Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
There was the Morwenna Morgenstern he knew, all hard eyes and flashing teeth as she bit and raked at you with her words, leaving you a flayed mess too cowed to argue.
“Fine.” That was Pete. “Try and keep her here, then. Ignore the fact that if we came to you voluntarily, things are already sideways and spinning into the ground. Be a stupid self-righteous cunt like always, Morwenna, because that worked out so well the last time the world was ending.”
Pete ended her speech less than a foot from Morwenna’s nose, between the woman and Margaret. It was Jack’s turn to grin. Even-keeled and cool-headed as Pete was, it was terrifying to see her slagged off.
“We only came here because things are so bad we couldn’t go anywhere else,” Pete continued. “That ought to scare you, and if it doesn’t, consider this: If you try to keep this girl against her will—a girl I consider
my child—
I will burn this pile of bricks to the ground with your carcass inside it, and make it my personal mission to fuck up your little club’s agenda from here to kingdom come.”
Morwenna swallowed hard, cheeks flushed and hands fluttering ever so slightly with nerves. Jack caught Pete’s eye and nodded. Shock and awe were the only things mages like the Prometheans understood. You can think you’re top of the heap, until one of your herd is ripped apart in front of you, and then you’re off balance and scared.
Good,
Jack thought. He wanted Morwenna Morgenstern scared.
“If you help Pete and Jack, I’ll consider coming here once a month to be trained,” Margaret said. They’d gone over this part carefully before the call. “But only once a month, and only if Jack or Pete is with me. And if I don’t like it, I’m quitting. You lot don’t have one tiny say in what I do or don’t do with my talent.”
Morwenna straightened her spine, a boxer shaking off a bad round, spitting out the blood and putting her defenses back up. “What sort of help do you require? A catastrophe of your own making, no doubt.”
Jack tried not to let the accusation smart. It figured, the one time he hadn’t backed himself into a corner with a demon deal or a slagged-off primal creature of Hell on his arse, and Morwenna assumed he’d caused the whole mess.
“The Black and the daylight world,” he said. “Barrier’s going to rupture unless we find the bloke who set things in motion and send him back downstairs for a spanking and no supper from the Princes.”
And I’m having visions of the apocalypse that may have already been triggered. Even if I do what Belial wants, there may be no way to stop it.
He pushed the thoughts down. They weren’t any that Morwenna or whatever pet mind reader she had eavesdropping needed to hear.
“And that’s all you have?” Morwenna said, mouth crimping in the cruel smile of a girl who’s just realized her rival came to school with her skirt tucked into her tights. “‘A bloke’? Care to be a bit more specific?”
Jack thought of Belial confronting the demon, of how easily the demon had turned the Fenris, and took out his pen. “He’s been kicking this symbol around,” he said, grabbing up a pad from next to an old-fashioned rotary phone to sketch on. “Doesn’t mean anything to me. Also, he’s not a Named—he’s an elemental who got too big for his britches. Thought maybe with all your vast high and mighty anointed-one mage knowledge, you might’ve run across the symbol somewhere.”
Morwenna reached for the pad, but Jack held it back. “Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Not until you promise me—a real promise, none of that crap where you use some clever language loophole—to abide by Margaret’s terms.”
Margaret crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes, a pitch-perfect imitation of Pete that would have made Jack laugh, had this been anywhere else, any other time.
Morwenna’s jaw bunched and relaxed, and she let out a long-suffering breath. “I promise that I shan’t try to keep Margaret here against her will. I make no promises, however, about trying to persuade her to join us on our own merits, and leave you two idiots in the gutter where you belong.”
“I wouldn’t live here if it was raining piss and this was the only place with a roof,” Margaret said. Morwenna squeezed her eyes briefly, while Margaret gave Jack a wide smile.
“I feel so terribly for what they’ve put in your head, child,” she said. “I really do.”
“Oi.” Jack snapped his fingers. “Less sob-sistering, more information.”
“Assuming you know anything,” Pete scoffed.
Morwenna grabbed the paper from Jack and stormed back toward the double doors. “Well, come on!” she snapped when no one followed her.
Beyond the doors was a sitting room, the sort of overstuffed, flower-plagued place that old folks and the clinically depressed flocked to. Morwenna sat disdainfully on one of the threadbare velvet armchairs, touching it with as little of her slim frame as possible.
Jack stayed standing, as did Margaret and Pete, until Morwenna raised her eyes with a glare.
“I’m not going to ambush you with idiot-eating armchairs the moment you sit down,” she said. “So for fuck’s sake, stop hovering like a pack of wild dogs.”
Jack sat, figuring he’d probably get an answer faster, and have to listen to Morwenna’s store-bought plummy accent less, than if he’d pushed the issue.
“Mean anything?” he asked, pointing at the paper. The memory of the sigil was seared into him. He’d see it until he died, imprinted on his brain like a scar. Fucking Belial.
Morwenna examined the drawing under the light. Turned it, examined it again. Her lips pursed, and she gave Jack a glare as if he were a naughty schoolboy, fitting her for a wind-up.
“Let me guess,” she said. “One of the Named gave this to you.”
“What does it matter?” Jack said. He was surprised she’d gone right to the consorting-with-demons place. To Morwenna, such a thing was distasteful; plus, she probably thought Jack was too stupid to do anything with a Named except get turned into a carpet.
“Because this is the sigil of Legion, an elemental demon who has many hearts and minds at once,” Morwenna said.
“Wait, wait.” Pete waved a hand. “Are we talking Legion, the one Christ cast into a herd of pigs and drove off a cliff? That bloke?”
“Legion is not a name,” Morwenna said. “Because he’s not a Named. And he’s much more than just a hive mind demon with a lot of bodies. Legion has been the boogeyman in Hell for a long time.”
“Great,” Jack said. “Any idea where he might vacation, were he to slip the surly bonds of that crap pool he calls a home and visit earth?”
Morwenna started to laugh—not the cool Bondian chuckle he’d expect from a woman like her, but a genuine laugh, shoulders shaking, rich and cruel. “I have no fucking idea,” she said. “Because Legion is a story, Jack. He’s a campfire ghost for the Named—the elemental, the
legion
member who’s stronger than they are, could take over and wipe them out.” She crumpled the paper, dropped it, and stepped on it with her pointy witch shoe when she rose. “Have fun chasing your apocalypse, you two,” she said, opening the doors wide. “Because Legion doesn’t fucking exist.”
Pete and Margaret were silent the entire length of the private lane, until the driver pulled back onto the motorway and accelerated. “I think that went well,” Pete said at last.
“Don’t even start,” Jack muttered.
After a moment, Pete’s hand closed over his in the dark car. “I believe you,” she said.
“Well, you shouldn’t.” Shame ate at Jack’s throat like stomach acid. “I bought it hook, line, and sinker. Whatever sick game Belial’s playing, I walked right into it and looked like a proper fool.”
He’d let the demon inside his head. Fuck, what had he done? What else had been planted there while Belial had been making his cerebral cortex a demon’s playground?
“Maybe he wasn’t just playing around,” Pete said. “You said that Hell was in an uproar.
Something
is going on. I know plenty of spittle-flecked cult leaders who co-opt symbols to make their followers toe the line. If Legion is a scary story, maybe someone in Hell capitalized on that.”
Jack felt a headache blossom behind his eyes like someone had hit him. It was too much, the visions and the demons, and he just wanted it to stop.
“Something is happening,” he muttered. His sight had never acted up this way. Something was causing it, and Belial’s nameless demon was involved. “But this Legion business leaves me right where I was before—holding me dick in me fist with nothing to show what might kick off the end of the world.”
Pete gave him a sharp nudge and jerked her head at Margaret, sitting across from them in the car’s vast rear seats.
“Sorry, luv,” he said. “Don’t take the filth that I spew as an example, eat your vegetables, don’t skip school, etcetera.”
Pete heaved a sigh. “So you’re just going to give up.”
Jack felt the headache multiply, spreading across the crown of his head like someone had smacked him repeatedly in the skull. “I’m not giving up, but where do you suggest we go from here? If the Prometheans say this is bunk, then I’m at a loss as to who this demon is, where he is, or what he’s up to.”
“Then ask the person who can tell you,” Pete said. “In all the time you’ve known Belial, has he ever been completely straight with you? Even if the world was on the line, Belial doesn’t care about humans. He only cares about himself. He’s a survivor, just like you, and like you, he puts himself first.”
Jack watched London growing larger in the windscreen, glittering and rising out of the blackness of the land around. Pete was right. The acid-soaked pit of hopelessness in his stomach hardened into something else, the old rage from his younger days, the thing that protected him, armored him, kept him from being fucked with by things like Belial.
“Jack?” Pete said. She withdrew her hand as a crackle of blue energy passed between them, the ambient magic that gathered when Jack let his rage or any strong emotion grow. The interior of the car was bathed in blue for a moment, and then Jack tamped it down again. He was going to save this for the target who deserved it.
“I’m fine,” he said. “When we get home, though, the Prince and I are going to have a talk.”
Early, when the sun had just started to give a thought to coming up, Jack grabbed his kit and climbed to the roof of his flat. The roof was bumpy with tarpaper and disused chimney pots, covered in empty lager cans and pigeon shit, but it was quiet and private. He wasn’t going to take the risk of summoning Belial in his flat, where Pete and Margaret and Lily slept.
He’d had the green canvas bag since he’d left Manchester, and in almost thirty years the color had gone from green to a vague moldy-vomit shade, the weave smoothed by thousands of hours carried on his back. The edges were frayed, and the numbers and names he’d inked on the canvas over the years were mostly rubbed out, but the contents had never varied much. Chalk, some herbs that came in handy, a flat antique mirror he’d found in a junk shop in Dublin that he used for scrying, some red thread for binding curses, and the other bits and bobs accumulated over the course of a life spent slinging hexes to get by.
Jack kicked the garbage out of the way and used the chalk to draw a circle big enough for two people to stand in. The last time he’d summoned Belial it had been an accident—he’d been either incredibly lucky or incredibly stupid, depending on who you asked. A hungry elemental could have just as easily shown up and devoured him, but instead his frantic last-ditch summoning attracted one of the Named.
Belial had saved his life, and then spent the next decade fucking it up beyond all recognition. That was the nature of dealing with demons. Nobody ever got what they wanted in a demon deal, except the demon themselves.
He’d memorized Belial’s sign since that first time, the unique brand that every one of the Named carried. He drew that, dropped some herbs, and pulled out his lighter, setting them on fire. Belial’s offering required blood, but Jack wasn’t stupid. The demon would love to get ahold of Jack’s blood. Then he would never have to ask nicely for a favor ever again. Blood magic was the sort of thing even most sorcerers didn’t mess with. The last one who had, Nicholas Naughton, had snuffed himself out when the thing he’d called forth with his ritual decided the necromancer was a tasty snack.
That was what
should
happen, when you trucked with demons and black magic. You feel like the hard man for a few ticks of the universe’s clock, and then something from the back of beyond snaps you up like a digestive biscuit.
The fact that he had a different sort of relationship with Belial should have scared him, Jack thought as he breathed in the smoke. It was sticky and pungent, and the scent reminded him of both church incense and high-grade marijuana, smells that wound around his senses and pitched things just slightly off. It should terrify him, should make him constantly look over his shoulder, knowing that sooner or later his luck would run out and Belial would have no more use for him.
Then he’d be dead. He might not owe Belial his soul to torment any longer, but Jack had never kidded himself on that score—when he finally kicked it for good, he was Hell-bound no matter who snuffed him.
Or bound for something much worse.
The tattoos on his arms and chest fluttered, as if a wind had passed through him, raking over his blood and bones. The feathers shifted and re-settled in a new pattern, like the flight of ravens just before he’d slashed his hand.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” Belial appeared across the chalk marks from him, face twisted in fury.
Jack sucked in a hot, singed lungful of smoke, feeling his feet slam back to the ground. The time for messing about with the thing that had marked him could come later. Now he had to be sharp, because Belial was well and truly slagged.
“Did you really think you’d feed me that fat pack of lies and I wouldn’t take exception?” He folded his arms, and even though every impulse in his hindbrain screamed not to, he stepped into Belial’s space, forcing the demon’s heels against the chalk circle. If Jack broke it, the demon would be free and he’d be lunch meat. If Belial broke it, he’d get a one-way express ticket back to Hell, courtesy of magic that was stronger than either of them.