Jack tried a hex, even though the answering echo of emptiness told him that in this place, the Black did not exist.
Parker’s claws grabbed at his boot, but they couldn’t get through the steel and pin him in place. Jack wrapped his arm through the chain and kicked with his free foot, cracking Parker in his elongated jaw. Parker slipped a little, but kept his hold.
Jack tried the curse again, as reflex more than anything. Magic was his armor, his sword, all he had. He wasn’t strong, and wits alone weren’t going to take a pissed-off chupacabra off his arse.
The cold started in his fingertips, as if he’d gone outside on a snowy day in Manchester and forgotten his gloves. It spread up his arms, down his back, deep into his chest, and around his heart. His blood roared through his ears like a freight train. Parker stopped struggling, his rheumy yellow animal eyes going wide.
Jack watched the ink of the tattoos, the Morrigan’s marks, shift and wriggle under his skin, giving birth to new shapes that moved with a life of their own. Feathers sprouted on his skin, covering every inch of him from scalp to sole.
The word sprang to his lips unbidden, the cold spreading to his mind and killing the panic and the scrabbling fear, everything except the dead-eyed logic that lived in the lizard part of his brain.
“
The cables holding the lift car glowed, and turned to slag, in the space of a breath. Parker jerked his head up, but the iron car fell too fast, and it took him to the bottom of the shaft, pinning him under its crushing iron weight.
Jack fell back on the tiles, slamming his bad arm hard and starting the flow of blood afresh.
The cold retreated, and when he came back to himself he picked his arse up off the floor and ran. The chaos inside the Bradbury Building served him well, and he ducked across 4th Avenue and into the lobby of the Million Dollar Theater as a herd of cop cars screeched to a stop, jamming up traffic and starting a cavalcade of horns.
He caught a flash of blond hair and saw Kim peeking at him from the women’s loo. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said.
“You’re all right, luv,” Jack said. Kim pointed at his arm.
“Your jacket is all torn up.”
“Arm, too,” Jack said. He looked down. Time to assess the damage, see if he’d make it as far as somebody who’d stitch him without asking too many questions.
His arm was smooth and bloodless. A thin line of scars, narrow and square as standing stones, was all that remained to show his arm had once been torn to hamburger.
Kim leaned in to examine his arm, and then shrugged. “Seems all right to me.”
“It does, at that,” Jack told her. He could think about it later. Figure out how it had happened later. Decide what the fuck had gone on back in the Bradbury Building with Parker. Later. All later.
He guided Kim to the back exit and out onto the street. The safehouse Sliver had given Pete was out of the question—Abbadon had found it and walked through his hexes without a second thought.
“You got a mobile?” he asked Kim. She tilted her head at him, pale brows drawn together. “A mobile phone,” Jack snapped. “You got one?”
“Oh, yeah.” Kim passed him a bright pink hunk of plastic, the screen displaying a photo of herself and another, equally blond and vacant-eyed girl with their cheeks pressed together. Jack handed it back.
“I can’t work something that doesn’t have buttons. Dial the number I give you.”
Kim did as he said and Jack explained, in as few words as he could and with as little detail as possible, where to find them.
Pete arrived about half an hour later, and Jack put Kim in the back seat of the Fury. Pete looked her over and cocked one eyebrow at him.
“I know,” he told her. “Just … don’t make a big deal of it, all right?”
“Bigger deal is where we’re going to hole up,” Pete said. “Considering this bastard apparently has a live feed of where you are at all times.”
“There’s a couple of motels on Sunset,” Kim piped up. “My girlfriends and I used to crash there. Nobody pays attention to who’s in and out, and if you slip the night clerk a fifty he’ll say he hasn’t seen you.”
“Fine,” Pete said. She turned the Fury toward Hollywood, and dealt with the clerk at the Sunrise Motel while Jack took Kim to her room.
“Why’re you doing this?” Kim said. “You’re just going to piss them off, you know. And then I’ll be right back where I started.”
“You wouldn’t have come with me if you believed that,” Jack said. “You know Sanford and those gits back there want to take your kid and you know what would happen when they did. You’re not like them, at least not all the way.”
Kim sat on the bed, rotating her spine so it popped. “Fuckin’ kid weighs a ton,” she said. “They don’t tell you when you get pregnant it’s like having that thing from
Pete came in and shut the door. “This place is about as lovely as a sewage treatment plant in Aberdeen,” she said, “but I don’t think anyone human followed us. Most of these people wouldn’t know if Jesus Christ himself was riding down Sunset on a pony at the head of a zombie parade.”
“Is she your wife?” Kim said.
“No,” Jack said, in concert with Pete. Pete shot him a look, then turned her attention to Kim.
“You must be hungry, luv. What can I bring you?”
“I like burgers,” Kim said. “Burgers and chili fries.”
“I’ll be back,” Pete said. Jack followed her to the door and caught her hand.
“You sure about this?” he said. Pete gave him a smile.
“I’ll be fine. Can’t hide in a shitty motel forever, can we? The girl’s got to eat, and so do I.” She turned her hand in his, and squeezed, before lifting his arm to examine it. “What happened to your jacket?”
“Something thought it was tasty,” Jack said. Pete stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“Take it off. You look homeless.” She left, and Jack locked the door after her and went about chalking a hex. Not that it would do shit against Abbadon, but it was familiar and he needed something to do.
Kim spoke from the bed. “She really loves you.”
“Don’t know about that,” Jack said. “Tolerates, maybe.”
Kim folded her hands over her stomach and swung her feet up on the bed. “Put the TV on. I don’t want to hear the hooker in the next room faking her way to twenty bucks.”
Jack turned the telly to a news program and sat next to Kim. “Got some experience with that?”
She sniffed. “That obvious?”
“People like Anna prey on people on the game, and junkies, and runaways. Lost souls. I doubt it was your fault.”
“I had a kid,” Kim said quietly. “Before this one. I was seventeen. He was born addicted to meth.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“When this happened, I was clean and I was living at Anna’s,” Kim said. “Getting fucked by her kinky friends wasn’t so bad. She fed us and we weren’t prisoners. Place to live. It wasn’t rape. More than I can say for when I was hooking.”
“Did you really think you could raise your kid in that place and everything would turn out fine?” Jack asked.
“I don’t fucking know,” Kim muttered. “I don’t even know who the father is, but I do know the baby’s going to be healthy this time and I’ll take it from there.”
“Until Abbadon takes it from you and uses it as a vessel for one of his pals,” Jack said. “He screwed up with the last child. He won’t take that chance with you.”
Kim sniffed again, and in the light of the TV Jack saw wet lines on her face. “What am I supposed to do?” she demanded. “If it’s not that, they’ll still take the kid. That guy you came with, Sanford. He told Anna when I got it in me he wanted to adopt it. Legal and everything. I thought it’d be great—he’s rich, and he could give the kid stuff I couldn’t.” Kim started to sob in earnest, her shoulders fluttering like wings. “When I found out … what he wanted it for … I knew this wouldn’t be any different than my other boy. But you don’t ask a man like Harlan Sanford questions. You just give him what he wants.”
