Dark Days

CHAPTER 18

Jack took the tube to Oxford Street. After the shitstorm of the last few days, he needed people, flash, normalcy. All of the things he usually hated about London—posh types pushing through the crowds, herds of ASBOs kids screeching into their mobiles, tourists blocking entire swaths of the pavement to snap photos of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure—now made him feel like he could finally lower his shoulders from his ears and relax for a few breaths.

It was hard for a demon or a sorcerer to blend in among so many mundane types. With so much metal and technology, it was a dead spot for Fae as well. He was just another plonker shuffling past the wafer-thin girls going in and out of Topshop, just another middle-aged bloke paging through the New Releases rack at HMV while a pudgy employee half his age rolled his eyes at Jack’s leather from behind his ironic glasses.

Jack walked as far as Tottenham Court Road, where he turned from Oxford Street to Bloomsbury Street and the honking, glittering, bleeping commerce turned into refined flats and posh antique shops. He passed the hulk of the British Museum, turned around and made it as far as Piccadilly Circus before he was satisfied that he wasn’t being followed or watched by anything or anyone more sinister than a herd of Swedish teenagers sitting by the fountain, eating sandwiches and snapping photos of each other.

He turned his senses away from the crowds around him and into the Black, which was strong in this old part of the City. Whitechapel had so many layers that the flow was muted, blocked by a hundred competing channels of spirits, death, black magic, and cold iron distorting the signal.

Here, though, things were old, and they tended to stay the same. He was standing at the edge of a massive circle, bound on all sides by stone and with a massive iron focus in the center. You couldn’t ask for a better thin spot between the daylight and the Black.

Jack used the alley between the Piccadilly Waterstones and the next building to slip the bonds of daytime, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself in a twilight world, sun down but light not yet snuffed out.

A few figures drifted through the thin wisps of fog. The temperature here was fallish, and Jack sank inside his leather. The Black had a different flow—different time, different season, different citizens.

The figures—a woman in a black mourning gown circa Queen Victoria and some kind of shapeshifter poured into racing leathers—cast long, unblinking stares in his direction.

Jack saw the red thread binding the mouth of the woman and the black eyes and pointed ears of the shifter, and he shook his head. Not so long ago, a zombie and a lycanthrope would have been ripping each other to shreds. They were both children of a necromancer—one started as a corpse, one started as a man—but as with all siblings, there were certain rivalries.

True shapeshifters, living creatures that had emigrated to the Black from a dusty corner of Who-Knows-Where, were rare. The juice to bespell yourself to flip from human to bear, big cat, wolf, or other creature didn’t come along very often. But leave it to a clever fleshcrafter to figure out that if you got ahold of a living subject, you could pop out their consciousness and drop in whatever you liked, augmenting their muscle and bone and blood to be your very own little Lon Chaney wannabe.

Whatever they were up to, Jack decided he wanted no part of it. It was just another symptom of how sideways things were, war making strange bedfellows and all that.

He walked on, keeping his eyes off the pair so they wouldn’t think he wanted to involve himself in their business, either as a customer or an interloper, and fixed his senses on finding the familiar roads through the twilight to the one spot in the Black he could conceivably call home.

It had been a long time since he’d frequented the Lament with any regularity. Life got in the way of visiting his local. Life, demonic prison breaks, zombie armageddons … Jack looked up at the red door, triple-banded in iron, and felt a flutter of unease. He didn’t have many friends on the twilight side since he’d put down Nergal. Fuck it, he’d never had many friends, just folks who tolerated him, but now even the tolerance was gone. He’d lost count of the number of “Never darken my doorway again” speeches he’d gotten in the wake of the primordial demon pulling his Hulk-smash act on London.

Strange bedfellows, he reminded himself. There were at least a few rational sorts left who’d listen to what he had to say before they tossed him out on his arse.

He hoped.

The Lament was suitably dim on the inside, the right amount of shadow tucked in between the pools of light cast by sooty ceiling fixtures and candles stuck in mounds of wax in the center of the tables. Jack tried to ignore the fact that the burble of conversation stopped when he walked in, that only the thready tune of the jukebox carried on.

He caught a few poisonous stares from a table of hedgewitches sharing a pitcher of pink cocktails, and one outright bird flip from a pair of tweedy mages he pegged as too mild-mannered to be anything but sex cultists. He ignored it all. There was a time he would have knocked over some chairs and kicked up a fuss until someone threw a punch, but he had a mission now.

The bartender was new, a petite Indian girl wearing a Neon Trees shirt, and she set him up with a pint of Newcastle with a minimum of fuss and glaring. “Anything for you?” she asked, when Jack pushed the pint to the side without tasting it.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a time machine back there,” Jack muttered.

“Sorry,” the girl said. “Left my sonic screwdriver at home.” She gave him a radiant, teasing smile, and Jack thought there also would have been a time when, after the dustup was over, he would have walked out with this girl and taken her home. So what if she had a row of pointed shark’s teeth where her dull human ones should be, and the oval pupils of a reptile? Lamias needed love, too.

“I like you,” Jack said, returning her smile. He passed over a tenner. “Keep it,” he said, when she started to reach for change. The Lament traded in a variety of currencies, not all of them corporeal, but the fact was that whether sex cultist or hedgewitch, magicians were shit tippers.

The lamia stuck his crumpled bill in the ancient cash register and slid a glass of dark, pungent whiskey his way. “You look like you need this,” she said. “Good luck with whatever it is you’re here to do.”

Jack knocked back the whiskey, his balance and his stomach warning him that with the next tipple, he’d be on the wrong side of pissed to stay sharp. “Staving off the end of the world, defending goodness and kittens,” he said. “You know, the usual shite.”

He faced the room again, relieved that no one had slung a hex or tried to shank him while his back was turned. Inciting violence in the Lament meant a permanent ban, but Jack knew he’d inspired more than a few blokes to the sort of hatred that was worth being barred for the chance to crack his skull.

The table was always the same—at the back of the room, where the occupant could see without being seen, tucked into the shadows.

Jack set the pint of Newcastle on the pitted surface and took a chair. “Some things never change, eh, Ian?”

Ian Mosswood scrutinized Jack, and the glass, with his expressionless black eyes. “I don’t want to ask what you need from me, Jack. Because to come here and ask it, you must be so desperate I’m wondering if I should peer outside for a rain of frogs.”

He took the glass and drank, and Jack felt the tight place under his ribs unknot. Mosswood had accepted the offering, so Jack wasn’t going out the door head first just yet.

“Since when do you make Biblical references, Ian?” he said.

“I read it some time ago,” Mosswood said. “Absolute bunk, the lot, but they do have some amusing stories about the end of time. I like the one about the giant dragon meant to swallow up the world.”

“Eh, stole that one from Norse bedtime stories,” Jack said. “The Jesus and pals squad is big on plagiarism. But then again, every mage I know stole half his spells from some dead bastard’s grimoire, so we’re no better.”

“I was worshipped,” Mosswood said. “Though never in such a ridiculous fashion. I fancy myself a more practical sort of figure. Effectual, if you will.”

“Ask and ye shall receive?” Jack said. “Yeah, you Fae types are good about that. Except what humans receive is usually a great bending-over followed by an untimely death.”

Mosswood spread his hands. “Can I help it if humans are venal, weak, selfish, and greedy?” he said. “No, I cannot. I am a Green Man, not a loan officer. I’m not compelled to be fair, just as they’re not compelled to accept my terms.”

“You’re a barrel of fucking sunshine, as usual,” Jack said, “but you’re right. I, venal, selfish, greedy arse that I am, do have something to ask.”

“You want to know about the shadow,” Mosswood said. He’d drained the glass and set it on the table, folding his hands and staring at Jack without blinking.

“What shadow?” Jack’s heart thumped, his danger sense and his sight sending fingers of fear running up and down his spine.

“The shadow of her wings,” Mosswood said. “I see it, as do others who are very old. None of us can see the beginning, but we see the darkness that sweeps in behind it, the covering of the whole of the world with the shadow of the crows. The smoke, the darkness, and finally the end.”

Jack’s mouth tasted dry and sour, like the whiskey had come back up again. “Yeah, that’d be what I’m trying to stop.”

Mosswood turned his empty glass between his rough palms. He was one of the oldest creatures Jack had encountered in the Black, second only to things like the Morrigan. Jack would wager he’d lasted even longer than some of the Named roaming around down in Hell. If anyone could give him a straight answer, it would be Mosswood.

“I don’t think we’re meant to,” Mosswood said at last.

Jack felt as if someone had put a boot in his ribs. “Excuse me? You going all zen and fatalistic on me, Mosswood? You, of all people?”

“My roots go deep and wide,” Mosswood said. “But even the oldest living thing must eventually blow away on the wind.” He sighed and leaned back on his chair, rungs bumping against the pub’s stained plaster walls. “I left my realm long ago, because I did not share contempt for humans with my Fae masters. I was not like them, not like the humans, but I made my home in this little slice of shadow. I always knew it was temporary. And so should you, Jack.”

Jack shook his head. He felt heavy, as if he’d already taken the beating his sight had shown him, numb and exhausted, as empty as the Green Man’s pint glass. “I can’t accept that. I don’t live in the Black, Ian. I live with people, my people, and I can’t lie down until I’ve been put down.”

“Then it’s your choice.” Mosswood stuck out his hand, and Jack took it almost by reflex. In all the years he’d known the Green Man, they’d never touched voluntarily. He felt the deep, wide river of power that flowed through the Green Man, a power as ancient as the dirt beneath their feet, ancient as the first man on the isle of Britain who’d lifted his head from the mud and seen the things waiting for him in the shadows and the realms beyond. It was solid power, bright, shining, but as Jack grasped Mosswood’s rough hand it faded out, until he might as well have been holding a handful of sticks.

“Been happening more and more,” Mosswood said. “Ever since things started to slide sideways. Old magic’s draining out of the world. What’ll take its place, I can’t say. Nor will I be around to see it, likely.”

“Take care of yourself, Ian,” Jack said, barely able to hear himself over the din of the bar. Mosswood squeezed his hand and then stood.

“And you, Jack. But then you always do, don’t you?”

Jack was about to tell Mosswood to wait, that he couldn’t just fold his hands and accept that this was it, roll credits, but the door to the pub opened and a man dressed in an overcoat and a red cap stumbled in. He had a handful of notices and a stench rolling off him that could have stopped an oncoming rhino.

“I really wish they’d keep the bums out of here,” Mosswood said as the man shuffled from table to table, passing out notices and sometimes collecting a few coins or notes in return.

“Yeah, well, as long as they’re not pissing on me shoes I try to give ’em a pass,” Jack said. He’d spent too many nights under motorway bridges and in doorways to turn up his nose at someone who slept rough. Even if he did wish the bloke would invest some of his change in a can of deodorant.

The homeless man shoved a handful of paper at Jack and Mosswood. The Green Man held up his hands as if the bum had offered him a plate of rat entrails, but Jack took the cheap one-sheet and smoothed it out.

When he saw the face, his stomach dropped through his feet and kept dropping until it hit the stone buried beneath the tube tunnels, covered rivers, and disused sewers below the floor.

The bartender hurried over to the man, taking him by the arm. “Now, Gerald, I told you … we can’t have you in here passing this stuff out.”

“But they need to know!” Gerald shrilled. Jack forced himself to get a better look at the bum—he was in rags and filthy, sure, but definitely human. He had the sunken-eyed look of a man who’d spent too many years struggling through some sort of debilitating illness without the benefit of either prescription or self-medication. Jack had met fellows just like him in the state mental clinics, one of the many times he’d been sectioned when the cops picked him up for roaming the street in a smack haze. The doctors were always treated to an earful of screaming about ghosts and monsters once Jack started to detox and his sight kicked him in the brain.

A mage, just like him, but one who hadn’t been lucky enough to finally put a collar on his visions. Probably another psychic, if the shaking hands and uneven pupils were anything to go by.

“Gerald, behave yourself,” the lamia scolded, “or I’m going to have to bar you.”

“But I can do so much!” Gerald cried. “I can save so many, all the lost and everyone struggling to stay one step ahead of the darkness. They need to know about this place, about him…”

The lamia grabbed him unceremoniously by the back of the coat and propelled him toward the door. “Sorry, luv,” she said. “I’ve given you your warning.”

Jack grabbed up the wrinkled flyer that bore the grainy photo of Legion’s face, and ran after her. “Oi,” he said, as she slammed the door in Gerald’s wake. Her mouth screwed up.

“Look, I’m sorry if he bothered you, but this ain’t a high tea. Poor Gerald is just a bit confused.”

“Look, it’s not about the fact that he’s a bum. I don’t give a fuck if he pitches camp in the men’s loo, frankly,” Jack said, thrusting the flyer in the bartender’s face. “What’s this? Who is this arsehole on the one-sheet?”

The bartender blinked at him. “That’s Larry Lovecraft.”

Jack dropped a gaze heavy with disbelief on her, and the bartender rolled her eyes in return. “Look, I know how that sounds. I don’t know who he really is, but he took over some old monastery up in the Midlands, and he’s been running it as a refuge for people like Gerald. Mages who’ve gone a few rounds with black magic and lost, Fae creatures who’ve been exiled, types who can’t blend in outside the Black.” She pointed to her teeth. “Like me.”

“You been to this … refuge?” Jack asked. Legion. It had to be. Calling himself by some stupid Channel 4 talk show host name, as if this were a fucking joke.

“Me? Fuck, no.” The bartender snorted. “I got one of his little trust-circle pitches from the blokes that run the vans, and I about vomited my spleen. We’re all children of magic, we should all love one another, nobody else understands us like he does … shit. The lot of it. I’d sooner have an imp piss on my head.”

“I know a few who’d be happy to arrange that,” Jack said. His fist was shaking, nails carving bloody circles into his palms, soaking into the flyer where he held it crumpled. “You said he has drivers?”

“Recruiters, more like.” The bartender sniffed. “They cruise all over London, mostly on the daylight side, looking for poor sods like Gerald and scooping them up with the promise of a square meal and a warm bed and unending rivers of bullshit from this Larry Lovecraft bloke.”

Lovecraft: the xenophobic twit who conceived of a vast, otherwordly madness coming to swallow humanity whole. Jack gritted his teeth. On top of all his other irritants, Legion clearly thought himself fucking hilarious.

“Know where they picked Gerald up?” Jack said. When the lamia hesitated, he took her by the arm. “Please. I need to talk to Larry. It’s important.”

“I hear they got him down in Peckham,” she said. “Near one of the missions that does the free lunches on the weekends.”

Jack dropped the flyer under his boot and shoved open the door of the Lament, cool air doing little to soothe the prickles of sweat working their way down his spine.

Mosswood might have given up, but he hadn’t. And now he had a face, a target to focus the rage burning like stomach acid in his guts. Belial’s politics inside, Legion had thrown the guantlet with the one human who might be enough of an arsehole—and an idiot—to fight back.

Jack just hoped this wasn’t his worst idea yet.