Pete stared for a long two heartbeats. The ripples in her head, the pulse of the magic wound through everything, gave an unpleasant twinge, as if just for a second she'd brushed her hand against something still and slimy. The dead thing's bulging eyes took on a shine, and Pete turned away.
"Just a thought," she said to Jack, as she got an armful of pink towels from the rack and threw them over the corpse, "but perhaps we shouldn't indulge in a sea swim anywhere in the greater Blackpool vicinity."
"Most bloody disgusting thing I've ever seen," Jack muttered. His shoulders twitched and he started on a fourth bottle of whiskey, emptying it in a swallow. Jack was heavily tattooed and at the moment the ink and his old track-mark scars stood stark against his skin. He looked like his body was engaging him in debate about whether to vomit.
"Who could have done it, is the question," Pete murmured. "If it's someone in the hotel, they've got a bloody twisted sense of humor." She gathered the towels into a bundle and lifted the dead creature out of the bath, sadness pricking her. "Poor thing."
"Poor thing?" Jack demanded. "No, not poor thing—what about poor
me
? My nerves are utterly shot! I'm from the city—we don't find dead wildlife in the loo very often!"
"
Yes
, poor thing," Pete said sharply. "It was ugly and smelly, but it was defective too—defenseless. It couldn't run or fly from whatever human wrapped hands around its neck. If I meet the tosser, I'll kick him in the sodding bollocks."
"Just get it out of here," said Jack. "And ask room service if they can bring about ten liters of bleach for the bath."
Pete found a spare garbage bag in the outer suite and slid it around the mass of towels. Jack would just have to pay for them. A few oily gray-green feathers slid loose and stained the carpet at her feet, and Pete felt that lap of discomfort again, the faintest pinprick of the disturbance against the smooth surface of the Black. An experienced Weir, a shaper of magic, would probably know what it meant, but all Pete knew was that it made her head hurt like she'd just woken up hungover.
She shoved the feathers into a desk drawer so she wouldn't have to look at them, and put the corpse outside the suite's front doors, locking them firmly behind it.
"I'M HUNGRY," JACK ANNOUNCED WHEN HE CAME OUT of the bath. A towel sat low on his skinny hips, and he padded about on bare feet.
Pete threw his jeans at him from the bed, where she'd ensconced herself under the satin sheets with a novel. "Put some bloody clothes on."
"Easy, luv—we are married, after all." Jack grinned at her and fished a cigarette out of the pocket of his pants before tossing them aside in favor of a pair of slim suit trousers.
"I'm going to bloody murder you, Jack Winter," Pete muttered. It was a threat she delivered often, and usually hollow, but she was in no mood. "I mean it. Don't sleep tonight."
"Well, there'll be no sleeping when I'm dead of bloody starvation," Jack said, exhaling smoke through his nose. He pulled on the trousers and shucked the towel. "There's a restaurant downstairs. Romantic dinner for two included in the package. What do you say?"
"I say that I'm comfortable where I am," said Pete. "You and your prodigious talent for ticking me off are welcome to the restaurant."
Jack sighed, dumping the candy out of a china dish on the wardrobe and putting out his Parliament in it. He came over to the bed and sat next to Pete. She scooted away, but he trapped her wrist with wire-strung fingers. "Pete. I know you're unhappy and bloody angry at me, but it's just dinner. Come eat and raise up your blood sugar and I wager you'll be a deal less cranky."
"More wagers?" Pete arched her eyebrow. "We're up to forty quid. You can't play in these leagues, Jack." She
was
hungry, and Jack's sincere blue gaze was very hard to ignore. His eyes were changeable, like a sky, glacial and bright when he was intent, the burning base of a candle flame when he was angry. Mage's eyes, flaring and settling depending on mood and magic.
"I'll match it if you can." Jack grinned. Inwardly, Pete felt the lump of resentment toward Jack's arrogant, bugger-all decision about this stupid holiday like a malignancy. Whatever else he'd done, Jack
was
trying.
Pete sighed. She didn't want to look at him. Jack pleading or discomfited was out of order. She settled her stare on the twin Eyes of Horus tattooed on his collarbones, touching one to change the subject. "The ink's holding up?"
Jack lifted a shoulder. "Better than nothing." The black Eye tingled under Pete's fingers. The light Eye looked toward the world of the living. The dark saw the land of the dead. Both served to take the edge from Jack's psychic sight, so it couldn't catch him unaware.
"Are you close to edge? Going to have an episode?" Pete asked anxiously. Jack shook his head.
"Hotels are good for that. So much humanity, so much fear and strain and pleasure too—like listening to a radio tuned just out of frequency. Peaceful, really. Sort of a white noise."
Pete's heart beat normally again. Jack wasn't going to disappear into the well of his sight, when it bounced back from his mage sensitivities amplified to the point where he sometimes couldn't tell the murdered, gibbering ghosts from flesh. He wasn't going to control it with a needle as he had before.
The ink holds
, she told herself firmly, and nearly believed it.
"I guess
I am a
bit peckish," she conceded, on the heels of her relief. Jack gave a bounce on the mattress next to her.
"Bloody right! Get dressed." He dropped a kiss on Pete's cheek, featherlight and dry, and then jumped up and went to root in his case. "What d'you think will give those stick-up-the-arse hotel staffers a bigger coronary?" He held up two jerseys, one featuring Iggy Pop flipping the bird and one a River City Rebels bit that proclaimed CORRUPT THE KING WHILE YOU FUCK THE QUEEN!
"Rebels," said Pete. She slid off the bed and got a black sweater and jeans to change into. Another hard and fast rule of life in the Black—never clothe yourself in anything you weren't able to run in, or willing to sacrifice to burns, blood, or demonic spittle.
THE RESTAURANT, Ml AMOR, WAS DECIDEDLY NOT A denim-and-sweater sort of place and caused a fidgety response in Pete akin to stepping into a dowager aunt's parlor.
White and pink linen billowed over the tables, and a terrace looked out on the sea. The entire arrangement was lit only by candles, and red-jacketed waiters moved among the bowed heads of diners like phantoms. Torches on the terrace flared valiantly against the fog and the wind that had sprung up. Pete smelled the tang of the bog through the doors, open even though it was late autumn. She shivered involuntarily. The closer she got to the sea, the louder the magic hissed, like standing too close to an amplifier.
"Winter, Suite 103," Jack told the maître d'. The maître d', shaven-headed and wearing a tuxedo that fit like he'd hastily buttoned it over his footie jersey, ran a stubby finger down the list.
"Ah," he said, grinning and displaying the sort of teeth that gave England a bad name, "The honeymooners."
"Bloody right." Jack grinned back, throwing an arm around Pete. His hand wandered south toward her chest and she twisted his index finger, hard. Jack hissed but managed to keep smiling.
"Right this way," said the maître d'. He shuffled through the candlelit cavern, flames and linens rippling in the wind off the sea.
"Reminds me of a bloody tomb," Pete muttered. "All shrouds and saint's candles."
"Anyone ever tell you you've got one bloody morbid set of sensibilities?" Jack muttered back. Pete shrugged out from under his arm and wrapped hers around herself. The mist swirled beyond the French doors and obscured whatever was beyond the torchlight. Somewhere far away in the night, waves hit the rocks with a hushed, wind-driven desperation.
"Here we are," the maître d' said, pulling out Pete's chair. She sank down, still shivering. Jack took her hand, a pretense of a romantic gesture, but in reality he squeezed her fingers and mouthed, "All right?"
"Donovan will be your waiter," said the maître d', and withdrew with another rotted-out smile.
"I'm fine," Pete said, low toned. "Just cold."
"I feel it too," Jack assured her. "It's wild out there. The hunting moon is whipping everything into frenzy. Just eat something and have a drink and a laugh. It'll settle once midnight passes."
Pete nodded to placate Jack, sipping her water. It wasn't just the impending moonrise, pushing against her skin as the ambient magic of the world gathered and sparked wild hunts and bonfire dancing. It was the slithering sensation, the closed-in mist that penetrated everything in Blackpool, closed off the famous neon lights and Spire, and wrapped the hotel in silence. She felt like something was stirring, just behind her eyes, ancient and terrible. Was
this
what she looked forward to if she left the Metropolitan Police and went with Jack to learn what he had to teach about magic? This horrible
birthing
, that struggled to surface?
"Drinks?"
Pete gasped and stared up—and
up
—into the face of possibly the most grotesque man she'd ever seen. The waiter had a brow that jutted like a Cornish cliff, ginger eyebrows parading across the bone ridge. Birdlike black eyes burned from sunken sockets and his jaw was knotty and misshapen, like he'd taken a bad hit during a rugby match. A scar ran from the left side of his mouth, disappearing in a serrated line down his neck. "Drinks?" he said again.
Jack shook his head once and put on his congenial, one-of-the-blokes face. Jack was good at instant masks of true feeling. "Whiskey here, mate. Straight with no nonsense, if you please."
The waiter, who had shoulders that a yeoman could have yoked a wagon to under his starched red shirt, grunted and wrote on a pad. His name tag read DONOVAN in the same overwrought, near-unreadable print repeated throughout the resort.
"And you, miss?" Donovan had a Geordie accent, and it came out more like "Anyewmess?"
"Red…" Pete swallowed, tracing the terrible scar down his neck and into his collar with her eyes. How had he
survived
such a slash? Maybe because he was built like a mountain troll… "Red wine," she managed.
"It were a gaff," Donovan said. He touched the scar with hands that could have turned Pete's head into a cracked egg. "Used to work the fishin' boats out on the North Sea. Me mate turned and caught me with the gaff one day, in the fog. Didn't see me comin'. I were real quiet-like, back then. Made no more noise than smoke." He grinned, although his bulging jaw made the expression sag on one side.
Pete, and Jack, who was making a valiant effort not to burst into laughter, if his snorts were any indication, were saved from a reply by a keening, gull-like shriek from the front of the restaurant. There was a commotion of linen and dropped silver, and a woman stumbled through the tables and launched herself at Donovan. "You stole my husband!"
Donovan batted the slim, sandy-haired girl away with the brutal grace of a big bloke who fights dirty. The woman rocked backward into an empty table, shattering wine goblets. "Bastard!" she screamed and grabbed Donovan again, beating at the waiter's oak-barrel chest with bloodied fists. The chatter of the restaurant stilled and even the couple snogging at the next table stopped for a moment to watch.
Donovan grabbed the woman by her torn sweater, soaked in mud and bog water like the rest of her, and held her at arm's length. "Gerroff, you!"
"You stole him!" the woman sobbed. "You sons of bitches stole my Sheldon…"
"Here," said Pete, standing up and inserting herself between Donovan and the woman. "What's happening?"
"She's mad as a hatter, is what's happening," Donovan growled. "Was ejected from hotel grounds just this morning for causing a fuss."
"They crawled up," moaned the woman. "Across the tow-path. They wrapped him in rot… oh God… they were
writhing
…" Her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused and sweat stood in a line of beads across her cheeks. Pete sniffed. No alcohol on the woman's breath, and Pete felt the instinctive flinch that occurs when in the presence of someone quite mad.
"What's your name?" Pete asked her quietly. "Do you know it? Do you know where you live?"
"Henrietta," the woman shuddered. "Henrietta Phillips. From London."
"Oi," said Donovan. "Who're you to be askin' all these questions?"
"Pete Caldecott," said Pete. "Detective Inspector. Also of London."
"Here, now," said Donovan. "No police needed. This bird's just had a falling out with 'er medications."
"I
saw
it," Henrietta hissed, and there was terror in her creaking tones, the kind brought on by witnessing something a human was never meant to endure. A touch of cold prickled the back of Pete's neck. She listened when Henrietta said, "I saw it, coming out of the mud and the salt… I heard it speaking… and the smell—oh God, the
smell
… death and rotted fish and Shel let out this scream—"
Donovan pulled Henrietta close and slapped her cheek, leaving a handprint. "Shut yer gob! Gerry!" he yelled to the maître d'. "Call up security!"
"Oi!" Pete shouted in turn. She shoved Donovan back from Henrietta, laying a hand flat on his chest and holding him away. "I think you've done quite enough to help the situation."
"Touch me again and I'll lay a smack on you that'll have teeth out of yer head," Donovan growled.
In less time than it took to blow out a candle, Jack was on his feet. "Lay one hand on her, and you'll be fit for a closed coffin," he said. Jack didn't snarl, or posture, he just stood at Pete's shoulder, over her left side. The hairs on her neck crackled from the power gathering around him, dark blood-fueled magic that clung to Jack when he was angry.
Donovan's eyes flared; then he dropped his chin and backed up a step. Jack smiled in a manner that managed to be genial and terrifying at the same time, all Big Bad Wolf teeth and menace. "Glad we understand one another, mate." He produced a cigarette and lit it off the hurricane candle on the table. No magic in front of the mundanes.