Soul Trade (17 page)

“Oi,” Pete said, turning her nudge into a jab. “You’re not supposed to look at anyone’s arse but mine.”

“And yours is definitely tip-top in my book, darling,” he said. “This does leave us with the matter of being exactly where Crotherton was
before he buggered off—nowhere.”

Morwenna wasn’t going to like nowhere. Pete was fairly sure she’d have a fit, one that ended with more threats and more shite tossed on Pete’s doorstep.

She stood up, regarding the Killigans’ door. “Then we go inside. I’m fairly sure Crotherton never got this far.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m all for a bit of B and E, luv, but unless you’re going to shimmy up the drain
pipe like Catwoman, we’re out of luck.”

Pete sucked in a breath as the wild energy of the Black surged around her. Here, on the outskirts of Overton, it was less tainted and strangled. The farther from town she got, the easier the magic came.

“I have an idea,” she said. “But you’re not going to like it.”

Before Jack could protest or even question, Pete stepped into the Killigans’ ragged rose
bushes, the thorns grabbing at her jacket, flesh, and hair. Pete levered herself up onto the raised bed next to the front window, then turned her back and smashed her elbow through the glass. The wavy single pane shattered on impact, and Pete felt the charms Dexter Killigan had set about the place grab hold of her.

The magic slithered over her hands, across all of her bare skin. It felt like
the slick underbellies of dirt-dwelling things, smelled like leaf rot and mildew. She held on, gripping the frame of the window, small pearls of leftover glass slicing her palm. The hex groaned in pleasure at her blood, and the power covered her, trying to find ingress via her eyes and mouth.

She’d only done this once before, with a hex designed to kill rather than merely shoo away, but back
then she’d had the advantage of being a complete bloody idiot with no idea that using her talent to siphon something so powerful could kill her.

Now, she was aware with every atom of her being as the Weir woke up, snarling and hungry, feeding on the slippery marsh magic of the hex. It fed with an alacrity that alarmed even Pete, and she felt the Black flow into her as if she were completely hollow,
only a vessel.

Which she would be, if the Weir had its way.

Pete was aware of Jack shouting, but she couldn’t understand the words. She pulled the hex to her and refused to let go, even when it began to struggle.

The rush hit as the hex withered and died, the euphoric high of pulling in power not her own. Just as quickly the sick burning developed in Pete’s guts, the knowledge that her mere
flesh could not contain a carefully woven spell.

She screamed and dropped to her knees, the thorns cutting at her. The pain brought her back, let her expel the magic of the hex and feel it dissipate. Only frayed ends of the spell were left now, nothing that could hurt them.

When she came back to herself, she was looking up at scaly rainclouds and the glow of the hidden moon. Jack stood over
her, hands gripping her coat, face pale as a corpse. “I’m all right,” she said. Her voice came out choked and raspy. That fit—she felt as if someone had wrung her neck, shaken her, and dropped her to the ground.

“Are you crazy?” Jack demanded. “I mean, are you completely off your nut? You could have really hurt yourself.”

Pete let herself be still for a moment. She ached like she’d run miles,
but that was usual. Her scratches stung in the cold, wet air, but other than her cut palm and the redoubled ache in her arm from Mickey Martin’s attack, she was in one piece, and that was about the best one could hope for.

“I’m all right,” she said again.

“Stupid,” Jack said. His expression hurt Pete more than the slight. It was the one he reserved for people he thought beneath him, who weren’t
clever enough to circumvent anything that hurt or was unpleasant.

“What else are we supposed to do?” Pete asked, standing up. All around her, the rosebushes hung black and ashy, flowers reduced to nubs. The ground itself was dead, the grass and dirt ravaged from the magic that had flowed back into the ground.

Jack glared at her, but he didn’t have an answer. Pete waved him off. “Just stand back.”

She put her boot against the deadbolt, gauging the distance. She didn’t want to kick in the door itself, but the doorjamb. Bust apart the housing of the lock, and even the strongest door wouldn’t have anything to hold it shut. The trick was hitting right, and not breaking your foot off in the process.

Pete took a breath, willing herself to stay upright, and drove her boot into the apex of the
door and the jamb. The wood splintered, and another kick dislodged the door entirely. Musty air breathed out, air that hadn’t touched the outside in months, coated with the faint, sweet odor of decomposition. The hair on the back of Pete’s neck, trained by a hundred crime scenes, prickled as she stepped inside.

“Fuck me,” Jack said, voice echoing in the empty room. “Smells like something crawled
up a bum’s arse and died.”

Pete shushed him with a gesture. There were times—not many—when she missed her pistol, and this was one of them. Not that bullets were much use against demons. She could punch holes in their host body, but she couldn’t kill a demon. Not unless she burned them from the inside out with pure magic, and that could just as easily kill you as them.

Inside the Killigans’
home, things were bare and dusty. A few spare pieces of furniture were shoved in one corner of the sitting room. The kitchen held only a table and a single chair, and dishes rimed with spoiled food were piled on every surface. The drone of flies hung heavy in the room, even in the chill of the darkened house.

Trying not to breathe too deeply of the stench, Pete moved on to a back parlor fitted
with windows that would usually look over the back lawn and out to the hills. Now they’d been covered in spray paint, hasty frantic marks in a splash of colors that looked like the inside of a particularly bad acid hit.

Pete backed out. “Nobody here.”

“There’s a cellar,” Jack said. The door was thin, barely the width of a person, and when Pete opened it, she saw a ladder leading down into darkness.

“Of course,” she grumbled, putting her foot on the first rung.

“Oi,” Jack said, and Pete prepared to scream if he tried to stop her, but he only handed over his lighter.

“Thanks,” she said softly. Jack could surprise her. He was too stubborn for his own good, taciturn and unreliable and everything she should run from, especially when she had Lily to consider. But there was this side, too. The
Jack she’d first met, the Jack she loved, the Jack who’d never leave her.

Dirt met her boots when she reached the bottom of the ladder. It was an old cellar, older than the house above it, from a time when food rotted slowly in the dark, and the dead who passed in winter stayed down there until the ground wasn’t frozen any longer.

Pete flicked the lighter wheel and examined her surroundings.
There was a small brick arch leading to an antechamber across the dirt space from her, and Pete picked her way toward it. The lighter flickered, and she thought she heard a low sound. Laughter, maybe.

Just keep walking,
she told herself.
Not the worst place you’ve ever been. Not even close.

Before she reached the support arch that framed the larger cellar, her foot caught on something firm but
yielding.

Pete pitched into the dirt with a grunt, the impact knocking most of the fear out of her. What good was she if she went on her arse the moment someone turned out the lights?

She rekindled the lighter and illuminated a canvas-wrapped bundle, crawling with more of the blowflies she’d seen upstairs. Pete drew back the canvas gingerly and winced at what she found, then scrambled up and
went to the ladder.

“Jack,” she said. “Remember when I said I thought Crotherton hadn’t made it here?”

“Yeah?” he said, brows drawing together.

Pete tried to breathe through her mouth, to cut out some of the putrefaction scent rising from the open canvas. “I was wrong,” she said. “I just found him.”

“Do you need me to come down?” Jack asked. He tried to make the question casual, but she knew
that any time there was a dead body, there was the chance of an associated angry ghost, one that would hook on to Jack’s sight like a hawk striking a rabbit.

“No,” Pete said. “Stay put and keep watch.”

She went back to Crotherton, crouching. He was turning colors, the gentle blooms of green and black mold under his skin telling Pete he’d been moldering in the basement for at least a week.

She felt bad for Jeremy Crotherton, just doing his shit job like any street-level plod. His lips had pulled away from his gums, and even though Pete knew it was just an effect of decomposition, she put the canvas back over his face. She didn’t need to think about how his last expression looked like he’d been screaming.

So the hikers had disappeared, then the bird-watching couple, and now Crotherton.
Had they been early victims, before the demon had found a perfect host body? Sacrifices required to complete the summoning? Demons were varied as people and required everything from catsup to still-beating hearts as tribute.

Or was she sneaking around a house that wasn’t her own with a dead man in the cellar, just asking to be fitted for something she hadn’t done by the local coppers?

Honestly,
Pete decided, she didn’t care. She’d found Crotherton, and now she had to get Margaret Smythe out of here. Morwenna and her little shell game with the Prospero Society could go piss up a rope.

“Have you come to play with us?”

Pete whipped toward the support arch, raising the lighter.

A small white face stared back at her, half-buried in the earth. Bridget Killigan had carved herself an alcove
in the cellar wall, and she and Patrick and Diana were pressed into their individual dirt dens, staring at Pete with unblinking eyes.

“I think you’ve all had enough time to play.” Pete advanced toward the three figures, trying to get a better look at them. Maybe if she was lucky, the thing inside the children would be in a chatty mood.

She’d ignore the nauseating fact that she was talking to
something living inside the bodies of three children she’d tried and failed to save. Ignore that this was a nightmare she’d had more than once.

This bastard was going to learn Pete Caldecott was made of sterner stuff than falling apart when faced with living nightmares.

Her foot bumped against something else yielding, and she glanced down to see Dexter Killigan lying face down on the cellar
floor. A tray lay just north of his outstretched hand, and a shattered plate next to it. Flies had already massed on the raw meat the plate had carried, and maggots wriggled under the lighter’s glare.

This time she wasn’t surprised at the corpse. The poor sod was likely much happier wherever he was than he had been here, serving the whim of something he had to know wasn’t actually his Bridget.

Pete looked back up at the three figures and frowned her most disappointed and motherly frown. “I don’t know what kind of fuckwit takes over children’s bodies, but it wasn’t your smartest move. You’re small and fragile. Easily handled.”

Bridget laughed. It was low, rough. Her throat distended as she spoke, as if something were trying to claw its way free of her skin. “Jeremy thought so, too.
Big boy that he was. He actually tried to exorcise us.”

The others laughed, bullfrog throats throbbing, and Pete fought to keep from turning around and running until she was out of air. “I can’t do that,” Pete said. “But what’s waiting for you upstairs sure can.”

“The crow-mage doesn’t scare us,” Bridget snarled. “
You
don’t scare us.”

Pete stepped over Dexter’s body, holding the lighter within
snuffing distance of Bridget’s face. “You don’t scare me either,” she said. “So I guess we’re even.”

“Lies,” Patrick hissed, turning the upper half of his body to face Pete. She winced as she heard his vertebrae crack, spine unhinging. Even if she and Jack pulled off an exorcism, these poor kids weren’t going to be long for the world.
And maybe that’s for the best,
she thought.

“We scare you
all right,” said Diana. “You used to be the fearless one, but everything scares you now. You think about her every waking moment. Your blood given form. Your Lily.”

Bridget started laughing again. “She has dreams about Lily being like us. Dreams about the demons who want to possess her.”

Pete didn’t usually give in to temper—that was Jack’s problem, not hers. She could hold herself together
past the point of screaming. But not this time. This time, she wasn’t even aware she was moving until she’d dropped the lighter and wrapped her hands around Bridget Killigan’s throat in the dark. Until the laughter choked to a stop. Until their talents clashed.

“
Don’t you ever,
” Pete snarled, in a voice so grating and enraged she couldn’t believe it sprang from her, “
use your filthy Hell-spawned
mouth to say my daughter’s name.
”

Not even her voice—Connor’s voice, as if he were reaching out to lend her every last ounce of rage she could pour into the words.

Bridget gave a choking gasp, but she was still laughing. “There’s your first mistake, Weir,” she croaked. “We’re not from Hell.”

Pete started, but she couldn’t have let go if she tried. She was lost in the demon’s power, as her talent
opened up and drank it down. The Weir was hungry, denied the power of the hex, and now it wasn’t letting go until it had its fill.

“Stop … stop…” Bridget vomited up bile, the green of the bottom of a pond. Pete felt her palms burn, nerves screaming as if she’d thrust them into an oven, but she couldn’t let go. Wouldn’t let go, until the thing grinning at her from Bridget Killigan’s face burned,
too.

As the Black surged around them, a tidal wave smashing on rocks, the shape of the thing inside Bridget—the true thing, which gave life and speech to the little girl’s body—began to show itself. It was cold and slithering, a thing that dwelled in the dark of the earth, driven by a hunger only sated by wholly consuming its hosts. They would sicken and die, withered husks of what they had been.
Bridget was such a host—entirely hollow, left to be filled by this presence, this thing that wormed its way through vast empty expanses Pete only caught a glimpse of, ashy gray earth topped by a sky the color of pus and blood, triple suns oozing endlessly from one side to the other. Three children were enough for the thing and its companions, three of them escaping that miserable place to come
here, to this breathing and fertile and verdant place.