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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events

portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously.

soul trade

Copyright © 2012 by Caitlin Kittredge.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.

ISBN: 978- 0-312-38825- 6

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / September 2012

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1.

Pete Caldecott sat on a tombstone, watching fog curl

soft fingers against the graveyard earth and waiting for
Mickey Martin’s ghost to appear.
Mickey Martin hadn’t always been a ghost, and be-
fore a hail of constable’s bullets had snuffed out his life
in the winter of 1844, he’d managed to slit the throats of
thirteen women.
Murderers weren’t supposed to be buried on conse-
crated ground, but with a bribe to the right vicar, Mickey
Martin’s admirers made sure he got a proper burial.
Even razor-wielding serial killers had their fans.
Mickey Martin professed to be a man of God, ridding
the earth of wickedness, and in the poverty-stricken
world of Victorian London, a bloke who went about
slashing prostitutes and charwomen was looked on not
as a monster, but as an avenging angel, cleaning the
mud-choked streets of the East End of their filth.
Pete wasn’t usually the one who sat in chilly grave-
yards, waiting for the dead. Usually, that was Jack’s job.
But Jack, the one who could see the dead with his second
4 CA I TL I N KI T T R E D G E

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

of Pete’s old squad when she’d been on the Met, smart

and hardworking, ambitious and driven. And now terri-
fied, after a routine call had turned into a brush with
Mickey Martin.
Pete had a reputation with such matters, whether she
liked it or not. Everyone at her old squad in Camden
knew she’d quit to go chase spooks and vapors. Or at
least those were the rumors. The truth was a little more
complicated. But trying to explain to coppers like PC
Wolcott that if they just cared to look, from the corner
of their eye, a part of London would reveal itself—a
part made of magic and shadows, harboring creatures
like Mickey Martin and far, far worse—would end with
leather straps and lithium, and that wouldn’t help any-
one.
“Caldecott.” Pete’s Bluetooth headset came to life,
and she jumped. She cleared her throat before fishing
her mobile from her overcoat. She didn’t want PC Wol-
cott to know she’d been drifting and not holding up her
end of their two-person search team.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“I’ve finished my perimeter sweep. Heading back
your way.” Wolcott was out here on her own time, which
Pete gave her credit for—though not more credit than
she gave PC Wolcott for calling her in the first place.
Ghost attacks against the living were rare and could usu-
ally be written off as muggings or bad trips, but some-
thing about this one had shaken Brandi Wolcott badly
enough that she quietly went searching for an exorcist,
and found Pete. Beyond that, she hadn’t said all that
6 CA I TL I N KI T T R E D G E

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

what she’d taken for reluctance was actually fear. Wol-

cott’s entire body was strung with it, as if she were a
puppet on wires. Pete sucked in a deep lungful of damp,
cold air. Whatever had happened here, it had been a lot
worse than a ghost popping out of a mirror or a polter-
geist flinging crockery.
Not for the first time that night, she cursed Jack and
his stubborn refusal to do anything that wasn’t exactly
in line with what he wanted.
Wolcott spoke again in a rush, voice rattling like the
dead leaves all around. “I seen this shape hunched on
the ground, and he were mumbling, over and over. It
were Bible talk, I don’t know. I never did pay attention
in church.”
“ ‘Behold, I am coming soon. I have my reward with
me and I shall give to everyone according to what he
has done,’ ” Pete said. That had been Mickey Martin’s
favorite passage to quote in his letters to the various
tabloids and one-sheets of the day.
Wolcott’s nose wrinkled. “Yeah, that. Street-corner
nutter ramblings, I thought.”
“It’s Revelation,” Pete said. “The handbook of all
street-corner nutters.”
“You some kind of brain, then?” Wolcott asked,
clearly glad to have the subject diverted from what she’d
seen.
“No,” Pete said. “Just a very poor sort of Catholic.”
“Was about to ask,” said Wolcott. “Don’t see many
Catholics mucking about with the dark arts.”
“You saw the man and then what?” Pete prompted,
 SOUL TRADE 9

deciding that the lecture on black magic versus exor-

cism could wait for another day.
“I told him the churchyard was closed and he’d have
to move along,” said Wolcott, “and then he just . . . he
looked at me, and I can’t describe it. Had dead black
eyes, bleeding onto his face. Such deep holes. Felt like
I was falling, and then the cold was all around, and
he . . .” Wolcott swallowed, her voice trembling along
with the rising energies of the Black.
Pete scratched at the back of her neck. The feelings
picking at the part of her mind connected to magic were
bloody active, even for a graveyard. Then again, not all
graveyards boasted their very own serial killer.
“He came for me,” Wolcott said. “Straight through
the headstones, like he were made of smoke. And he
grabbed for me, his hand went through my stab vest,
and it was as if . . .” She shuddered. “He knew me. Could
see every wicked thing I’d done, and was going to burn
me up from the inside.”
“I know it must have been terrible for you,” Pete said.
“If it makes you feel better—six other people have had
the same thing happen over the last six months.”
“Shit,” Wolcott muttered, but her shoulders relaxed
a fraction. Pete figured knowing it wasn’t just her might
help settle Wolcott’s nerves—not that it did much for
her own tingling hands and jumping heart. The church-
yard had been silent for decades until the first terrified
woman had called 999 from the pub across the road, and
Pete had an idea why Mickey Martin was up and about
again—when she and Jack had stopped the primordial
10 CA I TL I N KI T T R E D G E

demon, Nergal, from ripping his way into the daylight

world, it had rippled out and touched everything in the
city. Every ghost, every lesser demon, every scrap and
snip of magic-having life in London had felt the effects.
And now they were awake, and hungry.
At least Pete could put Mickey Martin in his place.
The larger aftermath of Nergal and his brethren would
just have to sort itself out.
“You’re nicer about it than my DCI, but you still
probably think I’m crazy,” Wolcott mumbled, leaning
against the monument. “Everybody else does.”
“Crazy’s not the word I’d use,” Pete said. Wolcott,
too, represented a problem—when the Black echoed
like a rung bell as Nergal and the other four primordial
demons tried to break out of the prison the Princes of
Hell had erected for them millennia ago, all of the citi-
zens of both daylight London and the Black beneath
with the slightest bit of sensitivity got a jolt like grabbing
a high-tension cable.
For psychics like Jack it meant more sleepless nights,
more waking visions, and more barrages from the dead
and the living alike. For people like Wolcott, who would
have never known she possessed the slightest bit of
talent under normal circumstances, it led to nights like
this.
It wasn’t Pete’s problem. Her problem was Mickey
Martin and his recently reacquired hobby of murdering
those he considered wicked.
“You don’t seem so looney,” Wolcott observed. “From
 SOUL TRADE 11

what they say around the station, I was expecting Stevie

Nicks.”
“I thought I’d leave my scarves and tarot at home,
yeah,” Pete agreed. She ignored the implication that ap-
parently the longer she was gone from the Met, the more
of a moony-eyed hippie type she became in common
legend.
“Never liked stakeouts,” Wolcott said. “Bloody bore-
dom sets in quick, don’t it?” She scraped a fingernail
against the moss on the monument. “How’d you cope,
when you was a DI?”
Pete’s head started to throb, though she didn’t know
if it was from a lack of coffee, the cold, or Wolcott’s
persistent questions. She shouldn’t be mad at the PC—
Wolcott was just trying to distract herself from her
nerves.
She did the same, counting headstones, listening to
the faint thump of music from the far-off pub, feeling
the droplets of fog collect on her face and hair. The
whispers of the graveyard had stilled, and even the mist
held its place, covering the ground, the headstones, and
the dead beneath. For a moment, it was as if the entire
city of London held its breath—no music, no cars, no
trains, not even the heartbeat of the rushing Thames.
Then the pain in Pete’s head spiked, and she knew
the silence had only been a lull, not a finale.
From the stone behind Wolcott, the shadows began
to seep and merge, moving of their own accord, against
the light that gleamed from the vestry windows and the
12 C AI T LI N KI T T R E D G E

streetlamps beyond the confines of the churchyard.

The monument gave birth to a dripping black shape
that wavered from cohesive to vapor and back again,
sliding through the pocked limestone like oil through
water.
“Wolcott!” Pete shouted, but it was too late. The
thing had Brandi by the throat and engulfed her, pour-
ing into her eyes and nostrils and down her open gullet,
choking her scream before it had a chance to be born.
“Shit,” Pete said, only able to watch as the ghost of
Mickey Martin poured itself like black, oily water into
a brand-new body. She’d only met a few ghosts that
could do that, and none of them had anyone’s best in-
terest in mind. Exorcisms were hard enough when you
were only dealing with a vapor.
And yet, Pete thought as Brandi’s eyes clouded over
with silver and she let out a choked moan, her limbs
jerking and spasming as the ghost took control, it didn’t
feel like a ghost. Pete wasn’t a psychic—that was Jack’s
game—but ghosts felt like electricity, like lightning
striking too close for comfort, like every ion in the room
was awake and slamming against her skin. This was
cold, and black, and bottomless, giving no sense that the
thing inside Brandi Wolcott had ever been alive, never
mind human.
The one thought pounding through her head over and
over was that Jack would never have let this happen.
He’d have known something was off, and been ready
for this thing that was not a ghost.
 SOUL  TRADE

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