Black London 05 - Soul Trade

fingersknotted in her shirt, head cradled against her chest. She rubbed the back of his neck, trying to hold back her talent, which clamored to take all of the energy stirred up by Jack’s visions and drink it down as it had soaked up Bridget’s magic moments before.
    “Fuck,” Donovan sighed. He took Jack’s other arm, easing some of the weight off Pete. “Of course my son is a psychic who can’t stomach thedead. Why would this be easy?”
    “Your idea to come here,” Pete grunted as they dragged Jack inside the rusted, half-fallen iron fence around the graveyard.
    “I didn’t know he was psychic, did I?” Donovan snapped.
    “Maybe if you’d stuck around for more than five minutes, you would,” Pete said. Donovan cocked his eyebrow, but he kept quiet as they passed among the headstones into the cool corpse-handedembrace of the mist that clung to Overton like spider silk to skin.
    Close in, standing amid the mausoleums and falling-down monuments, Pete saw what had so agitated Jack.
    Shapes moved between the tilted gravestones, shimmering as they drifted from place to place, long spectral fingers sinking into the earth before moving away. Some perched on the rooflines of the mausoleums, swaying with eachbreath of wind and watching the surrounding country with their blank silver eyes.
    “Wraiths,” Pete breathed. She found she couldn’t take her eyes off them.
    Donovan smirked. “I see Jackie doesn’t just keep you around for your looks.”
    On the hill above, the three figures slowed, then stopped a dozen yards from the fence, watching Pete with unblinking white eyes. Donovan shoved open the door ofthe closest mausoleum. A wraith drifted down from the roof, but Donovan hissed at it under his breath, and it drifted away.
    “Just a little aversion hex,” he said. “Make ’em think we’re not all full of soul energy for them to suck up like an espresso.”
    Pete let Jack down on top of the sarcophagus in the tomb, and he groaned before shutting his eyes and curling in on himself.
    “He going to manup, or is this an ongoing thing?” Donovan asked, folding his arms across his raven-colored wool coat.
    Pete ran her hand over Jack’s forehead, brushing sweaty lines of platinum hair away from his skin. She felt a stab of desperation, that knee-jerk need to do anything to make his pain stop.
    Except there was nowhere else to go, nowhere the children wouldn’t find them. It was the wraiths or diescreaming. “Depends on how long we’re here,” she said to Donovan. “He can hold it back with the dead, but this is different.”
    There had to be twenty wraiths in the graveyard, ghosts that went up to eleven. Jack shuddered under her hand, scrabbling at it with his fingers until she laced hers in. “Shh, luv,” she soothed. “Just hold on and it’ll be over soon.”
    “Not soon,” Donovan said. “We stayhere unless we want those wee little monsters to send us the way of dear old dad,” Donovan said. “They won’t come close enough for the wraiths to drain them, and the wraiths won’t go too far from the spirit buffet in the graveyard, so we’re all right for the time being.”
    Pete chewed on her lip. She didn’t think “all right” applied to any facet of the situation, but most of all not to Jack. “Hecan’t stay here.”
    “Poor little Jackie always did have a delicate constitution,” Donovan said. “Thought that boy would turn out more like me. I’ve looked just like him waking up from a hangover and I soldiered through.”
    “Listen,” Pete said, dropping her voice into Official Copper. “He’s an unusually strong psychic, and this place is a nightmare factory, so unless you want him to be catatonicand drooling on himself within the hour we need to find somewhere else.”
    Donovan grinned at her, which Pete found both infuriating and utterly familiar. It was the same kind of smile Jack had, when he thought he was in control of a situation. “Bossy little thing, aren’t you?”
    “I appreciate that you helped out with Dexter Killigan,” she said. “But that doesn’t make you the general.”
    “I thinkit does make me the man who saved your arse, seeing as it would be all full of zombie bites by now if I hadn’t thrown that little leg-locker hex,” Donovan said, grinning even wider. “Though I’d never let that happen. You’re far too adorable.”
    “I had it handled,” Pete said. “Need I remind you that I was the one who actually burned that bastard