Black London 05 - Soul Trade

these days, sleep always won.
    “Yeah, it’s almost through with,” he said. He caught her hand as she started for the bedroom. “You swear you’re all right?”

    “Sure,” Pete said, fighting a grimace as her arm flared up. “Never better, luv.”
    Jack, at least, had the decency not to call out her lying.
    Pete dropped her clothes on top of the ever-growing pile next to their bed, then collapsed on it in her jersey and underwear. She was tired—too tired to change, too tired to tuck herself under the duvet, too tired to do anything except stare at the ceiling,tracing the familiar stains, continents of cracks and water damage amid a plaster sea.
    Still, she couldn’t convince herself to shut her eyes and fall asleep. When Jack shuffled in from the bathroom and added his denim and his moth-chewed sweater to the pile of laundry, she sat up and decided she had to ask. “Jack, you ever hear of the Prometheus Club?”
    He froze, for just a heartbeat, beforehe shrugged. “Might’ve heard some chatter, but nothing much.” His glacial eyes focused on her with an intensity that made the cold in her bones return with a rush. “Why?”
    Pete shrugged in turn. “No reason,” she said. “Heard of them somewhere.”
    Jack got under the duvet and offered her half, and Pete curled on her side facing him. He wasn’t telling her everything. After years of seeing him liein every conceivable way, catching him was almost a reflex, an instinct for detecting the deception Jack used as an invisible shield. If you didn’t know him, you couldn’t hurt him. The first line of defense for paranoids everywhere.
    Whether or not his paranoia was justified in this case, she could find out in the morning.
    “Seen many wraiths around London lately?” she asked him, changing thesubject. Trying to pry the truth out of Jack when he didn’t want to give it was like trying to reroute the Thames—messy, difficult, and not happening.
    “Wraiths? Not unless the sad old men are telling stories down the pub.” Jack snorted. “Why, you see one?”
    “Saw it, talked to it, felt it try to rip my soul out,” Pete confirmed. She peeked under the duvet, checking out her injuries. Her leg wasa solid parade of bruises on the side where she’d caught the gravestone, and she’d be feeling them even worse in the morning. If Lily weren’t a consideration, she’d down a handful of the Vicodin Jack kept in the medicine cabinet, but instead she tried to shift the pillows around to support her sorest bits and switched off the light.
    After a moment, Jack’s arm snaked gingerly around her waist,and she let his warmth and smell of soap, leather, and tobacco envelop her. It was a scent that could smooth all her rough edges and calm her instantly, but it wasn’t working tonight.
    “Wraith moving into a churchyard around here’s not a good sign,” Jack muttered into her hair. “What’d it say to you?”
    “Usual rot,” Pete said. “It was riding Mickey Martin’s ghost—what it hadn’t already drained—tryingits hand at the living. Almost turned poor Brandi Wolcott into a milkshake.”
    “Hmm,” Jack said, but that was all. He didn’t offer an opinion, didn’t give voice to the fears knocking around Pete’s brain since she’d gotten in her car at the churchyard. Pete listened as his breathing smoothed into sleep, but her own thoughts wouldn’t quiet.
    They whispered that she should be afraid, and if Jack hadany sense he would be, too. That the talented—latent mages, unwitting psychics, and nascent sorcerers—were awake all over London because of what Jack had done. That the incidents of ghosts and the Black spilling into daylight had multiplied by orders of magnitude since Nergal had tried to break free. They weren’t stopping; they were increasing, like a flood tide rising to swallow everything inits path. Monsters thought to be only stories had once again appeared, and the fractious and scattered human magicians in London were no match for any of them.
    The whisper of her own fears told Pete that the Black and the daylight world were wounded, ruptured and bleeding into one another, and nobody had the faintest idea what to do.
    The thought kept Pete awake for what remained of the night,and her eyes were still open when the first gray whispers of dawn crept through the dirty panes and across the threadbare carpet of the bedroom.

 
    3.
    Neither Pete nor Jack had any jobs booked for the rest of the week—then again, Jack