Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“Never invoke Hitler in an argument,” Legion purred. “Weakens your position. And those demons, Jack? You really telling me you’re going to weep for the very creatures who gave you a life full of misery and pain rather than the birthright your talent demanded?”
“Shit choices and smack got me this life,” future-Jack said. “Demons were just a side effect. And right now, my life is the best it’s ever been, so you bet your arse I’m going to give my last breath, my last ounce of blood, to stop you.”
Legion sighed and looked back at the city. The smoke came from a few localized fires, but Jack saw a haze spreading from the north, a dark bank of thunderclouds.
Not clouds, he realized. Birds. Thousands of them, their cries cutting through the rain and the sirens.
“The bride of war comes to feast on the corpses,” Legion said. “And the walls all fall down. This is how it was in the beginning, Jack. And how it shall ever be from now on.”
Legion held up the piece of metal he’d stolen and it formed itself into a small, smooth globe, dark brown in color, the sort of thing a City banker would pay too much for in a gallery. “The Princes denied me, but the world won’t. And if you persist in this, Jack, I’m sorry, but you’re no longer useful.”
Jack saw his future self work the piece of the Gates that Belial had given him out of his sling as he and Legion closed distance.
“I’m warning you,” future-Jack said. “Don’t do it.”
“It’s already done,” Legion said. “I didn’t even need to break down the walls, just weaken them. I’ve used this marvelous little thing to pop around, prying out a stone where I needed to. A whisper in the ear of a mage in the 15th century, the right grimoire in the hands of a Nazi occultist in 1941, loosening the latches just enough to give Nergal and Abbadon and them the idea of escaping and weakening the barriers around Hell … when you think about it as I have, Jack, it’s like the world was always waiting for this. The day it stops being segmented and becomes a whole.”
The birds were close now, sweeping overhead, and Jack saw the tattoos on his future arms ripple and change, the ambient witchfire around him crackling like blue fire. Raindrops sizzled off it, steam adding to the surreality of the scene on the rooftop.
It couldn’t be, Jack thought. The barriers between Hell, death, the Black … they were porous, but they were eternal. And now Legion was saying that everything that had happened since Pete had strolled back into Jack’s life was his doing, his jumping back and forth, molding events to his end. Nick Naughton, Nergal, Abbadon, his deal with Belial … all to break the walls. But nothing could break them down fully. Nothing in the Black could exist on the same plane as the daylight. Side by side, yes. On top of one another, no.
They’d repel each other like magnets.
They’d cause exactly what he’d seen when he’d run from the hospital.
The Morrigan had tried to warn him, and when he hadn’t listened, she’d come. The Hag, the woman who watched the end of the world, who collected the dead for her army.
She’d come to see Legion’s victory.
The other Jack, the one with the eyes empty of everything but rage and grief, lunged at Legion with the key. The demon shook him off, laughing.
“Sorry, Jack. Too little, too late. If you think you’re taking me back to Hell, then you’ll be trapped there, same as I was.”
His other self hesitated, and Jack wanted to scream at the stupid cunt to just do it, just suck them back to the Gates and be done with it. Pete and Lily were counting on them. The fucking world was coming down around their ears, and he couldn’t pull the trigger when it counted.
“Oh, did your dear friend Belial not mention that?” Legion sneered. “He can pass you back and forth like you’re hopping on a tube train, but if you use the key, it’s a one-way trip. You’re a living soul, Jack, and your ticket isn’t good for a return, even if the other Princes would let you go after you’d proven yourself a loyal dog.” He shrugged. “But by all means, use it if you want. If your conviction is that strong. If you really think it’s the way to stop me.”
Do it,
Jack tried to scream, but he was just an echo, just a bloke watching television and yelling at the screen.
His arm wavered, just for a moment, and in that half a heartbeat Legion closed the distance between them, grabbed Jack by the throat, and tossed him over the side of the roof.
He heard himself scream, felt his stomach drop, watched Legion’s grin spread, the grin of a small child who’d just stepped on an ant.
“Didn’t think so,” the demon said, and Jack heard his body hit the pavement below before his eyes shot open.
Jack jerked upright like he’d taken a cattle prod to the balls. “Shit!” he gasped, before he saw he was alone except for a morbidly obese pigeon pecking at a crisp wrapper and an old woman in the flat across the street, watching him through a gap in her curtains.
He gave the woman a weak wave, and she waved back. The pigeon flew away, and Jack stood up, feeling all the odd bits of him that he’d broken over the years protest. He picked up his kit and climbed back down the fire escape. Small white fireworks exploded in his vision every time he moved wrong. His head was a minefield after the onslaught of sight, and he’d wrenched something in his shoulder when he’d taken a tumble.
Pete looked up from her laptop when he climbed through the window, eyebrow rising. “You all right?” she asked.
He slumped on the sofa, throwing his bag down, and closing his eyes. He wanted to buck up, not burden her with anything more, but he couldn’t. He was drained. The well was dry.
He was the man who couldn’t kill Legion when he had the chance.
“Not remotely,” he said.
A moment later, Pete’s weight sank the couch cushion next to him. She smelled like lavender perfume, baby powder, a tinge of wood smoke, the scent of magic. A tumbler pressed into his hands, and Jack tossed back the whiskey in a single gulp.
“It’ll be all right,” Pete said softly.
Jack opened his eyes, looking into Pete’s gaze. She had green eyes, deep and dark like a pool long left undisturbed. She was beautiful, and he was going to get her killed. He was going to get all of them killed. Legion was going to steal Lily, and Pete was going to be dead.
“Not this time, luv,” he said, setting the tumbler down with a clunk.
“Oh, fuck off, Jack,” she said. The snap in her voice made him look up. Pete didn’t look concerned any longer. She was glaring at him. “I know how bad this is,” she said. “I know exactly what it means if you can’t find Legion, or whoever he is, and stop him before he tries to rip a hole in Hell. I
know
that you saw me die, and if you think I haven’t lain awake just as long as you have most nights then you’re either stupid or fucking over-the-moon selfish. And yet, somehow, I trust it will be all right. You know why?”
“Why?” Jack said. He felt the warm burn of shame that came from being a man with his head firmly inserted into his own arse.
“Because I trust you,” Pete said. “And I trust myself. And I know that while we’re together, trying to keep things safe for our daughter, that no power on this earth or any other can stop us.” She put her hands gently on either side of Jack’s face, one thumb running down the scar on his cheek.
“You think you don’t deserve trust or anything else from me,” Pete said. “But that’s shite. You’re the only one who can stop this, Jack.
We’re
the only ones who can stand up and say no, the world will keep spinning through this day, and all the days to come. It’s a burden, and probably one we don’t deserve, but we must do it, and I know we will.” She pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Together.”
Jack grabbed her, needing to feel her warmth, her heartbeat, and pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her body, which was so small it still fit neatly into his arms, as if they’d been meant to stand side by side from the very start. “You’re a bloody amazing woman,” he said into Pete’s hair, “and I don’t deserve you.”
“No, you don’t,” Pete agreed. She straightened up and looked at him. “But I’m here, and I’m kicking you in the arse. Do what you have to do, Jack, to keep the world turning, and I’ll always be here when you need me. Right?”
“Right,” Jack said. He picked up the tumbler and went into the kitchen, pouring another generous mouthful of whiskey. He didn’t have much, but he’d seen Legion’s face. He knew for sure what the demon intended to do, even if he didn’t believe Legion had orchestrated things to the degree he claimed. And there was someone else from the visions afflicting him who would have some answers.
“I’ll be back,” he told Pete when he’d fortified himself against both his headache and the sinking feeling in his stomach that told him they were all fucked. “I’m going to see a man about the apocalypse.”
Jack took the tube to Oxford Street. After the shitstorm of the last few days, he needed people, flash, normalcy. All of the things he usually hated about London—posh types pushing through the crowds, herds of ASBOs kids screeching into their mobiles, tourists blocking entire swaths of the pavement to snap photos of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure—now made him feel like he could finally lower his shoulders from his ears and relax for a few breaths.
It was hard for a demon or a sorcerer to blend in among so many mundane types. With so much metal and technology, it was a dead spot for Fae as well. He was just another plonker shuffling past the wafer-thin girls going in and out of Topshop, just another middle-aged bloke paging through the New Releases rack at HMV while a pudgy employee half his age rolled his eyes at Jack’s leather from behind his ironic glasses.
Jack walked as far as Tottenham Court Road, where he turned from Oxford Street to Bloomsbury Street and the honking, glittering, bleeping commerce turned into refined flats and posh antique shops. He passed the hulk of the British Museum, turned around and made it as far as Piccadilly Circus before he was satisfied that he wasn’t being followed or watched by anything or anyone more sinister than a herd of Swedish teenagers sitting by the fountain, eating sandwiches and snapping photos of each other.
He turned his senses away from the crowds around him and into the Black, which was strong in this old part of the City. Whitechapel had so many layers that the flow was muted, blocked by a hundred competing channels of spirits, death, black magic, and cold iron distorting the signal.
Here, though, things were old, and they tended to stay the same. He was standing at the edge of a massive circle, bound on all sides by stone and with a massive iron focus in the center. You couldn’t ask for a better thin spot between the daylight and the Black.
Jack used the alley between the Piccadilly Waterstones and the next building to slip the bonds of daytime, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself in a twilight world, sun down but light not yet snuffed out.
A few figures drifted through the thin wisps of fog. The temperature here was fallish, and Jack sank inside his leather. The Black had a different flow—different time, different season, different citizens.
The figures—a woman in a black mourning gown circa Queen Victoria and some kind of shapeshifter poured into racing leathers—cast long, unblinking stares in his direction.
Jack saw the red thread binding the mouth of the woman and the black eyes and pointed ears of the shifter, and he shook his head. Not so long ago, a zombie and a lycanthrope would have been ripping each other to shreds. They were both children of a necromancer—one started as a corpse, one started as a man—but as with all siblings, there were certain rivalries.
True shapeshifters, living creatures that had emigrated to the Black from a dusty corner of Who-Knows-Where, were rare. The juice to bespell yourself to flip from human to bear, big cat, wolf, or other creature didn’t come along very often. But leave it to a clever fleshcrafter to figure out that if you got ahold of a living subject, you could pop out their consciousness and drop in whatever you liked, augmenting their muscle and bone and blood to be your very own little Lon Chaney wannabe.
Whatever they were up to, Jack decided he wanted no part of it. It was just another symptom of how sideways things were, war making strange bedfellows and all that.
He walked on, keeping his eyes off the pair so they wouldn’t think he wanted to involve himself in their business, either as a customer or an interloper, and fixed his senses on finding the familiar roads through the twilight to the one spot in the Black he could conceivably call home.
It had been a long time since he’d frequented the Lament with any regularity. Life got in the way of visiting his local. Life, demonic prison breaks, zombie armageddons … Jack looked up at the red door, triple-banded in iron, and felt a flutter of unease. He didn’t have many friends on the twilight side since he’d put down Nergal. Fuck it, he’d never had many
friends,
just folks who tolerated him, but now even the tolerance was gone. He’d lost count of the number of “Never darken my doorway again” speeches he’d gotten in the wake of the primordial demon pulling his Hulk-smash act on London.
Strange bedfellows, he reminded himself. There were at least a few rational sorts left who’d listen to what he had to say before they tossed him out on his arse.
He hoped.
The Lament was suitably dim on the inside, the right amount of shadow tucked in between the pools of light cast by sooty ceiling fixtures and candles stuck in mounds of wax in the center of the tables. Jack tried to ignore the fact that the burble of conversation stopped when he walked in, that only the thready tune of the jukebox carried on.
He caught a few poisonous stares from a table of hedgewitches sharing a pitcher of pink cocktails, and one outright bird flip from a pair of tweedy mages he pegged as too mild-mannered to be anything but sex cultists. He ignored it all. There was a time he would have knocked over some chairs and kicked up a fuss until someone threw a punch, but he had a mission now.
The bartender was new, a petite Indian girl wearing a Neon Trees shirt, and she set him up with a pint of Newcastle with a minimum of fuss and glaring. “Anything for you?” she asked, when Jack pushed the pint to the side without tasting it.