Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“Still the same old Jack,” she said. Pete felt the sharp craving penetrate her skull at the hit of smoke, but she bit it back. She’d quit when she’d gotten pregnant, and she wasn’t about to let Wendy and her sad little council flat
drive her back into the habit.
“I wouldn’t know,” Pete said. “We met later on.”
Wendy appraised Pete, with a good deal less friendliness than she’d displayed in front of Jack. “Oh yeah. You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”
“I’m thirty-one,” Pete said, keeping her voice low and calm. She wasn’t going to do this—she wasn’t going to play some silly game that had started between Jack and Wendy
before she’d even been born.
“’Course you are, sweetheart,” Wendy said. “But younger when you met, I’d wager.” She grinned. Her teeth were the same color as her stained plaster walls. “Jack always did like to get ’em young and willing.”
“All right, look,” Pete said. “I appreciate that you’re put out helping us like this, and that you might think you have some kind of claim to Jack, being there
first and all, but I’m a grown woman, not a teenage girl, and seeing as he and I have a baby back in London, I really doubt he’s going anywhere. Sweetheart.”
Wendy glared at her through the fog of smoke, but she stayed quiet. Pete didn’t feel any better—she actually felt worse. She hated the reminder that there was an entire life Jack had lived before her. Friends and enemies, love and heartbreak.
She could know about it, but she’d never be part of it. She’d always be the one that came after, the younger woman, the one who’d sent Jack down a spiral he nearly hadn’t climbed out of.
If she were being honest, she knew she wasn’t Jack’s first love, or even his second. Not by a long shot. Wendy might not be either, but she was a reminder of the Before, and the other Jack, the one Pete had never
known and never would.
“Not like he ever made an effort to look me up after he took off,” Wendy sighed at last. “Broke my heart one day when I went ’round to his flat and he was just gone. His mum was stoned off her arse, as usual, and I didn’t hear from him for near ten years.”
“That’s Jack now, too,” Pete said, feeling herself soften toward Wendy just a bit. “Good at flash, not big on follow-through.”
Wendy sucked on her fag and gave Pete a wry smile. “That’s us.” She gestured at a shabby photo in filmy glass sitting on her end table next to the ashtray. Pete extended her hand.
“May I?”
Wendy nodded, and Pete ran her thumb over the glass to clear the dust away. Jack, young and skinny, stood next to Wendy on the stoop of her council flat. They couldn’t have been more than twelve, Wendy’s hair
in an eighties perm that looked like it could support its own weather system, and Jack slouched in a shirt and tie that both had clearly been borrowed from someone who was much larger and a fan of bold paisley prints.
“What was the occasion?” she asked Wendy.
“I had a part in the school play,” Wendy murmured. “
The Music Man.
Jack and his da came to see me, since me mum was always at work.”
Pete focused on the tall figure standing behind Jack and Wendy. Wendy squinted at her through the smoke from her fag. “What?”
“Nothing.” Pete swallowed the dozen questions that exploded into her brain. “Jack never said much about his dad. I always thought he was dead.”
Wendy shrugged. “Probably is, now. Showed up once in a blue moon, threw cash around, left. Never gave a fuck one way or the other
what poor Jackie was actually going through at home.”
Before Pete could contemplate the photo any further, Jack returned from the loo, swiping his hands across his jeans. “Everything all right, then?” he asked, darting a look between Pete and Wendy.
“Tip-top,” Wendy said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’ll just go down and get something for tea, yeah?”
She left, and Jack paced the flat, four
steps to each wall, until he finally scrubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t take this,” he muttered, heading for the door.
Pete ran after him, nearly falling down the broken front steps. “You can’t just go running about Manchester by yourself,” she said. “Not after what happened at the train station.”
Jack ignored her, walking for a good minute in silence. “You’d think it’d be easier,” he sighed
at last.
“What?” Pete asked, though she knew.
“Coming back here,” Jack said. “I haven’t been back to Manchester since I was fifteen, Pete. I didn’t even come back for me mum’s funeral.”
“I wouldn’t worry over it,” Pete said quietly. They walked another block, until they stopped in front of a flat, same as all the other flats in the row, with empty windows peering into a sad, floral-papered
sitting room.
“I wouldn’t have ever come back if I had it my way,” Jack said. “But I’d do it for you, no question.”
Pete opened her mouth, then shut it again. What the hell did you say to that? Jack might be the sort of fuckwit who’d look up an ex-girlfriend and expect everything to go swimmingly, but he had never left her. Never let her down, never done anything less than all he could to protect
her. Even at the cost of his sanity and almost his life.
“I know,” she said at last, reaching for his hand, but Jack wasn’t beside her any longer.
“This is it,” he said, stopping at the semi-detached on the corner. “Good old number seven. Every time the council was ready to kick my mum out for fighting and keeping her shady boyfriends here on the sly, she’d cry and make me come with her to the
hearing, look sad and skinny and pathetic.”
Pete thought back to the photo, to the small dark-haired boy who held only the barest hints of the Jack she knew. She would have felt sorry for that boy. She
did
feel sorry for that boy.
Jack conjured a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke at the darkened windows. “Can’t believe we ended up spending fourteen years here. No wonder my dad bolted as soon
as he saw an opening.”
“You ever see him after you lit out?” Pete asked cautiously. “Your dad?”
“Never since the day I packed a kit and shut the door behind me,” Jack said. “He crops up, he’s asking for a kick in both the teeth and the arse.”
“Fair enough,” Pete said. He didn’t want to talk about it, and that was his choice. The questions she had were just going to have to keep waiting, as
they always had.
She and Jack reached the end of the road, which ended abruptly in a pit of gravel, mud, and leftover rainwater, green scum floating on top. The residents had been using the place as a makeshift tip, and an icebox of some indeterminate vintage lay on its side, doors gaping open.
A number of small children ran in circles amid the garbage, shrieking and giggling. They weren’t playing
the cruel games that Pete remembered from the council kids around her neighborhood growing up, nor were they smashing things for the Hell of it. The game seemed to involve one kid who was a dragon, who shot the others with some kind of foam dart launcher, slowly turning each to his side when they got hit. It was an innocent game, without any sharp edges. They seemed happy.
“You think Lily will
ever be that?” she said.
Jack snorted. “Raggedy little council rat? Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Come on,” Pete said sharply. “It’s not like they’re running about setting small dogs on fire. I meant do you think she’ll ever be like
that,
right this moment?” Her voice trailed off to a whisper. “Happy, with nothing troubling her?”
“’Course I do,” Jack said, surprising Pete by twining
his fingers with hers. “She’s got you, doesn’t she?”
Pete looked at her feet. Better modesty than letting Jack know she was hiding a prickle of tears in the corners of her eyes. “Right” was all she said.
“Pub’s down the way, used to be decent,” Jack said. “’Course, that was 1984. Care to chance it?”
“Would I ever,” Pete said. She let Jack lead her back up the road and into the high street,
the lights of Alexandra Park coming on around them one by one, like stars filling a darkened sky, remote and frozen as outer space.
7.
The residents of the Dodger’s Arms—and Pete used the term on purpose, since the men at the bar looked as if they’d been sitting there since at least before Thatcher came to office—glared at her when she and Jack came in out of the twilight, but Jack ordered for them at the bar, and at the sound of his ever-thickening Manchester burr, the punters turned back to their sudsy pints and let
Jack and Pete be.
The weight of the packet Preston Mayflower had given her knocked against her chair when she hung her jacket, and she pulled it out, turning it in her hands. Jack examined the dirty paper object over the lip of his pint glass. “What’ve you got there?”
“Mayflower slipped it to me,” Pete said. She picked at the edge of the paper, which was greasy—she wagered from the many times
Preston had performed this exact motion. “I’d really like to know what could possibly be enough to throw yourself into traffic over.”
“Could be nothing,” Jack said. “Bloke
did
fling himself in front of a bus for no fucking reason.”
Pete thought about telling him what she’d seen, the two figures chasing Mayflower, the real fear driving the madness-tinged exchange they’d had.
But Jack had enough
to worry about being back home, and she didn’t
know
the figures came from the Prometheus Club. She had her suspicions, sure, but she wasn’t going to get Jack up in arms until she was certain. The Proemetheans hadn’t been after her, anyway. They wanted her with them.
Unless they know you have this grimy little trinket,
her logic whispered. Preston had been scared enough to try and warn her away
from the Gathering, and now he was dead for his trouble.
Then again, Preston could be a complete frothing nutter. The only thing Pete could figure was that she couldn’t trust anyone in Manchester—not the Prometheans, not Wendy, and not Mayflower.
So decided, she took a long swig of her pint. Sooner or later, she’d tell Jack the whole story, but not tonight. Not with the ghosts of his past looming
so large that he’d already downed a pint and a shot and ordered a repeat.
Though the pub was dingy, it had been a long time since she’d just been able to go out and relax—at least since before she left the Met. She and Ollie Heath, her partner, used to go out a few times a week with some other DIs from the squad, drink and laugh at horrible jokes and unwind. Take their minds off life on the murder
squad, which was bleaker than most and less rewarding than nearly all.
She fingered the packet for a moment longer. “Suppose you’re right,” she told Jack. “It’s probably nothing.”
He extended his palm. “Let’s see it, then. Strange men slip you gifts, I think I deserve to know.”
As she unwound the soft, worn paper, Pete felt a frission of anticipation, the barest finger of the Black scraping
over her talent, leaving the slightest bloody scratch. It vanished as the paper fell apart and the small, hard object Mayflower had passed her thunked onto the sticky pub table.
“Shit,” Jack breathed, as the small stone caught the light. To Pete it looked rather ordinary—something like those crystals you bought in museum shops, leftover pieces of larger geodes—pretty and sharp-edged but ultimately
unremarkable.
“I’m just glad it’s not a severed ear, really,” she said, mindful of Jack’s ashen expression. The crystal was cool to her touch—too cold, as if it had been out in the void of space. She pulled back her fingers as the tips turned blue.
“An ear would be a fifty-quid note compared to what that is,” Jack muttered. He grabbed his second shot and knocked it back with a shudder, making
all the ink up and down his arms ripple.
“You all right?” Pete asked. She cast a quick look around the pub, but they were still relatively incognito. Nobody spared them a glance of more than a few seconds.
“Not really,” Jack said. “You say the train station nutter
gave
you this?”
Pete rubbed the spot between her eyes where a fierce headache bloomed. “Just give me the bad news. What is it—a
bomb? A cursed object? Am I going to start vomiting toads?”
“That’s a soul cage,” Jack said softly. When he was really worried, his voice dropped to just above a whisper, rough and tight as dragging his palm over gravel. “I’ve only seen a few, and ones this compact are extremely rare.”
Pete flinched. She’d encountered a soul cage when she’d been attempting to undo their mistake with Nergal,
and they were nasty pieces of work. “But don’t they take up whole rooms?” she protested. “And aren’t they used on the living?”
The soul cage as she knew it had been writ with magic sigils and used to trap the soul of a victim eternally, in the space between the Black and the Land of the Dead. At the base, they were torture chambers, and usually only necromancers could construct them. Nergal had
deserved no less, but Pete had a feeling that whoever had their soul encased in the cold crystal was merely unlucky.
“Not this one,” Jack said, gingerly taking the crystal and turning it in its cloth without touching it. “This one … this is a masterful piece of work, I’ll tell you. Made with care, for somebody this mage really and truly hated.”
Pete caught a flash from the crystal in the low
light, and for just a moment it seemed something moved beneath the lava-glass surface, oily and alive. She drew back in her chair, as far from the soul cage as possible. She didn’t even want to think about what it would be like, soul ripped from her body, trapped in a tiny sliver of the in-between caught in the cage. A miniature Purgatory for a single soul, entrapped for eternity.
“Can you tell
what sort of thing is in there?” she asked in a whisper.
Jack laid his finger carefully against the side of the crystal. “Human,” he said. “Beyond that, I’m not poking around.” He swiped his fingers across his jeans, brushing off the invisible psychic residue of whomever the soul cage contained.
“So what do we do with this?” Pete asked. Jack’s eyebrow went up.
“What d’you think?” he demanded.
“We don’t know what sort of sod is cooped up in there. At best, he’ll be a mightily pissed off ghost when he comes out. At worst, he got his soul caged for all eternity for a reason. You do
not
mess with magic this strong.” He lowered his voice, looking around. “Not to mention that whoever made that is mucking in dark stuff of the highest order. Not a bastard whose careful work you want to undo.
So we’re not doing a damn thing except wrapping it back up so it can’t give me frostbite.”