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“You can’t cheat a demon,” Lawrence said softly. “No living soul can manage that. You going to die, Jack, and the best you can hope for is to go with your head up.”
Jack’s guts twisted up. “Thanks. Nothing like knowing my mates are expecting me to come marching home with a smile on my ruddy face.”
“You’re good, Jack,” Lawrence said quietly. “But you’re not that good. I’ll say my farewells, and if you come to your senses . . .” He flashed the flat key, made it disappear again. “You know where to find me.”
“Cheers. And fuck you, Lawrence.” Jack shoved the door open, let the sound and light of the station engulf him once more, like dropping into an ocean of bodies and sound. High above him, on the same rafter, the crow watched. Jack stilled, glaring at it. He’d been seeing entirely too many nosy birds of late. It was like being trapped in one of those insipid talking-animal films, laced with a hit of bad acid.
Lawrence came to his shoulder. “You got a fetch on you, boy.”
Jack rolled his eyes toward the crow. “That animal companion shite is for your type, Lawrence. I call it a bloody obnoxious pest.”
The crow hopped from one foot to the other, flexing its wings to their full length. It stared at Jack. Jack flipped it two fingers.
“Treat your fetch better, Jack.” Lawrence clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Never know when you need that old boy to carry your soul home.”
“Like you said,” Jack told Lawrence. “Too little, too late.”
Lawrence knocked one booted toe against the ground. “Take care of yourself, Jack.”
Jack lifted one corner of his mouth. “You going to miss me, you great pair of knickers? Going to have yourself a cry once I’m gone on my way?”
“I ain’t saying good-bye,” Lawrence told him hotly. “It is what it is. You don’t listen to no demon’s lies and you don’t get yourself in more trouble than you already carrying.”
Jack threw Lawrence a salute. “Just as you say, guv.”
Lawrence gave a nod. “Then I see you later, Jack.”
“Yeah,” Jack told him as Lawrence joined the line of people descending back into the tube. “Much later.”
A garbled call for the Heathrow Express echoed over the PA, and Jack’s headache joined his nervous stomach. He joined the line of people boarding the sleek dove gray train car, passing his fingers over the ticket machine to open the gate to the platform.
The magic tingled, ran through him from head to toe like he’d just grabbed a live socket. Such a small trick shouldn’t send pain up and down his nerves, but then his sight shouldn’t be going haywire and he shouldn’t be dreaming of a ritual that had gone out of fashion with painting yourself blue and chopping the heads off of Picts.
Shouldn’t be feeling the pull of Pete’s Weir talent even when she was miles away. Shouldn’t be going to bloody Thailand on a fool’s errand. Jack would have traded with a demon all over again in that moment to be back in Naughton’s smelly, lumpy bed with his arm over Pete’s waist and her slender leg wrapped around his.
Pete’s leg dug into his thighs, urging him harder, urging him to take what he wanted, needed.
“Oh, fuck off,” Jack gritted as the Heathrow train rolled out of Paddington, gathering speed as it slid through the junkyards and council estates of south London. Not that any vision he’d ever been subjected to had been chased off with a bit of bad language.
“Jack . . . ,” Pete gasped, back arching, body stiffening around him, driving him to the edge. “Jack, stop . . .”
He wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop as the chanting crested, the onlookers watching the pair on the stone, faces blank and eyes glistening with desire.
“Jack.” Pete stilled herself and looked into his eyes. “You have to stop, Jack.”
The chanting fell away and the circle closed in, and Jack saw for the first time the white robes, the silver masks, and the crowns of horn hiding the circle of mages from his view.
Not the Fiach Dubh. Not his brothers. These were strangers, and all at once, the rain and the mist froze against Jack’s skin. Cold. Always the cold. Pete tried to put her hand against his cheek, stopped at the end of the shackle, and sank back to the stone. Jack saw the bruises blossoming under the woad, saw Pete’s starvation thi
Jack placed his hand against her cheek. “Can’t, luv. I’m doing it for you.”
She shook her head, a bitter smile thin as a line cut on broken mirror growing on her face. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Jack Winter. And you don’t know me. Not really.”
The circle of mages closed in, their hands snatching at Jack, trying to drag him away, and Pete strained to hold him. “Wake up, Jack,” she whispered. “Open your eyes.”
“We are now arriving at Heathrow, Terminal Three,” the train robot a
Jack managed to rise, collect his kit, and leave the car with the rest of the foreigners and travelers shuffling through the dank gray tu
Jack felt the gnawing ache of an empty stomach, the jittery sick dance of his heart. Jack wanted Pete with him. She’d have made sense of the vision, helped him quiet his sight and his magic. He could talk himself out of the truth, if Pete were with him.
His talent was going haywire. He couldn’t control his sight. As the a
Wake up, Pete had said. Open your eyes.
“She sees you, Jack Winter, and she says that you can run. . . .” Pete gri
Chapter Twenty-one
Jack dug his fingers into his armrest when the Malaysia Air plane took off from Heathrow, and kept them there as the jet bounced from cloud to cloud, each jerk designed specifically to keep his guts somewhere in the vicinity of his tongue.
“Bad flight?”
The girl in the middle seat was one of those self-conscious hippie types made of natural fibers and he
“’M fine,” Jack said. When was the last time he’d flown? American, 1994? The ill-fated trip to Belgium when Lawrence got himself mixed up with the Stygian Brothers and Jack had to go to their necropolis and bargain back Lawrence’s death?
Too bloody long, and he hadn’t liked strapping himself inside a giant lipstick tube and getting suspended five miles above the earth any better in the bad old days.
“You don’t look fine,” the girl said. She eyed the flight attendants in their colorful vests and neckerchiefs moving in the galley and then dipped a hand into her hemp bag. “Here.”