“You’re not screwing me with that particular dildo, not again,” Jack snapped. He turned to walk away, because he knew it would slag the demon off. Demons were creatures of ritual and respect to the point of compulsion. Jack tipped a salute over his shoulder. “Do give my regards to the other droogs.”

“You don’t want her?”

Jack stopped in the middle of the road that ran by the church, looked back. The demon smirked, rocking back and forth on the balls of its feet like it was waiting for the punchline of a joke. Jack sneered in return, contempt he didn’t feel except as a nervous boil in his guts.

“You know exactly what I want, you bastard.”

The demon smiled, tongue flicking out between its teeth. “I suppose that’s why we’re here, isn’t it, Jack?”

“It is,” Jack agreed. “But the difference between you and me is that me, I don’t care about my moth-eaten old soul. But I’ll be thrice-damned if I drag Pete down with me, so if you show your face again before it’s my time, I’ll exorcise you so far back into Hell you won’t even have a name.”

“Ohhh.” The demon shut its eyes and breathed deep, nostrils flaring, as if Jack’s belly-deep, sweaty fear was a heady perfume. “Jack, Jack. You shouldn’t threaten me so, old son. You know that I can visit you any time I like. Can do anything to you that might come into my little head.”

“Fuck. Off,” Jack said plainly, putting the rest of the road between the demon’s grin and his person.

The demon raised its hand as if to say farewell, and Jack felt the breathless, vertiginous sensation of magic, demon magic, too late as it gripped hold of his mind and dug its claws in deep.

Pete shivered in the night air, the rain causing the torches at the edge of the stones to spit and smoke. Her hands tugged against the iron restraints, small delicate fingers begging to return the gesture as Jack’s hands searched over her stomach, her ribs, coming to rest on her breasts. His finger pads stroked her nipples, smearing the blue paint in time with his thrusts.

This was raw magic, how it had always been, since the first druid and the first Weir long ago. Layers of power wrapped Jack, sweat grown cold against his skin. Pete circled her legs about his waist. Her heels dug into his thighs and her lips parted, panting wordless cries that urged him on to finish, to bind the spell their bodies wove, to take her magic as his own, by force. . . .

Jack raised his face from the pavement, feeling small pockmarks where grit had wormed its way into the flesh of his jaw. A car horn sounded from somewhere far off.

“Jack?” Pete’s voice drew closer and small hands felt his pulse, checked his pupils, and then sat him up.

“’M all right, luv,” he managed. “Just wanting tea, I expect. Low blood sugar.”

Pete favored him with her Don’t pull my bloody leg eye-brow.

“Alien abduction?” Jack offered. “Over eager and/or amorous sheep?”

“Don’t think we won’t discuss this when you’re not sprawled in the dirt,” Pete said, offering him a hand up.

After what the demon showed him, Jack knew better this time than to take it and expose himself to her talent. Even so, he swayed like he’d downed six pints when he managed to pull his shivery legs under him and stand. “But?” he said as Pete climbed back into the Mini.

“But I found something at the council that you need to hear about,” she said. “So loosen your corset and try not to swoon again, Mr. Darcy.”

Jack collapsed into the passenger seat with a grateful sound, rather like someone had punctured him and let the air out. “That’s hurtful, that is. I’m far better looking than Colin Firth.”

Pete steered them back toward the estate, even though it was the second-to-last place in England and the Black that Jack wanted to go at that moment. He kept that to himself. He had pride.

“I looked at old newspapers and provincial records, trying to find any deaths that might be our four,” Pete said. “And fended off a sweet old thing who kept trying to give me a biscuit and send me out on a date with her grandson.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack leaned his head back. “Any potential there?”

“He stuffs lamb sausages for a living, so no.”

Jack grinned with his eyes closed. He didn’t have to look at Pete to make her blush. “You know you could never give me up, luv. I’m in your blood like the Black.”

“The hell you are.” Pete snorted. “Like cheap vodka, maybe. Give me a fag and a coffee and I’m well rid of you.”

Jack opened his eyes then. Wanted to say, I could be. If you let me. But he’d just told off a demon, claimed he was the white knight who wanted for no strength or nobility.

It was a fucking nightmare, being the knight. No small wonder white witches always looked like they had poles up their bums.

Pete stayed quiet while they rode back to the estate, and she handed him a sheaf of photocopies when they were in the kitchen. She plugged in the ancient and calcified electric kettle and found two mugs, as well as a box of loose tea. “I’m thinking eating anything in this kitchen is asking for us to join the ranks of the gloopy dead upstairs,” she said.

Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.

“Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”

Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.

The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed Ten fine head of horse flesh.

The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.

June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.

Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”

Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”

“Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”

“What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.

Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache returned, swift and vicious as a Staffordshire terrier latching on to a postman.

“I can undo the necromancer’s bindings. But to get the ghosts out of the house, I have to find their gravesites and set them to rest and if I can’t find little Creepy June’s remains I can’t bloody do that, can I?”

Pete sighed. “Let me see if I can call in a favor with Ollie at the Met. They’ve got some toys for sniffing out cadavers that are quite good.”

“Cadavers that have been under a log for seventy years?” Jack said. Pete sighed.