My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon

NEWLYDEADS A Tale of Black London Caitlin Kittredge

This story takes place in the world of the Black, place of fae, demons, and magic-users that hides in the nooks and crannies of the real. As far as human denizens go, Pete Caldecott and her friend Jack Winter are by far the most notorious…

BLACKPOOL APPEARED OUT OF THE FOG, A THOUSAND neon eyes winking from a hunched and gleaming body.

Pete Caldecott stood in the swirling salt-scented mist and glowered at the edifice of the Paradise Palace Casino & Resort. The pink neon letters blinked lethargically, a beacon to middle-aged couples, poor young families, and gamblers on their last shilling. Not so common were detective inspectors, like herself, and sneaky gits like her companion.

Pete turned her head to glare at Jack Winter, the titular companion. "This is not my idea of a bloody holiday."

Jack shrugged, producing a Parliament from the thin air between his fingers. "You said you needed a change. This is a change. Chin up, lip stiff or some rot. Besides, you love the seaside." He clicked his fingernails together and an ember flared on the Parliament's tip.

Pete ignored him. Jack used magic on her only when he was trying to weasel out of an apology. "Get the bags, then," she said. "Can't wait to relax in the confines of a double-twin between the lift and the ice machine."

Jack grabbed up their suitcases from the back of Pete's Mini and jogged after her. "Oi! Come back here!"

Pete quickened her pace in retaliatory spite. The carpark was silent and empty except for the Mini's red beede-backed shape, pavement slick and slimy in the descending twilight. The mist gathered behind her, obscuring Jack's bowed platinum head for a moment, and a wind brought the scent of rotting sea things. No bird cries carried from the Irish Sea and no drunken holiday chatter, which there should surely be in Blackpool of all places, reached her ears.

Just for a moment, she could be anywhere, trapped in fog ancient as the marshes around the city, lost to the Black like the women of fireside stories.

A doorman in a crumpled pink coat slumbered at the lobby doors when Pete reached them. Moisture dripped from the brim of his cap. The doors were frosted glass, etched with the image of kissing swans.

Jack caught up to her, wheezing equal parts wet air and smoke, his jackboots raising a clatter. The doorman did not stir.

"You going to be in a mood for the entire weekend?" Jack demanded, dragging deeply on the end of his Parliament before flicking it into a puddle. It hissed and sparked out with a little question mark of smoke.

"Very probably," said Pete. Jack got his smile, the curled ends pushing at the early lines in his face and the little spark of imp-light in his eyes. Pete always thought of it as the devil-smile.

"I promise you—no, I wager you, Pete Caldecott, that before this holiday is over you'll admit that you've had a bit of fun."

Pete opened the lobby door. "Never happen. Ten quid?"

Jack hefted the suitcases. "I'm a confident bloke. Make it twenty."

The swans whooshed shut behind them, kissing once more. The Paradise Palace's lobby was done in bloodred carpet and pink satin chairs, walls the color of a poisoned tide washing sand.

Pete said, "I'm surprised you have that much to bet, after the horrendous expense of dragging me to a family casino resort done entirely in swans." The motif repeated through the lobby, the only relief a gilt-edged oil painting over a fake fireplace that depicted a marsh scene, a deep swirl of blacks and fleshy greens.

"They're having a special," said Jack smugly, shoving Pete's suitcase back into her arms. "St. Gummarus's Feast rates for all of the week. Get ready to pay out on Monday, Miss I'm-So-Sure."

Jack Winter had many vices, not the least of which was usually being right. Pete pointed at the black marble reception rather than admit she was out of retorts. "Go check us in. I'm tired and I'd like to go claim my glorified broom closet so I can lie down."

"You wait, Caldecott," Jack assured her, strutting over to the reception. The clerk eyed his black denim, jackboots, and nicotine-tinged Dead Kennedys shirt with something approaching stark horror. "You wait. You'll have the time of your life. Mark my words."

JACK GRINNED SILENTLY THE ENTIRE TIME THEY WAITED for the lift, and practically cackled when he reached across Pete and punched the button for the top floor of the hotel.

"All right, what?" she finally demanded. Jack burst out into laughter, which quickly turned to a cough.

"Bollocks, is it sodding damp enough in this place? My insides are growing mold."

"You chose it, you don't get to complain," Pete said, punctuating her speech with her best I'm-going-to-fetch-you-a-bloody-smack glare. "What's so bloody amusing?"

Jack rummaged about the inside pocket of his tatty black longcoat and pulled out two plastic cards emblazoned with—what else—the kissing swans. The cards were gilt-edged, like some sort of psychotically romanticized Golden Ticket. "Here, you look at this," Jack said, still barely containing his mirth, "and you try telling me that this won't be the best bloody holiday in the history of Britain."

The plastic card read Honeymoon Getaway—Suite Access Key in flamboyant red script.

Pete felt as if the lift had abruptly reversed direction. "Jack, what did you do?"

"I told that sad bloke at the counter we were married," said Jack, eyes alight. "And it being our honeymoon, and us having so little money with the baby on the way, it might be nice if he offered us a sort of upgrade…"

Pete dropped her suitcase and moved for Jack's throat. Height advantage he may have, but she was a trained inspector with the Metropolitan Police. She'd faced down demons and rampaging ghosts, and more important, she was angry.

"Oi!" Jack shouted, her blow glancing off his shoulder as he ducked. "Settle down! The honeymooner's suite gets free room service! And a whirlpool bath. You bloody women love that sort of thing."

"Jack," said Pete, pitching her tone to cut steel. "We are not married. We are not sleeping together. Right at this moment in time, I don't even like you."

"It was just a lie, Pete," he sighed, leaning back against the satin-draped wall of the lift. "Lies don't draw blood. And besides, we got free liquor and a big fancy hotel suite out of it."

"You did," Pete hissed, jabbing him in the chest. " You did all of this. Dragged me along off the bloody cliff, as usual."

The lift doors rolled back with a soft chime. Jack threw up his hands. "I give up," he snapped. "I thought if I took you away like you wanted, maybe you'd stop being so bloody serious, but I was wrong."

Pete bit the inside of her lower lip and looked at her shoes. Jack didn't complete the thought, didn't say took you away from what happened in London. But then, he needn't. Pete dreamed it, every night, cinematically and vividly and with the same gut-ripping terror of the real event. As a Weir, she dreamed colors, smells, letters and sounds, and always had. Once upon a time, she'd dreamed about the day when they were young that Jack had nearly died the first time.

Now, it was all ghosts and blood.

The lift started to close and Pete slipped out, following Jack down the muffled hallway of bleeding floor and medium rare walls. "I'm sorry," she said when he could hear her. He was trying to jam the keycard into the reader slot to the side of their suite's double doors.

"Yeah, well, me too," Jack muttered. "Let's just get through the weekend and forget this whole event, right? Chalk another win on the board for me and my brilliant bloody ideas."

Pete looked at the doors of the suite. They were black, carved with a swirling symbol that evoked the painting in the lobby, artful strands curling around the central point. Circles were supposed to be safe, for mages. Jack never went anywhere without odd ends of chalk in his pockets. "It could be worse," she said finally. Jack ripped the card out of the reader. "Bollocks!" Pete took it from him. "Just let me." He backed up, glaring. "There better be a sodding lake of free booze in there. I need a bloody drink."

INSIDE, ALL WAS BLACKNESS, PETE CLICKED THE SWITCH next to the door, with no response. "That's odd."

Blue shine blazed behind her, illuminating overstuffed and gilded furniture and a bed the size of a football pitch on an elevated dais at the far side of the room. Jack shuffled past her, the witchlight flickering in the curve of his palm, and turned on a floor lamp. "Bad wiring. Not surprised. This whole city is sinking back into the fucking marshes."

He fished in his jacket pocket and found chalk, and drew a sloppy warding hex on the inside of the door.

"Jack, no," Pete protested. He jabbed the stubby end of the chalk at her.

"When some bloody beastie from beyond the beyond is on the other side, you'll thank me." He dropped his bag, his coat, and his boots in a heap in the center of the hearts-chamber carpet, emptied the gold-painted bar of its supply of tiny whiskey bottles, and went into the bathroom. The door slammed in Pete's face.

"Oh, of course," she muttered. "Because I don't need a shower after four bloody hours of M-55 Saturday traffic. Tosser."

At least he hadn't claimed the bed. Pete smiled grimly and laid her suitcase on the satin duvet, the color of bone mellowed by centuries. Except for this white, the whole suite repeated the rest of the hotel. The colors and slippery fabrics gave Pete the uncomfortable feeling of being inside something huge and crimson and beating.

She shivered the feeling away, and opened her case. The file inside, on top of her weekend's worth of holiday clothing, was accusing as a murdered man's open eyes.

Pete knew that nothing would have changed since the last time she'd read the file's contents, but she opened it anyway and scanned the first line.

Detective Chief Inspector Geoffrey Newell

SO5, Metropolitan Police Service, London

Dear Sir,

I regretfully tender my resignation from the position of Detective Inspector…

It went on, with the required platitudes. Invaluable experience. Due to recent events… Do not feel able to discharge my duties…

The memo didn't give her room for much more than that, just the entrails of a promising career that, thanks to Jack, she was considering chucking. And on cue, Jack had turned into an absolute wanker.

"Should have told him," Pete castigated herself out loud, pulling a jersey and sleep pants out of the case. She shoved the file to the very bottom, crumpling the edges. Jack would tell her she was bloody stupid—bloody fucking stupid, if he were actually talking. That it wasn't his fault. She hadn't had to go looking for him four months ago, and her slippage into the Black, her awakened but not controlled Weir talents and her entree into magic was entirely her own doing.

Jack would tell her all of that and then turn around, with his self-satisfied smile, and leave all over again. Jack was good at leaving—twelve years long the last time he and Pete had parted. If she admitted she needed his help now, he'd be off again. Jack Winter was not a fan of commitment, to anything except his own skin.

How do I ignore it? How did she go on chasing shoplifters and prosecuting hooligans who got pissed and went Paki-bashing once she'd looked on the face of ghosts hungry for a living heart's essence and seen what crawled away into the shadowy places of London when the light hit its scaly hide?

Jack yelped, from the bathroom, "Bloody buggering fuck!"

Pete's skin leapt as she jerked back into herself, and she cleared the dais and the distance to the door in two steps. If there was one thing her time with Jack had taught hard and surely, it was that screams of terror were never to be ignored.

She hit the door with her shoulder, popping the gilt latch off its hinges, and nearly skidded into Jack. He had his shirt off, half-empty mini-bottle in one hand and an expression traveling the road from shock to revulsion on his face.

"What is it?" Pete demanded, expecting to see a shade, those angry howling scraps of a human soul stranded after death, or something worse, like the slime-mold demons Jack claimed lived under London Bridge.

Jack tossed down the rest of the whiskey and set the bottle with its empty brothers on the vanity. "Look," he said, pointing into the basin of the whirlpool tub. Pete stepped around him and peered in, then clapped a hand over her nose to shield against the smell of rotted seaweed and sundered guts that rolled out to meet her.

"Bloody hell." A dead thing lay in the basin, and Pete thought thing because that's exactly what it was—it could have been a gull, or some other waterfowl at some point, but instead of legs it had sadly curling feelers, rubbery and yellow, and a beak that hooked like the letter C, black and scarred. Its eyes bulged out and its neck had been twisted around. The thing's greenish blood, a color like absinthe mixed with motor oil, smeared the pale porcelain.

Pete stared for a long two heartbeats. The ripples in her head, the pulse of the magic wound through everything, gave an unpleasant twinge, as if just for a second she'd brushed her hand against something still and slimy. The dead thing's bulging eyes took on a shine, and Pete turned away.

"Just a thought," she said to Jack, as she got an armful of pink towels from the rack and threw them over the corpse, "but perhaps we shouldn't indulge in a sea swim anywhere in the greater Blackpool vicinity."

"Most bloody disgusting thing I've ever seen," Jack muttered. His shoulders twitched and he started on a fourth bottle of whiskey, emptying it in a swallow. Jack was heavily tattooed and at the moment the ink and his old track-mark scars stood stark against his skin. He looked like his body was engaging him in debate about whether to vomit.

"Who could have done it, is the question," Pete murmured. "If it's someone in the hotel, they've got a bloody twisted sense of humor." She gathered the towels into a bundle and lifted the dead creature out of the bath, sadness pricking her. "Poor thing."

"Poor thing?" Jack demanded. "No, not poor thing—what about poor me? My nerves are utterly shot! I'm from the city—we don't find dead wildlife in the loo very often!"

"Yes, poor thing," Pete said sharply. "It was ugly and smelly, but it was defective too—defenseless. It couldn't run or fly from whatever human wrapped hands around its neck. If I meet the tosser, I'll kick him in the sodding bollocks."

"Just get it out of here," said Jack. "And ask room service if they can bring about ten liters of bleach for the bath."

Pete found a spare garbage bag in the outer suite and slid it around the mass of towels. Jack would just have to pay for them. A few oily gray-green feathers slid loose and stained the carpet at her feet, and Pete felt that lap of discomfort again, the faintest pinprick of the disturbance against the smooth surface of the Black. An experienced Weir, a shaper of magic, would probably know what it meant, but all Pete knew was that it made her head hurt like she'd just woken up hungover.

She shoved the feathers into a desk drawer so she wouldn't have to look at them, and put the corpse outside the suite's front doors, locking them firmly behind it.

"I'M HUNGRY," JACK ANNOUNCED WHEN HE CAME OUT of the bath. A towel sat low on his skinny hips, and he padded about on bare feet.

Pete threw his jeans at him from the bed, where she'd ensconced herself under the satin sheets with a novel. "Put some bloody clothes on."

"Easy, luv—we are married, after all." Jack grinned at her and fished a cigarette out of the pocket of his pants before tossing them aside in favor of a pair of slim suit trousers.

"I'm going to bloody murder you, Jack Winter," Pete muttered. It was a threat she delivered often, and usually hollow, but she was in no mood. "I mean it. Don't sleep tonight."

"Well, there'll be no sleeping when I'm dead of bloody starvation," Jack said, exhaling smoke through his nose. He pulled on the trousers and shucked the towel. "There's a restaurant downstairs. Romantic dinner for two included in the package. What do you say?"

"I say that I'm comfortable where I am," said Pete. "You and your prodigious talent for ticking me off are welcome to the restaurant."

Jack sighed, dumping the candy out of a china dish on the wardrobe and putting out his Parliament in it. He came over to the bed and sat next to Pete. She scooted away, but he trapped her wrist with wire-strung fingers. "Pete. I know you're unhappy and bloody angry at me, but it's just dinner. Come eat and raise up your blood sugar and I wager you'll be a deal less cranky."

"More wagers?" Pete arched her eyebrow. "We're up to forty quid. You can't play in these leagues, Jack." She was hungry, and Jack's sincere blue gaze was very hard to ignore. His eyes were changeable, like a sky, glacial and bright when he was intent, the burning base of a candle flame when he was angry. Mage's eyes, flaring and settling depending on mood and magic.

"I'll match it if you can." Jack grinned. Inwardly, Pete felt the lump of resentment toward Jack's arrogant, bugger-all decision about this stupid holiday like a malignancy. Whatever else he'd done, Jack was trying.

Pete sighed. She didn't want to look at him. Jack pleading or discomfited was out of order. She settled her stare on the twin Eyes of Horus tattooed on his collarbones, touching one to change the subject. "The ink's holding up?"

Jack lifted a shoulder. "Better than nothing." The black Eye tingled under Pete's fingers. The light Eye looked toward the world of the living. The dark saw the land of the dead. Both served to take the edge from Jack's psychic sight, so it couldn't catch him unaware.

"Are you close to edge? Going to have an episode?" Pete asked anxiously. Jack shook his head.

"Hotels are good for that. So much humanity, so much fear and strain and pleasure too—like listening to a radio tuned just out of frequency. Peaceful, really. Sort of a white noise."

Pete's heart beat normally again. Jack wasn't going to disappear into the well of his sight, when it bounced back from his mage sensitivities amplified to the point where he sometimes couldn't tell the murdered, gibbering ghosts from flesh. He wasn't going to control it with a needle as he had before. The ink holds, she told herself firmly, and nearly believed it.

"I guess I am a bit peckish," she conceded, on the heels of her relief. Jack gave a bounce on the mattress next to her.

"Bloody right! Get dressed." He dropped a kiss on Pete's cheek, featherlight and dry, and then jumped up and went to root in his case. "What d'you think will give those stick-up-the-arse hotel staffers a bigger coronary?" He held up two jerseys, one featuring Iggy Pop flipping the bird and one a River City Rebels bit that proclaimed CORRUPT THE KING WHILE YOU FUCK THE QUEEN!

"Rebels," said Pete. She slid off the bed and got a black sweater and jeans to change into. Another hard and fast rule of life in the Black—never clothe yourself in anything you weren't able to run in, or willing to sacrifice to burns, blood, or demonic spittle.

THE RESTAURANT, Ml AMOR, WAS DECIDEDLY NOT A denim-and-sweater sort of place and caused a fidgety response in Pete akin to stepping into a dowager aunt's parlor.

White and pink linen billowed over the tables, and a terrace looked out on the sea. The entire arrangement was lit only by candles, and red-jacketed waiters moved among the bowed heads of diners like phantoms. Torches on the terrace flared valiantly against the fog and the wind that had sprung up. Pete smelled the tang of the bog through the doors, open even though it was late autumn. She shivered involuntarily. The closer she got to the sea, the louder the magic hissed, like standing too close to an amplifier.

"Winter, Suite 103," Jack told the maître d'. The maître d', shaven-headed and wearing a tuxedo that fit like he'd hastily buttoned it over his footie jersey, ran a stubby finger down the list.

"Ah," he said, grinning and displaying the sort of teeth that gave England a bad name, "The honeymooners."

"Bloody right." Jack grinned back, throwing an arm around Pete. His hand wandered south toward her chest and she twisted his index finger, hard. Jack hissed but managed to keep smiling.

"Right this way," said the maître d'. He shuffled through the candlelit cavern, flames and linens rippling in the wind off the sea.

"Reminds me of a bloody tomb," Pete muttered. "All shrouds and saint's candles."

"Anyone ever tell you you've got one bloody morbid set of sensibilities?" Jack muttered back. Pete shrugged out from under his arm and wrapped hers around herself. The mist swirled beyond the French doors and obscured whatever was beyond the torchlight. Somewhere far away in the night, waves hit the rocks with a hushed, wind-driven desperation.

"Here we are," the maître d' said, pulling out Pete's chair. She sank down, still shivering. Jack took her hand, a pretense of a romantic gesture, but in reality he squeezed her fingers and mouthed, "All right?"

"Donovan will be your waiter," said the maître d', and withdrew with another rotted-out smile.

"I'm fine," Pete said, low toned. "Just cold."

"I feel it too," Jack assured her. "It's wild out there. The hunting moon is whipping everything into frenzy. Just eat something and have a drink and a laugh. It'll settle once midnight passes."

Pete nodded to placate Jack, sipping her water. It wasn't just the impending moonrise, pushing against her skin as the ambient magic of the world gathered and sparked wild hunts and bonfire dancing. It was the slithering sensation, the closed-in mist that penetrated everything in Blackpool, closed off the famous neon lights and Spire, and wrapped the hotel in silence. She felt like something was stirring, just behind her eyes, ancient and terrible. Was this what she looked forward to if she left the Metropolitan Police and went with Jack to learn what he had to teach about magic? This horrible birthing, that struggled to surface?

"Drinks?"

Pete gasped and stared up—and up—into the face of possibly the most grotesque man she'd ever seen. The waiter had a brow that jutted like a Cornish cliff, ginger eyebrows parading across the bone ridge. Birdlike black eyes burned from sunken sockets and his jaw was knotty and misshapen, like he'd taken a bad hit during a rugby match. A scar ran from the left side of his mouth, disappearing in a serrated line down his neck. "Drinks?" he said again.

Jack shook his head once and put on his congenial, one-of-the-blokes face. Jack was good at instant masks of true feeling. "Whiskey here, mate. Straight with no nonsense, if you please."

The waiter, who had shoulders that a yeoman could have yoked a wagon to under his starched red shirt, grunted and wrote on a pad. His name tag read DONOVAN in the same overwrought, near-unreadable print repeated throughout the resort.

"And you, miss?" Donovan had a Geordie accent, and it came out more like "Anyewmess?"

"Red…" Pete swallowed, tracing the terrible scar down his neck and into his collar with her eyes. How had he survived such a slash? Maybe because he was built like a mountain troll… "Red wine," she managed.

"It were a gaff," Donovan said. He touched the scar with hands that could have turned Pete's head into a cracked egg. "Used to work the fishin' boats out on the North Sea. Me mate turned and caught me with the gaff one day, in the fog. Didn't see me comin'. I were real quiet-like, back then. Made no more noise than smoke." He grinned, although his bulging jaw made the expression sag on one side.

Pete, and Jack, who was making a valiant effort not to burst into laughter, if his snorts were any indication, were saved from a reply by a keening, gull-like shriek from the front of the restaurant. There was a commotion of linen and dropped silver, and a woman stumbled through the tables and launched herself at Donovan. "You stole my husband!"

Donovan batted the slim, sandy-haired girl away with the brutal grace of a big bloke who fights dirty. The woman rocked backward into an empty table, shattering wine goblets. "Bastard!" she screamed and grabbed Donovan again, beating at the waiter's oak-barrel chest with bloodied fists. The chatter of the restaurant stilled and even the couple snogging at the next table stopped for a moment to watch.

Donovan grabbed the woman by her torn sweater, soaked in mud and bog water like the rest of her, and held her at arm's length. "Gerroff, you!"

"You stole him!" the woman sobbed. "You sons of bitches stole my Sheldon…"

"Here," said Pete, standing up and inserting herself between Donovan and the woman. "What's happening?"

"She's mad as a hatter, is what's happening," Donovan growled. "Was ejected from hotel grounds just this morning for causing a fuss."

"They crawled up," moaned the woman. "Across the tow-path. They wrapped him in rot… oh God… they were writhing …" Her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused and sweat stood in a line of beads across her cheeks. Pete sniffed. No alcohol on the woman's breath, and Pete felt the instinctive flinch that occurs when in the presence of someone quite mad.

"What's your name?" Pete asked her quietly. "Do you know it? Do you know where you live?"

"Henrietta," the woman shuddered. "Henrietta Phillips. From London."

"Oi," said Donovan. "Who're you to be askin' all these questions?"

"Pete Caldecott," said Pete. "Detective Inspector. Also of London."

"Here, now," said Donovan. "No police needed. This bird's just had a falling out with 'er medications."

"I saw it," Henrietta hissed, and there was terror in her creaking tones, the kind brought on by witnessing something a human was never meant to endure. A touch of cold prickled the back of Pete's neck. She listened when Henrietta said, "I saw it, coming out of the mud and the salt… I heard it speaking… and the smell—oh God, the smell… death and rotted fish and Shel let out this scream—"

Donovan pulled Henrietta close and slapped her cheek, leaving a handprint. "Shut yer gob! Gerry!" he yelled to the maître d'. "Call up security!"

"Oi!" Pete shouted in turn. She shoved Donovan back from Henrietta, laying a hand flat on his chest and holding him away. "I think you've done quite enough to help the situation."

"Touch me again and I'll lay a smack on you that'll have teeth out of yer head," Donovan growled.

In less time than it took to blow out a candle, Jack was on his feet. "Lay one hand on her, and you'll be fit for a closed coffin," he said. Jack didn't snarl, or posture, he just stood at Pete's shoulder, over her left side. The hairs on her neck crackled from the power gathering around him, dark blood-fueled magic that clung to Jack when he was angry.

Donovan's eyes flared; then he dropped his chin and backed up a step. Jack smiled in a manner that managed to be genial and terrifying at the same time, all Big Bad Wolf teeth and menace. "Glad we understand one another, mate." He produced a cigarette and lit it off the hurricane candle on the table. No magic in front of the mundanes.

"Sheldon…" Henrietta moaned. "My Shel… we were just on our honeymoon, no time at all… he's gone into the mud now…"

"Is anyone not on their honeymoon in this place?" Pete muttered. Gerry the maître d' and two sufficiently burly members of the hotel staff, clad in satin vests and breeches, rushed up.

"I think maybe this does merit the local constabulary being called…" Pete started, but Gerry pointed a furious finger at her, palm raised. A small tri-pointed tattoo flared from his palm.

"Set down and eat your supper, miss. We are handling the matter and it is none of your concern!"

Pete was set to inform the maître d' that it was more her business than his when Jack yanked her back into her seat. "Don't," he said. "Just sit and eat, like the man said."

"The smell…" Henrietta moaned as they dragged her out, heels wrinkling the carpet. "Brackish oil… the police laughed, and you can as well, but you'll see, you'll all see it soon enough…" Her sobs and screams faded as the arched doors of the restaurant whispered shut. After a moment, the canned music resumed and diners around Pete and Jack ducked their heads back to their plates.

"We better get a complimentary lunch or something for all of this ruckus," Jack said. "Puts off my digestion."

Pete tore a roll into tiny crumbs and watched the breathing dark mist beyond the terrace doors. "Jack, something's going on," she said, finally giving in to the whispers and the pressure on her mind.

"No bloody kidding," he muttered. "That shambling Gerry's been branded with the Tridach mark."

"The what?" Pete always felt as if she were sitting her A-levels while still in first form when Jack talked about the arcane.

"It means he worships the devil," said a burbling female voice from over Jack's shoulder. American, it burred on the skin like a fingertip's touch.

Pete canted her head to the left and caught a shadowed mixture of red lips and curling chestnut hair, lit by eyes the color of rain-washed evergreens, shot with gold. The woman, poured into a black satin dress, sat on the lap of a bloke who was trying hard to be Joe Strummer, and not managing it.

Jack turned in his seat, face lighting when he met the woman's eyes. "You know something about demons."

"I have an affinity for the darkness," said the woman. "And what lives in it."

Pete rolled her eyes. Jack seemed to have no such compunctions. "Do you, now." He let the easy, familiar smile he'd perfected in his days as a front man for the Poor Dead Bastards bloom into being. "Then you know the Tridach mark doesn't really mean he's a devil worshipper. It represents the Triumverate, the ruling body of Hell, and all the associations of being a faithful servant. According to demonic law, he was placed on earth to serve some special purpose. The Triumverate doesn't mark mortals very often."

The woman's lips parted and she looked positively aroused. "You know something about darkness yourself. Delicious." She extended a hand, red plastic talons crowning it in a wet gleam. "I'm Charlotte, and this is my husband, Roy. From Cincinnati."

"Yo," said Roy.

"We're on our honeymoon," Charlotte continued. "Exploring the mysteries of the Old World."

"Of course you are," Pete murmured, fighting the urge to shove the remaining dinner roll into Charlotte's mouth to shut it. "Very image of the virgin bride, you."

"Our fair isle has a lot of secrets to be found." Jack took Charlotte's hand, turning it over instead of shaking it, stroking his thumb over the palm. "May I?"

Charlotte's husband grunted, but her pupils expanded with delight. "You do divination?"

"Luv, I do many things," said Jack. He held Charlotte's hand close to his face and traced each line with the side of his thumb in turn. "A long love line," he intoned. "Life-line… is…"

Jack's shoulders stiffened, like he'd just choked on a sip of water, and his eyes suddenly went nearly white, color leaching. He let out a low moan as his sight gripped him.

"Bollocks," said Pete. She grabbed Charlotte's wrist and Jack's, and yanked them apart, fighting against the iron hold Jack had on the American's hand. Released, Jack slumped over, the pulse in his neck beating like a trapped bird.

Charlotte blinked at Pete. "Christ. He gonna be okay?"

"Fine," Pete snapped. "Just bloody fine, once he learns not to be so bloody stupid and careless!" The last was directed at Jack, but he was staring into the middle distance, color slowly drifting back into his face. He blinked, and his eyes were glacial blue again. Pete unclenched her fists, breathing deep to tell the shrieking part of her mind that it was past, the episode was averted, Jack was fine. It didn't work terribly well. They needed to get out of the restaurant.

"It was lovely meeting you," she told Charlotte. The woman acknowledged her insincere smile with a startled doe-in-the-headlights expression. Pete didn't bother trying to explain Jack's reaction away. Sorry, Charlotte, but my friend here sees dead people with regularity and sometimes it makes him a bit odd… Henrietta wouldn't be the only crazy person thrown out of the hotel tonight.

Pete took Jack's arm and he obediently followed her up, leaning against her shoulder like he'd had half a dozen pints. "Charlotte wanted to shag me," he muttered as he stumbled to the lift with Pete. "I give them six months… tops. 'Sides, she's going to die soon, and who would want to shag a corpse?…"

Pete punched the button for the lift with her free hand and settled Jack against her shoulder. Seeing death for a person still living was the worst of the sight. The crushing inevitability of it could send Jack out of commission for days.

"And you wonder why I don't want to get married."

JACK SLEPT, AFTER DEMOLISHING THE LAST OF THE minibar's whiskey, lying lengthwise across the bed. Using his sight was like popping a handful of Valium, or so he'd told Pete. He could sleep forever, completely blank and dreamless.

Pete grumbled him out of his shoes and socks and left him sprawled. She turned out the lights and curled on the sofa under a pink throw. If it were just her, she'd be on the motorway back to London. The hotel was wrong, like being trapped inside the skeleton of a giant desiccated beast. Lines of black power crossed under their feet, and Jack seemed oblivious.

Or maybe he was just used to it. And you would be as well, you poor excuse for a Weir, if you'd learn to block out feed from every stray spurt of magic floating on the wind. She couldn't very well shake Jack awake and say, "We have to go home. The hotel gives me the creeping spooks for reasons I can't fully explain." Jack would laugh himself weak, and then tell her she was being bloody stupid. "Besides, I'm a sodding inspector," she muttered, "and I'm afraid of harmless hotel ghosts."

"Harmless" here being a subjective term, of course. She groaned at her own pitiful state and pulled the throw up to her chin.

Since the incident in London, sleep was a reluctant and elusive partner, but Pete nevertheless felt her lashes flutter down against her cheeks. The sofa was soft and the throw was warming her and the hush-hush of the sea coaxed her to sleep, just sleep…

No nightmare forced Pete to wake or perish, just a repetitive, steady boom boom boom, like the beating of a great three-chambered heart.

Jack stirred and turned over on the bed, a shaft of weak fog-filtered sunlight turning his platinum hair white. The beating came again, boom boom boom. "Room service," a guttural voice spoke.

"Bollocks," Pete muttered. She was awake, and her neck and spine were on fire from sleeping crumpled against the sofa like a scarecrow. "Coming!" she shouted, tripping over her own shoes on the way.

Donovan the waiter stood outside the suite door, holding a covered silver tray. "Morning, miss." His slippery grin gave Pete an involuntary twitch between her shoulder blades.

"We didn't order room service," she said, keeping her frame fully blocking the doorway.

"Course you didn't," said Donovan. "Morning-After Brunch. Compliments of the management." He craned and caught sight of Jack. "Wore the wee lad out, did you?"

Pete snatched the tray. "Give the management my thanks." She shut the door in Donovan's face. "Tosser."

"Whossat?" Jack muttered, an arm over his eyes to block out the sun. "I smell sausages."

Pete set the tray down and regarded it. Silly, of course. Nothing but breakfast under the cover, but at the same time, she felt a spurt of pure animal fear when she thought about what could be under the innocuous nickel-plate lid…

Jack came up and snatched the top off, missing Pete's sharp intake of breath. "Toast is soggy," he muttered, tossing it into the bin. He shoveled eggs and sausage onto a plate and flopped down on the sofa, flicking on the telly. Pete ignored the food and opened the French door onto the balcony. Salted moisture kissed her hair and face. She could see a little ways down the beach in daylight, a lone figure weaving along the sand just in the mist, a lanky black-clad shadow.

Something about the cant of the figure wasn't right, he moved like a drunk or someone who'd been dealt a blow. "Jack," she called. He didn't stir himself. "Jack!" Pete shouted to make herself heard over the popcorn guns of a black and white Western film.

"What!" he bellowed irritably. "Can't a bloke eat breakfast in peace?"

The figure emerged into the slice of vision granted by the sun, and Pete saw Roy the American staggering along the beach. Blood ran down his face, tributaries and deltas along the stark lines of his mouth and neck, and he held his hands in front of his body. His fingers and palms were crimson too. As Pete watched, rooted like an ancient oak, Roy shuddered and then fell over, curling into the fetal position and growing still.

"Bloody hell," Pete muttered, whirling and making a dash for the front door of the suite. Jack watched her go.

"What's the matter, then?"

"That American bloke from last night," she panted, jerking on her shoes. "I think someone's killed him."

ROY'S BODY LAY IN THE SAND LIKE A broken marionette, blood patching the earth a darker brown. Pete skidded down the half-rotted wooden steps the hotel provided as access, and felt the wet sand suck at her feet as she dashed for Roy. Jack appeared behind her, like he sometimes did, panting like he'd just run a hundred meters.

"Call an ambulance!" Pete yelled over her shoulder. The ever-present fog dampened her shout, thinned it so that it remained trapped beside her. The hotel and the rest of the beach disappeared as the wind picked up and it was just herself and Roy's mangled form.

Jack appeared, hair like a spiked sun. "Pete. Don't touch him!"

Pete skidded to a stop, going to her knees next to the body. Seawater soaked through her trousers. The tide was coming in, and a crab with an extra claw protruding from its back scuttled through the mushy pool Roy's blood made. Jack dropped beside her and pulled back her wrist just before she felt for Roy's pulse. "Look."

An iron shackle was locked around Roy's neck, dug deep and sharp enough into the skin to form a necklace of blood droplets. The shackle was like nothing Pete had ever seen, metal holding a shine, forged with curling, roiling designs that caused the point between her eyes to ache. The broken end of an equally foreign chain link dangled from the collar.

"Bloody hell," said Pete, because anything else would have been insufficient. Jack wrapped the end of his t-shirt around his hand and flipped Roy's body over onto its back. What Pete had taken for cuts on his cheeks were more like burns, like something thin and coated in acid had taken Roy's face in its hands. But not hands. Diamond-shaped markings bubbled where the… where whatever it was had touched him. "He's been kissed by the Black, luv," said Jack, brushing his hand off. "Touch might transfer it. Just looking out for you."

Pete swallowed as she met Roy's open eyes. The magic was so thick around him, it choked the air out of her, and she let Jack pull her away. "All right?"

Laughing, Pete shook her head. "How would I bloody be all right? He was alive not twelve hours ago. Him and his silly bint of a wife." Her gut twisted, nothing to do with the dark energy around them. "Oh, God. Where's the wife?"

Jack conjured a Parliament and lit it, drawing deep before he said, "That thing you feel, like congealed grease on skin, is sacrificial blood magic. Old Roy's soul is half out of his body, waiting to be called as power in someone's ritual. Poor sod."

Pete looked down at Roy again, thought of dark wet things and mist-hidden shadows. "Who would do something like this?"

"A sorcerer," said Jack, flicking his cigarette away. The wind brought it back and spread embers across the sand. "A practitioner of black arts attempting to call something from the otherworld. Unusual that they'd just take two, even if this bloke did manage to get away. Usually sacrifices are threes, or sevens. Darkness loves the prime numbers, you know."

"Henrietta," said Pete, the woman's shattered eyes and disconnected ramblings jumping back to forefront. "That crazy bird from the restaurant last night. She said that something had stolen her husband."

Jack rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound against his morning shadow. "Three bodies needed, then, and they used old Roy's soul as kindling for the fire." He paced around the body, muttering. "Not phases of the moon. Not a demon. Might be amateurs. Chanting naked, bathing in blood. Some stupid shite like that."

"This is not an amateur anything," said Pete, pointing at Roy. "We have to call the police. Then we have to find Charlotte."

"What are you on about? What sodding we?" Jack asked. " 'M staying right here, in me honeymoon suite. Let the coppers sort it out. Always fun to watch you lot try and figure out creatures of the Black."

Pete seized Jack by his upper arm and jerked him to her. "Take my mobile. Call the police. I'm going to try and find Charlotte before something in this freaky place eats her insides." She pressed her mobile into Jack's palm. "Hurry."

"Can't, luv," said Jack. Pete turned on him, ready to scream, and he held up her mobile, NO SVC blinked in the center of the screen.

"Bollocks." Pete kicked a lump of sand, pacing away from Roy's body. She couldn't stand to feel the displaced magic any longer—it hurt, like a boil under the skin.

Roy's footprints came out of the fog, and just behind and to the left of him, twin webbed tracks moved, taking one step for Roy's four. They were like gull's feet, but human-sized and with far too many toes. A thin miasma of slime coated each track, sending the smell of overripe mud to Pete's nose. "Jack." She pointed numbly when he came to her side. "It followed him. All the way back. And then it just vanishes."

"Watched him die," said Jack. "Made sure he couldn't babble like that Henrietta bird."

"A demon?" Pete wrapped her arms around her torso, suddenly chilled beyond measure.

"No," said Jack. "No, a demon free in the world would be wearing human skin. This is…" He sighed and brushed the dampness from his hair, leaving it wild like a Celt's. "Bugger all, Pete. I don't know what this is." For Jack to admit ignorance made the situation bad, bad in the way that had ended in blood once before. Pete bit her lower lip hard to blot out memories of London that had no place.

"Knew this place was wrong," she muttered, retracing Roy's footstep. Knew that something sinister was lurking under the tacky cheerfulness of the Paradise Palace. Knew it, and doubted, and kept her mouth shut. Now Roy had been killed by it.

"Oi, where're you going?" Jack shouted when she started to walk away. Pete stopped, not looking back.

"I'm following it," she said. "Coming?"

PETE WALKED, UNTIL SHE WAS SURE THE WIND and wet had sunken into her bones and she would become soft and gibbous, a waterlogged shade who would never be warm again. Roy's footprints led down the beach, past casinos blinking their promise of free bingo weekly out to sea, past a boarded-up boat rental shack and finally into the wild, scrubby little trees and the phantom bones of driftwood clustered where the tide had left them.

The tracks took a turn inland, and Pete and Jack crested a hillock and descended into the bogs. The sound of the sea was muffled by winter-blackened dead trees and the salt air became clammy and sour. Roy's reversed tracks deepened, running for his life.

Pete slipped in the mud, but Jack, in his workman's boots, tromped along merrily champing on a cigarette like he was taking a turn through Regent's Park.

"Bloody kill you," Pete muttered.

"Here," said Jack from ahead of her, gesturing with the lit end of his Parliament.

Pete examined the spot where the web-foot tracks dragged themselves out of the peat muck and began to follow Roy's shaky strides. His ended a few meters farther on, seemingly in the flat marsh water that reflected Pete's frown back at her.

"This can't be where he came from."

"Maybe he swam," Jack shrugged. He did a slow circle, looking out over the brackish-colored marshland visible through the fog, and then flicked his cigarette butt into the water.

"That's a cartload of bollocks," Pete told him. She crouched and dipped her fingers into the marsh, recoiling as sinuous underwater plants grasped at her skin. "The water's no more than a couple of degrees. And he wasn't wet on the beach."

Jack sighed. "Pete, it's bloody strange, yeah, but what do you want me to do about it, grab a ruddy iron hook and drag the bottom? I'm on holiday!"

"That Charlotte girl could still be alive!" Pete cried. "Can't you call up an imp and offer it Roy's blood or something to reveal her true location?"

"Doesn't work that way and you know it," said Jack. "Magic isn't tricks and forcing it to do what you want. It's the fabric of the Black and it has its limitations."

"And by limitations, you're meaning that you're a lazy git," Pete snapped. "This place is doing something to the people in the hotel. You know it is." A bird screamed from somewhere invisible. She shuddered. Her skull felt like it was splitting apart from the inside the longer they stayed out here in the fog and if she stared at the water, she swore that glimmering ebony tendrils moved underneath the tiny ripples stirred by the wind. "I can feel it," Pete muttered. "I'm not imagining things and neither was Henrietta."

"There might be something evil here," said Jack, in what for him was a gentle tone. He clasped her on the shoulder, fingers knobby as a skeleton. "It's not ours to rush in with flaming swords, Pete. Charlotte's gone, probably dead. 'S what I saw for her last night, anyway. I don't know about you, but I'm wet and tired. Let's go back to the hotel, sleep, and go back to London, right?" He rubbed both hands up and down Pete's arms when she shivered. "Charlotte will either turn up or she won't. Dead, or not. It's not in your hands, luv."

"And when we get back to London," Pete said quietly. "Everything will be safe and nice and normal? Is that what you think, Jack? You think a cheap hotel suite and lies to get a free dinner made me forget you nearly being killed, or being left alone with that sorcerer's spirit to fight off?" She shook her head, venom coursing in her veins. For just a moment, the air was breathy with corpse-dust and the glowing eyes of the spirit Jack had released shone down on her with the light of damnation.

"You're pathetic," Pete spat at Jack. "You fob off problems and expect the world to flow around you and everyone to forget what a bastard you really are. Well I won't forget, Jack, so you and your holiday can go bugger yourselves."

His face clamped shut over the flicker of pain Pete saw, and his lip curled. "You aim for the killing cut, luv. Well done." He pushed past her and walked back down the path. After a moment more staring into the fog, trying not to sob from sheer frustration, Pete followed him because there was nothing else she could do.

THE SKY WAS THE GRAY OF A DEAD WOMAN'S hair when they finally reached the hotel. The light was moving on toward evening, if there was such a thing in this endlessly fogbound place. Jack made a beeline for the hotel bar and Pete stormed over to the lift and punched the button to take her back to the room.

"You've left mud on the carpet, Miss," Gerry the maître d' sneered, creeping up at her elbow. Pete hit the button again.

"Ask me if I bloody care. Isn't it your job to clean these things?"

"You're fighting with the other half, then?" Gerry said, his smile growing wider. Pete glared at him as the lift dinged open.

"Poke your shiny head into someone else's business."

"That's a yes, then," said Gerry as the door rolled closed. Just for a second, her Weir gift flared and Gerry had pointed teeth and a frog's webbed hands. He laughed, flicking a forked tongue.

Pete leaned her head back against the satin wall and the tears did come, unstoppable against the tide of the Black. The city and the bog and the hotel were dark places, evil, and she just wanted to get away… Pete clutched at her head as a flood of whispers engulfed her, sliding into a crouch against the pain and the unbearable pressure of magic. "Stop it," she begged. "Stop it, stop it… I see. I understand."

Hissing, the whispers faded away, slowly, and she realized that the lift doors were standing open on the top floor. Everything was normal—cheesy gilt wallpaper, kissing-swan mirrors and the plastic carved paneling on the suite's door.

The thought that she might be going mad crossed Pete's mind.

She slammed the door to the suite behind her and locked the chain bolt, not that it would stop Jack, when and if he came upstairs. If he'd lived a hundred years ago, he could have easily plied a trade as a sneak-thief in the alleys of London.

Pete threw off her shoes and collapsed on the bed, sundown darkening the room to velvety gray-black. Jack came in after a time, stumbled in the dark, smelled of whiskey and too many Parliaments, and then Pete slept, fitfully and with dreams of dark things rolling beneath marsh water.

PETE WOKE WITH A GASP AND THE SOFTLY glowing face of the bedside clock staring at her. Twelve midnight. She breathed deeply and put a hand over her heart, which was thumping the way it did when she had the nightmare that Jack had died, and she'd been too late to save him. The sorcerer spirit touched him and stole his magic. And then Pete killed the ghost wearing Jack's face.

Jack let out a soft drunken snore from the sofa and Pete relaxed, using the still rush of waves and the cool touch of the utterly black night to calm herself.

In the darkness by the wardrobe, something slithered.

Pete bolted upright, out of the satin sheets and over the edge of the bed, scrabbling away from the sound toward the balcony. "Jack!" she hissed.

The sounds were all around her, not half-imagined offshoots of ambient magic but real, wet squelching of misshapen limbs over the carpet and gibbering moans. For a dreadful instant, the fog parted and moonshine struck the room. Pete saw hundreds of wet black-green bodies gleaming, while triple rows of eyes lolled in protuberant exoskeletons and bone teeth with razor points dribbled ichor from misshapen mouths.

In her lifetime, Pete had faced too many of her fears without flinching, because it was what was required. Gang members with guns. Jack, alive and dead. The bottomless cold power of the Black that burned you from inside your skull when your magic took hold.

The nearest marsh-creature's tentacle wrapped around Pete's ankle with a cold so icy, it burned, and Pete decided Bugger all that for a lark. She screamed to wake the dead. "JACK!"

For a horrible second nothing happened, and then witchfire flamed to life in the vicinity of the sofa and Jack's tousled platinum hair and face coalesced, hollow-eyed in the blue light. "Bloody hell, can't a bloke get a decent night's—?" He saw the things, then, although they hissed and drew back from the witch-fire into the dark.

Pete grabbed the digit around her ankle and pulled, but it only contracted harder, squashy and palpable like a muscle with no bones inside. "Do something! Get rid of these fucking things!" she screamed at Jack. More feelers attached to her wrists, her legs, snaking up from the floor to bind her, or worse.

Jack stomped on the creatures underfoot. The witchfire in his palm matched by twin flames in his eyes. "Saighid!" he bellowed. The chalk warding on the door flared to life like a flashbulb, and then just as quickly threw violent blue sparks and went out.

"Well, bugger me sideways with a barbell," Jack mused. "That should have worked."

Pete snatched the cut-glass candy dish Jack used as an ashtray off the wardrobe and began beating away the beasts, some of which looked like many-legged octopods, some just gaping mouths with three or four eyes supported by flimsy nets of tissue. She was nearly free when a pair of crushingly strong arms wrapped around her torso and lifted her off the ground.

"It didn't work, Mr. Winter," said Gerry the maître d', now attired in a black sweater and slacks, a watchcap covering the sheen of his bald head. He appeared from out of the loo, the long kitchen knife in his hand catching light like the tooth of a great wolf. "Innocent blood spilled is piss-poor for warding hexes. Degrades their magic right down to nothing."

Jack gaped at him, looking more outraged that his hex had failed than at the fact his hotel room was full of bog-spawned horrors. "Innocent blood?" he managed. "What sodding blood? I cut meself shaving, but in case it escaped your attention, I'm far from innocent as Leicestershire is from Los Angeles."

"The creature," Pete managed, although the person holding her was doing it tightly enough to crack ribs. "The dead thing, in the bath. Innocent blood."

"Oh, you have got to be jerking me!" Jack shouted. "The bloody hell is wrong with you freaks? Drink too much swamp water on the job?"

A small five-legged octopod with a sucker mouth crawled up Pete's leg, and she kicked it away. It gave a high squeak as it bounced off the opposite wall. The man holding her grabbed her hair with one hand and jerked her neck back almost to breaking. "I'll thank ye to leave my creatures alone, miss."

"Donovan?" Pete rasped.

He grinned. "The same."

"Let go of her," Jack said, his eyes narrowing to fiery slits. "You've made me ask you twice now, and I'm all out of patience for it."

"You're coming along quietly," said Gerry. "Or my servant is going to snap your wife's neck. We'd hate for an accident to occur on hotel grounds, but some things are simply unavoidable."

"It's all right, Jack," said Pete. An involuntary tear worked out of her eye when Donovan twisted her neck. "Just go with him."

Jack looked from her to Gerry, then slowly lowered his hands. The witchfire nickered out of existence. "You've got me," he muttered quietly. "I'll do anything you sodding want. Just don't hurt her."

Pete slumped. Jack wasn't supposed to surrender—he was supposed to bloody get away and help her escape when the opportunity presented. Noble gestures were so contrary that she almost started crying again.

"Unfortunately," said Gerry with a wide smile. "I'm not sure I can fulfill that promise, Mr. Winter. You and the missus make a pair, you see." He jerked his head at Donovan. "Get her to the boat."

DONOVAN AND GERRY TOOK THEM THROUGH A BASEMENT service door that backed onto a canal filled with garbage and brown sludge that looked more like intestinal distress than water. A pole launch bumped gently against a pier made of old plastic drums sealed with tar.

Pete fell on her knees in the aft of the launch when Donovan shoved her. "Not so chatty now, are ye?"

"I'll set a badger on your bollocks," Pete muttered. Donovan kicked her and she felt something give, low down near her stomach. She bit the insides of her cheeks. She wouldn't get Donovan off by yelling.

"Knock that off," Gerry commanded as he wrestled Jack into the launch. "You remember what happened last time you bruised the sacrifices, surely."

Donovan grunted, and Jack raised his eyebrows. "So you two are the silly gits playing doctor with creatures of the Black. Have to say I'm a bit let down."

"Shut up," Gerry said. "This is older and larger than you, mage, and I don't expect you to understand." He pushed Jack down next to Pete, and cast off the line. Donovan poled the skiff into the channel and they drifted toward the sea.

"You all right?" Jack muttered without moving his mouth too much. Pete sucked in a breath. A dull shiv of pain slid between her broken bones.

"Hurt, but I can run for it if I need to."

"Quiet, you two," Donovan warned.

"Go bugger yourself," said Jack loudly. "If you hurt us, you'll be stuck sacrificing that bloody overcooked roast you served me last night." To Pete, he murmured, "Sorry."

Pete blinked. Never mind creatures in the suite and the thick dark magic that lived in the air around Blackpool—Jack apologizing was truly a phenomenon. "You are?"

"Should have listened to you," he said. "This is a dodgy place."

"Yeah, and the time for guilt has cruised past like a missed bus," Pete said. "So what are we going to do?"

The launch drifted through connected channels and the salt tang told Pete they were near the bog, moonlit mist curling away from the prow. Were it not for the pain in her ribs and the thrumming of darkness in the waters, they could have been on the hidden path to Avalon.

"We wait, for now," said Jack. "Until we get where we're going. I want to see what these sods are on about."

"That's a terrible plan," Pete hissed. "We need to swim for it. Where we're going to is an untimely death!"

"No…" said Jack slowly, his head swiveling as the skiff began to slow. Pete struggled up and followed his eyes. Jack tilted his head. "That's where we're going."

Something massive and hunched rose out of the water, taller than the windbroken trees along the shore. It was stone and moss, slimy and shining as if it had just woken from under the mud. Columns held a crooked roofpiece made of insectoid carapaces and steps covered in algae led to the round opening, jagged pieces of broken stone lining it like rotted teeth.

The skiff bumped against the bottom stones and Donovan hauled her up, nearly dislocating her arm.

"Any tricks from ye," he told Jack, "and she breaks like a matchstick."

"I'll enjoy feeding you your still-beating heart, you bastard," Jack said pleasantly as Gerry pushed him out of the boat.

"Hear that, Donnie-boy?" Gerry said. "That's a sentiment born of true love." They laughed as Pete and Jack were herded up the steps to the temple door.

It was a temple. That was the best way Pete could describe it. The stones were massive and hand cut, carved with curling tentacles and lidless eyes and the great humped backs of creatures rolling through deep waves. Gaseous fumes tinged the air of the single open chamber yellow. The temple wasn't Roman and it wasn't Celtic or Saxon—the place was slightly out of focus, as if built by something with an idea of human shapes but no practice.

Moss and algae covered almost every surface and Pete slipped, going down hard. Donovan dragged her the rest of the way by her scruff, locking her next to Jack into the neck cuff and a pair of iron shackles, chains bolted to a collapsing column.

Jack winced. "Iron's cold," he said by way of explanation.

"You better have a bloody good plan," Pete whispered. Witch-light flamed up in alcoves along the walls, and Pete saw the chamber was larger than it appeared, stretching to a massive fallen-in piece of the floor leaking bubbling marsh water. Tiny waves sloshed at her bare feet.

"Trust me, I'll be thinking of one right quickly," said Jack. "Interesting place, though. Appears to be some kind of death cult, chaos worshippers."

"Two pathetic sods without girlfriends," Pete muttered. "Not much of a cult."

Gerry hit a bronze gong mounted near the edge of the water pit, and with a low moan and a shuffling of feet a row of robed figures shuffled in. Their tattered black garments bore the tridach mark. Pete recognized the doorman from the hotel, and a friendly clerk at the petrol station where she and Jack had stopped on their way into the city.

"Bugger all. Look at them."

"Patience," Jack sighed. "I'm sure they'll eventually free us for the sacrifice, and then you can kick them, and I'll send up a little smoke, and we'll be off in the bloody boat."

"That's about as well-planned as this holiday was," Pete snapped.

"Listen!" Jack shouted. A few of the cultists glanced at them. "You didn't have to come along, but I was trying to do something for you because I felt bloody guilty about what happened in London and now that we've managed to end up like this, I just feel bloody stupid, neither of which is improving my mood, and on top of it all I feel a hangover coming on, so you can just bugger the bloody hell off, Petunia!"

Pete blinked, fury for just a moment overriding her fear. Then she hissed, "You are a selfish, self-absorbed git, Jack, and if you'd bothered to check on me after you almost died and I had to kill a ghost that sucks out people's souls—and do you know how hard it is to kill a ghost, Jack? Sodding hard!—if you'd just thought for one second about doing what I needed instead of what was easy, we wouldn't be in this mess!"

"Silence!" Gerry bellowed. He had donned his own robe, as had Donovan. "That's better," he said when Pete just glared at Jack in mute rage. He turned to the assembled cultists and raised his arms. "Brethren, we have joined thrice on this, the feast cycle of St. Gummarus the hunter, to bring prey and offerings to our lord, the immovable and towering Lord of Rage, Mnarhoteph."

"Mnarhoteph, fear his Name," the cultists chorused unevenly.

Pete met Jack's eyes, and even though she wanted to loose her chains and wrap them around his skinny tattooed neck, she felt a bubble of laughter when she saw he was trying to bite back a grin.

"Every cycle of the seasons we feed the unending and bottomless anger of Mnarhoteph, and when his hunger has been satiated, he grants us the power of his hatred."

"Mnarhoteph, praise his Fury," the cultists droned.

Gerry hit the gong again, three times, and it reverberated inside Pete's skull like a rusted dull blade scraping bone. "Mnarhoteph, the moon is high! Arise!"

The waters in the pit began to boil and heave and then in a vast sigh of fetid air and a groaning of chains, a massive body filled the pit, reaching for the temple roof. Mnarhoteph had row upon row of eyes, tentacles the size of tree trunks, suckers and feelers rimmed with teeth all studding a gleaming black hide. Pete felt his magic hit her, felt as if her sanity and her skull had split by gazing upon Mnarhoteph's silently shrieking edifice. "He's the source… the source of what I feel here…" And she lost the ability to speak, mesmerized by the awful beauty of the creature.

Jack went paler than usual, making him look dead. "Bollocks. I thought these gits were just playing at chaos worship." He began to jerk his chains frantically. "Pete, we need…" His eyes roamed over the witchfires in the alcoves and the poisonous yellow air, over Mnarhoteph and the great salt-bitten chains studded to his skin with harpoon spikes that held him in the pit. "We need a spark," said Jack finally.

"Thrice we have brought you sacrifices to fuel your towering hatred!" Gerry cried. "A female, a male, and now both aspects of the human filth lie before you in offering. Feed, master, and be strong!"

"A spark," Pete repeated, clinging to Jack's voice as her breadcrumb trail of sanity. Her words were lost as Mnarhoteph opened its maw and roared, a sound of pain that shook the temple to the stone bones.

Pete sobbed as Mnarhoteph's cry went through her and wrapped around her heart, filling her with agony heavy as iron.

"Pete," Jack muttered urgently as Mnarhoteph's tentacles snaked across the floor, bleeding black ichor from the piercing iron bonds. "Pete, make a spark. Small, large, in-between, just hurry!"

Her mind still raged with Mnarhoteph's cry—trapped, alone and in pain—but Pete gathered herself, just as she had when the sorcerer's ghost took Jack's face, and banged her wrist against the stone column she was shackled against. The wet stone elicited nothing but pain in her hand.

Jack's eyes went milky and rolled back in his head, and he murmured wordlessly as Mnarhoteph moved inexorably out of the pit. His chains shrieked against the rock.

Pete made a fist and banged the shackle against stone again, and again. Purple bruising and crimson blood sprouted around the edges of the band, but she kept hitting stone, chipping off centuries of muck until, sure her hand was pulp, she hit dry rock.

A bright orange spark flew off the iron and Jack's eyes snapped back, twin flames replacing the color. "Aithinne," he breathed. A wind sucked the air from Pete's lungs and then with Jack's magic fire—real, crimson fire—sprouted from her spark and the gaseous air all around them began to burn. The initial explosion cracked the pillar Pete was chained to and drove Mnarhoteph's rubbery tentacles back.

Tracers of fire floated through the air, catching cultists as they attempted to run and roiling a bluish smoke from the burning algae. Donovan, robe and hands aflame, slid in the burning muck and cracked his head against broken rock, falling still.

Pete slipped her shackle with her blood-slicked hand and went to Jack. He was bleeding from a cut in his forehead and lying still, but breathing.

Pete turned to watch the fleeing cultists as the fumes burned away, leaving the air damp and salty as it had always been. "I guess that was a plan, all right. A bloody stupid plan, but a plan nonetheless."

From the pit, Mnarhoteph groaned. In a voice bottomless and liquid as the sea, he said, "Please."

Pete's heart thudded as she walked ankle-deep into the water pit and stood, close enough to touch Mnarhoteph's hide. "What did you say?"

"Please…" he grumbled. "Hurt…"

Jack stirred and pulled himself up, freeing himself now that his shackles were loosed. "What the bloody hell are you doing, Pete? Get away from that thing!"

"It's hurt," Pete said. Jack's sight let him perceive the dead, but Weirs were the conduits for the old gods, shapers of magic who spoke to all of the Black. Jack couldn't hear the creature's pain.

Pete placed a hand on Mnarhoteph and this close, the dark churning of magic was loneliness, not evil. "What do you want?" she whispered.

He pulled against the massive chains and harpoons that held him. "Home…"

Pete looked at the carvings along the temple walls, the deep waves and open seas—not a shallow and polluted bog on the edge of civilization.

Jack came to her side. "Guess he's not such a nasty chaos beastie, after all. Some ancestor of those blithering idiots in the robes must've summoned and trapped him here."

"How long, do you think?" said Pete. Jack shrugged.

"Centuries, at least."

To be trapped and forced to feed power into these small, grasping people… Pete met Jack's eyes. "Could you—?"

He sighed and she felt the crackling of air as his magic took hold. So different from the bottomless darkness of Mnarhoteph's power, but just as strong. The chains fell away from their bolts in the stone, and Mnarhoteph shuddered, the harpoon spikes falling away from scarred and rendered flesh.

"Go," said Pete, stepping back. "We don't mean you any more harm."

Mnarhoteph's nearest row of eyes focused on her, and he trumpeted. "Home."

Pete and Jack followed in the shining trail Mnarhoteph's body left as he slithered down the temple steps and splashed into the water. The light was the gray of a nearing sun, and the mist had disappeared so that Pete could watch him swim, all the way to the sea.

AFTER PETE HAD CALLED THE BLACKPOOL POLICE FROM a cultist's unmelted mobile, she sat next to Jack on the steps of the temple. He produced a lit Parliament. "Fag?"

"I'd murder one."

Jack handed it to her, and then exhaled before he said, "You really meant what you said before the bloody creature from the black lagoon showed up, didn't you."

Pete bit her lip. Jack's eyes weren't fiery or glacial or masked. They were just hurt. "Bits of it, yes," she said finally.

Jack started to say, "I guess that means…" but he was knocked into the water by a flying, charred shape in a black robe.

"Infidels… usurpers!" Gerry groaned. Burns covered one side of his face and head, and his eye was a leaking pit. His lips were twisted and swollen, most of the tender flesh gone. "Down into the black pit with you!" he growled, grabbing Jack by the neck and pushing his face into the bog. Jack clawed at Gerry's burnt hands, raking away long strips of flesh, and came up sputtering.

"Leggo, you git!"

"Die!" Gerry howled, hitting Jack with his good hand. Jack spat blood and swamp water.

"If I'm allowed last words, I'd say look behind you."

Pete slammed a mossy chunk of rock into Gerry's bald, roasted skull. The cultist folded like a puppet with his strings cut. She grabbed Jack's hand and pulled him out of the water. He collapsed next to her, shivering.

"I win."

Pete blinked. "Pardon me?"

"I win," said Jack with a wide grin. "Did I not tell you you'd have a bit of fun?"

Pete looked at him, looked at Gerry's still form, and contemplated telling Jack he was incurably deranged. Then she started to laugh. "Smacking that arsehole was the most fun I've had in months."

"Forty quid," Jack reminded her.

"I'll write you a check when we get out of this bloody swamp," she promised.

"Am I right you'll be finding your own flat, then, when we get home?" Jack said. He went on before she could answer. "Pete, for what it's worth, those bits you meant—I am a bastard and a selfish git, but I kept alive this long because of it. I'm sorry I can't undergo a miraculous transformation for you, luv. Truly I am."

Pete reached and took Jack's hand. He started, then squeezed her fingers and didn't loosen his grip. "I'm quitting," Pete said.

"The Metropolitan Police. I can't do that and be this." She gestured at the bog and the temple.

Jack's forehead crinkled. "But you love your job."

"I did," said Pete. "But you taught me that you're part of the Black first and a member of society second. And…" She almost swallowed down the words, jumped up and ran far away as she could, "I'd like you to teach me more."

Jack looked down on her, for a long time, smoke trailing out of one nostril. "You're bloody mad, Caldecott. You honestly think I'm any kind of qualified to take an apprentice? Bloody buggering fuck, you've seen what happens when things go bad with me. You'd sign on willingly for that?"

Pete nodded once, and was telling the truth.

"I'll be hard," Jack warned. "I won't let you be because you're my friend or because I care for you. It won't be any sort of pleasant and if you work with me there's a good chance you'll be buried in an early grave. So quit being so bloody stupid, go back to the Yard, and forget it, Pete, because if you take me as a teacher, I'll make bloody sure you regret it." He glared at her, but there was an expression in his eyes that was entirely new to Pete. She'd call it hope, if it were anyone but Jack.

"You're right, Jack Winter," she said. "You are a git."

"I told you," Jack started, but Pete leaned up and over and kissed him firmly, until he stopped trying to talk.

"I knew what I was getting into the first moment we met," she said. "And I don't want a transformation. I knew what I got the day I met you and you don't frighten me. Never did and never bloody will."

He grinned at her, but his eyes were calm cold glaciers in a choppy sea. "We'll see, luv."

Pete put her head on Jack's shoulder and they sat on the steps of the old temple in the bog, waiting to be rescued and watching the neon spires of Blackpool fade into daylight, skeletons of a nightshade world that crumbled away under the sun.

Caitlin Kittredge is the author of the Nocturne City series, featuring werewolf detective Luna Wilder, and is currently hard at work on the first full-length volume of Pete and Jack's adventures in Black London. By day, her mild-mannered alter ego works as a video game designer. Hobbies include listening to old-school punk rock, collecting comic books, and mocking bad films. She enjoys a nice cup of tea. Find her online at www.caitlinkittredge.com.