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soul trade
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1.
sight, the one who had all the talent when it came to
disposing of the unnatural that crawled under cover of
night in London, wanted nothing to do with the Mickey
Martin business. Or, if Pete was honest, with much of
anything lately.
She could have put her foot down, demanded that
Jack be the one to take this on, but that would bring on a
row, and she’d had her fill of those for this lifetime and
possibly the next. Sitting alone in a graveyard at nearly
midnight didn’t bother her overmuch. It wasn’t like
she’d be getting any sleep at home, between Lily’s er-
ratic schedule and Jack’s ever-present foul mood.
Still, she wished she could chuck it in and go home,
sit down in front of the telly with Lily and Jack, and pre-
tend just for the span of a program or two that they were
a regular sort of family. The sort where Mum and Dad
occasionally got along, and neither of them had any
special connection to the ghosts and magic that wound
around the city as surely as the river and the rail lines.
Jack had said this job wasn’t worth their time when it
had come in, but he said that about every routine exor-
cism. They weren’t flashy, but they usually paid, the
victims too terrified to even consider stiffing the person
who had made the big bad ghost go poof. And some-
thing had to put food on Pete and Jack’s table, to pay for
Lily’s nappies and the expenses involved with living in
London, which were considerable. If that was boring,
shopworn exorcisms, so be it.
It wasn’t as if this particular ghost job had come from
a disreputable source. PC Brandi Wolcott was a member
SOUL TRADE 5
much, and Pete got the sense she was having second
thoughts about the whole thing. You didn’t want to be
the only PC who believed in ghosts.
Pete shoved her mobile back into her pocket and let
her hands follow. October nights brought on the chill
and the threat of winter to come, and the damp crept
through her hair and her clothes, all the way to her skin.
She could feel the gentle pulse of the Black, the other
side that people like Wolcott chose not to see, like the
vibration of a subterranean train under her feet. She was
mostly used to it by now, but on nights like tonight,
when it was silent and the hum of the city seemed miles
away, it seeped in and knocked around her skull, al-
most as palpable as the fog.
Wolcott’s blonde head appeared, bobbing between
the monuments. The churchyard was only a hundred
meters from end to end, but it was crammed full of
headstones and obelisks, with far more bodies than there
were stones below Pete’s boots. London suffered from
too many dead and too little space, and before great
swaths of green were cordoned off for burying by the
later Victorians, the dead resided wherever there was
room—in churchyards, under the church floorboards,
in shallow pits that fouled the air and drew in the Black
like a magnetic field.
“Christ, this weather,” Wolcott said. Her bronze skin,
painted on rather than earned under the sun, was as
brassy as her hair. In her off-hours, Wolcott favored
skintight satin pants, loud prints, earrings large enough
to use as handcuffs, and makeup by the pound. But she
SOUL TRADE 7
was bright and had nerves of steel, and Pete was glad
she’d agreed to come.
“It’s going to piss down rain any moment,” Pete
agreed. She gestured toward a large winged angel, the
biggest monument in the churchyard. “Can you take
me through it again? What happened the other night?”
“Sure.” Wolcott shrugged. “Station got a call from
the vicar about half-twelve and I came around. Said
there were lights out in the churchyard. Figured it was
some hoodies pissing about, thought nothing of it.” She
walked a few paces, staring up at the angel. Its stone eyes
were blacked over with moss, and the ghostly marks of
old graffiti wrapped like white vines around its base.
“I got about halfway into the yard when I heard this
sound,” Wolcott said softly. “This low sound, like a
moaning. Still thought it were kids, so I pulled out my
light and gave the order to show their smart little faces.”
The wind picked up, pushing leaves against Pete’s
feet, and the fog flowed and rippled across the uneven
ground as if it were alive and making a mad dash for the
safety of the church. “But it wasn’t,” Pete encouraged
the other woman. Wolcott flinched, as if she expected
Pete to accuse her of making it all up, or simply laugh in
her face.
“Brandi,” Pete said. She laid a hand on Wolcott’s
nylon-clad arm. “I believe you. The more I know, the
easier it’ll be for us to make sure this doesn’t happen
again.”
The PC hunched inside her navy blue windcheater,
and Pete saw then, up close under the sodium lights, that
8 CA I TL I N KI T T R E D G E
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