Caitlin Kittredge - Soul Trade

“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.

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

10th 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.