Devil's Business

Pete let out a single, desperate sob. “You have to…”

“No,” Jack said. “No, we’re going to make this right, all right?” He grabbed Pete’s shoulders, and squeezed hard enough that she whimpered. “All right?”

She licked the blood from her lip, and finally met his eyes. Don’t be scared, he prayed. He needed one of them to not be scared, because the new Jack had deserted him, along with the cold singlemindedness, and he was only himself again, shit plans and shit luck and all.

“All right,” Pete said softly. “Fuck him, anyway. Who the hell does he think he is?”

Jack pulled her against him, felt the hard swell of her stomach against his torso, and nothing else mattered. “A bastard,” he said in her ear.

“The worst sort of cunt,” Pete said. “I fucking hate this, Jack. It’s never going to be over, is it? This kid is like a beacon for all the shit and evil of the Black, and it’s all going to come down on the poor thing.”

Jack pressed his face into Pete’s neck, into the curve behind her ear. “Worry about it when you need to worry, luv. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He brushed his lips over her forehead, tasted the sweat there. “Either of you.”

Pete’s mouth curled down. “Promise?”

“On my fucking life,” Jack said.

This is all very touching, Teddy said. But you’re not leaving here.

“No,” Jack told him. He pulled the paper he’d taken from Lucinda’s coffin from his pocket. It was wrinkled and smeared in blood, but legible. “You are,” Jack said.

From the next room, he heard stirring and skittering through the walls. Levi and the girl were awake. He turned to Pete. “We don’t have a lot of time. No time, really.”

She nodded. “What do you need from me?”

Jack handed her the gun. It was a relief to get rid of the thing, if he was honest. “Shoot anything that comes through that door right in the fucking face, and that includes adorable little girls.”

“Right,” Pete said. Jack pulled out his knife and she cocked her eyebrow. “And what are you going to do?”

She gave a small gasp when Jack jammed the knife into Teddy’s neck. It wasn’t demon blood, but it would do.

Teddy screamed. This isn’t going to save you, Jack. Not you or your whore or your brat.

“Let me tell you something,” Jack said. “She is not a whore. She’s a good woman and I don’t deserve her, and that attitude of yours is exactly why you’re hanging from a wall in this shit-trap.” He twisted the knife in deep, and felt Teddy’s heart give its last misshapen tremble. “Try to be less of a twat in your next life, yeah?”

He drew Locke’s sigil in the blood pooling on the warped floorboards. He stood in the center of it and recited the words that Sanford had intoned, although he liked to think he sounded like less of a pretentious gobshite while doing it. As a last thought, he picked up a discarded bottle of cheap Mexican beer—probably Levi’s doing—and tucked it inside his jacket.

He’d thought a portal straight to Hell would be more dramatic, but instead a thin line of white smoke rose from the circle, and the sigil fell away. The real world started to ash away little by little as the physical laws of space bent, burned up, and blew away.

Jack grabbed Pete by the hand and pulled her into the circle. The Black here was strong. He was the Black, inside Locke’s doorway, atoms spread from one end of the universe to the other. Pete’s Weir talent flowed through him, except this time it wasn’t an onrushing storm, a flood that could drown him. Here they were two halves, and they fit together. Weir and mage, floating on the time stream of magic, outside the realm of anything usual.

Jack put one hand on Pete’s stomach, used the Weir to widen his sight. His skull didn’t hurt—it merely felt as if the top had come off and an avalanche of foreign sensation had poured in.

The child was vague—not really thoughts so much as impulses, impulses of hunger and curiosity and fright. It wasn’t formed yet, didn’t really exist in the psychic space.

Abbadon’s magic rode it like a caul over its psychic presence, like an oil spill in cool water. He’d slipped inside Pete’s talent, inside her physical body, and planted a seed amid the psychic DNA of his child so that when it formed, it would form in his image.

Jack drew the darkness out, drew out the spark of Abbadon that still lived, inside Pete.

He saw the glass sands of Hell and smelled the hot wind. It wasn’t a dream, now. He was here, could taste the ashes, hear the screams and the clink of the soul bottles, smell the acrid roast of human flesh borne on the air.

Pete stared, turning in a slow circle. “This is Hell.”

“You are smart, luv,” Jack said. “I do love that about you.”

Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Another time, Jack.”

Abbadon stood there. He wasn’t the dragon that Jack had faced in the graveyard, not the slick-faced human. He was a shadow, all teeth and screams. “You think you’re so fucking smart,” he snarled.

“Smarter than you,” Jack said. “You decided to use my fucking child as your next ride into the daylight world. Not your brightest move, mate. Not even on a slow day.”

“You think you put me in Hell and I’ll stay?” Abbadon snapped. “I got out of this place once, Jack. I can do it again.”

“About that,” Jack said. “See, I don’t peg old Nergal as the generous sort. He may have weakened the bars, but I think you had help crawling out the first time. Whether it was a general, or one of the Princes, or a rat you trained to gnaw through the bars—it doesn’t matter. Belial knows your tricks now. I think this time, you’ll stay right where I put you.”

He pulled the bottle from his coat and held it up to Abbadon. “You’re bound, by the laws of Hell and by my will, Abbadon. Bound to stay in this place, until Hell ends or you do. So fuck off, and leave us alone.”

Abbadon’s shadow flickered once, twice, like faulty film, and then he disappeared, a curl of black smoke at the bottom of a manky bottle, sharing space with a half-centimeter of beer and two dead fag-ends.

Jack shook the bottle a bit, watched the smoke swirl. “Reckon he’s very angry?”

“Who bloody cares?” Pete said. “Trying to get at my kid. Twat.”

“You said it, luv,” Jack said. He walked to where the world dropped off, at the edge of the iron ravine. “Oi!” he shouted. “The prodigal son returns. Enjoy it, you coldblooded sons of bitches.”

Pete caught his arm. “Let me,” she said. Jack handed her the bottle. Just a sad scrap of soul. Just like everyone, no matter how evil or how much they wanted to stay alive, ended up eventually.

“Go on,” he said.

Pete cocked her arm back and flung the bottle hard as she could. It arced out over the ravine and flashed in the harsh white light before it fell from sight and disappeared.

She looked up at Jack. “That’s done, then?”

Jack looked down into the ravine. “For now.” Without Abbadon, Belial and his ilk would make short work of the other three. Jack stepped back, let go of the threads of Locke’s gateway spell, and watched as the daylight world slowly blended back together, and the laws of physics righted themselves.

Pete grimaced. “Awful. Feel like I’m going to puke now.”

“I’ll join you,” Jack said. Nothing else stirred in the farmhouse. Teddy’s corpse hung silently, bloodless and still. In the hallway, the little girl lay staring at the water-spot continents on the ceiling, unblinking.

Pete flinched. “Christ, she was creepy, wasn’t she?”

Jack shivered. “Adorable ones usually are.”

Outside, he saw a line of light on the horizon. It was nearly dawn. Pete sat down on the steps, inhaling a deep breath of air. “Don’t suppose we’ve got a ride out of here.”

“I came with that twat Mayhew and with Sliver,” Jack said. “But I imagine after that light show, Sliver got smart and fucked off back to Angel City. And Mayhew is just fucking useless.”

“He really was a twat,” Pete said. “I’m sorry, you know. You told me it was bad business and I went anyway.”

“Luv, if you lined up all the bad business I’ve followed up on in me life, you’d circle the earth,” Jack said.