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“I’m fine,” he breathed out. Seth grunted.
“Look worse than you did when I found you, boy. You keep up like this, you’re going to be under the ground before the week’s up. Forget the demon and all his plans, you’re doing a fine job of it yourself.”
“About that.” Jack sighed. “I talked to that bird bartender in the music club. Hornby’s dead.”
Seth felt in his pack and came up empty. “Got a fag?” Jack passed him a Parliament. “Did you hear me? I said that Hornby’s dead.”
“I’m old, not deaf, you sod,” Seth snapped. “Came to tell you I made a few calls and heard the same thing.”
“That’s it, then.” Jack looked at the toes of his boots as he walked. He’d come a long way in these boots. Steel peeped out where the leather had worn away at the toes and the mismatched laces had been broken and reknotted like a map of a B road at home. “The demon played with me. I came here for nothing.”
“Hell.” Seth exhaled into the face of a passing female tourist, who coughed dramatically and then shot him the bird. “I could have told you that, boy. What was lesson one, after you came to me?”
Jack chafed, Seth’s tone snapping him back like a rubber band to when he was young and stupid. “I didn’t come here to be lectured on your musty old crow magic, McBride.”
“Demons lie!” Seth spat. “Lesson. Fucking. One.” His face hardened from anger into something more permanent. Jack decided that if he cared, he’d call it disappointment.
“You were my best, boy,” Seth grumbled. “You had the spark, the talent, and look at you. Pissed it all away, didn’t you? Bloody waste.”
“You’re one to talk,” Jack said. The passing urge to ball up his fist and hit Seth in the jaw to even up his bruises gripped him, but he forced it down. “Look at you—hiding here, living like a retarded pensioner, bored out of your skull. You might as well top yourself and join Hornby, because this ain’t a life, mate—it’s just a prolonged, sweaty death.” He lit a fag of his own and sucked down the smoke, relishing the burn. “Hornby would probably be far better company.”
“You’re so hung up on him, go find his grave and lie on it,” Seth returned. “And good riddance to you.” He turned his back and stomped up the stairs to his landing.
Jack stood for a moment, fuming, before he followed Seth. “That’s it?” he shouted. “You’re just tossing it in? That’s all Seth McBride is good for?”
Seth turned back, his eyes lit from within with witch-fire. His magic was pure white, the white of cleansing fire and sacred incense. “I can’t help you, boy, you understand? Hornby’s beyond our reach.”
Jack rubbed the back of his neck.
The demon had told him to bring Hornby home. The demon had lied. The demon had made the new bargain for his name.
Names had meaning, in the Black. They had power and currency in the great tide of magic that swept along the underside and seeped through the cracks of the waking world.
The demon wouldn’t promise a name, even idly.
“He’s not beyond all reach,” Jack said.
Seth narrowed his eyes, the sun-drenched wrinkles in his redly ta
“If Hornby’s kicked it,” Jack said, “then why was the demon so keen to have him brought back? He’s alive, I understand not coming onto another demon’s patch. He’s a stiff, I’d collect me debt and cross Hornby off the books. I wouldn’t send my arse halfway around the world.”
“Jack.” Seth held up his hand. “Leave it alone. Leave Hell to Hell’s concerns and go home.”
“I can’t do that and you know it,” Jack growled. “Come on, Seth. You can’t say you’re not curious about this. About why a demon would ask me to reel in a dead man.”
“If there’s one thing I know,” Seth said, “it’s that I don’t give two shits about the wherefore and the why of the Black any longer. That’s why I retired.” Seth pushed into his sweltering flat.
“The demon should have collected its debt,” Jack insisted. “It shouldn’t have sent me here. It still needs Hornby.” Jack massaged his temples. “I still have to bring him back.”
Seth tipped his head back, and his eyes went narrow, as if Jack had just suggested setting fire to his own hair.
“I hope you’re talking about a body bag and a slew of customs forms and not what I think you are.”
Jack took up Seth’s seat in the sticky plastic armchair. “The demon was very clear. He wants Hornby. Not just a bag of dead flesh.”
Seth flicked on the telly and sat on the edge of his futon, kicking aside a pile of dirty football jerseys. “Jack, you’re talking about raising the dead. Necromancy. Not just a dip of your toe into a little sorcery, but a full-frontal fuck with the dark side.”
“Spooky,” Jack commented. “You going to scold me, or help me?”
Seth snorted. “As if I’d let you die on me again, boy.”
Jack tipped his head back. “Bloody wonderful. After I catch a few hours of kip, we need to find ourselves Hornby’s corpse.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Pete opened her eyes, staring a hole in Jack as he moved in her. The chanting of the watchers rose. The rain ceased, leaving the air snapping cold against his bare skin.
He could stop, or he could die at the watchers’ hands. The stone would have its blood this night, and Jack’s blood was as sweet as a Weir’s.
Pete’s lips moved, her words lost in Jack’s breath and the sounds of the bespelling song.
Jack bent his head closer as they coupled, and as the ritual flowed toward completion—toward the circle of power that bound him surely as the shackles bound Pete, toward the vile and u
“Wake up, Jack.”
Jack bolted from his rest. His back and neck screamed at him for passing out, yet again, at odd angles in a chair better suited to employment as a medieval torture device.
“You got that look again,” Seth commented. The light outside the flat was hazy dawn, and the telly had changed from cricket to a Thai cooking show presided over by a cheery woman in a neon pink apron.
Jack cracked the tension from his neck with a sound like a rifle. His head echoed. “What look’s that?”
“Haunted,” Seth said. “You were anyone else, I’d say you’d caught ghost sickness.” He pottered around the kitchenette until he’d installed coffee and filter in an ancient carafe and switched it on. “That you’d got a spirit feeding off you, like you were a fuckin’ milkshake.”
“I’ve seen ghost sickness,” Jack said. “’S not what I have.” Ghost sickness ate a person slowly from the inside. It had showed in Pete’s eyes first, in the haunted cast of her gaze and in the dreams of death that came any time she shut them. She’d carried Algernon Treadwell’s spirit like a black rider on her back, her slight body pale and papery as Treadwell drank of her life.
“Oh?” Seth rummaged in the fridge and found a few eggs, which he cracked into a frying pan. “Always thought it was a load of bollocks, myself. Who’d you know got it?”
“Someone in London,” Jack said, and ended Seth’s probing with a flick of his hand. “We need to find out where Hornby is buried. Dig him up and get on with it.”
“You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Jackie,” Seth told him. “Unless, in the intervening years, you’ve taken it upon yourself to learn the ways and means of calling back the dead.”
Jack shoved his hands into his hair. It was flattened on one side and he attempted to muss it equally again. “You know I’m no fucking sorcerer, Seth. But if we have no body, no necromantic spell we try will do one bit of bloody good, so let’s start at what we do know.”
Seth shook crystallized sugar into his coffee, sipped, and winced. “Fuck me. Can’t brew a cuppa in this country worth shite.”