Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
Jack could think of few things more unpleasant than the Prometheus Club, but breaking the news to Margaret came close.
“Come with me, luv,” he said. “Need to run down to the shop.”
When they were on the street, Jack let Margaret lead the way, stopping here and there to examine jewelry in the street stalls, before she cocked her head and looked up at Jack. “You didn’t really bring me out here to pick up some tea and fags, did you?”
Jack shook his head. “Can’t put much past you, can I?”
Magaret picked up a fake purse from one of the stalls and turned it over in her hands. “You know, my dad was in jail for most of my life, and when he did come back my parents almost got me killed because they were fuckwits.”
Jack figured he probably should have told Margaret that those were her parents, and for all their mistakes they did the best they could. But he wasn’t that sort of parent himself, so he just nodded.
“You and Pete are the only people who ever made me feel as if things might be all right,” Margaret said. “Like, you don’t care that I’m weird or that my real parents are freaks. You’re good to me.” She put the purse back and faced Jack. “So I figure whatever it is you want from me, you can ask it. I want to help you, Jack. You’re not like my dad.”
“You want to be careful agreeing to help me like that,” Jack said. “Good kids like you have a tendency to wind up dead when they get mixed up with bad people like me.”
“You’re not bad.” Margaret crinkled her nose as if the very notion was ridiculous. “You’re a bit rough and mean, sure, but you’re good. Everyone can see it.”
“Luv, if everyone could see that, I’d have been punched out a lot less in my youth,” Jack said, giving her shoulder a nudge. Margaret wasn’t one of those girls who flitted and darted, smiled at everything and giggled when she was nervous. She was so serious he sometimes wondered if on the inside, she was a brittle old pensioner. She had a thousand-yard stare that could back down a demon. She reminded Jack of himself at that age, when he was just starting to realize that not everyone could speak to the dead, conjure hexes, or feel the inexorable tide pulsing under the skin of everything that was safe, normal, and daylight.
“
I
can see it,” Margaret said. “I can see people, and when I see you, you’re good. So is Pete, and Lily. There are more good people in the world than bad, Jack. I’m sorry it’s hard for you to see.”
“Curse of getting older, Margaret,” Jack said, the urge to joke with her gone. “Your opinion on that might change the first time some nutter comes at you with a sacrificial knife, just because you looked at him wrong.”
He was stalling, and he felt a prick of disgust from the part of himself that was still the boy who thought his talent was a weapon rather than a vast cataclysm he couldn’t control. The younger Jack who threw punches, drank whiskey, and dove into the pit during stage shows just because it was fun to taste his own blood.
That boy hadn’t seen half the shit adult Jack had, though, so he could fuck right off. He’d never known what it was like to be a living thing in the Land of the Dead. To feel his own brain turn against him because of magic it couldn’t contain. To be shivering and starving on the street in the dead of winter, needing heroin so badly that his burning blood was all that kept him moving.
Margaret moved on, out of the passage of traffic, pausing to hoist herself onto the iron fence of a council estate. “What is it you don’t want to tell me, Jack?”
Jack watched a couple of hoodies kicking a half-deflated football on the graffiti-stained pavement, blowing out a lungful of air he dearly wished was nicotine. “You know those yobs that came after you when your parents got mixed up with the zombies in Herefordshire?”
“Yeah.” Margaret’s lip twitched in disgust. “They were lame. Totally naff.”
“That they are,” Jack said. “But they have something Pete and I need, only we’re not exactly welcome in their little club anymore.”
“And I am.” Margaret’s voice was flat. She wasn’t a stupid child by a long shot, and Jack had wished more than once that it was easier to put things past her, to cushion her from her talent for just a little longer. He wished she didn’t have to go through what he had, the birth spasms of a life no human should have to live.
“Yeah, luv,” he said. “You’re the Merlin.”
“I’m like a nuclear bomb,” Margaret said. “And they want to aim me at whoever they don’t like.”
“You’re not wrong,” Jack said. “The Prometheus Club never has anything but their own best interest at heart.”
“So am I supposed to let them?” Margaret turned to face him, her eyes wide and unsure for the first time. “I’m the Merlin. Not them. You said it was my choice.”
She was still a teenager, Jack reminded himself, and her mood could flip faster than a stoplight. Beyond that, she was a teenager with latent talents that would make her the most powerful mage in all of Britain, if not the world, when she came into them. The Merlin, the mage those nutters in the Prometheus Club thought would unite all the squabbling groups and sects under the banner of human magicians against … whoever they were slagged off at that week.
Which was complete and utter ripe bullshit, Jack knew. You could no more get mages to agree on anything than you could teach cats to do a hula dance. But for what he needed now, he was content to feed the Prometheans’ delusion.
“It is,” Jack said. “Say no, we’ll go home, get some chips in for tea, and never speak of this again. I’m not going to force you into anything, Margaret. What you do with your talent is your choice, and that’s more important than anything else, because it’s a choice nobody gave me when I was your age.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment, a gesture she’d adopted from Pete. “Okay,” she said. “If I just have to lie to them a bit, that’s fine. What do you want me to do?”
“Tell them you’re not ready to come to them and be the Merlin, not yet,” Jack said. “But that you do want to receive training.”
Margaret wrinkled her nose. “But you and Pete are better than any of them. They’re rubbish at magic.”
“Of course they are,” Jack said. “And like most arrogant pricks, they’ve got tiny talents and big egos. I just need to talk to one woman in particular, and the only way we’re getting in is to show up with you.”
Margaret hopped off the fence and gave him a sly smile. “Sounds fun. Sort of James Bond.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “If James Bond was a nutter who consorted with dark magic, that’s exactly what it is.”
Margaret started back toward the flat, and Jack followed her. He wasn’t hungry any longer, anyway. Even though she’d agreed, there was still a chance the Prometheans could pull something and take Margaret against her will, as they’d tried to in Herefordshire, and Jack could do fuck-all on his own against a full complement of them.
The thought of Margaret living with those people turned his stomach, even more than the thought of her on her own, sleeping rough and trying to figure out what the hell this brave new world of demons and the dead was, as he had.
“So, why do you need to talk to them?” Margaret asked. “It’s bad, right? You and Pete wouldn’t go unless it was bad.”
Jack watched the traffic, the street vendors, the usual people going about their usual lives. He tried very hard not to see the superimposed image from his visions of the burned-out hulk of Tower Hamlets and the dead roaming the streets.
“Yes,” he said. He didn’t believe in lying to kids. What good would that do now, at any rate? “It’s about as bad as it can possibly get.”
Secret societies weren’t really as secret as they all liked to claim, especially when you had something they wanted. Less than twenty minutes after Jack had Pete dial up Morwenna Morgenstern, the public face of the Prometheus Club, a car was idling at the curb in front of their flat.
Jack hadn’t bothered with the suit after all—it wasn’t like Morwenna had any friendly feelings toward him. Especially not after he’d done a dust-up with her little best mate, Donovan Winter. The Prometheans, and Morwenna in particular, excelled at manipulation in the way that only lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool sociopaths could. Using Jack’s father to get Jack and Pete to try and rip open a seam to Purgatory was a small game, in the scheme of things.
Anyway, he wasn’t there to impress Morwenna or revist his animosity toward Donovan. The hatred was there, though, a hot coal in his guts as the car sped through the West End and into wide, green, flat countryside with the occasional rise of a stately home.
He’d told Donovan that if the man interfered with his family or his life again, he’d kill him. Donovan knew he was prepared to follow through, too, so Jack hoped that would keep the father-son chatter to a minimum.
“I don’t understand,” Margaret said, staring out the window as they wound up an endless private road lined with beech trees toward the hulk of a brick mansion. “I thought they all lived up in Manchester.”
“They’ve got hidey-holes all over the place,” Pete said. “Rich folks like them are the greatest paranoids. Why have one secret clubhouse when you can have ten?”
Jack looked past the trees at the rolling hills, bracketed by stone walls and bracken bathed in gold as the sun went down. Absurdly, he thought of “Stairway to Heaven”.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now. It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.
Stupid airy-fairy bullshit. If that’s what most people thought real magic was all about, then they had it coming when real magic broke through the barriers, chased them down, and turned them into dinner.
Jack sighed, then looked up to find Pete’s eyes on him. He was so on edge he felt like he’d snap back like a rubber band at the slightest provocation, and she could tell. They shared the gentle brush of talent against talent—it just felt like static electricity now, but when mages spent enough time together they got to know each other, how they felt when they were happy or hurt or tense or afraid. Margaret’s clean energy, the bell-tone of white magic, muddled things a bit, like muffling your head with a pillow when things got loud and you had a raging hangover.
She
would outdo either of them, if she lived long enough. Sure, Jack had some muddy, bloody talent the Morrigan wanted, and Pete was still stronger than him because she could take on other mages’ gifts and magnify them from a stray cloud to a storm that could sweep the whole of the Black clean if she let it. But Margaret was going to be stronger still than Pete, a force unlike anything the world had seen in ten centuries. The Merlin, the hawk on high who saw everything, top of the food chain.
Jack was just glad as fuck she’d gone light-side and hadn’t turned out like him. Because then the world really would be fucked, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
The car pulled into a round drive, gravel crunched, scary blokes in cheap suits patted them all down, and finally they were granted entrance into the Prometheans’ posh den of idiocy.
It looked like any other posh country house Jack had had the misfortune to find himself in—lots of dark wood, ugly oil paintings, and hushed tones. Margaret gave everything an appraising glance, and then her high forehead crinkled. “My magic’s gone.”
She insisted on calling it
magic,
no matter how many times Jack told her that she’d be laughed out of any mage gathering in the UK with that sort of language.
“They keep the whole place cut off,” he said. “No service in this area, luv. Sorry.”
Pete fidgeted next to him. “I hate this. I fucking hate this.”
“You think I feel any different?” he muttered. “Take away my talent, and what am I?”
“A man who is rather poor at following through on his promises.” Morwenna Morgenstern glided from a set of double doors at the far end of the entry. She was still doing her slick City getup: slim skirts, perfect hair, and lips like a fresh wound.
“Morwenna,” Jack greeted her. “You’re looking particularly constipated this evening. I’d think the Prometheans all indulged in monthly group colonics.”
Her face wasn’t as pretty as she’d probably been told it was her entire life, but it wasn’t bad, and she managed to give only a twitch of her cheek muscles at Jack’s jab. “The last I recall, Mr. Winter, you were leveling some extremely vulgar and insubstantial accusations at me before promising never to step foot within a mile of me again.”
“Oh, that wasn’t a promise,” Jack said. “That was a threat. I never would have let your merry band of psychopaths within spitting distance of Margaret if we weren’t desperate.”
Morwenna made a show of turning her back on him before she extended her hands to Margaret. He was nothing, over, a speck on her shoe. Jack tried not to feel a prick of offense, despite hating the woman’s fucking guts. He could do these people some damage. They should at least be smart enough to treat him like he was dangerous.
“My dear, dear girl,” Morwenna intoned with a voice that could have given a pixie a toothache. “I am so glad you reconsidered.”
“Fuck off,” Margaret said when Morwenna tried to take her hands. “I’m only here because Jack asked me to help him.”
Jack gave Morwenna a wide grin when she whipped her head back around. “Sorry. Looks like you’re going to have to deal with the unwashed peasants a bit longer.”
Pete gave a small shoulder-shrug of a laugh, which he took as a good sign. If she was calm enough to appreciate winding up Morwenna, this all might just go the way they’d planned. Pete was his barometer for calm. She never lost her head, never wavered, until it was well and truly time to go off the rails. He didn’t have that built-in stabilizer, didn’t trust himself not to ignore danger signs and still, after all his fuck-ups, think he could smile and charm his way out of something.
Just one more time.
“You seem to be laboring under the misconception that you can bargain,” Morwenna said. “Let me make this very clear, Jack—you have no leverage here. Margaret is meant to be among her own kind, and by taking that from her you’re making her life very difficult. If you think I’m letting her walk back out that door, to the gods know what sort of life, you must be fucking delusional.”