Devil's Business (16 page)

“Sliver?” Jack got out of the Fury and tried lifting his arms. A dozen knives, from his skull to his knees, stabbed him for his trouble. He twisted the kinks from his back, trying not to gasp as his tender ribs vibrated.

“Yeah, him.” Pete grabbed her bag, his kit, and a disintegrating cardboard box from the trunk. “What’s wrong with his face?”

“For a wraith, nothing,” Jack said. “He’s an all right sort.”

Pete shouldered open a metal door marked
FIRE EXIT ONLY
. Considering that it was propped open with a cinder block, Jack figured the building either had a lot of fires, or had stopped worrying about the eventuality.

“We never have any normal friends,” she said.

“Normal’s overrated,” Jack said. The door swung shut and only a single bar of light illuminated the metal staircase, leading up and up. He smelled piss and stale air, and pulled Pete behind him. “Let me,” he said. The Black here was like smoke curls from a candle just snuffed—thin and ethereal, the boundaries of the daylight world worn to practically nothing.

On the one hand, Abbadon and his merry band of freaks would have a hard time finding them in the swirling hotspot of magic. On the other hand, anything could be lurking in the dark and his sight would only hear the static of the nexus.

“Fine,” Pete muttered, shoving the box at him. “Take this, then.”

Jack accepted the burden, and saw in the slice of sunlight that Pete was pale, with sweat beading on her forehead. “You all right, luv?”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she said. “Only been vomiting more than that bloody child from
The Exorcist.
Had it with this fucking pregnancy, I’ll tell you that much. I want to climb in the TARDIS and fast-forward to when the kid is about eleven.” She set her jaw and followed Jack up the stairs. He tried not to listen to her sawing breath. Pregnant birds threw up. His mum had certainly never let him hear the end of it.
Morning sickness out the arse, and what do I get? Ten fuckin’ hours of labor to pop out the world’s most ungrateful little cunt.

It didn’t mean anything, and fussing over Pete would just make her chuck something at his head. Maybe if he repeated it enough times in his own head he’d believe it. Pete would be all right. The kid would be all right. He just had to play the game a bit longer, and he’d no longer be in any danger of fucking either of them up.

And that was the way it should be. The way it had to be, unless he wanted to raise another Winter to get nicked by the cops, slam handfuls of smack, and drift through the Black as useless flotsam.

“Here,” Pete said. “Sixth floor. Said the key would be on the jamb.”

The hallway of the flat wasn’t much better—someone had made an attempt to cover the stained diamond-shaped tiles with green lino, but most of it had been ripped back up, leaving jagged continents. The wood paneling and sooty lamps had probably once been grand, but that had been decades, if not centuries, ago. The high ceiling merely served to create a smog layer inside, a miniature of the outdoors, made of cigarette smoke and stale stench from cooking oil.

A pair of junkies crouched by the elevator, a gated type with a hand-scribbled sign reading
OUT OF ORDER
. The pasteboard was yellowed and a variety of creative and obscene graffiti covered the black letters.

The girl, one half of her head shaved and one covered in blue dreadlocks, stretched out her hand. “Got any change, brother?”

“None you could spend in this country, sorry,” Jack told her.

“Oh, you’re British,” she said, and gave him a dreamy smile. “That’s cool.”

The boy nodded, skinny arms quivering as they wrapped around his knees. The bare flesh poking through his pants was scraped raw, concentric lines making hash marks in the skin. His arms were in the same condition. Ice could make you scratch that way, think there were insects and demons crawling in and out of your flesh.

“Down here.” Pete fitted a key into the last flat in the hall and stepped inside.

Jack paused on the threshold, but there were no hexes on the flat, just the swirling ankle-deep tide of the Black. He’d need to fix that.

The flat smelled of ammonia and stale fag smoke. A roach scuttled along the back of the kitchen sink, and the walls were the yellow of stained teeth. A broken shade let in a little light, but otherwise, except for a stained mattress, the single room was empty.

“Home sweet fucking home,” Jack muttered. Pete sat down on the mattress and put her head between her knees. Jack dropped the box and sat next to her.

“All right, luv?” he said. He weighed his risk, and then put a hand on the center of her back. Touching Pete was usually like putting your hand in something warm and sweet, a blissful hit of the best narcotic his brain could imagine. Now it was like grabbing a high-voltage wire with his bare hand. A rush of her talent fed into his and tried to convince him to expel the cloud of power as a hex or a spell that could blow a hole through the flat’s wall.

He hadn’t really touched her since the pregnancy—he’d brushed her hands, sure, or put his arm around her while they watched telly if she was in a good mood, but there hadn’t been any close contact, and he certainly hadn’t tried to fuck her. That would be a fast ticket to the A&E, considering Pete’s usual mood. He hadn’t expected to feel the touch of the Weir so strongly—stronger than it had ever been.

Stronger than before the Morrigan touched
you,
you mean,
his treacherous inner voice whispered. Jack fucking hated the voice. It always told him the truth.

Pete surprised him by leaning her weight on his chest, nestling her head in the crook of his shoulder. “We ever going to make it back?” she said.

“Don’t know.” Jack didn’t have the heart to lie to her. She would’ve known, anyway. “Doesn’t look good,” he said.

“You going to tell me what happened now?” Pete said.

He should move his hand. Move it before Pete’s talent overwhelmed him, made him drunk on the rush of the Black through his brain, and he did something stupid. But she was warm, and small under his hand, and he could feel her ribs move when she breathed.

Jack kept his hand on Pete while he gave her the short version of meeting Abbadon. “Fucking nutter,” he finished. “Thinks he can take on Belial and the rest of Hell. Probably wants to grab his He-Man sword and go toe to toe with the Princes, stupid git.”

“Why is that so stupid?” Pete got up and ran water into her hand from the rusted tap. She swiped the sweat from her face and drank another fistful.

“Because he’s talking about destroying Hell?” Jack spread his hands. “Nobody can go up against demons, Pete. A demon, maybe. But not all of them. Besides the six hundred and sixty-six, there’s their legions. Berserkers, Phantoms, Fenris. Millions of them, Pete. It’s like a hobo shouting at taxis—funny to watch, but completely ineffective.”

“I don’t think you’d need to take on millions,” Pete shrugged. “Just the ones who control the millons. Even the Named would fall into line. They’re demons, Jack. You told me they follow the leader. They value the rank and file. If someone were to knock down the Princes, I bet all but a few would fall in.”

Jack massaged his forehead. If he was honest, he’d had the same thought. “Abbadon’s too crazy to be organized,” he said. “Too much time in solitary. His mind is porridge.”

“He was the first thing in Hell, Jack,” Pete said. “To be only one of four survivors, over countless millennia—he might be crazy, but he’s a hard man. If he was a human, he’d be the worst kind of bastard. Seen them time and again in the prisons when I was on the Met.”

“Even so,” Jack said. “’M not being his errand boy. I got enough of that with Belial.”

Pete sat back beside him, mattress bowing under her weight. Her shirt was loose—one of his; he recognized the faded
SUSPECT DEVICE
lettering across the front—and if he hadn’t known, he wouldn’t have been able to detect the slight swell of her stomach. It was there, though, and she let out a small sound as she sat back down.

“Can’t wait to swell up and have to visit the loo every ten seconds,” she said. “My mum was all, ‘childbirth is a miracle and a beautiful gift from the unicorn faeries,’ but all my sister could talk about was how big Mum’s feet got when she was ready to pop with me.”

“Your feet look fine to me,” Jack said. “You’re not your mum.”

“Thank fuck for small favors,” Pete muttered. She flipped open the top of the cardboard box. “So, Abbadon. You manage to figure out why he’s after these families?”

Jack had been actively trying not to think about that, but after seeing things like Teddy, he couldn’t very well ignore what his eyes and his logical mind were both shouting at him. “Got an idea, yeah.”

Pete pulled out the stack of files Jack had first seen on Mayhew’s desk. “Good, because I’ve gone over these fucking police reports ten times apiece and I still can’t see any reason behind the murders.”

“I think Abbadon and his pals are trying to grow themselves new bodies,” Jack said. “Saw one out at his little ranch of horrors that had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.”

“But they’re corporeal creatures,” Pete said. “Don’t they have flesh of their own?”

“I think they can’t pass out of Hell,” Jack said. “When they were born, there was no here. There was just Hell, and a void. At least if I understand his ramblings correctly.”

Abbadon’s flesh was working all right, but the others were falling apart. Teddy was the worst, but there was nothing normal about the way Levi’s and the girl’s flesh had reacted to the intrusion of something ancient and malicious beyond measure.

“The kids,” Pete said. Jack nodded.

“I don’t think either the Case baby or this recent one are dead,” he said. “I think they’re being used as vessels.”

Pete’s face went pale, and she swallowed hard. “Christ.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Not exactly an acceptable hobby.”

“To have something like that, randomly deciding to slaughter you to get at your kid…” Pete trailed off, and paged through the pictures again.

Jack patted himself down for fags and found his pack partially crushed in his pocket. He lit one, dragged. He didn’t want to tell Pete that he had a feeling the Cases’ and the Herreras’ slaughter wasn’t all that random. Ancient creatures of Hell didn’t simply latch on to you because they liked the cut of your jib.

Abbadon had escaped the great iron prison Jack had found while in Hell. Had escaped a full ten years before Nicholas Naughton had tried to awaken Nergal and sent the rest of the domino tiles flying.

Abbadon had had help. Nobody escaped Hell without it. Jack sure as fuck hadn’t.

“I need to see Mrs. Herrera’s body,” he said. “It’d still be on ice, yeah?”

“They keep unsolveds for as long as there’s room and they don’t go ripe, ’least they do back home,” Pete said. “I imagine she’d still be about. File said they had no family to claim the remains anyway.”

“Right,” Jack said. “Let me put up some hexes on this shithole, and then we’re going to go find out exactly what the fuck Belial has gotten me into.”

He dug through his kit bag and found chalk and a few of his dried baggies of herbs. He didn’t put much stock in kitchen witchery—that was the provenance of white magic, the sort of person who believed nailing a few twigs and a twist of colored thread above the doorjamb would keep out anything that meant you harm.

Only the Black could do that, and bending the Black to your will wasn’t something a white witch would ever truck with.

He chalked the barrier marks around the doorjamb and across the threshold, something to focus the hex. Protection hexes, good ones, took time, but Jack could pull a quick and dirty barrier together in a few heartbeats. That was important—if something was clawing at the other side of your door, speed trumped elegance every time.

He laid a line of salt from his ancient tin and followed it up with a line of herbs. He reached out, touched the electric swirl of the Black just beyond sight, and pulled it into the chalk, into the salt, tugging and weaving it into a crackling barrier across all the thresholds of the flat. A twinge in the front of his skull, and it was done. Anyone trying to come at him would get enough of a jolt to reconsider their life choices.

“Let’s get this done,” he told Pete. “I’m ready to be out of this miserable city.”

Pete collected her mobile and her bag, but before Jack could stow his kit, fists pounded on the door. Pete rolled her eyes. “Probably just some crackhead.”

Jack touched the door with splayed fingers, but nothing spiked his sight. “Yeah? What?”

“Hey, dude.” The female junkie’s voice was thin and papery through the water-stained door. “You got a place we could maybe piss? The gas station is like half a mile away.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said. “This isn’t a hotel.”

Jack sighed. “What’s the harm?” A girl couldn’t just find a convenient alley, like he had when he was a junkie. He could practically feel the grimy film that built up on your skin when you were concerned with showering maybe once or twice in a month. The stale taste in your mouth of fags and the bite of bile, because you hadn’t eaten in recent memory and didn’t want to. Your veins burned you from the inside out, burned out hunger and everything except the need to chase the fire, reignite it when it got low.

Pete threw up her hands. “Whatever. Just be quick.”

Jack undid the deadbolt and opened the door a crack. Saw the girl’s bloodshot eyes and rigid face, and tried to slam it again, but she thrust her steel-toed boot into the gap and then threw the door off its hinges with a boom.

He went down hard, the door landing on top of him. If it hadn’t been half-disintegrated with dry rot, it would’ve crushed his ribs, but instead the junkie girl landing on top of him finished that job. She crouched atop Jack and leaned down, nostrils flaring wide. She wore a piercing, a ring with a jewel bead that shimmered in the low light as she inhaled his scent.

Jack thrust against her with his whole weight, but she wrapped a hand around his neck. “You really think you can just run from me? You think Belial can protect you?” The voice was low and masculine, and as it twisted out of her narrow throat it sounded like a creature trapped far below ground.