Caitlin Kittredge: Soul Trade

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?”

Pete held out her palm wordlessly. The pain had largely ceased, but she still felt the intrusion of the ink under her skin, and foreign, unfriendly magic along with it.

Jack picked up her palm and turned it, brushing his finger over the ink.

“Stop!” Pete shouted through gritted teeth, as the hot poker feeling flared again. “Dammit, Jack, that hurts.”

He whistled, removing his callused fingers from the ink. “That’s a bloody strong one,” he whispered.

“Strong what ?” Pete demanded, trying to pull her hand from Jack’s grasp. The ink was agitated at his touch, turning and twisting under her skin like a living serpent, trying to escape its confines. The pain made her a bit dizzy, the magic warring with her Weir as it tried to absorb the spell and was rebuffed. Pete coughed as a wave of nausea swept through her. That had never happened before, and it didn’t improve her outlook on what might happen next.

“Strong geas,” Jack said. “It’s a compulsion spell. What did you do ?”

“Why are you assuming I did anything?” Pete snapped. “All I did was open that stupid envelope.” She stayed upright despite the vertigo and the sick feeling running all through her like a fever. She wasn’t going to give whoever had cast the thing the satisfaction of passing out.

Jack cast his glance down at the envelope and then shut his eyes tight before meeting her gaze. “You didn’t,” he sighed. “You didn’t get involved with the Prometheus Club.”

“I knew you had more on them than you were telling,” Pete said, pulling her hand free.

“’Course I did, but you didn’t say you’d been contacted by them,” Jack growled. He picked up the invitation between his thumb and forefinger and whispered a word of power.

Pete watched the paper curl up, eaten by blue flames. She hoped the ink on her hand would disappear with it, but it stayed under her skin, throbbing and hot. “Would it kill you not to snap at me?” she asked Jack. “I didn’t exactly do this on purpose, you know.”

He stayed silent, in his maddening Jack way, until the letter was only ash drifting to the carpet. Then he sat on the bed and gestured for Pete to sit next to him. She did it, mostly glad to have an excuse to sit down and quiet her spinning head.

“You better tell me, from beginning to end, what happened last night,” he said. His voice was still harsh and clinical, and Pete flinched.

“I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave off behaving as if all of this were my fault. I didn’t ask for them to show up and thrust that silly envelope at me.”

Jack sighed and ran his hands through his hair, then put one around her. He was wiry but strong, and Pete leaned into the warmth of his chest.

After a moment he spoke, his voice vibrating through her. “I’m sorry, luv. I just … I thought we’d be under their radar. The Prommies are a bunch of snobs, wouldn’t deign to come down our level unless it was life or death.”

“Is this gathering of theirs that?” Pete said, staring at her palm. “Life or death?”

Jack nodded, his angular jaw tightening. “They wouldn’t have called you and made sure you’d come if there weren’t something big on the horizon, big and bad enough to get them pissing themselves.”

“What could that be? Who are these people?” Pete asked, rolling over some of the things she’d seen in her time with Jack. Demons, black magicians, the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell—even the first beings of Hell themselves, the veritable Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What could possibly be worse than that?

“To the first, I have no idea, and to the second, they’re twats,” Jack grumbled. “A secret society in the worst way you could imagine. Bunch of magicians more concerned with standing around patting each other on the back for being special than with actually doing anything useful. Holdover from the days of corsets, servants, and landed gentry.”

“Like you said,” Pete murmured. “Twats.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. He kissed the top of her head and covered her injured hand with his, softly this time. “Got no idea what they want with us. We’re emphatically not Their Kind.”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Pete said. “When we go to Manchester.”

Jack raised one eyebrow as if she’d lost her mind.

“We can’t very well not go,” she said. “I’ve got a compulsion spell on me, and I’m not chopping off my hand. We’ll go, we’ll be civil, and we’ll figure out what they want from us, then find a way to graciously decline.”

Jack sighed, then nodded. “Fucking Manchester. Could’ve been anywhere, and they chose Manchester.”

Pete twined her fingers with Jack’s. The pain had cooled some, and his touch soothed the burn of the ink. The back of his hand, pale as a corpse, was covered in his own black ink, feathers and thorns twining in a pattern that could make you dizzy if you stared at it long enough. Jack’s tattoos used to be haphazard, but now they covered nearly his entire torso in the same pattern.

Something else she’d been ignoring—the change that Jack had undergone when he’d stopped Nergal. He’d had to make a bargain with the Morrigan, the patron goddess of his talent, and when Pete couldn’t sleep, she often thought about how some day, the Hag would be back to collect.

But for now, there was this mess. Her mess. At least this time it was something she’d done herself and not something Jack had walked into. That was oddly comforting. Her problem, her solution, no collateral damage.

“How bad could it possibly be?” Pete whispered, turning to plant a kiss on Jack’s jawline. His stubble rubbed her skin, and she concentrated for just a moment on the feel of him and not on all of the myriad shitstorms that swirled around them like a rotating crop of nightmares.

“You say that now,” he said, with a laugh as dry as old bones, “but just you wait. It’s the dirty North, luv, not a weekend in the country.”

“Perhaps,” Pete said, settling back against Jack’s chest, listening to his heartbeat and Lily burbling in the other room. Jack was real, solid, the only thing she could count on to be real and solid now. “But it’s not as if I have a choice.”

Go to Manchester, into who knew what sort of situation with hostile mages, or stay in London and perish under the geas if she couldn’t figure out a way to reverse it in time. It was the story of her life: shit choices, but the only ones available to her.

As the train raced toward Manchester the next morning, Pete watched the fields and towns slip by, punctuated by trees and arials. She tried to keep her eyes open, but no sleep combined with the little she’d managed to snatch in the previous weeks meant the rocking of the train put her under.

It felt strange to be going somewhere without Lily. She’d gotten used to taking the pram, the diaper bag, and everything else any time she and Jack attempted anything more complicated than a quick trip downstairs to the small off-license next door.

“Don’t you worry,” Jack’s friend Lawrence had said when Pete dropped off Lily at his doorstep earlier in the morning. “I got three little sisters, changed more diapers than I wanna remember. She and me, we’ll have a good time.” He bounced Lily in his massive arms and she cooed, trying to reach up and grab his dreadlocks. Lawrence chuckled, then fixed Pete with an unsmiling gaze. “What should I do if you don’t come back?”