Dark Days

CHAPTER 30

Pete had no trouble with the myriad twists and turns of the inner vaults, leading them through dozens of hallways, lifts, and stairwells, ever deeper and ever downward once they left the display room. Jack wondered how many hundreds of feet below Hell they were. How many thousands of years it had been since any eye—demon, damned, or human—had rested on the stone walls and dripping, rusted iron doors of the inner sanctum.

“I saw it, you know,” Pete said after a time. Her voice echoed into the upper reaches of the vault, and they both jumped. They were walking along a narrow corridor lined on both sides with vault rooms, dozens of catwalks crisscrossing above their heads like an iron spider web.

“What did you see?” Jack whispered. His own voice taunted him, echoing from the curved walls and ceilings so high above their heads they were invisible in the dark. See, see, see.

“This place,” Pete said. “It’s a circle, a maze really. To build it must have taken hundreds of years. I doubt anyone knows what’s at the center of this thing.”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to find out,” Jack said. “I just want to get the Morrigan’s blade and get out of here.”

Pete stumbled, and Jack fought against his urge to help her up. She grimaced as she stood, pressing her fingers to her temples. “We have to hurry,” she said. “It’s talking to me, trying to convince me to just unleash it, destroy this place. I don’t have much longer before it turns.”

“Fight it,” Jack said. “Just listen to me. Talk to me about anything while we walk, all right?”

Pete moved faster, her gait hitching with pain, but she was still quicker than Jack, whose leg had started to bleed enough to soak his jeans all the way down to his ankle. His vision spun just a bit, but he kept going. He’d be fine. He’d had worse injuries. He wasn’t the one in danger of burning alive.

“Do you know,” she said, “I bought myself a funeral plot. A while ago, my first year in the Met.”

Jack swiped a hand over his face, finding cool droplets of sweat. “Maybe this isn’t the best subject for us.”

“Most officers run a higher risk of dying on the job in their first few years,” Pete said. “They’re inexperienced and arrogant and think they’re untouchable. It was next to my dad’s. Lovely little spot. Knowing it was there kept me sharp, kept me from doing stupid shite that would have gotten me killed.”

“Pete…,” Jack said, as they started down a narrow flight of stone stairs, a spiral carved into the earth like the passage of a great worm.

“I sold it when I found out I was pregnant,” Pete said. “Because I knew then that I was never going to need that plot. I’m not going to die on the street, Jack, because I stopped the wrong plod with a grudge and a black-market gun.”

“Of course not…,” Jack started, but Pete held up her hand.

“I’m not going to die in my bed, either, because if I’ve learned one thing from being with you, it’s that we’re all just specks compared to what’s out there in the universe. And seeing what that thing had to show me confirmed it. I bought that cemetery plot because I was afraid, Jack. I was afraid that I’d see death coming and have no way to stop it, just like my father.”

Jack liked to think he’d learned to keep his mouth shut at the right times over his tenure living with Pete, so he focused on walking without falling over, limping heavily as they moved down a low hall lit with a string of hissing, fizzing Edison bulbs. The iron doors looked familiar, and he hoped they were close.

“I figured out that it’s not about dying,” Pete said. “It’s about living with the time we have, doing what we can to look at ourselves in the mirror, and not being afraid. I made myself look at my death, Jack. I’ve done it a dozen times, and this is the closest I’ve come.”

She stopped in front of the last door in the row, the iron blistered with rust and green fingers of oxidization. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’ll never be afraid again. So don’t worry about me, all right?”

Jack couldn’t look at her. “I can’t help it,” he managed. “I am afraid, Pete. Why do you think I made that deal with Belial?”

“You bought your plot,” Pete said. “Big fucking deal. You were the one who taught me how to not be afraid, Jack. Of anything. You’re not brave because you don’t have any fear. You’re brave because you do what needs to be done.”

She rapped her knuckles against the iron. “Now get this door open, because if you don’t, we’re both getting up close and personal with the Land of the Dead.”

Jack exhaled. It felt as if he had a load of stones in his pocket, and somebody had just reached in and snatched out the heaviest one. Just a small piece, but now he felt like whatever happened next, he could probably come out the other side without breaking down into the sort of mess who’d sell his soul and scramble over everyone else in the world to save his own life.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “No problem, luv.” He dropped the crutch and put his hands on the door. The lock was pretty rudimentary—he guessed the real power of the room came from whatever hexes Azrael had put in place.

No time to worry about that now; the hexes wouldn’t reach out and bite him. Pete was counting on him. Jack pressed his fingers against the lock. Locks had never been difficult for him, even when he’d had a go at picking them the old-fashioned way, without any magic.

The lock clicked, and the door swung open a few inches, the waft of air shut in for a thousand years dry and stale in his face.

Jack flinched for a split second, waiting for whoever Azrael had screwed over to come screaming out of the vault and rip his face off.

Pete moved past him, the white witchfire rising from her skin again. “Come on!” she rasped. “I’m going to nuke whatever’s in here—you better get the blade.”

Jack flipped his lighter open. He didn’t want to risk any conjuring this close to Pete and her runaway talent. The small flame illuminated the stone table where the wooden box lay, covered in a millennium of dust and the webbing of a creature that Jack didn’t care to imagine.

His light also caught the bones embedded in the walls—whether they were here for burial or more of Azrael’s victims, he guessed he’d never know.

“Jack!” Pete’s voice held the kind of sharp urgency reserved for diffusing bombs, or going into labor. “Get out,” she said.

Jack started to shake his head as he grabbed the box and stuffed it into his coat. “I’m not leaving you here.”

Pete stared at him, the white overtaking her eyes again. “Get … out…,” she groaned, her voice echoing off the walls of the vault. “We can’t both turn to ash down here, so go.”

She was right. Pete was always right. One of them had to make it out of here, for Lily and Margaret, so they would have a world to go back to.

“I love you,” he said, running for the door. Pete managed a thin, pain-filled smile.

“I know.”

Jack bolted from the vault, slamming the door behind him. The iron was thick. It had blocked out everything but darkness for a thousand years, but it couldn’t block out Pete’s screams.

Jack had never been one to pray, even when he was a small boy and his mother had dragged him off to church every Sunday to look good for the neighbors, until the vicar kindly suggested that until she could stop taking hits off a gin flask during the service, the Winter family should probably just stay home.

What was the point? There was nothing out there that would help him out of the goodness of their heart. The gods weren’t altruistic—they were the most selfish, scheming ones of all. There was no magical sky grandfather who would swoop in and make everything all right if he really, really wanted it. Faith was for people who didn’t know better. It was for the small boy he’d been, keeping the faith that someday his life would be more than a council flat, a mother who only made it to the bathroom half the time when chasing her gin with a handful of benzos made her puke her guts up, and a mind full of dead people only he could see, who wouldn’t stop talking no matter what he did.

Faith was bullshit of the highest order.

But he still covered his head as the ground shook and dust rained down, and he let himself believe, for just a moment, that Pete was all right. If he was going to have faith in anyone, Pete made more sense than any fairy tale humans made up to feel better about not being able to see what was waiting out there in the dark beyond the campfire.

The miniature earthquake trailed off, and Jack watched the door, which had come loose and hung crookedly off its hinges. Blood rushed through his ears, but after a moment the door fell and drowned it out with a clang, narrowly missing the toes of his boots.

Pete supported herself against the wall, her thin arm shaking. “Did you get it?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse from screaming, and she was as pale as a corpse, but she straightened up and swiped the dust off her cheeks, leaving dark runnels from her sweat and tears.

Jack pulled the box from his coat. “Got it,” he said. “Are you…”

Pete waved her hands. “Later. They must have felt that from their head to their arse—we have to go. Now.”

Jack didn’t say anything, but he did reach out and shoulder her weight, even though his leg twinged like he’d taken to it with a cattle prod. “You know the way back?” he said.

Pete nodded. Her hair was lank with sweat, but her breathing had calmed down and she was no longer emanating magic like a loose high-tension cable, snapping sparks at anyone unfortunate enough to get close.

“Wait,” she said as they started to move. “Check the box. Make sure Belial’s not fucking with us.”

Jack pulled out the box with his free hand and flipped the latch, his stomach doing a somersault. It could so easily be empty. Then he’d be right back where he was when the whole mess started.

The blade sat on a nest of black straw, a film of dried blood still resting in the groove. The broken edge shimmered as Jack tilted the box for Pete to see. “Looks like you could stab someone with it,” he said.

Pete nodded. “Good. I’ve got someone in mind.”