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"Maybe he swam," Jack shrugged. He did a slow circle, looking out over the brackish-colored marshland visible through the fog, and then flicked his cigarette butt into the water.
"That's a cartload of bollocks," Pete told him. She crouched and dipped her fingers into the marsh, recoiling as sinuous underwater plants grasped at her skin. "The water's no more than a couple of degrees. And he wasn't wet on the beach."
Jack sighed. "Pete, it's bloody strange, yeah, but what do you want me to do about it, grab a ruddy iron hook and drag the bottom? I'm on holiday!"
"That Charlotte girl could still be alive!" Pete cried. "Can't you call up an imp and offer it Roy's blood or something to reveal her true location?"
"Doesn't work that way and you know it," said Jack. "Magic isn't tricks and forcing it to do what you want. It's the fabric of the Black and it has its limitations."
"And by limitations, you're meaning that you're a lazy git," Pete snapped. "This place is doing something to the people in the hotel. You know it is." A bird screamed from somewhere invisible. She shuddered. Her skull felt like it was splitting apart from the inside the longer they stayed out here in the fog and if she stared at the water, she swore that glimmering ebony tendrils moved underneath the tiny ripples stirred by the wind. "I can feel it," Pete muttered. "I'm not imagining things and neither was Henrietta."
"There might be something evil here," said Jack, in what for him was a gentle tone. He clasped her on the shoulder, fingers knobby as a skeleton. "It's not ours to rush in with flaming swords, Pete. Charlotte's gone, probably dead. 'S what I saw for her last night, anyway. I don't know about you, but I'm wet and tired. Let's go back to the hotel, sleep, and go back to London, right?" He rubbed both hands up and down Pete's arms when she shivered. "Charlotte will either turn up or she won't. Dead, or not. It's not in your hands, luv."
"And when we get back to London," Pete said quietly. "Everything will be safe and nice and normal? Is that what you think, Jack? You think a cheap hotel suite and lies to get a free di
"You're pathetic," Pete spat at Jack. "You fob off problems and expect the world to flow around you and everyone to forget what a bastard you really are. Well I won't forget, Jack, so you and your holiday can go bugger yourselves."
His face clamped shut over the flicker of pain Pete saw, and his lip curled. "You aim for the killing cut, luv. Well done." He pushed past her and walked back down the path. After a moment more staring into the fog, trying not to sob from sheer frustration, Pete followed him because there was nothing else she could do.
THE SKY WAS THE GRAY OF A DEAD WOMAN'S hair when they finally reached the hotel. The light was moving on toward evening, if there was such a thing in this endlessly fogbound place. Jack made a beeline for the hotel bar and Pete stormed over to the lift and punched the button to take her back to the room.
"You've left mud on the carpet, Miss," Gerry the maître d' sneered, creeping up at her elbow. Pete hit the button again.
"Ask me if I bloody care. Isn't it your job to clean these things?"
"You're fighting with the other half, then?" Gerry said, his smile growing wider. Pete glared at him as the lift dinged open.
"Poke your shiny head into someone else's business."
"That's a yes, then," said Gerry as the door rolled closed. Just for a second, her Weir gift flared and Gerry had pointed teeth and a frog's webbed hands. He laughed, flicking a forked tongue.
Pete leaned her head back against the satin wall and the tears did come, unstoppable against the tide of the Black. The city and the bog and the hotel were dark places, evil, and she just wanted to get away… Pete clutched at her head as a flood of whispers engulfed her, sliding into a crouch against the pain and the unbearable pressure of magic. "Stop it," she begged. "Stop it, stop it… I see. I understand."
Hissing, the whispers faded away, slowly, and she realized that the lift doors were standing open on the top floor. Everything was normal—cheesy gilt wallpaper, kissing-swan mirrors and the plastic carved paneling on the suite's door.
The thought that she might be going mad crossed Pete's mind.
She slammed the door to the suite behind her and locked the chain bolt, not that it would stop Jack, when and if he came upstairs. If he'd lived a hundred years ago, he could have easily plied a trade as a sneak-thief in the alleys of London.
Pete threw off her shoes and collapsed on the bed, sundown darkening the room to velvety gray-black. Jack came in after a time, stumbled in the dark, smelled of whiskey and too many Parliaments, and then Pete slept, fitfully and with dreams of dark things rolling beneath marsh water.
PETE WOKE WITH A GASP AND THE SOFTLY glowing face of the bedside clock staring at her. Twelve midnight. She breathed deeply and put a hand over her heart, which was thumping the way it did when she had the nightmare that Jack had died, and she'd been too late to save him. The sorcerer spirit touched him and stole his magic. And then Pete killed the ghost wearing Jack's face.
Jack let out a soft drunken snore from the sofa and Pete relaxed, using the still rush of waves and the cool touch of the utterly black night to calm herself.
In the darkness by the wardrobe, something slithered.
Pete bolted upright, out of the satin sheets and over the edge of the bed, scrabbling away from the sound toward the balcony. "Jack!" she hissed.
The sounds were all around her, not half-imagined offshoots of ambient magic but real, wet squelching of misshapen limbs over the carpet and gibbering moans. For a dreadful instant, the fog parted and moonshine struck the room. Pete saw hundreds of wet black-green bodies gleaming, while triple rows of eyes lolled in protuberant exoskeletons and bone teeth with razor points dribbled ichor from misshapen mouths.
In her lifetime, Pete had faced too many of her fears without flinching, because it was what was required. Gang members with guns. Jack, alive and dead. The bottomless cold power of the Black that burned you from inside your skull when your magic took hold.
The nearest marsh-creature's tentacle wrapped around Pete's ankle with a cold so icy, it burned, and Pete decided Bugger all that for a lark. She screamed to wake the dead. "JACK!"
For a horrible second nothing happened, and then witchfire flamed to life in the vicinity of the sofa and Jack's tousled platinum hair and face coalesced, hollow-eyed in the blue light. "Bloody hell, can't a bloke get a decent night's—?" He saw the things, then, although they hissed and drew back from the witch-fire into the dark.
Pete grabbed the digit around her ankle and pulled, but it only contracted harder, squashy and palpable like a muscle with no bones inside. "Do something! Get rid of these fucking things!" she screamed at Jack. More feelers attached to her wrists, her legs, snaking up from the floor to bind her, or worse.
Jack stomped on the creatures underfoot. The witchfire in his palm matched by twin flames in his eyes. "Saighid!" he bellowed. The chalk warding on the door flared to life like a flashbulb, and then just as quickly threw violent blue sparks and went out.
"Well, bugger me sideways with a barbell," Jack mused. "That should have worked."