Soul Trade (26 page)

Most rituals weren’t all chanting and incense, wearing robes and scribing ancient symbols. All you really needed for a ritual was a little chalk, some talent, and an intent.

The Prometheans moved into a circle,
leaving Morwenna at the center. Donovan smirked at Pete over his shoulder.

“Can’t say I ever pegged you as a quitter, sweetheart,” he told her. “Disappointing. But then again, most of what Jackie’s chosen to do with his life is disappointing.”

Pete stayed quiet. Her stomach flipped, and she wondered how long she had, this close to the soul well, before she became another one of the shambling
villagers. She wondered what had become of the hikers and the birdwatchers who’d come too close to this place. Worms? Or did they simply go mad and fall down a ravine somewhere to die?

“To the oldest of the old ones, to the things before men and the time before time,” Morwenna said. For the first time since Pete had met her, she spoke reverently and quietly, none of her usual arrogance in her
posture.

“We bring you this gift,” Morwenna said, voice just above a whisper. “The soul of a mage, to do with as you will.”

She reached out and started to place her hand on the soul well. Pete looked at Jack. She had to time it just right, so no one had a chance to react.

“You know how you said letting her win was a bad idea?” she whispered to Jack.

He stared at her. Beyond him, Pete saw white
shapes encroaching through the mist—worms, called back by the energy she could feel rising around her even now, strong enough to drown everyone in its path.

“For once, you were right,” Pete said, and shoved Donovan hard, knocking him aside.

“I am open to receive you!” Morwenna cried. “Come to me with all the power of the Merlin!”

Donovan grabbed for Pete, but she dove toward Morwenna and knocked
the woman out of the way, closing her own fist over the soul cage.

All at once, the rising energy disappeared. Everything stopped, sound and breath and air. Pete thought she heard Margaret scream, and then she was in the void, inside the soul well, and the white nothingness had consumed her.

27.

The raven alighted on a tree above Pete. It was gray and long dead, just a husk barely able to support the bird’s weight.

I did tell you,
it said.

“I’m not letting Morwenna use this place,” Pete said. “She’ll cover England in worms and zombies, and she’ll think she’s doing it for the greater good. So I’m shutting the well.”

No
 … the raven started.
You don’t know what could happen …

The soul well wasn’t a physical drop, not really. It rushed up at her, a vortex of mist, full of shapes and screams. She was on a white plane with a gray tree, nowhere, among the stars. She was spread out across a thousand light years and compressed down to a single point, all at once.

“The worst thing that can happen is that I die,” she said. “But this thing started, and it’s got to have an end.”

It started because of what the crow-mage did,
the raven sighed.
It will not end, not simply because you want it to.

“There’s one sure way I know to drain power out of a place,” she told the raven.

No!
The bird let out a distressed cry.
You know that will be the end of you …

“Then I’ll end,” Pete said. “I told you, nothing lives forever.”

When she’d made the decision to lie to Jack the night
before, to stop Morwenna, the shadow had been in the back of her mind, the whisper that it might come to this. But she couldn’t hesitate. As much as Belial might insist otherwise, she couldn’t do anything else. Couldn’t risk her daughter growing up in a world ruled by the white nothing.

Or by Morwenna Morgenstern.

If she did this, if she gave in to the howling energies around her, that would
be that. The end, a period as final as her father’s lung cancer or a bullet fired from a gun.

If she did this, Lily would never know her. Jack would never be the same.

But if their world was this, the white place full of nothing but wasteland and misery, then it wouldn’t matter anyway. If she did this, her daughter would grow up in a world that allowed light and good dreams next to all the shadows
and black magic swirling around her. Jack would get to remember her as strong, standing beside him, rather than wrung out, spent, and given up.

So she didn’t hesitate, but instead stepped forward until even the tiny white slice of world faded away, and there was nothing but her, alone in the in-between.

It was nothing like the last time she’d visited, when she’d tried to hold Jack’s soul back
from crossing into the Land of the Dead. She stood in front of the flat where her family had lived when she was a tiny kid, and everything looked very normal.

A shape opened the door and stepped out, and Pete saw the elegant woman in black, feathers for hair and obsidian eyes.

“You again,” the Morrigan sighed. “Can’t get rid of you, can I?” She grinned, blood dribbling from her pointed teeth.
“Besides, I thought you belonged to my sister.”

“The Hecate washed her hands of me,” Pete said. “Wouldn’t do what she wanted.”

“She’s mercurial, that one,” said the Morrigan. “What a marvelous word,
mercurial.
Like mercury. Ever-changing, never still. Much like me.”

“Not the word I’d use,” said Pete.

The Morrigan laughed. “Here you are, trapped in Purgatory, faced with the gods, and you’ve
still got a mouth.” She moved to Pete and stroked her cheek. “How rare you are, Pete.”

“I’m not trying to trifle with you,” Pete said. “I’m trying to shut the door that’s been opened from here to the daylight world.”

“Yeah,” the Morrigan said. “And I come here, at great personal risk, to tell you there’s only one way to do that.”

“I already know the price,” Pete sighed. “I’m not afraid of dying.”

The Morrigan shook her head. “You’re afraid of leaving him behind, though. Your Jack.” She made a spiteful sound. “You’re not the one he’s meant for, Petunia. I am. And I’ll have him, make no mistake.”

“Then why not just let me die, any number of times you could have?” Pete snarled. “Why keep fucking up my life, instead of just ending it? You’ve made it clear you have that power.” She jabbed
her finger into the Morrigan’s chest. All her fear was gone now. When she had decided this was the end of the line, her fear had released her.

Nothing the Morrigan could do now would make anything worse.

“If I killed you, Jack would never help me,” the Morrigan said. “He’d spend eternity in Hell first, and you know it.” She spread her arms and feathers bloomed, wings forming from her fingers.
Her eyes turned yellow, and the feathers spread over the rest of her body, covering her face as it elongated. “But if you’re lost in a noble fight I help you with, only to just barely let victory slip away, then Jack owes me his allegiance. And I’ll have it, Pete. Make no mistake.”

“I know all I have to do is channel the soul well. Let the Weir take it,” Pete said. “You’re not going to tell me
anything I don’t know.”

“Is that what you think? How simple a creature you are,” the Morrigan said, laughing. Her feathers rustled, and her eyes narrowed in pleasure.

Pete set her jaw. “Tell me, then, since you’re so keen to see me fail.”

“You can’t close a well by channeling it,” the Morrigan said. “There’s more power in Purgatory than a hundred Weirs could absorb in a lifetime, never mind
that woman who started this mess. No, you’ve crossed over with that sacrificial soul, and now you have to find a way back. Pull the well after you and collapse it.”

She grinned, and the blood rivulets on her chin gleamed crimson in the harsh white light of this empty place. “But you won’t make it. No one who enters Purgatory makes an exit. That’s why they call it Purgatory, Petunia. I’m afraid,
as your dear Jack put it, that you’re worm food.”

The Morrigan spread her wings. “And now, he’s all mine. Enjoy eternity, Petunia. It’s going to be a much easier road now that you’re not standing in it.”

Pete’s hand flashed out, before she even really thought about what a horrible, suicidal idea it was, and latched on to the Morrigan’s arm. “You’re wrong about one thing,” she said.

The Morrigan
gave a crow’s cry, struggling.

“One thing did make it out of here at least once,” Pete said. “You.”

She opened her talent, with no hesitation, let the power of the goddess she held flow into her. “Maybe I don’t have to drain Purgatory,” Pete hissed in the Morrigan’s ear, so close their bodies shared a heartbeat. “Maybe I just have to drain you.”

“Bitch!” the Morrigan screamed, but Pete was
beyond caring. The power was vast and cold, the power of death carried across every war, every plague, every place from the beginning, when death had taken root in bloody soil and spread its pall across the world.

Her body convulsed, the pain warning Pete that wherever her physical form was, she was burning from the inside out. The pain worked as an anchor, keeping her focused as the magic flowed
from the Morrigan to her, more and more even as the Morrigan screamed and took flight with Pete still wrapping her in a tight embrace.

As they fell through Purgatory, Pete saw the place for what it was as her talent amplified her connection to the Black—not a block of flats but a blank place, a place of stone and ash dropping endlessly into a screaming void absent of stars, the cold of space
encroaching. White things wriggled in the darkness like maggots in rot, reaching for her, so close that Pete knew that in another few seconds, she’d have been consumed by the worms and the Morrigan would have had Jack all to herself.

“You keep this up and you die!” the Morrigan screamed. “I’ll have your soul, and it will be tormented in my army for eternity!”

Pete watched the Morrigan’s inhuman
gold eyes as they fell, never blinking. “You didn’t believe me,” she said, “but I was telling the truth. I’m not afraid of you. Or death. I’m afraid of leaving the world to people like the Prometheans. I’m afraid of letting Jack down, and I’m afraid my daughter will forget me.”

She dug her fingernails into the Morrigan’s flesh, and at the touch of the goddess’s blood, Pete’s vision was filled
only with magic, only with the power that was pouring into her so quickly it was a wonder she wasn’t turning to ash.

“But you, Hag?” she hissed. “You don’t scare me one fucking bit.”

The Morrigan screeched, a sound so inhuman it echoed off everything in Purgatory, and then the white flashed away and Pete heard other sounds, sounds of the world she knew.

“Pete?” Jack’s voice echoed as if from
a tunnel. Like breaking the surface of a frozen pond, her eyes flew open and she saw a spotty gray sky, clouds drifting, felt a thumping on her chest like a hammer.

“Fuck off!” she shouted at Jack, who stopped using his clubbed fists to pump at her chest. “What the Hell are you doing?”

“CPR,” he panted. “You stopped breathing.”

“You’re doing it all wrong,” Pete said. The pain wasn’t from the
CPR, though. It was the power, burning her from the inside. The Morrigan was gone, but an eternity of power harvested from the dead still rode Pete’s mind. Her vision blurred, her heart stuttered, and she felt her muscles go rigid and spastic with convulsions.

All at once Jack disappeared, shoved bodily out of the way by Donovan, and Morwenna was bending over her.

“She channeled it right into
her,” Morwenna breathed. “I can’t believe it. Donovan, we can still do it. She’s got enough juice to light up Manchester.”

“Hurry up,” he said. “And Victor, will you please fucking keep control of my son? He almost smashed her ribcage to bits.”

Morwenna grabbed Pete’s face between her thumb and forefinger, squeezing hard enough to carve half-moons into Pete’s flesh. “I don’t care what happens
to her body, Donovan. I just want what’s riding it. Winter’s far too much of a weakling to carry this kind of power. It’s evident that I’ll be taking up the mantle of the Merlin. Look how the power responds to me.”

She placed her fingers on Pete’s forehead and inhaled. “Give the power to me, old ones,” she murmured. “I await you, your worthy servant, worthy of the gift first given one hundred
generations past.”

It was as if someone had placed a magnet against her. Pete felt all the power rush to the surface of her mind and travel through the pathways of her neurons toward Morwenna’s voice. In the woman’s clenched fist she saw the soul cage, still coaxing the vast energies of the emptiness toward the pain and suffering of the mage soul inside.

Well,
she thought absently.
At least
I’m not going to die in the mud. Might even make it to a hospital if I’m lucky.

Beyond the roaring of the Morrigan’s magic, she heard a scream. At first she thought it was Margaret, but it was Morwenna, mouth open wide as it would go, a grotesque red slash of rage and disbelief.

The power left Pete as abruptly as it had come, and she fell back into the mud, that hit-by-a-lorry feeling worse
than ever.

Beyond the circle of mages, Margaret gave a small shudder, a jolt, and then passed her hands over her face.

“What the fuck just happened?” she asked Jack.

“It’s her,” Victor said, his voice soft and full of awe. “The magic chose her.”

“No!” Morwenna screamed, starting for Margaret. “It’s mine! I made the offering! I said the words! I’m the one who bloody stepped up when it counted!”

Victor put an arm out and stopped her as easily as you’d stop a small child throwing a fit. “I’m sorry, Morwenna,” he said. “But she’s the Merlin. The Weir’s energies chose her.”

One by one, the mages of the Prometheus Club turned to Margaret, some staring with blantant hostility, others with curiosity.

“Guess that explains why you’re not a worm, luv,” Jack said, squeezing Margaret on the shoulder.

“Please accept my apology,” Victor said, extending his hand to Margaret. “And consider this a formal offer to take your seat at the head of the Prometheus Club.”

“Don’t do it,” Jack said instantly. “Worse than school. Make you wear an ugly suit like his. Install a stick up your arse on your eighteenth birthday.”