Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
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 thing. Abbadon didn’t know that yet, but he would.
CHAPTER 19
By the time they pulled off the freeway at North Mission Road and took the turns that brought them to a complex of brick buildings that looked more like an old-fashioned movie studio than a mortuary, Pete had gotten some of her color back and she’d stopped wincing every time she took a breath. Jack felt his own chest unknot.
Pete parked in the visitor’s area and turned to him. “It’d take more than that to hurt me and the kid,” she said to Jack. “Don’t worry, all right?”
“Can’t make any promises,” Jack said. “I’m never going to not care if you’re getting hurt, Petunia. You know that.”
She winced at her full name. “You leave off calling me that. Know how much I bloody hate it.” She shoved the door open and perched a pair of sunglasses on her nose. “Tell you one thing, I’m not saddling this child with a name that’ll follow them through life, giving them endless shite. Been wondering even more lately what the hell my mum was thinking.”
“You given it any thought? A name, I mean, not your mum,” Jack said. The mortuary started at one of the brick buildings, with a peaked roof covered in red clay tiles, and continued in a modern gray box that told Jack in no uncertain terms via several signs that visitors were not allowed.
Pete shrugged. “I’m not much good at names. Figure I should stick my Da’s given name in there somewhere if it’s a boy. What about you? Your mum? Lawrence?”
“Lawrence, maybe,” Jack said. “My mum … are you mad? I’d never do that to a kid. Fucking bitch is dead and she’s going to stay that way, not live on forever saddling some poor offspring of mine with her name.”
“Well, excuse me very fucking much,” Pete muttered. “Just thought I’d ask.”
Jack was saved from having to think about what his mother’s reaction would be to him naming a living being after her by Detective Shavers, who came from the low gray building. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he told Jack. “I’m not happy about this.”
“You don’t have to be happy,” Jack said. “I’m not thrilled to see you either, mate.”
Pete jabbed him sharply in the ribs. “Thanks very much for setting this up,” she said.
“It’s not for you,” Shavers snapped. “I’ve had Ben calling me eight times a day, drunk off his ass, crying about the dead families. I can’t deal with this shit, Ms. Caldecott. Whatever you’ve stirred up in his head, look at the body, say what you have to say, and calm it back down.”
“I don’t think I can do much about Mayhew,” Pete said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s not exactly a stable individual.”
“If you don’t fix this, I’m going to arrest you and throw you in county myself,” Shavers said. “And I will personally ensure that your boyfriend’s in there with you, in a cell with a roommate who has a thing for blonds. That clear enough for you?”
Jack thought that Shavers could do with a good pop in the mouth. Knock out a few of those film-star teeth, and see how he’d act then. Coppers were, at the root, mostly the same. There were a few, like Pete, who thought they were genuinely on the side of justice, if not always the side of Good, but most were like Shavers—little men, with a little bit of power, using it to the hilt to fuck up everyone else’s day.
Shavers led them into the morgue proper and got them visitor’s badges, the kind given to families identifying the corpses of their loved ones. The only other person with the same colored badge as Jack was a sobbing Mexican woman with gray hair wrapped in an orange scarf. A morgue worker stood by her, not close enough to get grabbed, but close enough to look uncomfortable.
Shavers showed them the way to the cold room, then pulled out his mobile and left.
Pete opened the refrigerator door, as small and square as the reliquary for a person’s ashes. Mrs. Herrera was naked, covered in a plastic sheet. Blue around the edges, her eyes were shut, but nobody would ever mistake her for being asleep.
Jack got out a pair of rubber gloves. Who knew what kind of shit the morgue workers did with the unclaimed bodies? Nothing he wanted all over his skin. He took the sheet off and looked Mrs. Herrera over. She’d been in good shape when she was alive. The gaping cavity in her abdomen had been sewn up with rough stiches, and she could have been a trophy wife recovering from a tummy tuck. Her breasts were natural, flat brown nipples and not much volume, as far as tits in Los Angeles went.
Jack checked her arms, the inside of her thighs. No track marks and no tattoos. In the parlance of the Black, that made her practically a nun. Ink and smack were the two most common things to go under the skin if you had a talent.
He gestured to Pete. “Help me roll her.”
Pete didn’t flinch—she had ten times the experience with stiffs that he did. “You looking for anything special?”
“Don’t know,” Jack muttered, running his fingers lightly down Mrs. Herrera’s spine. It could have been random. Abbadon could have seen a pregnant woman at the market, at the cinema, anywhere at all. He moved among humans like a shark, and he could have happened on her by chance.
He couldn’t believe that, though. Not really. Abbadon was smart, and people weren’t all the same. One could be possessed as easily as breathing, while the next would fight to their dying heartbeat against psychic invasion, killing themselves and wearing Abbadon down to a nub. A fugitive from Hell couldn’t afford to take a chance like that. He’d chosen the children for a reason.
Jack found what he was looking for under the fold of Mrs. Herrera’s buttock. She had an arse toned in life by the sort of workout that came with private gyms and trainers named Sven, but the small shadow was a flaw, the sort of flaw a woman like her wouldn’t allow.
Pete got a pen light from a tray of instruments and shone it on the mark. “What the hell is that?”
Jack used his thumb and forefinger to spread the skin tight, touching the raised ridges with his other hand. The slightest bit of power was still there, mostly faded by death. No blood, no life.
“A brand,” he said. Seeing the simple lines, in the shape of a twinned cross surrounded by a broken triangle, stirred a memory that he’d just as soon forget. Another pretty girl, skinnier and paler, but beautiful nonetheless. Hollow, lifeless eyes. Skinny fingers that wrapped around his wrist and left marks when he yanked himself free.
Her
name had been Fiona Hannigan, and she was dead now, but she’d been into the same shit as Mrs. Herrera.
“I can see it’s a brand,” Pete said. “You look as if you’ve swallowed a mouthful of embalming fluid. What’s it mean?”
“It means she was part of a sect,” Jack said. “Not a sect, really—like a club. It’s a calling card for sex magic. She was one of the cattle. One of the conduits they used for ritual.” He threw the sheet back on Mrs. Herrera. He didn’t need to look at the brand any longer.
A baby conceived during a ritual, already tainted by black magic, would be the perfect flesh for something like Abbadon. Jack honestly wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
Pete was chewing on her lip, a gesture that she reverted to when she was nervous or going over some particularly nasty truth. “You said one of them went wrong,” she said. “One of the things riding with Abbadon.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Fucking disgusting. Looks like a twat with teeth. Think it was the Herrera baby, poor soul. Abbadon took the Case child for his own flesh, and fuck knows where he found bodies for the other two. They’re not working out much better, I can tell you that.”
“And I can tell you they’re not finished,” Pete said. “You can’t go against the Princes a man down.”
She was right. Pete was usually right. That was the maddening thing about her. Jack shoved a hand through his hair. It was still stiff with blood. He needed to wash, needed a drink. Needed to get out of this city, where there was nothing but a black hole of pain and misery to fall into, until you smacked the bottom and came apart like a doll.
“There can’t be too many cabals of fuck-mages, even in a city like this,” he said.
“We can’t let that thing get its hands on another kid,” Pete said. “Nor slice up another family like they’re a fucking fruit cocktail.” She stripped off her gloves and threw them in the biohazard bin.
“Don’t worry,” Jack told her. “I know somebody who’ll know exactly where we can find ourselves a pregnant sorcerer.”
CHAPTER 20
Sanford practically bounded down the drive when Jack rang at his gate, Gator and Parker in tow. “Jack! You have some good news for me?”
“Not even a droplet of piss for you,” Jack told him. Parker grunted, and Sanford blinked.
“Then, pardon me, but what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Got a proposition for you,” Jack said. This had to go just right. If he slagged Sanford off, that great cunt Parker looked like he’d be all too happy to leave him stone dead in a canyon somewhere, food for the coyotes that Jack could hear yipping even now in the hills behind Sanford’s house.
“For me.” Sanford cracked his knuckles. “This should be good, considering how I believe I told you exactly what I needed from you, and the consequences if that didn’t happen.”
“Yeah, well,” Jack said. “You really know so much about me, you’ll know that following orders from gits in slick suits isn’t exactly my forte.”
Sanford rubbed a thumb across his forehead. “Shall we take this somewhere more conducive to negotiation?” he said. “You look like a man who could use a drink. Possibly a flea bath.”
This time, there were no pleasantries by the pool. Sanford took Jack to a study, full of film tear sheets from pictures Jack had never heard of, a set of fake fencing swords and the rubber head of a swamp monster hanging on the walls. “Basil was quite a collector,” Sanford said. “Somewhat notorious for stealing from his sets, actually. Have you seen any of his films?”