Black London 05 - Soul Trade

extended his palm. “Let’s see it, then. Strange men slip you gifts, I think I deserve to know.”
    As she unwound the soft, worn paper, Pete felt a frission of anticipation, the barest finger of the Black scrapingover her talent, leaving the slightest bloody scratch. It vanished as the paper fell apart and the small, hard object Mayflower had passed her thunked onto the sticky pub table.
    “Shit,” Jack breathed, as the small stone caught the light. To Pete it looked rather ordinary—something like those crystals you bought in museum shops, leftover pieces of larger geodes—pretty and sharp-edged but ultimatelyunremarkable.
    “I’m just glad it’s not a severed ear, really,” she said, mindful of Jack’s ashen expression. The crystal was cool to her touch—too cold, as if it had been out in the void of space. She pulled back her fingers as the tips turned blue.
    “An ear would be a fifty-quid note compared to what that is,” Jack muttered. He grabbed his second shot and knocked it back with a shudder, makingall the ink up and down his arms ripple.
    “You all right?” Pete asked. She cast a quick look around the pub, but they were still relatively incognito. Nobody spared them a glance of more than a few seconds.
    “Not really,” Jack said. “You say the train station nutter gave you this?”
    Pete rubbed the spot between her eyes where a fierce headache bloomed. “Just give me the bad news. What is it—abomb? A cursed object? Am I going to start vomiting toads?”
    “That’s a soul cage,” Jack said softly. When he was really worried, his voice dropped to just above a whisper, rough and tight as dragging his palm over gravel. “I’ve only seen a few, and ones this compact are extremely rare.”
    Pete flinched. She’d encountered a soul cage when she’d been attempting to undo their mistake with Nergal,and they were nasty pieces of work. “But don’t they take up whole rooms?” she protested. “And aren’t they used on the living?”
    The soul cage as she knew it had been writ with magic sigils and used to trap the soul of a victim eternally, in the space between the Black and the Land of the Dead. At the base, they were torture chambers, and usually only necromancers could construct them. Nergal haddeserved no less, but Pete had a feeling that whoever had their soul encased in the cold crystal was merely unlucky.
    “Not this one,” Jack said, gingerly taking the crystal and turning it in its cloth without touching it. “This one … this is a masterful piece of work, I’ll tell you. Made with care, for somebody this mage really and truly hated.”
    Pete caught a flash from the crystal in the lowlight, and for just a moment it seemed something moved beneath the lava-glass surface, oily and alive. She drew back in her chair, as far from the soul cage as possible. She didn’t even want to think about what it would be like, soul ripped from her body, trapped in a tiny sliver of the in-between caught in the cage. A miniature Purgatory for a single soul, entrapped for eternity.
    “Can you tellwhat sort of thing is in there?” she asked in a whisper.
    Jack laid his finger carefully against the side of the crystal. “Human,” he said. “Beyond that, I’m not poking around.” He swiped his fingers across his jeans, brushing off the invisible psychic residue of whomever the soul cage contained.
    “So what do we do with this?” Pete asked. Jack’s eyebrow went up.
    “What d’you think?” he demanded.“We don’t know what sort of sod is cooped up in there. At best, he’ll be a mightily pissed off ghost when he comes out. At worst, he got his soul caged for all eternity for a reason. You do not mess with magic this strong.” He lowered his voice, looking around. “Not to mention that whoever made that is mucking in dark stuff of the highest order. Not a bastard whose careful work you want to undo.So we’re not doing a damn thing except wrapping it back up so it can’t give me frostbite.”
    There’s no doubt of that , Pete thought as she looked at the crystal, watching the soul within move beneath the surface. “Preston didn’t exactly strike me as the type to work with necromancy and black magic,” she said. “Though I admit he did come across as completely off the wall.”
    “The real question is,why you? Why pass on something so rare to a complete stranger?” He fixed his gaze on Pete. The full power of Jack’s gaze, with blue fire magic dancing behind it,