knees and fingered a piece of chalk, deciding what to draw into the varnish-bubbled floorboards. Spells and hexes ran wild in a mage’s blood, scrawled on car windows and dripped onto tube station floors, but exorcisms had to be orderly.
Seth had shown him the results when they weren’t orderly and measured. When an exorcist lost his cool.
Once Jack had finished vomiting his breakfast into Seth’s loo, he’d paid attention to the lessons, and he hadn’t let a ghost get over on him yet. Until Algernon Treadwell’s ghost. But that time, Pete had been there. She’d yanked him back from the Gates with her talent, and anchored him to the living world.
He owed Pete a favor, no question. And such a favor wasn’t lying about the demon’s bargain. Jack could deceive others with ease but lying to Pete always took on a hollow quality, made him feel rotted and twisted up inside like a car wreck.
“Find anything else? More rattling skeletons?” he asked as Pete poked about in the wardrobe, so that she wouldn’t take his silence for what it was and ask him, in the manner of nosy coppers, what he was thinking about.
“Aside from a baggie of extraordinarily mediocre pot and the slips? No.” Pete sat on the edge of the mattress. “Just the usual leftovers of life.”
“Pot?” Jack perked up. “Mediocre or not, at least the lad wasn’t completely boring.” He winked at Pete. “Give it here.”
“Not a chance.” Pete stuffed the dusty baggie into her jeans.
“You don’t have the slightest idea what to do with that stuff,” Jack teased her.
Pete rolled her eyes. “Please. I went to university.”
“Did you, now.” Jack found the black silk squares and cord at the bottom of his bag. “Smoking marijuana, getting up to mischief—if you tell me there was inexperienced but enthusiastic lesbian experimentation, I could die a happy man.”
One of Danny Naughton’s worn-out loafers narrowly missed his head. “You’re a sod,” Pete said, but she was chewing her lip to mask the smile.
Jack grabbed his baggies of exorcism herbs and patted the spot next to him on the floor. “Come here, luv. First things first.” Protect yourself before you even think about ghosts. An unguarded exorcism was akin to painting yourself with honey and insulting a grizzly bear’s mum.
Pete folded up into a seat across from him. “If this is anything perverted and unnatural . . .”
Jack folded the herbs into the silk—camphor, white pine, and garlic root drifting past his nose in waves—and tied them up with a red ribbon. “Perverted and unnatural comes later.” He winked. “This is just a conjure bag. Keeps the ghosts from doing . . . what Treadwell did.”
“This smells like a Pizza Express,” Pete complained.
“Lawrence taught it to me,” Jack said, preparing his own bag and slipping it around his neck. “His grandmother uses them back home to keep away the duppies.”
Pete softened at the mention of Lawrence, and put the cord over her head. “Jack, it’s not going to happen again. Treadwell. Going to the thin spaces. Any of it.” She grabbed his hand, unexpectedly. He’d been shivering since they saw the
“I’m stronger now,” Pete whispered. “And so are you. It’ll never happen again, Jack. I won’t let it.”
Jack’s memory of the night in Highgate came back in snatches. Treadwell had tried to take his flesh, to cast out Jack’s spirit into the thin spaces, the mists outside the walls of the Underworld. A reverse exorcism, Jack supposed. Throw out the living git and move into his empty meat sack.
He hadn’t seen anything in the thin spaces besides his own life parading past in reverse, but it had been bad enough.
Jack knew what was waiting for him, when the clock wound back to zero.
And then Pete had come, and she’d pulled him back, and she’d banished Treadwell back through the Bleak Gates. Lain bleeding by the gravestones afterward, blood staining the white linen of her shirtfront, eyes clouded over with the pure white of the Weir.
His palms had gone cold. Blood was supposed to be warm, but when it soaked his fingers it was chill.
Jack had never had fear like that moment since. Not the kind that put claws into your throat and drained all the hardness and wickedness out of a person.
In the present, far from the bloody grass of Highgate Cemetery, Pete squeezed his fingers between hers, and Jack nearly told her everything. The only thing that stopped him was the thought that Pete wouldn’t understand she had to leave him, get as far away as possible once she’d heard the true story.
She’d stay and try to face the demon. And it would end just like it had the first time.
“I won’t let it,” Pete said again, and Jack heard the desperate strain creep into her voice.
“Pete . . .” He sighed, but there weren’t words for it. No words could explain that after he’d been walking dead for a decade, she breathed life back into him. No way to explain that Pete was in every heartbeat since the day they’d found each other again, in a filthy Bloomsbury hotel room.
She made him solid. Pete was the thing keeping the world real. And no one, no matter how hard-bitten and capable they thought they were, deserved to hear that. No woman deserved the responsibility of keeping Jack Winter in one piece.
Pete’s tongue darted out, licked her lips. “What, Jack? What’s the matter?” In the pale halfling light of the storm, her skin was translucent and her eyes drowning deep. When she looked at him like that, Jack’s fine thread of control snapped at last.
“Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling her close by their connected hand, his other taking the back of her neck, wrapping his fingers in her hair.
It was nothing like the kiss in the marsh, not hesitant and not slow. Pete’s lips were warm, parted, and breathless. Jack could have drunk her, every drop, and still been parched.
Her hands, trapped as they were against his chest, pushed him back, and they broke apart as abruptly as they’d come together, Pete’s taste in Jack’s mouth, melting and dissolving. Nothing he could do to save it. The bitterness returned when Pete stood up, cheeks flushed to roses and breath ragged.
“I shouldn’t have done that.” She flexed her fingers, fists and not, over and over. “Shit. I really shouldn’t have.”
“Too right,” Jack murmured, though he wasn’t talking about Pete. His own heart was thrumming, speeding along like he’d just choked down a handful of uppers. The drug was power, and the fix was Pete. How he wanted to taste her again, throw her down on the dirty mattress, expose that snow-petal skin, make the blood rush to the surface as she took away his pain quick as any needle.
“It’s not . . . I mean, it wasn’t . . .” Pete slammed her fist against the wall. Plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling. “Bloody hell, Jack. I know there’s something you’re not saying. Until you trust me, I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Quick as it had come upon him, the need subsided and left the same small dirty knot Jack felt in his chest when he stole from Lawrence, or nicked pensioners’ prescriptions, or woke up in a filthy squat with no memory of how he’d come to be there.
Before, the solution was simple—get high again and bollocks to guilt and shame.
Jack rolled the kinks out of his neck and picked up his chalk, short savage slashes on the polished floor drawing the beginnings of his circle. “Let’s just get this done and get back to the city, yeah?”
“Best, I suppose,” Pete said. “What should I do?”
“Just stay out of the way, if you please,” he snapped. Pete’s eyes narrowed and then she took a large, deliberate step back to the window that overlooked the fields beyond the back garden.
“You git,” she said softly.
Jack’s chalk snapped in half from the force of his stroke. “Never claimed I was Prince Charming, did I?”
Pete shook her head, but she stayed where she was, rain lashing the glass behind her. Jack focused on the circle blossoming under his chalk stub, the grit between his fingers and the soft scratch on the wood. It didn’t make him less of a wanker, but it helped dull the facts.
Ghosts were thin and slippery creatures, and a circle for an exorcism was about control more than power. Demons a sorcerer summoned needed power, drank it and craved it. Ghosts a mage tangled with were inevitably hungry and desperate, and they would rush the electric fence until it broke.
The exorcism circle required precision, focus, clarity. The trifecta of things Jack Winter didn’t have and had never held in any quantity.
“You’re right,” he said. The magic words. Bollocks to
Pete sniffed. “Of course I am.”
“When we’ve done what we came here to do,” Jack said slowly, “I promise I’ll tell you why I’ve been . . .”
“A complete and utter cock-stain?” Pete supplied.
“That,” Jack said. “But it won’t matter if we’re out on the street for want of cash, and right now I need to concentrate. Can we put a hold on the couple drama, please, until I kick this poltergeist back beyond the beyond?”
He expected an argument or maybe a slap—Pete was the kind of woman who slapped rather than sulked—but instead she frowned a little, and then her shoulders dropped and her fists relaxed.
“You called us a couple.”
Jack felt one side of his mouth curl. “Did I? Must have inhaled some of that shite pot you found.”
The baggie smacked him in the side of the head. “Arse-hole.” Pete glared at him as he worked, the circle growing and expanding and building on itself, a framework intricate as any clock, ready to hold the power of cleansing spells.
Jack finished the circle, checked the symbols to make sure he hadn’t cocked up, and dumped incense into the bowl. He added a pinch of galangal to draw any lingering spirits to the smoke. His lighter clicked thrice before he called a flame and touched it to the pile of dry herbs.
The house held its breath, stayed silent and still. Nothing inside his head except echoes and nothing before his sight except darkness.
“Feels normal,” Pete said. “Just a dusty old house.”
“That’s bothersome,” Jack said. “Old place, shouldn’t be so quiet. Old homes, old bones. Echoes.”
“Not every place is a backdrop for
“Can you look at Sir Nicholas and honestly tell me you believe that sack of wank-leavings was ever happy, for a single moment in his life?” Jack slipped his scrying mirror from the velvet. He set it gently on the floor and pointed at his bag. “Hand me that white candle, would you?”
Pete found it and passed it across, keeping well clear of his chalk markings. Jack lit the white candle and placed it west, the direction of the dead. He set his mirror on the floor and sat, fingers on the glass.
Waited.
The Naughton house was curiously blank, like a dead station on the radio, not music, not static. Just silence, eerie in its stillness and breadth. Jack’s skin crawled all up and down his body.
“Daniel Naughton,” he said, putting a push behind the words. “Master of this house. Come to me, spirit. To the circle, you are called.
Pete shifted. “Where is he?”
