Dark Days

CHAPTER 3

“Take the baby.” Pete shoved Lily into Jack’s arms while she screamed and thrashed, her face several shades darker than the pink onesie he’d dressed her in that morning.

Jack tried to breathe, but there was nothing, no air, and his vision began to spin. Pete snatched Lily back. “Jesus, Jack! If you don’t want to quiet her, then go pick Margaret up from school. Either way, get off your arse and be a bit useful.”

He blinked at Pete. His eyes were dry, gritty. As if he were still standing in the smoke.

“Was I asleep?” he asked.

Pete rolled her eyes. “How should I know? I’ve been dealing with our darling daughter’s fit for the past half hour.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Jack said, taking Lily back and bouncing her until her screams became merely complaints.

He wanted it to be a dream, and for now, it would be. He’d had dreams before that were totally real in the moment.

“Thank you,” Pete said. Her hair dusted her eyes, the new pixie cut she’d adopted standing on end, and her face was flushed. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just in a rotten mood, I guess.”

Jack shifted Lily to one arm and used the other to pull Pete close. She smelled like baby powder and shampoo. When he kissed her, she smiled against his mouth. “So I take it all is forgiven?”

“I’ll keep the baby occupied,” he said. “Go get Margaret.”

He waited until Pete flew out the door of their flat, keys jangling, before he collapsed into a chair with Lily on his chest.

Dreams about being dead were nothing new. He’d been having those since he was barely past puberty. Dreams about Pete being dead and Lily gone … those were new.

If it was a dream at all, and you know it wasn’t, something treacherous whispered inside him.

Visions and prophecy were a load of shit, as far as Jack was concerned, but he couldn’t change the fact that what just happened had been real, a direct line from his second sight into some sort of apocalyptic ripple reaching out from the Black and disturbing things so much that the whole thing had rung his skull like a bell.

Or, he convinced himself more and more as Lily settled down to sleep on his chest and he managed to pour a glass of whiskey one-handed, it really was just a dream. A horrible, vivid, shit-your-pants dream, but just the same, nothing but his own frayed neurons firing out of sequence.

He’d almost managed to talk himself into believing the whole nightmare had been just that when a bird crashed into the glass of the flat, sending spider cracks across the heavy pane. Half of the wavy panes had survived the Blitz and everything since, and Jack felt his hand spasm as the whiskey glass shattered in it. “Fuck!” he hissed.

Lily woke up and began to wail as the crow fluttered on the windowsill outside, helpless with a damaged wing. Jack started to get up and help the silly thing, cursing up a blue streak as he put Lily in her bounce chair and took off his shirt to wrap around his hand, sliced to shit and dribbling blood all over the floor.

He stopped when he saw the rest of the crows. Not just crows—ravens, sparrows, all the other birds in London, too. They alighted on rooftops, on wires, on the awnings of the money-changers and the mobile phone kiosk below his window. People on the street stopped and pointed, and even the cars on Mile End Road slowed as their passengers stared.

Birds, as far as the eye could see, just sitting and staring toward his flat. The crow righted itself and tapped its beak against the glass over and over, as more and more cracks appeared in the pane.

“Fuck off!” Jack shouted, and thumped on the glass with his good hand. He felt the constricting panic of a bad attack of sight coming on, the throbbing in his skull that he’d do anything to quiet, the tides of magic all around him converging into a drowning wave.

As one, the birds took flight, and Jack felt the wave of magic choke him and take him under. Blackness took him before he hit the floor.