Dark Days

CHAPTER 4

“Jack?”

Water hit him in the face and burned when it went up his nose. Jack choked and bolted up. Margaret Smythe, the teenage girl he and Pete had saved from an apolcalyptic cult, crouched next to him, her school water bottle upended over his head.

“Sorry,” Margaret said. Beyond her, Jack saw Pete standing with her mobile, talking to the 999 service.

“No problem, luv,” he said. He started to swipe the water off his face, but Margaret shook her head. “Don’t. You’ll get blood everywhere.”

Jack saw the red puddled on the floor next to him, then took in the broken glass and a window ledge newly covered with bird shit. “Is Lily all right?” he asked.

Margaret went and got a dish towel, which she wrapped around his hand. “Fine,” she said. “What happened?”

Jack wasn’t sure himself, and he definitely wasn’t going to get Margaret all worked up over nothing. She was only thirteen, and she had endured one set of crap parents already.

“You’re good at that first aid thing,” he said instead.

Margaret shrugged. “My mum used to crack her head on stuff all the time when she passed out. At least you’re just clumsy.”

“Might need some work on the bedside manner, though,” Jack said.

Pete hung up and came in. “I’m just going to skip asking what happened,” she said. “There was a pile-up on the M25, so it’ll be faster to just drive to the A&E. Think you can manage it?”

Jack nodded. He’d welcome anything that involved a lot of normal people and lights and noise, even though he usually hated hospitals.

“Stay with Lily,” Pete told Margaret. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

The A&E was packed and busy, but between Jack’s steadily dripping dish towel and Pete’s insistence, they were put in a curtained cubicle almost immediately.

When the nurse pulled the screen, Pete slumped in the plastic chair opposite him. “You want to tell me what happened now?”

Jack shrugged, even though his cut throbbed with every motion. “Window broke, I cut my hand, it was worse than I thought and I fainted.” He leaned back and shut his eyes. “Humiliating, yes. Cause for alarm, no.”

“You should know by now you can’t lie to me.” Pete’s weight shifted the mattress next to his. “You’ve been pale as a sheet ever since we came in.”

“Blood loss?” Jack offered lamely.

“Bullshit,” Pete said. Jack sighed. He was going to have to tell her. Maybe saying it out loud would make the whole thing seem like something kicked up by the intersection of his talent and a hiccup in the flow of power winding under this world, full of its hospitals and traffic wrecks and everything mundane. Something weird, but not worthy of worry.

“I had a dream,” he said. “It was … it was the future. Things had gone wrong. And you and Lily … you were dead.”

He thought Pete might be about to smack him, or that she’d walk out, until he felt her head cradle against his chest, her small frame sharing the skinny hospital bed. “And how did that lead to you making the flat look like a crime scene?”

“I hate birds,” Jack grumbled. He didn’t want to think about what the birds meant. He knew. It wasn’t exactly a subtle hint.

The Morrigan, the bride of war and death, was sending him yet another love note. She’d never been so direct, so out in the open, but her tricks were all designed to make him piss himself and fall in line.

It hadn’t worked before, and it wasn’t going to now.

“It was just a dream,” Pete said. “At the risk of sounding soppy, dreams can’t do anything to you, Jack, unless you think about them afterward.”

“You were dead,” he said again, not liking how small his voice got.

“But I’m not,” Pete said. “And I’m not going to be. You’ve known me a long time, Jack.” She sat up and pressed her lips against his skin. “You know I’m far too mean to die.”

The curtain whipped back, and Pete moved back to her chair at the knowing smile from the nurse.

“Right,” she said, pushing her cart ahead of her. “Let’s get that hand fixed up, Mr. Winter.”

“It’s Jack,” he said. The nurse took away the towel and examined his cut, clucking.

“I’m Ida,” she said. “This is a nasty scratch, but it’s not deep. I’ll stitch you up and a doctor can make sure you didn’t damage your nerves, but we’ll fix you up with some pills and you can go on home.”

“No pills,” Pete said. “He used to be addicted to opiates.”

Normally, Jack would have given her a dirty look at that—just because he used to shoot smack didn’t mean he was going to start popping handfuls of housewife’s helpers.

He didn’t, though, because he’d gotten a good look at the nurse’s face, and her name tag: Ida Higgins.

It was her. Same face, minus dirt and tear streaks. Same tall lanky frame, only clad in pink and yellow scrubs rather than dirty, torn green ones.

Ida returned his stare with an expression that told Jack she was wondering if she should remove herself from biting distance. “Are you on any narcotics right now, Jack?”

“I…,” he tried, but there was a rock in his throat, a scream building behind it as the sounds and smells of his dream came rushing back over the beeping and clanking and shouting of the A&E.

Because it hadn’t been a dream. What he’d seen had been real, and somehow the Ida Higgins he’d met months or years in the future had converged with Jack now, before whatever led to their encounter on the docks had happened.

His dream was a vision. It was his talent, his inexorable connection to the cataclysms of death that surged through both the Black and the daylight.

The Morrigan had finally gotten his attention.

Jack looked down at the tattoos that covered his skin down to his knuckles, one of them sliced through by the glass. She’d marked him, the ancient thing that fed his talent, and he’d been an idiot to think he could pretend she wasn’t going to collect on her mark.

“Jack?” Ida held his palm gently, antiseptic soaked gauze poised over his cut. Nothing sparked when they touched. She was normal, human.

He had to get away from her.

“Jack!”

This time Pete screamed, but he was running, his talent bubbling up through his mind, dropping the veil of sight over his eyes. The A&E was choked with spirits, some fresh and wavering, cast in black and silver, and some were so old they were just voids of black smoke in the background magic of the place.

He burst onto the street, the traffic barely registering, and saw more spirits, from every age of London. Prostitutes; men in top hats, wigs before that; soldiers from the Great War wrapped in bandages and missing limbs; dirty, skinny children who’d died on the steps of a hospital they couldn’t pay to enter. Roman dead before that, when the entire East End of London had been a burning ground for Britain’s conquerors.

They didn’t move or flicker in and out as the dead should.

They all looked in one direction, at him, and then turned their heads as one, south, toward the Thames, and watched the black clouds laced with lightning roll across the face of London, every church bell in the path of the screaming wind tolling the end of the daylight world.

Jack ran. He dodged the cabs and buses, crossed the street, and kept running until his lungs felt like twin sawblades planted in his chest.

By the time he looked up, he was on Old Street, miles from the hospital. Jack stumbled to the nearest wall and leaned against it, glad that passersby gave him a wide berth.

His shirt stuck to him, and his hands shook. His head felt as if it were full of pistons, thrumming away in time with his jackhammering heart.

At least his hand had stopped bleeding. Small comfort, considering that Pete probably thought he’d finally gone around the bend. He’d always known there was an expiration date on the trust she put in him. She’d helped him find ways to stave off his sight that didn’t involve smack, stuck by him when he’d made bad choice after bad choice with demons and the Morrigan and everything in between, but Pete wasn’t stupid. Sooner or later, she was going to hit her threshold.

Jack had just always thought that when she left him, only his world would collapse. Now, it looked like everyone in London was pretty well fucked.

He sank down to the pavement, cold now that he’d stopped moving, and wrapped his arms around his knees.

He’d remembered so much during the vision. Why things were the way they were, how to get around the city, but not how everything had started. It was as if he’d woken up in the middle of a program he’d never seen, and picked up the threads but not the bigger picture.

Glad he hadn’t managed to eat anything, as his shoes would be wearing it now, Jack considered that this was pretty much where everything had started. On a sidewalk, sick and out of prospects, when a man named Seth McBride had plucked him up and told him that he wasn’t mad or bad or dangerous to know. He was talented, meant for something bigger.

Something bigger turned out to be the Morrigan, and what Jack was meant for was to usher in her rule. After that, Seth and his ilk hadn’t been so enthusiastic, and Jack was on his own again. Besides Pete, nobody before or since had the nerve to get close enough to him to be hurt.

“That’s not entirely true.”

Jack looked down at the snakeskin shoe that reflected his own face back dozens of times in the shiny hide. He looked up at the pale black-nailed finger proffering a cigarette.

“Stop reading my thoughts,” he told Belial. “It’s tacky.”

“And not very illuminating,” the demon agreed, sticking the fag between his own lips and lighting it.

“We’re done,” Jack said. “Remember? Square accounts and all.”

“I did tell you that there’s something brewing in Hell.” Belial exhaled. “And that I’m asking—nicely, even—for your help.”

Jack narrowed his eyes as the demon leaned against the wall next to him. “You’re a Prince of Hell, mate. Why the fuck do you need my help?”

The demon smiled. Jack hated it when demons tried to mimic emotion. The only thing that could put a genuine smile on Belial’s face was the pain and suffering of others. Jack’s had filled that slot more than once.

“You know that expression, ‘only human’?” he said. “Well, I’m not that, but apparently I’m not perfect either, Jack. Because when I floated my opinion to the other Princes that things have gone off the rails, I was unceremoniously told to fuck off. As if I were a junior partner.”

It was Jack’s turn to laugh. He didn’t like Belial—hated him, even, but he liked seeing the obsequious bastard squirm. “I take it ruling the roost isn’t as easy as you thought.”

“I’m right.” Belial glared at Jack. “There’s a bloke come up through the ranks, got everyone all stirred up, and he’s created a right bit of chaos in the Pit that could have been avoided if we’d just liquidated the little shitbird when I suggested it.”

“And pardon me, but why should I care?” Jack said. “I hate you, Belial, did you forget that?”

“Your hate is not nearly equal to the contempt I hold for you, be sure,” the demon said. He scratched out his cigarette against the brick wall. “This world of yours is shit,” he said. “But for as long as anyone can recall, it’s all been spinning around as it is. Hell, the Black, this, the Land of the Dead, all stitched together by the in-between places, and aside from the occasional primordial demon jailbreak, quite nice, really.”

Jack felt unease squirm in his chest. Belial was chatty, but he usually only talked about either himself, or how thoroughly he was going to fuck over the victim of his attentions. Having a conversation like they were equals was much, much worse than feeling like Belial was about to drop his boot on Jack’s head. It was unnatural. Demons were predators, and mages were conditioned to avoid them at all costs.

“Get to the point,” Jack said. “I have to walk all the way back to Tower Hamlets before my wife has a fit and bans me not only from sex, our bed, and anything enjoyable for the next six months, but the flat as well.”

“I said it to dear Petunia,” Belial said, “and I’ll say it to you. Nice as this little juggling act is, we’ve too many balls in the air. Everything that’s happened since I met you lo these many years ago, Jackie … it’s all been leading to this.” Belial stood up and faced Jack. His smile was oddly small and calm, no hint of superiority. “It’s the beginning of the end, and if something isn’t done, then when the end has come and the end has passed us by, we’re not going to be on top. This other tosser is.”

Jack started to tell him to fuck off, but Belial held up his hand. “You are the only one who knows firsthand what it would mean if this balance of Hell and magic and the mundane fell out of balance, Jack. You’ve seen the precursors, and you saw what almost happened when those moronic cultists who had little Maggie Smythe tried to slice into Purgatory.”

Jack wished fiercely that he’d taken the cigarette when the demon had offered. “Fine, the end is nigh. What am I supposed to do, march about with a sign hanging off me neck?”

“Help me stop it, of course,” Belial said. “Because old-fashioned as it might be, I like things the way they are. I don’t relish the apocalypse. I’m a contented creature, Jack, and this bastard has threatened to upset all that. So I’m asking. Not cutting a deal. Asking you. Help me put the brakes on this long skid we’re on into armageddon. If you do…” Belial’s smile was bitter this time. “I owe you a favor.”

That made Jack pause. Vision or not, Belial was talking about the end, the big show, the falling of all the walls that kept the Black apart from the daylight, and the dead from walking the earth as the living did. Like most things Belial said, it was a load of crap, but a favor from a demon?

Jack had a feeling, if something big enough to send this vision to him was coming, that might come in handy.

And because Jack didn’t believe in ignoring the obvious, he thought Belial’s shit-stirrer would probably have some part in kicking things off.

Jack shivered at the thought of a world without the Black and the daylight—just one world, rampant with all of the darkness and evil that sprang from magic, and the human suffering and wickedness on the other. No buffers, no barriers, nothing to keep the world sane.

“Fine,” he said to Belial. “But that favor? It’s going to be the biggest you ever do.”