Black London 05 - Soul Trade

would help you out?” Wendy clicked her tongue against her teeth. “For shame.” She gestured them inside. “C’mon. Nosy old bint across the street’s got nothing better to do than poke in my business, and the rest of them are just waiting to paint rude things on me front door when I’m not around.”
    Pete followedJack, kicking the door shut behind her with a hollow thump that she tried not to compare to a coffin lid.
    Wendy’s council flat crouched on the shoulders of an empty one below it. Narrow as the stairs were to the flat in London, these were half the size, shadowed and perfumed with decades of smoke, cooking oil, and stale piss. All council flats of a certain age smelled the same. Pete had beento enough of them on welfare visits for the Met to know what lay beyond the door—gray carpet, a rusty radiator, leaky windows, and a kitchen that smelled constantly of damp rot.
    Wendy’s flat didn’t disappoint, although it was snug and dry, and rife with protection hexes. Pete felt them skitter across her face like a welter of tiny spiders when she stepped over the threshold. That was rude—onewaited to be invited in when entering a mage’s dwelling—but she wasn’t in a polite sort of mood, so she shoved through the hexes, not particularly caring if she left the ends in tatters.
    “Not a lot of room,” Wendy said. “But what’s mine is yours and all.”
    “Thank you, luv,” Jack said, touching the back of her hand. “I mean it. Most mages aren’t mad enough to take on the Prometheus Club.”
    Wendylaughed again, the husky bark endemic to chain smokers. “You could always convince a girl to be a bit mad, luv.” She winked at Pete. “This one’s got a touch of the devil about him. Drove me mum mad, us seeing one another.”
    “Where is your scary old hag of a mother?” Jack asked. “Terrorizing old men down the rest home?”
    “Christ, no,” Wendy said. “She kicked off near ten years ago. About time,too—if I’d had to see her into her twilight years, all her screeching about Jesus and his seven fucking dwarves or what have you, I’d’ve topped meself.”
    “And not a soul would blame you,” Jack said, setting his bag down and looking about the place. “I’m going to wash up, luv,” he said, and then left Pete alone in the sitting room with Wendy.
    Pete stood in the center of Wendy’s stained Ikea ruglike a knob, waiting for an invitation to sit, smoke, or even fuck off, but Wendy went back to ignoring her until she’d lit a fresh fag from a pack lying on the sofa.
    “Still the same old Jack,” she said. Pete felt the sharp craving penetrate her skull at the hit of smoke, but she bit it back. She’d quit when she’d gotten pregnant, and she wasn’t about to let Wendy and her sad little council flatdrive her back into the habit.
    “I wouldn’t know,” Pete said. “We met later on.”
    Wendy appraised Pete, with a good deal less friendliness than she’d displayed in front of Jack. “Oh yeah. You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”
    “I’m thirty-one,” Pete said, keeping her voice low and calm. She wasn’t going to do this—she wasn’t going to play some silly game that had started between Jack and Wendybefore she’d even been born.
    “’Course you are, sweetheart,” Wendy said. “But younger when you met, I’d wager.” She grinned. Her teeth were the same color as her stained plaster walls. “Jack always did like to get ’em young and willing.”
    “All right, look,” Pete said. “I appreciate that you’re put out helping us like this, and that you might think you have some kind of claim to Jack, being therefirst and all, but I’m a grown woman, not a teenage girl, and seeing as he and I have a baby back in London, I really doubt he’s going anywhere. Sweetheart.”
    Wendy glared at her through the fog of smoke, but she stayed quiet. Pete didn’t feel any better—she actually felt worse. She hated the reminder that there was an entire life Jack had lived before her. Friends and enemies, love and heartbreak.She could know about it, but she’d never be part of it. She’d always be the one that came after, the younger woman, the one who’d sent Jack down a spiral he nearly hadn’t climbed out of.
    If she were being honest, she knew she wasn’t Jack’s first love, or even his second. Not by a long shot. Wendy might not be either, but she was a reminder of the Before, and the other Jack, the one Pete had neverknown and never