Dark Days

CHAPTER 14

Pete and Margaret were silent the entire length of the private lane, until the driver pulled back onto the motorway and accelerated. “I think that went well,” Pete said at last.

“Don’t even start,” Jack muttered.

After a moment, Pete’s hand closed over his in the dark car. “I believe you,” she said.

“Well, you shouldn’t.” Shame ate at Jack’s throat like stomach acid. “I bought it hook, line, and sinker. Whatever sick game Belial’s playing, I walked right into it and looked like a proper fool.”

He’d let the demon inside his head. Fuck, what had he done? What else had been planted there while Belial had been making his cerebral cortex a demon’s playground?

“Maybe he wasn’t just playing around,” Pete said. “You said that Hell was in an uproar. Something is going on. I know plenty of spittle-flecked cult leaders who co-opt symbols to make their followers toe the line. If Legion is a scary story, maybe someone in Hell capitalized on that.”

Jack felt a headache blossom behind his eyes like someone had hit him. It was too much, the visions and the demons, and he just wanted it to stop.

“Something is happening,” he muttered. His sight had never acted up this way. Something was causing it, and Belial’s nameless demon was involved. “But this Legion business leaves me right where I was before—holding me dick in me fist with nothing to show what might kick off the end of the world.”

Pete gave him a sharp nudge and jerked her head at Margaret, sitting across from them in the car’s vast rear seats.

“Sorry, luv,” he said. “Don’t take the filth that I spew as an example, eat your vegetables, don’t skip school, etcetera.”

Pete heaved a sigh. “So you’re just going to give up.”

Jack felt the headache multiply, spreading across the crown of his head like someone had smacked him repeatedly in the skull. “I’m not giving up, but where do you suggest we go from here? If the Prometheans say this is bunk, then I’m at a loss as to who this demon is, where he is, or what he’s up to.”

“Then ask the person who can tell you,” Pete said. “In all the time you’ve known Belial, has he ever been completely straight with you? Even if the world was on the line, Belial doesn’t care about humans. He only cares about himself. He’s a survivor, just like you, and like you, he puts himself first.”

Jack watched London growing larger in the windscreen, glittering and rising out of the blackness of the land around. Pete was right. The acid-soaked pit of hopelessness in his stomach hardened into something else, the old rage from his younger days, the thing that protected him, armored him, kept him from being fucked with by things like Belial.

“Jack?” Pete said. She withdrew her hand as a crackle of blue energy passed between them, the ambient magic that gathered when Jack let his rage or any strong emotion grow. The interior of the car was bathed in blue for a moment, and then Jack tamped it down again. He was going to save this for the target who deserved it.

“I’m fine,” he said. “When we get home, though, the Prince and I are going to have a talk.”