Jack had learned that rule the hard way.
In his hand, the spirit heart stopped.
It gave a last
“Yes? Hello?” Mary Poole stood partly in the earth, ankles cut off by the grave. Her burial clothes clung to her frame in tatters. “Hello, yes? Can you hear me?”
“What do you want?” Stuart Poole was heavy, a heavy face full of jowls sitting on top of a heavy mound of body. “Who are you?”
“Jack Winter,” Jack said. “This here’s Petunia Caldecott.”
He flinched when Pete fetched him a punch in the shoulder. “Tosser.” She faced the ghost, pleasant and pointed as if Stuart Poole were a banker she suspected of defrauding his clientele. “Mr. Poole, we’re here on behalf of your children. Jayne and Stuart, the junior?”
“Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Can you hear me?”
“Repeater,” Jack said at Pete’s questioning eyebrow. “Just a fragment of a spirit left behind with the bones. Mary Poole’s been taken on to her eternal reward, if you believe that bollocks.”
“Comforting to know what’s waiting when I shuffle loose the mortal coil,” Pete muttered.
“Pardon me, but I’ve asked a question—
“Pete,” Pete said. “And that’s Jack, like we’ve established. Your children have some questions about your will, Mr. Poole. Seems they’re absent from it?”
“Your beloved offspring were wondering if perhaps there was some mistake there,” Jack expanded. The dead pressed closer behind him, and he heard the wings, like wind through a grove of trees, but they were wings. He knew the sound. It was familiar, old, as much a part of him as his tattoos or the vertical scar on his right cheek from the business end of a smashed witch bottle.
Jack supposed he had stolen that necromancer’s Hand of Glory, and his wife, but he still thought the bloke had overreacted.
Scars faded, but the rush of wings never did. They always circled back, always came to him when he talked to the dead. A living walker in death’s realm always called to them, the eyes and wings of the Underworld. The crows of Death.
“Jack . . .,” Pete said, right on cue. She didn’t have the sight, but she did have a connection he didn’t, to the push and pull of power under the world, the constant tide of the Black under their feet.
“I know, I know,” he snapped. “Wrapping up—how is it, Stu? You cut your brats out of the will, or was it all a terrible misunderstanding that will be resolved with tears and hugging and vows to be a better sort of person because it’s what Mum and Dad would have wanted if they hadn’t kicked off in that lorry collision?”
Stuart Poole puffed up, his silvery insubstantial form spreading out over the graves. “It most certainly was not a misunderstanding. Jayne and my son were miscreants—Stuart with his embezzling and Jayne with her women.”
Jack cocked an eyebrow at Pete. “The very nerve.”
“They’re not getting a penny!” Stuart Poole bellowed. “Not a single cold shilling, you understand?”
“Perfectly.” Jack dropped a wink at Stuart Poole. “Hope you’re less of a miserable sod in the afterlife, guv.”
“I never heard such . . . ,” Poole began, but Jack let go of the thin thread of spirit he’d caught, and Stuart sputtered out like a run-down torch.
The wings were much closer now, ruffling the leaves and the grass around their feet, filling up the air with hisses and cries.
“Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Hello?”
“Shove off, luv,” Jack said. “Your ticket’s pulled. Run on and frolic up in God’s heaven, now.”
“Jack, honestly,” Pete said, rolling her eyes. She snapped the camera shut and tucked it back into the bag.
Jack reached out and gently cradled the heart as the clockwork slowed to nothing. The sound of ghosts leaving the living was almost never a howl, an explosion, or a dramatic dying gasp. Like most things, the dead just faded away.
The wings went with them. The ravens of the Bleak Gates, the guards of the entrance to death, had found their quarry, and it hadn’t been him. Today.
“Good job of that,” Pete said. “Quick and quiet, and the Poole family can’t dispute it.”
“Pete, people will always dispute what they don’t want to hear,” Jack said. “Although if you’re desperate enough to call on a shady ghost-raising sod like meself, I really don’t think you can dispute much of anything. Certainly not that you’re a tosser.”
“And I thought I was a pessimist.” Pete folded the camera into its case and handed him the bag. Jack shoved his spirit heart inside and shouldered the weight. He’d never had to drag around a bloody satchel when he was living as a mage. A little salt and chalk in the pocket, a sliver of mirror or silver, and it was enough to curse or hex his way out of and into most trouble. He’d carried more kit to shoot up than to work magic.
“Let’s call on the Pooles and get this over with, shall we?” he asked Pete, ignoring her last comment. You couldn’t spend any time at all in the Black and not lose faith in men, gods, and basic decency. The only ones who didn’t were the prize idiots who soon got themselves topped, if the older, hungrier citizens of his world were merciful.
“Now we’re eager to work?” Pete shoved her hands into her jacket. “This isn’t going to be a pleasant scene, you know.”
“Yes, well. The less time I have to spend doing parlor tricks for rich twats, the better off we’ll all be.” Jack added extra weight to his step as they reached Old Brompton Road and started for the tube station. His jackboots rang against the pavement like funeral knells.
Pete let the twat remark pass, and for that Jack was grateful. His temper had returned with a vengeance when he kicked his habit, and lost the thing keeping his sight at bay. The sight was no longer intermittent and faulty, forcing him to live rough and desperate as he used to keep the dead where the dead belonged. Now it was raw, like a fire eating through the paper of his mind, and it played hell with his control.
Pete got the brunt of it, and though she bore it with sharpness and a frown like a Victorian nursemaid, she didn’t deserve it. The heroin hadn’t eaten away enough of his brain to mask that fact. He was a twat himself for the things he said and did to her, but she’d chosen to stay with him, chosen the Black over her old, safe life, and Jack wasn’t so noble he would force her away for her own good.
The truth was, if he didn’t have the fix he needed her. And needing anything wasn’t a luxury a mage of his situation could afford.
But it was the truth, and Jack knew that in the Black, there was no changing truth.
Chapter Two
The Pooles lived in Kensington, in a million-pound row house that Jack would have happily vandalized at a point in the not-so-distant past. Pete stepped up and rang the bell, the camera dangling from her fist. “Let me talk to them, right? Let’s have a minimum of interrupting and an absence of swearing until the check’s in hand.”
Jack sighed, irritation spiking like acid in his guts. “I know how to play nicely, Pete. I’m not going to steal the silver or insult the Queen.”
“The Pooles’ kids are not going to be pleased,” Pete said. “The last thing I need is you making things worse.”
“Oi, who’s the teacher and who’s the apprentice, luv?” Jack said. “I’ve been raising ghosts since you were in nappies.”
“You’re the teacher, it’s true and you’re brilliant,” Pete said, with that deceptively sweet smile, the one that would take your head off like a razor if you got too close to it. “But you have the social skills of a chimpanzee on match day, and I’ll be doing the talking.”
“Well and good,” Jack grumbled in assent, since he’d probably say something to get the police called with the mood his headache and the effort of raising the spirits had fetched.
Jayne Poole opened the door and drew back, like one did when they found salesmen on the stoop. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve found something?” Jayne Poole had a pinched, anxious air to her, like a thin, nervous dog with thin, nervous blood.
“We did, Ms. Poole,” Pete said. “May we come in?”
Jayne Poole stepped aside and gestured them into the dank bowels of the house, which still smelled like her parents even after the nearly full year since their deaths. Jack couldn’t blame her entirely for the grim memorializing that was going on—death by runaway beer lorry wasn’t the most dignified end a couple of posh twats could come to.
Pete walked ahead of Jayne Poole, who moved slow and sloppy with pills or gin, or both. Jack would wager there was a regular Sid and Nancy doing a dance in her bloodstream.
“We made contact with your mum and dad,” Pete said, “and spoke about the issue of the will. . . .”
“Yes?” Jayne Poole chewed on her bloodless lower lip, one long square nail tapping her overbite. All that money, Jack thought, and the Pooles couldn’t fix their daughter’s traditional English teeth.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Pete said. Jayne Poole put her hand on her throat, covering the large emerald pendant that sat in the hollow like a wart on a wicked witch.
“What on earth is that supposed to mean, Miss Caldecott? I was Father’s favorite. I paid you good money . . .”
Jack cleared his throat. “Not to split hairs, but your brother paid us, and it don’t change the result—you and he both get nothing. And incidentally, the old man? Not such a fan of yours.”
Jayne Poole’s mouth flapped open, snapped shut, and she jabbed her finger at Pete. “How dare he speak to me that way? How dare the both of you take our money and deliver this . . . this . . .
Pete opened the camcorder and pressed the playback. Stuart Poole’s voice rattled through the sitting room, the windy, eldritch sound that ghosts on film took on.
Two heat flowers blossomed on Jayne Poole’s cheeks. “It’s fake,” she said hotly. “You must have faked it. Father would never say such things. Patently ridiculous.”
“Ms. Poole, we’ve done the job you paid us for,” Pete said, “and we’d like the rest of the money now.”
Jayne Poole clopped over to the door on her spiked shoes, heels digging divots out of the soft wood floors. Jack thought of his flesh, and flinched. “Get out,” Jayne Poole snapped, flinging the door wide to let in the muted daytime sounds of Kensington. “You’ll get not one red cent from me, and you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.”
“Ms. Poole,” Pete warned, her eyes going jewel-hard. “I advise you to think carefully before you decide not to pay us.”
“What are you going to do?” Jayne Poole’s horsey lip curled back. “Put a curse on me?”
“Don’t bloody tempt me,” Jack muttered, and grunted at the sharp pain when Pete jabbed him in the ribs.
“I’ll deal with this,” she said, low. “Ms. Poole . . .”
“Out!” Jayne Poole cried. “Out, right now, before I call the police.”
Pete threw up her hands. “I would
Jack followed Pete to the door, stopping on the threshold and turning his eyes back to Jayne Poole, who stood in the center of the foyer huffing like a well-coiffed freight train. “Your father hated you,” he told Jayne. “Right down to your greedy, rotten core, and it’s easy to see why. You’ll see him again sooner than you think, so perhaps you should spend your remaining years trying to become a bit less of a cunt.”
Jayne Poole’s fists curled, and she let out a sound of fury, but Jack ducked out before she could land a blow. “You take care, now, Ms. Poole.”
Pete rubbed her forehead as the door slammed behind them, leaving them with curious looks from the pavement population, tourists and posh types browsing in the nearby antique shop. Jack
