Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
Seth thumped the top of the car. “You listening to me, boyo?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. He could hear the sea roaring at the foot of the cliffs beyond Seth’s front yard. It was the only sound aside from their voices. He’d never been anywhere so quiet.
“You’re a good lad,” Seth said. “Whatever happens, don’t you go and forget that.”
The crows took flight, screaming, and Seth didn’t move until they were out of sight, black dots on the gray sky that eventually faded away into nothing.
The light of the sky turned into the bare bulb of a hanging lamp glowering down at him, and Jack squinted into it. “If this is the afterlife, the ambience is shit,” he said to whomever might be listening.
Pete’s face slid into his vision, slightly blurred at the edges. Jack took inventory of his parts and felt slow and dopey, the warm caress of opiates warming his bloodstream.
“I’m sorry,” Pete said. Her voice was full of vibration, and it came to him as if through a pane of wavy glass, distorted and high. “You were screaming. They had to give you a shot.”
“They?” Jack said. His throat was sore when he talked, and he could barely make out his own words.
“Relax, Mr. Winter,” said Morwenna Morgenstern, coming to stand next to Pete. “You’re in good hands.”
“Fuck me,” Jack groaned at the sight of her. “Pete, what’d you do?”
“Called some people who could help,” she said. “Now, relax. They didn’t undress you or anything. They’re just giving us a safe place to fix you up.”
Even in his excessively drugged state, Jack picked up the signal. The Prometheans hadn’t searched him. They didn’t have the blade.
That helped the screaming inside his mind quiet down a bit. To come this far, only to be foiled by the Dudley Do-Rights of the Black, would sting more than any betrayal from Belial.
Which made him remember that he owed Belial a kick in the balls, and he tried to sit up and get off the table.
“Whoa, whoa,” Morwenna said, shoving him back down. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, Mr. Winter.” She turned away, out of Jack’s line of sight. “Victor, we need another shot over here! Now.”
“Bad girl,” Jack said, a giggle bubbling out of him unbidden. “You know I was a drug addict?”
“Believe me, Mr. Winter,” Morwenna sighed. “I know more about you than I ever wanted to.”
“You lie,” Jack said, giving her a wide smile. “You know you can’t get enough of me, luv. Uptight broads like you always fall for the dark, dangerous types.…”
“All
right,”
Pete said as Morwenna’s shambling horror, Victor, came into view with a syringe. “If you don’t knock him out with that I’m going to do it with my foot.”
“Calm down,” Morwenna said. “He’ll be dreaming, Ms. Caldecott. Don’t you worry.”
Seth had tried to keep him calm before the initiation, but Jack remembered feeling his heart slam like it hadn’t since he’d come to Ireland and stopped sleeping rough and looking over his shoulder. He’d been in plenty of bad situations since, thanks either to his own penchant for finding trouble or because of messes that Seth brought upon them.
Seth never fled, though. He was always there, always had a plan and a backup to the plan. When Jack fucked up, Seth got him out of it. When Jack couldn’t con or fight his way out of a bad situation with the numerous enemies the
Fiach Dubh
counted, Seth always had a bright idea.
But now Seth stood in the door of the caravan, staring out into the field, toward the orange glow of the torchlight.
“Just remember, Jack … whatever happens…”
“I promise not to make you look bad,” Jack said. “I’ve got it, all right? It’s an initiation, not a party. I will conduct myself with the utmost dignity.”
“Please.” Seth conjured a lit cigarette and dragged on it. “You wouldn’t know dignity if it jumped up and bit you on the testes, boy.” He passed the cigarette, and Jack took a pull, blue smoke filling the small interior of the caravan.
“I promise,” he said, softer. “I know I fuck up a lot, Seth, but I won’t tonight. I get that this is important to you.”
He was eighteen, and he could join Seth as a full member of the crow brothers, privy to their archives, their secrets, and the bad blood with most other mage sects.
If Jack was honest, he couldn’t fucking wait. He could sling hexes and do simple spells and summonings, but this was the big show. He could learn real showstoppers, have real power. Maybe even find a way to keep his sight from hitting him upside the skull whenever he got within spitting distance of a ghost.
“Not me,” Seth said, gesturing Jack out of the caravan, where a knot of other crow brothers waited. “You, Jack. This night is all about you.”
The brothers stripped him to the waist and painted his torso with blue woad, the symbols signifying that he belonged to the
Fiach Dubh,
skin and bone and everything in between. Seth had told him to expect a lot of bullshit druid pomp and ceremony, but he’d also warned him that things went wrong all the time at these things. The patron goddess of the crow brothers was mercurial, to say the least, and if she took a dislike to an initiate, they were hamburger.
The brothers led him to the stone circle, into the ring of torchlight. Jack lay on the stone slab in the center, trying to ignore the blood grooves and the stained earth around the altar.
He turned his head and caught sight of Seth, standing outside the circle, his white shirt gleaming in the low light.
The crow bothers circled him. Their robes were cascades of gleaming black feathers, their hoods crowned with silver beaks that hung low, shadowing their brows.
The smoke from the torches was pungent, and that was how he explained it later. A bad trip, brought on by nerves and fear and too much hallucinogenic smoke.
Because behind the crow brothers, a figure moved. Golden-eyed, mouth dripping blood. The Morrigan approached him, and Jack remembered from Seth’s pep talk that she’d either accept or reject him, and that rejection was very fucking bad indeed.
He wasn’t sure how it worked—if she’d drink his blood, look into his head, or ask him the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
What she did, though, he couldn’t have planned for. She came to him, climbed the altar, and stood over him. Then she reached into his chest with her talons, his blood spurting far enough to hit some of the crow brothers, putting her hand around his heart. Putting her mark on him, on the inside where he would always feel it, even if no one could see.
She marked him as her own, and when he woke it was daylight and everyone except Seth had gone. He sat at the base of a stone pillar, surrounded by fag-ends and the ash from the torches, shaking, his eyes sunken and his fingers twitching.
He stood up and came over to Jack, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder as he examined his bare chest. The blue paint was smeared, but his body was intact, heart beating, ribs where they should be. There was no sign of anything he’d experienced in the night.
“What the fuck was that?” he asked Seth, and the mage shook his head.
“You belong to her now, Jack,” he said, lighting the last cigarette in his pack. He dragged hard on it, the cherry flaring, and he didn’t offer to share. “I guess in a way I should have known—with that talent of yours, and all that power you can pull on command, you were never long for this world.”
“Seth…,” Jack started, trying to stand. It didn’t work out so well, and he slid to the muddy ground.
“I’m sorry,” Seth said, backing away from him. “But you’re the crow-mage now. You’ve gone beyond my pay grade. I stay away from the Hag, and she stays away from me.”
“Seth, please…” It hurt to talk. Jack felt as if his limbs were no longer his own, as if there had been some fundamental violation of his body and mind, something he couldn’t remember in detail but felt all the same, right down to his bones.
“I’m sorry,” Seth said again, with more urgency. “But I can never see you again.”
He walked away, Jack would always remember, without any hesitation. Straight back to his car, never once turning back. And he did see Seth again, after his suicide attempt, after he understood what being the crow-mage meant. Saw him more than once, but it was never the same. The Seth McBride he trusted, thought of as a brother, walked away from him that morning, and Jack had never met him again.
That Seth had walked away and left Jack there, broken and alone.
When he woke again it was gentler, floating back down into his mind on the puffy cloud of copious amounts of prescription drugs.
“Whatever they’re giving me, see if you can get some to go,” he said when he saw Pete sitting next to his bed. “Be great to bring out at parties.”
“It’s just some Percocet to tide you over,” Pete said. She pointed at his leg, which was swathed in tight, bloody bandages. More lay in a trash bin near the foot of his bed. “Morwenna says you’re lucky. Your leg looked like the zombie apocalypse after their doctor got the glass out.”
“Doctor? More like some fly-by-night veterinarian, based on how these stitches feel,” he said. The wound felt hot and jagged, and he hoped that Morwenna’s pet surgeon had slipped in some antibiotics along with the good drugs.
“Whoever he was, you’re alive,” Pete said. “And because I asked so nicely, I got Morwenna to send someone to check on Legion without us having to lift a finger.”
Jack groaned. “What did we end up owing her for that, I wonder?”
Pete offered him a paper cup of water. “I’m thinking that’s one of those bridges we cross after we avert the apocalypse, myself.”
Jack swallowed the water in one go. The inside of his mouth felt like a gravel pit, and his throat was swollen and hot. Going through surgery was somewhere on his list of fun Friday nights after getting hit by a taxi and listening to chamber music while sober.
“Thank you,” he rasped to Pete. “Even if you did give these posh twats something to hold over our heads.”
Pete moved herself to lie down next to him, putting her hand on his unbandaged leg. “At least you still have a head for them to threaten, thanks to me. You owe me big time, Mr. Winter.”
Jack grinned at her. “As soon as I’m mobile again, I’ll express me gratitude in numerous anatomically improbable ways, don’t you worry.”
Pete gave him a jab. “You’re higher than a pigeon with a jetpack, so I’ll let that one slide.”
Jack pouted at her. “You’re horribly mean to me.”
Pete nodded, nestling her head into his shoulder. “Yeah. And that’s why you love me.”
Jack was going to suggest they express their love with a well-deserved lie-in when the door opened and Morwenna strode into the room. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, with an expression that any bitter old nun would have killed to mimic.
Pete sat up, keeping her hand on Jack. “You found something,” she said. “At that monastery.”
Morwenna exhaled, tapping her fingers against her leg. “How much do you know about this, really? And I warn you, don’t play dumb with me. I’m going to be very upset.”
“You know that scary story you tossed us out for telling you?” Jack said. “Well, that’s where the scary story is currently holed up, with half the kingdom of Faerie as backup, plus enough elemental demons to turn every person in London into their very own beans on toast.”
“It’s considerably more serious than a gathering of ragtag interests,” Morwenna said. “Our sources say the Faerie king himself is there, and that this demon has Fenris guarding him along with a host of lesser elementals. Egregors are patrolling the perimeter and the monastery itself is hemmed in by Fae assassins.”
Pete let out a long breath. “Shit.”
“I don’t know what your ulterior motive is,” Morwenna said. “But going near that place is suicide.” She went to the door and opened it again. “I’m not going to tell you your business, but I assume you do want to stay alive. If you have some idiotic notion about going out like a superhero … please don’t drag the Prometheans into it.”
“I can hardly gad about in a cape like this, can I?” Jack snapped. Morwenna gave a delicate sniff.
“You have until sunset to get yourself together and leave,” she said. “The Prometheans don’t need the kind of trouble you’re bringing.”
Pete gave Morwenna a poisonous glare. “The Prometheans are going to be sipping tea on the ashes of the world if they keep this up,” she said.
“We have endured for a thousand years,” Morwenna said. “The prophecies have us existing for many more.”
Jack managed to sit up, feeling around for his coat and his pants on the floor next to the bed. The weight of the blade was still in his pocket, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “The Prometheans are going to vanish under what’s coming just like me and Pete,” he said. “The difference is, we’re willing to adapt enough to fight back.”
He struggled into his pants. Thanks to the drugs, his leg only twinged a bit. “I think you and I are done, Morwenna. The Prometheans no longer have any claim over Margaret, or us. I wouldn’t be eager to meet us again if I were you.”
“Just goes to show,” Morwenna said. “You do someone of your class a favor, and they repay you with insults.”
“You can send us a fruit basket after we kill Legion for you,” Pete said. “Then you can consider us even.”
Jack sat down on a small stone bench outside the gates of the Prometheans’ country estate, watching the empty road. “What exactly are we going to do now?”
Pete massaged her forehead. “I have no idea. I just didn’t want that bitch to think she got the upper hand.”
“She’s right, though,” Jack said. “Much as I thought those words would never march across my lips. If Legion has a full complement of elementals and Fae, he’ll liquidate us the minute we land within a mile of that monastery.”
Pete pulled out her mobile and dialed up a local cab company. “So what do we do?” she asked while they had her on hold. “I mean, aside from getting hold of a teleport spell. Do those even exist?”
“I met somebody once, in Amsterdam, who said he did it,” Jack said. “Turns out he just ate too many hash brownies and thought he’d walked through a wall. Tried to do it in front of me and knocked himself out.”