Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
Jack set his feet and let a tendril of power uncurl inside his head. Morningstar was a dangerous, unpredictable snake of a man, and it wouldn’t surprise Jack if he tried to open him like a Christmas pudding just for the fun of it. “Get the hell out of my patch, Ethan,” he said. “We don’t want what you’re selling.”
“I’m here informally,” Morningstar said. “A friendly gesture, if you will.”
That made Jack laugh. The Order of the Malleus was never friendly, not to people like him. With mages, they tended more to thumbscrews and waterboards. “Whatever you say, Ethan. I’m still telling you to fuck off.”
Morningstar leaned against the fender of his motor, which creaked and shifted under his weight. He might look like somebody’s surly headmaster, but every bit of his bulk was muscle—muscle he knew how to use. Jack had to admit, so far the witchfinder was being remarkably civil. That in and of itself bothered him.
“I was hoping after you failed to set Nergal on the waking world like a hungry dog, somebody would do my job for me,” Morningstar said. “One of the other mud-grazers would creep up on you in the dark and put a knife in your ribs, and that’d be the end of it. But like the man says, we can’t always get what we want.”
“I’ve got another one,” Jack said. “‘Oh bondage, up yours.’”
Ethan sucked his teeth, then folded his arms. “This can’t go on, Jack.”
Here it was. The nightstick, the Taser, the needle full of dream-time. Waking up in a dank basement tied to a chair whose wood was already soaked with other men’s blood. Tortured and prodded until the Malleus had extracted all of his useful information, then fed into a crematory furnace by a discreet and sympathetic mortuary worker. Fascists, magical or not, didn’t employ a lot of variety.
Jack braced himself. “I’m not going to go quietly.”
“I don’t care how you go,” Ethan said. “Just that you do. Get out of my sight, get out of my city, and don’t come back.” He stood up and moved into Jack’s space, so that they could’ve kissed if Jack had been remotely interested. “How did you put it? If I see you on my patch again, I will kill you. You’re spreading chaos, making the other spell-dabblers nervous, and somebody innocent is going to be hurt. I won’t allow that.”
Jack felt his heartbeat peak and recede, like a tide smashing on a rock. “That’s it?”
“What did you think I was going to do, stuff you in the boot and take you away to a secret prison?” Morningstar chuffed. “Not hardly. Maybe I’m soft in my old age. Maybe I just remember that your little girlfriend did give us Nergal’s reliquary when it was all said and done. Maybe I think you’re not worth the time it’ll take to clean the blood off my boots.” Morningstar opened his door and got back into his car. “You’ll just have to wonder, won’t you?”
He started to pull away from the curb, then tapped the brakes. “Speaking of Petunia, take her with you. The same rules apply, and she’s a lot more dangerous than you. She comes back here and sows more trouble for London, the Malleus will be forced to take steps.” He tipped his head, grinning wide for the first time, then gunned the engine. The BMW roared away into Mile End traffic like a black shark, but not half as beastlike as the driver.
Pete was standing on the stoop of their flat, watching him with folded arms while he crossed the road again. “Was that who I think it is?”
“None other,” Jack said. “And it looks like I’m coming with you, whether you want it or not.” He held up a hand when Pete started to object. “Look, I’ll stay out of this thing with your friend Mayhew. But I can’t stay in London and I’d just as soon go someplace that’s not pissing down rain.” Los Angeles was as good a place as any. He could look up some old mates from his band days, have a laugh, and get away from London and all of the memories it implied. And if he was closer to Pete until she had the kid, so much the better. She’d made her feelings clear, but Jack wasn’t prepared to be that much of a shit father. Letting your kid and its mother get murdered because you two had a spat wasn’t parent of the year material in anyone’s book.
Pete flapped her hands. “Fine. But it’s not a bloody comic book team-up. You’ll let me conduct my business with Mayhew and you’ll stop dragging me into this ridiculous feud of yours.”
“Fine,” Jack agreed. “Consider me a ghost, luv. You won’t even know I exist.” Pete went inside without another word.
It took Jack remarkably little time to pack up what he needed from the flat. He’d have thought that after nearly twenty years, he’d have more essentials. But the books, aside from a few rare grimoires that he could hock for cash if he needed it, the vinyl, the odds and ends that one collected after twenty years of living half in and half out of the Black … they suddenly seemed like so much junk, piled up in all the corners and crevices. Whoever eventually broke in here wouldn’t find anything worth salvaging, unless they were into moldy takeaway or vintage porn.
Jack packed up a few changes of clothes, his leather, his least disreputable pair of boots, and the master reel of his band’s first and only album. The Poor Dead Bastards had something of a cult following, and maybe he could trade it for something, if he needed to. He hadn’t been to Los Angeles since the early 1990s and what he remembered didn’t exactly inspire fits of joy. He’d need money, and he’d need to make a good impression on the locals. American mages tended toward pompous and territorial, instilled with the idea that they were special, as if there weren’t tens of thousands just like them the world over.
Pete had allowed them to get on their flight together, since it was her charge card that was financing the venture. They took the fast train to Heathrow, found the Virgin flight to LAX, and Pete proceeded to ignore him again. She took the window seat and fell asleep, or at least pretended to, as soon as they were in the air.
Jack decided the only antidote for his hatred of being locked inside a large metal lipstick tube suspended above the earth was to get as drunk as the twenty quid in his wallet would allow, and flagged down a flight attendant.
He drifted in and out, and when he woke for good, the plane had touched down and they were on the tarmac at LAX.
Pete climbed over him and got her carry-on bag. “Been fun,” she said, and got ahead of him, cutting herself off with a herd of slow-moving passengers.
“Yeah,” Jack muttered, shouldering his own bag. “Like getting teeth pulled in the middle ages.”
CHAPTER 3
LAX was interminable, moving walkways shunting along herds of people, most of whom were wearing sunglasses. Coming from a place where the sun was a luxury, if not an outright oddity, and if you wore shades you never wore them indoors, Jack decided they were all cunts.
He got through customs, got out to the curb, and found himself facing a wasteland that went on as far as the eye could see. Palm trees poked above the landscape here and there, and the roar of jets competed with the drone of the nearby freeway.
“Christ,” Pete said at his elbow. “It’s a bit
1984,
isn’t it?”
“I think you’d need a few more government billboards and few less birds in midriff tops for that,” Jack said. He looked down at her. “You ditching me, then?”
Pete kicked the dirty concrete. “Look, Jack. I was really angry, and I still am, but…” She drew a deep breath, and then made a face. “Even the air here tastes dirty. Anyway, I think the thing to do is stick together. At least until great swaths of the UK don’t want us dead any longer.”
“I really am sorry,” he said quietly. He was, too. He wasn’t sorry often. Sorry was for people who lived their lives looking for something to regret, and when you’d gotten as many friends killed as he had, you could be sorry straight down to the bottom of a whiskey bottle or the point of a needle full of smack. There was no future in being sorry for every fucking thing.
But this was Pete. And he was sorry, for both of them.
“Save it,” she said. “I don’t want you to pity me. I just want you to stop walking around like a kicked puppy.”
“Then stop kicking me,” Jack snapped. “I know your life plan didn’t include a kid, Pete. I know it didn’t include me, and I know you’re slagged off that you have to put up with either of us. I know you blame me. Fuck it,
I
blame me. I know it all, that you’re done with me soon as the sprog makes an appearance. So until then, can we just agree that’s how it is and leave off kicking a dead horse in the balls?”
Pete blinked, and Jack let himself imagine that for a moment, she’d wanted to deny what he was saying, but then she nodded. “Sounds good. We’re colleagues, nothing more.”
“Fantastic,” Jack agreed. He’d protect Pete until the baby came, and then he’d go his way and she’d go hers. And that would be that. No need for crying or hair-pulling on either end.
He knew he’d never believe that one, but Pete wasn’t leaving him much of a choice.
A long, low convertible, in a shade of yellow Jack would describe as “violent sunshine,” pulled up in front of them, and Pete took up her bag. “That’ll be Mayhew,” she said. “I told him to meet us here.”
“Christ,” Jack said. “If I’d’ve known he was bringing a boat, I would’ve worn a life vest.”
“Behave,” Pete muttered, moving to shake hands with the car’s driver. Mayhew was short, but not too short; fat, but not too fat; with a smile that was sincere, but only just. Completely average and utterly unremarkable. He must’ve made a hell of a cop.
“Pete, great to see you,” he said, although the words didn’t match his face, which was sweaty and pinched.
“Yes, same,” she said. “Shall we?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mayhew said. He chugged around the car and picked up Pete’s bag, noticing Jack for the first time. “Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks for coming, both of you.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Jack said. He held out his rucksack until Mayhew took it. “Cheers,” Jack said, and slid into the back seat. Pete shot him the look, the one that meant he was being a cunt, but Jack ignored it.
The interior of the car smelled slightly sour, whether from Mayhew’s sweat or the plethora of fast food wrappers crushed under Jack’s boots, he didn’t care to speculate. Plush dice dangled from the rearview mirror and a small plastic hula dancer undulated her hips from the dash when Mayhew pulled away from the curb.
“So,” he said to Pete, “first time in LA?”
“For me,” Pete said. “Jack’s been.”
“Oh yeah?” Mayhew hooked a look back at him in the mirror. “You like it?”
“Not particularly,” Jack said, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Oh, sorry,” Mayhew said. “Can’t have you smoking in Lucille. The upholstery is original.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jack said, and got the look from Pete again.
“’Fraid so,” Mayhew said. “Believe me, I understand. I polished off a pack a day when I was LAPD. Quit a year ago and I’ve never felt better.”
As they drove past warehouses, used car lots, and cheap airport motels and merged onto a freeway roughly the width of the Thames, Jack felt a marked urge to reach over the seat and bang Mayhew’s head against the steering wheel.
He stabbed his fag out against the car’s door panel instead, then rubbed the sooty mark in with his finger. Small and petty, yes, but Mayhew was already up his nose and he’d barely spent ten minutes with the man. Jack bet with himself that Mayhew’s “problem” would involve teenage Satanists in store-bought robes and missing neighborhood pets.
“You named your car?” Pete said, sliding closer to Mayhew on the sofa-sized front seat. Mayhew immediately forgot about Jack’s existence.
“Sure did. This is my baby Lucille. Sixty-five LeSabre—restored her myself.” He ran his hand across the dash in the proprietary manner with which most men touch women’s thighs.
“Really,” Jack said. “You pick out the color?”
“Hey, this is LA,” Mayhew said. “Land of big tits, good teeth, and primary colors. Takes some getting used to if you’re from a place like London.”
Pete twitched but she jumped in front of the bullet again. “It take long? Fixing this thing up?”
Mayhew shrugged, an aw-shucks gesture that clearly implied yes, normally, but not when you were a special sort like him. “A while. Supposed to do it when I retired in twenty years, but what the hell? Being a PI is a lot of waiting around, and I like to keep busy.”
Jack slid down on Lucille’s slippery plastic seat and shut his eyes. Mayhew was trying to do the civilized equivalent of pissing a circle—his car, his city, his eyes all over Pete’s tits. Jack wished him good luck with the last one. Pete didn’t need white knighting—Mayhew would find out soon enough, with a knee in his balls if he was especially unlucky.
As to LA, he could have it. The sun penetrated Jack’s eyelids and made his head throb, and he threw his arm up as Lucille crested a rise and revealed a glimpse of the downtown before Mayhew veered off onto another freeway. Who needed a concrete-covered, haze-choked hellhole full of women with silicone sacks in their chests and men like Mayhew, whose biggest concern was his motor and getting into a dick-measuring contest with everyone he met?
“You’ll need a car,” Mayhew said to Pete. “I set it up with a friend of mine who runs a garage—you can drive American-style, right?”
“I’ll manage,” Pete said.
“Great,” Mayhew said. “We’ll go back to my office and talk business. I really am glad you’re here.”
There it was, the hook. Jack had no doubt that Mayhew’s real reason for gladness was that whoever was pulling his strings wouldn’t immediately peel his skin off his fat form and put it on toast. He’d actually gotten Pete to show up and proven himself a useful underling. Jack could put up with the git just as long as it took to see the big picture, the puppeteer rather than the puppet, and then he was going to give Mayhew a real reason to be glad for American dentistry.
He dozed on the drive, the rank air doing little to replace his need for a fag. When they finally bumped to a stop, he realized he’d been somewhere else, the freeway turning into a long, black road made of smooth obsidian, and the smog cloud becoming the ashes of things burnt alive, drifting down to catch in his hair and eyelashes like charnel snow.
Jack didn’t have many memories of his time in Hell. When the Morrigan had led him back from the Bleak Gates, she’d smoothed his mind over, picked out with her beak all of the time that Jack had lost when he went down to the Pit, and left plain gray nothing in its place.