by Demon Bound
Jack stepped up and faced Belial.
You can’t cheat Death, boy. You just got to go with your head up high.
No escape. Not for you.
You know it’s coming, mage. The fires of war.
He smiled at Pete. That was the only kind of knight he was—beaten and broken, lying in the mud. “What I should’ve done thirteen years ago,” Jack said to Pete. “You be good to yourself, luv. And don’t waste one moment crying over me.”
Belial put his hand on Jack’s cheek, and leaned close to his ear, whispering the ways and words of the secret passages into Hell. Jack didn’t flinch, as his sight screamed and the magic around them flared. He watched Pete, on her knees by the great tree, arms wrapped around herself, face slick as glass with her tears. He watched her scream, wordless and lost, into the air.
Jack wished he could speak to her, tell her the truth, but before he could do more than raise his hand in farewell, the Dartmoor vanished under an onslaught of the sight.
When his eyes opened, Jack found himself looking up at three triple spires crowned with a lightning-etched sky. Hot wind snaked across his face and brought with it the smell of charnel fields. In the distance, across a blackened marching ground, a thousand pyres burned under the watchful eye of the spires. Thorns tangled around Jack’s bare feet and cinders landed on his skin, leaving fresh red burns.
Next to him, Belial took a deep breath of his native air. “Welcome to Hell, Winter,” the demon said. “We’ve missed you.”
EPILOGUE
Hell
The places I see in my nightmare
Ain’t nothing compared to what I see each day
—The Poor Dead Bastards
“Strange Days and Nightmares”
Chapter Fifty-three
Jack lay on a damp concrete floor, the floor of his flat in Manchester, the council flat where he and his mum had lived until he’d lit out for London.
He spat a little blood. His jaw wasn’t broken, or maybe it had been. Here in Hell—or Manchester—time lengthened and bent and folded back on itself. What was true today would not be true tomorrow and could be true yesterday. He wouldn’t know until he got there.
Belial made him see. All of the guilt, all of the lies. The beatings and the bar scuffles and the betrayals, from Seth down the line to Pete.
The demon showed it all to him, like a movie reel, and when it was over Belial wound the reel and showed him again.
The pain was physical. It wouldn’t last. Belial was tenderizing his meat, softening Jack for the main event. The memories were what would continue, for all the term of his bargain.
Jack rolled onto his back, stared up at the stained ceiling. He’d memorized the maps of past residents, the water stains, leaks, and billowing clouds of petrified nicotine in the plaster.
He would stay here for a while, curled on the floor with blood dribbling across his vision.
Then the workings of Hell’s clock would wind backward, and Belial would start over.
A shadow fell across Jack’s gaze, changing the landscape of the ceiling. The familiar whispers crept in around the edges of his sight.
He didn’t shy away from the crow woman as she crouched above him. Even if he’d wanted to move, he couldn’t. His ribs were broken, at least one of his hands. Head swimming with concussion. Her touch was, for once, the least painful thing about his body.
So far you’ve fallen, the crow woman intoned. Has this torment salved your conscience, Jack? Has it saved your soul?
“Do I bloody look like my soul is saved?” Jack muttered.
Her skirts floating around her in a rain of feathers, the crow woman placed her lips against his forehead. I can make it stop, crow-mage. I can lift you from this perdition and elevate you to salvation.
“No thanks, luv,” Jack said. “I’ve had my fill of bargains.” The pit was as low as he could go. The endless loop of his life was the end.
Not a bargain, my child. The crow woman sighed. A duty. The duty you were born for.
The Hecate came to Jack’s mind. It was a memory Belial never showed him, because Jack thought of it often enough on his own. “No,” he said to the crow woman. “I have to stay away. Pete . . .”
The Weir has her fate and your fate is twined with hers so tightly that your trees have grown together. You share the same soil, crow-mage, the same air, the same life. You sacrificed for her and still you cannot pull away.
She stood, her shadow spreading across the room, across the prison of Jack’s memories.
You can stay in Hell, Jack Winter, the crow woman said. Or you can take your place on my field, and stand in my ranks as it always should be.
Jack tried to sit up, failed as his ribs stabbed him with pain like a rusty blade. “I don’t belong to you anymore. I belong to Belial now.”
Belial is a pitiful, scrabbling cockroach, the Morrigan hissed. I am Death’s walker, the raven of war. Her wings scraped the walls, rained plaster dust down on Jack.
What do you think will happen to your Weir? she asked. When war rips the Black asunder and you are here, locked willingly in Hell? How long will she remain if you are not at her side? Mage and Weir, Jack. As it has been since the beginning. Without you she is bereft, one half of a broken pair of wings.
Jack hadn’t let himself think of Pete, when he could think. Pete would survive. She was made of tension wire underneath the skin, and she could be battered and stripped, but she’d survive. Everyday life, even living life in the Black, she’d survive.
I speak the truth, the Morrigan intoned. She will not see the end of what is coming if she is alone.
Jack swallowed, tasted blood. “What do I have to do?”
Come with me, the Morrigan said. Stop your running and your hiding from your fate as the crow-mage. Burn the world down and rebuild it in the image of Death. Spread your hand across the sun and turn my enemies to ash.
She held out her hand to Jack. You only have to agree, crow-mage. Take up the mantle of your fate.
Slowly, with a dull popping in his knuckles, Jack grasped her hand and held on tight. He saw the battlefield, smelled the blood, heard the screams. Felt his feet sink into bloodied earth. Saw the way spread out before him, spires of London drifting with smoke while sirens wailed and screams twisted in the wind. War and death. The twin desires of the Morrigan, his to bring to the world. Jack Winter, the pale rider. The harbinger of war.
A war that Pete would face alone, as long as he remained under the yoke of Belial’s bargain. A war that he knew, deep in the small part of him where truth was still alive, that she wouldn’t live survive.
Not unless Jack finished what he’d started in Seth’s circle. Until he acknowledged the touch of the crow woman on his life, and his sight.
You are dead, Jack, the Morrigan whispered. With the dead you should stay. As the crow-mage’s fate always cycles. She stroked his blood-caked hair from his face with her free hands, claws tracing his skull. Will you stay, Jack?
Jack squeezed the Morrigan’s hand, until his broken knuckles creaked. “Take me,” he told the crow woman. “I’m ready.”
