Soul Trade Read online

  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 wr
aith that ate Mickey Martin, she wasn’t about to take any more stupid chances tonight.

  “You are cordially invited to attend the tenth full gathering of the Prometheus Club,” said the figure. His voice was oddly high and reedy, as if he were on the verge of having his vocal cords wriggle their way out through his throat.

  “I … have no clue what you’re on about,” Pete said, holding the envelope by the corner. In any other place, on any other night, this would smack of bad live theater, but she was rattled enough not to antagonize the waxen men. There was something about their mannerisms and the way they’d just appeared out of thin air that hinted to Pete that they were dead serious.

  “The patrons of the Prometheus Club do hope you will choose to attend, Weir,” said the lead figure.

  “It took five of you to tell me that?” Pete asked, flicking her gaze quickly between the pale men. It wasn’t exactly a secret that she was a Weir, but those in the Black were usually a bit more circumspect about saying it to her face. She scared people, and she wished she didn’t, but the Weir was something to be afraid of. Hell, she was afraid of it.

  “We are messengers,” said the lead figure. “We have delivered our message.”

  “Yeah, well,” Pete said. “Tell your club to shove it. I don’t particularly cotton to shadowy errands, especially ones that come with an implied threat.”

  “That is a pity,” said the figure, and he tilted his head so that Pete caught a bit more of his face and a flash of his eyes. Or where his eyes should have been. The thing didn’t have any sockets, just divots in the skull, covered over with that same waxy, unnatural flesh. Pete swallowed a roll of nausea. She’d seen worse. Crime scenes had been worse. She kept her face still. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t come face to face before with things that weren’t strictly human. Or strictly alive.

  “I never considered it a pity to miss a fancy party full of twats who think scenes like this are funny,” she said.

  “The penalty for refusing the Prometheus Club is dire,” said the figure. He gestured woodenly at the envelope still pinched between Pete’s fingers. “Would you care to reconsider?”

  “No,” Pete said instantly. The type who’d send heavies for a simple invite were the type you wanted to avoid. “No, I will not reconsider. And now I’m tired, so kindly fuck off and let me go on home.”

  “Your choice,” said the figure, and all five turned and marched, single file, through the churchyard gate and into the inscrutable fog.

  2.

  The midnight streets were as deserted as they ever got in central London, and Pete made it home on autopilot, still trying to take off the chill engendered by the wraith. The church bells on Bow Street were tolling half-twelve when she parked the Mini in the alley behind Jack’s flat.

  Each step up the four flights to the flat hurt, and she leaned against the wall inside the door, collecting herself before she saw Jack and Lily. She didn’t want him kicking up a fuss about her going on jobs alone. The prewar light fixture in the hall buzzed, and Pete made a mental note for the dozenth time that they needed to get the wiring in the place checked out.

  Before she’d had to look at the flat through the eyes of a responsible parent, it had been more than fine. Now, though, she couldn’t help but see the nicotine stains on the ceiling and the lead paint on the windowsills, the stove that emitted strange and dizzying odors anytime she or Jack tried to do more than heat up takeaway, and she realized that they’d never make enough money to move someplace more conducive to raising Lily. Not that Jack would go for it, if she suddenly found thousands of pounds lying in the street. He’d been living in Whitechapel since the eighties, and Pete couldn’t imagine someone like him moving to the country, surrounded by flat motorways, flatter fields, Tesco superstores, and normal people.

  The protection hexes that wrapped the flat like spider silk slithered away from her as she advanced into the sitting room. There might be a pile of clean clothes on the floor and a sink full of filthy dishes, but at least Jack hadn’t let the hexes slide.

  He sat on the sofa, Lily cradled in one arm, watching a film with no sound on Pete’s laptop. He’d never kick in for a TV, but he’d finally given in to the allure of the internet. Lots of mages were technophobes—and lots tended to fry whatever electronics were in their range—so Pete counted herself lucky that she didn’t live with a walking electromagnet, and that Jack had decided having an endless supply of Lucio Fulci films and spaghetti westerns was worth the extra bill.

  “She’s been asleep for a few hours,” Jack said softly. He shifted, almost imperceptibly, and reached for his glass of whiskey. “I was afraid to move her.”

  Pete let herself drop down beside him, coat, bag and all. She was weary from top to bottom and still chilled to the bone. “I’ll put her down in a few minutes.”

  Jack regarded her in the blue light of the screen. Clint Eastwood stalked across a dusty town square, merciless sun beating down on cheap plaster sets. “You look like shit,” he said presently.

  “I love you, too,” Pete grumbled. Her attempt to pull herself together had been useless. Why did she even try to hide things from a psychic?

  Jack tilted his head. “Did something happen?” he said. Pete scooped Lily into her arms.

  “You might say that,” she murmured. The baby grizzled a bit but settled down. Pete got up and put her in her cot in the corner of the sitting room near the disused fireplace, then switched on the baby monitor.

  “You and Clint finishing up?” she asked Jack. Usually he stayed awake until near sunrise, which meant they rarely slept at the same time, but then again, it meant he was the one awake for Lily’s dawn feedings. The part of Pete that wanted to spend time with Jack like they used to hated it, but the sleep-deprived mother in her thought it was a fantastic idea, and these days, sleep always won.

  “Yeah, it’s almost through with,” he said. He caught her hand as she started for the bedroom. “You swear you’re all right?”

  “Sure,” Pete said, fighting a grimace as her arm flared up. “Never better, luv.”

  Jack, at least, had the decency not to call out her lying.

  Pete dropped her clothes on top of the ever-growing pile next to their bed, then collapsed on it in her jersey and underwear. She was tired—too tired to change, too tired to tuck herself under the duvet, too tired to do anything except stare at the ceiling, tracing the familiar stains, continents of cracks and water damage amid a plaster sea.

  Still, she couldn’t convince herself to shut her eyes and fall asleep. When Jack shuffled in from the bathroom and added his denim and his moth-chewed sweater to the pile of laundry, she sat up and decided she had to ask. “Jack, you ever hear of the Prometheus Club?”

  He froze, for just a heartbeat, before he shrugged. “Might’ve heard some chatter, but nothing much.” His glacial eyes focused on her with an intensity that made the cold in her bones return with a rush. “Why?”

  Pete shrugged in turn. “No reason,” she said. “Heard of them somewhere.”

  Jack got under the duvet and offered her half, and Pete curled on her side facing him. He wasn’t telling her everything. After years of seeing him lie in every conceivable way, catching him was almost a reflex, an instinct for detecting the deception Jack used as an invisible shield. If you didn’t know him, you couldn’t hurt him. The first line of defense for paranoids everywhere.

  Whether or not his paranoia was justified in this case, she could find out in the morning.

  “Seen many wraiths around London lately?” she asked him, changing the subject. Trying to pry the truth out of Jack when he didn’t want to give it was like trying to reroute the Thames—messy, difficult, and not happening.

  “Wraiths? Not unless the sad old men are telling stories down the pub.” Jack snorted. “Why, you see one?”

  “Saw it, talked to it, felt it try to rip my soul out,” Pete confirmed. She peeked under the duvet, checking out her injuries. Her leg was a solid parade of bruises on the
side where she’d caught the gravestone, and she’d be feeling them even worse in the morning. If Lily weren’t a consideration, she’d down a handful of the Vicodin Jack kept in the medicine cabinet, but instead she tried to shift the pillows around to support her sorest bits and switched off the light.

  After a moment, Jack’s arm snaked gingerly around her waist, and she let his warmth and smell of soap, leather, and tobacco envelop her. It was a scent that could smooth all her rough edges and calm her instantly, but it wasn’t working tonight.

  “Wraith moving into a churchyard around here’s not a good sign,” Jack muttered into her hair. “What’d it say to you?”

  “Usual rot,” Pete said. “It was riding Mickey Martin’s ghost—what it hadn’t already drained—trying its hand at the living. Almost turned poor Brandi Wolcott into a milkshake.”

  “Hmm,” Jack said, but that was all. He didn’t offer an opinion, didn’t give voice to the fears knocking around Pete’s brain since she’d gotten in her car at the churchyard. Pete listened as his breathing smoothed into sleep, but her own thoughts wouldn’t quiet.

  They whispered that she should be afraid, and if Jack had any sense he would be, too. That the talented—latent mages, unwitting psychics, and nascent sorcerers—were awake all over London because of what Jack had done. That the incidents of ghosts and the Black spilling into daylight had multiplied by orders of magnitude since Nergal had tried to break free. They weren’t stopping; they were increasing, like a flood tide rising to swallow everything in its path. Monsters thought to be only stories had once again appeared, and the fractious and scattered human magicians in London were no match for any of them.

  The whisper of her own fears told Pete that the Black and the daylight world were wounded, ruptured and bleeding into one another, and nobody had the faintest idea what to do.

  The thought kept Pete awake for what remained of the night, and her eyes were still open when the first gray whispers of dawn crept through the dirty panes and across the threadbare carpet of the bedroom.