Soul Trade (2 page)

“
Crazy
’s not the word I’d use,” Pete said. Wolcott, too, represented a problem—when the Black echoed like a rung bell as Nergal and the other four primordial demons
tried to break out of the prison the Princes of Hell had erected for them millennia ago, all of the citizens of both daylight London and the Black beneath with the slightest bit of sensitivity got a jolt like grabbing a high-tension cable.

For psychics like Jack it meant more sleepless nights, more waking visions, and more barrages from the dead and the living alike. For people like Wolcott,
who would have never known she possessed the slightest bit of talent under normal circumstances, it led to nights like this.

It wasn’t Pete’s problem. Her problem was Mickey Martin and his recently reacquired hobby of murdering those he considered wicked.

“You don’t seem so looney,” Wolcott observed. “From what they say around the station, I was expecting Stevie Nicks.”

“I thought I’d leave
my scarves and tarot at home, yeah,” Pete agreed. She ignored the implication that apparently the longer she was gone from the Met, the more of a moony-eyed hippie type she became in common legend.

“Never liked stakeouts,” Wolcott said. “Bloody boredom sets in quick, don’t it?” She scraped a fingernail against the moss on the monument. “How’d you cope, when you was a DI?”

Pete’s head started
to throb, though she didn’t know if it was from a lack of coffee, the cold, or Wolcott’s persistent questions. She shouldn’t be mad at the PC—Wolcott was just trying to distract herself from her nerves.

She did the same, counting headstones, listening to the faint thump of music from the far-off pub, feeling the droplets of fog collect on her face and hair. The whispers of the graveyard had stilled,
and even the mist held its place, covering the ground, the headstones, and the dead beneath. For a moment, it was as if the entire city of London held its breath—no music, no cars, no trains, not even the heartbeat of the rushing Thames.

Then the pain in Pete’s head spiked, and she knew the silence had only been a lull, not a finale.

From the stone behind Wolcott, the shadows began to seep and
merge, moving of their own accord, against the light that gleamed from the vestry windows and the streetlamps beyond the confines of the churchyard. The monument gave birth to a dripping black shape that wavered from cohesive to vapor and back again, sliding through the pocked limestone like oil through water.

“Wolcott!” Pete shouted, but it was too late. The thing had Brandi by the throat and
engulfed her, pouring into her eyes and nostrils and down her open gullet, choking her scream before it had a chance to be born.

“Shit,” Pete said, only able to watch as the ghost of Mickey Martin poured itself like black, oily water into a brand-new body. She’d only met a few ghosts that could do that, and none of them had anyone’s best interest in mind. Exorcisms were hard enough when you were
only dealing with a vapor.

And yet, Pete thought as Brandi’s eyes clouded over with silver and she let out a choked moan, her limbs jerking and spasming as the ghost took control, it didn’t
feel
like a ghost. Pete wasn’t a psychic—that was Jack’s game—but ghosts felt like electricity, like lightning striking too close for comfort, like every ion in the room was awake and slamming against her
skin. This was cold, and black, and bottomless, giving no sense that the thing inside Brandi Wolcott had ever been alive, never mind human.

The one thought pounding through her head over and over was that Jack would never have let this happen. He’d have known something was off, and been ready for this thing that was not a ghost.

Pete sidestepped as Brandi came for her, acrylic fingernails catching
and ripping at the front of Pete’s overcoat. Jack would never have let this happen, but he wasn’t here, so she was just going to have to make do with her own wits. They’d served her well enough for thirty-one odd years; they’d do for a few more minutes.

Brandi came for her again. She was as fast and mean as a PCP addict, an inhuman sight with black energy spilling out of her eyes and her mouth,
her face twisted in a grimace of perpetual agony.

Pete amended that. If she managed to survive the next few minutes, then she could figure out how to end this.

A headstone caught Pete at the knees and she fell, feeling her left arm twist under her, the ugly crunch of bone on stone resonating over Brandi’s ragged breathing and Pete’s own heartbeat.

“Aren’t you pretty,” Brandi growled in the
guttural tones of East London. The voice of Mickey Martin, made rough and hot with hatred. “Pretty enough to turn heads.” Brandi crouched over Pete, inhaling deeply at the nexus of Pete’s neck and shoulder. “I can smell it on you,” Brandi intoned. “Wickedness. Sin. The filth of the streets dripping off your skin.” She grinned, black spilling over her tongue and down across Pete’s cheek. “Going to
enjoy slicing you open and watching it all bleed out.”

Pete was glad Mickey Martin was a talker. It gave her time to plunge her hand into her opposite coat pocket and bring out her metal police baton. She tried to snap it open, but the bolt of lightning up her left arm told her that the plan was dead before it began. Her arm was sprained, at best. Shattered, at worst. Later. She could fix her
arm later, when she was alive and away from here. Otherwise, they could arrange it in her casket so nobody would know. Either way, she had a more pressing problem.

Instead, she wrapped her good hand around Brandi Wolcott’s neck and squeezed. Ghosts riding bodies needed life, breath. They weren’t zombies, hunks of corpse revived by a necromancer. So Pete squeezed, with every ounce of strength
left in her.

She expected that Mickey Martin would vacate Wolcott’s skin, and then she’d have a fighting chance to send him back to the Bleak Gates and the land of the dead beyond. She never expected the smoke pouring from Wolcott to wrap itself around her wrist and begin the slow crawl up her own arm.

Not again,
Pete’s mind screamed.
Not this.

She didn’t allow herself to give voice to the
scream she felt bubbling up in her throat. When a nasty from beyond the beyond was bent on her flesh, panic was a luxury she didn’t have. She let the onslaught of the ghost’s form come, because it was better for her to be Mickey Martin’s victim than Wolcott. Wolcott didn’t know how to save herself.

“You think this’ll end well for you?” Brandi growled as the black smoke overtook Pete’s hands,
her arms, crept toward her mouth and throat.

“Better than it will for you,” Pete rasped, as the first fingers of cold found their way over her tongue.

The ghost of Mickey Martin didn’t feel right, as it bled out of Brandi Wolcott in a flood and rushed up at Pete’s consciousness. It didn’t feel like a ghost; it just felt hungry, and cold.

This is wrong
. Pete didn’t have to be a psychic or a
professional exorcist to know when things had gone pear-shaped. She’d had a ghost try to take up residence in her skin once before, and it hadn’t felt like this, this … nothing, howling and trying to swallow her.

Brandi collapsed on top of Pete, choking, and Pete managed to wriggle out from under her and get herself upright. She was still tangled with Mickey Martin’s ghost—or the thing that had
been his ghost. Pete knew that the regular exorcism that she’d planned would do less than shit. It might tickle this thing that had grown out of the ghost, or ruffle a few hairs, but that would be about it.

Then it would just be a matter of how many pieces she and Wolcott were found in, once someone noticed they were missing.

What would Jack do? Something stupid, likely, but as Pete felt the
chill air against her face, felt the smoke creeping into her nostrils, she decided stupid was better than nothing.

Rather than fight the smoke any longer, she let it come. She might not have the sort of talent that let her throw fireballs or read minds, but she did have one. She felt the thing trying to move into her flesh, overpower her mind, and she welcomed it. Let it in until it touched her
talent, and reared back with a scream.

“Oh no,” Pete told it, as the thing coalesced into a form, tall and skinnier than any man, with a mouth as wide as Pete’s two hands put together. “You wanted me, you have me.” She felt her talent wake up, begin to drain the cold from the thing, the malice and the hunger. It thrashed like a fish on a line, screaming now in pain rather than anticipation.

Pete recognized the thing now—a wraith, a personification of the hunger and the rage that were the dregs of a spirit. Wraiths consumed ghosts, fed until they’d burned through the spirit’s energy like a bad battery, and then moved on. Any humans that happened along would be found by an unfortunate passerby after they’d been wholly consumed, desiccated and frozen from the inside out.

This wraith,
though, would never escape to feed on any of the other spirits that haunted the churchyard. This wraith belonged to her now, and she felt its cold magic seeping into her, as her talent drank the wraith down. It gave one final spasm before it detached from the battered shell of Mickey Martin’s ghost and scattered on the cold wind, wisps and faint trails and finally only the echo of its last howl
against the headstones.

Pete felt her legs give out, and she sank to her knees in the rough dead grass at the base of the obelisk. Her fingers were blue, and her breath when she blew it out was frosty and opaque white. She could feel the wraith’s magic fluttering inside her like a dying bird, and she let it go. If she held it in too long, her talent would burn her from the inside out. It hadn’t
been easy, to learn to let go of that dizzying high that came with sucking another being dry. That high was the ostensible upside of being a Weir, a channel for the darkest and oldest powers in the Black. Unlimited power, as much as you could steal—if you could hold it. Otherwise, you went insane when you hit the threshold and took too much of another’s power. Or simply burst a blood vessel and
keeled over dead, because magic was more powerful than any narcotic, and your lust for it had eaten you alive.

Weirs didn’t usually last long. To make it to thirty-one was a feat, according to Jack. Most days, Pete wasn’t sure it was something to be proud of.

“Fuck, my head,” Brandi Wolcott groaned. “What happened, Pete? What
was
that?”

“Mickey Martin,” Pete said quietly. “Or what was left
of him.” Wraiths were rare; it took a clever predator to survive by eating the innards out of ghosts, and London, while rife with spirits, was also rife with mages, exorcists, and psychics who ensured that predators like wraiths stayed where they belonged—in the vast screaming nothing where unfortunate lost souls could be consumed by any number of hungry things. They couldn’t usually fight their way
out to attempt to make a meal out of flesh-and-blood people.

Pete supposed she was just lucky she’d been the one to get the full brunt of this wraith, rather than poor Wolcott or some unsuspecting priest or church worker.

“So it’s over?” Wolcott looked a bit mussed, but none the worse for wear. Most victims of possession never even knew it had happened. The mind glossed it over, a horror a regular
person couldn’t contemplate.

“Yeah,” Pete said. Wolcott came and helped her up, and Pete bit down hard enough to draw blood when her arm spasmed again. “Fuck,” she hissed. She simply couldn’t be laid up right now—not only did she have more jobs booked over the coming weeks, but it was also going to be impossible to hold, feed, and change a baby with one working arm.

“You all right?” Wolcott’s
alarmingly orange brow furrowed.

“I’ll manage,” Pete said. Wolcott considered for a moment, and then nodded.

“Right. I’m parked up on the high street. Should get on home, probably.” She started to walk away, then turned back. “He’s … it’s … that thing’s not … coming back, is it?”

“No,” Pete said. “That’s done with.”

“And those things he said to me … they’re not true.”

Pete shrugged, the last
of her ability to sugarcoat gone. “I don’t know what he said to you, Wolcott. I can’t know if any of it was true.”

The constable’s mouth turned down at the edges, and she glared at Pete. “You know, them up in the squad was right about you.”

“What, that I’m a nutter?” Pete shrugged and immediately regretted it, feeling the twinge of battered tendons.

“No,” Wolcott said. “That you can be a bit
of a bitch.” She made her way through the churchyard and out the gate, not looking back.

“No argument from me on that score,” Pete muttered, feeling for the keys to her battered red Mini Cooper. They’d fallen from her pocket in the struggle, along with her wallet and her mobile, scattered across the grass. Pete collected everything, and then gave a fresh yelp as she straightened up and almost
bumped foreheads with a tall figure in a black coat and hat.

Her first thought was
Shit, shit, shit
as she braced herself to come face to face with a squad of witchfinders, the only sort of gits who favored the “Orson Welles circa
The Third Man
” look.

When the figures merely stood impassively, however, she got a second look. Their hat brims were pulled low, and what faces she could see had the
corpselike pallor and waxy, unhealthy skin that normally only cropped up on zombies. Their mouths were free of red stitching, though, and the way they’d appeared out of thin air wasn’t terribly zombielike. Zombies were brutes, and they were generally no good at sneaking about.

“Petunia Caldecott,” said the leader. His voice didn’t make her name a question. The other four stared at her, motionless
as the headstones all around.

Pete figured there was no point in arguing. “Yeah?”

The figure extended a hand. His fingers were long, the nails nonexistent, pulled out by the root, gnarled scar tissue in their place. Pete gingerly took the black envelope offered, being careful not to touch the thing. Skin-to-skin contact in the Black was often worse than grabbing a live wire—and there was plenty
of black magic that could be passed with only a touch. After the scene with the wraith that ate Mickey Martin, she wasn’t about to take any more stupid chances tonight.