Soul Trade (3 page)

“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.

3.

Neither Pete nor Jack had any jobs booked for the rest of the week—then again, Jack never had any jobs booked of late. Nobody in the Black trusted him, and nobody wanted him anywhere near them, especially after word had got round of what happened in Los Angeles. Personally, Pete thought that returning four of the worst things the Black had to offer to their iron prison in Hell was an accomplishment,
not a liability, but mages were only human. They got scared, they got paranoid, they closed ranks. Jack might be more talented than most, and a damn good exorcist, but nobody in London would consider him worth the risk. Not for years to come.

Possibly not ever.

Pete herself, not being in direct contact with the four primordial demons or Nergal, was less of a risk, but nobody trusted her because
she was the Weir. Only mundanes would hire her, and the work she’d done for Wolcott would barely cover their bills.

She scooped up dirty clothes from the bedroom floor, determined to do at least one thing today that would actually yield a tangible result. Lily was in her bounce chair watching children’s programs on Pete’s laptop. Jack was out on the fire stairs smoking. Pete figured she could
take a few loads of clothes down to the wash, then do the sweeping and washing up before both Jack and Lily got bored and demanded her attention.

The black envelope given to her by the pale men fluttered to the floor from inside her jeans. Pete considered it for a moment, a square black stain on her floor, then decided she was being ridiculous. It was just paper—nobody was afraid of paper. She
picked it up, sitting on the edge of the bed and sliding her thumbnail under the edge of the envelope.

She’d been inclined to ignore the sort of buffoonery that resulted in a bunch of gits accosting her in a graveyard, but Jack’s reaction to her question hadn’t been what she’d expected. If this Prometheus Club scared him so much, didn’t she owe it to herself and Lily to at least see what they
wanted from her? To be prepared for the worst?

The invitation was all one sheet, folded in on itself like a puzzle box, and Pete watched as black ink flowed across the white paper, spelling out a formal script before her eyes.

Miss Petunia Caldecott

The Prometheus Club requests your presence

10
th
full gathering of Members

Manchester, England

One week hence

Pete blinked, logically knowing
that it was only a small enchantment on the paper, but transfixed all the same. How could they know she’d even open the envelope, not toss it in the bin?

Because they knew her, Pete realized, and knew she’d be too curious to not at least look.

She felt the same flash of worry and panic she’d caught in Jack’s face take up residence in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t like strangers knowing
her this well. Where to find her, how to manipulate her.

She was about to crumple the thick paper and toss it into the bin when she felt a stab of pain in the hand not already aching from her tussle with the wraith.

“Shit!” Pete gasped, leaping up and dropping the invitation to the floor. Too late, she saw the ink had raced from the letters, through the paper, and into her hand, piercing her
skin like a barb. The ink massed into a circle within a circle in the center of her palm, and Pete hissed, scraping at it but only making the pain worse. It burned and stung, like being tattooed with a hot iron.

On the floor, one final phrase bled across the thick white card.

Attend or die. The choice is yours.

“Shit,” Pete said again, feeling her blood drain with all haste toward her feet.
She swayed from the pain, catching the wall, which only made the mark hurt more.

“Luv?” Pete heard the sitting room window open and shut as Jack came in from his smoke.

“I’m fine,” she managed. “Just … scraped a bit.”

Her shaking voice gave her away, and Jack came running. “What’s happened?”