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The plastic card read Honeymoon Getaway—Suite Access Key in flamboyant red script.
Pete felt as if the lift had abruptly reversed direction. "Jack, what did you do?"
"I told that sad bloke at the counter we were married," said Jack, eyes alight. "And it being our honeymoon, and us having so little money with the baby on the way, it might be nice if he offered us a sort of upgrade…"
Pete dropped her suitcase and moved for Jack's throat. Height advantage he may have, but she was a trained inspector with the Metropolitan Police. She'd faced down demons and rampaging ghosts, and more important, she was angry.
"Oi!" Jack shouted, her blow glancing off his shoulder as he ducked. "Settle down! The honeymooner's suite gets free room service! And a whirlpool bath. You bloody women love that sort of thing."
"Jack," said Pete, pitching her tone to cut steel. "We are not married. We are not sleeping together. Right at this moment in time, I don't even like you."
"It was just a lie, Pete," he sighed, leaning back against the satin-draped wall of the lift. "Lies don't draw blood. And besides, we got free liquor and a big fancy hotel suite out of it."
"You did," Pete hissed, jabbing him in the chest. " You did all of this. Dragged me along off the bloody cliff, as usual."
The lift doors rolled back with a soft chime. Jack threw up his hands. "I give up," he snapped. "I thought if I took you away like you wanted, maybe you'd stop being so bloody serious, but I was wrong."
Pete bit the inside of her lower lip and looked at her shoes. Jack didn't complete the thought, didn't say took you away from what happened in London. But then, he needn't. Pete dreamed it, every night, cinematically and vividly and with the same gut-ripping terror of the real event. As a Weir, she dreamed colors, smells, letters and sounds, and always had. Once upon a time, she'd dreamed about the day when they were young that Jack had nearly died the first time.
Now, it was all ghosts and blood.
The lift started to close and Pete slipped out, following Jack down the muffled hallway of bleeding floor and medium rare walls. "I'm sorry," she said when he could hear her. He was trying to jam the keycard into the reader slot to the side of their suite's double doors.
"Yeah, well, me too," Jack muttered. "Let's just get through the weekend and forget this whole event, right? Chalk another win on the board for me and my brilliant bloody ideas."
Pete looked at the doors of the suite. They were black, carved with a swirling symbol that evoked the painting in the lobby, artful strands curling around the central point. Circles were supposed to be safe, for mages. Jack never went anywhere without odd ends of chalk in his pockets. "It could be worse," she said finally. Jack ripped the card out of the reader. "Bollocks!" Pete took it from him. "Just let me." He backed up, glaring. "There better be a sodding lake of free booze in there. I need a bloody drink."
INSIDE, ALL WAS BLACKNESS, PETE CLICKED THE SWITCH next to the door, with no response. "That's odd."
Blue shine blazed behind her, illuminating overstuffed and gilded furniture and a bed the size of a football pitch on an elevated dais at the far side of the room. Jack shuffled past her, the witchlight flickering in the curve of his palm, and turned on a floor lamp. "Bad wiring. Not surprised. This whole city is sinking back into the fucking marshes."
He fished in his jacket pocket and found chalk, and drew a sloppy warding hex on the inside of the door.
"Jack, no," Pete protested. He jabbed the stubby end of the chalk at her.
"When some bloody beastie from beyond the beyond is on the other side, you'll thank me." He dropped his bag, his coat, and his boots in a heap in the center of the hearts-chamber carpet, emptied the gold-painted bar of its supply of tiny whiskey bottles, and went into the bathroom. The door slammed in Pete's face.
"Oh, of course," she muttered. "Because I don't need a shower after four bloody hours of M-55 Saturday traffic. Tosser."
At least he hadn't claimed the bed. Pete smiled grimly and laid her suitcase on the satin duvet, the color of bone mellowed by centuries. Except for this white, the whole suite repeated the rest of the hotel. The colors and slippery fabrics gave Pete the uncomfortable feeling of being inside something huge and crimson and beating.
She shivered the feeling away, and opened her case. The file inside, on top of her weekend's worth of holiday clothing, was accusing as a murdered man's open eyes.
Pete knew that nothing would have changed since the last time she'd read the file's contents, but she opened it anyway and sca
Detective Chief Inspector Geoffrey Newell
SO5, Metropolitan Police Service, London
Dear Sir,
I regretfully tender my resignation from the position of Detective Inspector…
It went on, with the required platitudes. Invaluable experience. Due to recent events… Do not feel able to discharge my duties…
The memo didn't give her room for much more than that, just the entrails of a promising career that, thanks to Jack, she was considering chucking. And on cue, Jack had turned into an absolute wanker.
"Should have told him," Pete castigated herself out loud, pulling a jersey and sleep pants out of the case. She shoved the file to the very bottom, crumpling the edges. Jack would tell her she was bloody stupid—bloody fucking stupid, if he were actually talking. That it wasn't his fault. She hadn't had to go looking for him four months ago, and her slippage into the Black, her awakened but not controlled Weir talents and her entree into magic was entirely her own doing.
Jack would tell her all of that and then turn around, with his self-satisfied smile, and leave all over again. Jack was good at leaving—twelve years long the last time he and Pete had parted. If she admitted she needed his help now, he'd be off again. Jack Winter was not a fan of commitment, to anything except his own skin.
How do I ignore it? How did she go on chasing shoplifters and prosecuting hooligans who got pissed and went Paki-bashing once she'd looked on the face of ghosts hungry for a living heart's essence and seen what crawled away into the shadowy places of London when the light hit its scaly hide?
Jack yelped, from the bathroom, "Bloody buggering fuck!"
Pete's skin leapt as she jerked back into herself, and she cleared the dais and the distance to the door in two steps. If there was one thing her time with Jack had taught hard and surely, it was that screams of terror were never to be ignored.
She hit the door with her shoulder, popping the gilt latch off its hinges, and nearly skidded into Jack. He had his shirt off, half-empty mini-bottle in one hand and an expression traveling the road from shock to revulsion on his face.
"What is it?" Pete demanded, expecting to see a shade, those angry howling scraps of a human soul stranded after death, or something worse, like the slime-mold demons Jack claimed lived under London Bridge.
Jack tossed down the rest of the whiskey and set the bottle with its empty brothers on the vanity. "Look," he said, pointing into the basin of the whirlpool tub. Pete stepped around him and peered in, then clapped a hand over her nose to shield against the smell of rotted seaweed and sundered guts that rolled out to meet her.
"Bloody hell." A dead thing lay in the basin, and Pete thought thing because that's exactly what it was—it could have been a gull, or some other waterfowl at some point, but instead of legs it had sadly curling feelers, rubbery and yellow, and a beak that hooked like the letter C, black and scarred. Its eyes bulged out and its neck had been twisted around. The thing's greenish blood, a color like absinthe mixed with motor oil, smeared the pale porcelain.