Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

When the checkout girl at Sainsbury’s tried to murder him with her bare hands, Jack Winter decided he should probably get out of London for a while.

He’d joined her queue with a fistful of crisp packets, chocolate, and a few wrapped sandwiches. The woman ahead of him wanted to argue about her change, and Jack simply wanted to get outside so he could smoke.

The Sainsbury’s on Fenchurch Street was crammed into a dingy granite shopfront above a 1960s brick box that tried to blend in with the older, more ornate row buildings around it and did a piss-poor job. The two front windows were planked over with plywood and caution tape, and Jack still detected the sandy crunch of glass fragments under his boots.

The area around Aldgate had gotten a hard hit from the rioting and general chaos of the weeks before, and the Sainsbury’s was one of the few shops within striking distance of his flat that was open late, or open at all.

He shoved his food onto the belt and felt in his pockets for spare coins, few and far between these days. Any residual jobs he might have had as an exorcist or clearing homes and workplaces of the dead, or the undead, dried up with the chaos. When you’re responsible for releasing an old god like Nergal from his prison to devour the psyches of London’s inhabitants, people tended to hold it against you.

Even if you’d promptly helped put him back again.

Jack supposed that was fair. If he were a hearth witch, ghost finder, or anyone else who knew what’d really happened to cause half of London to lose their minds and take to the streets, he’d tell him to fuck off right along with them.

The checkout girl ran his food listlessly over the scanner, staring directly at a buzzing light tube behind Jack’s head. His total popped up, and she just kept staring.

“’Scuse me, luv,” he said, thrusting his mess of lint-encrusted coins and a crumpled fiver at her. “I don’t mean to be that bloke, but I wasn’t planning on spending the entire night in your shop, edgy and deconstructed as it is in its present state.”

He expected a sneer, or possibly a muttered curse—she looked the type, riot of blue hair and chain necklaces under her uniform shirt, in sharp contrast to most of her colleagues, who ran more along the lines of hijabs and sensible shoes.

She turned her dull gaze from the light fixture to his face, and Jack took a step back. Her eyes were entirely blank, and filmed over with the first stages of decomposition.

“You did this,” she said, before she launched herself over the till at him.

His step back wasn’t enough, and her fingernails caught Jack’s neck. He fell into a display of tea mugs and digestive biscuits and slammed the floor hard. The checkout girl couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos, but she wrapped her hands around Jack’s throat with the strength and rage of a much larger and more predatory creature.

She was screaming, and black blood-infused spittle flecked her lips and chin and landed on his cheeks. She slammed Jack’s head into the vinyl floor in time with each cry.

It wasn’t the most alarming situation Jack had found himself in by a long shot, but it was worrisome enough. Deranged types were the worst—there was no reasoning with them, and usually the only way to end the scuffle was to knock them out or chop off their heads, depending on their level of deadness.

He gathered his legs under him and tried to buck the girl off, which worked in the sense that she flopped to one side but didn’t detach her fingers from his throat. Hitting her with a paralysis hex at this range would be dangerous—the thing could bounce back and smack him in the nose, and then he’d be easy pickings for this crazy twat.

Jack decided on the next best thing—he balled up his fist and punched the girl under the eye, glancing the blow off her cheekbone. He’d more intended to startle than hurt her, but she hissed as if his fist were made of hot iron, falling back on her arse and scuttling through the broken glass. She paid no more mind to her cuts than if she were crawling through a bed of custard cake.

Hauling himself to his feet, Jack got out two breaths before the checkout girl was back up. “You did this,” she repeated in a guttural, ragged snarl. Her movements weren’t her own, her next attempt to tackle him resulting in Jack sidestepping and the girl falling into the sandwich case, more glass slicing at her skinny arms as it shattered.

Not a zombie—she was breathing like a chainsaw, pulse throbbing in her neck, plus she wasn’t sewed up with red thread and encased in hoodoo magic. Not a demonic possession, either—his psychic sight wasn’t pinging off the charts trying to tell him something from Hell was wearing a nice punk girl’s skin.

Human magic then. That narrowed his options to fight back considerably.

Jack grabbed a mop from where the janitor had abandoned it and snapped the head off, holding the pointy end in front of him. “ Stop, ” he ordered when the girl came at him again. She was fading rapidly, blood flowing freely from her nose and mouth, black stuff oozing out of her tear ducts as her brain strained to contend with the violation of a compulsion spell.

Whoever was running the spell had to be nearby—and that was who interested Jack.

The girl ignored his ultimatum and sprang again. She was as agile as a shapeshifter with the accuracy of a predator. Whoever had hit her with the compulsion had juiced her with a few enhancements. No wonder her body was shutting down one system at a time. Soon her brain would pop and she’d be a blue-topped carrot on the floor of Sainsbury’s.

Jack gripped the mop handle like a nightstick and whipped it up and across her temple as she came. He’d gotten hit by enough members of London’s finest to know it was the quickest way to put someone down.

The girl dropped straight down, knees folding up. A thin line of blood ran across the tiles from her nose, and Jack swiped it onto his palm as he joined the exodus of panicking customers into the street.

He stopped, tried to catch more than a lungful of air, and cast his eyes up and down the pools of light illuminating Fenchurch Street. Most of the nearby cars were parked and empty, but a Peugeot sitting in a loading zone contained a passenger. Said passenger was trying to turn over the engine as the whoop of police klaxons closed in.

Jack darted into traffic, causing the driver of a small hybrid to swerve up onto the pavement. He ignored the cursing and horns, reaching the Peugeot just as the engine caught at last. There wasn’t time to be delicate and ask leading questions, so he drew back his elbow and drove it through the driver’s window.

The man inside started to shift into gear to run him over, but Jack grabbed him by the jaw with his blood-stained hand. “Shut it off.”

His victim squirmed and twisted, but he didn’t scream for help or shout for the police, like a normal person should when a crazed man covered in blood smashed into their car on a public street. Jack gave the driver a shake. “Shut it off or I’ll lay a blood hex on you that’ll have your eyeballs dripping out your arse.”

The man considered him for a few seconds more, and then took his hand off the gearshift and foot off the clutch. The car stalled out, but Jack didn’t relax his grip. “Why are you after me?”

The man glared, trying to swallow under Jack’s grip. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it. My soul is right with my gods.”