paged through the pictures again.
Jack patted himself down for fags and found his pack partially crushed in his pocket. He lit one, dragged. He didn’t want to tell Pete that he had a feeling the Cases’ and the Herreras’ slaughter wasn’t all that random. Ancient creatures of Hell didn’t simply latch on to you because they liked the cut of your jib.
Abbadon had escaped the great iron prison Jack had found while in Hell. Had escaped a full ten years before Nicholas Naughton had tried to awaken Nergal and sent the rest of the domino tiles flying.
Abbadon had had help. Nobody escaped Hell without it. Jack sure as fuck hadn’t.
“I need to see Mrs. Herrera’s body,” he said. “It’d still be on ice, yeah?”
“They keep unsolveds for as long as there’s room and they don’t go ripe, ’least they do back home,” Pete said. “I imagine she’d still be about. File said they had no family to claim the remains anyway.”
“Right,” Jack said. “Let me put up some hexes on this shithole, and then we’re going to go find out exactly what the fuck Belial has gotten me into.”
He dug through his kit bag and found chalk and a few of his dried baggies of herbs. He didn’t put much stock in kitchen witchery—that was the provenance of white magic, the sort of person who believed nailing a few twigs and a twist of colored thread above the doorjamb would keep out anything that meant you harm.
Only the Black could do that, and bending the Black to your will wasn’t something a white witch would ever truck with.
He chalked the barrier marks around the doorjamb and across the threshold, something to focus the hex. Protection hexes, good ones, took time, but Jack could pull a quick and dirty barrier together in a few heartbeats. That was important—if something was clawing at the other side of your door, speed trumped elegance every time.
He laid a line of salt from his ancient tin and followed it up with a line of herbs. He reached out, touched the electric swirl of the Black just beyond sight, and pulled it into the chalk, into the salt, tugging and weaving it into a crackling barrier across all the thresholds of the flat. A twinge in the front of his skull, and it was done. Anyone trying to come at him would get enough of a jolt to reconsider their life choices.
“Let’s get this done,” he told Pete. “I’m ready to be out of this miserable city.”
Pete collected her mobile and her bag, but before Jack could stow his kit, fists pounded on the door. Pete rolled her eyes. “Probably just some crackhead.”
Jack touched the door with splayed fingers, but nothing spiked his sight. “Yeah? What?”
“Hey, dude.” The female junkie’s voice was thin and papery through the water-stained door. “You got a place we could maybe piss? The gas station is like half a mile away.”
“Fuck off,” Pete said. “This isn’t a hotel.”
Jack sighed. “What’s the harm?” A girl couldn’t just find a convenient alley, like he had when he was a junkie. He could practically feel the grimy film that built up on your skin when you were concerned with showering maybe once or twice in a month. The stale taste in your mouth of fags and the bite of bile, because you hadn’t eaten in recent memory and didn’t want to. Your veins burned you from the inside out, burned out hunger and everything except the need to chase the fire, reignite it when it got low.
Pete threw up her hands. “Whatever. Just be quick.”
Jack undid the deadbolt and opened the door a crack. Saw the girl’s bloodshot eyes and rigid face, and tried to slam it again, but she thrust her steel-toed boot into the gap and then threw the door off its hinges with a boom.
He went down hard, the door landing on top of him. If it hadn’t been half-disintegrated with dry rot, it would’ve crushed his ribs, but instead the junkie girl landing on top of him finished that job. She crouched atop Jack and leaned down, nostrils flaring wide. She wore a piercing, a ring with a jewel bead that shimmered in the low light as she inhaled his scent.
Jack thrust against her with his whole weight, but she wrapped a hand around his neck. “You really think you can just run from me? You think Belial can protect you?” The voice was low and masculine, and as it twisted out of her narrow throat it sounded like a creature trapped far below ground.
Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Pete moving—she held a thin metal tube he recognized as her collapsible baton that she’d carried as a detective, and still kept in her bag for rough spots.
Jack looked back at the girl. Blood vessels had erupted across the surface of her eyes from the strain of Abbadon’s magic, and her breathing was sawing in and out of her throat. “What part of no don’t you understand, Donny boy?” he said. “I’m not interested in your jailbreak. I have to live in this world same as everyone else. Don’t particularly want to destroy it.”
“Then you’ll burn like the rest,” the girl hissed. “Like all the other sons of bitches who stood up to be counted against me.”
Pete raised her baton, but on the downswing the shape of the male junkie slammed into her, knocking Pete into the wall hard enough to leave indents in the stained plaster.
“Shit…” she gasped, as the boy straddled her, wrapping his fingers in her hair. He had a knife, a rusty little Swiss Army number like a boy playing at wilderness adventures would carry, but he jammed it into the fold of Pete’s jaw.
“Stay down, whore,” he rumbled. Levi. Jack would know the wet, smothered gasp of the voice anywhere.
“I’d hoped you’d be one of us,” Abbadon snarled, “but now you’re useless to me. Loose ends get cut, Winter. Your little demon boyfriend can’t protect you now.”
Jack felt the cool metal of Pete’s baton brush against his fingers, and he struggled under the door and the weight of the girl, batting it back toward Pete. Her fingers closed around it and she whipped it up and across the boy’s face. A welt of bruise blossomed up one cheek and Jack saw a tooth fly, borne on a spray of blood.
The girl turned her head for a split second, and Jack braced his hands against the blistered paint of the door and shoved. She tumbled off him, and Jack scrambled onto her back, grabbing her by the hair and slamming her head once into the floor, short and sharp.
The girl went still, but the boy was less tractable. Pete was up now, and hit him again with her baton, and again, until he fell, twitching and bleeding. Jack scrambled for his kit bag. Exorcisms, unlike barrier hexes, were not something he could perform on the fly, but it wasn’t like a demon had actually crawled inside the junkie. Levi was just riding him, using him like a puppet.
He flipped the top off his salt tin and dumped the full contents over the junkie’s body, watching the flakes turn pink as they stuck in the runnels of blood across the boy’s face. “Get the fuck out,” Jack snarled, and pushed, with his talent, as hard as he could. He contacted the expanse of Levi’s power—sticky, dark, endlessly hungry. A vast maw, a thing that could devour the world and never be sated.
Jack shoved, using the salt as his vessel, and thin green flames rose from the junkie’s body as the Black clashed with Levi’s talent. The junkie spasmed, then rolled on his side and vomited a thin stream of sticky bile laced with blood.
Jack grabbed Pete by the hand, slinging his kit bag with the other. Abbadon knew where they were, and his hexes had done precisely shit. Keep moving—that was the only way to defeat a predator. Run until your feet are bloody and then run some more.
“You all right?” he said. Pete was pale, the only spots of color high in her cheeks.
“I’m fine,” she said tightly. “Fucking go.”
They made the reverse journey down the stairs and into the Fury. Pete let out a small sound as she lowered herself into the seat, and Jack tossed his kit to the floor, taking her chin between his fingers. He knew that sound, had made it himself when he thought everyone, his mum and Kevin and the rest, had stopped listening. The sound came after beatings, after falls, after you’d swallowed the blood and the bruises had flowered fully on your skin.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing,” Pete snapped. “Just took a hit from that fucking junkie, is all. I told you not to let them in.” She sucked in a breath, and passed a hand across her abdomen before shoving the key into the Fury’s ignition. “Stupid,” she told Jack. “So stupid.”
Jack couldn’t disagree with her as they drove away, but he at least had the comfort of knowing he was going to make Abbadon answer for this, and for everything else. Belial couldn’t threaten him and Abbadon couldn’t scare him, but now he’d fucked himself. Jack could take a beating, take a knife in his own back, but Pete was a different
