Black London 05 - Soul Trade

regarded her, perhaps rightly thinking she was a madwoman, then shrugged. “Hundred quid.”
    “I haven’t even told you where I want to go,” Pete said with a roll of her eyes. She needed to calm down and be steady, reliable copper Pete insteadof deranged, magically inclined Pete. “Forty, and I don’t let my man here kick your teeth out and feed them back to you.”
    Jack stood silent and unsmiling. His menacing glare did the trick, because the kid huffed in contempt and threw up his hands. “Fifty, and I ain’t carrying your bags.”
    Pete slung her kit into the cab and got in after it. “Deal. But you better drive fast.”
    Once out of Hereford,the cabbie drove as if he were being pursued by large, mutant weasels intent on mating with him. Pete thought that if this was what he’d do for fifty quid, she’d hate to see what happened when he was actually motivated.
    “What’d you say the name of the town was?” he bellowed over the car’s distressed engine and whining transmission.
    Pete told him, and he veered onto a B road before stopping abruptlyby a sign in the middle of nowhere.
    VILLAGE OF OVERTON , the sign proclaimed. POPULATION 271 .
    “Spooky, innit?” said the kid, smacking his gums. “Not keen on being turned into some fat farmer’s bum buddy, so I’ll let you out here, I think.”
    “Are you kidding me?” Jack said. “It’s got to be two fucking miles at least into town.”
    “Man, you ain’t heard about the backpackers that went poof up heremonth before this?” said the kid, making a disappearing motion with his fingers. “Not to mention those fuckin’ travelers in their tent city. Don’t trust gyppos. ’M not going another inch.”
    “Your attitude is as charming as your breath,” Pete told him, thrusting a fifty at the kid and climbing out.
    “Thanks, Mum,” he said with a grin that was begging to be smacked off his face. He screeched away,nearly before Jack was free of the door, and Jack flipped the bird at the red smears of the car’s taillights.
    “It’ll be all right,” Pete said. “Like we really expected anything to be easy on this jaunt?”
    “I’m not a fuckin’ backpacker,” Jack grumbled. “I don’t swan all over the country on foot.”
    “Find your balls and let’s go,” Pete snapped. She could see lights ahead, and even though it wasthe middle of the night, they were also in the middle of nowhere. People had gone missing in recent memory, not to mention Jeremy Crotherton and his theory that a demon was running loose.
    Pete walked close to Jack, swinging her eyes from side to side, seeking for anything hiding in the shadows. The moon was high and horned above them, and Pete could see the blue shadows of hills on either sideof the road. She’d never been much for the country, preferring the eternal twilight of streetlamps and the buzz of motorways. Too much silence just made her think there was someone out there, watching.
    Jack rolled his gaze from one side of the road to the other, and his step was short and hitched. “Waiting for the cannibals to break from the forest and carry us off to make attractive jumpersout of our skin,” he said.
    “You’re acting as if you’re twelve,” Pete said. “Knock it off.”
    “I’m not being spooky,” Jack insisted. “This fucking place is off. Do you hear anything? Anything at all?”
    Pete listened. There was nothing. No dogs, no doors slamming, no car engines. Even the wind was quiet, the air still, as if the earth held its breath. “It’s a small place,” she said with a shrug.“Not like London.”
    “There’s small villages, and there’s boneyards,” Jack said. “Last place I was in that was this quiet was a tomb.”
    Pete reached into her pocket and brushed her baton. Just knowing it was still there let her keep walking.
    When they reached Overton proper, the village was empty and silent. The high street consisted of a few blocks of semi-detached homes that had been made intosnug storefronts, and a square with a statue in it of a Franciscan in a robe, his staring eyes weeping oxidized tears. A pair of ravens sat on his shoulders, the only movement in the whole square. Not crows—true ravens, like the one in her dream, with bodies as long as Pete’s arm and beaks sharp as pikes.
    She stopped in the center of the cobblestone street, watching the birds. They paid her nomind, hunching against the chill and blinking their obsidian eyes. If the Hag cared that she and Jack were in