Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
Jack said nothing, just breathed in time with the clack of the rails, and Pete started to wonder if she’d enraged him or saddened him beyond speaking. She let out a silent sigh
of relief when her mobile buzzed with Ollie’s number.
“You never can stay away from trouble, can you?” Ollie said when she picked up.
“I bloody well can, thank you,” Pete said. “All I did was ask you to find one man who’s not even crooked as far as I know. What’s troubling about that?”
“I mean the Smythe bit,” Ollie said. “I got your address, and HOLMES kicked back five or six calls to the
locals for fights between the Mr. and Mrs.” He didn’t need to elaborate. They both knew what that meant. “What’s happened, Pete?” Ollie said at last. “You’re the last person I’d peg to go nostalgic over an old case.”
The last case. The last one she’d ever worked for the Met. The one that showed her, irrevocably, that she couldn’t hide from the Black inside the mundane. Eventually it would always
find her.
“Just give me the address,” she snapped. “I know what I’m doing, Ollie.”
“Never said you didn’t,” he said, mild as ever. Pete felt like shit for snarling at him.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Here’s the rundown,” Ollie said. He wasn’t one to hold grudges, which Pete figured was why they’d stayed friends for so long. She could be hard to live with on the best of days.
“Looks like the Smythes
picked up and moved soon after the Treadwell business. Dear old dad came home from Pentonville and the whole lot buggered off to a little map speck called Overton, in Herefordshire. Sheep and quaint cottages and all that.”
“Yeah, heard they moved away from London,” Pete said. “I wouldn’t blame them, honestly.”
“There’s something else about Overton you should know,” he said. “The families of
the three other kids are all living within five miles of each other.” He took in Pete’s silence and then heaved a deep sigh. “But you already knew that.”
“I’d heard the news,” Pete said. The thought of coming face to face with the other families—the Killigans, the Leroys, and the Dumbershalls, the children she hadn’t been able to save—made her want to stick her head between her knees. “Tell me
what you found, though,” she said. “I appreciate it, Ollie.”
“Property records say they all picked up and moved within a month of each other. Hell, the Dumbershalls and the Leroys live in the two halves of a semi-detached. If you can call it living, poor souls.”
“Anything else?” Pete asked. Memories of white eyes and mouths open to scream but producing no sound flooded up at her, and she dug
her fingers into her own palm.
“Just a string of backpackers and dog walkers disappeared about three months ago. Locals think it’s some kind of Russian mafia deal, sex slaves or whatnot, which gives you an idea of exactly what kind of brain trust you’re dealing with out there.” Ollie gave a snort. “Probably nothing. It’s rough country—people do stupid things or they wander off.”
Or they got
caught up in the supposed demon summoning Jeremy Crotherton had investigated, before he’d gone missing. “Thanks,” Pete said. “Call me if you run across anything else, Ollie.”
“You take care,” Ollie said, more concern roughening his voice that was usual for his unflappable soul. “You’ve got a little one now.” He rang off and Pete swiped a hand over her face. She wasn’t going to cry. Or scream.
She was going to hold it together and do her bloody job, because that was what she did. She was cool under pressure. She wasn’t some fragile, birdlike thing that fell apart at the slightest hint of trouble.
Jack was staring at her, and when she blinked he spread his hands. “Come on, spit it out. The Met know where this Crotherton bloke fucked off to?”
“Ollie hasn’t found anything,” Pete said.
“All I know is that all of Treadwell’s survivors are living down there, and sooner or later I’m going to have to talk to them.”
“Well, you don’t
have
to,” Jack said. “You don’t owe those people anything. You saved their kids.”
“Not soon enough,” Pete whispered. If she’d just believed Jack when he popped back into her life, if she’d just listened from moment one, she could have put Treadwell
out of comission before three lives had been ruined and Margaret Smythe’s had nearly been snuffed out.
“You did every fucking thing you could for them,” Jack said in a tone that brooked no argument. “And now we’ll go down there, find out what soggy pub Crotherton is holed up in, put the demon back where it belongs, and go home. Spend a few days in the country in the bargain. Won’t that be lovely?”
Pete felt the weight of the soul cage in her pocket, saw the memory of the children’s blank white eyes after Treadwell had taken away everything that made them human. “Yeah,” she agreed, feeling the knot of fear twist tighter than ever in her gut. “It’ll be fucking wonderful.”
12.
The last train to Hereford arrived a few minutes after midnight, and a silent, empty station greeted them. Pete traded a look with Jack. “Got to love God’s country,” he said. “Everyone rolls up the streets at eight p.m. sharp.”
The front of the station was absent of vehicles, either buses or cabs. The street itself was quiet and empty, a light fog spinning under the streetlights like
sand suspended in water.
“Shit,” she said. “You’d think if Morwenna wanted us here so bad, she could at least have sent us a bloody car.”
Jack pointed across the street, where a skinny kid slumped against the fender of an ancient Puegeot. “Our chariot awaits,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “Oi,” he called to the kid. “How much for a ride?”
He appraised them, sucking on gums high and white
from some kind of speed. “For you, pervo? Not enough in the world. For the lady there? Could be free if she’s into the kinky stuff.”
“I’m into beating the shit out of smart little tossers with my bare hands,” Pete said sweetly, giving him a wide smile. She half hoped the kid would push the issue. She was wound so tightly violence would feel like a relief.
Then she got hold of herself and wondered
what the fuck was wrong with her. She didn’t lose her mind and beat people up for no good reason. Being here, thinking about the Treadwell case, missing Lily—it was pushing her too far. She pressed her thumbs into the center of her forehead, feeling the whisper of her talent.
Just let me go and we could burn him alive on the spot.
Sometimes it was like having a serial killer rooming in her head.
Once she’d started to really understand her talent, she never questioned why Jack’s had turned him into a junkie and nearly driven him to suicide.
The kid regarded her, perhaps rightly thinking she was a madwoman, then shrugged. “Hundred quid.”
“I haven’t even told you where I want to go,” Pete said with a roll of her eyes. She needed to calm down and be steady, reliable copper Pete instead
of deranged, magically inclined Pete. “Forty, and I don’t let my man here kick your teeth out and feed them back to you.”
Jack stood silent and unsmiling. His menacing glare did the trick, because the kid huffed in contempt and threw up his hands. “Fifty, and I ain’t carrying your bags.”
Pete slung her kit into the cab and got in after it. “Deal. But you better drive fast.”
Once out of Hereford,
the cabbie drove as if he were being pursued by large, mutant weasels intent on mating with him. Pete thought that if this was what he’d do for fifty quid, she’d hate to see what happened when he was actually motivated.
“What’d you say the name of the town was?” he bellowed over the car’s distressed engine and whining transmission.
Pete told him, and he veered onto a B road before stopping abruptly
by a sign in the middle of nowhere.
VILLAGE OF OVERTON
, the sign proclaimed.
POPULATION 271
.
“Spooky, innit?” said the kid, smacking his gums. “Not keen on being turned into some fat farmer’s bum buddy, so I’ll let you out here, I think.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jack said. “It’s got to be two fucking miles at least into town.”
“Man, you ain’t heard about the backpackers that went
poof
up here
month before this?” said the kid, making a disappearing motion with his fingers. “Not to mention those fuckin’ travelers in their tent city. Don’t trust gyppos. ’M not going another inch.”
“Your attitude is as charming as your breath,” Pete told him, thrusting a fifty at the kid and climbing out.
“Thanks, Mum,” he said with a grin that was begging to be smacked off his face. He screeched away,
nearly before Jack was free of the door, and Jack flipped the bird at the red smears of the car’s taillights.
“It’ll be all right,” Pete said. “Like we really expected anything to be easy on this jaunt?”
“I’m
not a fuckin’ backpacker,” Jack grumbled. “I don’t swan all over the country on foot.”
“Find your balls and let’s go,” Pete snapped. She could see lights ahead, and even though it was
the middle of the night, they were also in the middle of nowhere. People
had
gone missing in recent memory, not to mention Jeremy Crotherton and his theory that a demon was running loose.
Pete walked close to Jack, swinging her eyes from side to side, seeking for anything hiding in the shadows. The moon was high and horned above them, and Pete could see the blue shadows of hills on either side
of the road. She’d never been much for the country, preferring the eternal twilight of streetlamps and the buzz of motorways. Too much silence just made her think there was someone out there, watching.
Jack rolled his gaze from one side of the road to the other, and his step was short and hitched. “Waiting for the cannibals to break from the forest and carry us off to make attractive jumpers
out of our skin,” he said.
“You’re acting as if you’re twelve,” Pete said. “Knock it off.”
“I’m not being spooky,” Jack insisted. “This fucking place is off. Do you hear anything? Anything at all?”
Pete listened. There was nothing. No dogs, no doors slamming, no car engines. Even the wind was quiet, the air still, as if the earth held its breath. “It’s a small place,” she said with a shrug.
“Not like London.”
“There’s small villages, and there’s boneyards,” Jack said. “Last place I was in that was this quiet was a tomb.”
Pete reached into her pocket and brushed her baton. Just knowing it was still there let her keep walking.
When they reached Overton proper, the village was empty and silent. The high street consisted of a few blocks of semi-detached homes that had been made into
snug storefronts, and a square with a statue in it of a Franciscan in a robe, his staring eyes weeping oxidized tears. A pair of ravens sat on his shoulders, the only movement in the whole square. Not crows—true ravens, like the one in her dream, with bodies as long as Pete’s arm and beaks sharp as pikes.
She stopped in the center of the cobblestone street, watching the birds. They paid her no
mind, hunching against the chill and blinking their obsidian eyes. If the Hag cared that she and Jack were in the village, she wasn’t immediately tipping her hand.
Jack flicked a fag-end in the general direction of the birds. “Still think everything is right and good?”
“Of course not,” Pete said. The shadows and reflections on the glass were liquid, and the first real unease stirred, a flutter
of her stomach that had nothing to do with the silent town. Nobody being in residence would be a much better outcome than
something
being there.
“Can’t do anything about Crotherton until morning,” Jack said. “So aside from bunking with the travelers, where are we sleeping?”
Pete had hoped that, as with most villages that attracted hikers and tourists, there’d be an inn or even a shoddy chain
hotel, but there was nothing. Everything was dark and silent, and no signs on any of the storefronts promised lodging.
Pete sighed. “I can only think of one place, and you’re not going to like it.”
“Luv, I’d sleep cuddled up with a horny skinhead inside a roach-infested box at this point,” Jack said, punctuating his words with a wide yawn.
“All right, then,” Pete said, telling her mobile to
give her a map to the address she’d gotten from Ollie. “Come with me.”
The Smythe house was only about half a mile from the square, but it was the most uncomfortable half mile Pete had ever walked. She could feel stares, hear whispers, and sense the rising crescendo of unearthly magic all around them. It was as if they’d tripped an alarm, and now the electric fence was on and charging the air
itself to prick her skin.
Jack grimaced and rubbed his forehead. Pete glanced at him. “You going to make it?”
“It’s not even sight,” Jack said. “Something else. Whole damn place sets me teeth on edge.”
“If everything were all right, we wouldn’t be here,” Pete said. “Think it’s some residue from the summoning? Maybe that’s what made Crotherton bugger off.”
Maybe it’s what sent Preston over
the edge.
Or maybe she was just tired and far too edgy. She stopped at the correct house number and looked up the walk, not sure what to expect.
The Smythe house looked normal from the street. White plaster, red tile roof, almost like an Italian villa plopped down in the middle of green England. A neat garden with a weathered fence containing late mums and lilies. It was a far cry from the dank
council house the Smythes had occupied when Pete had first met Margaret’s mum, after Margaret had been kidnapped by Treadwell’s agents.
The lights were off, but she pushed through the gate and up the path. The gate springs gave a shriek, deafening in the quiet night. Jack stayed on the street, eyes roaming through the darkness. Just knowing he was behind her gave Pete the nerve to pound on the
door.
After a minute of thumping, she started to hope that they weren’t home, or had moved, or
anything
that would save her from having to talk to Margaret’s parents. But then the lamp flared on above her head, and the door flew open.
“What!” a skinny man in an undershirt and pants barked. “It’s one in the fuckin’ morning! Did you lose your watch up your arse?”