Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

He came back to himself to find that his nose was dripping blood, gleaming black droplets on the Cases’ countertop. Pete sighed and wiped it up with her sleeve. “You think you could manage not to leave your DNA all over everything, genius?”

“Sorry,” he muttered. For the moment, he left aside thinking about what could set a trap for any psychic who might try to follow it, keep it on for years after the fact, and burn out every trace of its presence. Right then, breathing was enough of a headache. “You were right,” he told Pete.

“What is it?” Pete said. Jack thought about the smoke, trailing through his sinuses, burning with that ashes-and-dust scent that he recognized from his dreams. The scent of the wind in Hell. Belial’s missing nightmare was definitely the nasty git who’d hacked up the Case family.

Jack rubbed his forehead. His headache in the morning was going to be a thing of epics. “Something that doesn’t appreciate me sniffing after it, that much is certain.”

The creature had done a good job—it had left only a burn scar on the Black around the Case house. Nothing Jack could probe further, unless he relished his brain leaking out. But it hadn’t disappeared into thin air. It was a thing, with a form and a body, a thing that had to hide its passage, because otherwise any psychic worth his bad dreams would know it for what it was.

Pete tensed as a car passed on the street, headlights sweeping down the hall from the foyer. “Our luck’s probably up,” she said. “We should get out of here.”

Jack waited until he was back in the Fury to punch the dash, leaving a crack in the veneer.

“Oi!” Pete said. “I have to return this in pristine condition, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, my fault,” Jack muttered. “You can tell Sal that Christine did it.”

“What’s your problem all of a sudden?” Pete demanded. “Throwing a tantrum isn’t going to get anything done.”

His knuckles were bleeding, and Jack swiped them against his jeans. Pete made a fair point. “With a ghost or a demon, I can track it or summon it, find its true name and compel it to appear. But all I’ve got now is ashes.” Belial’s boogeyman thought it was smarter than him, and Jack didn’t like creatures that thought that.

“I’m just a little frustrated, and I very much want to nail this bastard to the wall and be free to be on my way,” he told Pete.

“We, you mean,” Pete said. “Belial can act like I’m some shrinking flower, but I made that deal and this is as much my mess as yours.” She started the Fury with a rumble and pulled away. “ We’ll nail him, and then you can go right back to your sordid little magic lifestyle and we’ll no longer be a bother for you.”

“You know it won’t matter if I give it all up,” Jack said quietly. “Something will still come knocking.” He wished he could force Pete to believe him, by screaming or shaking her or any other way, but he couldn’t, and trying to do so now was just burning daylight he could be using to finish Belial’s latest exercise in ant-farm sadism.

So he stayed quiet, and she stayed quiet, and things went on exactly as they’d been for months. Pete drove for a bit, until Jack couldn’t take the confined space and the wanting of a cigarette any longer. “Let me out here, yeah?” he asked Pete. She braked and gave him a stare.

“Why?”

“Need to walk a bit,” Jack said.

“Right,” Pete said, but she let him get out of the car without anything further. “See you back at Mayhew’s?” she called.

“Maybe,” Jack said. Dealing with Mayhew again was somewhere on his list of activities after letting a ferret chew on his balls, but he didn’t want to give Pete more problems.

She followed him for a few feet before pulling back into traffic. Jack stopped on a corner and lit a cigarette. He was on Hollywood Boulevard, near an on-ramp to the 101 freeway. At night, the low cinderblock buildings were mostly dark and gated. A pair of hobos dozed in a doorway, cradling their paper-wrapped bottles close. “Hey, brother,” one said. “How about a few bucks?”

“Sorry,” Jack told him. “Not from around here.”

“Then how ’bout a smoke?” the other said. Jack sighed and handed over the rest of his pack.

“God bless you,” the hobo said, snaking the fags inside his jacket faster than a stage magician.

“He’s got fuck-all to do with this, hasn’t he?” Jack said, walking on. He clocked the shadow half a block down, along a dark section of unoccupied storefront. Cars swooped past, but the streetlamp above was burnt out, creating a slice of dark perfect to pull someone close and stick a knife in their kidney.

Jack slowed his steps a little at a time, then stopped and dropped his cigarette, crushing it under the toe of his boot.

The shadow was silent, just a ripple in the psychic airflow, but it was there, hanging back and taking its time. Jack spread his arms. “I haven’t got all night,” he said. “Come on out, then.”

Sliver melted from the shadow of the storefront. “They said you were good. That’s just spooky, though.”

“Says the shadow-walking wraith to the mage with bad knees,” Jack said. “’M not that good. Maybe you’re just crap at this spy gig, you ever think of that?”

Sliver looked at his feet. “I wasn’t going to actually kill you.”

“What a comfort,” Jack said. He didn’t try to throw a curse on the wraith. That would only slag Sliver off. He could turn tail and run, or cut down the alley to the next street, but if a wraith really wanted to catch up with you, it could have a hand inside your ribcage before you could draw your last breath.

“This is all Mayhew’s fault,” Sliver said. “He brought you here.”

“Yeah, it was pretty fucking convenient that you wanted to be my best friend back at your bar,” Jack said. “But I thought maybe you just fancied me.”

Sliver looked up and down Hollywood Boulevard, studying each pool of light and neon sign, silver eyes reflecting like pools of oil. “I don’t know who wants you dead, Jack, but they reached out.”

“Lots of folks want that,” Jack said. “Too many to list.”

“Nobody has that kind of influence in this city,” Sliver said. “Not anyone who followed you. But these people do. They’re tossing around threats and cash like it’s Mardi Gras.”

“How mysterious,” Jack said. Sliver fell into step beside him when he started walking again.

“I was just keeping an eye on you,” the wraith said. “There’s a lot of mean and hungry bastards in this city who wouldn’t think twice about erasing you for the kind of things these dudes are offering.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I banged a stick against somebody’s cage,” Jack shrugged.

Sliver blended with the shadows for a moment, then reemerged. “You need to watch your ass,” he said. “This isn’t merry England. The Black here, this is the Wild fucking West. And you’re stomping around in those big boots of yours across the top of everyone’s bridge.”

Jack thought about what Pete’s father, a detective inspector with bad lungs and a worse temper, had once told her. “When somebody tries to kill you, means you’re getting somewhere,” Jack said to Sliver.

“And are you?” the wraith said. “Getting anywhere?”

“No, not really,” Jack said. The missing trail of the thing that had murdered the Cases dogged at him, though he tried to ignore the obvious solution. That would open him up to all kinds of nasty things, lay his mind bare and at the mercy of his sight. He could go catatonic and never come back if he did what most psychics would do in this situation. But he wasn’t most. A mage with the sight was a time bomb as it was, without inviting the entire world of the dead inside his skull.