Dark Days bl-6

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I don’t think we’re meant to,” Mosswood said at last.

  Jack felt as if someone had put a boot in his ribs. “Excuse me? You going all zen and fatalistic on me, Mosswood? You, of all people?”

  “My roots go deep and wide,” Mosswood said. “But even the oldest living thing must eventually blow away on the wind.” He sighed and leaned back on his chair, rungs bumping against the pub’s stained plaster walls. “I left my realm long ago, because I did not share contempt for humans with my Fae masters. I was not like them, not like the humans, but I made my home in this little slice of shadow. I always knew it was temporary. And so should you, Jack.”

  Jack shook his head. He felt heavy, as if he’d already taken the beating his sight had shown him, numb and exhausted, as empty as the Green Man’s pint glass. “I can’t accept that. I don’t live in the Black, Ian. I live with people, my people, and I can’t lie down until I’ve been put down.”

  “Then it’s your choice.” Mosswood stuck out his hand, and Jack took it almost by reflex. In all the years he’d known the Green Man, they’d never touched voluntarily. He felt the deep, wide river of power that flowed through the Green Man, a power as ancient as the dirt beneath their feet, ancient as the first man on the isle of Britain who’d lifted his head from the mud and seen the things waiting for him in the shadows and the realms beyond. It was solid power, bright, shining, but as Jack grasped Mosswood’s rough hand it faded out, until he might as well have been holding a handful of sticks.

  “Been happening more and more,” Mosswood said. “Ever since things started to slide sideways. Old magic’s draining out of the world. What’ll take its place, I can’t say. Nor will I be around to see it, likely.”

  “Take care of yourself, Ian,” Jack said, barely able to hear himself over the din of the bar. Mosswood squeezed his hand and then stood.

  “And you, Jack. But then you always do, don’t you?”

  Jack was about to tell Mosswood to wait, that he couldn’t just fold his hands and accept that this was it, roll credits, but the door to the pub opened and a man dressed in an overcoat and a red cap stumbled in. He had a handful of notices and a stench rolling off him that could have stopped an oncoming rhino.

  “I really wish they’d keep the bums out of here,” Mosswood said as the man shuffled from table to table, passing out notices and sometimes collecting a few coins or notes in return.

  “Yeah, well, as long as they’re not pissing on me shoes I try to give ’em a pass,” Jack said. He’d spent too many nights under motorway bridges and in doorways to turn up his nose at someone who slept rough. Even if he did wish the bloke would invest some of his change in a can of deodorant.

  The homeless man shoved a handful of paper at Jack and Mosswood. The Green Man held up his hands as if the bum had offered him a plate of rat entrails, but Jack took the cheap one-sheet and smoothed it out.

  When he saw the face, his stomach dropped through his feet and kept dropping until it hit the stone buried beneath the tube tunnels, covered rivers, and disused sewers below the floor.

  The bartender hurried over to the man, taking him by the arm. “Now, Gerald, I told you … we can’t have you in here passing this stuff out.”

  “But they need to know!” Gerald shrilled. Jack forced himself to get a better look at the bum—he was in rags and filthy, sure, but definitely human. He had the sunken-eyed look of a man who’d spent too many years struggling through some sort of debilitating illness without the benefit of either prescription or self-medication. Jack had met fellows just like him in the state mental clinics, one of the many times he’d been sectioned when the cops picked him up for roaming the street in a smack haze. The doctors were always treated to an earful of screaming about ghosts and monsters once Jack started to detox and his sight kicked him in the brain.

  A mage, just like him, but one who hadn’t been lucky enough to finally put a collar on his visions. Probably another psychic, if the shaking hands and uneven pupils were anything to go by.

  “Gerald, behave yourself,” the lamia scolded, “or I’m going to have to bar you.”

  “But I can do so much!” Gerald cried. “I can save so many, all the lost and everyone struggling to stay one step ahead of the darkness. They need to know about this place, about him…”

  The lamia grabbed him unceremoniously by the back of the coat and propelled him toward the door. “Sorry, luv,” she said. “I’ve given you your warning.”

  Jack grabbed up the wrinkled flyer that bore the grainy photo of Legion’s face, and ran after her. “Oi,” he said, as she slammed the door in Gerald’s wake. Her mouth screwed up.

  “Look, I’m sorry if he bothered you, but this ain’t a high tea. Poor Gerald is just a bit confused.”

  “Look, it’s not about the fact that he’s a bum. I don’t give a fuck if he pitches camp in the men’s loo, frankly,” Jack said, thrusting the flyer in the bartender’s face. “What’s this? Who is this arsehole on the one-sheet?”

  The bartender blinked at him. “That’s Larry Lovecraft.”

  Jack dropped a gaze heavy with disbelief on her, and the bartender rolled her eyes in return. “Look, I know how that sounds. I don’t know who he really is, but he took over some old monastery up in the Midlands, and he’s been running it as a refuge for people like Gerald. Mages who’ve gone a few rounds with black magic and lost, Fae creatures who’ve been exiled, types who can’t blend in outside the Black.” She pointed to her teeth. “Like me.”

  “You been to this … refuge?” Jack asked. Legion. It had to be. Calling himself by some stupid Channel 4 talk show host name, as if this were a fucking joke.

  “Me? Fuck, no.” The bartender snorted. “I got one of his little trust-circle pitches from the blokes that run the vans, and I about vomited my spleen. We’re all children of magic, we should all love one another, nobody else understands us like he does … shit. The lot of it. I’d sooner have an imp piss on my head.”

  “I know a few who’d be happy to arrange that,” Jack said. His fist was shaking, nails carving bloody circles into his palms, soaking into the flyer where he held it crumpled. “You said he has drivers?”

  “Recruiters, more like.” The bartender sniffed. “They cruise all over London, mostly on the daylight side, looking for poor sods like Gerald and scooping them up with the promise of a square meal and a warm bed and unending rivers of bullshit from this Larry Lovecraft bloke.”

  Lovecraft: the xenophobic twit who conceived of a vast, otherwordly madness coming to swallow humanity whole. Jack gritted his teeth. On top of all his other irritants, Legion clearly thought himself fucking hilarious.

  “Know where they picked Gerald up?” Jack said. When the lamia hesitated, he took her by the arm. “Please. I need to talk to Larry. It’s important.”

  “I hear they got him down in Peckham,” she said. “Near one of the missions that does the free lunches on the weekends.”

  Jack dropped the flyer under his boot and shoved open the door of the Lament, cool air doing little to soothe the prickles of sweat working their way down his spine.

  Mosswood might have given up, but he hadn’t. And now he had a face, a target to focus the rage burning like stomach acid in his guts. Belial’s politics inside, Legion had thrown the guantlet with the one human who might be enough of an arsehole—and an idiot—to fight back.

  Jack just hoped this wasn’t his worst idea yet.

  CHAPTER 19

  Though days were mild and all of the bad weather other places famously harassed the UK for had gone off for the impending summer, mornings were still chilly.

  Jack wrapped his arms around himself inside his thin overshirt and cotton jacket with the Gate key in the pocket, sucking on his fag to keep warm as he stood in the line of other stooped, smoking, shivering men.

  This was the third mission he’d tried since the sun came up, a neat little outfit that looked more like your grandmother’s council flat than a homeless shelter. A hand-l
ettered sign in the window proclaimed Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.

  Jack tried not to roll his eyes. Believing in a higher power, in his experience, just got you steamrollered. The sign might as well have encouraged the bunch around him to Believe in the Dark Knight Batman and thou shalt receive large sacks of cheap whiskey and fags.

  There was no higher power. There were the beings older and hungrier than you, and there was avoiding being stepped on when they got a hair up their bum cracks. The Romans had it right, when they stepped foot on the isle—appease the old gods when you could, run when you couldn’t, and drink plenty of wine always.

  “Spare one a those?” The voice was thick, Scottish, and Jack turned to see a tall, skinny television aerial of a man staring down at him from under a black watch cap.

  “Sure, mate,” he said. His pack was empty after that, but he could always conjure more. He swept the street again with his gaze, but only a few buses and cars passed at the nearby intersection. No sinister vans, creeping to and fro looking for willing additions to Legion’s army.

  “Cheers.” The Scot lit up with a pack of matches, brown fingers curling around the cigarette carefully, as if it were delicate and alive.

  “Line always this long?” Jack asked. There were at least thirty men gathered on the pavement. “I thought this place didn’t open until lunch.”

  “Aye, but if you turn up early sometimes the bakery up the road comes around with yesterday’s stale buns,” said the Scot. “And there’s always a chance somebody’ll hire you a day’s pay to clean the garden or paint a fence.”

  Jack sized up the Scot. Chatty, older than him by about twenty years, skinny but enormous, wearing a military coat that probably hailed from the 1980s. “You a lifer, then?” he said. Some just liked sleeping rough. It got in your blood, and four walls never quite felt the same.

  The Scot gave him a thin smile, a smile that told Jack he’d just confirmed something. “I thought you might not be one of us.”

  “I was,” Jack said. “Long time ago.”

  The Scot nodded, sticking the fag between his lips and extending one of his plate-sized hands. “Barry.”

  “Jack.”

  No prickle when they shook. Barry was as ordinary as they came.

  “You a reporter?” Barry asked. “Or a blogger?”

  Jack snorted. “Do I look like I blog?”

  Barry shrugged. “Never can tell. I read ’em all myself. Library’s on the Internet, I go in there when it rains and do the BBC breaking news, Huffington Post, that sort of thing. Keep myself informed. Check in with my old unit occasionally.”

  Jack cocked his head. “Falklands? Had some mates who had brothers and whatnot involved in that.”

  “You can’t have been very old,” Barry said. “But yes, I was there. Came back, suddenly didn’t have much of a taste for my semi-detached and a thank-you from Her Majesty.”

  “She’s not very popular in the patch where I grew up, either,” Jack said. He swung a glance out at the street again. A white bus, of the sort used to cart seniors to and fro from activities, was parked near the corner, but not moving.

  “Listen,” Jack said. “You know anything about a van, been coming around picking folks up, promising them a place to live and meals and whatnot?”

  Like he’d triggered a trap, Barry’s genial expression shut off, and a dark anger filled his eyes.

  “I think you best move along, boy,” he said.

  “Look,” Jack held up his hands. “I’m not press and I’m not police. I just really, really need to speak to whoever’s filling those vans.”

  Barry regarded him for a long moment, and Jack felt his heart throb. If he couldn’t find Legion’s gatekeepers, then he was back to square one, just a face and a bullshit name.

  “That’s them,” he said, jerking his thumb at the bus as it started to move, curb-crawling toward the line of homeless people. “But you don’t want to go with them,” he said. “Blokes get on, and they never come back.”

  “And I’m guessing you don’t believe it’s because they have a great new life at a compound in the country?” Jack said.

  The bus pulled to a stop. It was brand new, shiny, driven by a shaven-headed bloke in a leather coat very much like the one Jack had relunctantly left at home. He’d needed to blend in, and he felt naked without it.

  “I’ve seen enough God-botherers to know when someone’s just bending your ear and when they’re a cult,” Barry said. “And mark my words, Jack, these blokes are the sort who’ll have you in trainers and matching outfits before a fortnight’s out.”

  “Oi.” The shaven-headed drone glared at Barry, taking a thin black police baton like the one Pete carried from his pocket. “Shut your face or I’ll give you something to cry about, Nancy.”

  Barry ignored him, still staring at Jack. “Good luck, son,” he said. “You’re gonna need it.”

  The bald drone went down the line, picking out Jack and a pudgy kid still wearing the vestiges of his life before he’d hit the street—brand-name windcheater, good sneakers, prescription glasses that weren’t third-hand, scratched, or broken. The kid sucked nervously on a lip piercing, and Jack leaned over to him. “You should probably stay out of this.”

  “Fuck off,” the kid snarled. “You take your share, gramps, and leave some for the rest of us. I’m not going to piss off just because some towheaded rent boy doesn’t like it.”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “Fine, you ruddy little ASBO. Suit yourself.” If Margaret ever reached the stage where she talked like that, he was going to lose his mind.

  “You two,” the drone said. “You interested in taking a trip to a place with a bed and some food? In exchange, all you have to do is listen to a speech from the leader of the commune, Mr. Larry Lovecraft.” The drone had said the line so many times it sounded like a draggy tape recording.

  “You have no idea how interested I am,” Jack said. He climbed in the bus after the kid, who practically bowled him over to be the first one up the steps.

  Just a normal kid, even if he was an arse. A few scraps of latent talent, nothing he’d ever notice unless he got smacked on the forehead with a hex. Walking right into Legion’s maw just because living on the streets was much rougher than it seemed on telly, and he wanted an out that didn’t involve crawling back to his home life.

  The coach lurched, and Jack felt sick. Legion was like a bird of prey, high on his wire, picking off the vulnerable. Thinning the herd before the real culling started.

  Closing his eyes and steadying his breath, Jack told himself to stay calm. He felt the piece of the Gate in his pocket, resting against his hip. In a perfect world, he’d get close and snatch Legion, and the both of them would be back in the Pit before the lunch hour.

  Oh, didn’t he tell you? You’re mortal. That’s an express ride with no return ticket.

  Jack leaned his forehead against the glass, hoping the cool vibration of the coach would still the memory of his latest vision. Demons lied, and Legion was clearly a champion at it.

  Or Belial could be jerking his chain even harder than he’d thought, still lying to him. Either situtation was possible.

  As the coach picked up speed and entered the M25, Jack decided he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he was going to find Legion and do his bit to put things back where they belonged.

  Or he was headed into the country to die trying.

  CHAPTER 20

  The coach hummed on for several hours, past Oxford, closer to Birmingham than London before it pulled off the motorway onto a B road, and from there onto something that Jack thought might have last been used to herd medieval sheep.

  After what seemed like an eternity of potholes at war with both the coach’s suspension and Jack’s spine, they rolled to a stop in front of a low pile of stones and a slate roof that Jack supposed could have passed for a monastery at some point in the distant past.

  A group of men in threadbare clothes loiter
ed in front of the main doors, and not far off a generator buzzed, delivering power via a thick orange cable fed through a shattered window.

  The whole place looked like a before shot on one of those posh makeover shows that Pete liked to watch sometimes, when she was trying to turn her brain off for sleep. Beside him, the kid sniffed.

  “Looks fucking haunted.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Jack muttered.

  The bald bloke gave him a shove. “Move along. You’ll be taken for a shower and delousing and then we’ll see about a bed.”

  Jack decided to just go along—the more concrete information he could give to Belial, the better. The kid was busy goggling at everything as they passed room after room filled with decades of dust, junk, and mildew, and Jack was busy taking inventory of the sad sacks floating about the place.

  There were mages, and he caught a few markings of orders like the Stygian Brothers—black magic to the core. The usual mix of shapeshifters and other dark-dwelling creatures of the Black. Even a few zombies stood around, one staring out the window at a far-off field dotted with the modern relatives of the sheep who’d made the road, the other in an alcove off the long hallway banging his head repeatedly against a wall.

  They came into a thin, high room that Jack supposed had been the chapel at one point, and he started as a gray shape drifted down from above the altar. The bean-sidhe glared at him, her eyes as black and glassy as rock chips, before drifting away, the blood dribbling from her mouth leaving cold, hissing droplets on the stone floor.

  If Legion was taking in Fae creatures, particularly nasty attack dogs like those, this was a serious coup against Hell indeed. Fae stayed away from the rest of them, whether they checked the human, demon, or “other” box. Pete had dealt with them once, just one of their many ruling bodies, and that once had been enough for her.