Black London 05 - Soul Trade

cheap, boxy number favored by private bodyguards. He was carrying Pete’s and Jack’s bags, and he dropped them unceremoniouslyin front of Morwenna.
    “Thank you, Bruce,” she said. To Pete, “Now that we’ve spoken and you understand that you will assist us, we’ll put you in a suite and return your things.” She held out Pete’s bag to her and had the audacity to smile. Pete snatched it roughly. Morwenna had worn out her self control. She felt snappish and dangerous, ready to bite the head off the next bastard who crossedher.
    Morwenna offered Jack’s kit to him, but kept him at arm’s length. Whatever else she was, Pete conceded, she wasn’t stupid. “We don’t want to be your adversaries, Jack. You’re the one who set that dynamic, not us.”
    Pete did a cursory check of her bag. Everything appeared to be there, minus her mobile and all the cash and plastic from her wallet. The Prometheans left nothing to chance.
    “Let me ask you something,” she said to Morwenna, straightening up. Her baton was still in her bag, but if she was honest with herself, that wouldn’t net her anything except the chance to go down swinging. “If I said fuck off and we both walked out of here now, can you honestly tell me there’d be no repercussions?”
    “No,” Morwenna said. “Honestly? The time for that passed when Jack turned us downthe first time. You’ve seen it, Pete. The chaos, the wrongness of the Black when it whispers to you. Things are past the event horizon, and it’s how we come out the other side that matters now. We need Jack, and you, to solve the problem that’s cropped up before the ripples destroy everything you and I know.”
    “Why me?” Pete sighed. “I can’t do anything useful. My talent just burns things down.”

    Morwenna closed her hand around Pete’s shoulder. “Let’s talk, you and I.”
    Jack moved closer to her, but Pete held him off with a glance. His jaw jumped, but he picked up his bag and turned to the guard. “All right, big’un,” he said. “Let’s see this suite you’ve got.”
    Morwenna led Pete back into the room with the rock, the soft dripping of the water making Pete’s hair stand out in a frizzy halo.Morwenna appeared as polished as ever. “You really don’t know, do you?” she asked. “You don’t know the first thing about the Black, or about what you are.”
    Pete took a few steps toward the plinth rising from the water. She’d seen plenty of Roman ruins as a schoolkid, taken a weekend to Bath when she’d been engaged to her ex-boyfriend Terry and seen the steam rising off the hot springs. Back inher old life, when things were simple. This seemed different though, carved from the living rock as it was, with the building constructed around it much later.
    “I know enough,” she told Morwenna, but the other woman shook her head.
    “You are a beginner, Pete, practically a white-robed virgin, offered up for sacrifice. It’s criminal what Jack let slip through his fingers. Seth McBride, for allhis failings, at least taught him to take care of himself in this harsh realm we inhabit. You didn’t get any of that.”
    “You don’t know him,” Pete said. “So kindly shut up about it before I do walk out of here and leave you in the lurch.”
    Morwenna frowned, pretty face going pinched, but then she pointed at the rock. “Even you must know the story. The arm reaching from the lake, clutching theblade that would unite the warring tribes and give us England as we know it.”
    “You can’t be serious,” Pete said. The rock could have held something long and straight, long ago. The groove had been nearly worn away by time and moisture. “That’s just a story,” she said. “And a silly one at that. Moist woman rises from lake, gives farmboy magic trinket, hijinks ensue? Please.”
    “King Arthur andhis knights? Yes, that’s a fairy tale,” Morwenna said. “But there was a man, not Arthur, but a mage, who many centuries past united the Black. Who protected men from Fae and showed the demons that our world wasn’t theirs for the taking. Who stopped the bloody battles between rival factions and made us see that we could work together, one man from each tribe, on a council that would protect all ofus from the end times. He had no name anyone remembers, so Prometheans gave him the name of a hawk, both predator and guardian, watchman and warrior. The Merlin was the first one to shape the Black, Pete, and his is the only seat in the