Black London 05 - Soul Trade

waistband of his stained trousers. She looked at her companion and shook her head imperceptibly, and by the timethe copper reached the scene, they had melted into the crowd, two beige vapors gone on the wind.
    Pete swallowed the scream that had never gotten further than the back of her throat as Jack stared at the body. He asked, “Holy Hell, did you see that bastard leap?” but she didn’t really hear him.
    She felt the weight of the wrapped parcel Preston had forced on her inside her own pocket, and a chillcrept over her exposed skin, all the way down to her bones.
    Whatever was inside the parcel, Preston Mayflower had just died to give it to her.
    Jack gripped her arm before she could pull out the object and open the paper. His touch created a warm spot on her frozen skin. “Come on,” he said in her ear. “Rest of the cavalry’ll be here soon. No point in still hanging about when they show up.”
    Pete allowed herself to be led away, and soon the crowd had shut them off from the scene in the street. She could still hear the sick impact of the body and the squeal of tires, though, and see the panicked expression in Preston Mayflower’s eyes. If that had even been his real name.
    She hadn’t felt good about coming to Manchester, but she had allowed herself to think it might work in her favor—clearlythe Prometheans didn’t want her dead, just obedient. If she did what they asked, or at least heard them out, she’d be able to get out clean.
    Now, though, she wasn’t sure. Not of her plan, or of anything, including the Prometheus Club’s true intentions. But she couldn’t break the geas, Jack couldn’t break the geas, and she wasn’t naive enough to think anyone they went to in Manchester about theproblem wouldn’t run straight to the Prometheus Club with the news that Pete Caldecott was trying to skip out on their invitation.
    So she’d go. She’d be a good little soldier, at least for now. But she wouldn’t trust the bastards who’d forced her to come here one bloody inch.
    She let Jack hold on to her as they walked a block over and down, then hailed a cab. Nobody followed them, and Pete forcedherself to relax until they were away from the center of the city and heading into Jack’s old stomping grounds.

 
    6.
    Pete hadn’t grown up on a council estate, but she’d had plenty of school friends who had, and she knew the drill. Suspicious of outsiders, and angry at their lot in life, and they didn’t give a fuck about much of anything.
    Council estates in London were mostly cut from the same cloth—tower blocks where her friends lived stacked on top of one another like past-date merchandise, filled withnoise, cigarette smoke, and older boys who leered at them any time they had to pass by in the stairwells or the garden.
    The cabbie who drove them sped away, his taillights smears of red in the pools of dark created by broken streetlamps. Pete looked up and down the street, but they were the only souls about. The sun was still setting over the Beetham Tower in the center of the city, but the shadowshere were already long. Alexandra Park, Jack’s old estate, contained squat brown semi-detached houses, rusty iron gates, and windows covered with tatty curtains that twitched in sequence as the residents of the estate scrutinized the outsiders. It was as if a child who was shit at taking care of his toys had discarded a model town and left it to moulder and rot.
    “Feels like home already,” Petesaid, staring down a particularly cheeky bitch who peered at her from her front garden, glaring as if Pete had just kicked her pets.
    “Lot better than it was,” Jack muttered, lighting a cigarette. “Back then, someone would’ve chucked a bottle at you and someone else would’ve pulled a piece and demanded all your worldly goods.”
    He pointed to a corner shop, windows bright with fresh vegetablesand hand-lettered signs in Farsi. “That place burned down in eighty-eight or eighty-nine, ’cos of some hooligans. Mum was too stoned to keep me inside, so I watched the whole thing from the pavement until the fire brigade shooed me away.”
    “Dare I ask what greasy friend of yours we’re bunking with in this charming hamlet?” Pete said. Alexandra Park wasn’t any worse than wandering down the wrongstreet in Peckham, but there was an undercurrent of hostility that she’d never felt in her hometown. They weren’t wanted, and both the residents of the estate and the currents of the Black