes darkened. “Speak to me like this again, and I’ll slit your throat and raise you to carry my purse about while I’m out at the shops.”
She jerked him up by the elbow. “Come on. You want to get your Ava back, you need to be sober. And not a twat.”
Jack sneered as they left the pub, but he leaned against Nina’s small frame and stayed close. He owed her that much. He was a twat, no argument.
Nina was nowhere to be found when Jack woke up. He heard a telly from another room, saw a water-stained ceiling and a patch of wall, and smelled a curry cooking.
He winced when Nina came back into the room. “Me head.”
“Serves you right,” she said, handing him a paper cup of tea and a sandwich, transparent with grease. “Breakfast of champions. Eat up, drunkard.”
“Wicked woman,” Jack moaned, downing the tea and burning his tongue.
“I am,” Nina said. “You don’t care to know how wicked.”
“Not until my head stops vibrating.” Jack forced himself to bite into the egg and bacon butty. Noise rose from the telly, like a night bus in the fog.
“Manchester’s playing,” Nina said. “Think you can make it into the front room?”
The room didn’t swim much when Jack sat up, so he nodded. “Where are we?”
“My mum’s flat,” said Nina. “I still had a key.”
“Your mum in?”
Nina shook her head. “She and I haven’t spoken since my da took sick. We’ll have to light out before her shift at Sainsbury’s ends.”
Jack settled himself on the sofa and watched Man U’s red jerseys dart up and down the field against Chelsea for a few silent moments. “You know, Nina,” he said finally, massaging the center of his forehead, “you don’t have to be involved any further. Going up against something like Areshko … well … you’re just a necromancer.”
Nina sighed. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, boyo. Drink up your tea and tell me your grand scheme.”
Jack followed Nina up a flight of stairs that had nearly collapsed back to the floor below, and down a narrow hallway where the air was drunk with the scent of herbs and magic. Nina waved a hand in front of her nose. “Never could stomach that smell.”
“That’s funny, coming from a girl who digs up corpses,” said Jack.
“Not that,” Nina said. “That sulfur smell.” She gestured at the open flames lighting their way through the condemned flats.
“Tar,” Jack said. “Makes the torches burn longer.”
“It’s foul,” said Nina. “Just like Catacomb City. Foul and rotten, through and through.”
“No argument here,” Jack said.
Nina kicked against the last door in the hallway. After a pause it swung open, letting out a puff of rancid air. Inside, Jack saw candles, a bed, and a threadbare velvet chair, no doubt nicked from some nice old pensioner’s flat.
“You sure this is the place?” he asked Nina.
“Said you needed supplies for a summoning,” Nina said. “And I didn’t ask precisely why you would want to summon
A cat prowled from under a sofa and hissed at Jack. He hissed back and stepped into the flat. “Hello?”
One whole wall of the flat was comprised of apothecary shelves, the kind any good magic shop had by the score.
“It’s self-serve,” Nina said. “You leave the money in the cashbox at the door when you walk out.”
“Or?” Jack said, as he started pulling down herbs, salt, and charcoal.
“Or you don’t walk out.” Nina fetched a paper bag and snapped it open, holding it while Jack dumped his supplies into it. “So, you know I’m going to ask,” she said, as Jack pulled a crumpled wad of fives and tenners from his back pocket and shoved them through the slot in the rosewood cashbox.
“Ask what, luv?” he said.
“What demon you think can possibly help you get Ava back?”
They descended the stairs, the wood shuddering under Jack’s feet.
“Promise you won’t be mad?” he said.
“No,” Nina said.
Jack stopped on the landing and pressed his thumb and forefinger between his eyes. “Nazaraphael.”
“You’re mad, you know that?” Nina shoved a hand through her hair. It stood up like a porcupine. “Summoning the demon of the city.”
Jack felt in his pockets and came up empty. “Got any chalk? Forgot it when we stopped off at Magic Tesco.”
Nina pursed her lips, but passed him a nub. She sat on the steps of a crypt, watching him. “A graveyard’s a bit theatrical, don’t you think?”
“Graveyards are repositories,” said Jack. Every good sorcerer knew that for a quick fix, burial ground offered the best high you could stomach. The Black curled, radiant and radiating, among the tombstones and frozen grass and silvery moonlight, tendrils of it passing over his mind like fingers through his hair. The air was thick, cold, puffing from his mouth in waves.
If he hoped to bind a demon of the city, a graveyard was the only place that would do it. And he had only one chance at Nazaraphael, before the grinning demon tore him limb from limb.
The symbols he needed were easy enough, since he didn’t know what stripe of demon Nazaraphael was, besides a resident of Hell and a walking fashion disaster.
He should be doing this with a copper circle, properly, safely. Jack sucked in air through his teeth, trying to banish Lawrence’s voice and his own doubts from his mind. He sketched a circle, closed himself in, scooped up a hand of graveyard dirt, and made the circle again. Double, and tight as he could make it.
Nina offered him her flick-knife, and Jack accepted. She chewed on her lip. “Please be careful. I’ve grown rather fond of you, Jack.”
Jack grinned. “I have that effect on women, darling.”
“On second thought, I hope Nazaraphael picks his teeth with your bones,” Nina said sweetly.
Jack chuckled and held up the flick-knife. He paused before he sunk the blade into the pad of his thumb. Summoning demons wasn’t something a man did if he had a desire to keep breathing. Summoning demons was for the desperate, the pathetic, or the plain bloody stupid.
He was at least one of those, Jack thought. He wasn’t certain which.
The blade bit into his skin and blood welled, warm against the air. Jack turned his hand over and squeezed three droplets into the center of the circle. The graveyard ground sucked it up, drinking down his life force and his talent.
“I call upon the power of the ancient circle,” Jack said. “On the wings of the crow, I call the true name of Nazaraphael, demon of the city of Edinburgh.”
For a moment, nothing happened at all, not even a negative, not even his circle breaking and his own talent throwing him to the ground as Nazaraphael shook off his summons.
Then Jack felt a tingling start on the backs of his palms and his sight flared, a bright pinpoint of light growing in front of him, flooding into the chalk lines that bound the earth.
