Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
Jack avoided the festivities as best he could, heading for the docks where you could find a ferry south, if you were either not human or suicidal.
Before he’d gone far, though, he heard screaming of a different kind—human and panicked. Not that human screams were rare outside the safe zones, but this was bookended by the kind of cackling that Jack attributed to men who enjoyed inflicting pain on smaller, weaker things.
He rounded the corner into an alley that dead-ended at the water. Once, the area had been posh, like most of the wharfs. When he’d first landed in London, the Docklands had been a rotting mass of wharves and junkies and tips falling into the river. Over the years, the tips had been knocked down and the junkies shuffled off to places like Peckham, and the wharves supported posh shops, restaurants where the prices were longer than the menus, and gleaming towers of flats that Jack always figured cost a quid to even look at.
Now it was all burned or overrun with the gangs and the zombies. He could smell the river from here. It was like London had reverted to its dirty, blood-soaked roots. A river full of sewage, a sky full of smoke, and streets full of people so desperate they were worse than animals.
There were four of them surrounding the source of the screaming, a woman with a backpack which one of the hooligans was busy ripping into.
They didn’t sport colors, except for the rusty streaks across their bare torsos. Jack dropped his head to his chest. Fucking cannibals. What was it about people that made them decide the quickest way to deal with the end of the world as they knew it was to turn each other into entrées?
He should just walk away. There were four of them, and often enough cannibalism led directly to necromancers, all too happy to have a band of homicidal nutters who’d work for long pig. Bad enough the cannibals ran about feasting on human flesh; being juiced up on black magic was just unfair.
Still, Jack picked up a length of pipe lying in the street and marched forward. He hit the one rummaging through the pack first, laying him out on his face, and then banged the pipe off an overturned metal rubbish bin. “Oi!”
The cannibals turned as one. Their eyes were as empty as the next addict’s, and Jack sighed. They were definitely running on sorcery.
Jack set himself, gripping the pipe so he felt the threads bite into his palm. “Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
The leader was a skinny bloke with short hair, pasty and small. He might have been one of the posh twats occupying this stretch of the wharves before it all kicked off. Jack threw a leg-locker hex on him and watched him go down, one of his friends falling with him. Jack took the brunt of the third’s charge on his shoulder, the cannibal glancing off and going past. He responded with a hit to the kidneys with the pipe, and another to the back of the cannibal’s skull when he went down.
And another, just for good measure.
The woman screamed something, and Jack turned to see the leader up and bearing down on him. He wondered, as the man closed his teeth on the sleeve of Jack’s leather, why she hadn’t done a rabbit as soon as he’d shown up. Might explain why she’d gotten caught by cannibals in the first place—she was too fucking stupid to live.
Jack let himself fall. The bloke wasn’t big enough to pin him, and Jack rolled them and pressed the pipe across the bloke’s throat. He kept pressing until the bastard twitched and went still.
He realized he’d forgotten about the leader’s friend when he felt a waft of air across the back of his neck as the cannibal wrapped his hands around it.
Then there was a report, a sting in his ears as the shot echoed back and forth from the narrow alley walls, and the woman straightened up from her pack holding a handgun, an old-fashioned revolver that gits in movies called a .38 Special.
The cannibal dropped, the exit wound in his chest the size of Jack’s balled fist.
“Fuck,” he said, sitting down hard. The woman picked up a piece of gauze from her pack and approached him, wiping what turned out to be cannibal blood off his face.
“You know,” she said. “You have a shotgun strapped to your back. Why go to all this trouble?”
Jack blinked at the nurse from King’s Cross. Her face was scratched and dirty, and the collar of her scrubs hung in rags, but she looked a lot more together than he felt. “What the fuck are you doing out here?” she asked, tossing the gauze away, sticking the gun in her waist, and gathering up the wreckage of her pack.
“I could ask you the very same question,” he said.
“Not everyone who needs help made it to the safety line,” she said. “And now the army won’t let them in if they make it, so I’m out here.”
She hauled Jack to his feet with surprising ease for a woman who’d almost been turned into carpaccio. He let her. He wasn’t young any longer, and a dust-up like that belonged to the Jack Winter who strode through the streets in steel toes and black leather, daring someone to give him an excuse to shed blood. His own or the other bloke’s, it hadn’t mattered.
“How about you?” she said. “You one of those mages? The ones who claim they aren’t doing sorcery even though everyone knows they fucking are?”
Jack shook his head. If she’d seen the leg-locker hex, he’d deny it. People in the safe zones hated mages. They hated magic, period. Believed in it, saw it with their own eyes, and hated it. That bit hadn’t changed—give the human race something it didn’t understand and it got right down to the business of burning it out of existence.
“Just heading across,” he said.
The nurse’s light brows drew together. “That’s demon territory.”
Jack nodded. “I know,” he said. “And to answer your other question, luv, I didn’t ventilate those cannibals because I didn’t want to also ventilate you.”
She snorted. “Glad you’re concerned with my safety, because you sure as hell don’t care about your own, going over there.” She pointed at the columns of smoke rising from across the Thames. “You go over there, you’re dead.”
Jack sighed. “Look, what’s your name?” He didn’t want some gun-toting Florence Nightingale to stop him from crossing in the mistaken belief that his life was worth saving. He had to shift her before she decided they were friends, or worse, that she needed to help him.
That was how people ended up getting hurt. There’d already been enough of that.
“Ida,” she said. “Ida Higgins.”
“Christ, what did you ever do to your parents?” Jack said.
Ida Higgins shrugged. “My grandmother’s name. What’s yours?”
“Jack,” he said. “Jack Caldecott.” Ida hated mages, and he was one of the big names on the list. He figured if Pete were here, she wouldn’t mind him using her maiden name to save his arse.
“You want to tell me why you’re bent on feeding yourself inch by inch to demons, Jack?” Ida said.
While he’d been wasting time saving Ida, the horizon had started to bleed red. The smoky sunset was already in full, apocalyptic swing. It would be almost night by the time he made it across.
Fuck it,
Jack decided. It wasn’t like he was planning to come back anyway. “Because my daughter is over there,” he said. “If I go after her, I may die. If I don’t, she will for sure.”
“Take the baby.” Pete shoved Lily into Jack’s arms while she screamed and thrashed, her face several shades darker than the pink onesie he’d dressed her in that morning.
Jack tried to breathe, but there was nothing, no air, and his vision began to spin. Pete snatched Lily back. “Jesus, Jack! If you don’t want to quiet her, then go pick Margaret up from school. Either way, get off your arse and be a bit useful.”
He blinked at Pete. His eyes were dry, gritty.
As if he were still standing in the smoke.
“Was I asleep?” he asked.
Pete rolled her eyes. “How should I know? I’ve been dealing with our darling daughter’s fit for the past half hour.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Jack said, taking Lily back and bouncing her until her screams became merely complaints.
He wanted it to be a dream, and for now, it would be. He’d had dreams before that were totally real in the moment.
“Thank you,” Pete said. Her hair dusted her eyes, the new pixie cut she’d adopted standing on end, and her face was flushed. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just in a rotten mood, I guess.”
Jack shifted Lily to one arm and used the other to pull Pete close. She smelled like baby powder and shampoo. When he kissed her, she smiled against his mouth. “So I take it all is forgiven?”
“I’ll keep the baby occupied,” he said. “Go get Margaret.”
He waited until Pete flew out the door of their flat, keys jangling, before he collapsed into a chair with Lily on his chest.
Dreams about being dead were nothing new. He’d been having those since he was barely past puberty. Dreams about Pete being dead and Lily gone … those were new.
If it was a dream at all, and you know it wasn’t,
something treacherous whispered inside him.
Visions and prophecy were a load of shit, as far as Jack was concerned, but he couldn’t change the fact that what just happened had been real, a direct line from his second sight into some sort of apocalyptic ripple reaching out from the Black and disturbing things so much that the whole thing had rung his skull like a bell.
Or, he convinced himself more and more as Lily settled down to sleep on his chest and he managed to pour a glass of whiskey one-handed, it really
was
just a dream. A horrible, vivid, shit-your-pants dream, but just the same, nothing but his own frayed neurons firing out of sequence.
He’d almost managed to talk himself into believing the whole nightmare had been just that when a bird crashed into the glass of the flat, sending spider cracks across the heavy pane. Half of the wavy panes had survived the Blitz and everything since, and Jack felt his hand spasm as the whiskey glass shattered in it. “Fuck!” he hissed.
Lily woke up and began to wail as the crow fluttered on the windowsill outside, helpless with a damaged wing. Jack started to get up and help the silly thing, cursing up a blue streak as he put Lily in her bounce chair and took off his shirt to wrap around his hand, sliced to shit and dribbling blood all over the floor.
He stopped when he saw the rest of the crows. Not just crows—ravens, sparrows, all the other birds in London, too. They alighted on rooftops, on wires, on the awnings of the money-changers and the mobile phone kiosk below his window. People on the street stopped and pointed, and even the cars on Mile End Road slowed as their passengers stared.
Birds, as far as the eye could see, just sitting and staring toward his flat. The crow righted itself and tapped its beak against the glass over and over, as more and more cracks appeared in the pane.
“Fuck off!” Jack shouted, and thumped on the glass with his good hand. He felt the constricting panic of a bad attack of sight coming on, the throbbing in his skull that he’d do anything to quiet, the tides of magic all around him converging into a drowning wave.
As one, the birds took flight, and Jack felt the wave of magic choke him and take him under. Blackness took him before he hit the floor.
“Jack?”
Water hit him in the face and burned when it went up his nose. Jack choked and bolted up. Margaret Smythe, the teenage girl he and Pete had saved from an apolcalyptic cult, crouched next to him, her school water bottle upended over his head.
“Sorry,” Margaret said. Beyond her, Jack saw Pete standing with her mobile, talking to the 999 service.
“No problem, luv,” he said. He started to swipe the water off his face, but Margaret shook her head. “Don’t. You’ll get blood everywhere.”
Jack saw the red puddled on the floor next to him, then took in the broken glass and a window ledge newly covered with bird shit. “Is Lily all right?” he asked.
Margaret went and got a dish towel, which she wrapped around his hand. “Fine,” she said. “What happened?”
Jack wasn’t sure himself, and he definitely wasn’t going to get Margaret all worked up over nothing. She was only thirteen, and she had endured one set of crap parents already.
“You’re good at that first aid thing,” he said instead.
Margaret shrugged. “My mum used to crack her head on stuff all the time when she passed out. At least you’re just clumsy.”
“Might need some work on the bedside manner, though,” Jack said.
Pete hung up and came in. “I’m just going to skip asking what happened,” she said. “There was a pile-up on the M25, so it’ll be faster to just drive to the A&E. Think you can manage it?”
Jack nodded. He’d welcome anything that involved a lot of normal people and lights and noise, even though he usually hated hospitals.
“Stay with Lily,” Pete told Margaret. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
The A&E was packed and busy, but between Jack’s steadily dripping dish towel and Pete’s insistence, they were put in a curtained cubicle almost immediately.
When the nurse pulled the screen, Pete slumped in the plastic chair opposite him. “You want to tell me what happened now?”
Jack shrugged, even though his cut throbbed with every motion. “Window broke, I cut my hand, it was worse than I thought and I fainted.” He leaned back and shut his eyes. “Humiliating, yes. Cause for alarm, no.”
“You should know by now you can’t lie to me.” Pete’s weight shifted the mattress next to his. “You’ve been pale as a sheet ever since we came in.”
“Blood loss?” Jack offered lamely.
“Bullshit,” Pete said. Jack sighed. He was going to have to tell her. Maybe saying it out loud would make the whole thing seem like something kicked up by the intersection of his talent and a hiccup in the flow of power winding under this world, full of its hospitals and traffic wrecks and everything mundane. Something weird, but not worthy of worry.
“I had a dream,” he said. “It was … it was the future. Things had gone wrong. And you and Lily … you were dead.”
He thought Pete might be about to smack him, or that she’d walk out, until he felt her head cradle against his chest, her small frame sharing the skinny hospital bed. “And how did that lead to you making the flat look like a crime scene?”