Huntress

DOWN IN THE GROUND WHERE THE DEAD MEN GO A Tale of Black London Caitlin Kittredge

Edinburgh, 1990

The Crucifixion Club smelled like whiskey, smoke, and piss. The Poor Dead Bastards were on the downside of their second set, and the crowd had thinned to the diehards, the drunks, and the groupies.

Jack Winter leaned on his mike stand, feeling sweat droplets lick their way down his spine. Thank fuck for the groupies. They were the only thing that made some nights worthwhile.

Brown glass from a lager bottle crunched under Jack’s boots as he grabbed the mike again, Gavin’s drumming, like a heart in fibrillation, signaled the start of “Lockstep,” the big finish, the big ending that should have them on their feet in the pit, at one another’s throats—punks throwing elbows into skinheads, blood washed out by the janitor’s mop at the night’s end.

No one in the Crucifixion Club got the message. Jack shot a glance to the right, Rich the guitar player, to the left, Dix on bass. Then he threw the microphone down, into the pit. “You know what? Fuck it. You can piss off, the lot of you kilt-lifting wank-sacks.”

A pint glass sailed past his head and shattered on the backdrop, a garish neon Jesus with purple blacklit blood spilling from his wounds. Jesus’s eyes rolled up into his head, in a way that made him look like there was a weasel chewing on his privates.

Rich shucked his Fender and hopped down into the pit, retrieving the mike. He covered it with his long, spidery fingers, the calluses on the ends making rough noise against the PA. “Jack, the fuck are you on about?”

Jack wiped sweat off his face with the back of his arm, the salt blurring his eyes, making the shapes and shadows of the Crucifixion Club into a fever dream, just for a moment. “Come on, Rich. Let’s get a drink and end the evening with our dignity intact. No one in this piss-miserable city wants to hear us play.”

Gavin stopped drumming, the heartbeat bleeding away to flatline as he sensed the ugly black knot between guitarist and vocalist. Dix thumped his thumb on his bass in a discordant rhythm, his tattooed knuckles fluttering under the stage lights.

“Right or not, we have a contract,” Rich said, gesturing with his head at the owner of the Crucifixion Club, an intractable Scot with a thatch of white hair and a face like a lorry wreck during rush hour. “Somehow, I don’t think the old goat over there is going to be overjoyed if we cut out before finishing two hours.” Rich shifted his weight, hid his next words with his back to the pit.

Jack scanned the crowd, more with his magic than his eyes, to make sure no skinhead was taking the golden opportunity to shank his guitar player in the kidney. Rich might be a pain in the arse, but he could make six strings sound like wailing bansidhe or angel tears, you just had to tell him which.

“We need the money, mate,” Rich said. “I’m skint, and you know Ella is counting on me to make rent on the flat this month.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “Do ‘Falling Down,’ and I swear if another one of these kilt-lifters chucks a bottle at me fucking head, it’s curtains.”

Dix beat out the baseline, Rich hit the first chord, and Jack sang. He felt the smoke, raw in his throat. Most of all, he felt tired.

The night ended without a bang, without even a whimper. Jack helped Rich pack up his amps while Dix carried equipment back to the van, an arthritic Peugeot that oozed smoke and rust like a pustule on wheels.

“Hey, you. Boyo, with the Billy Idol up top.” The Scot jabbed his cigar stub at Jack.

“Yeah?” Jack crossed his arms. He was half the Scot’s breadth, but he had a good head on him. The old bastard would be trying to dick around with their payment, and it fell to Jack to deal with him, since they hadn’t a manager, not even a proper roadie since Lefty Nottingham got pinched for passing bad checks.

“You got a girl out front.” The Scot leered. “Nice gear, too. Real top of the pops.”

“Jack.” Rich glared warningly. “We have to start the drive back.”

Jack went to the rat-eaten curtain and gestured to the Scot. “Point her out to me.” Rich was engaged to Ella. He’d never dipped his pen in even when he hadn’t been. Dix would go for anything that breathed, and Jack had a fair notion that Gavin was a poof, although it made no difference. Good drummers were worth their weight.

The girl sat alone at a table dead-center in the empty club. She was all black—black bob, black sweater, black pencil skirt that showed of a bit of Snow White leg in black fishnet stockings.

“Yeah?” said the Scot.

Jack stepped out from the curtain. “Yeah.”

“Oh, fuck off!” Gavin shouted. “I want to be driving out of bloody Scotland, not sticking around to sample the locals.”

Jack flipped him the bird and walked over to the table. Pulled a chair and sat on it backwards. “You wanted to perform sexual favors for me, luv?”

She exhaled from a black cigarette with a gold band, blue smoke. Her face was heart-shaped, like a black-and-white film starlet’s. Her severe bob and straight fringe made Jack feel as if he were looking at someone who might have conjured herself off celluloid, too refined for the likes of the Crucifixion Club.

Or Jack Winter himself, if Jack were being honest.

“Meet,” she corrected coolly, the low throaty American voice sending gooseflesh over not-unpleasant parts of Jack’s skin. “I wanted to meet you, Mr. Winter.”

“Fuck,” he choked out, losing himself in laughter. “Mr. Winter would be me dad, if I had one. Never met the bastard, so you can just call me Jack. What name will I be panting out for you, darlin’?”

“Ava,” she said, and killed the ember of her fag in a Jesus-shaped ashtray. Even her name was posh and fantasy. Jack put his chin on his forearms and smiled at her.

“Pleasure’s all mine, Ava. Or will be.”

“Mr. Winter—Jack—if you’d stop for one moment, you’d discern I’m not interested in you. At all.”

Jack felt his hard-on die a quick death underneath his ripped denim. “Ah,” he said. “Then why’re you wasting me time, exactly, luv?”

“Like I said”—Ava produced a pack of Turkish cigarettes and a silver lighter engraved with the initials DVB—“I wanted to meet you.”

“And why’s that, if not for a quick roll?” Jack demanded. “Any bloke can see you’re not here for the music. If the outfit weren’t a tipoff, the fact you’ve had a bath is. Bloody Scotland.”

Ava’s lips twitched. Jack consoled his loss of a fine, taut piece of groupie with the fact that she was at least pretty, and he’d at least made her smile.

“My friends in the city told me you were a mage. One who’s good at what he does,” said Ava. “And when I found out you were playing a gig here in Edinburgh, well …” She lit the fag with a hiss and pursed her full lips, full like fruit bursting with juice. “I figured you were just the man for the job.”

“Someone’s been speaking out of school,” Jack said. It was probably Lawrence, that chatty bastard. He was only too happy to brag of his association with Jack fucking Winter to his little sewing circle of white witch mates, who in turn spread hideous rumors all over the fucking isle like they were some magic edition of Hello!

“Don’t be angry with your friends,” Ava said.

He snorted. “You’re assuming I have any.”

Ava narrowed her eyes. Jack saw when she turned the lighter that her nails matched her lips, both kissed with false blood. She blew smoke out through her nose. “I can be very persuasive.”

Jack looked her up and down obviously, taking in the breasts pushing at the sweater, the rear bumper that some would consider generous, but he considered fully serviceable. “I’ll just bet you can, sweetheart.”

“Do you ever pull yourself out of the gutter?” she demanded. Her brown gaze flashed daggers at him.

“No,” Jack said, helping himself to one of the fags. When he reached for the lighter, Ava’s hand shot out like an arrow off a longbow and closed on his wrist before he could touch it. “I rather like my gutter,” Jack said softly, meeting those melting eyes. “I know all of the rats that live in it.”

“I can give you money,” Ava said. “I can give you anything you want. I need someone who won’t fuck up, someone who’ll do a sensitive task for me.”

Jack got up at that. “Sorry, luv. I’m not a hire car.”

“Wait,” Ava said. “Don’t you even want to hear my terms?” She leaned forward, a move that told Jack he very much wanted to hear her terms.

“I’m not an idiot, Ava,” he said. “It’s going to take more than a smile and a flash of the goods. I’m nobody’s rent boy.”

Rich came to the curtain and jerked his head, Aren’t we going yet?

Ava trailed her finger down Jack’s arm, past the line of razor cuts, road map to the twin cigarette burns on his wrist. “Been meaning to get a new tattoo,” Jack said. He pulled his arm away.

“I’ll make you a very good deal,” Ava said. “For a very easy job. I promise.”

“Demons deal in promises,” Jack told her. “I don’t like deals. In my experience, somebody always ends up fucked.”

Ava stood. She was taller than Jack had imagined, tall enough to look him in the eye. “Funny you should mention demons.” Her mouth curled, a little more blue smoke escaping.

“Not much about those buggers that calls forth a laugh,” Jack said. Ava grinned at him—sly, and full of secrets, like an old fortune teller.

“Despite that, demons are exactly why I need your help.”

Ava took them to a pub, a hole in the ground in a basement suite where water dripped from exposed pipes and you could smell the bog no matter where you sat.

Dix grunted as a droplet of condensation splashed into his pint. “You take us to the nicest places.”

Gavin was sitting ramrod-straight, trying to avoid touching anything in the pub, including his glass. Rich was in the van, sulking.

Ava tilted her head. “Not to your liking, Gavin?”

“I’m going to get a disease, I know it,” he muttered, and sunk into his army jacket up to the chin.

“Give us some privacy, lads,” said Jack. “Won’t be a moment to straighten this out.”

Dix hit Gavin in the shoulder. “Come on, you great pair of girl’s knickers. I fancy a smoke.”

They left, and Ava let the door shut against the cool past-midnight air before she spoke. “You haven’t tried to exorcise me, so you must have dealt with demon problems before.”

“No,” Jack said. “Haven’t tried because it wouldn’t do any bloody good. You’re as human as they come, luv. The flesh is weak, through and through.”

“You don’t know that.” Ava didn’t have a drink, just a smug grin. Jack was reminded of a fat and well-groomed black moggy.

“You stay around the Black long enough, you learn to tell,” Jack said. “Not knowing for sure can mean your skin. Your soul.”

It was a pat excuse, a weak one at that, but Jack rubbed his forehead and gave Ava a wan smile. It was better than admitting to possessing the sight. Psychics were freaks, deranged and babbling at you in the entrance to the tube station. Mages, by comparison, were pillars of society.

By comparison.

Ava’s aura furled back from her, red shot through with jet, like a solar storm or a sunrise that sailors would abjure. There was something dark riding with her, something curled on her shoulder to be sure, but she didn’t make Jack dizzy as a two-day bender just to look at her. Definitely human.

“Fine, maybe I am,” she said. “But my … problem isn’t. I guarantee you she’s as demon as they come.”

“Name,” Jack said, draining his pint to the dregs. He knew what Lawrence would say—Fuck off you crazy bird. But Lawrence wasn’t around, and Ava was pretty.

Demons aside, the night could be going in worse directions.

“You think I know the true name of a demon?” Ava snorted. “We flesh-puppets aren’t privy to that sort of information.”

“You’d be surprised what people cough up when they’re dying. Desperate. Pick your D-word.” Jack pushed his glass at Ava. “Another, luv, and get me a plate of food, if this place has any that won’t land me with botulism. If we’re going to talk about demons, I’m going to need something to eat.”

Her face glowed. “So you’ll do it.”

“Did I say I would?” Jack said. “Americans. So quick to jump their little six-guns. Get me another pint and order me a fry-up and we’ll discuss it.”

Ava narrowed her eyes. “Why? You were going to say no before.”

She could read him well. Jack remembered that for the future, when he had the sneaking suspicion it would bite him in the arse. “You interest me.” There, frank and open. “Not many humans deal with demons. Fewer call them a ‘problem.’ Must have a pisser of a story behind that.”

Ava pushed back her chair and went up to the bar, passing the bartender a wad of notes. He grumbled, but went in back and turned on the grill.

Jack watched her, pulling a fag out of the air and touching his finger to the end. A moment before sweet, blessed tar filled his lungs. He should say no to Ava. Say no and walk away before he heard anything that would get a demonic boot in his arse, or outright killed in the street. Mages already had a short enough lifespan in the scheme of the Black, the harsh and gleaming world of magic they and a host of nastier creatures inhabited. Mages were forever damned to playing both sides, standing in the Black and the mundane, belonging to neither.

Just say no. Jack snickered at himself. Here he was, as if he were fourteen again, seeing ghosts and scared of the dark, and not a man who survived, who walked in and out of light and shadow like passing under a bridge.

The good: Ava meant money, a change from hours on the road, nights in clubs that smelled like piss and lager, kips in places that smelled worse.

The bad: he could end up in a backstreet with his heart torn out. Death in bloody Scotland.

Jack liked music, liked the life. He liked fronting the Bastards and having time with people who weren’t aware of the Black any more than your average housewife.

But he admitted he liked the prospect of meeting Ava’s demon even more.

“It’s simple, really,” Ava said. “I just need you to get me into the demon’s city.”

They were walking through narrow streets watched over by silent shops and terrace flats. Jack had convinced Rich, Dix, and Gavin to get bunks in a hostel. Rich complained, but Jack paid. Tomorrow they’d go back to England and he’d be here. But if it went sour tonight, Jack liked the idea that he wasn’t alone.

He took a forkful of eggs from the takeaway container in his hand and chewed before he answered. “Never simple. Not with demons. Especially the type that have their own cities.”

“What’s your problem with demons?” Ava’s heels made a sharp heartbeat on the pavement.

“What’s your romance with them?” Jack said. The fry-up tasted of year-old grease and stale ingredients, but he was starving and Ava’d paid.

“Demons and I go back a long way, and I don’t have any illusions about them,” Ava said. “They took away someone I cared very much about. Let’s leave it at that.”

“What sort of deal did you make to get ’em back, then?” Jack glanced at her as he licked bacon grease off his fingers.

Ava rounded on him. “I didn’t make a deal. My soul is my own.”

“Ain’t that a fucking bit of poetry,” Jack snorted.

Ava took his container away and tossed it into a passing bin, then looped her arm through his.

“Aren’t you curious? To know what type of girl I am?”

“I already know,” Jack said. “Dangerous. Dangerous to a bloke like me.”

“Look. I need to speak with a particular demon at a particular time, and I’m not welcome. I need a guide who knows the Black and has neutral associations with the demon contingent. That’s where you begin and end. Sound dangerous? In the least?”

“I didn’t say the job was dangerous, luv,” Jack said. “Said you were dangerous.”

Ava stopped him, with a hand on his chest, and pressed two fingers against his lips. “Take the job and you’ll see I’m a pussycat.”

She was warm, much warmer than the air around them. Jack curled his fingers around hers. “As long as this demon of yours will keep until morning.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Morning will be fine.”

Her skin was warm, and she smelled like heat and smoke. She tasted like magic burning.

Ava pushed him against the brick wall, the rough mortar scraping Jack’s neck. Her fingers closed over the spot and her other hand tugged his belt, heavy with nail heads, free.

Jack pushed under her sweater, the cold of the night and the heat of her skin combustible. He let her pull his head down, bruise her mouth against his and smiled around them at her gasp as his cold fingers trailed up her back.

Ava jerked his fly free, her hand freeing his cock from the confines of his jeans.

Jack tugged back against the hand on his neck. “You know I would have done the job without the favors, luv.”

Ava kissed him again, biting his bottom lip before she let go and slid down his chest to waist level. “Shut up, Jack. That’s not why.”

Jack decided arguing any further would be pure idiocy. Her lips pressed down on him, and Jack’s head snapped back against the brick, fingers knotting in the dark corn silk of her hair.

Her tongue, rough and insistent, stroked and curled around him, and Jack’s throat caught, the only sound that escaped a groan as Ava moved.

He watched her head bob fore and back, hair gleaming under the streetlamps, each stroke of her mouth hotter and firmer and harder to resist than the last. Jack rolled his eyes upwards, to the rusted terraces and swaybacked rooflines of the mews.

Ava’s tongue trailed along his underside, curled and sucked like she was savoring something sweet, and Jack shut his eyes, breath scraped from his throat. He put a hand on Ava’s head, fingers tangling in her hair, trying to beg her to slow down, though he doubted he could actually speak. Ava didn’t take his message, more insistent with every stroke, and Jack swore he could feel her grinning.

Her free hand hooked fingers over the waistband of his jeans, pads stroking against his hipbone, and it was that small, oddly intimate gesture that pushed Jack over the edge. He pushed his hips forward, and Ava let out a mewl as she allowed it, sticky lip gloss and spit and her frantic, hungry movement combining so that Jack let out a shout. “Fuck!”

Ava raised her eyes, alight with mischief. She sat back on her heels, tucked her hair behind her ear, and stood. She traced the crescent of her lower lip with her thumb. “Serviceable, I take it?”

Jack started to laugh as he buttoned himself up. “You know exactly what that was, you wicked tease.”

Her mouth quirked up. “I do indeed.” She slid a hand into his. “Come on, Winter. Let’s get you to bed.”

When he woke up, in the hostel bed on a mattress that barely deserved the title, the sun was just a possibility, a little ghost-light and shadow beyond the broken window shade.

Ava was gone, her clothes absent the floor and her heat vanished from the pillow next to him. Jack rolled out of the sheets and felt under the bed until he found his trousers and boots, and pulled them on.

The hostel was a Victorian pile, and there was a terrace, too small to really stand on but big enough to smoke a fag. Jack caught the eye of the mirror and ran a hand through his hair to make it stand up.

Just pink around the edges, the sky glowed, that unearthly glow that made normal people stay indoors. Jack lit up and blew smoke toward the heavens. Two drags in, the doorknob turned, creaking like dead bones in the old house.

“That was fast,” Jack said. “But you didn’t need to freshen up for me, luv. I rather liked you filthy.” Hearing no reply, he half-turned. “Ava?”

A great weight hit him from behind—hands, Jack realized, massive hands—and bounced his skull off the doorjamb before taking him to the floor. A voice curled forth, over the ringing in his skull, like a tendril of smoke through the air. “Hold his arms, Barney.”

Jack’s face pressed into the musty Persian rug, and Barney planted a knee in his kidneys. Jack grunted. “Love you too, darling.”

“Shut up,” Barney intoned.

“Well,” the voice said. Scots, the thick, expansive brogue that made tourists and Americans mistake the city of Edinburgh as friendly. “Jack Winter, is it?”

A toe reached under Jack’s chin, lifted his face. The shoe was shiny snakeskin, emerald green dotted with black. The owner of the foot in the shoe reeked of burnt paper, the grand mal scent of demons.

“It’s your fucking mum, is what it is,” Jack snarled. He had a hangover, too much beer and sex, and too little sleep, and his mood in the mornings was uncharitable on any day.

“Just listen,” said the voice of the shoe. Jack rolled his eyes up and saw a young git, angelic fat baby face, blond hair long enough to be fashionable in 1987 but no later, and a loud white suit that screamed gangster.

“You want me to listen, have your villain here leave off feeling me up. My gate don’t swing that way, son.”

Barney bashed Jack’s nose into the carpet for his trouble. Bright Lad snapped his fingers. “Barney! That’s quite enough. I’m sure Mr. Winter agrees there’s no need for violence.”

“Mr. Winter is going to shove your blond gob straight up your arse if you don’t let him go,” Jack grunted.

“Senseless altercations will only hurt you, Mr. Winter. Now, do I have your guarantee as a gentleman that you’ll refrain from any antics if I let you up?”

Jack began to laugh, shaking the weight of Barney on his back. “Someone told you I was a fucking gentleman? You should pay him, mate, because that’s a hell of a story.”

“If you’re not going to cooperate,” Bright Lad said, “I do have other ways of keeping you compliant.”

Jack sighed. “Just let me up. This carpet smells like piss.”

Barney retreated, and Jack climbed to his feet, rubbing his forehead in a futile attempt to ease the throbbing. “Now tell me why you broke in here before I get all sorts of cranky fuck and do you in on the spot.”

“That would be ill-advised, Mr. Winter,” Bright Lad cooed. “Humans against demons tend to end in very small pieces.”

“Little ’uns,” Barney agreed, like lorries colliding. “Bite-sized.”

Opening his sight just a little, Jack took another look at Bright Lad. White hair in a sharp point over his forehead, teeth even sharper, a lipless mouth, and great, screaming black holes for eyes. You could fall into those eyes, be torn apart by the knives in his empty gaze …

Jack shook his head and passed a hand over his eyes. The screaming faded.

“Now that you’ve ascertained that I am, in fact, what I say I am,” said Bright Lad, “I have a simple message for you.”

“Hardly seems fair,” Jack said. “You seem to know all about me, Tony, and I don’t even know your name.”

Bright Lad cocked his head. “Tony?”

“Montana. The suit? It’s a bit over the top, mate.”

The demon pursed his lips. “My name is Nazaraphael, Jack Winter. Now may I state my business?”

Jack picked up his leather coat, the liberty spikes pressing into his palm, reassuringly flesh and blood. He rattled around in the pockets until he found a bottle of rotgut whiskey that still had a mouthful left. He sat on the bed and swallowed it down. “Go right on ahead, Francis.”

“Stay away from the woman you call Ava,” said Nazaraphael. “Stay away from the underground. Leave Edinburgh today and don’t come back. She’s bringing more trouble on your head than you could imagine.”

“Let me guess.” Jack regretfully tossed the bottle at the bin. “If I don’t, you’ll do unspeakable things to my person and soul?”

“If you don’t, you won’t need my ministrations to regret your decision,” said Nazaraphael. “You have no friends in this city, Mr. Winter. Make the right choice.” He snapped his long fingers. “Come along, Barney.”

Barney snarled at Jack as he passed. Jack caught a flash of black and red skin, muscle, chains anchored by hooks in weeping flesh. A berserker. He’d have to watch that one. Whatever magic Nazaraphael was using to control his attack dog, it wasn’t enough.

Ava came back a few minutes after the demons had left. “What’s wrong, lover?” she said, handing him a paper mug from Lavazza. “You look like a man who’s just realized he’s playing The Crying Game. I’m all woman, FYI.” Low laughter, like velvet rubbing on skin. “But I think you’ve found that out.”

Jack set the coffee aside. “I just had a visit from a right nasty member of Hell’s Fashion Victims and his mate.” He narrowed his eyes at Ava and she backed up a step, unconsciously. When the magic was up, Jack could feel the witch-fire writhing behind his gaze, giving it a glow. It was a nice trick, for scaring the piss out of someone.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with me.” She came and straddled Jack’s lap, breath warming a spot on his neck. “Maybe you looked at him funny.”

Jack pulled back, far as the yoke of her arms would allow. “How about you put aside the femme fatale act, and you tell me the truth?” he said.

Ava licked her lips. “Or what?”

“Or I might take it into my head you’re not as friendly as you first appeared, darling. And that might upset me greatly. What’s the man say? You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “I’m not crazy about you right now, either. This inquisitive streak is less than cute.”

“You like them dumb, eh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Jack ducked out from under her arms, and waited until Ava climbed off his lap. Reluctant as he was to lose the firm weight of her against his fly, the expression in her eyes was frozen over, cold.

“You’re not just human, are you?” he said.

She sighed. “You weren’t supposed to ask questions. They told me you’d do it for money and a quick roll. No questions.”

“They were misinformed,” Jack said. He watched Ava’s aura unfold as she got up and paced. It was almost entirely red now, and there was a hot, hard sort of magic flowing from her that he’d mistaken for lust the previous night.

To be fair, Jack allowed, he probably would have pegged her correctly if he hadn’t been drunk off his arse.

“What are you?” he asked softly.

Ava threw his shredded T-shirt at him. “Put your clothes on. It’s better to talk in the open.”

“Nazaraphael has spies everywhere,” Ava explained when they were walking in the Prince Street Gardens, the sleeping bums and early joggers the only company.

“So you’ve had the displeasure,” said Jack. He smoked, and the cloud of blue met the mist of the rising sun and mingled, interchangeable.

“Nazaraphael is the direct competition of Areshko, the demon I’m trying to speak with.” Ava hunched her shoulders. “He’s bad news, like we say across the pond.”

“I sort of figured that bit out, him being a great bloody demon and breaking into me room and all.”

“No, he’s more than that.” Ava rubbed her hands together, her sweater little help against the bite of the air. After a minute, Jack pulled off his coat and gave it to her, pulling the ambient pale green magic of the park around him and warming it so he wouldn’t shiver.

“Thanks.” She wrapped the battered thing around her, sinking into it. “There are demons in Edinburgh that don’t agree with the way Nazaraphael does things. Areshko is one of them.” They stopped at a copse of bushes and Ava looked over her shoulder. There was just a bum wrapped in newspapers, mumbling to himself. Jack saw the silvery flash of a spirit hanging over his shoulder, talking back.

There’s your future, Winter. Jack blinked the spirit out of his view. It used to be easy to shut them out. Lately, it was like someone had set an amplifier next to his head and cranked every knob to ten.

“You know, this cryptic bullshit might fly with the bell, book, and candle ponces, but not with me,” Jack said. “Still haven’t explained what your stake in this is and who you are.”

“I’m me,” said Ava. “I didn’t lie about that. What I am …” She chewed on her lip, making it look bruised, kissed.

“If you say ‘It’s complicated,’ I’ll fetch you a smack,” Jack warned. “Crow help me.”

“I’m a demon hunter.” Ava stopped and stared at him, daring him to react badly. Jack laughed instead.

“What, like you run about with a sword and a little cross, exorcising for the greater good? Americans have some bloody strange hobbies, don’t they?”

“I’m dead serious,” Ava said. “Nazaraphael is a bastard, but Areshko is worse. I had a friend, Daniel. She killed him and picked his bones clean.”

“You think you’re the only one in the whole of the Black had a mate come to a bad end?” Jack snorted smoke from his nose.

“He loved me.” Ava’s face went hot, blossoms of blood coloring her pale cheeks. “The only way I’m getting close enough to take her out is on the arm of someone like you. I’m murdering the demon who murdered my friend, Jack. Now you’ve got the whole truth.”

“And I’m rapidly walking the other way, luv,” Jack said, turning to do just that. “You think I’m going to lead a fox into a birdhouse and have any sort of life expectancy after you’ve slung your weight around?” He shook his head. “Mages live because we’re useful, because neither side claims us. Once I throw me lot, I might as well throw me person off a car park.” He snatched for his leather. “Give the jacket back.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Ava’s voice rang over his shoulder, sharper than the cold air, after he’d gone a few yards.

Jack flipped two fingers at her over his shoulder and kept walking.

“STOP!”

The spell unfolded and spread its fingers over him, loops and shackles of magic like red-hot iron, and Jack stopped with a gasp as every bit of his body lit up with flame. He couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and tasted ash in his mouth.

Ava walked around to his front and shook her head. “That was just my safety, but you’re as stubborn as they say.”

“What …” Jack felt sweat work down his temples, his spine, and the magic was consuming him, reaching down to his core as the spell writhed on his skin. He wanted to grab Ava, push her skirt aside, tear at the lace tops of her stockings, and lose himself in her until he was spent. The desire was wrenching, consuming. “What did you do?” he managed.

“Relax,” Ava soothed. “It’s a geas.”

Jack felt the tendons in his neck twitch, as he fought against the spell that kept him rooted, the desire that clenched at his core. “You didn’t cast a geas on me. You didn’t do any magic.”

“I did,” Ava said. Her lips twitched. “Sex magic.”

Jack’s heart plummeted to the vicinity of his boots. “Fuck off. No one practices that in this age.”

Ava trailed her finger from his jaw down his neck and across his chest, skin-on-skin contact through the holes in his shirt. Jack let out an involuntary moan, his cock jumping painfully against his fly.

“Don’t they?” Ava purred. “Funny. This little trick usually works pretty well.”

“You can’t …” Jack tried to fight, pushing against the great pulsing loops of the geas with his own talent, but all that he could see was a great red blur of lust and compulsion that made his heart hammer a hole through his chest.

“I just did.” Ava snapped her fingers. “Enough.”

The geas retreated and Jack collapsed, his muscles aching like he’d come through a fever and gotten seven colors of shit kicked out of him in the bargain.

“Until my business with Areshko is done, consider yourself my employee,” Ava said. “And if you cooperate, you won’t feel that again. I’d much rather have you on my side than force you there.”

“You’d better pray you can run far and fast enough when I slip your leash, you trixy wight,” Jack panted. He managed to get up, soaked in sweat and still horny as a sailor on his first hour of leave. “Because if I catch hold of you … I’m going to make you sorry you clapped eyes on me.”

“Talk, talk, talk,” Ava said. “Believe me, Jack, talking is not your strong suit.” She leaned and kissed him, and it quenched a little of the ache inside him. Jack felt a sort of filthy miasma slither over the exchange, like something glimpsed down a side alley in a bad neighborhood.

She had her hooks in him. He hadn’t seen the knife behind her back, and now he was fucked.

“Come on,” Ava said, and the geas tugged him. The worst part was, he didn’t entirely want to disobey.

“I figured it out when I was around fourteen.” Now that she had him on a tether, Ava was positively chatty. They left the gardens and she hailed a cab. “Train station, please. Thanks.” She put her hand on Jack’s knee, and he shrugged her off.

“Oh, don’t be mad at me.” Ava sighed. “Live long enough and you’re bound to run into someone smarter than you. It’ll happen to me, too. Just remember that it was really incredible, wall-shaking sex that got you into this mess.”

“Trust me,” Jack said with a grimace. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Like I was saying”—Ava leaned her forehead against the window, as the early morning furled by the misted windows of the cab—“I figured it out when this friend of my father’s came after me. He did what he did, but afterwards …” Her lip curled back. “Afterwards he was all mine. They found him hanging from his balcony.”

“Thrilled as I am that you’re working out your daddy issues with me,” Jack said, “what do you expect me to do, hurl fireballs at whoever you aim me toward?”

Ava snorted. “I’ll take care of Areshko. You just stand there and look pretty.”

“I don’t suppose reiterating that you’ll literally be putting a stopwatch on my life expectancy if you make me do this will sway that icy heart, my princess?” Jack shifted, to be as far away from her as he could.

“No.” Ava slid over, closed the distance, started nibbling at his neck. “Sorry. I’ll try to make it up to you.”

He wanted to shove her off, tell her to keep her filthy magic paws off him, but it felt … It felt like a hunger that he’d never known he possessed was finally being sated. Jack moaned and leaned into her.

“Train station,” said the driver, clearly glad to have the sex-crazed American and her fling out of his cab. Ava paid and took his hand.

“I have to put a few things together before we make this attempt. I suggest you get your affairs in order and tell your band to go home before Nazaraphael decides to use them as leverage,” She stepped away from him. “And if you get an idea to break the geas, or run … don’t. I’ll find you. And no matter how cute you are, I won’t be pleasant when I do. Clear enough for you, Jack?”

“Crystal,” said Jack. He lit a fag and sucked on it. If Ava didn’t get him, Nazaraphael would. Might as well poison his lungs while he had lungs to poison.

“Good boy.” Ava blew him a kiss. “Meet me right here at noon.”

Jack returned her smile with a snakelike grin of his own. “You’re not getting out of this free and easy. Don’t think you are.”

“That sounds like a promise.” Ava waggled her fingers at him. “Noon. Don’t be late.”

Jack found a pub. It was the natural thing to do when you were fucked, and English.

He stared at his pint, the bubbles slowly working their way from bottom to top.

Ava had him over a barrel. Even if Jack could assemble the workings to break a geas in a few hours, he wasn’t sure it would work, whether it would snap back and kill him outright. Dying of lust wasn’t the worst way to kick it, but it wasn’t on his top ten list, either.

Damn the bitch. She’d zeroed in on his weakness and his arrogance, that he was Jack fucking Winter, untouchable, and she’d slipped inside his armor as neatly as a serpent. Now she wanted him to be party to the assassination of a demon.

“Not bloody likely,” Jack said to his pint, and drained half of it in a go. Ava wanted his help badly, that much was plain, and equally plain was that she wasn’t giving him the whole story, playing the cryptic woman who comes out of the rain into the private dick’s office, asking for help, poison on her red lips. Playing it to the hilt.

Jack drank the rest of his pint and didn’t taste it, turned over the question some more. Could he afford to believe Ava was simply an arrogant sorcerer with an inflated sense of her own superiority on a half-cocked revenge drive? That she couldn’t dent Areshko, this boogeyman demon?

Devious as the bint had shown herself to be, Jack doubted he’d get off that easily.

A fresh pint banged on the wood in front of him. Rich, Gavin, and Dix joined the table, drinks in hand. “Now that you’ve kept us here far past the freshness date, what’re you banging on about staying?” Rich demanded.

“Yeah,” said Gavin. “We’ve got a gig Thursday, mate. Sort of need our lead singer. I can’t swap—I already took the personal day.” Gavin worked in a chain record store on Oxford Street, the sort that made you wear a colored shirt and a name badge. Jack and Dix gave him endless shit about it.

“That girl in the Crucifixion Club,” Jack said. “She’s got a gig for me. Just me.”

“Fuck off, you’re not that good. Or handsome.” Rich took an irritated sip of his beer.

“Not a Bastards gig, you git. The other sort.”

Dix just nodded gravely. Gavin chewed a hangnail, and Rich rolled his eyes. “Not more of your spooks and specters shite, Winter. Those Goths always pay in bent pennies and mournful stares. We need you in London. For real work.”

“I’m serious as a tombstone,” Jack said. “And I’m also staying. You can whinge about it all you want. Get it out of your system. Cry if you have to.”

Dix grunted. “Bad idea, this.”

Rich pushed back from the table. “He’s right. And if you feel that it’s a bright one, you can bugger yourself sideways with a lager bottle. I’m going back to London. Shall we audition a new singer tomorrow, or after we cancel our engagement and can’t pay the electric or the phone?”

Gavin watched him go, and then sighed. “I can’t disagree with him, Jack. I’ve got my job, and my mum isn’t well … This rock star shite doesn’t fly in my life as it is.”

Jack dropped his fist down. All of the glasses jumped. “Fine. Go skip on back to London in your pinafore, you great girl. Not like I could expect a little backup from my friends.”

Gavin pursed his lips. “No need to be that way, Jack …”

“You’ve made yourself clear,” Jack said. “Go on, get lost. And tell Rich he can use that lager bottle on himself, if he’s so keen.”

Dix nudged him before the tiff with Gavin could dissolve into a real John-and-Yoko slugfest. “Ey. That your bird?”

Ava stepped in, pausing to unwind a crimson scarf from her sausage-curled hair. There was a light mist on the gray day, and droplets of moisture gleamed on her skin.

She glided over to the table, sliding into Rich’s empty stool and running her fingers down Jack’s arm, over the Celtic knot tattooed on his bicep—the triple insignia, done in plain blue ink, by hand, signifying that he’d been trained in magic by the Fiach Dubh. Jack had never met a villain yet on either side of the Black who was impressed by the mark.

“You weren’t where I told you to be. Aren’t you going to give me a kiss hello?” Ava inquired. Dix raised his eyebrows an inch, the equivalent of shouting, for most. Gavin just rolled his eyes.

“Sorry, luv, but you’re not very popular among my mates at the moment,” Jack told her. Ava pressed her lips to his cheek. Jack felt the hot wax and wet of her lipstick mark his skin sure as the tattoo.

“Hello,” she said. “And hello to you, Jack’s mates. What’s a girl have to do to get in your graces?”

“Scratch,” said Dix. “Or tits.”

“A man of few words.” Ava smiled, just this side of mockery. “I’m entranced.”

“They were just buggering off back to London,” Jack said. “I guess I’m at your service, milady.”

Ava smiled, all teeth. “You bet your ass you are.” She turned to Gavin and Dix. “Nice meeting you. Run along. Drive safely.”

“Go fuck yourself, slag,” Gavin said sweetly. “Our mate may be fooled by you, but I know cheap damaged goods when I see them.”

“My, my,” Ava said. “You’ve got some grit behind that limp wrist, boy.”

Jack turned a glare on her. “Leave them out of this or I swear I’ll slit me own throat with the cutlery before I go another step with you.”

Ava and Gavin traded simmering glares for a moment, before Gavin pushed his chair back with a shriek. “Just don’t come crying to me when you get fucked, Winter.”

“Don’t you worry.” Ava’s hand slid over the black denim up Jack’s thigh and into coastal waters. Jack tightened his jaw and cast her a pained look. “He’s in good hands.”

Jack briefly saw stars under her ministrations as the sex magic ran fingers and tendrils of sweetly scented power over his face. “Gavin,” he ground out, “stop being a nonce. I’m fine.”

Dix shrugged. “No, you’re not.” He scraped back his stool and pulled on his shredded denim jacket. “Happy trails, mate.” They left, and Jack squeezed his eyes shut. The Bastards barely tolerated the other half of his existence as it was. And if Jack was honest, he liked the easy time they had making the music come together. Ava had burned all that down with a few words, a touch.

She stopped her hand moving and stood up. She was wearing a black satin pencil skirt now, and a red cardigan with cherries for buttons. Her hair was pinned back in a waterfall of curls. She looked like the pouty-lipped American birds that Jack’s uncle Ned had collected on the walls of his locksmith shop in Manchester. Uncle Ned had been a good bloke for the few years that Jack knew him before his liver said Bugger this and gave out under an onslaught of off-license vodka.

“Let’s go,” Ava said. “With friends like those …”

“If you had any friends,” Jack said, following her as the geas pulled on him like a sharp hook through the flesh of his spirit, “you wouldn’t say that.”

“Look who’s got a mouth on him,” Ava said. She gave his arse a squeeze. “Cheer up, Jack. I’m very good company, if you let me be.”

“Need the loo,” he said. “I won’t be a minute, mistress.”

Ava’s mouth turned down at the sardonic tone. “Jack, I told you this wasn’t how I wanted things.”

“And yet you don’t seem to be shedding any tears over having your very own mage in sexual bondage.” Jack stepped away from her, experimentally, and she let him. None of the white-hot need to rip her blouse open and savage her, teach her the wrongness of making a man like him her pet, reared its head.

“Go pee,” Ava said, an impatient click of her pump heels on the pub floor. “We don’t have all day.”

Jack turned his back to her, and she let him walk. He knew the part of himself that responded to her geas. It usually manifested as temper, or as the row of paper-thin white scars on his forearms, rather than a savagery toward a woman.

But Ava was no usual woman, and Jack didn’t have perfect control.

He locked himself in the bog and pulled the frayed light chain. Shadows danced and settled into all of the corners. Jack splashed rusty water on his face and dried off on the tail of his shirt.

Even though she’d shown herself to be colder than stone, he could almost fancy Ava. She had balls, and she wasn’t afraid, of him or the demon. Not to mention that she was a regular talent in the sack.

Which had gotten him into this, hadn’t it?

A snuffling from the corner broke Jack’s concentration, on a cracked mirror hung crooked over the basin. Cold ran up and down his neck, like sleet melting on his skin.

“Please …” A whisper came from all directions, higher than a dog whistle, and skated across Jack’s skull, and he flinched. He didn’t want to turn and see. He never truly wanted to see, and never had, but he always looked, eventually.

The ghosts wouldn’t allow otherwise.

“Please,” the ghost snuffled. He was a sad scrap of spirit, a skin-and-bones teenage boy in life with raggedy hair in his eyes. A crooked star, drawn around the left with eye pencil, scrubbed off as his tears slid down his glitter-pocked cheeks. His silk shirt was open to the waist, and his pants were worn away at the knees. “Please, don’t tell them where I am,” he begged Jack, worrying a glass vial around his neck.

Jack pressed his thumb between his eyes, the pounding inside his skull threatening to send him to his knees. The sight took everything away, sound and sensation—everything except the sucking, screaming void where spirits lived.

“Fuck off,” he told the ghost. “I can’t help you.”

“Can’t help me,” the ghost singsonged. “Can’t help yourself.”

“Oi, shut it,” Jack warned. “I don’t need your second-rate prophesizing.”

“They found me.” The ghost sighed. “They kicked me and hit my skull against the sink. They beat my queer face in.”

“And I’m sorry,” Jack gritted as warm blood worked its way out of his nose. Ghosts always wanted help. Always wanted to let go and never could. And the harder they fought to be seen, the more it hurt.

“Not sorry,” the ghost whispered. “Not like you will be.” The boy jerked up straight, his coke vial bouncing against his wasted chest, rife with bruises from the beating that had ended him on the scarred tile floor. “Turn back, Jack Winter. The demon city waits for you like the open mouth of the beast, and will swallow you.”

Jack smeared the blood away from his face. “That’s not a ghost talking.”

The boy’s eyes shone, white as headlamps in a fog. “Leave Edinburgh, Jack Winter. Before you go down under the ground. Forever.”

“Bugger off, Nazaraphael,” Jack said wearily. He was upright, barely, by grace of clutching the sink basin. “Leave that poor spirit be.”

“It’s a fair warning, mage, and the last you’ll get,” the boy-ghost growled, before the glow died from his eyes and he went back to sobbing.

Jack shut his eyes and willed to see only a filthy pub loo when he opened them. The sight burned him up from the inside when it truly took hold, made him sick and dizzy as a lifetime of hangovers. It never slept, never stopped.

But finally, it retreated enough for Jack to stumble back into the pub and take hold of Ava. She blinked at him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he grumbled. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”

“You don’t look good … Are you bleeding?” Ava demanded.

Jack squeezed her arm hard enough to feel the bone under the skin. “Sodding walk. I need fresh air.”

Ava went silent, and after a time, Jack’s vision cleared and his heart stopped hammering and the earth stopped churning under him. Ava smiled, leaning her head against his shoulder.

“Better now?”

Jack swiped greasy sweat from his forehead. “Still a bit sick. No one really wants a demon manifesting to them in the bog.”

Ava went on tiptoe and licked his ear. “Believe me, after this is over … I’ll make you forget all about big bad Nazaraphael.” She turned and led Jack into the train station, the slow sway of her hips like the passage of a ship.

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets and looked anywhere but her admittedly pristine rear bumper. On the opposite side of the street, shadows moved in concert, as if the sun were setting in cadence with his footsteps.

Trackers. Maybe ghosts, maybe demons. Certainly employed by that white-suited ponce Nazaraphael. Jack flipped two fingers at the shadows and turned into the cavernous innards of the train station, feeling like a man walking the last mile to his death.

Ava stopped on the train platform like a flickering spirit from a movie about love, and loss, and wartime, done up in black and white.

Jack found a fag, lit it with his finger, and wrinkled his nose. “Stinks down here.”

Ava cast a nervous look back over her shoulder, and Jack didn’t doubt her instincts. This was a good place for an ambush. Not from ghosts or the Fae—too much iron—but demons—or fuck it, humans—could be three feet from him, tucked back in the dark places, and he’d never see it coming.

Jack muttered under his breath, felt the ambient magic of the Black pluck at him, and sent a small tendril outward, searching, feeding back. Ava was a hot spot, her humanity and the spell that bound them, but otherwise the tunnel was blank and cool, devoid of feeling.

Lots of people could keep themselves under wraps against an inelegant finger of mage spellcasting. Every demon could. Cold comfort was better than no comfort.

“We’re alone,” Ava said, and he coughed.

“No offense, luv, but I already got jumped by a great bloody demon wanker today and I’m not keen on a repeat. Not to mention that you, yourself, qualify as a hazard to me health.”

“Whatever makes you feel better, lover.” Ava jerked a thumb at the mouth of the tunnel, ringed with lamp-teeth and wires. “Come on. I’ll brief you on my plan on the way down.”

“Down where?” Jack asked, but Ava shook her head.

“Good things come to those who wait,” she teased.

Jack watched Ava duck under the barrier at the end of the platform and push free a small service door. It tugged at him, that primal urge not to stray from the campfire, but Jack hadn’t spent his life being part of the pack. He knew the things that lived outside the circle of light, knew them by name.

Because he knew, knew why ordinary people were afraid of the dark. And rightly so. He flicked his fag away and followed Ava. Nothing nasty leaped out at him, and the geas eased a bit, lessened the shrieking in his brain, if he stayed close. She’d probably planned it that way. Clever little bint.

They walked through a curved service tunnel with yellowed tiles cracked and leaking from the Blitz. Jack saw a little girl in a car coat, clutching a doll to her chest as she crouched against the wall. She flickered, one moment staring at the floor, the next at him. Black pools of eyes. Lips curled back from pointed teeth, hands sprouting claw-nails.

“Can’t help you, luv,” he said quietly. “No sense in rattling your chains at me, is there?”

Ava looked back when he stopped walking. “Problem?”

“Not in the least,” he said. The angry little ghost faded from existence as quickly as her life had been snuffed by the Luftwaffe. Jack brushed off the chill from his neck and walked on.

The tunnel was long, lit with bulbs in steel cages that flickered and fluttered like a spirit trapped under glass.

Ava’s hair gleamed like oil under the light. Jack ran his hand over his own peroxided bristles, felt dampness from the aboveground world clinging to his skin.

“How far are we going?” he said.

Ava smiled over her shoulder, teeth bright.

“As far as we need to.”

Jack’s hand flashed out and wrapped around her arm. “That’s not much of an answer, luv.”

Ava twisted, like a snake in his grasp, and Jack felt her small hand close at his throat and his head slam into the tile, sending grout and grime loose and clattering to the floor.

“I am being nice, Jack,” she whispered. Jack felt her breath, she was so close. “Don’t make me be naughty.”

“Are we having a lovers’ quarrel?” he rasped.

Ava’s lips trembled. “I am not screwing this up,” she said, her voice like steel. “I have waited too damn long for my shot at Areshko.”

“What’s your epic love with this Daniel bloke?” Jack said. “Areshko snatch his soul away before you could have the white wedding? He go rushing in to defend your honor? Or was he a stupid git, like all the others a demon kills, and you think you can make it not so by avenging him?”

“You shut your mouth,” Ava spat. There was something in her look, in her touch that sent a peculiar heat all through him. Not the heat of her magic, skin-on-skin, sweat and release. This was the kind of heat that warned a bloke that he was about to catch on fire.

“You haven’t told me anything close to a whole truth, and I haven’t pressed,” he said. “But when I can’t help you no matter how hard you push or how much you beg, remember you had the chance of help from the goodness of me fucking heart, and you chose to be cryptic.”

After an interminable second, her grip eased enough that he could breathe again. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “You had your chance.”

“And you are a bastard if I ever saw one,” Ava snapped. “With your lectures and your holier-than-thous.”

“Holier? Hardly.” Jack snorted. “I never had a problem with a lady taking the lead. It’s a bit sexy, really.”

Ava brushed her hands over the front of her skirt, like touching his skin had dirtied her, and moved on.

Jack was left to trail again, and wonder what the bloody hell she was lying to him about when she had no reason to keep secrets at all. She had the cards. Every last bloody one.

Ava stopped at a metal fire door, long rusted shut, the warnings that no one except employees of the city of Edinburgh were allowed beyond this point obscured with graffiti endorsing a variety of gangs, ethnic groups, and bands. PAKIS GO HOME warred with SKINHEADS FANCY BLACK COCKS and the eternal sentiment FUCK THATCHER.

“I’ll take a pass on that last,” Jack said.

Ava pressed on the door and there was a grumbling of wheels and gears from beyond the wall. The door swung back with a great tomb-creak that would have done Count Dracula—the Lugosi version, of course—proud.

Beyond was a flight of stairs, and the dank breath of underground. “Down here,” Ava said. “This is the fastest way to Catacomb City.”

“Isn’t that precious and twee. Catacomb City.” Jack let witchfire blossom around his palm, the blue glow lighting the stairway in sharp relief.

“A demon city, in the catacombs,” Ava said, her heels clicking on the damp concrete. There was moss, and rot, and water dripping invisibly. No one had come this way in a long while.

Jack itched for a fag as they descended. His wasn’t sight tweaking, like it had in the old railway tunnel, but there was something else here, some eidolon waiting in the dark that whispered and clawed at him from the Black.

The curving stairs and the geas made him stick so close to Ava that he was practically in her pocket, and she smiled back at him like they were on a lovers’ walk. Jack saw lamps clipped to the pipes overhead, so old they were just rust lace in great spreading patches. A utility tunnel, in its previous life. The ceiling jogged lower and he ducked, the very top of his hair flattening out against the slimy surface.

Ava turned back, her cheeks dimpling. “A little close, isn’t it?”

“It’s a bloody grave,” Jack said, bending over and flexing his palm. The flames of witchfire leaped higher, a wreath of slow-motion flame enclosing his hand, showing all the bones. Just ambient magic burning off in the world of the solid and real, but the effect usually kept people at a distance.

Ava sighed. “Put it back in your pants, Jack. Areshko’s buddies won’t be pleased if you come in with guns blazing.”

“Thought that was why you bloody tricked me into this,” Jack said.

“Yes, but we’re trying to make love, not war, if you can wrap your mind around that,” said Ava. “Until I’m ready, Areshko needs to think I’m one of hers.”

“What am I, then?” Jack regretfully let go of the slip of Black that allowed his witchfire to burn, and the light went out. It got colder, and he shivered in his leather.

“Look at that.” Ava smirked. “The bad nasty mage is afraid of the dark.”

“Anyone with sense is afraid of the dark,” Jack told her. He felt for his lighter and found instead a leftover glow stick from a music festival in Brighton—frightful new-wave synth-pop, lots of girls in baggy pants and flannel; all around, a wasted weekend.

Jack cracked the stick and alien green flared, making Ava blue-tinted where she walked beside him. His own flesh just went a little paler, ghost pale, and he could see all of his veins, the road map of the skin.

“So here’s how we work it,” Ava said, loud enough to carry along the length of the tunnel. The pipes petered out, and it was brick now, the mortar hollowed out and rats skipping in and out of gaps in the stone. A Victorian sewer, with the smell to match. The fetid river trickling through the dip in the floor splashed on Jack’s boots and promptly soaked his socks.

“Bloody hell. This Catacomb City better have plumbing, luv.”

“Don’t worry,” Ava said. “Your delicate sensibilities won’t be tested for long.”

“ ‘Delicate,’ hell. You can taste the air down here.” Jack’s feet squelched and echoed off the tunnel walls.

“I’m going to tell Areshko I want to make a deal with her.” Ava slipped her arm through Jack’s. “For something or other—I think best on the fly. When she brings me in to her private chamber to seal the bargain, I’m going to kill her.”

“Just another day as a demon hunter, yeah?” Jack muttered. “You can’t kill a demon, Ava.”

“Don’t start with me,” she said. “I’ve done it. Believe it or not, Jack, not everyone lives in fear of hellfire. Some of us have learned to fight, and if you cared a little bit more about your fellow mages and a little bit less about yourself—”

“You don’t finish that thought, if you know what’s good for you,” Jack snarled. His heartbeat overshadowed the sound of their steps. “You know nothing about me, Ava. Bloody skint.”

“And you don’t know me, either,” Ava said. “Demons don’t come out on top with me, Jack.”

“Let’s hope so,” Jack muttered.

Ava’s heart was pounding, those extraordinarily statuesque breasts rising and falling fast.

“You were trained by the crow monks,” she said. “I saw the ink and I know what it means. I was trained by a hunter who knew his shit. You should try a little trust with me, Jack.”

“Not a vice I make a habit of, trust,” Jack said. “I find it allows treacherous little bitches with sad eyes entirely too close.”

Ava rolled her eyes. “I like you, Winter, but this is getting …”

Something tickled across the back of Jack’s neck before he could snap back, cold and sharp like a scale, or a fingernail. He hushed Ava. “We’re not alone.”

Ava stiffened, and they both looked down the black mouth of the sewer tunnel. “Kill the light,” she said.

Jack shoved the glow stick into his pocket. He tried to burn a hole in the darkness, see through it, but it was only a weak white glow from up ahead.

“Shit,” Ava hissed, so quiet as to be just another breath. Jack heard a rustle as she crossed herself, a quick economical motion like cocking a shotgun. His own heart thumped against his bones.

The white glow grew, bobbing through the dense air of the tunnel, and the figure within it floated into view. A woman, or really a girl, her long nightgown stained with blood, black tears coursing down her cheeks, her arms, covered in cuts, outstretched in supplication.

The terrifying thing wasn’t the spirit. It was the fact that Ava saw her, too.

“What is it?” Ava asked. Her breath made a puff of cold as the temperature dropped around them. Frost grew on the bricks, feathers and fingers reaching out for Jack’s cheek.

“It’s a ghost,” Ava whispered to herself. “I’ve never seen a ghost—”

“Ghosts don’t bring the cold with them,” Jack said. “That isn’t a ghost.”

The girl locked eyes with him. They were black, like a spirit’s, but white flame danced in their depths.

She opened her mouth and let out a moan, and then, she was against Jack, her hands at his throat, freezing, burning with cold.

Jack slipped in the water and found himself flat for the second time that day, the thing howling and scratching at him. He felt it latch on to his magic, the part of him that lived, bright and burning, in his chest.

Sorcerers could leech your magic and Fae could drink it like nectar, but nothing could yank it from him like this, this pain that made him scream and snap his teeth together as a convulsion gripped him.

The girl’s hand was in his chest, in his heart. Jack forced his eyes open and looked into her howling face. Only one thing could turn the air cold and drink down human energy.

“Ava …” Jack gasped. “Ava, help me …”

Ava, her face a flat sheet of white, yanked a knife from her sweater pocket and flipped the blade open. “Get out of the way!” she shouted.

Jack struggled against the creature, feeling ice-chip nails digging into him, his blood freezing as it came in contact with the air.

“Move!” Ava shrieked, and Jack clawed at the thing, his fingers passing through the girl’s face, her shrieking mouth. “I’m bloody trying!”

Ava gritted her teeth, and flipped the knife in her palm to hold it blade first. She cocked it back and threw it. The blade passed through the howling, screeching girl and she wavered, trailing off like blood in water. Jack felt a sharp, short tug in his shoulder, and then pain, as hot as crematory fire, chased away the cold. The knife was in his flesh, and the ghost was shrieking and thrashing, pinned by the iron surely as a butterfly on a tray.

Jack reached into the Black and locked his hand around the ghost’s neck in turn. Blue fire blossomed. “That’s the end for you, luv,” he said, and pushed the girl off him. She was hungry, but Jack was desperate and bloodied, and his raw piece of magic blasted her off him and dissolved her into a thousand black strands of smoke.

Ava leaned down and pressed a hand over the wound. “Hold still. This will hurt.” She yanked the blade free without any warning, and Jack let out a yelp several octaves higher than he would have liked. Ava shook her head as she helped him up. “What the fuck,” she said, “was that?”

Jack accepted the silk handkerchief she handed him and pressed it over the knife wound, below his collar bone, but it still spread a dull, sick ache all through him, and his vision blurred. “A revenant,” he said. “A citizen of the City of the Dead. Bansidhe, black dogs, those sorts of things. Hungry dead things, looking for their next meal.”

“Is that … normal?” Ava picked up the blade from the ground, wiped it carefully on her arm, and folded it back in on itself.

“Iron destroys revenants.” Jack felt the bloody scratches on his neck. “Much as it buggers me to say it, you saved my life.”

Ava shrugged. “Of course I did. I need you, Jack. And I like you, a little.”

Jack popped the kinks out of his back from where he’d hit the brick. His shoulder was bleeding slowly, a steady leak that would do him serious harm if he didn’t get it stopped. He wadded the silk up tighter, shoving it under his shirt, hissing as the pressure sent fresh fingers of pain up and down his arm. “I suppose I can stand the sight of you, as well.”

“Touching. Let’s keep moving,” Ava said. “The city is much safer than these tunnels.”

“You’re wrong,” Jack said quietly, after they’d been walking for a time. “Revenants don’t just appear. Someone has to let them out of the City.”

“So?” Ava said. “Obviously, Nazaraphael has a problem with you being down here, with me.”

“So, demons don’t need revenants to do their work,” he said. “Nazaraphael has Barney, and a hundred others he could have sent if he really wanted us out.”

“We’re not the only humans down here,” Ava said. “Some kid must have been messing with necromancy.”

“Undoubtedly,” Jack said. His voice dripped ice, just as the revenant had.

“You can rot in Hell, Jack,” she said. “I’m not a liar.”

“Oh, you are,” Jack told her. “We all are, luv. What matters is the reason for the lie, the core of truth. Feel like telling me that much yet?”

Ava sighed. The sewer diverged in two, and she ducked down into a tunnel that was old enough to be of rough stone instead of brick, the floor packed earth. “We’re close,” she said. “I promise, Jack, this isn’t malice. I picked you out of practicality.”

“For both our sakes, darling, I hope you were telling me the truth just then.”

“Me too,” Ava murmured, slipping ahead into the dark.

The tunnels got so low that Jack banged his head unless he bent at the waist. He cursed when he left hair and blood behind. “I’m going to need a new head, we keep this up.”

“Might improve things,” Ava teased.

“Up yours,” Jack muttered, but the mood had softened as they wound deeper into the ground. Jack could be patient. He could wait until Ava slipped, and then he, in turn, would slip the geas and perhaps show her what he was about sans sex magic, when Ava wasn’t in control. He had a sneaking suspicion she’d enjoy herself. Crow knew it was better fun than skulking in manky tunnels.

His scratches still hurt, small fingers of flame on his neck and shoulders. The skin would go black in the next few days, the contact with something from the City of the Dead spreading small deaths of its own.

A set of stairs appeared, narrow and slick with moisture. “These aren’t any sewers,” Jack said.

“No,” Ava agreed. “These are the Catacombs. Not the tourist trap, but the real thing, lost to the city but not to the Black. Most people … humans, that is … don’t even know they exist.”

“And how, exactly, is it that you know?” Jack said.

Ava sniffed. “In my training, we do plenty of research. There are plague pits down here,” she said. “When the Black Death was dancing on bones, they walled up hundreds down here. Sealed them up alive.”

“Cheery.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck, his vision prickling like a thorny collar.

“Don’t worry,” Ava said. “I won’t let the boogeyman get you.” She patted the pocket of her sweater, where the knife lived.

“How does someone like you get into something like this?” Jack asked. The stairs were dizzying, never-ending, like an illusion.

“You mean someone like a nice human girl?” Ava laughed lightly.

“You’re the last person I’d describe as ‘nice,’ luv, if I used that word to describe someone at all.” Jack’s foot skidded on the slime underfoot and he caught his hand against the wall, leaving a wide streak of blood.

“After my family put me out for turning in that guy who came after me—for all the good it did—I was in a bad way. Daniel found me. He was a good man. He taught me how to use this abomination inside me for a purpose. I became an exorcist, like him. I kill demons now.”

“File that under touching stories guaranteed to make a tear well up,” Jack said.

Ava snapped her gaze on him, like dog teeth. “You think I’m making this up? Would you rather I went around seducing men and stealing their life force, like a sorceress would use her sex magic?”

“What about me?” Jack said.

Ava tossed her head. “This is a war. You’re not a civilian. You don’t count.”

“Just what a bloke wants to hear from the bird he’s shagging.” Jack kept silent as the air got thicker and the darkness heavier outside their small circle of green light.

The stairs wound around and around, in spirals that grew tighter and tighter, and then suddenly they ended and Jack was free, standing in the open air before a massive wooden door spiked with iron nails.

“It’s a church,” he blurted out. The Gothic wheel of window above the door was half-crushed under the rubble that had grown over it like the roots of a tree, but the shape was unmistakable.

“It was,” Ava corrected him. “Now it’s the gateway into Catacomb City.”

Jack gave the church door a raised eyebrow, feeling like perhaps he should stand up straight, or worry about his immortal soul.

Ava lifted her hand to the door and placed her palm on it. After a moment, she shook her head. “You do it.”

Jack felt a warding hex curl around his hand when he stepped in and touched the door. It wasn’t strong, it didn’t have teeth, but it felt like the bands of an open trap—one wrong move and the whole mess would snap shut and take off his fingers.

Who goes?

Jack swallowed. “Jack Winter.”

Ava gave him a dirty look. He sighed. “And a friend.” If they decided they didn’t like the look of him, the hex would kill him before he even had time to tell Ava this was all her fault.

There was a painful moment of consideration on behalf of whoever held the hex. You mean us harm.

“Not me, mate. Just out for a walk, really.”

Something that could have been laughter tickled his mind. Then be well, and enter, brother of the crow. The hex curled back, like lace in a flame.

Jack pushed on the door, and it groaned its way open. The hex kissed his skin, a memory of heat as Jack crossed the barrier, and then he looked ahead and stopped, his boots crunching on old masonry and older bones.

They stood in a great sweeping space, roofed like a medieval cathedral. Curling stone beams made up the structure’s bones. The arch rose high enough to disappear into the shadows. Along the walls, hollows showed coffins, descending to shrouds, descending to stone sarcophagi carved with illuminations of saints and devils. Ossuaries at the lowest level were packed with skulls.

Catacomb City stretched vastly, lights flickering along upper levels, and ladders and stairs curving at angles that made Jack’s neck cramp. The floor was a course of culverts from a Roman sewer system, dotted with mausoleums and dark shapes slinking in and out of light, like a life-size and utterly peculiar rat maze.

“Welcome to Areshko’s pride and joy,” Ava said. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Horrifying would be more apt,” Jack said. “But for the sake of keeping all me limbs attached, we’ll use your phrase. How did she build this place without Nazaraphael’s notice?”

“The dead are a powerful ward against prying eyes,” said Ava. “You of all people should know that.” She rubbed her arms in the draft as they looked out from their ledge. “I always wonder what it was like before the demons came.”

“I expect when humans trod it it was a graveyard, and then the dirt underneath a graveyard, and then nothing at all,” Jack said. “That much, I do know. Demons fill up the spaces that people can’t or won’t see. They crawl into gaps left by fear and desire and make themselves at home.”

“We should pay respects to Areshko,” Ava said. “Before she gets suspicious.”

“Yes, yes, by all means.” Jack flipped a hand. “Lead the way, Jeeves. And once we’ve doffed our top hats to the demon lady, fetch us a spot of Earl Grey.”

“Your posh accent is atrocious,” Ava told him. “Stick to what you are, Manc.”

Jack’s mouth quirked. “Most Yanks can’t be bothered to tell the difference.”

Ava leaned up and kissed his cheek, feather-light and quick. “I’m not most.”

They descended to the level of the floor, winding among the mausoleums. Jack frowned. “People down here seem awfully dead.”

“We’re in a giant tomb,” Ava said. “You’re surprised?”

“No …” Jack whipped his head around as something moaned from behind the closest stone wall. “I mean ‘dead’ quite literally.” He watched a hunched figure still wearing a few scraps of hair and skin scuttle from one shadow to the next. “I hate to tell you, Ava, but you’ve got a zombie problem.”

She snorted. “Not everyone sees things the way you do, Jack. Areshko uses them for cheap muscle and labor.”

Jack rubbed his nose. “Smell a bit. Could be right nasty if they think you’re threatening their mistress.”

“Zombies are easy,” Ava said. “Stab them in the head or light them on fire. One of the first things Daniel taught me.”

“How nice for you,” Jack said. “I wish I had my own personal Mister Fucking Miyagi.”

“Jealous?” Ava’s hand skimmed across his arse and gave a light slap.

“Just hoping that when you have Areshko’s angry zombie armada on your tail, you’re as confident,” said Jack.

“Do your part and there won’t be any drama like that. Fuck around and I’ll make sure I leave you to be a chew toy.”

Jack sighed. If she wasn’t so bloody attractive, he would have thrown in his lot by now, geas or no. Zombies put a lid on any bloke’s libido.

The light grew stronger and the dark spots fewer, as they came to a much older ruin—a pagan place, Jack guessed, something that had sat on the land long before there was an England or a Scotland behind Hadrian’s Wall. Candle flames filled the glassless windows, and the tiny graveyard next to the chapel showed its teeth, the stones worn down to nubs amid mummified nettles and vines.

“This is where she holds court,” said Ava. “I’m a human. I’m not allowed inside.”

“You’re about as human as I am,” Jack muttered, raising his hand to bang on the scarred oak door.

Ava’s face twisted in surprise, like he’d slapped her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you can either accept you have a talent for sorcery, or pretend you’re not touched by the Black, like that Daniel wanker seems to have trained you to,” Jack said. “Trust me, Ava, the first way is easier.”

“You have no idea about me,” she said. “You have no idea who or what I am.”

“Not for lack of trying,” Jack reminded her.

The door of the chapel popped open, and a small scavenger demon, a carrion eater of some kind, shoved its pointed head out, its large, lidless eyes rolling over Jack and Ava. “Yeah?” it squalled, a long tongue flicking over its chapped lips.

“Be careful,” Ava told Jack. Her face, for the first time, was flat and her posture heavy.

Jack looked down his nose at the scavenger. “Areshko. I need to see her.”

“Yeah!” the demon shrieked, and hopped away on bird feet, its leathery wings fluttering like a curtain at the wrong time to show a multitude of piercings and an unfortunate PVC onesie.

Here were zombies and the things that ate them. It wasn’t a city, Jack thought, it was an abattoir. For who, he wasn’t sure yet. Hopefully not him, or Ava. She wasn’t bad—devious, damaged, perhaps deranged, but she wasn’t one of the dark things slipping along the underside of the Black. Just a lost girl, like a hundred others he’d seen.

Jack knew lost when he saw it. Until the Fiach Dubh had found him, he was as lost as Ava still appeared.

She tugged at his jacket. “Tell Areshko who you are. Tell her that you have someone who wishes to be graced by her. Use those words.” Ava’s whisper sounded like a ghost.

Jack rolled his eyes. “I’m not a virgin at bullshit, Ava.” He shoved the door wide open and stepped into the chapel. Rich honeyed light spilled from all directions, from hundreds upon thousands of candles set into every crevice and crack of the stone.

Ava’s face, pale and narrow, watched him until the door rumbled shut.

“Who comes?” The voice was cool as the light was sensual, a hint of a foreign land much, much farther than a channel away. It rolled over him, cool and sweet like rain.

“It’s Jack Winter.” He coughed. “And I’ve brought someone who wants to be … er … graced by you.” Ceremonial words were as much a part of being a mage as the magic under his skin, but they always struck Jack as faintly antique and ridiculous. He felt awkward in a way he never did just sitting still with the magic.

Areshko sat forward from her seat in the front of the chapel, near the altar. It was a Victorian high-backed chair, the red velvet worn away to the pink of skin, the wood carved with flowers and fancies of nymphs.

The chair wasn’t that striking. The demon woman seated in it was. She had skin pale as a corpse, but covered in blue—blue tattoos that swirled over every inch, eyelids, lips, tongue, the tops of her thin breasts that pushed against a corset made from the ribcage of some poor creature that hadn’t been quick enough to avoid having its flesh picked clean.

“Come closer,” the demon said. Jack started forward, wishing he had Gavin, Rich, and Dix arrayed in that loose triangle formation that had served him well when he’d lived on the street and had to fight something larger and nastier than himself.

“Just yourself, though. The one who wishes grace will not show her face?” The demon’s flat nostrils flared.

Jack bowed his head. “I’m sorry … er … lady. She thought it would be better if we didn’t disturb you.”

The carrion demon peeked out from behind the throne and squawked at them in its own language. “Piss off, then,” Jack said, “if I upset you so.”

Areshko’s teeth snapped together. “Mind yourself.”

“I apologize if I’ve offended you.” Jack didn’t mean a word of it, but he was pragmatic, when the thing across from you could rip out your larynx and pick her teeth with it. “I’ll go.”

The demon pointed at him. “I know you, Winter man.” Her voice dropped to a purr. “They call you the crow-mage. You are the one who sees the dead and the dark.”

“Right,” Jack murmured, keeping his gaze on hers, like you did with angry dogs. She had pure-white eyes, as those who’d looked too closely at what they oughtn’t and come away perfectly blind had. Lawrence’s grandmother Winifred, in Jamaica, was blind, but she could smell a storm or a liar for miles. Jack sent her marzipans at Christmas every year.

“Come, Jack Winter,” Areshko said. “I don’t bite, except in the right places.”

Jack stepped closer, not within range of her finely wrought, bone-thin arms, but definitely within range of a hex. Trust in baby steps, if demons had such a concept. “So, my companion … she can come in? And let the gracing begin?”

“Of course.” Her lips pulled back. Her teeth were blue. Jack saw with a start that the white marks weren’t skin—the white marks were the tattoos—burns, rather. The blue of the demon was everything else.

Jack whistled against his teeth. “Ava, luv. The lady of the house says come along in.”

Ava stepped through the door and bowed her head low. “My lady Areshko. I am honored.”

“Come, child.” The demon extended her hand, curled her fingers, long nails clicking. “Do not stand on ceremony if you seek my grace so heartbrokenly.”

Ava folded her hands and walked forward, head bowed, like a little girl taking first Communion. Jack had dated a Catholic girl the year after he had left Manchester, liked her enough to sit through a mass or three. The ceremony was comforting. Powerless, but comforting, and comfort counted more for ordinary people.

“My lady Areshko,” she repeated, “I’ve come a very, very long way to receive your blessing. Might I approach?”

“How do I know you are not an agent of the demon of Edinburgh?” Areshko tilted her head, flirting with a smile.

Ava twitched. Her mask didn’t slip, but it wasn’t perfect. Jack eyed the door, calculated how long it would take one skinny, too-tall punk singer to run for it.

“I’m not working for Nazaraphael,” Ava whispered.

Areshko spat a curse when she heard the name. “That snake in a tree, that foul torturer. May the Triumvirate pick over his bones.”

Jack held up his hands. “Easy. You know me, yeah? Jack. No one here has any love for that ponce in the suit. You have my word.” That, at least, was something he didn’t have to lie about.

Areshko took a shuddering breath, and stilled. Her hair was wound in thick braids, at least ten, smoke-colored and wire-thick. “Very well. The word of the crow-mage. Words written in blood.”

“Touch me?” Ava said plaintively. “Hold me in your embrace, Lady? Your touch brings wonder. I’ve heard it all the way across the ocean.”

Before Jack could tell her that she was laying it on a little thick, at least to his taste, Ava dropped to her knees at Areshko’s feet. Jack saw her knife hand drop as she spread her arms. “Please.”

The demon tensed, her long white nails curling against the wood. The chair creaked and Jack thought for a moment she was going to open Ava like a Christmas goose with the force of her gaze. Her long sweeping forehead and curious face, nearly alien with its planes and points, finally relaxed.

“Of course, child,” she said at last. Her skirts rustled. They were paper, hundreds of vellum pages sewn together with the same thick thread Jack had seen at funeral homes.

Jack allowed himself a smile thin as a razor blade. “Go ahead, Ava luv. This is what you’ve been waiting for.”

Ava shot him a dirty look. “I accept your grace,” she told Areshko. “I accept the stillness of your blessing.”

Areshko stretched out her hand, laid it on Ava’s forehead. A great shudder ran through Ava, one she played to the hilt, as though the feeling of Areshko was more than the last, longest climax she’d shared with Jack during the night in the hostel. Her hand dipped. It came up. The blade flicked free like a tongue of flame in the candlelight.

“Now accept death, you bitch,” Ava hissed. She swung the knife, a smooth and economical movement that Jack recognized. He’d met blokes who could work a knife, gangsters. Russians mostly. Ava put them to shame.

Areshko was still faster.

She opened her mouth and Jack felt a great weight settle on him, a blinding, oppressive echo inside his head, like he’d just stepped out of airlock doors into hard space.

Ava shrieked as Areshko reached down, her mouth gaping impossibly wide. Jack saw white, bright. He saw leaping licks of flame, and he heard himself scream, the sound rip raw from his throat, as his sight locked on Areshko’s power.

He saw it all—white cities, white fire. Great white wings made of metal and feather and flame. He knew that his brain was boiling in his skull and his eyes were bleeding, bursting, but he could not look away.

The sight would not allow it.

Areshko opened herself wider still, and then Ava was gone, just blinked out, like she’d never existed. The great sucking void subsided until Jack was on his knees, blood dribbling from his nose. He was crying blood tears. Everything ached, like he’d been battered by a wave of the Black itself.

Ava’s scream snuffed out quickly as she vanished. Jack reached for the spot where she’d been, but there was just the heavy air of Catacomb City.

Ava was gone. Jack blinked away the blood, as his eyes stung.

Areshko stood from her throne, no longer a beautiful demon but a hateful thing pregnant with power. “Don’t weep for your companion, child. She could come back to you.”

Jack shied away from her hand. “I don’t deal.”

“I am not a demon who deals,” Areshko said. “Hell frowns on bargains that are not overseen.”

“I know the Triumvirate’s law well enough,” Jack snapped. “I ought to. I’ve seen what it’s done to a score of mates—to a girl who wanted nothing more than fair play for what you took off her.” Ava was gone. The geas no longer sunk claws into him. It left a score of bleeding holes.

“A human gives up a soul willingly,” said the demon. “What happened to old friends is not my concern.” She reached forward, quicker than a viper, and grabbed Jack by his neck, pulling him down and pressing her other hand over the center of his forehead, the spot where the sight looked outwards. “What concerns me is what I can give you, what you will do, to keep this transgression private.”

For just a moment, everything stopped—the wash of the Black in his mind, the whispers of the spirits that clung to the catacombs, the restless stirring of magic that breathed from the air and the dead, and the demon herself.

It was perfectly blank. Jack felt wet on his face, and realized he was crying real tears, silent and cold against the chilly underground air. Ava was gone and he was sane and the demon’s embrace was the sweetest thing he could ever imagine.

“You see what I can do?” Areshko said. She released him and everything rushed back with a snap, like opening the window of your silent bedroom to morning traffic—the misery of the city, the ache of the sight, the small cold place that whispered Ava’s dead.

“I can make your life very pleasant, crow-mage, and all you must do in return for my silence and my favor is stay. Stay here. Stay hidden.”

Jack stumbled, feeling drunk, or as if he’d just taken a jackboot to the head. “How … How can you …” It had been so cool, so calm, so … empty. To not see was the greatest peace he could have imagined.

“You have a talent, I have a talent,” Areshko said. “And if you spurn it, I will spread the news far and wide that you brought a viper into my house.”

“I can’t stay here,” Jack whispered. “I don’t belong with the dead …”

“Ah, and there is the dilemma,” Areshko whispered.

“Die above, or live below? How to escape the trap? That is your talent, mage. Escaping traps. But not this trap, I fear.”

Jack suddenly wanted Ava very, very badly. She and he could have done something, gotten away now that everything was wrong. But he was alone.

Figure it out, Winter.

“Do you accept my terms? Your continued presence for your sight?” Areshko’s blue tongue flicked out.

Ava was devious, but Jack considered himself more of a talented liar. “You got yourself a bargain,” he said, taking a step toward the chapel door.

Areshko smiled. It was terrifying, nearly slitting her face in half and revealing an extra row of teeth. “Then your secret is mine as my blessing is yours, Jack Winter.”

She held out her hand. “Come here.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “That’s likely.” He stepped back again, and then spun and broke for the door, bones crunching under his boots. He clawed at the chapel door, bloodying his fingers. The fucking thing weighed a thousand pounds …

“I am Areshko.” The demon inclined her head. “Now, what made you think that such a base deception would be effective?”

Jack spread himself against the door, panting. “Hopes and dreams, mostly.”

Areshko rose. He could hear her skirt moving. She moved in the space between them, until her fingers were on the back of his neck. When she touched him, everything around Jack went dead. He was alone, as a normal person would be, except for the hot breath of the demon on his neck.

Her nails tore at his shirt. “Traitor.” Areskho lapped up the blood she’d drawn. “Deceiver.” Jack screamed as she lashed him with her nails again. “Liar.” Areshko shoved him against the door hard enough for Jack to see stars.

“You thought you were clever,” Areshko said. “But you’re human, and I am demon. You stand no chance.”

Areshko kept touching him, whispering to him, tasting his blood. Jack stopped screaming after a time, went still as the corpses around him, and waited for it to be over.

When Jack came back to himself, he was looking up at a stone ceiling, in a snug, warm space, on something soft.

He hurt. Like he’d hurt only a few times before, as when he’d met a skinhead with a pipe, alone. That had been two days in hospital and a few permanent markings. This felt worse. His shoulder was stitched, rudely, and his deeper cuts smeared with iodine, but the pain still coursed all through him.

Jack coughed, his tongue thick and his lips cracked. “Anyone there? Anyone who doesn’t want to kill me?”

The door swung open and the candles guttered. Jack sensed he wasn’t alone in the mausoleum—smelled it, really, a fresh and dense scent rather than desiccated and dry like everything else in the catacomb.

He tried to pull something to him, magic or anything, but all that responded was a weak trickle of power.

“Relax,” said a girl standing in the shadow of the door. Where Ava was robust, she was skinny, and where Ava was sultry, she was pale and thin as parchment. “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said.

“Drawn by my good looks and charm?” Jack tried to smile, found it split his head in new and agonizing ways. “You aren’t the first, darling, and I doubt you’ll be the last.”

She didn’t crack a smile, just set down a metal lockbox and popped it open, pulling out plasters and syringes and a bottle of antiseptic. She moved like she was used to it, her heroin-thin arms and hands moving like moths in the light. Glowing white skin showed through her cut-up shirt—something Jack himself would have worn ten years ago, when he was still shaving half of his head and putting fags out on his arm for kicks.

“I know who you are, Jack, and I know why you came and what Areshko told me to do with you.” She slashed a thumb across her throat.

“You’re me executioner?” Jack wished for a fag. “Guess I could be looking at worse things when I kick.”

“I’m not under Areshko’s thumb,” the girl countered. “We have a business partnership.” She tapped a menthol out of her pack and stuck it between Jack’s lips, lit it with a cheap disposable lighter. Then she picked up one of her syringes. “Nicotine and painkillers,” she murmured, and then laughed to herself.

Jack pulled his arm away and blew smoke out his nose. “I don’t fancy needles, luv.”

“Don’t be a bloody baby,” she said, and jabbed him with it. A moment later Jack was under a warm morphine ocean, and everything seemed softer and far more pleasant.

“So, you’re in bed with Areshko,” he murmured, trailing a hand lazily over the scratches that had appeared everywhere, shallow wounds that felt like briars in his skin. “Is that literally and figuratively?”

The girl didn’t flinch. Her eyes were burning from under her black fringe, accented by makeup that was both angrily and inexpertly applied. “It’s neither. She ordered me to murder you if you woke up.”

“So?” Jack cocked his eyebrow. “Going to smother me, or euthanize me? You’ve got enough in those sharps for an OD.”

“I’m not going to fucking kill you, Jack,” she snapped in irritation. “Subtlety’s not your strong suit, is it?”

Jack exhaled. The smoke was ghost blue in the dense air. “I don’t make a habit of it, no.”

The girl jutted out her chin like a small, defiant cat. “I’m no demon’s prozzie. I have a talent and I get paid for it, but I draw the line at assassination. I’m not some chav with a shank and a hard-on for blood.”

“What’s your name?” Jack said. “You know mine. It’s an unfair exchange this side of the Black if I don’t have yours.”

“Nina,” she said, “My name’s Nina, and I think it’s time that you and I got out of here, Jack Winter.” She finished his bandages, laid the rest of the fags by his bed, and slipped from his room like the shadow of a crow’s wing passing across the sun.

Nina came back as more and more candlelight blossomed through the catacombs, patches and glades and gardens of gold amid the bony fingers of the broken tombs and the hollow eyes of the ossuary walls. Jack watched it from the small arrow-slit in the wall of his prison—the door was locked and no amount of fussing on his part could budge the ancient tumblers.

Not that his hands were too steady—bloodied, ragged, and drugged as they were.

“There’s a celebration tonight,” she said. “On account of you being Areshko’s new chew toy, I imagine.” She handed Jack a tray with a suspicious bowl of stew and a cup of water. Jack ate it anyway, his stomach pitching against the morphine.

Nina sat on the edge of his bed. “Areshko has strong hexes on all of her boundaries, so making a run for it is out of the question. Got any bright ideas in that area? You’re supposed to be clever.”

“Sure, I’ll just wave my wand, twitch my robe, and do a lap on me broomstick while I’m at it.” Jack leaned back against the stone of the mausoleum. His head throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

Nina leaned forward and put her wrist against his forehead. Her fingers ruffled his hair. Jack felt a chill down his spine. “No fever,” she said. “You’re healing up. Tough bastard, aren’t you?”

“Worse things to be.” Jack said.

Nina’s mouth quirked. “It’s almost fate, you know. If I believed in a stupid thing like that. I’ve been down here for a long time.”

“You’re not more than twenty-two if you’re a day,” Jack said. “How long can it have been?”

“Long enough for me to turn pale as Princess Diana.” Nina tossed her head. “My dad’s from Pakistan. I’m not supposed to be Snow bloody White.” She got up and stood in the doorway, watching. “Areshko told me it would be one job.”

“And she tackled you and jammed her nails into your flesh when you tried to go topside?” Jack guessed.

Nina nodded. “She’ll keep me here until I die. It’s what she does. She is the Hunger. She consumes.”

“I saw,” Jack muttered, sitting up. Between the drugs and the food, he felt like the tail end of a drunk, rather than the beginning of death. “Ava’s gone,” he said.

Nina cocked her eyebrow. “That demon-hunter bird who dragged you in here? She’s not dead.”

“I’m pretty sure that when a demon vaporizes you with the sheer force of her rage, you’re dead.” Jack passed a hand over his face. He needed a bath, and a shave.

“Areshko …” Nina sighed. “Look. We both want something, yeah? I want out of here and you want your girlfriend back.”

“I suppose, yeah,” Jack muttered. Ava had tricked him, nearly gotten him killed, but she hadn’t bored him.

“I saw your look.” Nina smiled. “You cared for her.”

“She was … a bit of a crazy bint, really,” Jack said. “But innocent, in a way. Too many innocent people burn in the Black.”

“You’ll have her back,” said Nina. “Areshko didn’t kill her.”

“How can you be so sure?” Jack said.

“Because the last demon hunter come down here, she kept alive for a good long time. Until he was sorry he’d ever been born.”

Jack flinched. “That’s a demon for you.”

“We can get her back,” Nina said. “But we have to get to the surface first.” She leaned in, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Can I trust you, Winter?”

“Probably best if you don’t,” Jack said.

Nina laughed. “Sleep. We’ll leave after the festivities start.” She picked up Jack’s empty tray and left. Jack let himself drift for a time before he fell into an orange-tinged morphine sleep, dreaming of twisting black spirits bending over his bed, cooling his fever, silencing his dreams.

Jack woke with a raging hangover and a crick in his neck, to Nina shaking him.

“It’s started.” Through the stone wall, Jack could hear music, wild and keening, bansidhe song or goblin band.

“What kind of security does Areshko keep about?” he said. Nina pulled his boots from under the bed and thrust them at him.

“Scavengers, mostly. A few of her human groupies who get a bit too involved with the whole ‘child of the dark’ bit.”

Jack pulled on his leather and followed her to the door. He felt like he might wobble off keel at a breeze, never mind having to cut through a swath of border guards.

“You’re a mage, yeah?”

Jack nodded, focusing on putting his foot down on stone instead of air. Nina chewed on her lip.

“Ever met a demon like Areshko?”

“No.” Jack’s foot slipped and Nina grabbed his sleeve. A zombie grumbled and swerved to avoid them. It still wore a tattered corset, mostly whalebones, and one shoe from its burial.

“Not like her,” Jack said. “She’s a fright, that one.”

“You’ve really never dealt with demons before?” Nina cocked her head. “You seem like the type who wouldn’t blink.”

“Me, never,” Jack said shortly. “Friends, yes. Too many friends. I’ve seen what demons do, and it’s never worth what they take from your hide. Demons are for people who have a weakness in them, a fragility.”

Nina’s eyes froze over. “You really do have a narrow mind inside that pretty head, don’t you?”

“I just know what I’ve seen,” he returned.

“Some people have no choice,” Nina snapped. “Some people have a choice between a demon and something much worse. Don’t act like you know the mind of the entire world, Jack.”

Jack raised a hand. “Hit a nerve, did I?”

Nina just rolled her eyes. “Mages. Sanctimonious bastards, the lot.”

“Where do you get off?” Jack caught her wrist when she turned to walk away. “You came down here on your own. No one forced you.”

“My dad, the one I mentioned?” Nina said. “He’s ill. Needs to go to America and get experimental treatment NHS won’t pay for. I’m supposed to let my da die?” She disengaged his hand from her cool skin and walked away.

“Oi.” Jack followed her, both of them sticking to shadows and avoiding the zombies drifting aimlessly up and down the length of the steps. “I’m sorry,” he hissed. “I’m not bloody telepathic, am I?” That would be worlds better than the sight, he thought.

Nina sighed. “You’re a wanker. But I’ll let it go for now.”

“Guess I’m lucky,” Jack said.

“Not what I’d call it.” She flipped her spiky black head and led him down the steps to the lowest point in the catacombs. They skirted a gentle bowl with a fire pit at the center, a mass of demons and dead gathered around the blaze.

Areshko stood at the edge of the stone depression, her hands folded over her swollen stomach. Jack tugged Nina in the opposite direction, and she stuck close to his back, small and warm.

He’d lost sight of the avenue that Ava had brought him down when they came, but he ducked into one of the tunnels leading out of the catacombs and stepped carefully, like he would through a back alley in a bad part of London.

“Cold down here,” Nina said. She pulled a flat silver flask from the pocket of her painted-on jeans and swigged, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, left the sheen of bruised lips. “Never realized how cold.”

“It’s all of the spirits,” Jack said. “The dead steal all the warmth out of a room.”

There was a sound in the tunnel ahead of them, coughing and scraping, like a bum spending his last hours on a steam vent. Nina’s breath hitched. “Can you see what’s up there?”

“I’m not a television psychic,” Jack said. “I can’t do tricks like that.”

Nina sneered. “Might have known. Typical mage wanking.”

Jack knew he’d regret it, but he reached out a hand and clapped it on Nina’s shoulder. Her bones were lighter than a bird’s. She felt fragile, under all the black and posture.

Her magic slammed into his sight with all the force of a waterfall. It was deep, and dark, like sinking into a pool, at night, with just moonshine to guide the way. Fronds of it brushed his face, his skin, feathery and decayed as a dead man’s hand reaching aboveground.

Jack had felt that cold, dry power only once before, and he recoiled as visions of bones and flesh and skin wound together flashed in front of his eyes. “ ’Strewth,” he said. “You’re a … you’re the necromancer. No bloody wonder all of your zombies gave us a berth.”

“You don’t have to look so disappointed in me,” Nina said. “Reminds me of my da.”

They shuffled to the curve of the tunnel and peered around. Jack saw the carrion demon who’d been hanging around Areshko.

“I’m not disappointed,” he said.

“Shocked?” Nina whispered.

“A bit,” Jack agreed. “You’re much more attractive than the last skin dealer I ran into.”

“So, Mister Big Mage, what are we going to do about him?” Nina asked.

“I look like a thug, do I? I don’t bloody know,” Jack said.

The demon flapped and scratched itself between the legs. Nina wrinkled her nose.

“Well, I’m not a ninja, Jack. My tricks mostly work on stuff that’s already dead.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “That gives me an idea.”

The carrion demon picked bugs off the wall, weevils and maggots crawling over a new body stuffed on top of the old in the crevice of the tunnel. It slurped them with a smacking of lips and tongue. Jack flinched as it ripped a finger off the fresh body and sucked the bone and marrow like it was a chicken leg.

Jack stopped a fair distance away, but close enough to surprise it. “ ’Ey. Ugly.”

The demon spun around, wobbling on its clawed feet. “Yeah!” it shrieked.

“I can’t figure out what’s worse,” Jack said. “That you look like a bat smashed arse-first into a donkey, or that your mum actually fucked something like that to get you.”

The demon stripped its lips back from its teeth and let out an angry squawk. “What!”

“You heard me.” Jack spread his arms. “You’re ugly, you’re stringy, and you’ve got nothing between those legs to even scratch at.”

The demon snarled, a long black tongue unfurling, its eyes bugging out.

Jack grinned. “What are you gonna do about it, Arse-face? Wank me off with those little T rex arms?”

He sidestepped as the demon sprang, its claws catching him across the abdomen. They fell in a heap of wings and limbs, the demon snapping at Jack’s neck. Jack punched it, and skinned his knuckles on the thing’s teeth.

Nina’s shadow fell across them. “Any old time now, luv,” Jack grunted, as the thing kicked at him, coming dangerously close to the goods.

She hooked her upper teeth over her bottom lip, and cocked her head to one side. The fingers of her left hand twitched, and the carrion demon jerked, twisting to and fro like there were hooks in its skin.

“No!” it screamed, and then its skin bubbled, swollen, and the great boiling mass of dead flesh the demon had ingested burst through its stomach.

The carrion demon screamed again, twitched, and died.

Nina ran her hand through her hair. “Good idea.”

Jack felt warmth and wet on his face, and Nina’s eyes widened. “You’ve got a bit on you. Just there.” She brushed her fingers over her cheek.

“Help a bloke up?” Jack extended his hand. “Not as young as I used to be.”

Nina pulled him to his feet. Behind them, voices rose and fell, and footsteps followed.

“We’re not alone, luv,” said Jack. He swiped a hand over his face to get rid of the blood and bile and pulled Nina along with him.

“What grand plan have you?” Nina said, as they ran along the catacomb tunnel. “If we make it topside, I mean.”

“Tell you if we make it,” Jack said. All of his cuts and aches were starting again, and he could feel the press of more demons behind them, along with a few bright, malignant human minds that unfurled darkness across his sight.

“There!” someone shouted.

Jack saw a broken brick wall and an old sewer line beyond. He jerked Nina hard left, pulling them into the dank blackness.

They ran until Jack was completely out of breath, starbursts exploding in front of his eyes, and his ribs stabbing him every time he sucked in the moist air.

Nina pulled back, tugging his arm. “We have to stop. There’s something here.”

Jack bared his teeth. “Exactly. Care to speculate what, Nina?”

“She slipped out, all right?” Nina growled. “Going to crucify me for a little slip?”

“If I get some sort of undead virus from those neck scratches and start craving the brains of humans, it’ll be your fault,” Jack said. He stopped joking when Areshko’s minions came around the corner.

The two men who closed in on them weren’t anything remarkable—young, skinny, the sort of street kids you could find in any city, in any country, starved and starving for connection. Their eyes, however, burned with the fire that Jack usually saw only in cultists.

Having been touched by Areshko, he knew she’d have no trouble inspiring such devotion.

“Don’t worry, Nina,” he said. “Just back up slowly.” A chill kissed the scratches on his neck.

“ ‘Don’t worry’?” she demanded. “One of them has a knife!”

“I’ve got a knife, too,” Jack said.

“Areshko told us about you.” The one with the knife smiled, his eyes bright. “She told us what she did to you. She said we’d taste your blood.”

Jack shivered, taking another measured step back. “When I say get down, curl up in a ball. Don’t move.”

Nina cut a look at him, back at the two advancing men. “You’d better not get me killed, mage.”

Jack’s sight blossomed, tendrils of silver curling like fog around his face, and he folded at the knees. “Down, Nina!”

She dropped, pulling her knees up to her chest, and Jack felt the revenant pass over them, her feet trailing through his back, the chilling shock of this making his heart skip.

The revenant fell on the two men in the tunnel, hungry and moaning, her hands spreading frost over their skin.

Nina’s eyes widened. “That really was a mistake, you know.”

“Likely. Never let a mistake steal any sleep from me yet.” Jack extended his hand. “I need fresh air, and a pint. What do you say?”

“I say you’re an odd sort,” said Nina. “But all right.”

Jack squinted in the sun as they emerged from a utility hatch. He hadn’t expected it to be morning, the world looking as usual as it ever had.

Nina jerked her chin across the small cobble street. “Pub.”

Jack followed her. “Hallelujah. The gods are kind.”

“Not particularly,” said Nina. Jack snorted.

“Woman after my own heart.”

He ordered a whiskey instead of a pint, drained the tongue of liquid fire down his throat, and ordered another.

“You want your Ava back, yeah?” said Nina. “You’re going to have to challenge Areshko to do it.”

Jack shook his head. “Not something I fancy.” Ava’s face, just before she vanished, wasn’t leaving his eyes, even as he got a third glass of whiskey.

Nina snorted. “Yeah. I’d worry about you a bit, if you did.” She sucked on the straw in her tonic water. “The things some blokes do for love.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What makes you say love?”

She snorted. “Please. I saw her tits. It’s love.”

“Barely know her,” said Jack. “But I did like her, and I don’t like demons. Not at all.”

“So, demon killer”—Nina grinned at him over her drink—“how will you slay the dragon this time?”

“I’m thinking that there’s another bloke in this city who doesn’t have any love for Areshko,” Jack said. “And that he might be interested in what I’ve got to tell him.”

Nina drained her drink. “Do I know this person?”

Jack tossed back the last of his whiskey and gave her the rakish grin it inspired. “I don’t think so, nice little girl like you.”

“I may be little,” Nina retorted, “but I’m no little girl.”

Jack thought of the gray, grasping sorcery that she commanded, the sort of power that could pull a spirit back from beyond the Bleak Gates, out of the City and into its own dead flesh. “I suppose not,” he agreed. Lighting a fag, he ran a hand over his hair. It was hopeless, a rat’s nest of lopsided spikes. “Poor choice of words. You with me, or going to slap my face and storm off?”

Nina sighed. “Depends. Are you always so arrogant?”

“On me good days. And on days when a demon kills a friend and I nearly get chewed to death by Hell’s mistakes.” He gave Nina a grin, from the wicked spot inside his heart. “You fancy shagging me cheerful again? Might work.” Dimly, he realized he was drunk and exhausted, which was the only reason to be such a chav, but he didn’t stop.

Nina slapped his hand away. “I have a dirty talent but I’m a nice girl. Fuck you, Jack Winter.”

Jack pulled out his sharpest razor of charm—his smile. “That’s the general idea.”

Nina shook her head. “Just because I helped you, just because I owe you something for helping me get out of Catacomb City, doesn’t mean you can be a wanker and put your hands anywhere you bloody please!”

“Could just be a hummer round back,” Jack muttered, feeling the venom on his tongue. Or maybe that was just stale whiskey. “That’s how the last one got me, you know.” He was being exactly the kind of cunt he despised when he was in clubs or out drinking, and he cursed the whiskey that he could feel rising in his throat.

“You’re drunk,” Nina said. “And you did get me shut of Areshko, so I’m going to forgive you.” Her eyes darkened. “Speak to me like this again, and I’ll slit your throat and raise you to carry my purse about while I’m out at the shops.”

She jerked him up by the elbow. “Come on. You want to get your Ava back, you need to be sober. And not a twat.”

Jack sneered as they left the pub, but he leaned against Nina’s small frame and stayed close. He owed her that much. He was a twat, no argument.

Nina was nowhere to be found when Jack woke up. He heard a telly from another room, saw a water-stained ceiling and a patch of wall, and smelled a curry cooking.

He winced when Nina came back into the room. “Me head.”

“Serves you right,” she said, handing him a paper cup of tea and a sandwich, transparent with grease. “Breakfast of champions. Eat up, drunkard.”

“Wicked woman,” Jack moaned, downing the tea and burning his tongue.

“I am,” Nina said. “You don’t care to know how wicked.”

“Not until my head stops vibrating.” Jack forced himself to bite into the egg and bacon butty. Noise rose from the telly, like a night bus in the fog.

“Manchester’s playing,” Nina said. “Think you can make it into the front room?”

The room didn’t swim much when Jack sat up, so he nodded. “Where are we?”

“My mum’s flat,” said Nina. “I still had a key.”

“Your mum in?”

Nina shook her head. “She and I haven’t spoken since my da took sick. We’ll have to light out before her shift at Sainsbury’s ends.”

Jack settled himself on the sofa and watched Man U’s red jerseys dart up and down the field against Chelsea for a few silent moments. “You know, Nina,” he said finally, massaging the center of his forehead, “you don’t have to be involved any further. Going up against something like Areshko … well … you’re just a necromancer.”

Nina sighed. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, boyo. Drink up your tea and tell me your grand scheme.”

Jack followed Nina up a flight of stairs that had nearly collapsed back to the floor below, and down a narrow hallway where the air was drunk with the scent of herbs and magic. Nina waved a hand in front of her nose. “Never could stomach that smell.”

“That’s funny, coming from a girl who digs up corpses,” said Jack.

“Not that,” Nina said. “That sulfur smell.” She gestured at the open flames lighting their way through the condemned flats.

“Tar,” Jack said. “Makes the torches burn longer.”

“It’s foul,” said Nina. “Just like Catacomb City. Foul and rotten, through and through.”

“No argument here,” Jack said.

Nina kicked against the last door in the hallway. After a pause it swung open, letting out a puff of rancid air. Inside, Jack saw candles, a bed, and a threadbare velvet chair, no doubt nicked from some nice old pensioner’s flat.

“You sure this is the place?” he asked Nina.

“Said you needed supplies for a summoning,” Nina said. “And I didn’t ask precisely why you would want to summon another demon after what we just went through, so take me at my word, yeah?”

A cat prowled from under a sofa and hissed at Jack. He hissed back and stepped into the flat. “Hello?”

One whole wall of the flat was comprised of apothecary shelves, the kind any good magic shop had by the score.

“It’s self-serve,” Nina said. “You leave the money in the cashbox at the door when you walk out.”

“Or?” Jack said, as he started pulling down herbs, salt, and charcoal.

“Or you don’t walk out.” Nina fetched a paper bag and snapped it open, holding it while Jack dumped his supplies into it. “So, you know I’m going to ask,” she said, as Jack pulled a crumpled wad of fives and tenners from his back pocket and shoved them through the slot in the rosewood cashbox.

“Ask what, luv?” he said.

“What demon you think can possibly help you get Ava back?”

They descended the stairs, the wood shuddering under Jack’s feet.

“Promise you won’t be mad?” he said.

“No,” Nina said.

Jack stopped on the landing and pressed his thumb and forefinger between his eyes. “Nazaraphael.”

“You’re mad, you know that?” Nina shoved a hand through her hair. It stood up like a porcupine. “Summoning the demon of the city.”

Jack felt in his pockets and came up empty. “Got any chalk? Forgot it when we stopped off at Magic Tesco.”

Nina pursed her lips, but passed him a nub. She sat on the steps of a crypt, watching him. “A graveyard’s a bit theatrical, don’t you think?”

“Graveyards are repositories,” said Jack. Every good sorcerer knew that for a quick fix, burial ground offered the best high you could stomach. The Black curled, radiant and radiating, among the tombstones and frozen grass and silvery moonlight, tendrils of it passing over his mind like fingers through his hair. The air was thick, cold, puffing from his mouth in waves.

If he hoped to bind a demon of the city, a graveyard was the only place that would do it. And he had only one chance at Nazaraphael, before the grinning demon tore him limb from limb.

The symbols he needed were easy enough, since he didn’t know what stripe of demon Nazaraphael was, besides a resident of Hell and a walking fashion disaster.

He should be doing this with a copper circle, properly, safely. Jack sucked in air through his teeth, trying to banish Lawrence’s voice and his own doubts from his mind. He sketched a circle, closed himself in, scooped up a hand of graveyard dirt, and made the circle again. Double, and tight as he could make it.

Nina offered him her flick-knife, and Jack accepted. She chewed on her lip. “Please be careful. I’ve grown rather fond of you, Jack.”

Jack grinned. “I have that effect on women, darling.”

“On second thought, I hope Nazaraphael picks his teeth with your bones,” Nina said sweetly.

Jack chuckled and held up the flick-knife. He paused before he sunk the blade into the pad of his thumb. Summoning demons wasn’t something a man did if he had a desire to keep breathing. Summoning demons was for the desperate, the pathetic, or the plain bloody stupid.

He was at least one of those, Jack thought. He wasn’t certain which.

The blade bit into his skin and blood welled, warm against the air. Jack turned his hand over and squeezed three droplets into the center of the circle. The graveyard ground sucked it up, drinking down his life force and his talent.

“I call upon the power of the ancient circle,” Jack said. “On the wings of the crow, I call the true name of Nazaraphael, demon of the city of Edinburgh.”

For a moment, nothing happened at all, not even a negative, not even his circle breaking and his own talent throwing him to the ground as Nazaraphael shook off his summons.

Then Jack felt a tingling start on the backs of his palms and his sight flared, a bright pinpoint of light growing in front of him, flooding into the chalk lines that bound the earth.

“Stay back, Nina,” Jack said, and stepped out of the circle just before it snapped with power, and a shape began to grow in the center of it.

Nazaraphael fought, and fought hard. Jack felt claws raking his mind, felt the tug of the circle against him, knew that if Nazaraphael overwhelmed him, the magic it commanded would rip out his heart and show it to him.

“How dare you?” Nazaraphael shouted. “You are filth, Jack Winter! You think a circle of graveyard dirt can hold me?”

Jack felt the summoning begin to fray as Nazaraphael struggled. “Not forever,” he said. “But long enough.”

“I’m going to strip your flesh off and fry your fat,” Nazaraphael snarled.

“Not yet, you’re not.” Jack wagged his finger. “I told you I didn’t like it when you burst in and kicked me around, Nazzie. Now you’re going to listen to me, and you’re going to be polite about it.”

Nazaraphael’s eyes gleamed. He wasn’t like any demon Jack had seen—he looked alarmingly close to human, with his fine-line nose and full lips. The eyes were the giveaway, as they were with all things of the Black—the windows to the soul.

Nazaraphael’s were empty.

“Make it fast, boyo,” he said. “Because when I break this circle, you’re not going to have time to scream.”

Jack took his time pulling out a fag. He offered one to Nina, who accepted, keeping her eyes on the demon. “See, luv?” Jack said, as he touched his finger to the tip and was rewarded by an orange ember. “They’re not so spooky, when you see them in the open.”

“Damn you, Winter,” Nazaraphael shouted. “I am the demon of the city and I deserve that respect!”

“All right, all right.” Jack exhaled. “You and Areshko, yeah? You want her gone, I want her to give back a bird she’s holding and torturing.”

Nazaraphael’s nostrils flared, but his eyes lit with interest. “So?”

“So,” Jack said, “I’ll show you where she’s hiding, and you’ll convince her to give me back my good friend Ava.” He flicked his fag end away. “You can help me, Nazzie, or I can bind you and make you. You’re a demon, but I’m through fucking about. So what do you say?”

Nazaraphael stood very still. “I get Areshko? You don’t have some silly human vendetta against her?”

“I want the bitch gone as much as you do,” said Jack. “Will you help, Nazzie?”

The demon considered for only a moment. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Jack grinned at him. “I very much hope not.”

The return to Catacomb City was slower and even more unpleasant than the first time, with Ava. Nazaraphael hummed to himself, and when they reached the two bodies, now frozen and with gaping sockets where the revenant had taken their eyes, he chuckled.

“The follies of mortals. They’ll follow anyone.”

“Look,” Jack said. “Not really keen on hearing you talk, mate, so why don’t we all take a vow of silence until we get back to the city?”

“Do I frighten you, mage?”

Jack looked Nazaraphael up and down, from the top of his blond ponytail to his white-on-white wingtips. “Yes. I am completely terrified.”

Nazaraphael actually let out a chuckle. “I don’t hate humans. I do what I do because what I am compels me to. I can show mercy, Jack. Even if you did threaten me.”

Nina snorted. “Because your kind are so famous for mercy.”

Nazaraphael whipped his head around like a snake. “Be careful of what you’re insinuating, little skin trader. I can lose my good humor very quickly.”

Nina flared her fingers. “Shaking in my boots.”

Jack ducked under the arch at the city entrance and nearly smacked into Areshko. She stood, hands folded, a serene smile revealing the tips of her pointed teeth.

“I knew you’d return to me, Jack Winter.”

“Good for you,” he said. “And look, I’ve brought company.”

Nazaraphael tipped his head. “Lady Areshko. How very long have I been looking for you! I’ve lost count of the years.”

Areshko hissed and swiped at Jack with her claws. “You think this changes anything? I’ll never give her up.”

Nazaraphael stepped forward. “You will, and you will do it now, if you wish me to spare your city.” He reached out and laid hand on her cheek, and Areshko shuddered. “You will perish, but Catacomb City can live on.”

Jack didn’t have to see Nazaraphael’s eyes to know that he was lying, but he was a demon. It was hardly surprising. What was surprising was that Areshko softened under his touch, her eyes welling with blue tears that stained the white brands curling across her cheeks.

“I didn’t harm her,” she whispered. “I just kept her close.”

“I know,” Nazaraphael said kindly. “And now it’s time to return her to Jack.”

Areshko bowed her head. “So be it.” She bent down, her mouth unhinging and opening wide, as wide as Jack’s hip bones. Areshko’s body rippled and convulsed, her spine flexing like a lizard’s, and then she screamed.

Areshko expelled a cloud of magic and Ava shimmered back into being, naked and covered with blue bile. She choked, and then her eyes flew open. “Jack?”

“I’m here, luv.” Jack stripped off his leather and wrapped it around her.

Nazaraphael knelt on Ava’s other side.

“She’s beautiful, Winter. I see why you’d come back down into this hole for her.”

Ava threw her arms around Jack and pressed her cheek against his. “It was awful,” she whispered. “She did things … But I knew you’d come back for me.”

“You did?” Jack stroked her sopping hair. “You actually had faith in me, darling? I’m bloody touched.”

“Not faith,” said Ava. “Not in you.”

Jack pulled away from her. “Ava, are you all right?”

“Nazaraphael,” she said, “we brought you. We brought you to Areshko …” Her hand darted out, and Jack saw the bile-covered knife a second before it embedded itself in his chest.

He let out a cough and swatted at the knife. “What the bloody fuck … iron?” Cold fingers wrapped his heart and pain seized him. “Iron …” Jack fell on his side, his cheek digging into the stones.

Ava pulled her knees to her chest. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

Nazaraphael stood and brushed off his knees. He lifted Ava up by the hand, as if she weighed nothing. Jack’s leather slipped off her, as crumpled as he was.

Nina’s face obscured Jack’s swimming view of the pair. “He’s not dead,” she said in a hollow voice. “But he’s bleeding. … Why did you do it? He helped you.”

Areshko swiveled her head from Nazaraphael to lock Jack’s gaze, as his life unspooled at a terrifying rate.

“Nina,” Jack said. “Nina, get away from me!” He felt it again, the sickening sensation of Areshko’s magic, the great sucking void, and then he was moving, dragged across the ground toward the demon’s sphere. He wrapped his hands around Nina’s thin shoulders, trying to hold on, but he was left with a shred of her T-shirt, as she vanished into the void of Areshko’s magic.

Jack wanted to scream, but he hadn’t the breath or blood left. Beside him, Ava shrieked as Areshko’s influence scrabbled at her, nails cutting lines in her cheek and Nazaraphael’s shoulder when he shielded the demon huntress from harm.

Areshko swayed, shuddered, and smiled. Her terrible magic quieted, sated. “So sweet.” She sighed. “To taste the blood of the seraphim. It burns.”

Jack blinked at her, levering himself onto his arms. He felt nothing, floating as from an opiate high on the cold, fathomless water of shock. “Hold on just a bloody minute. What?”

Ava gave him that sad gaze. “Nazaraphael, Jack.”

Jack felt his mouth work. “He’s a …”

“I am not a demon,” Nazaraphael said. “I am Fallen. I reside in Hell but I am not a denizen.”

Ava swayed unsteadily, shivers wracking her naked skin. “I’m sorry, Jack, really I am. But he’s promised me. He promised me if I delivered Areshko, he’d …”—she swiped bile from her eyes—“he’d bring Daniel home to me.”

Areshko let out a moan, and Jack grabbed his head.

Feedback reverberated through his sight, and he watched as Areshko’s stomach swelled and her mouth opened, a great sucking void through which he could hear screams and a harsh, hot wind.

“Ava,” he whispered, “you know there’s no such thing as angels.”

“You hate demons as much as I do,” she said. “They make deals, and they steal souls. Daniel … She tortured him, and in the end he made a deal to end it.” She stood, wavering. “But now I have Nazaraphael. One of the Fallen, for the Triumvirate. And I have the means to go before them and bring his soul out of Hell.” She pointed to Areshko. “Take me. I want to go.” Ava took a wavering step toward Areshko, who held out her hand.

Jack reached up and grabbed Ava’s wrist. “I can’t let you do this, Ava. If you let her kill you and send you down, you’ll die in Hell. Nazzie here can’t deliver a soul any more than a mail boy can.”

“No,” she flared. “He is an angel. They’ll have to give Daniel back to me.”

“Daniel is dead!” Jack shouted. “And before he died, he made a deal to save his own arse! That’s not a man worth dying for, Ava.”

She jerked away from him and fell toward Areshko. “Take me! I want to die! The Fallen will resurrect me!”

Jack watched Areshko as her belly swelled even more, with the possibility of another meal. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “Ava. There are no angels. There are no Fallen. Demons lie.”

Ava pulled free of him and ran to Areshko, kneeling before the demon woman and spreading her arms wide. “Kill me. You want me. I was Daniel’s favorite.”

Areshko leaned down and caressed Ava’s cheek, then she bared her teeth and slapped Ava aside. Her mouth opened, and her magic swelled. Jack clutched his head, the blood chilling on the front of his shirt, as the air in the catacombs frosted with malice.

Nazaraphael threw up his hands, but Areshko was too much for him. The demon of the city withered, skin ashing and skeleton disintegrating, before he disappeared like dust in a wind.

Jack managed to get to his feet, one hand over the wound, which felt as wide and deep as a river. “Ava. Come with me. Come now.”

Areshko laughed at him. “Oh,” she said in a new, legion voice. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

Jack tugged Ava, only to find his way blocked by a crowd of zombies drawn by the ambient magic. “Why did he have to be the bloody demon of the city?”

Ava looked to Jack helplessly. “He said he was an angel …”

Jack watched the zombies ebb around Areshko. “I know,” he said. “I know. But what do you know about Areshko?”

“She killed Daniel,” Ava moaned. “Killed him in spirit. She is the Hunger. She hunts.”

“And when she eats—what then?” Jack drew back his fist and popped the nearest zombie in the jaw. It staggered away from him, and Jack bore Ava on toward the exit.

Another zombie lunged and caught her across the stomach. Blood made its lazy way down her abdomen. “Areshko … she’ll consume Nazaraphael, his talent and his power,” she said.

Below them, Areshko opened her mouth as wide as a sewer grate and bit down on a zombie’s neck. There was no blood in the dried-out thing, but Jack saw the vile cloud of magic escape all the same, grayish green like a punctured bladder of gas. Areshko drank it down, her blue skin taking on the glow of an oil slick, the white brands hissing as they heated. She ate like she was the Horseman of Famine, hungry moans issuing forth.

“Bollocks to that,” Jack said. “We can’t let her have that sort of power …”

“Jack,” Ava said, as he dropped her hand, “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care,” he said plainly. “You aren’t the first a demon’s lied to.”

“But I need you to know,” Ava said.

Jack shook his head. “Save it for when we’re out of the ground, yeah?”

“Can’t stop her,” said Ava. “Need a sanctuary, to wait for the end.”

Jack tossed her a look. “Sacred ground won’t stop zombies and demons. You think any necromancer or Hell fiend gives a bollocks what a priest said over a patch of dirt?”

“A warded house, then,” Ava said. “A bunker, a fucking tank. Something.”

Jack scratched the back of his neck. He felt like sleeping—sleeping for a hundred years, like some old tale. He was halfway to passing out, and bits of ghost and magic fluttered at the edges of his eyes, the sight waiting to pull him under.

Areshko would keep growing her hunger until it consumed enough of the Black to spill over into the world of the living.

“No,” he said. “No, we’re not leaving her to finish what she started.”

After a moment, Ava nodded. “We can’t.”

Jack stopped, still clinging to her, and swung himself around.

“You wish to petition me for mercy?” Areshko growled when Jack turned back.

“Fuck off,” he said. “Let the Fallen ponce go and just fuck off, back to Hell or wherever you came from.”

Areshko bared her teeth at him. “And if I do not?”

“Then, luv, I’m going to exorcise you,” Jack said. “And I’m going to enjoy it.”

The toe of his boot nudged Ava’s iron knife and he scooped it up.

“Die, mage,” Areshko hissed. “Meet the Triumvirate head-on.”

Jack spread his arms, even though the pain lanced him like hot iron. “I’m right here, darling. Come and take me.”

Areshko sprang, and Jack took her swipe full on, letting her hands grip him and pull him close.

He turned the iron knife in his hand and threw it to Ava.

She gripped it and said the banishing words. “Return to the place called home. Return to the darkness. Return to the void. Areshko, you are welcome no longer. Begone.”

Areshko latched her lips on to his, blue pointed tongue and white pointed teeth slicking and cutting his lips. Jack’s senses deadened, and just for a moment the agonizing scream of Areshko’s power ceased inside his mind. “I could give you this, mage,” she whispered against his mouth. “I could take it all away from you.”

Jack’s stomach twisted. No more nightmares, no more visions. No more feeling his mind fraying with every hour that passed.

All he had to do was turn around and stop Ava, and allow Areshko to consume Nazaraphael. All he had to do was nothing, as she grew fat on her Hunger.

“The flesh is weak,” Areshko said. “Too weak to see what you see. It will be your end, mage, slow and rotting from inside to out.”

“I have no doubt.” Jack sighed. He met her blazing eyes. “But I don’t deal with demons.” He spun Areshko like a lover into Ava’s path as she swept the knife up and buried the blade in the soft portion of Areshko’s back, between the ribs, blue blood spilling on white brands.

“Return to Hell, your mother,” Ava rasped. “Bound by iron, begone.”

Areshko screamed, and Nazaraphael shimmered back into existence on the ground. Areshko twitched and twisted against the banishing iron, wielded by an exorcist, and then she began to fade—first her skin and then her bones and finally the brands, hints of ghostly white, before she evaporated completely.

Ava held out the knife to Jack, her hand quivering. “Take it. I don’t need it anymore.”

Jack took the knife and flipped it, crouching so that he held the point against Nazaraphael’s neck. Jack’s wound hurt again, but at least he wasn’t slipping away toward the Bleak Gates.

“Now,” he said, “you’re going to tell this poor girl how you lied.”

Nazaraphael’s lip curled. “I am full-blood Fallen.”

“You’re full of shite, is what you are,” Jack snarled. “Say it. Tell Ava what you did.”

Nazaraphael looked into him, with his dead eyes. “Your soul will dance on the coals for this, Winter.”

“Tell me news, wanker.” Jack pushed the knife in, drawing a bead of blood, and Nazaraphael hissed.

“I am demon.” He gritted his teeth, trying to crawl away from Jack’s ministrations.

Ava let out a cry. “Daniel …”

“He burns. And he will forever.” Nazaraphael grinned. “I wanted Areshko. I said what was necessary.”

Jack stood up, swaying. “Go back to Hell and pray I never set eyes on you again.”

Nazaraphael faded in a swell of smoke, and the only sound echoing throughout Catacomb City was Ava’s sobbing.

When Ava was fit to move, Jack took her to Nina’s mum’s flat. The lock wasn’t anything special, and he let them in and left Ava to wash herself off and find clothes.

Jack waited in the sitting room, looking at Nina’s family pictures.

“She had a nice family.” Ava was wearing a jumper and jeans. Her face was scrubbed, her hair tangled and damp.

“She seemed like a nice girl,” Jack said. “For a necromancer.” He fished in his pocket for the last of his gig money, a hundred quid, and laid it on the mantle next to the picture of Nina and her dad grinning outside the O2 dome in London. He knew it was meaningless, considering what had been lost, but it was the only thing he had to give.

“I shouldn’t have lied to you,” Ava murmured, “about Nazaraphael and I bargaining. I met Daniel when I was so young. He loved me, and I loved him, and when he died—”

“Ava.” Jack shook his head. “Ava, Ava. Enough with that. I know what you are. You’re a liar and a sinner, just like me.”

Her mouth curved up. “We had fun though, didn’t we, Jack?” She leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed him softly.

Jack returned it, and then regretfully stepped away. “I could get used to you, Ava. Even if you are insane.”

“Mmm. You could come to New York.” She tugged on his waistband. “Help me hunt. Might be fun.”

Jack chuckled. “I do like you, Ava. If I never meet another one of you, it will be too soon.” He opened Nina’s door. “Take care of yourself, luv.”

“Jack.” Her eyes filled up. “Don’t leave. We could do so much good together …”

“Ava”—Jack shook his head—“I’m not a good man. You should know by now.”

“I suppose,” she sighed, “that’s why I picked you.”

“We’ve both got our shadows,” said Jack. “Don’t let them drown you, Ava.”

Jack left the flat and stepped out under an iron gray sky, walking away from Ava and waiting for the rain to fall.