Devil's Business

leave the kids at home?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Abbadon said. “They’re amusing themselves with Jack’s baby mama. I figured I could handle two of the three Stooges on my own.”

Jack lifted his head. There was blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten down, tasting like acid and pennies. “Pete?”

“Her.” Abbadon nodded. “Although we’ve got to think up a new name for her. Pete is just confusing.”

Jack hauled himself to his feet. The cold didn’t come this time, just the rage, hot and blood-pounding and familiar. “I swear, if you’ve touched her…”

“Oh, save it,” Abbadon said. “We’re not going to use your little crumpet to re-enact Last House on the Left. What good is a body if it’s fucked up beyond repair?”

Belial stood, then came at Abbadon from behind, but Abbadon turned, and the shadow of his power moved, and Belial went flying into the lake. He landed with a shallow crunch, then lay still amid the sloshing reeds.

“So, Jack,” Abbadon said. “My offer stands. Quit being a bitch about all this and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.” He put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “We could use a fucked-up critter like you. You and those freaky death powers will be real useful once things are different around here.”

Jack smacked the hand off his shoulder. “Where’s Pete?”

Abbadon wagged a finger under Jack’s nose. “That’d be telling. Say you’ll help and I might give you a clue. It’ll be a little fun for us. Or, you know, I could torture you into a pile of meat to tell me how you really open Locke’s gateway.”

Jack pulled the paper from his jacket. In that moment, if he were honest, he didn’t give a fuck what Abbadon did with it. Didn’t care if the hot, dry wind swept up from Locke’s doorway and blew away the entire world. It was a mad feeling, the sort that made people smash their cars into bridge abutments, beat their wives to death, or douse their children in kerosene and light a match. All that mattered was Pete.

“Here.” He threw it in the grass between them. “Have fun in Hell, you piece of shit. Now tell me where Pete is.”

Abbadon grinned at him. “Not the deal. You want to set the terms, you should have held out a little longer.” He bent to pluck the paper square from the grass, and Jack lifted his boot and drove the steel toe hard as he could into Abbadon’s gut. The body Abbadon had picked out wasn’t big as far as things went, and he folded around Jack’s foot, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

“So it’s like that.”

“Yeah.” Jack snatched the paper back up and shoved it in his jacket. “You can try to do whatever you want to me, Abbadon, but you’re not getting this. Where’s Pete?”

Abbadon got to his feet, brushing grass and dirt from his front. “I told you. Safe and sound and with my kind. I have to say, she’s way too good for you. Regulation hottie, too. How did you manage that?”

Jack called up the leg-locker hex silently, and when Abbadon went down, banged his forehead into the steps of Lucinda Lanchester’s tomb. “I was in a band.”

Abbadon started to laugh, the blood dribbling down his forehead and across his mangled nose like dark fingers. “All right, Jack. All right, we’ll do it your way.” He shoved Jack off and stood. Jack hit the ground and realized that this might be the last shit plan he didn’t think through. He hadn’t gotten beyond pissing Abbadon off, making him tell where Pete was, and then kicking the blue hell out of him in return.

Abbadon’s shoe pressed into his chest, and Jack felt a rib creak and then give. He didn’t have enough air to make any sound, so that was a blessing. It was difficult to feel hard when Hellspawn was crushing your ribcage. “You fucked up,” Abbadon told him. “I wanted to be friends, but now I’m just going to pull out your spine and shove it up your ass. You’re a worm, like all the rest.”

He moved his foot, but Jack did not make measurable progress toward sitting up. His chest was on fire, and his body had given his commands up for a bad job. Clearly, he didn’t have their best interest in mind, and he was no longer in charge.

Jack stared as Abbadon grew large, eclipsing the lamppost, the Fairbanks mausoleum, everything. He lengthened and his eyes went black, his teeth grew and his hands formed into scaly masses, tipped with claws.

“You wanted to see, Jack,” Abbadon hissed. “So behold the dragon.”

“Fuck me,” Jack whispered, because it was all he had the air for. “You do love the sound of your own fucking voice.”

Abbadon’s body curled between the tombs, and he leaned down so that Jack could smell the fetid breath pouring from between his underslung jaws. “You cost me a good body. I’m going to take yours apart slowly, now.”

A claw lanced into his arm, down to the bone, and Jack ground his teeth together. Even if he could scream, he wouldn’t give Abbadon the satisfaction of hearing.

Abbadon held him down with his claws and ran a long, black tongue across Jack’s face. “This is my real face,” he hissed. “What do you think of it, Jack?”

“I think your mum beat you every day with the ugly stick, and then kicked you down the stairs,” Jack grunted.

Abbadon snarled and snapped his jaws. “Funny man to the last, eh? See how funny you think it is when I make you eat your own guts.”

Jack saw a shadow rise behind Abbadon, and the creature screamed as something latched on to his back. Jack sailed through the air as Abbadon’s claw slipped from his flesh, then landed with a crash against the gates of Lucinda’s tomb.

The thing striking at Abbadon wasn’t as large, but it was lithe and black, a wingspan behind it blotting out the sky. Black smoke roiled around the body, obscuring the details, and Jack smelled the scent of Hell, the burnt ash crowding his throat and sucking out what little breath he could draw.

“You may have come first,” Belial snarled. “But you never grew beyond a petulant child, and it’s time somebody showed you where you belonged.”

“Finally, you grow some balls,” Abbadon said. He and Belial circled each other, the ground shaking under Jack’s feet. He heard Belial scream as Abbadon turned on him, wrapping him in serpentine coils, snapping at his exposed neck.

Belial’s form shimmered and writhed in Abbadon’s grip. Abbadon put his claws through Belial’s wing, tearing at the membranes, causing a spray of oily black liquid. Jack winced as he heard a bone crack, and Belial crumpled.

“We should have gotten it on a long time ago, demon,” Abbadon said. “In a stand-up fight, you’d never break me, and you knew it.”

“Fuck you,” Belial gasped, as Abbadon dug his talons into Belial’s belly. Jack saw the meaty sheen of intestines, then rolled onto his back.

Stand up, Winter. You’re dead if you don’t get your arse up.

Belial’s blood stank of sulfur, and Jack felt the memory of the hot wind of Hell race across his senses.

“Oh, we’ll get to that,” Abbadon purred. “Because now you’re going to be my bitch, demon, and you’re going to know exactly what it felt like for all that time, alone in the dark with ghosts for company.”

Jack levered himself up on the smooth marble of Lucinda’s tomb. He didn’t owe Belial shite. He could creep away now and hopefully find Pete before the rest of Abbadon’s kind killed her or worse. Or he could never find her. Abbadon alone had nearly turned him into paste. The other three would swat him like a bug.

The memory of standing at the edge of the chasm, of hearing the faintest whisper, came back strong amid the screams and the smell of blood. Abbadon’s family had marked him, had marked him while he was in Hell.

Hello, Jack. Teddy’s voice, or perhaps Levi’s. It didn’t matter. When they’d gone free, they’d told Abbadon about him, and Abbadon had known the crow-mage would be the one to use for his mad schemes.

He was a game piece, just like he was to Belial. And he was fucking sick of it, Jack decided, sick to the core. Belial, at least, had always been upfront that he was using Jack. And having a demon who owed you one would go