Black London 05 - Soul Trade

destination. This time, Pete followed the flightof the ravens, dark ink blots on the dirty paper of the sky, and walked. The gravel bit into her feet. She was dressed only in her sleep clothes, one of Jack’s T-shirts, underwear, and little else, same as last time.
    The landscape wasn’t entirely unexpected. She’d seen a lot of strange things, and a slice of the in-between bleeding into the real would could bring visions of the future. Or thepossible future. Or just her own fears.
    She decided to keep her head down as she passed a pile of bodies—the villagers, now naked and bloated with a week’s worth of rot, rivulets of black and green working their way under the skin where veins used to lie.
    It wasn’t real, she reminded herself. It was just power acting on her frail human neurons, her fear center, electricity dancing through hercerebral cortex. It wasn’t a real future, it was just Donovan shredding through her memories and making her see things.
    Pete tried to push back, to see things as they really were, but her vision skewed and pain cut her from head to toe.
    Donovan’s power felt like a net of barbs over her talent and consciousness, and Pete knew that pushing harder would only make her catatonic. There wasn’t muchshe could do when a mind-control spell had its hooks in her. And now, Donovan wanted her to show him the soul well, the place her talent had been so drawn to she’d walked there in her sleep.
    She had to play along or see Margaret and Lily and everyone she cared about hurt. So Pete pressed on through the memories, tainted by the proximity of the soul well, showing her all the things she fearedmost.
    It felt like eternity, the walk over rocky paths and rough-grassed hills that cut at her feet and snatched at her ankles. She’d begun to despair of ever seeing the spot, but she kept walking, kept following the ravens. They stopped occasionally, to perch on the corpse of a dead cow or peck at the eyeball of a fallen villager, but they moved west. Always west.
    The power in the earth swelledand groaned, a thrumming like buried cables that Pete could discern through the soles of her feet. The sound reached her ears like the entire world was breathing, sleeping, but not for long. When she came over the hill and saw the twisted tree and the pile of stones, she felt almost an anticlimax, as if the strangest part of the journey were over.
    I told you to go away, the raven croaked at her. Why did you not heed? It stretched its neck and wings, staring at her with its stone eyes.
    “I’m not the Morrigan’s bitch,” Pete said. “You don’t get to order me about.”
    The raven opened its beak wide, and Pete thought if it were a person, it would laugh in her face. The Morrigan’s desires and those of your allies will never match, Weir, it said. My lady makes no secret of what she wants.
    “War,apocalypse, and Jack leading the way,” Pete snapped. “I know exactly what she wants. And by the way, these aren’t my allies. This dream state I’m in right now was forced on me.”
    And why do you think what men and demons want is so very different? said the raven. What has given you the illusion that you and the other humans have disparate desires? You are all grasping for a little more life, alittle more power.
    “I don’t want power the way Morwenna Morgenstern means to get it,” Pete told the raven, itching to pick up one of the rocks from the cairn and whip it at bird’s smug black bulk. “I’m not a psychopath.”
    When the day comes that Jack stands at the head of the Hag’s army, Morwenna Morgenstern will be prepared, said the raven. Not you. Does that not trouble you?
    “I don’t wantimmortality,” Pete said. “I don’t give a toss about anything except shutting up the soul well, keeping this infection from spreading, and keeping my family out of harm’s way.”
    That’s all? The raven sounded genuinely puzzled. Not even the faintest thought of immortality?
    “Nothing lives forever,” Pete told it. “Not me, not Morwenna. Not even the Hag.”
    Then I wish you well, the raven said, sinceI couldn’t sway you. The Hag will see you if you attempt to close the well or to stall the reckoning a little longer. She sees everything.
    Pete wrapped her arms around herself. Standing here, the power of the soul well leaking into her mind, she felt small and frail. She was small and frail, in the face of this thing. Humans in the Black didn’t last long. They were specks compared