Authors: Caitlin Kittredge
“I’m confused, Jack,” Belial said. “See, I thought we had an agreement, an arrangement even. Quid pro quo, Clarice. But now you seem upset.” He placed a hand on Jack’s cheek, black nails digging in ever so slightly. “Do tell me what’s troubling you, Jackie boy.”
Jack slapped the demon’s hand away. “Careful, Belial. I’m not your bitch anymore. My soul is my own.”
“That’s highly debatable.” Belial snorted. “But fine, I’m not the man holding the pink slip, so what’s twisted up your panties this time?”
“Legion,” Jack said. He watched the demon’s face, but looking for Belial’s tell was about as useful as looking for a unicorn to give him a lift down to Brighton.
“So you already found out his name,” Belial purred. “Quick work for you, Jack. I think our dear Petunia would have figured that out in about half the time, but then again, you never were a star pupil.”
“I know that Legion is a load of shit,” Jack said. “I know he’s not real. So why don’t you quit wanking and be honest with me for a change?” He leaned even closer to the demon, close enough so that instead of herbs, he smelled the sharp, burnt stench of the demon’s body, the tickle of good whiskey and cigars, the tinge of some kind of colonge that was as thick and heavy as the scent of rot.
“Jack, I’ve always been honest with you,” Belial said. “I may occasionally say things that you don’t want to hear, but lying isn’t good business.”
“I’ll send you back to the Pit so fast your head will spin off,” Jack growled. “So either you answer me or I’m giving you a shove over that line there.”
“Jack, Jack,” Belial sighed, then shoved Jack back so hard his ankle twisted and he went down on his arse. “You really think I’d answer your page if I didn’t feel like it?” Belial snarled. He towered over Jack, blocking out the infant sun, his shadow falling cool across Jack’s face. “You didn’t even give me a proper blood sacrifice. Because that’s you, Jack—always making it halfway and expecting someone else to finish up for you.” Belial leaned in, and Jack forced himself to look into the demon’s coal-fire eyes, not blinking, not flinching, just staying still and feeling the pulse in his neck flutter as his heart primed him for flight.
“What do you think you know that gives you the right to toe up to me?” the demon hissed. “Because it’s not nerve, Jackie, nor is it conviction. You forget—I’ve had my hands around your heart. I’ve seen your guts spill onto the floor. I’ve tasted your blood and heard you scream for mercy, you stain upon my boot, so just because I came to you for help don’t think for a
moment
that I won’t crush you if you become inconvenient.”
Jack held his breath. It was the only way to keep from shaking under the onslaught of Belial’s rage. “I think you’re a fucking liar,” he said softly.
Belial blinked, twin spots of color rising in his pale fish-belly cheeks. “Excuse me?”
“I think you do need me,” Jack said. “Because I’m the only one who’ll help you, and I think you’re scared, Belial. More scared than you’ve ever been. Because whoever he is—Legion or someone else, doesn’t matter—he’s managed to excavate the one little spark of fear left in that charred lump of shit you call a heart, and he’s lit it aflame.”
Jack grabbed Belial by the demon’s tie and shoved him, just hard enough to get the purchase to stand up. He was careful not to touch skin; getting a jolt of Belial’s magic wasn’t on his agenda for this day or any other. “I think you need me—not to stop him, but to make sure you still have a place in Hell when this is all over.”
Going against every instinct in him, Jack turned his back on the demon and lit a cigarette, looking west toward the City. The sun was up now, the sky the stained yellow of aged wallpaper, bruise-blue clouds clinging low above the dome of the Old Bailey and St. Paul’s, flirting with the spires of Victoria Bridge. “I love this city,” Jack said. “I’ve loved it since the first time I saw it, tasted its magic, realized that I’d finally found a place I could rest my head without hearing the voices of the dead on a fucking tape loop to eternity. And since you brought me into this, I’ve seen it destroyed over and over again. People I love slaughtered. Nothing but ashes in the air.”
He exhaled, feeling the demon creeping around the edges of the chalk, neither of them quite willing to risk breaking off the dance just yet. “I will do whatever it takes, Belial,
whatever
it takes to stop what I’ve seen. I don’t give a shit about you, about Hell, or any of that. I’m free of you, and if I have to throw you under the bus to keep my city and my people safe, then I’ll do it with a smile on my fucking face.”
He turned around, praying he didn’t meet a slagged-off Belial out of his human skin, in full rageful glory, ready to rip Jack’s nuts off.
Belial stared at him, still in the shape of a man, a shape vibrating with fury. But Belial was an old pro at this back-and-forth of threats and offers. Too much so to ever let his rage show on his face.
“So if you want me to keep you in this race,” Jack said, “and you want to have a City and a cozy flat and a bevy of elementals and arse-kissing Named to go home to when it’s all over, then you will be straight with me from this second on.”
He crushed the cigarette, his mouth bitter with bile and fear. “You don’t have to tell me the whole story, and I don’t have to help you. You think you’ve seen me at my worst, Belial, down there in the Pit when you owned my soul, but I’m telling you now, mate: You lie to me again, and you’ll learn you haven’t seen anything yet.” The memories rushed up at him, tinged with black and red, echoing with nothing but screams. Jack shut his eyes for a heartbeat, opened them to find Belial with his more usual expression of disgusted ennui.
“You are truly an impossible man among an already trying race,” he said. “I look forward to the day when I can finally be rid of you.”
“Same, times two, mate,” Jack said. “Talk.”
“Legion—or whoever—stole something,” Belial said. “From the vaults. There are things buried in them I don’t know about. None of the Princes have a complete catalog, except maybe Azrael, and you know where he’s gotten off to.”
“And this trinket is what’s going to bring the whole mess crashing down?” Jack asked. Belial nodded. Jack felt a twist in his stomach, as if he were at the top of a rollercoaster, overlooking the drop, but he shoved it down.
“You must have a guess,” he said. “What is it? Weapon? The Hell-spawned equivalent of a nuclear bomb?”
“I don’t
know,
” Belial growled. “All we know is that he broke in, took something, and left again. There’s an empty spot with no record of what filled it. From one of the very oldest rooms in the vault—a room Baal and Beelzebub didn’t even see fit to tell me existed until it happened. What I showed you is the curated artifacts, Jack. The key and the eye and all that rot. But things get lost. People forget. All except him.”
Jack scratched his chin. “Or somebody told him what door to open and what deposit box to pull.”
Belial showed his teeth. “See, that’s the sort of quick thinking that makes me glad we didn’t just drown all the humans when they first started swanning around on two legs.”
“Thanks for the thought,” Jack said. “So Legion—or whoever—stole whatever, and buggered off to hide on earth? With not so much as a by-your-leave from you or the other Princes?”
“Jack, if I knew where a madman bent on breaking the universe was hiding, don’t you think I’d be there instead of choking on this hippie crap you insist on burning on a rooftop?” Belial snapped. “I don’t know, and that part was the truth. But yes, the artifact is the way he’s going to bring down the walls, and that’s why I’m concerned.”
Jack kicked some dirt onto the pile of burning herbs and rubbed out part of the chalk line with his foot. The demon wasn’t going to chew on him, for now. The circle’s use was over. “You could have just told me all this to begin with.”
“Unnecessary,” Belial said. “You would have just wasted time trying to figure out what he stole and not focused on the real problem, that aside from being a thief he has a remarkable pull with both Hell and the Black’s malcontents. He’s going to turn every dispossessed nutter in the Black against the daylight world, and who do you think they’ll point to as a scapegoat?”
“Harry Potter?” Jack couldn’t resist needling the demon a bit. Belial had lied to him and almost set him against an unknown quantity that commanded unknown power. He was far from the mood to play nice.
“You, you tit,” Belial said. “You and everyone close to you. You used to be a bad man, but now all you have a reputation for is swooping in and saving the day when nasty types try to ruin it.”
“Get off my roof,” Jack said. “I ended the circle what feels like an eternity ago.”
“Don’t take your mood out on me,” Belial said. “Save it for Legion.”
“He’s not Legion,” Jack snapped. “That’s a story. Even demons have monster stories.”
“Yeah,” Belial said. “Ask yourself where the story started, Jack. I wager if you think about that, it’ll scare you. It did me.”
Belial did the trick where there was a glimmer of sunlight and a shiver of wind, and when Jack blinked he’d gone, leaving nothing but a burned smell and a throbbing in Jack’s skull.
Jack sighed and bent down to shove his gear back into his kit bag. That was the thing with spells—a lot of pomp and crackling magic, and in the end you were usually no better than when you started, and sometimes considerably worse.
He preferred his comfort zone as a hex-slinger, somebody who did the dirty close-up magic that broke bones and scrambled brains. Leave the ritual and the robes to people like Morwenna Morgenstern, and eventually Margaret, people with enough training and power to command the vast forces of the universe.
Jack had spent most of his time caring less about the vast universe. Surviving was enough work, and he avoided the types who wanted to make him into one of those twats who stood at the center of a circle while the energies of the Black crashed through them like a tidal wave, sweeping away everything in their path.
The notion scared the hell out of him. It would, Jack reckoned, scare the hell out of anyone with sense.
He intended to stand up, climb down the fire escape, and go inside to talk things over with Pete. She always knew what to do. Always saw a way through. Pete never gave up, to the point where she could be psychotically stubborn. In times such as these, Jack reasoned, he could do with some bullheadedness on his side.
Instead, the world spun sideways as he rose, and the pink sky above London bled into black, as his sight rushed up and drowned everything in a void of smoke and howling klaxons.
Moisture dotted his cheeks, and grit and debris abraded Jack’s body as he lay prone. He heard the persistent, unending wailing of emergency sirens drifting over him. Wave after wave of sound penetrated his skin, down to his bones, deep into the fear center of his brain.
Get up,
it snarled, and his eyes snapped open, a breath that tasted of chemical smoke and hot ash filling his empty lungs.
The air hung heavy, like wet cotton pressed over his face, and rain plinked onto the metal sheet roofing and the pavement below.
He was on a roof, yes, but not the roof of his flat. He stood with his back to the roiling Thames, on top of a low warehouse in the Docklands, the type he’d thought had all been bulldozed in the service of gentrification.
A slim figure stood with his back to Jack, and at first he thought it was Belial. He had a moment of stinging rage knowing that he never should have given the demon an inroad into his head.
The man turned so Jack caught his profile, and Jack saw it wasn’t Belial at all. This man was fully human, wearing a tan jacket and jeans, the sort of getup a bloke wore when he was trying to appear laid back and fun but only succeeded in looking like a twat.
“You can’t stop me,” the man said to Jack, and a smile grew on his face. The smile was as thin and nasty as a clean wound, oozing malice the way a razor cut oozes blood.
Opening his mouth to reply, Jack instead choked when he saw himself take a few steps across the roof toward the man.
This version of Jack looked like shit. Face beat to hell, one arm hanging in a makeshift sling made from his shirt, his tattoos almost obscured by soot and dirt.
More than that, Jack thought, he looked old. His eyes were sunken, and the salt-and-pepper dark of his natural hair was starting to show below the peroxide job. He favored his bad knee, and exhaustion was evident in his voice when he spoke.
“Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to give it the old try.”
This was more than a vision, Jack realized, as his head started to throb with the sort of pain normally produced only by putting a power driver to your skull. It was an echo, a direct window into something that hadn’t happened yet, but would, sooner rather than later. Not a maybe future—a certain one. The psychic feedback of the event was so great that this him, this tired, beat-to-shit future version of Jack Winter, was passing it along the line, back to the Jack who could still do something about it.
Clever bastard,
Jack thought. He might not have much, but he at least had that going for him.
“Jack, I admire you and I wish you’d consider the reality here,” said the man. Or was it a man? Jack wasn’t physically here, so his senses were muted, those neurons that lit up when another magic user was near. Was this just a demon who was far better than Belial at looking human, because he’d had more practice? Something like Legion?
“The reality is that this world isn’t a play set for you to kick over whenever you have a temper fit,” future-Jack snarled. His nostrils flared, crusted with dried blood. Jack winced at the thought of the beating coming down the pike at him. Always inevitable, never pleasant.
“This world is broken,” Legion whispered. “Hell is broken. The Black is broken. You don’t understand, Jack. They’re all pieces of something that shattered, and all I’m doing is putting it back together.”
“By killing great swaths of humanity and demons alike,” future-Jack snarled. “You’re a proper fascist, mate. Hitler and Mussolini would be proud to count you.”