Black London 05 - Soul Trade

escape its confines. The pain made her a bit dizzy, the magic warring with her Weir as it tried to absorb the spell and was rebuffed. Pete coughed as a wave of nausea swept through her. That had never happened before, and it didn’t improve her outlook on what mighthappen next.
    “Strong geas,” Jack said. “It’s a compulsion spell. What did you do ?”
    “Why are you assuming I did anything?” Pete snapped. “All I did was open that stupid envelope.” She stayed upright despite the vertigo and the sick feeling running all through her like a fever. She wasn’t going to give whoever had cast the thing the satisfaction of passing out.
    Jack cast his glance down at theenvelope and then shut his eyes tight before meeting her gaze. “You didn’t,” he sighed. “You didn’t get involved with the Prometheus Club.”
    “I knew you had more on them than you were telling,” Pete said, pulling her hand free.
    “’Course I did, but you didn’t say you’d been contacted by them,” Jack growled. He picked up the invitation between his thumb and forefinger and whispered a word of power.

    Pete watched the paper curl up, eaten by blue flames. She hoped the ink on her hand would disappear with it, but it stayed under her skin, throbbing and hot. “Would it kill you not to snap at me?” she asked Jack. “I didn’t exactly do this on purpose, you know.”
    He stayed silent, in his maddening Jack way, until the letter was only ash drifting to the carpet. Then he sat on the bed and gesturedfor Pete to sit next to him. She did it, mostly glad to have an excuse to sit down and quiet her spinning head.
    “You better tell me, from beginning to end, what happened last night,” he said. His voice was still harsh and clinical, and Pete flinched.
    “I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave off behaving as if all of this were my fault. I didn’t ask for them to show up and thrust that silly envelopeat me.”
    Jack sighed and ran his hands through his hair, then put one around her. He was wiry but strong, and Pete leaned into the warmth of his chest.
    After a moment he spoke, his voice vibrating through her. “I’m sorry, luv. I just … I thought we’d be under their radar. The Prommies are a bunch of snobs, wouldn’t deign to come down our level unless it was life or death.”
    “Is this gatheringof theirs that?” Pete said, staring at her palm. “Life or death?”
    Jack nodded, his angular jaw tightening. “They wouldn’t have called you and made sure you’d come if there weren’t something big on the horizon, big and bad enough to get them pissing themselves.”
    “What could that be? Who are these people?” Pete asked, rolling over some of the things she’d seen in her time with Jack. Demons, blackmagicians, the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell—even the first beings of Hell themselves, the veritable Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What could possibly be worse than that?
    “To the first, I have no idea, and to the second, they’re twats,” Jack grumbled. “A secret society in the worst way you could imagine. Bunch of magicians more concerned with standing around patting each other on the backfor being special than with actually doing anything useful. Holdover from the days of corsets, servants, and landed gentry.”
    “Like you said,” Pete murmured. “Twats.”
    “Yeah,” Jack said. He kissed the top of her head and covered her injured hand with his, softly this time. “Got no idea what they want with us. We’re emphatically not Their Kind.”
    “I suppose we’ll find out,” Pete said. “When wego to Manchester.”
    Jack raised one eyebrow as if she’d lost her mind.
    “We can’t very well not go,” she said. “I’ve got a compulsion spell on me, and I’m not chopping off my hand. We’ll go, we’ll be civil, and we’ll figure out what they want from us, then find a way to graciously decline.”
    Jack sighed, then nodded. “Fucking Manchester. Could’ve been anywhere, and they chose Manchester.”
    Petetwined her fingers with Jack’s. The pain had cooled some, and his touch soothed the burn of the ink. The back of his hand, pale as a corpse, was covered in his own black ink, feathers and thorns twining in a pattern that could make you dizzy if you stared at it long enough. Jack’s tattoos used to be haphazard, but now they covered nearly his entire torso in the same pattern.
    Something else she’dbeen ignoring—the change that Jack had undergone when he’d stopped