Caitlin Kittredge: Soul Trade

Pete Caldecott sat on a tombstone, watching fog curl soft fingers against the graveyard earth and waiting for Mickey Martin’s ghost to appear.

Mickey Martin hadn’t always been a ghost, and before a hail of constable’s bullets had snuffed out his life in the winter of 1844, he’d managed to slit the throats of thirteen women.

Murderers weren’t supposed to be buried on consecrated ground, but with a bribe to the right vicar, Mickey Martin’s admirers made sure he got a proper burial. Even razor-wielding serial killers had their fans.

Mickey Martin professed to be a man of God, ridding the earth of wickedness, and in the poverty-stricken world of Victorian London, a bloke who went about slashing prostitutes and charwomen was looked on not as a monster, but as an avenging angel, cleaning the mud-choked streets of the East End of their filth.

Pete wasn’t usually the one who sat in chilly graveyards, waiting for the dead. Usually, that was Jack’s job. But Jack, the one who could see the dead with his second sight, the one who had all the talent when it came to disposing of the unnatural that crawled under cover of night in London, wanted nothing to do with the Mickey Martin business. Or, if Pete was honest, with much of anything lately.

She could have put her foot down, demanded that Jack be the one to take this on, but that would bring on a row, and she’d had her fill of those for this lifetime and possibly the next. Sitting alone in a graveyard at nearly midnight didn’t bother her overmuch. It wasn’t like she’d be getting any sleep at home, between Lily’s erratic schedule and Jack’s ever-present foul mood.

Still, she wished she could chuck it in and go home, sit down in front of the telly with Lily and Jack, and pretend just for the span of a program or two that they were a regular sort of family. The sort where Mum and Dad occasionally got along, and neither of them had any special connection to the ghosts and magic that wound around the city as surely as the river and the rail lines.

Jack had said this job wasn’t worth their time when it had come in, but he said that about every routine exorcism. They weren’t flashy, but they usually paid, the victims too terrified to even consider stiffing the person who had made the big bad ghost go poof. And something had to put food on Pete and Jack’s table, to pay for Lily’s nappies and the expenses involved with living in London, which were considerable. If that was boring, shopworn exorcisms, so be it.

It wasn’t as if this particular ghost job had come from a disreputable source. PC Brandi Wolcott was a member of Pete’s old squad when she’d been on the Met, smart and hardworking, ambitious and driven. And now terrified, after a routine call had turned into a brush with Mickey Martin.

Pete had a reputation with such matters, whether she liked it or not. Everyone at her old squad in Camden knew she’d quit to go chase spooks and vapors. Or at least those were the rumors. The truth was a little more complicated. But trying to explain to coppers like PC Wolcott that if they just cared to look, from the corner of their eye, a part of London would reveal itself—a part made of magic and shadows, harboring creatures like Mickey Martin and far, far worse—would end with leather straps and lithium, and that wouldn’t help anyone.

“Caldecott.” Pete’s Bluetooth headset came to life, and she jumped. She cleared her throat before fishing her mobile from her overcoat. She didn’t want PC Wolcott to know she’d been drifting and not holding up her end of their two-person search team.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“I’ve finished my perimeter sweep. Heading back your way.” Wolcott was out here on her own time, which Pete gave her credit for—though not more credit than she gave PC Wolcott for calling her in the first place. Ghost attacks against the living were rare and could usually be written off as muggings or bad trips, but something about this one had shaken Brandi Wolcott badly enough that she quietly went searching for an exorcist, and found Pete. Beyond that, she hadn’t said all that much, and Pete got the sense she was having second thoughts about the whole thing. You didn’t want to be the only PC who believed in ghosts.

Pete shoved her mobile back into her pocket and let her hands follow. October nights brought on the chill and the threat of winter to come, and the damp crept through her hair and her clothes, all the way to her skin. She could feel the gentle pulse of the Black, the other side that people like Wolcott chose not to see, like the vibration of a subterranean train under her feet. She was mostly used to it by now, but on nights like tonight, when it was silent and the hum of the city seemed miles away, it seeped in and knocked around her skull, almost as palpable as the fog.

Wolcott’s blonde head appeared, bobbing between the monuments. The churchyard was only a hundred meters from end to end, but it was crammed full of headstones and obelisks, with far more bodies than there were stones below Pete’s boots. London suffered from too many dead and too little space, and before great swaths of green were cordoned off for burying by the later Victorians, the dead resided wherever there was room—in churchyards, under the church floorboards, in shallow pits that fouled the air and drew in the Black like a magnetic field.

“Christ, this weather,” Wolcott said. Her bronze skin, painted on rather than earned under the sun, was as brassy as her hair. In her off-hours, Wolcott favored skintight satin pants, loud prints, earrings large enough to use as handcuffs, and makeup by the pound. But she was bright and had nerves of steel, and Pete was glad she’d agreed to come.

“It’s going to piss down rain any moment,” Pete agreed. She gestured toward a large winged angel, the biggest monument in the churchyard. “Can you take me through it again? What happened the other night?”

“Sure.” Wolcott shrugged. “Station got a call from the vicar about half-twelve and I came around. Said there were lights out in the churchyard. Figured it was some hoodies pissing about, thought nothing of it.” She walked a few paces, staring up at the angel. Its stone eyes were blacked over with moss, and the ghostly marks of old graffiti wrapped like white vines around its base.

“I got about halfway into the yard when I heard this sound,” Wolcott said softly. “This low sound, like a moaning. Still thought it were kids, so I pulled out my light and gave the order to show their smart little faces.”

The wind picked up, pushing leaves against Pete’s feet, and the fog flowed and rippled across the uneven ground as if it were alive and making a mad dash for the safety of the church. “But it wasn’t,” Pete encouraged the other woman. Wolcott flinched, as if she expected Pete to accuse her of making it all up, or simply laugh in her face.

“Brandi,” Pete said. She laid a hand on Wolcott’s nylon-clad arm. “I believe you. The more I know, the easier it’ll be for us to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The PC hunched inside her navy blue windcheater, and Pete saw then, up close under the sodium lights, that what she’d taken for reluctance was actually fear. Wolcott’s entire body was strung with it, as if she were a puppet on wires. Pete sucked in a deep lungful of damp, cold air. Whatever had happened here, it had been a lot worse than a ghost popping out of a mirror or a poltergeist flinging crockery.