Jack raised his face from the pavement, feeling small pockmarks where grit had wormed its way into the flesh of his jaw. A car horn sounded from somewhere far off.
“Jack?” Pete’s voice drew closer and small hands felt his pulse, checked his pupils, and then sat him up.
“’M all right, luv,” he managed. “Just wanting tea, I expect. Low blood sugar.”
Pete favored him with her
“Alien abduction?” Jack offered. “Over eager and/or amorous sheep?”
“Don’t think we won’t discuss this when you’re not sprawled in the dirt,” Pete said, offering him a hand up.
After what the demon showed him, Jack knew better this time than to take it and expose himself to her talent. Even so, he swayed like he’d downed six pints when he managed to pull his shivery legs under him and stand. “But?” he said as Pete climbed back into the Mini.
“But I found something at the council that you need to hear about,” she said. “So loosen your corset and try not to swoon again, Mr. Darcy.”
Jack collapsed into the passenger seat with a grateful sound, rather like someone had punctured him and let the air out. “That’s hurtful, that is. I’m far better looking than Colin Firth.”
Pete steered them back toward the estate, even though it was the second-to-last place in England and the Black that Jack wanted to go at that moment. He kept that to himself. He had pride.
“I looked at old newspapers and provincial records, trying to find any deaths that might be our four,” Pete said. “And fended off a sweet old thing who kept trying to give me a biscuit and send me out on a date with her grandson.”
“Oh yeah?” Jack leaned his head back. “Any potential there?”
“He stuffs lamb sausages for a living, so no.”
Jack grinned with his eyes closed. He didn’t have to look at Pete to make her blush. “You know you could never give me up, luv. I’m in your blood like the Black.”
“The hell you are.” Pete snorted. “Like cheap vodka, maybe. Give me a fag and a coffee and I’m well rid of you.”
Jack opened his eyes then. Wanted to say,
It was a fucking nightmare, being the knight. No small wonder white witches always looked like they had poles up their bums.
Pete stayed quiet while they rode back to the estate, and she handed him a sheaf of photocopies when they were in the kitchen. She plugged in the ancient and calcified electric kettle and found two mugs, as well as a box of loose tea. “I’m thinking eating anything in this kitchen is asking for us to join the ranks of the gloopy dead upstairs,” she said.
Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.
“Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”
Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.
The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed
The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.
June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.
Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”
Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”
“Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”
“What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.
Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache returned, swift and vicious as a Staffordshire terrier latching on to a postman.
“I can undo the necromancer’s bindings. But to get the ghosts out of the house, I have to find their gravesites and set them to rest and if I can’t find little Creepy June’s remains I can’t bloody do that, can I?”
Pete sighed. “Let me see if I can call in a favor with Ollie at the Met. They’ve got some toys for sniffing out cadavers that are quite good.”
“Cadavers that have been under a log for seventy years?” Jack said. Pete sighed.
“Must you shoot down everything I say?”
Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”
Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”
He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.
“Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”
“Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.
Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.
“Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”
“And the binding?” Pete said. “We need
Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”
He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”
Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”
“Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”
“We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”
“I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.
“If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.
Jack sobered. “I think after that
Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . .
“You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”
She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”
“Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”
Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”
Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”
She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.
“Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.
“That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”
“You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.
“Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”
Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”
“Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”
“So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”
Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”
He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”
Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”
Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”
Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”
Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”
“It just bloody
“Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”
“Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”
Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?
