Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“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.
Though days were mild and all of the bad weather other places famously harassed the UK for had gone off for the impending summer, mornings were still chilly.
Jack wrapped his arms around himself inside his thin overshirt and cotton jacket with the Gate key in the pocket, sucking on his fag to keep warm as he stood in the line of other stooped, smoking, shivering men.
This was the third mission he’d tried since the sun came up, a neat little outfit that looked more like your grandmother’s council flat than a homeless shelter. A hand-lettered sign in the window proclaimed
Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
Jack tried not to roll his eyes. Believing in a higher power, in his experience, just got you steamrollered. The sign might as well have encouraged the bunch around him to
Believe in the Dark Knight Batman and thou shalt receive large sacks of cheap whiskey and fags.
There
was
no higher power. There were the beings older and hungrier than you, and there was avoiding being stepped on when they got a hair up their bum cracks. The Romans had it right, when they stepped foot on the isle—appease the old gods when you could, run when you couldn’t, and drink plenty of wine always.
“Spare one a those?” The voice was thick, Scottish, and Jack turned to see a tall, skinny television aerial of a man staring down at him from under a black watch cap.
“Sure, mate,” he said. His pack was empty after that, but he could always conjure more. He swept the street again with his gaze, but only a few buses and cars passed at the nearby intersection. No sinister vans, creeping to and fro looking for willing additions to Legion’s army.
“Cheers.” The Scot lit up with a pack of matches, brown fingers curling around the cigarette carefully, as if it were delicate and alive.
“Line always this long?” Jack asked. There were at least thirty men gathered on the pavement. “I thought this place didn’t open until lunch.”
“Aye, but if you turn up early sometimes the bakery up the road comes around with yesterday’s stale buns,” said the Scot. “And there’s always a chance somebody’ll hire you a day’s pay to clean the garden or paint a fence.”
Jack sized up the Scot. Chatty, older than him by about twenty years, skinny but enormous, wearing a military coat that probably hailed from the 1980s. “You a lifer, then?” he said. Some just liked sleeping rough. It got in your blood, and four walls never quite felt the same.