Black London 05 - Soul Trade

back parlor fittedwith windows that would usually look over the back lawn and out to the hills. Now they’d been covered in spray paint, hasty frantic marks in a splash of colors that looked like the inside of a particularly bad acid hit.
    Pete backed out. “Nobody here.”
    “There’s a cellar,” Jack said. The door was thin, barely the width of a person, and when Pete opened it, she saw a ladder leading down into darkness.

    “Of course,” she grumbled, putting her foot on the first rung.
    “Oi,” Jack said, and Pete prepared to scream if he tried to stop her, but he only handed over his lighter.
    “Thanks,” she said softly. Jack could surprise her. He was too stubborn for his own good, taciturn and unreliable and everything she should run from, especially when she had Lily to consider. But there was this side, too. TheJack she’d first met, the Jack she loved, the Jack who’d never leave her.
    Dirt met her boots when she reached the bottom of the ladder. It was an old cellar, older than the house above it, from a time when food rotted slowly in the dark, and the dead who passed in winter stayed down there until the ground wasn’t frozen any longer.
    Pete flicked the lighter wheel and examined her surroundings.There was a small brick arch leading to an antechamber across the dirt space from her, and Pete picked her way toward it. The lighter flickered, and she thought she heard a low sound. Laughter, maybe.
    Just keep walking, she told herself. Not the worst place you’ve ever been. Not even close.
    Before she reached the support arch that framed the larger cellar, her foot caught on something firm butyielding.
    Pete pitched into the dirt with a grunt, the impact knocking most of the fear out of her. What good was she if she went on her arse the moment someone turned out the lights?
    She rekindled the lighter and illuminated a canvas-wrapped bundle, crawling with more of the blowflies she’d seen upstairs. Pete drew back the canvas gingerly and winced at what she found, then scrambled up andwent to the ladder.
    “Jack,” she said. “Remember when I said I thought Crotherton hadn’t made it here?”
    “Yeah?” he said, brows drawing together.
    Pete tried to breathe through her mouth, to cut out some of the putrefaction scent rising from the open canvas. “I was wrong,” she said. “I just found him.”
    “Do you need me to come down?” Jack asked. He tried to make the question casual, but she knewthat any time there was a dead body, there was the chance of an associated angry ghost, one that would hook on to Jack’s sight like a hawk striking a rabbit.
    “No,” Pete said. “Stay put and keep watch.”
    She went back to Crotherton, crouching. He was turning colors, the gentle blooms of green and black mold under his skin telling Pete he’d been moldering in the basement for at least a week.
    She felt bad for Jeremy Crotherton, just doing his shit job like any street-level plod. His lips had pulled away from his gums, and even though Pete knew it was just an effect of decomposition, she put the canvas back over his face. She didn’t need to think about how his last expression looked like he’d been screaming.
    So the hikers had disappeared, then the bird-watching couple, and now Crotherton.Had they been early victims, before the demon had found a perfect host body? Sacrifices required to complete the summoning? Demons were varied as people and required everything from catsup to still-beating hearts as tribute.
    Or was she sneaking around a house that wasn’t her own with a dead man in the cellar, just asking to be fitted for something she hadn’t done by the local coppers?
    Honestly,Pete decided, she didn’t care. She’d found Crotherton, and now she had to get Margaret Smythe out of here. Morwenna and her little shell game with the Prospero Society could go piss up a rope.
    “Have you come to play with us?”
    Pete whipped toward the support arch, raising the lighter.
    A small white face stared back at her, half-buried in the earth. Bridget Killigan had carved herself an alcovein the cellar wall, and she and Patrick and Diana were pressed into their individual dirt dens, staring at Pete with unblinking eyes.
    “I think you’ve all had enough time to play.” Pete advanced toward the three figures, trying to get a better look at them. Maybe if she was lucky, the thing inside the children would be in a chatty mood.
    She’d ignore the nauseating fact that she was talking