Dark Days

CHAPTER 37

The warehouse Ollie sent them to had been used as an illegal casino by the Russians, and Jack felt a heavy stone settle in his guts as the Mini crunched over gravel to the wide oversized doors.

“Of course,” he murmured, looking up at the broken-down four-story building.

“Something wrong?” Pete said. “Ollie said attorneys and the city are still fighting over this place after the seizure, and they’re too cheap to send a detail around to check on it. Quiet, out of the way … I thought it was what you wanted.”

“No,” Jack said, climbing out of the Mini and trying to work the stiffness out of his wounded leg. “It’s perfect.”

The warehouse looked just as it had in his vision, except that the sun wasn’t yet up. It was close, though. Close to the time when Legion would stride to the roof and bring everything crashing down.

Jack started for the door. “We need to move,” he said to Pete. “Legion’s going to make his play soon.”

Pete didn’t question him. She pulled the ragged yellow Met tape off the door. The padlock had already been clipped by hoodies looking for a place to loot or shoot up in, and the interior loading bay blossomed with graffiti.

Jack hopped onto the platform and surveyed the vast interior space. The floor was rough boards covered in decades of dust, and light beamed in from lacy holes in glass skylights. A few crates and boxes had tumbled on their sides, spilling their straw innards, but the contents were gone. In the far corner of the warehouse, a pair of dirty mattresses and a craps table turned on its side didn’t bear closer inspection.

Jack set down his kit bag and turned in a slow circle. Plenty of iron to keep out interference, and plenty of space to keep himself at arm’s length from Legion.

“All right,” he said to Pete. “Let’s get started.”

They chalked a wide circle, at least twenty feet in circumference. He needed to be able to move in any direction without breaking the lines. Jack sprinkled salt as an extra bit of electric fence, then set all the barrier sigils he knew around the edges. He held off sketching the symbol Belial had planted in his mind. No need to start the party early.

“None of these barriers will do fuck-all, likely” he told Pete. “So stay sharp. Won’t be easy to contain him.”

Pete sat on her heels, brushing chalk dust from her palms. “It’s no fun if it’s easy. We need anything else?”

Jack looked back toward the double doors. “Just some herbs and one particular extra I asked Mosswood to bring.”

Pete stepped carefully, so as not to disturb the chalk and salt line, and went to her own bag, taking out her collapsible metal baton. “Brought my own extras,” she said. “Just in case Legion decides he wants to make this physical.”

Jack thought about his tenderized state he’d seen in his vision. “I think that’s a distinct possibility.”

He jumped when the booming knock sounded at the door, his heart giving a painful thud. He was doing all right hiding his nerves from Pete, but he was doing a shit job of making himself believe he didn’t have them.

“I hope you know you’ve gone insane,” Mosswood said when Jack peered through the gap in the door.

“You would be far from the first to think that,” Jack said. Mosswood passed over a canvas-wrapped package, and then a glass vial carefully cushioned inside a small box.

“I know what these herbs are for, so I’m going to skip the foreplay of You don’t know what you’re doing and Are you bloody stupid? and just say that I hope I’m wrong. I hope you come out of this in one piece.”

Jack felt the electric shock of his fear and his own gnawing doubts subside a bit. “Thanks, Ian. That actually means something coming from you.”

“I’ll say goodbye,” Mosswood said. “And though it’s probably futile, I’ll hope it’s not for the last time.”

“Oh, come on,” Jack said, giving Mosswood’s tweed-clad shoulder a slap. “How many times have you seen the world end, Ian? This is nothing.”

“Even so,” Mosswood said sadly. “I think my time here among mortals is at an end. I will be going home, Jack. If we pass one another in the mist some day, I probably won’t know your name. Fae-lands have that effect.” He pressed his hand briefly on Jack’s shoulder. “We were good friends, but that is past, and as Hartley says, ‘The past is a foreign country.’”

Jack felt a sharp, sudden sensation just behind his eyes. He would be sad when the Green Man was gone, he realized. Sad in the way you’re sad to lose a favorite teacher or a really top-notch bartender. “Well, they also say ‘Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’” he said, pushing down the prickle. Moping around was a luxury he didn’t have right now. Later, he could think about exactly what Legion had taken from him—his fellow crow brothers, Mosswood, his own sense of security—but now he had to kick the bastard’s arse.

“Very poetic,” Mosswood said. “Dostoyevsky?”

“Cinderella,” Jack said. “The band, not the princess. You take care of yourself, Mosswood.”

The Green Man nodded and backed away, and Jack shut the door. He gave Pete the herbs to start burning, and he turned the vial in his hands.

“Do I want to know?” Pete said.

“It’s blood,” Jack said. “I somehow doubt Legion has a handy little call button like Hrathetoth, and blood is the most powerful conductor there is for ritual.”

Pete wrinkled her nose at the vial. “Please tell me that’s not human.”

“No,” Jack said. “Demon.” He uncorked the vial and poured the sticky black substance into the metal bowl he kept in his kit, placing it at the center of the circle. “And before you ask, I don’t know where Mosswood got it, and I know enough not to pry.”

“You know, there was a time when this sort of thing would make my skin crawl,” Pete said. “How things change, eh?”

Jack rolled his shoulders and his neck. It had been a while since he’d been in a stand-up fight, but he had no illusion that this summoning would be anything but. No room to be clever, no way to cut and run. Either he or Legion wouldn’t be leaving this circle.

He was going to prove his vision wrong, or he was going to die trying.

Looking over at Pete, standing just outside the circle, stun gun at the ready, he gave her a smile. “It’ll be all right,” he said.

“Liar,” she said.

Jack turned back into the center of the circle, pulling on the deep well of the Black that lay beneath London. It rushed up at him faster than it ever had before. The barriers were thin everywhere, thin as wet paper, and the tide of magic rushed up and covered him. Witchfire blossomed not just from his body but all around the warehouse, sparking off every surface and racing between the rafters like lightning jumping from cloud to cloud.

He touched the Morrigan’s blade once more for reassurance, and then started talking.

Words didn’t matter so much as intent with magic. Keep it simple, Seth always said. Simple is best. That way there’s no mistaking your intention to perform some feat of power.

Jack usually came up with a little phrase, something designed to tickle the frequencies of whatever or whoever he was trying to cast or summon for or against. This time, though, he only had one intent. Only needed one word.

“Legion,” he whispered. “Legion, Legion, Legion…”

He took all the power, all of the witchfire running off him like a flood, and he dipped deep down into the well, pushing the power into the circle, through the demon’s blood. That was his link to Legion. That was what made him strong.

“Legion,” he said. “Come here, you bastard. You and I haven’t finished yet.”

When he called up demons, there was always a moment of contact, a sense of presence when you’d latched on to the other side of the equation, wherever the demon happened to be. Demons weren’t human, and they felt a certain way. He could almost see their outlines wrought on the very fabric of the Black, their own personal magic signature that granted them enough power to flatten any human mage, but also made it possible to pull their body and magic into summoning circles.

But with Legion, there was nothing.

No spark, no sense of tapping into the demon’s feed. The Black was on, roaring through Jack like a turbine pushing on full power, screaming through the summoning circle so that the herbs withered into ash and the blood in the metal bowl started to boil before the vessel melted into slag and sent liquid metal and demon blood running across the wood floor.

“What’s wrong?” Pete shouted, and Jack realized he was pulling down so much power he’d kicked up his very own whirlwind, the witchfire racing in a cyclone around the warehouse, whipping Pete’s hair and Jack’s coat but leaving the salt and the summoning tools untouched.

“I don’t know!” he shouted back. “I’ve never had this happen with a demon before!”

“That’s because I’m not a demon,” Legion said. His shadow loomed up, his body filling Jack’s vision, and then Jack was flying through the air, feeling wind and grit on his face before he smashed through the crates and hit a steel girder holding up the wall behind it.

Jack’s field of vision turned into a flashbulb, and Pete screamed, but Legion ignored her and started for Jack, crossing the circle with no more trouble than a human would have stepping off a curb.

Jack felt a hammer blow land on his chest when he tried to breathe. One of his lungs was done for, and he’d felt ribs give way when he’d hit the girder.

“Well done, Jack,” Legion said. “Made some rookie mistakes, though.”

Breathing was agony, a thousand razor blades scraping against his breastbone, but Jack managed to get out a sentence. “Like … what?”

Legion crouched down and knotted his fingers in Jack’s hair, tugging Jack to face him with a sharp sting to his scalp. “If you wanted to summon me, you should have used human blood.”

Jack felt as if he’d been hit all over again. He didn’t bother trying to talk anymore. His face was clearly telling a story, because Legion started to laugh. “That a bit hard to swallow? Imagine how I must have felt.”

He lifted Jack up by the hair until Jack stood. Legion pressed him against the wall, one hand pressing down on Jack’s collarbone until it gave a crack.

Jack found the air for sound, then, and he screamed until it echoed off the rafters. His entire world was red, and black started to spiral up as Legion kept laughing. “Imagine my life in Azrael’s torture vault, all that magic, that new wild magic he plucked out of this miserable mud-pit you call a world, and nothing to use it on. Imagine knowing that you are not a demon, that you are new. That you are an abomination. That things like the Morrigan wished to enslave me. Imagine how lonely that was.”

He spun abruptly, dropping Jack to the ground again, and Jack curled around himself just like he was seven fucking years old again and trying to defend himself against his mum’s boyfriends’ boots and fists.

“I’ll thank you not to insult my intelligence by trying to sneak up on me, Ms. Caldecott,” Legion snarled.

Pete stood a few feet from Legion, brandishing her baton. “Leave him be.”

“I don’t want to harm him.” Legion spread his hands. “I asked your husband to join me, Petunia. I don’t want to harm anyone. I just want them all to have the chance I never did. Equal footing. No more demons above mages, mages above humans…”

“You know what?” Pete said. “I could not give less of a shit what you want, mate.”

She swung and Legion held up his hands, baton glancing off his forearm. They bit into his flesh. He laughed and laughed until it was all Jack could hear beyond the erratic thumping of his own heartbeat.

Legion jerked the baton from Pete’s grip, and then advanced on her. Pete backpedaled, tried to get out of his way, but Legion had speed that no human could match and he grabbed her, tossing her like she weighed less than a suitcase. She landed at the edge of the loading dock and slid over the edge, disappearing from Jack’s view.

Legion turned back to Jack. “Alone at last.”

Jack tried to get up, but any movement started the agony afresh. He didn’t even care that Legion was in front of him anymore. He just had to make sure that Pete was all right.

“Relax, Jack,” Legion said. “I didn’t kill her. I want her to see this, just like you.”

He grabbed Jack by his ankle and dragged him to a wire-frame lift, tugging the door shut after them. The ride to the rooftop was an agony of bumps and jostles that told Jack he had at least three broken bones and some truly spectacular internal injuries that were probably hemorrhaging even as Legion hummed, stopping the lift at the roof and dragging Jack outside.

Gravel scraped at his cuts, but he was done fighting. His body wouldn’t sustain any more punishment.

He was at Legion’s mercy.

Legion reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out the small orb Jack had seen in his vision. “Azrael made so many things,” Legion sighed. “I’d like to think I was the best, but this … this truly is it.”

He stepped up onto the low ledge at the edge of the roof. The sun was up, and London turned gold under the rising rays. Legion was a black smudge, a shadow against the light that made Jack screw up his eyes. He hoped the demon would keep talking until he could stop feeling like he was going to vomit or pass out, and think of something actually useful.

“This made it all worthwhile,” Legion said softly. “I was in the dark for so long, but this let me go everywhere. I saw so many things. I saw what I had to do to lead me to this moment. Weaken every foundation just enough that the whole thing would topple.”

He looked back at Jack, a smile curving his lips. “What’s that little rhyme? Ashes, ashes?”

“We all fall down,” Jack croaked.

Legion nodded. “That’s it. I have to say, I’m glad you’re taking this so well, Jack. Humans have a survival instinct that borders on the idiotic. They fight against the inevitable even when everything has already reached terminal velocity.”

“I’m not fighting,” Jack said.

“Rejoicing, then?” Legion said. “Brave new world, Jack. You’re going to be a part of history, one of the few humans there when all of the worlds became one.”

Jack shook his head. His vision swam in concert with the movements. “Distracting you,” he managed. Legion’s smarmy grin smoothed out into the flat nonexpression Jack had come to recognize as the default of the deeply psychopathic.

“What?”

Jack flipped Legion the bird with his good hand. “Sciotha.” Usually a leg-locker was enough to knock someone down, get their attention, and take the wind out of their sails. The Black was so vast and so tumultuous here, though, that the hex slammed into Legion with the force of a lorry, knocking him off the edge of the roof. Jack heard the crunch of his body hitting the gravel.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and tried unsuccessfully to stand. The gravel was too slippery, and he was too beaten to do much more than flip himself into a sitting position. The wound on his leg had started to bleed again, and he was so lightheaded from the pain that every sound and sensation felt like being bounced around the inside of a giant tin can.

He tried to put his scrambled thoughts in some kind of coherent order. Legion’s ramblings aside, he needed to find Pete, make sure she was all right, and get them the fuck away from here. He’d failed in what he’d intended to do, but Legion had been right about one thing—he planned to survive.

The plan seemed like a good one until a form crashed onto the roof, and Legion strode toward him, brushing brick dust and debris off his clothes. “I did not fucking appreciate that,” he snarled, grabbing a fistful of Jack’s shirt and pulling their faces so close he could see almost nothing but Legion’s eyes.

“You know,” Legion breathed, “I can go anywhere with Azrael’s machine. Time, space, future, past … all of it is open to me. I think when I’m done ripping down these walls I’ll go back to your sad little childhood home and kill your mother. And then I’ll kill you, you little shit, but not before you watch your guts fall out into your hands.”

Jack stared at him. He’d never seen so much rage contained in a living body, never felt such malevolent black magic rolling off a creature. Human, demon, or whatever Legion claimed he was, he was the worst thing Jack had ever laid eyes on.

“You’re full of shit,” he rasped. Legion blinked, and then bared his teeth.

“Are you stupid, or do you just have a death wish?”

“I’m going to die either way,” Jack said. He fumbled inside his coat with his good arm, hoping that Legion was too enraged to notice anything but his squirming. “I might as well say what I think—all that nonsense about tearing down walls and balance is crap. You’re just kicking over your toys because you’re mad at Daddy. Isn’t that right?”

Legion snarled, a bone-deep sound that was definitely animal rather than human. “I am going to enjoy holding your heart in my hand, Jack,” he said.

Jack whipped the Morrigan’s blade up and into Legion’s chest, aiming under the breastbone and for his vital organs. “Promises, promises,” he said.

Legion grabbed his wrist in a crushing grip, looking down at the blade in Jack’s fist. “You sneaky little bastard,” he said. “I hope you’re proud of yourself.” He ripped the blade from Jack’s grasp and shoved Jack down, onto his back so that he could see the sky. Dark thunderheads rolled across the skyline of London, and Legion whipped his head around as the sound of a million wings beat the air louder than thunder.

“Cavalry’s here,” Jack said. Talking was getting difficult again. Legion looked back at him, his grin wider than ever.

“All that you’ve accomplished, Jack, is that now I get to kill you twice.” Legion raised the blade and with an economical movement drove it straight down into Jack’s chest, planting it to the hilt.

He stood, looking up at the sky, and shook out his coat. “Gotta run. Armageddon time.”

Legion hopped over the lip of the roof and disappeared. Jack couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink, could only stare at the sky as the darkness rolled in.