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Pete bit her lip. Jack's eyes weren't fiery or glacial or masked. They were just hurt. "Bits of it, yes," she said finally.
Jack started to say, "I guess that means…" but he was knocked into the water by a flying, charred shape in a black robe.
"Infidels… usurpers!" Gerry groaned. Burns covered one side of his face and head, and his eye was a leaking pit. His lips were twisted and swollen, most of the tender flesh gone. "Down into the black pit with you!" he growled, grabbing Jack by the neck and pushing his face into the bog. Jack clawed at Gerry's burnt hands, raking away long strips of flesh, and came up sputtering.
"Leggo, you git!"
"Die!" Gerry howled, hitting Jack with his good hand. Jack spat blood and swamp water.
"If I'm allowed last words, I'd say look behind you."
Pete slammed a mossy chunk of rock into Gerry's bald, roasted skull. The cultist folded like a puppet with his strings cut. She grabbed Jack's hand and pulled him out of the water. He collapsed next to her, shivering.
"I win."
Pete blinked. "Pardon me?"
"I win," said Jack with a wide grin. "Did I not tell you you'd have a bit of fun?"
Pete looked at him, looked at Gerry's still form, and contemplated telling Jack he was incurably deranged. Then she started to laugh. "Smacking that arsehole was the most fun I've had in months."
"Forty quid," Jack reminded her.
"I'll write you a check when we get out of this bloody swamp," she promised.
"Am I right you'll be finding your own flat, then, when we get home?" Jack said. He went on before she could answer. "Pete, for what it's worth, those bits you meant—I am a bastard and a selfish git, but I kept alive this long because of it. I'm sorry I can't undergo a miraculous transformation for you, luv. Truly I am."
Pete reached and took Jack's hand. He started, then squeezed her fingers and didn't loosen his grip. "I'm quitting," Pete said.
"The Metropolitan Police. I can't do that and be this." She gestured at the bog and the temple.
Jack's forehead crinkled. "But you love your job."
"I did," said Pete. "But you taught me that you're part of the Black first and a member of society second. And…" She almost swallowed down the words, jumped up and ran far away as she could, "I'd like you to teach me more."
Jack looked down on her, for a long time, smoke trailing out of one nostril. "You're bloody mad, Caldecott. You honestly think I'm any kind of qualified to take an apprentice? Bloody buggering fuck, you've seen what happens when things go bad with me. You'd sign on willingly for that?"
Pete nodded once, and was telling the truth.
"I'll be hard," Jack warned. "I won't let you be because you're my friend or because I care for you. It won't be any sort of pleasant and if you work with me there's a good chance you'll be buried in an early grave. So quit being so bloody stupid, go back to the Yard, and forget it, Pete, because if you take me as a teacher, I'll make bloody sure you regret it." He glared at her, but there was an expression in his eyes that was entirely new to Pete. She'd call it hope, if it were anyone but Jack.
"You're right, Jack Winter," she said. "You are a git."
"I told you," Jack started, but Pete leaned up and over and kissed him firmly, until he stopped trying to talk.
"I knew what I was getting into the first moment we met," she said. "And I don't want a transformation. I knew what I got the day I met you and you don't frighten me. Never did and never bloody will."
He gri
Pete put her head on Jack's shoulder and they sat on the steps of the old temple in the bog, waiting to be rescued and watching the neon spires of Blackpool fade into daylight, skeletons of a nightshade world that crumbled away under the sun.
Caitlin Kittredge is the author of the Nocturne City series, featuring werewolf detective Luna Wilder, and is currently hard at work on the first full-length volume of Pete and Jack's adventures in Black London. By day, her mild-ma
WHERE THE HEART LIVES
Marjorie M. Liu
The Dirk & Steele series is set in contemporary times, but in a world where magic rubs elbows with science, where men and women with more-than-human powers secretly risk their lives to help others.
This story, however, takes place long before the events of the series, and is a glimpse into the lives of those who influenced the creation of the Dirk & Steele detective agency.
WHEN MISS LINDSAY FINALLY DEPARTED FOR THE WORLD beyond the wood, it meant that Lucy and Barnabus were the only people left to care for her house and land, as well as the fine cemetery she had kept for nearly twenty years outside the little town of Cuzco, Indiana. It was an important job, not just for Lucy and Barnabus, but for others, as well, who for years after would come and go, for rest or sanctuary. Bodies needed homes, after all—whether dead or living.
Lucy was only seventeen, and had come to the cemetery in the spring, not one month before Miss Lindsay went away. The girl's father was a cutter at the limestone quarry. Her brothers drove the team that hauled the stones to the masons. The men had no use for a sister, or any reminder of the fairer sex; their mother had run away that previous summer with a gypsy fortune-teller, though Lucy's father insisted his absent wife was off visiting relatives and would return. Eventually.
When word reached the old cutter that a woman named Miss Lindsay needed a girl to tend house, he made his daughter pack a bag with lunch, her comb, and one good dress from her mother's closet—then set her on the first wagon heading toward Cuzco. No good-byes, no messages sent ahead. Just chancing on fate that the woman would want his daughter.
Lucy remembered that wagon ride. Mr. Wiseman, the driver, had been hauling turnips that day, the bulbous roots covered beneath a burlap sheet to keep off the light drizzle: a cool morning, with a sweet breeze. No one on the road except them, and later, one other: an old man who stood at the side of the dirt track outside Cuzco, dressed in threadbare brown clothes, with a thin coat and his white hair slicked down from the rain. Pale eyes. Lost eyes, staring at the green budding hills like the woods were where his heart lived.
In his right hand, he held a round silver mirror. A discordant sight, flashing and bright; Lucy thought she heard voices in her head when she saw the reflecting glass: whispers like birdsong, teasing and sweet.
Mr. Wiseman did not wave at the man, but Lucy did, out of politeness and concern. She received no response; as though she were some invisible spirit, or the breeze.
"Is he sick?" Lucy whispered to Mr. Wiseman.
"Sick and married," said the spindly man, in a voice so loud, she winced. He tugged his hat a bit farther over his eyes. "Married, with no idea how to let go of the dead."
"His wife is gone?" Lucy thought of her mother.
"Gone, dead. That was Henry Lindsay you saw. Man's been like that for almost twenty years. Might as well be dead himself."
Which answered almost nothing, in Lucy's mind. "What happened to her?"
A sly smile touched Mr. Wiseman's mouth, and he glanced sideways. "Don't know, quite. But she up and died on their wedding night. I heard he hardly had a chance to touch her."
"That's awful," Lucy said, not much caring for the look in Mr Wiseman's eye, as though there was something fu