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"What!" he bellowed irritably. "Can't a bloke eat breakfast in peace?"
The figure emerged into the slice of vision granted by the sun, and Pete saw Roy the American staggering along the beach. Blood ran down his face, tributaries and deltas along the stark lines of his mouth and neck, and he held his hands in front of his body. His fingers and palms were crimson too. As Pete watched, rooted like an ancient oak, Roy shuddered and then fell over, curling into the fetal position and growing still.
"Bloody hell," Pete muttered, whirling and making a dash for the front door of the suite. Jack watched her go.
"What's the matter, then?"
"That American bloke from last night," she panted, jerking on her shoes. "I think someone's killed him."
ROY'S BODY LAY IN THE SAND LIKE A broken marionette, blood patching the earth a darker brown. Pete skidded down the half-rotted wooden steps the hotel provided as access, and felt the wet sand suck at her feet as she dashed for Roy. Jack appeared behind her, like he sometimes did, panting like he'd just run a hundred meters.
"Call an ambulance!" Pete yelled over her shoulder. The ever-present fog dampened her shout, thi
Jack appeared, hair like a spiked sun. "Pete. Don't touch him!"
Pete skidded to a stop, going to her knees next to the body. Seawater soaked through her trousers. The tide was coming in, and a crab with an extra claw protruding from its back scuttled through the mushy pool Roy's blood made. Jack dropped beside her and pulled back her wrist just before she felt for Roy's pulse. "Look."
An iron shackle was locked around Roy's neck, dug deep and sharp enough into the skin to form a necklace of blood droplets. The shackle was like nothing Pete had ever seen, metal holding a shine, forged with curling, roiling designs that caused the point between her eyes to ache. The broken end of an equally foreign chain link dangled from the collar.
"Bloody hell," said Pete, because anything else would have been insufficient. Jack wrapped the end of his t-shirt around his hand and flipped Roy's body over onto its back. What Pete had taken for cuts on his cheeks were more like burns, like something thin and coated in acid had taken Roy's face in its hands. But not hands. Diamond-shaped markings bubbled where the… where whatever it was had touched him. "He's been kissed by the Black, luv," said Jack, brushing his hand off. "Touch might transfer it. Just looking out for you."
Pete swallowed as she met Roy's open eyes. The magic was so thick around him, it choked the air out of her, and she let Jack pull her away. "All right?"
Laughing, Pete shook her head. "How would I bloody be all right? He was alive not twelve hours ago. Him and his silly bint of a wife." Her gut twisted, nothing to do with the dark energy around them. "Oh, God. Where's the wife?"
Jack conjured a Parliament and lit it, drawing deep before he said, "That thing you feel, like congealed grease on skin, is sacrificial blood magic. Old Roy's soul is half out of his body, waiting to be called as power in someone's ritual. Poor sod."
Pete looked down at Roy again, thought of dark wet things and mist-hidden shadows. "Who would do something like this?"
"A sorcerer," said Jack, flicking his cigarette away. The wind brought it back and spread embers across the sand. "A practitioner of black arts attempting to call something from the otherworld. Unusual that they'd just take two, even if this bloke did manage to get away. Usually sacrifices are threes, or sevens. Darkness loves the prime numbers, you know."
"Henrietta," said Pete, the woman's shattered eyes and disco
Jack rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound against his morning shadow. "Three bodies needed, then, and they used old Roy's soul as kindling for the fire." He paced around the body, muttering. "Not phases of the moon. Not a demon. Might be amateurs. Chanting naked, bathing in blood. Some stupid shite like that."
"This is not an amateur anything," said Pete, pointing at Roy. "We have to call the police. Then we have to find Charlotte."
"What are you on about? What sodding we?" Jack asked. " 'M staying right here, in me honeymoon suite. Let the coppers sort it out. Always fun to watch you lot try and figure out creatures of the Black."
Pete seized Jack by his upper arm and jerked him to her. "Take my mobile. Call the police. I'm going to try and find Charlotte before something in this freaky place eats her insides." She pressed her mobile into Jack's palm. "Hurry."
"Can't, luv," said Jack. Pete turned on him, ready to scream, and he held up her mobile, NO SVC blinked in the center of the screen.
"Bollocks." Pete kicked a lump of sand, pacing away from Roy's body. She couldn't stand to feel the displaced magic any longer—it hurt, like a boil under the skin.
Roy's footprints came out of the fog, and just behind and to the left of him, twin webbed tracks moved, taking one step for Roy's four. They were like gull's feet, but human-sized and with far too many toes. A thin miasma of slime coated each track, sending the smell of overripe mud to Pete's nose. "Jack." She pointed numbly when he came to her side. "It followed him. All the way back. And then it just vanishes."
"Watched him die," said Jack. "Made sure he couldn't babble like that Henrietta bird."
"A demon?" Pete wrapped her arms around her torso, suddenly chilled beyond measure.
"No," said Jack. "No, a demon free in the world would be wearing human skin. This is…" He sighed and brushed the dampness from his hair, leaving it wild like a Celt's. "Bugger all, Pete. I don't know what this is." For Jack to admit ignorance made the situation bad, bad in the way that had ended in blood once before. Pete bit her lower lip hard to blot out memories of London that had no place.
"Knew this place was wrong," she muttered, retracing Roy's footstep. Knew that something sinister was lurking under the tacky cheerfulness of the Paradise Palace. Knew it, and doubted, and kept her mouth shut. Now Roy had been killed by it.
"Oi, where're you going?" Jack shouted when she started to walk away. Pete stopped, not looking back.
"I'm following it," she said. "Coming?"
PETE WALKED, UNTIL SHE WAS SURE THE WIND and wet had sunken into her bones and she would become soft and gibbous, a waterlogged shade who would never be warm again. Roy's footprints led down the beach, past casinos blinking their promise of free bingo weekly out to sea, past a boarded-up boat rental shack and finally into the wild, scrubby little trees and the phantom bones of driftwood clustered where the tide had left them.
The tracks took a turn inland, and Pete and Jack crested a hillock and descended into the bogs. The sound of the sea was muffled by winter-blackened dead trees and the salt air became clammy and sour. Roy's reversed tracks deepened, ru
Pete slipped in the mud, but Jack, in his workman's boots, tromped along merrily champing on a cigarette like he was taking a turn through Regent's Park.
"Bloody kill you," Pete muttered.
"Here," said Jack from ahead of her, gesturing with the lit end of his Parliament.
Pete examined the spot where the web-foot tracks dragged themselves out of the peat muck and began to follow Roy's shaky strides. His ended a few meters farther on, seemingly in the flat marsh water that reflected Pete's frown back at her.
"This can't be where he came from."