Jack wished fiercely that he’d taken the cigarette when the demon had offered. “Fine, the end is nigh. What am I supposed to do, march about with a sign hanging off me neck?”
“Help me stop it, of course,” Belial said. “Because old-fashioned as it might be, I like things the way they are. I don’t relish the apocalypse. I’m a contented creature, Jack, and this bastard has threatened to upset all that. So I’m asking. Not cutting a deal. Asking you. Help me put the brakes on this long skid we’re on into armageddon. If you do…” Belial’s smile was bitter this time. “I owe you a favor.”
That made Jack pause. Vision or not, Belial was talking about the end, the big show, the falling of all the walls that kept the Black apart from the daylight, and the dead from walking the earth as the living did. Like most things Belial said, it was a load of crap, but a favor from a demon?
Jack had a feeling, if something big enough to send this vision to him was coming, that might come in handy.
And because Jack didn’t believe in ignoring the obvious, he thought Belial’s shit-stirrer would probably have some part in kicking things off.
Jack shivered at the thought of a world without the Black and the daylight—just one world, rampant with all of the darkness and evil that sprang from magic, and the human suffering and wickedness on the other. No buffers, no barriers, nothing to keep the world sane.
“Fine,” he said to Belial. “But that favor? It’s going to be the biggest you ever do.”
CHAPTER 5
The army evacuated Whitechapel at dawn, convoys of trucks miles long rolling down Whitechapel Road, spreading through Tower Hamlets ahead of the fires and the looters.
The corpses weren’t all human, or even mostly. Scavengers from across the river had made it to the Docklands in the night, and Jack had been listening to the screams of people too stupid or unlucky to make it inside before the legions of Hell fell upon them.
They were mostly scavengers, carrion feeders or elementals that crawled inside human hosts and left the street littered with corpses.
The trucks didn’t care. They crunched over flesh and skulls, the long dead and the ones that were still warm.
By the time Jack held the door open for Pete and Lily and Margaret, it was chaos all around. Trucks were on fire, the army had taken cover anywhere they could, and the streets were filled with mobs of panicked civilians and looters all struggling to run from the demons.
* * *
Pete tried to turn with the baby and go back inside, but a flaming bottle shattered against the building, and flames sprouted so close Jack could feel the heat singe his eyebrows.
Magaret screamed, and he grabbed her hand while Pete shielded Lily, and they ran down the alley where they’d kept Pete’s Mini Cooper. The car had been looted weeks ago, was just a spray-painted corpse now, no glass, no tires, and no engine.
Gunfire chattered from the road. The army hadn’t figured out yet that bullets didn’t do much good against things that weren’t human. Jack hoped, at least, that they’d put a dent in the looters.
“Where are we going to go?” Pete panted. “If we can’t evacuate, we’re fucked.”
“If we go back that way, we’re fucked,” Jack said. Margaret’s grip on his hand was so tight that he could feel his fingers going numb. “Maybe we can try to get to a tube station. At least we’ll be off the streets.”
“They shut down the stations weeks ago,” Pete said. She looked up at him, pulling Lily tight against her. “Jack, what are we going to do?”
Jack didn’t get to tell her he had no fucking idea. A cluster of looters appeared at the far end of the alley, and the leader let out a sharp whistle, pointing at Jack and Pete.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. He could see it now—they’d be beaten, anything useful would be taken, and then if they were lucky it would end there. If they weren’t, they’d be taken or killed, or left alive but too weak to fight off the demons that hid in every dark spot in the city.
It was Pete who acted while Jack was still frozen. She shoved Lily into Margaret’s arms. “Run,” she told Margaret. “Get to a truck, and go with the evacuation. We’ll find you.”
“But Pete…” Margaret’s eyes filled up with panicked tears.
“Don’t argue!” Pete snapped. “We will find you, but you need to take Lily and you need to run.”
Margaret turned and fled, Lily wailing. Jack looked at Pete, panic forming a bubble in his chest and making his heart thrum. “We should have stayed together,” he said.
Pete turned back toward the looters, who were taking their time. They knew Jack and Pete had nowhere to go. It was either the gang, or the demons out on the main road. Magaret could find her way to the army, as long as they bought her some time.
“I’m sorry,” Pete said.
Jack felt the panic burst abruptly, replaced with something that felt like a blade to the gut. “We’re not going to meet them, are we?”
“Maybe,” Pete said. “But the important thing is we give them time to get away.”
She didn’t look upset or afraid, but then, Pete never did. She was strong. If it weren’t for him, Jack thought, she probably would have survived even this without a scratch.
He threw a leg-locker hex on the first looter, but there were more and more of them, and he and Pete got pushed, slowly, back toward the body of the Mini. Jack was about to say fuck it and hex up a fire that would incinerate every last looter when one sprang forward and grabbed Pete, pulling her forward into the forest of grasping hands and cold, frenzied faces.
Pete screamed and kicked at the looter, but before Jack could do anything, a shot rang out, snapping off the walls of the narrow alley. The first was followed by another volley as three soldiers with machine guns advanced, mowing down the looters until none of them moved.
Jack caught Pete as she swayed, and he didn’t understand for a moment why she was falling. The looters hadn’t had blades, just tire irons and cricket bats, things left over from when they’d been rational people, before the advent of the demons and the dead had driven them over the edge.
Then he saw the two blossoms of red on her shirt, and he started screaming. Pete fell, and she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything. Her eyes stayed open, but she didn’t look at him, and there wasn’t enough breath left in her lungs to say anything.
He’d never imagined this. That it would be quick, unexpected, that one moment Pete would be in his arms and the next she’d be gone, just another body out of the hundreds he’d seen in the preceding weeks. He’d never imagined that Pete would die before him.
Jack wanted to stay with her, right there on the bloody pavement, but the soldiers grabbed him and forced him onto a truck. He fought them. They’d killed her, and now he was alone. Finally, one of them hit Jack on the skull with the butt of a rifle, and he tumbled into the merciful void of nothing.
CHAPTER 6
Belial was watching him when his eyes flickered open. “It’s a little weird when you go out like that, just so you know,” he said. “People are staring.”
Jack sat up and immediately wished he hadn’t. “You might want to move unless you want me redecorating that ugly suit of yours,” he told Belial.
The demon pulled Jack to his feet and hailed a cab. Once they were inside, he looked Jack up and down.
“You going to tell me what you saw?”
Jack pressed his forehead against the glass. “No.” The gunshot still echoed in his ears, and he could still see Pete lying at his feet, silent and bloody.
Belial shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it might interest you to know that what you’re seeing isn’t certain.”
“‘Always in motion is the future?’” Jack grumbled.
“More like, you’re going to come down to the Pit with me and we’re going to convince the Princes that they can’t bargain their way out of this,” Belial said.
That made Jack sit up. His head was still thick and muzzy, but a day trip to Hell was the one t
hing worse than the visions that had started knocking him on his arse. “I don’t fucking think so,” he said. “The last time I was there, if you’ll remember, the Princes didn’t exactly take to me.”
“I’m one, and I certainly don’t,” Belial said. “But you’re tied up in this now, whether you like it or not.”
Jack wanted to argue that this was a demon’s mess, and that Belial could piss off, but much as he hated to admit it, Belial was right. He was tied up in it. The things he was seeing couldn’t be written off. If there was even a chance that what he’d seen could happen, he couldn’t do anything but try to help Belial stop it.
Pete and Lily weren’t going to end up in the place he’d seen. He wasn’t going to be that man, drifting through the end of the world with nothing to anchor him except the fact that his heart was still beating.
The cab stopped at the entrance to Regent’s Park, and Belial stepped out. Jack followed him, and Belial held out his hand. “Let me do the talking,” he said. “Things with the Princes haven’t exactly been smooth since all this kicked off.”
“You mean you found someone besides me who thinks you’re an insufferable twat?” Jack said. “Imagine that.”
Belial heaved a deep sigh. “The day the first human crawled out of the mud was the day the rest of the universe went to shit,” he muttered. “Just stick with me, and try not to get both of us turned into furniture, all right?”
“Sure,” Jack said to himself. “Sweet-talk the Princes of Hell. What could be easier?”
CHAPTER 7
Jack hated the way the air smelled in Hell. The City belched smoke from its furnaces and factories, and the heavy, hot winds borne out of the surrounding white bone deserts invaded his nostrils with the worst elements of both a garbage tip on a hot day and a vigorously burning tire fire.
He hated the sounds, too. The clanging of the heavy iron trains that ran on tracks fifty stories above the cesspits at street level. The snarling and hissing of the elemental demons that prowled every alley and dark byway like packs of especially hungry dogs. And the screaming. It was like flies buzzing, after a time—the screams of tormented souls floating from every corner of Hell.
Belial’s new quarters, as a Prince, were two thirds up the tallest spire in the City, the triple-towered fortress that, to Jack’s eyes, had always resembled a pitchfork. Jack wondered if that was on purpose. Demons weren’t known for their sense of humor.
“Nice place,” he said, looking around the flat. Twenty-foot ceilings and black glass floors aside, the space wasn’t what Jack had imagined for a ruler of Hell. Everything was black or white, and aside from a rug made from the hide of some furry white creature that had three curling horns sprouting from its lifeless head, everything was made of stone or glass.
“It’ll do,” Belial said. Jack examined himself in a mirror framed in interlocked skeletal hands. He didn’t bothering asking if the bones were real.
“Bit severe, isn’t it?” he said. “Sort of reminds me of a monastery by way of a gay nightclub.”
“You implying something?” Belial asked, standing next to Jack so their reflections overlapped.
Jack turned his head. He didn’t like the demon that close. “You working up the courage to tell me something?”
Belial flashed him that grin and slapped him on the shoulder. “Get it all out of your system now. The Princes aren’t nearly as tolerant of that sewage pit you call a mouth.”
“You know,” Jack said, brushing Belial’s grip off him, “you’re one of them now. Still getting used to that heavy crown?”
“I include myself in that statement,” Belial said. “Now shut up and stay close.”
The first and only time Jack had stood before the Triumvirate, he’d seen them in a dull sort of corporate office, which fit his imagining of the Princes as a stodgy bunch of bureaucrats obsessed with bargains and rules and divvying up Hell so they all got an equal slice of the pie.
This time, Belial led him through smooth black hallways, arched at the top, which looked as if they’d been carved by the passage of some great serpent rather than any tool.
The room he opened the black double doors to was smaller than Jack had expected—too small for comfort. The remaining duo of Princes sat on either side of a long table inlaid with the bones of a winged creature, floating in clear resin like a fossil chipped out of the ground. The walls held a selection of paintings depicting medieval tortures, in graphic and colorful detail.
Jack sucked in a breath to dispel the tightness in his chest. They needed him, for whatever reason, he told himself. And he needed them, for the time being, if they were going to call a halt to the event sending him nervous breakdowns through the frequencies of the Black.
“I’ll never understand your proclivity for running to the humans whenever something goes wrong, Belial,” said the Prince on the right. Baal, Jack remembered, a bloke who did an even more piss-poor job with his human form than Belial. Baal had snake’s eyes and sallow skin spotted with sores. His tongue was twice as long and thin as a man’s, which gave his voice a curious sibilance. Bald, he resembled something that lived in the dark and popped out at night to eat unwitting household pets.
“You don’t understand a lot of things.” Belial took his seat at the head of the table. “You still think this can all be smoothed over.”
“He’s just an elemental, for fuck’s sake,” said the other Prince, Beelzebub. Where Baal couldn’t be bothered to look human, Beelzebub looked almost too human, slick and blond as a film star, and about as plastic. Belial at least looked like he had blood pumping through his veins. Beelzebub resembled one of those dolls that came to life and tried to carve up your family with a chainsaw.
“Wait, wait,” Jack said. Belial slitted his eyes, and Jack ignored the demon’s poisonous look. Belial may have managed to oust Azrael, the oldest of the three Princes, but he was still the same tosser who’d made Jack’s life a pain in the arse for over a decade. “This problem of yours is an elemental demon? Not even one of you Named fuckwits?”
“He is one of the legion, yes,” Baal hissed. “Is there a problem, skin sack?”
“No,” Jack said, spreading his hands. “No problem. Impressed, actually, that one of your office drones managed to get you three in such a tizzy.”
“Do yourself a favor, Mr. Winter, and stop talking before I turn your tongue into an appetizer,” said Beelzebub. “For fuck’s sake, Belial, do you think it’s funny to torture us with breathers?”
Jack kept his mouth shut. Baal was creepy and Belial was irritating, but he’d always had the sense that Beelzebub might actually be unbalanced. For a demon, that was saying something.
“You two knobs know full well how far his influence has spread into the Black and the daylight,” Belial said. “Face it—we’re demons. We need a man on the ground if we’re going to nip this in the bud.”
“Maybe we should give him something,” Beelzebub said. “A token concession so he’ll stop all this nonsense in Hell. Maybe something like … Europe.”
Belial’s fist hit the table, and the resin cracked. “We are not,” the demon snarled, “giving one fucking inch to something that crawled out of the ashes and the mud and challenged the rule of the Named. He’s spitting in your eye, Beelzebub. If your head wasn’t so far up your own colon perhaps you’d have noticed.”
“Listen, you upstart prick…” Beelzebub began, but Baal opened his mouth and let out a long hiss that landed in Jack’s ears like scalding water.
“Enough.” Baal’s tongue flicked in and out, tasting the air. “This matter will not conclude if we are eating one another’s entrails like the carrion birds above this city. It will only turn out in our favor if we can all agree.”
“Excuse me.” Jack held up a finger, and thought by the intensity of the glares turned on him that it might not have been his brightest idea ever. Still, he had their attention now, so there was nothing to do but press on. “This is all fantastic,” he said. “Believe me,
I love watching you two gentlemen rake Belial’s pale hide over the coals, but I’m not in your little loop. You maybe want to bring me up to speed, since you’re asking for my help?”
“Are you going to shut him up or am I?” Beelzebub snarled at Belial. “You know, you may have gotten Azrael in the back when he was weak, but I know what you are, Belial. You’re as much of a bottom-feeder as our little problem is.”
Belial pushed his chair back, the screech making Jack flinch, and came around the table to grab him by the arm. “Couldn’t just keep your gob stopped, could you?” he snarled.
Jack didn’t argue as Belial dragged him out of the room. “Tough crowd, those two,” he said. “You’d almost think they were plotting your death behind your back or summat.”
“Of course they are,” Belial said. “And if I get the chance, I’ll throw both of them off the top of this building and take the whole pie for myself. That’s how it works down here, Jack. And now you made me look weak in there.”
Jack wrestled himself from the demon’s grip. “I didn’t do shite to you, Belial. You wanted me to dance, but you didn’t tell me the steps. So either you fill me in on all the lines, not just the alarmist crap about the end of days, or I’m going home.”
He held his breath, feeling his blood throbbing against his neck and his temples. Bluffing with a demon was something he never would have concieved of a few years ago. Back then, Belial owned his soul and scared Jack shitless. Now, though, he’d seen that there was so much worse out there than demons, even one with as much power behind him as Belial.
Belial sighed. “Come with me,” he said, leading them back through the smooth halls, past occasional white-uniformed servants who pressed their bodies against the wall when Belial passed. They were all sorts of common demons—berserkers, scavengers, others that Jack had never clapped eyes on—but they all shrank back from Belial like he was contagious.
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