Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

Jack wrapped his arms around her. She let him, pressing her face against his leather. “You’re all right,” he said.

“I am,” Pete said. She gave a small gasp, just an intake of air. “The baby…”

Jack felt the cold grow in him again. Of course. The baby. The fucking baby. How could he not have seen it? Kim had never been Abbadon’s real plan, not since he and Pete had landed on their patch.

“What did they do to the baby?” he said.

Nothing yet. Teddy’s voice sliced into him, and it still hurt. It bypassed his sight and cut straight to the part of his brain where his talent lived, hollowed it out and echoed there. Abbadon had plans, though. Great plans, and they’re in motion, and you can’t stop them. A thin giggle punctuated the sentence.

Jack looked up at Teddy. “Don’t think I won’t waste you in just a moment, you piece of shit.”

“Abbadon said…” Pete sucked in a breath and steadied her voice. “He said that the baby was his now … that he’d done something … to me.” She dug her fingers into Jack’s wrists. “I can feel it. I can feel what he put in my kid, Jack. It’s going to be his. I’m going to be just like those stupid cows that he sliced apart.”

She’s right, you know, Teddy purred. Don never was happy with that raggedy meat bag he was riding. He had big plans. Big plans to live forever in that brave new world he was gonna open up.

Kim hadn’t been carrying a body for Teddy. Pete hadn’t been snatched as leverage. Sanford had never intended to give her back. He’d traded Pete to Abbadon in exchange for his help with Locke’s doorway. A brand new infant body, with talented blood pumping through it to sustain Abbadon’s power. A body that wouldn’t burn out like a regular meatbag, as Teddy had put it. A body that he could ride forever, while he ushered the fires of Hell into downtown LA.

“I’ve got some news for you,” Jack told Teddy. “Abbadon is dead. He’s gone. This baby isn’t his and it isn’t going to be.”

He’s not dead, Teddy said. You know how many times Azrael did him in, down there in the Pit? Only for the fun of it? Thousands. We can’t cease to exist, Jack. Not forever. We’re the beginning and the end.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. “The Alpha and the fucking Omega. He’s still not getting my kid.”

“He already has,” Pete whispered. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t even shaking. The world could end and Pete would hold it together. “I can feel it, Jack. We were alone a long time, and he put his mark on the baby, the same as he did those other poor children, who got turned into things like…” She pointed at Teddy, gulping back a sob. “Like him.”

There’s a process. Teddy chuckled. A seed to be planted. The child will be Abbadon. Poetic, if you think about it . The phoenix and the ashes.

“You shut up,” Jack told him. He pulled Pete to her feet. “They didn’t touch you, yeah? Didn’t hurt you?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Jack, no,” Pete said. “Nobody molested me, and honestly, when they snatched me that was the least of my worries.” She laced her hands across her stomach. “That thing is right. He did a ritual, and his magic was so strong. When this kid is born, it’s going to become Abbadon. There’s no help for it.” Her tears did start then, and she bit her lip savagely, causing a trickle of blood. “You’re going to have to do it. I don’t think I can.”

Jack stared at Pete. Her stomach was barely showing—he thought she might have put on a stone, at worst. In all of his ramblings about the kid, he’d never imagined there not being a kid at all. Head so far up your own arse you never even realized what Abbadon really wanted, the new Jack whispered. That Jack was pragmatic. He saw the whole picture. Abbadon couldn’t be allowed near the daylight world, never again. Pete was resilient. She could have more children, when she was ready, with someone who wouldn’t be a complete cock-up as a parent. And he’d keep the first evil the universe had known at bay for a bit longer, and could go through life knowing he hadn’t contributed to anyone else’s fucking up.

It made sense. In every way that mattered.

Jack dropped his hands to his side. He was hot now, the air in Teddy’s room stuffy and stinking of a hospital ward, and massively tired. He could curl up between the IV stands and sleep for a week.

“I can’t.”

Pete let out a single, desperate sob. “You have to…”

“No,” Jack said. “No, we’re going to make this right, all right?” He grabbed Pete’s shoulders, and squeezed hard enough that she whimpered. “All right?”

She licked the blood from her lip, and finally met his eyes. Don’t be scared, he prayed. He needed one of them to not be scared, because the new Jack had deserted him, along with the cold singlemindedness, and he was only himself again, shit plans and shit luck and all.

“All right,” Pete said softly. “Fuck him, anyway. Who the hell does he think he is?”

Jack pulled her against him, felt the hard swell of her stomach against his torso, and nothing else mattered. “A bastard,” he said in her ear.

“The worst sort of cunt,” Pete said. “I fucking hate this, Jack. It’s never going to be over, is it? This kid is like a beacon for all the shit and evil of the Black, and it’s all going to come down on the poor thing.”

Jack pressed his face into Pete’s neck, into the curve behind her ear. “Worry about it when you need to worry, luv. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He brushed his lips over her forehead, tasted the sweat there. “Either of you.”

Pete’s mouth curled down. “Promise?”

“On my fucking life,” Jack said.

This is all very touching, Teddy said. But you’re not leaving here.

“No,” Jack told him. He pulled the paper he’d taken from Lucinda’s coffin from his pocket. It was wrinkled and smeared in blood, but legible. “You are,” Jack said.

From the next room, he heard stirring and skittering through the walls. Levi and the girl were awake. He turned to Pete. “We don’t have a lot of time. No time, really.”

She nodded. “What do you need from me?”

Jack handed her the gun. It was a relief to get rid of the thing, if he was honest. “Shoot anything that comes through that door right in the fucking face, and that includes adorable little girls.”

“Right,” Pete said. Jack pulled out his knife and she cocked her eyebrow. “And what are you going to do?”

She gave a small gasp when Jack jammed the knife into Teddy’s neck. It wasn’t demon blood, but it would do.

Teddy screamed. This isn’t going to save you, Jack. Not you or your whore or your brat.

“Let me tell you something,” Jack said. “She is not a whore. She’s a good woman and I don’t deserve her, and that attitude of yours is exactly why you’re hanging from a wall in this shit-trap.” He twisted the knife in deep, and felt Teddy’s heart give its last misshapen tremble. “Try to be less of a twat in your next life, yeah?”

He drew Locke’s sigil in the blood pooling on the warped floorboards. He stood in the center of it and recited the words that Sanford had intoned, although he liked to think he sounded like less of a pretentious gobshite while doing it. As a last thought, he picked up a discarded bottle of cheap Mexican beer—probably Levi’s doing—and tucked it inside his jacket.

He’d thought a portal straight to Hell would be more dramatic, but instead a thin line of white smoke rose from the circle, and the sigil fell away. The real world started to ash away little by little as the physical laws of space bent, burned up, and blew away.