Chapter Forty-nine

Jack’s eyes snapped open, and he snatched up Pete’s mobile from the bedside table. Pete stirred next to him, groaning and pulling her pillow over her face.

The numerals spelled out 10:13, and Jack slumped back, forcing his heart to stop pounding.

He had hours. Hours until he faced the demon in Hell.

“Jack?” Pete curled into him, her leg sliding up his thigh to drape across his waist. “Don’t leave yet.” Her hands brushed down his abdomen. “Haven’t had a chance to say a proper good morning.”

Jack’s cock jumped as Pete’s hand wandered into unsafe territory, and her lips brushed over his earlobe. He rolled over and pinned her frame beneath his weight, causing Pete to yelp. Jack grinned. “Good morning, Petunia.”

“I called Ollie Heath while you were sleeping,” she said.

“Ohh, yeah. Nothing’s more erotic than talking about your work mates,” Jack said, nuzzling into her neck.

Pete slapped him on the back of his head. “Don’t be awful.”

Jack sighed, coming up for air. “What did he say?”

“Nicholas Naughton’s done a runner,” Pete murmured. “Cleaned out his flat and his accounts and he’s gone.”

Jack levered himself onto his elbows. “I’m sorry, luv. Looks like he’s not quite the idiot I thought.”

Pete lifted one bare shoulder. “It’s a problem for another day, Jack.” She pulled his face down, and Jack followed willingly.

He kissed her for a long moment, letting his fingers roam over her, memorize her. If it was the last touch he had, it needed to count. Memory was all that mattered, in the Black.

Pete pushed him off gently after a moment, rolling her face to the window. “Jack, there’s a bird watching us.”

Jack followed her eyes and saw the crow nestled on the sill, staring at him.

“Creepy thing,” Pete muttered. Jack rolled over on his back, throwing a hand over his eyes.

“It’s a fetch. A psychopomp.”

Pete quirked her eyebrow. “What’s it fetching?”

Jack laughed. “My soul, if I’m lucky. Everybody has a fetch. All the citizens of the Black.”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t.”

Jack put his feet on the floor, winced at the chill, and reached for his pants. “’Course you do.”

“No,” Pete insisted. “Never had anything like the crow in my life. I don’t have anything that’s stayed with me.” She propped herself up on her elbow and ran her free fingers down Jack’s spine. “Except you.”

Jack shuddered when her fingers, her magic, made contact with his skin. “I can’t say I’ve been that great about sticking around,” he told Pete. “In fact, I’ve been shite.”

“If anyone is going to take my soul down into the Land,” Pete said softly, “I’d rather it be you.”

Jack looked at the crow again. Its eyes gleamed, and it stared back at him, unblinking, piercing him down to the core of his magic.

You know what’s coming, the Hecate whispered. The fires of war.

Jack raised his hand, staring at the crow through splayed fingers, an inkblot on the pristine dawn.

Something uncurled in his chest, behind his sight. It didn’t ache and pound against his mind as it had in recent weeks, it just stayed in his head, heavy and present.

“I meant it, you know,” Pete said. She sat up and wrapped her arms around him, her bare breasts pressing into his ribs.

“I know, luv . . . ,” Jack murmured.

You’re gonna die, Jack, Lawrence whispered. Best you can do is go with your head held high.

Jack stared at the crow. The crow stared at him. Watching, the way it always watched him. Waiting for his soul to float free of his body, so it could carry it to the Land. The way he’d watched Pete, since the first night they’d laid eyes on each other.

“Jack?” Pete said as he got out of bed and pulled on his shorts. “You’re quiet. What is it?”

Jack put a fag in his mouth and started for his books. “ Don’t you worry. I think I may not be going anywhere.”

Chapter Fifty

The demon was on time.

Jack stood under the tree in bare feet, denim, and his tattered Supersuckers shirt. He smoked a fag slowly, letting the burn travel all the way down his throat and warm him against the cool air.

“You ready, Winter?” the demon said. The grass under its polished shoes withered and died, fading away to bare salted ground. “No more excuses. No more tricks. You and I, down into Hell.”

“If you’re that eager to give up your name,” Jack said, flicking his fag away, “then let’s get on with it, mate.”

The demon’s smile twitched into life like a worm on a hook. “Why do I sense another card up your sleeve, Jack?”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “Maybe ’cause I’ve got one.”

Pete stood on the stoop of the Naughton house, watching. Far enough away not to get caught in the edge of a hex. Close enough for what Jack had thought of as he sat with her in bed, watching the crow.

The demon let out an irritated huff. “Let’s see it then, Winter. I’ll kill you that much quicker.”

Jack gave Pete a small smile of reassurance, and she lifted her hand in return. She trusted him, though he hadn’t told her what he intended to do. On the off chance it didn’t work, and the demon peeled his skin off.

Fuck off chance. There was a very good bloody chance it would all go pear-shaped. But Jack wasn’t going to hold his head high. He didn’t have the dignity left to accept his fate, so he might as well fucking fight.

He might live.

And Margaret Thatcher might hop on a broom and do a lap around the Houses of Parliament.

The demon grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulling them close enough to kiss, if Jack were that sort of man. “What the fuck are you grinning at, Winter?”

Jack turned his smile on the demon, and let the spell that he held in his mind unfurl. No kit this time, no salt or iron. Just his talent, coiled in his mind starving and stinging, like a snake.

Jack stared into the demon’s eyes, at the flame dancing there.

“Everyone has a fetch,” he said.

The spell unfolded, caught the wild magic of the moor, and faster—far, far faster than he expected—Jack and the demon tumbled into the whirl pool of his sight.

Everything is black. Everything is pain. Jack is aware that the screams echoing are his.

Light burns through his eyelids, light blotted out by a man’s shadow, and when he opens his eyes, he’s in Ireland. Seth is leaning over him. He’s fallen asleep on the grass, trying to read one of the interminable Latin diaries the older mage foisted on him. He throws the mouldering thing at Seth.

“This is a great load of shit.”

“’Course it’s shit,” Seth tells him. “But it’s shit that might save your wee arse one day, boy, so you best read on. Conjugate some verbs if that will break up the monotony.”

Jack watches a crow land on Seth’s roof, and stare at them. Seth sees it, and his smile grows sly. “You’ve got a fetch, Jackie boy.”

Fetches aren’t something Jack believes in. Jack believes in what he can see, touch—the magic in him that responds to liquor and rage and cigarette burns. The sweet taste of a fag and the sweeter taste of skin under his lips. “Old wives’ tale,” he tells Seth. “It’s probably seen something dead in the field.”

“Old wives could learn you a thing or two, as well,” Seth tells him, and retreats indoors.

Jack shuts his eyes against the sun and he’s on his knees in a circle of stones, wearing the white raiments for the first and last time in his career as a Fiach Dubh. In a few weeks, Seth will catch him with the grimoire. This is the first nail in his coffin.

Seth and his brothers stare in horror, Seth’s athame held at half-mast, as the crows land one by one, on the top of each stone, and before Jack the crow woman stands with her hair made from feathers and her face spattered in blood.