Black London 05 - Soul Trade

face. Such deep holes. Felt like I was falling, and then the cold was all around, and he…” Wolcott swallowed, her voice trembling along with the rising energies of the Black.
    Pete scratched at the back of her neck. The feelings picking at the part of her mind connected to magic were bloody active, even for a graveyard. Then again, not all graveyards boasted their very own serial killer.

    “He came for me,” Wolcott said. “Straight through the headstones, like he were made of smoke. And he grabbed for me, his hand went through my stab vest, and it was as if…” She shuddered. “He knew me. Could see every wicked thing I’d done, and was going to burn me up from the inside.”
    “I know it must have been terrible for you,” Pete said. “If it makes you feel better—six other people have hadthe same thing happen over the last six months.”
    “Shit,” Wolcott muttered, but her shoulders relaxed a fraction. Pete figured knowing it wasn’t just her might help settle Wolcott’s nerves—not that it did much for her own tingling hands and jumping heart. The churchyard had been silent for decades until the first terrified woman had called 999 from the pub across the road, and Pete had an ideawhy Mickey Martin was up and about again—when she and Jack had stopped the primordial demon, Nergal, from ripping his way into the daylight world, it had rippled out and touched everything in the city. Every ghost, every lesser demon, every scrap and snip of magic-having life in London had felt the effects. And now they were awake, and hungry.
    At least Pete could put Mickey Martin in his place.The larger aftermath of Nergal and his brethren would just have to sort itself out.
    “You’re nicer about it than my DCI, but you still probably think I’m crazy,” Wolcott mumbled, leaning against the monument. “Everybody else does.”
    “ Crazy ’s not the word I’d use,” Pete said. Wolcott, too, represented a problem—when the Black echoed like a rung bell as Nergal and the other four primordial demonstried to break out of the prison the Princes of Hell had erected for them millennia ago, all of the citizens of both daylight London and the Black beneath with the slightest bit of sensitivity got a jolt like grabbing a high-tension cable.
    For psychics like Jack it meant more sleepless nights, more waking visions, and more barrages from the dead and the living alike. For people like Wolcott,who would have never known she possessed the slightest bit of talent under normal circumstances, it led to nights like this.
    It wasn’t Pete’s problem. Her problem was Mickey Martin and his recently reacquired hobby of murdering those he considered wicked.
    “You don’t seem so looney,” Wolcott observed. “From what they say around the station, I was expecting Stevie Nicks.”
    “I thought I’d leavemy scarves and tarot at home, yeah,” Pete agreed. She ignored the implication that apparently the longer she was gone from the Met, the more of a moony-eyed hippie type she became in common legend.
    “Never liked stakeouts,” Wolcott said. “Bloody boredom sets in quick, don’t it?” She scraped a fingernail against the moss on the monument. “How’d you cope, when you was a DI?”
    Pete’s head startedto throb, though she didn’t know if it was from a lack of coffee, the cold, or Wolcott’s persistent questions. She shouldn’t be mad at the PC—Wolcott was just trying to distract herself from her nerves.
    She did the same, counting headstones, listening to the faint thump of music from the far-off pub, feeling the droplets of fog collect on her face and hair. The whispers of the graveyard had stilled,and even the mist held its place, covering the ground, the headstones, and the dead beneath. For a moment, it was as if the entire city of London held its breath—no music, no cars, no trains, not even the heartbeat of the rushing Thames.
    Then the pain in Pete’s head spiked, and she knew the silence had only been a lull, not a finale.
    From the stone behind Wolcott, the shadows began to seep andmerge, moving of their own accord, against the light that gleamed from the vestry windows and the streetlamps beyond the confines of the churchyard. The monument gave birth to a dripping black shape that wavered from cohesive to vapor and back again, sliding through the pocked limestone like oil through water.
    “Wolcott!” Pete shouted, but it was too late. The thing had Brandi by the throat andengulfed her,