“I made the shit choice,” Jack said. “To willingly go to Hell and challenge the demon to learn its name before the three ruling members of the Triumvirate.”

Pete chewed on her lip. “Can you win?”

Jack took the pillow away. “Not a chance.”

Pete let her air out, slumping back to mimic his position. “Oh.”

She went to her travel bag, found her fags and lighter, lit one. She offered it to him when she’d taken a drag. Jack accepted it and polluted his lungs for a long breath.

“Cheers.”

“And the Naughton mansion?” Pete asked. Jack scratched under the edge of his bandage, where the cut from Jao was beginning to itch like a particularly virulent venereal disease.

“Blank spot in the Black. Energy is so bollocksed up from the necromancer fucking about I thought it might give me an edge.”

Pete curled against him, surprising him with her weight, and Jack moved to make room for her in the crook of his body. “Thought you said you’d lose,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Jack put his lips on the top of her head. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t go down kicking.”

“Jack.” Pete rotated her head to look at him. “I don’t want you to go.”

“Not keen on visiting Hell myself,” Jack said. “But unless you’ve got a corker, luv . . . I’m out of ideas.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Jack fell asleep with Pete’s breath rising and falling against his chest, setting the pace for his heartbeat and his thoughts.

Everything took on a sharp-edged quality when he woke. Washing up, making tea, having a fag, and restocking his kit to put in the Mini were acts of incredible significance, rife with color and meaning.

The drive to the Dartmoor was no longer arduous and too long. The colors of the moor, the wild magic that embraced him like a prodigal son, it was all irrefutably alive, sharp and vivid enough to pain his senses.

Pete set the brake in the Naughton’s circular drive. “Here we are.”

Jack tried to shake off the hyper awareness, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Death had ripped the veil from his eyes, shown him exactly what he would be seeing no longer, if the demon had his way.

Death, Jack reflected, was a bit of a cunt that way.

While Pete put up her overnight bag and laid in a tea in the Naughton kitchen, Jack laid out his kit on the long table in the formal dining room.

Salt, chalk, herb bags. Black and red and white thread, his scrying mirror, and a butane lighter for starting herbs in his censer.

It wasn’t much, in the scheme of things, but the battered canvas satchel had kept Jack alive thus far.

None of it would do a bit of good against the demon. Jack swept his things back into the satchel and left it on the table. His reflection in the polished wood twisted, distorted and ghostly, pale face crowned by pale hair with sunken black pits for eyes, just as a spirit.

A shape shimmered in the reflection behind him, and Jack snapped his head around. He was prepared for the ghost of June Kemp, or the mansion’s poltergeist, but it was only the owl.

It sat on the branch of the tree near the drive, staring at Jack with unblinking eyes. The sunlight skipped through the clouds on the moor, dark and light slashes across the ground. The owl should be far away from the light, asleep somewhere, but it watched him and when Jack merely stared, twitched its head and wings in irritation.

Jack tilted his head in return, and the owl spread its wingspan wide. A cloud rolled across the sun and the afternoon plunged into iron-gray dark. The owl took flight, alighting at the edge of the garden near the fallen stone wall that bound the estate, kept it from the encroachment of the moor.

Jack went to the wide front doors, left them open in his wake, and crossed the sodden lawn to the tree by the stone wall where the owl had flown.

When the sunlight fell through the clouds again, a woman stood under the tree. Though her hair was gray, her face was young, with the round, pale, unlined freshness of a pubescent girl.

She extended her hand to him, fingers wide, as if tasting the air before his passage.

Hello, Jack. A bar of light fell through her, gray and diffused where it scattered through her form.

A few steps from her, Jack caught a hint of the wild magic that rolled over the moor, the wild magic that had summoned the cu sith and distorted his sight. The power wasn’t coming from the moor this time, though. It came from the gray-wrapped figure in front of him.

She regarded him with her golden creature’s eyes, while the gray mist that clad her pale form writhed and shifted in the Dartmoor’s changeable wind.

“You,” Jack said. “That was you on the airplane.”

Yes. You asked for safe passage. I granted it. She smiled at him, with a coquettish tilt of your head. You’re not an easy man to deny, Jack. I can see why she stays with you.

From behind the tree, in the shadows, Jack heard a rumbling snarl and two cu sith blossomed from the dark spot on the ground, coming to stand at the girl’s flanks. On the tilt of the moor, a herd of sluagh drifted with the wind, howling and grasping at the wild magic of the earth. All around Jack, the world faded as the Black swelled and spilled over the edges of his unconscious, staining his sight like ink.

“Why?” he said, keeping his eyes on the black dogs. “Why send this lot? What do you want from me?”

Nothing. The girl laid a hand on each cu sith’s head.

“I’m confused, then.” Jack shoved his hands into his leather. “You’ve been following me since Paddington, for what? A laugh? Got a crush? Tell me, because I’m out of ideas, luv.”

The girl stepped toward him, and though her countenance was calm and far less terrifying than either the demon or the Morrigan, Jack took a hasty step back.

Her magic wasn’t something he wanted touching him, not a feeling he wanted to remember over and over again in nightmares that shot him screaming back into the waking world.

You feel it, she whispered. You’ve felt it for months, since you found her again. This time she was faster, and she pressed a hand to his cheek, pulling Jack down to her eye level. The gold burned, roiling with liquid witchfire as magic flared in the girl’s gaze.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said flippantly. “All I’ve felt is a great and overwhelming desire to stab meself in the forehead to end the visits of things like you.”

Her nails dug into his cheek. Watch yourself, mage. You may be able to speak to the hag so, but I’m a different breed.

Jack flinched, blood dribbling down is jaw. “I know.” He sighed. “I know what you are.”

The girl’s smile curved up at the ends, became predatory. Say it.

Jack shut his eyes, to close off that burning gaze, the triad of youth, magic, and death that marked the girl for what she was. “You’re the Hecate.”

The girl’s tongue flicked over her pale lips, and she withdrew her hand, running her fingers through Jack’s blood and painting streaks down his cheek, covering his scar.

I am the guardian of the gateways. And you are the crow-mage, so I have come to give you this courtesy. She stepped back, cradling the head of the black dog against her. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it, Jack. Your magic curdling within you. Your sight is clawing your mind to pieces.

Jack looked out toward the moor. The sun was falling, slowly but surely, painting the tops of the hills with pale fire.

“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed it. Same shite, different day, you know?”

It is not the same, crow-mage. The Hecate sighed. The Black is in turmoil. The ways between the worlds are choked with corruption. You know what is coming, Jack, and what you must do.

“I haven’t the faintest, darling,” Jack said. “All you old ones can never just spit it out, can you? Always got to dance in circles until your feet bleed.”