It took very little persuading before Jack agreed to come with them. It wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go.
Dowser’s Row was a long walk from the nightclub on Gallows Hill, and the rain had yet to let up. Eli let Jack keep the coat, for now.
Neither he nor Danny could shake the feeling they were being followed. At a corner, Danny knelt to re-tie her boot and cast a glance back the way they’d come.
There was a brief glimpse of gray fur; a stray dog, probably. Nothing else.
Dowser’s Row was a ramshackle neighborhood crammed between the endless vices of Sinner’s Acre and the austere warehouses surrounding the docks. Most nights, Eli and Danny slept in a tiny shack that had once been a crib: a single-occupancy brothel, not much more than four walls and a roof.
Tonight, a police officer waited by the front door.
“Officer Landry.” Eli hid his nerves with a forced smile. “What brings you here?”
Landry was a picture of the friendly neighborhood policeman, pressed uniform, broad shoulders and all. There was a certain fatherly aspect to him, despite the fact that he only had about a decade on Danny and Eli; in another life, he might have been a schoolteacher.
He’d beaten a man bloody two weeks ago, on this very block.
Landry tipped his chin back, studying both Danny and Eli with narrowed eyes. “Where’s your brother, Daniela?”
Danny glared back, crossing her arms to hide the tremor in her hands.
With a dismissive sniff, Landry turned to Eli. “Heard from Ben Harris that you two rented his rowboat earlier tonight. You wouldn’t have taken it out to that quarantined ship, would you?”
“No, that’s a terrible idea.” Eli winced as he said it. “Why would we do that?”
“I’m in no mood to drag you both down to the station.” Landry’s hand rested lightly on his truncheon, hanging from his belt. “I just want my cut.”
“We didn’t find much.” Eli rummaged in his pocket and produced a handful of gold teeth. “Just these.”
With quick fingers, Landry picked half the teeth from Eli’s hand. Then he stepped to the side, slowly circling the three of them. His eyes settled on Jack. “Who’s this?”
There was a damning breath of hesitation before Eli blurted out, “My cousin?”
With a condescending smile, Landry said, “You sure about that?”
Jack stared right back at Landry, fingers clenched in the sleeves of Eli’s coat.
“Yes,” Eli said, too loudly.
Landry’s attention drifted back to Eli. “If you’re holding out on me, I’ll find out sooner or later. Think on that.” With a final nod and tip of his hat, he strolled off down the block.
Only once Landry was out of sight did they turn their backs on the street and file into the crib.
There were two rooms, separated by a heavy curtain: the front room, containing a few rickety chairs and an old couch they’d found in an alley, and the back room, which served as the bedroom. Eli and Danny maintained a schedule to determine who got to sleep in the bed and who had to settle for the couch, based on a complex accounting of whoever had fucked up most recently.
Eli was doomed to the couch for the foreseeable future.
As Jack paced through the crib like a cat investigating an unfamiliar space, Eli pulled Danny aside. “We should let him have the bed.”
Danny made a face. “Fuck no. If you want to be nice so badly, let him have the couch.”
“He was in a crate.”
“Exactly! The couch will be a feather bed, after that.”
Eli glanced across the room and lowered his voice. “If we’re both out here, that puts us between him and the door. Faulkner said—”
“I know what Faulkner said.” Danny sighed. “Fine. But I’m taking the couch. You get the floor.”
Suspecting he’d won and lost at the same time, Eli crossed the room and tugged the curtain aside. “You can take the bed, Jack. Danny and I will sleep out here.”
The back room contained a narrow bed with a straw mattress. A single window, small and high on the wall, had originally been barred; Danny ripped the bars out when they first moved in. Even without them, anyone unaccustomed to second-story work would find it very difficult to climb out.
Untold years of exhaustion seemed to catch up with Jack all at once. He sat heavily on the bed, petting the covers with an odd fixation—as if the sensation were alien to him.
He looked up into Eli’s eyes and said, “Thank you,” and the sincerity of it grabbed Eli’s heart and twisted.
Eli coughed. “I’ll let you—um. Good night.”
He closed the curtains with such force that they nearly tore free from the ceiling.
Danny was already sprawled across the couch. Once, all three of them had been small enough to sleep on it together, but those days were long gone. Eli stretched out on the floor next to the couch and stole a blanket.
“Something’s bothering me,” Danny said.
“Just the one thing?”
Danny peered at Eli over the edge of the couch. “That ship was at sea for weeks. I didn’t see a food hatch in that crate.”
“There wasn’t one.” Eli rolled onto his back, hands folded over his chest. “And you’d think, if they kept a person in a box for that long, there’d be an unholy mess by the time we opened it up. But it was clean.”
“Something weird is going on.”
Eli sighed, head thumping back against the floor. “All we have to do is watch him.”
“And how long are we stuck doing that?”
Eli didn’t have an answer.
They lay there in the quiet and the dark, until Eli said, “Why didn’t you tell Landry about Leon?”
“He didn’t deserve to know.” She blinked back tears and wriggled on the couch, searching for a comfortable position. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
Eli shrugged, a noisy rustle in the silence of the night. “I don’t know. For a second or two, I guess I could pretend he wasn’t dead.”
A few hours before dawn, someone tripped over Eli.
He flailed awake, half-conscious and swearing. Above him, barely visible in the dim light from outside, was the shape of a man he didn’t recognize: large and burly, with a grim set to his mouth, apparently quite bewildered to find Eli where he was.
The man’s jacket was unbuttoned. His hand twitched toward the knife sheathed on his belt.
Then Danny launched herself up off the couch and tackled him.
A shout and a crash resounded from the other side of the curtain, and the nameless thing lurched unsteadily back to consciousness.
It knew nothing, except that it had to run. It stumbled from the bed.
The unseen yet undoubtedly violent chaos of the front room blocked the way to the door; the only other way out was the window, high up on the wall. Stretching as far as this body would go, the tips of its fingers just barely brushed the edge of the windowsill.
There was a bellow of pain from the front room, and the sound of wood splintering.
The nameless thing backed away a few steps. With a running start, it leapt for the window.
Its fingers just barely caught the edge of the sill. Arms trembling, disused muscles screaming with pain, it pulled itself up and through.
The rain had continued through the night, turning the unpaved alleys behind the shack to a sodden mire. The nameless thing dropped from the window and hit the ground in a spray of mud; then, soaked and barefoot, it ran.
Splashing footsteps echoed and multiplied in the narrow alleys of Dowser’s Row. There might have been a dozen men in pursuit. There might have been nobody at all.
A shadow appeared at the edge of sight, and an arm wrapped around the nameless thing’s middle. It thrashed, desperate to wriggle free even as it was pulled tight against an unyielding body.
“Stop it,” said a familiar voice in its ear. Finley. He must have been waiting behind the shack. “Settle down. You know what I’ll have to—”
He grunted as a vicious kick landed on his instep, and sealed his hand over the nameless thing’s nose and mouth.
As it had so many times before, its body reacted on instinct; all other concerns vanished in the frantic clawing struggle for breath. A hysterical scream rose up in its throat, trapped behind that asphyxiating grip: not again stop it help me help me help me—
Something hit Finley from behind, knocking them both into the mud.
The nameless thing dragged itself away through the muck. Finley rolled onto his back, gasping for breath that fled once more as a massive furry body pinned him to the ground.
Finley shoved his arm up into the snapping wolf’s jaws that snapped at his throat. With a frustrated huff, the wolf thrashed its head from side to side; there was a dull, wet crunch as the bones of Finley’s arm gave way. The limp, broken limb fell aside, and the wolf pinned it with a paw.
One of Finley’s hands strained desperately through the churning mud, as if reaching for help. His eyes and those of the nameless thing met for a brief, pleading moment—
And his screams dissolved into a wet gurgle as the wolf finally closed its teeth around his throat.
Finley went still. His eyes, still wide with plaintive terror, glazed over.
The nameless thing struggled up onto its knees. The wolf lifted its head, crimson smeared across its muzzle, and padded forward until its hot, rusty-smelling breath washed across tear-stained cheeks.
Swaying forward, weary and grateful, the nameless thing laid its brow against the soft, downy fur between the wolf’s ears.
In any fair fight against a larger and stronger opponent, Danny was at a clear disadvantage. But she’d never known what a “fair fight” was supposed to entail and refused to learn.
Eli knew better than to try and help. As Danny and the intruder grappled with each other back and forth across the front room, Eli darted through the curtain and into the bedroom. “Jack—?”
Jack was gone.
Danny had the intruder in a headlock, clinging to his back, while he slammed into the wall and tried to scrape her off like a big, vicious barnacle. The way to the door was clear; Eli bolted outside.
He circled around back, where footprints led through the mud into the alleys. The trail led to the scene of a struggle, not long past.
A dead man lay in the churned, bloodstained mud. A few feet away, Jack clung to a huge gray dog with blood all over its face.
The dog looked at Eli as if wondering what took him so long.
Eli cleared his throat. “Uh, Jack?”
“He tried to take me back.” Jack was blank and unfocused; the words came from somewhere far away.
“Yeah.” Eli eyed the dog warily. Stray dogs were a gamble. Half of them would latch onto anyone who offered them food and affection, but the other half saw people as food. “Danny’s got the other one.”
Wherever Jack’s mind had been, it returned in a sudden rush. He stood and strode back toward the crib. The dog followed leisurely behind.
Danny had used their climbing kit to tie the intruder to a chair. This was no mean feat; he had the physique of a man who used his fists often and the sartorial extravagance of someone paid very well to do so. Blood trickled from one nostril and soaked into his well-groomed mustache.
He looked up as Jack entered the crib and hissed out a quiet, “fuck.”
“What’s your name?” Eli asked him.
Before the man could answer—or refuse to—Jack said, “His name is Quinn.”
Quinn glared at him. His shirt lay slightly open, revealing the faint curve of a long-healed scar: a sigil, a tiny mirror of the marks all over Jack’s body.
“He works for Sinclair?” Danny guessed.
Jack nodded.
“Where’s Finley, then?” Quinn’s eyes were fixed on Jack. “Did you kill him?”
The dog licked its lips.
Quinn turned to Danny and Eli. “If you’re letting it wander around loose, you’re even more fucking stupid than I thought.”
Eli ignored him and took the liberty of rifling through Quinn’s pockets. He found a few coins and bills, plus a bet ticket for a boxing match.
“Fuck.” Quinn slumped back in the chair, eyes turned to the ceiling. “You have no idea what it is, do you?”
“Sure we do,” Danny said. “That’s the fella you kept in a box for God knows how long.”
“Feeling all high and mighty, are you?” Quinn leaned forward, straining against his bonds. “You won’t after it rips your fucking face off.”
Jack flinched. He reached for the dog, fingers tangling in the thick fur at the back of its neck.
Quinn cast a wary glance in Jack’s direction. “You want to let me out of this chair right fucking now.” His voice was quiet, intent. “It’s a demon.”
Jack’s gaze flitted around the room, as if calculating an exit route.
“I can get you money,” Quinn continued. “Anything you want. But you need to lock that thing up now, before it—”
Danny hit him.
Quinn collapsed into the chair, unconscious. Jack stared at Danny with wide, surprised eyes.
“What?” Danny said. “Did you want a go?”
Jack blinked. “No?”
Eli put his hands on his hips, taking in the destroyed front room and the unconscious man tied to a chair at its center. “We can’t stay here.”
The sun had just barely started to peek over the horizon.
Danny said, “Hodge’s should be open.”
The restaurants of Sinner’s Acre opened early, the better to profit off those who worked all night and finished at dawn. Among these was Hodge’s Canteen, which was little more than an open yard crammed with tables, bounded on two sides by sheds that served as kitchen and pantry. The food wasn’t particularly good, but it wasn’t particularly expensive either.
Danny shoved through the quickly-gathering crowd and claimed a table for the three of them in a quiet corner. The dog followed them in; Hodge himself, peeking out from the kitchen’s service window, looked as though he were about to protest but quickly thought better of it. The dog settled under the table, head resting on its front paws.
Eli lost a coin toss and made a quick trip to the service window, returning in short order with breakfast for the three of them. Jack fell on the food with quiet but ravenous hunger, demolishing the eggs and bacon laid in front of him with small, fast bites.
“There was a girl, a few months back,” said Danny, almost conversationally. “Story was, she had a demon riding her. Ripped people apart with her bare hands.” With a sharp look at Jack, she continued, “You planning on anything like that?”
Jack paused, fork halfway to his mouth. “No.”
Danny was unconvinced.
“I couldn’t if I wanted to.” Jack glared down at his plate; his grip on the fork tightened. “My power has been taken from me.”
There was no polite way to ask is that why Sinclair was keeping you in a box? and, thus, Eli said, “Is that why Sinclair was keeping you in a box?”
“He summoned and bound me with my own name.” Jack’s free hand went to his throat, tracing the symbols marked into living flesh. He didn’t seem aware he was doing it. “Once, I was invoked on battlefields by the greatest of warriors. Your people called to me in sacred, wild places for boons only I could grant. Now I am reduced to a—” he spat the word, “—familiar,” as if it were profane.
“And who’s—” Danny gestured vaguely at Jack’s body, “—this?”
Jack finally seemed to notice what his hand was doing; he shook his head and turned his attention back to the food. “I don’t know.”
“Is he still in there with you?”
“I don’t know.”
Danny went quiet. Jack reached for the mug Eli had brought him, took a sip, and made a face. Hodge’s coffee was usually palatable, if a little burnt, but Jack clearly didn’t care for it.
Eli glanced at Jack’s now-empty plate. “They weren’t feeding you in that box. And you were in there a while.”
Jack pushed the plate away. “While I inhabit this flesh, it will not age, or starve or suffocate.” He glanced briefly at Eli’s untouched breakfast. “But it still aches. For food, water.” A brief, shaky breath. “Air.”
Eli shoved his plate across the table. Jack fell on it gratefully.
“Your hand,” Danny said. “Did they—”
Jack shook his head. “Sinclair’s men were forbidden to break my skin, or to—” he paused, swallowing heavily. “The most ancient magics are tied to blood and sex. Either might disrupt the binding spell.”
“So how—”
“I bit my hand as the ship entered the bay.” Jack’s fingers curled around the bandage. “It wasn’t much power, but it was enough to influence the minds of those aboard. I called on their greed.”
“And they all killed each other over a locked box,” Danny said. “And then the runners arrived and did the same thing.”
Acting on reflex, Jack sipped from the mug again—then glared at it, as if it had betrayed him. “It likely called the both of you, as well.” He placed the mug firmly on Eli’s side of the table.
Eli cast a hopeful look at Danny, who replied, “You’re still sleeping on the couch.”
“Fuck.”
“I was prepared to pass from one captor to another,” Jack said. “You two are … not what I expected.”
Eli coughed. Danny became very interested in the wood grain of the table.
“But you’re out now,” Eli finally said. “You don’t have to go back. Right?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s not so simple as that.” He lifted one hand, turning it, glaring at the scars. “The binding is still in place. So long as it exists, my power will never be my own.”
“Can you break it?”
Jack’s hand fell to the table. “I don’t know.”
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