Dark Days bl-6

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Jack followed the dead, who passed straight through walls and buildings, not needing the benefit of streets and pavement as he did. He still had a body as the Morrigan did, but now he was inhuman as her.

  London was in chaos. Emergency vehicles clogged the streets, and looting had already started along Oxford Street. Fires raged, people screamed, and the wounded tried to pull themselves to safety.

  He saw creatures of the Black—zombies, lycanthropes, lesser things, dark-dwelling things. They ran through the daylight world with impunity, and the people of London panicked. The city had turned itself inside out, and Legion had barely started.

  Jack walked faster.

  The dead had stopped, arrayed in columns across the plaza in front of Buckingham Palace. The crown of the palace was on fire, and the Territorial Army had set up tanks in front of the gates, soldiers firing on rioters and zombies with equal prejudice if they came too close.

  Legion watched the chaos around him with a bemused expression. Even though the entire city was eating itself alive, burning and screaming, spinning out toward the ashes-and-dust future that Jack’s talent had shown him, nobody came within a hundred feet of Legion. He stood alone, holding Azrael’s device, watching everything with the delight of a small child.

  “You really couldn’t be more obvious, could you?” Jack said. “Buckingham Palace, really? Is your ego that massive?”

  Legion turned on him, face going from serene to poisonous in a split heartbeat. “I killed you.”

  “Oh, right and proper,” Jack assured him. “You put that knife right in the sticking spot, and I died in agony. No need to feel bad on that score.”

  Legion turned in a slow circle, looking at the dead, then at Jack, and finally down at the device. His shoulders began to shake and Jack sighed. The Joker routine was getting old.

  He didn’t feel the rage, though, that he’d felt when he was alive. There wasn’t any feeling, really, just as there was no air in his lungs. He was devoid of life, and only life brought the sort of rage that had gotten him killed.

  “Jack, you still don’t get it,” Legion sighed. “You never did. I made you. Mage kind. My blood is the blood that gave the human race the spark. Azrael saw the wild magic of this world when it was new, and when he saw what sprang forth when he fused that magic into flesh, when he made me, he panicked. He saw his end in my eyes, and in the eyes of my line, of every human mage to come. When I escaped Azrael’s vault, I came here. I saw the things that were thrashing in the mud and shit to become human, and I gave them a gift. It nearly ended me, but I knew I had to plant the seed that would grow into the race that toppled the Princes, toppled Hell itself. I waited and I hid among the elementals, and when I finally took Azrael’s prize, I went to each of his pressure points and I squeezed. Nergal and Abbadon, and fostering mage-kind, pushing them along. Even making sure that a little council rat from Manchester found a shady Irish book dealer to teach him how his talent could aid my cause.”

  Jack tilted his head. What he remembered from life said Legion was trying to bait him, to torment him one last time before he ripped the universe apart.

  Legion turned the orb in his hands. “I am not the end, Jack. I am life. A new world will come, and it will be better. Just as it was after I came here the first time. You see…”

  He sputtered as Jack closed the distance between them, knocking the device out of the way and slashing the blade down. The device dropped, but Legion flowed backward.

  He was fast, but Jack could see now. He could use his sight the way he had always been meant to—he was dead, and it couldn’t harm him or drive him insane. It could always be on, searching for the dead and for the true face of the living. The soul that dwelled within the flesh, the thing that the Morrigan came for when the flesh gave out.

  He had never seen a soul before. Demons didn’t have them, and by the time a soul became a ghost, it was so corrupted and in so much pain it was unrecognizable.

  Legion’s soul looked like him, naked and painted with ancient woad, hair slicked with mud, eyes pure black and impossibly large in his face. He was alien, but he was alive.

  He laughed, but Jack barely saw Legion’s body any more. This was how the Morrigan saw the world, he realized. Saw the ordinary people as pinpoints, and the bright souls of things like Legion as beacons.

  Jack wondered, just for a moment, what his own soul had looked like.

  Legion snarled, and then screamed, as Jack grabbed him. He felt much stronger than he had in life. All of the aches and twinges he’d acquired had vanished, and he felt better than he had that night when he was eighteen, when he’d first climbed onto the altar with no idea of what lay before him.

  “You can’t stop me!” Legion howled. “I am this world’s reckoning! I do not destroy, but I will create, and there’s not a damn thing you can do, crow-mage! You hear me?”

  Jack jammed the blade deep into Legion’s soul, pinning it to his flesh, and it glowed for a moment before it exploded into ambient magic that ran all around the plaza, hitting off metal, causing people’s mobiles to melt and the army’s tanks to give off showers of sparks as their electronics blew.

  “Second verse, same as the first,” Jack said as he pulled the knife out. Legion’s soul was gone, destroyed. His body was just an object. “Change the record, mate. Honestly.”

  Jack threw the blade aside and scrambled for the device as soon as he was sure Legion was dead. The Black was convulsing, shuddering, and with each pulse more and more magic poured into the daylight world. People were starting to notice him, which in and of itself said just how much magic had already leaked out and taken over a realm that had no defense against it.

  It was a radiation leak that was going to contaminate a fuck of a lot of people if he didn’t do something. “Help me!” he yelled at the staring bystanders, pointing at the device. “I need that thing if I’m going to stop this!”

  A foot came down on the object and crushed it just as Jack had it in his hands. The Morrigan tilted her head, looking down at the shards.

  “Azrael thought he could remake the stars,” she said. “Hang them in the sky any way he pleased. Legion may have set it to destroy rather than create, but it is the same. It is not something I will allow.”

  Jack felt as if a thousand-pound weight had dropped on him. All at once, he smelled the smoke again, heard the screams, saw exactly what was happening. What he was too late to stop. Had always been too late to stop.

  “You bitch,” he ground at the Morrigan. “You knew this would happen.”

  “Once the Black has fractured, it will proceed, whether we will it or not,” the Morrigan said.

  “And let me guess.” Jack tasted bitter chemical smoke and blood against his teeth from where he’d slammed into Legion. “Now I’ll lead your army of the dead, and overtake this broken place that used to be a world.”

  The Morrigan looked up at the sky. Crows circled above Buckingham Palace, but they were not the sweeping cloud of darkness he’d seen before Legion had killed him.

  “No,” she said. “This is not Legion’s world. This is something new, something that you and I did not foresee.”

  Jack dropped to his knees. He’d failed. He was dead. London was burning. Pete was alone, and she and Lily were in danger.

  “This is not a day of death,” the Morrigan said. “It’s life, Jack. Legion was correct—this is creation. Ashes are a beginning, you know. What grows out of them is the strongest of all.”

  Jack didn’t lift his head. He was dead. He felt nothing, and he was glad. He had no air, no life, no blood.

  Blood.

  He tasted blood.

  Jack snapped his gaze back to the Morrigan. “You tricked me!” he shouted. She spread her arms, her feather cloak flowing, her blood-coated smile wider than ever.

  “I am Death, Jack. I choose my instruments wisely. You were dead, and as my avatar you used your blade as only my avatar could to end Legion’s plans to terrorize this new life, this beg
inning.” She came to him, and she lifted him as gently as anyone had ever touched him, her talons on either side of his face. “Life has its day, Jack. I learned that the hard way. You and I have another meeting, a long time from now, when we will spend eternity together.” She pressed her lips to his forehead, leaving a cool imprint of blood and magic. “Go back, Jack. You are alive, and with the living is where you stay.”

  His own banishment hex, used on more ghosts than he could count, said back to him was like a jolt to the heart. He gasped, fire filling his chest as his lungs sprang back to life.

  Spasms threw him onto his back, and his heart sputtered like a defective motor while his nerve endings danced.

  When he opened his eyes, the Morrigan had gone and Pete was kneeling over him.

  “Fuck,” he gasped. “What the fuck are you doing here? How’d you find me?”

  “I followed you,” Pete said, as if he were a very specific sort of idiot. “You got up and started walking like a zombie, and I followed you here. I saw you kill Legion.”

  Jack grabbed Pete and pulled her down, kissing her hard enough to bruise their lips. He tasted a tinge of her blood on his tongue. He wrapped his arms around her and didn’t let her pull away until his heartbeat had decreased to a level where he didn’t feel like it was about to explode.

  When he did, he saw the Morrigan standing at the edge of the crowd, now being pushed back by a contingent of riot police clearing a path for ambulances.

  Life has its day, she whispered, but so does Death, and when that day comes, the two of us shall conclude our twined destinies. Until then, Jack … rise from the ashes, and live out your time.

  Pete flagged down an ambulance for them, and when Jack looked again, the Morrigan had vanished.

  The paramedics cut away his shirt and attached a heart monitor, but Jack felt fine. Even the ever-present throb of his sight was quiet for the moment. Pete drew back, her fingers passing across his chest with the lightest touch.

  “Your tattoos are gone. Your scars…”

  Jack sat up, looking down at his arms. He’d gotten a clean slate once before, but it hadn’t lasted long. His arms were bare, pale, and dusted with dark hair. He touched his face and didn’t feel the scar on his cheek. Even his knee felt fit.

  “I’m a new man, luv,” he said. “From the ashes, and all that.”

  “Yeah, well,” Pete said, helping him onto the gurney. “You’re still going to the hospital.”

  Jack nodded. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  He watched the chaos retreat as the ambulance drove away. The Black was everywhere now, no longer a hum and a tide but like the air around them, touching his skin, his mind, his talent. It was one with the daylight now, and the world was still here.

  That’s what’s important, Jack told himself as the ambulance bumped through the streets in the old part of London.

  Until that last day came, the world would be there. And so would he.

  CHAPTER 40

  Jack was glad that for once he didn’t actually need a hospital, because he hated them more than any place on earth. The A&E doctor looked him over, saw that he wasn’t gravely injured or bleeding out, and sent him on his way through a packed waiting room full of the aftermath of the riots and the incursion of the Black.

  Jack stepped outside to the smoker’s patio to call Pete and tell her that he’d be home soon. She’d left to be with Lily, and he hadn’t minded a bit—he could handle a few pokes and prods just fine on his own.

  After the day he’d had, a hospital actually seemed like a vacation, albeit a loud, crowded vacation that smelled of antiseptic and latex.

  He watched a zombie shamble down the sidewalk and some lesser form of Fae flit among the gargoyles on top of the hospital. His sight showed him everything as if he were tuned to some kind of radar, pings of magic feeding back to him, but without any of the usual pain.

  Jack sat on the steps and lit a cigarette. He could get used to this—magic in the daylight, creatures out in the open, people like him living in the human world like they should instead of living with one foot in the daylight world and one foot in the stuff of nightmares.

  “Spare one of those?” Belial flopped down beside him, looking pressed and polished and utterly, utterly slagged off.

  “Well look at you,” Jack said, passing over the last of his crushed pack. “Aren’t we a sight for sore eyes.”

  Belial lit his cigarette with Jack’s proffered lighter and pulled a face. “These human brands are like sucking on a candy stick. Horrible.”

  “You enjoying yourself?” Jack asked. “Seeing everything all topsy turvy?”

  Belial shook his finger. “Don’t avoid the subject, Jack. You didn’t give me that blade.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “You threatened me. You couldn’t even use it, anyway. And I did your job for you, so by the by, you’re welcome.”

  Belial turned to Jack, and his expression was as stony as any of the gargoyles, dead as any of the zombies all around them. “I don’t take this sort of thing lightly, Jack. We may all be neighbors now, but there is still a food chain, and I’m still the big bad wolf.”

  Jack exhaled his last drag and scraped out his cigarette on the granite next to him. His virgin lungs protested a lot more than the ones he’d spent decades torturing, and smoking no longer held its masochistic joy. “See, that’s the thing,” he said to Belial, when he’d dragged out the action long enough that the demon looked like he might be about to have a cardiac event. “I don’t think so.”

  Belial’s teeth flashed. Jack glanced back at the hospital. If this went wrong, at least they were near an A&E that was rapidly gaining experience dealing with demon attacks.

  “Explain to me exactly why I shouldn’t rip your balls off and make a tasty carpaccio to feed back to you,” Belial said, voice as silky as the cut of a good razor blade through a willing wrist.

  “Let’s see.” Jack ticked on his fingers, hoping as hard as he could that Belial wouldn’t simply cut his losses and kill him. His brief brush with immortality had worn off, and now he was just sore and painfully alive. “Hell’s only barrier is the Gates. The walls are down. Anyone can breach the Gates, from either direction, and I bet that you lot are going to be busy with revolt for the next, oh, say, five hundred years.” He gave Belial a smile. “Elementals don’t like being your slaves, Belial. Handy tip. Not to mention whatever science projects Azrael has tucked away, plus that prison holding Abbadon and his buddies has got to be pretty shaky by now, and I’d say that even if you wanted to take this Legion mess out of my hide your hands are already full.”

  “Don’t test me, Winter…,” Belial started, but Jack held up a finger.

  “Shhh, darling. I wasn’t finished.” He reached into the pocket of his coat, which Pete had grabbed when they’d started cutting off his clothes on the plaza. “Also—and this is the important part—you fucked up, Belial. You went against the Princes, misguided as they might be. You stole from them, violated their vaults, and made them look like fools. I’d say the chances of them treating you like a friend at this point are, oh, zero.”

  He pulled the key to the Gates from his pocket and held it up. “You have two choices, Belial, the way that I look at it. You can get all hot and bothered and try to get your pound of flesh, or you can walk away into this brave new world, keep that human suit on full time, and sample what the new deal has to offer.”

  Belial threw down his cigarette and stood up, glowering as he loomed over Jack. “Are you actually bargaining with me? That is pathetically hilarious.”

  “Not bargaining,” Jack said. “Telling. Those are your choices, and these are your consequences: You walk away and you don’t take to eating babies, and I’ll let bygones be just that. I’ll forget what you did to me. I’ll do my best to forget what you are.”

  Jack stood, toeing up to Belial. He had a good inch on the demon’s human form, and he gave Belial a stony look as he held up the key. “You ever come at me again or tr
y to worm your way back into the Triumvirate by screwing me over, and I will use this on you. I’ll deliver you to the Princes’ doorstep in gift wrap, and I’m telling you, Belial, I won’t be the one they’ll have words with.”

  He tucked the key back into his pocket and folded his arms. “What do you say, Belial? Do you think we can be friends?”

  Belial sucked in a breath. His nostrils flared, and Jack could count every one of his shark teeth, could feel his slender body as it vibrated with rage. “Go to Hell, Winter,” he finally spat, spinning and storming down the steps.

  “Already been there!” Jack shouted. “And I’m going to want my lighter back, one of these days!”

  Belial shot him the bird and kept walking. Jack sat back down, his knees feeling a bit more liquid than they had before. But it had worked. He’d backed off a demon. First step into a brave new world.

  Jack tossed his pack into the bin and went back inside to wait for Pete. If this was the world, he could get used to it.

  EPILOGUE

  Two weeks to the day later, Jack stood glaring at Morwenna Morgenstern over the bonnet of her Bentley. “Keep staring,” she said, curling her lip at Jack. “Maybe I’ll do a trick.”

  “That would be far too much to hope for,” Jack said. He watched Margaret give Pete a hard hug and kiss Lily on the forehead before she picked up her backpack and suitcase and slumped toward the car.

  “Do I really have to go back with them?” she asked Jack. Jack sighed.

  “You need real traning, luv, and after what happened it’s too much of a mess here. You need to be safe, and much as I hate to admit it, these tossers will do a decent job of that.” He returned to glaring at Morwenna. “Or they better, if they don’t want me foot up their arses from here to eternity.”

  Morwenna gave a delicate shudder. “That literally sounds worse than actually going to Hell and being tormented by demons, Jack.”