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Pete stared for a long two heartbeats. The ripples in her head, the pulse of the magic wound through everything, gave an unpleasant twinge, as if just for a second she'd brushed her hand against something still and slimy. The dead thing's bulging eyes took on a shine, and Pete turned away.
"Just a thought," she said to Jack, as she got an armful of pink towels from the rack and threw them over the corpse, "but perhaps we shouldn't indulge in a sea swim anywhere in the greater Blackpool vicinity."
"Most bloody disgusting thing I've ever seen," Jack muttered. His shoulders twitched and he started on a fourth bottle of whiskey, emptying it in a swallow. Jack was heavily tattooed and at the moment the ink and his old track-mark scars stood stark against his skin. He looked like his body was engaging him in debate about whether to vomit.
"Who could have done it, is the question," Pete murmured. "If it's someone in the hotel, they've got a bloody twisted sense of humor." She gathered the towels into a bundle and lifted the dead creature out of the bath, sadness pricking her. "Poor thing."
"Poor thing?" Jack demanded. "No, not poor thing—what about poor me? My nerves are utterly shot! I'm from the city—we don't find dead wildlife in the loo very often!"
"Yes, poor thing," Pete said sharply. "It was ugly and smelly, but it was defective too—defenseless. It couldn't run or fly from whatever human wrapped hands around its neck. If I meet the tosser, I'll kick him in the sodding bollocks."
"Just get it out of here," said Jack. "And ask room service if they can bring about ten liters of bleach for the bath."
Pete found a spare garbage bag in the outer suite and slid it around the mass of towels. Jack would just have to pay for them. A few oily gray-green feathers slid loose and stained the carpet at her feet, and Pete felt that lap of discomfort again, the faintest pinprick of the disturbance against the smooth surface of the Black. An experienced Weir, a shaper of magic, would probably know what it meant, but all Pete knew was that it made her head hurt like she'd just woken up hungover.
She shoved the feathers into a desk drawer so she wouldn't have to look at them, and put the corpse outside the suite's front doors, locking them firmly behind it.
"I'M HUNGRY," JACK ANNOUNCED WHEN HE CAME OUT of the bath. A towel sat low on his ski
Pete threw his jeans at him from the bed, where she'd ensconced herself under the satin sheets with a novel. "Put some bloody clothes on."
"Easy, luv—we are married, after all." Jack gri
"I'm going to bloody murder you, Jack Winter," Pete muttered. It was a threat she delivered often, and usually hollow, but she was in no mood. "I mean it. Don't sleep tonight."
"Well, there'll be no sleeping when I'm dead of bloody starvation," Jack said, exhaling smoke through his nose. He pulled on the trousers and shucked the towel. "There's a restaurant downstairs. Romantic di
"I say that I'm comfortable where I am," said Pete. "You and your prodigious talent for ticking me off are welcome to the restaurant."
Jack sighed, dumping the candy out of a china dish on the wardrobe and putting out his Parliament in it. He came over to the bed and sat next to Pete. She scooted away, but he trapped her wrist with wire-strung fingers. "Pete. I know you're unhappy and bloody angry at me, but it's just di
"More wagers?" Pete arched her eyebrow. "We're up to forty quid. You can't play in these leagues, Jack." She was hungry, and Jack's sincere blue gaze was very hard to ignore. His eyes were changeable, like a sky, glacial and bright when he was intent, the burning base of a candle flame when he was angry. Mage's eyes, flaring and settling depending on mood and magic.
"I'll match it if you can." Jack gri
Pete sighed. She didn't want to look at him. Jack pleading or discomfited was out of order. She settled her stare on the twin Eyes of Horus tattooed on his collarbones, touching one to change the subject. "The ink's holding up?"
Jack lifted a shoulder. "Better than nothing." The black Eye tingled under Pete's fingers. The light Eye looked toward the world of the living. The dark saw the land of the dead. Both served to take the edge from Jack's psychic sight, so it couldn't catch him unaware.
"Are you close to edge? Going to have an episode?" Pete asked anxiously. Jack shook his head.
"Hotels are good for that. So much humanity, so much fear and strain and pleasure too—like listening to a radio tuned just out of frequency. Peaceful, really. Sort of a white noise."
Pete's heart beat normally again. Jack wasn't going to disappear into the well of his sight, when it bounced back from his mage sensitivities amplified to the point where he sometimes couldn't tell the murdered, gibbering ghosts from flesh. He wasn't going to control it with a needle as he had before. The ink holds, she told herself firmly, and nearly believed it.
"I guess I am a bit peckish," she conceded, on the heels of her relief. Jack gave a bounce on the mattress next to her.
"Bloody right! Get dressed." He dropped a kiss on Pete's cheek, featherlight and dry, and then jumped up and went to root in his case. "What d'you think will give those stick-up-the-arse hotel staffers a bigger coronary?" He held up two jerseys, one featuring Iggy Pop flipping the bird and one a River City Rebels bit that proclaimed CORRUPT THE KING WHILE YOU FUCK THE QUEEN!
"Rebels," said Pete. She slid off the bed and got a black sweater and jeans to change into. Another hard and fast rule of life in the Black—never clothe yourself in anything you weren't able to run in, or willing to sacrifice to burns, blood, or demonic spittle.
THE RESTAURANT, Ml AMOR, WAS DECIDEDLY NOT A denim-and-sweater sort of place and caused a fidgety response in Pete akin to stepping into a dowager aunt's parlor.
White and pink linen billowed over the tables, and a terrace looked out on the sea. The entire arrangement was lit only by candles, and red-jacketed waiters moved among the bowed heads of diners like phantoms. Torches on the terrace flared valiantly against the fog and the wind that had sprung up. Pete smelled the tang of the bog through the doors, open even though it was late autumn. She shivered involuntarily. The closer she got to the sea, the louder the magic hissed, like standing too close to an amplifier.
"Winter, Suite 103," Jack told the maître d'. The maître d', shaven-headed and wearing a tuxedo that fit like he'd hastily buttoned it over his footie jersey, ran a stubby finger down the list.
"Ah," he said, gri
"Bloody right." Jack gri
"Right this way," said the maître d'. He shuffled through the candlelit cavern, flames and linens rippling in the wind off the sea.
"Reminds me of a bloody tomb," Pete muttered. "All shrouds and saint's candles."
"Anyone ever tell you you've got one bloody morbid set of sensibilities?" Jack muttered back. Pete shrugged out from under his arm and wrapped hers around herself. The mist swirled beyond the French doors and obscured whatever was beyond the torchlight. Somewhere far away in the night, waves hit the rocks with a hushed, wind-driven desperation.