I cannot force you, the Morrigan said. If I could, I would have claimed you as my avatar long ago, Jack Winter. But now, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The demons are sad, sulfur-born bastards. The Fae are too wrapped in tradition to see what their actions have wrought. Only I, and my legions of the dead, stand ready.
“And to get them free of the Bleak Gates, you need me,” Jack said. “Once Legion is down, what then? Full-tilt zombieland all across the earth, I suppose?”
Every victory has a price, the Morrigan purred. Every war has casualties. At least, when you join with me, there will be a world to mourn. If you thrash and scream as you are now, things will vanish as so much cosmic dust borne away on a hurricane.
“I won’t thrash or scream,” Jack said, trying not to flinch at the proximity of something so ancient and rife with magic. It was like kissing up to a cockroach, making your skin crawl no matter how good your self-control was. “So that you’re very, very clear on my answer: There is no way in hell or any other world that I will ever trust you, or allow you to use me to unlock your own particular brand of apocalypse. You can keep trying, but I’ll be dead before I help you.”
So be it, the Morrigan said. Dead, I can live with. You are mine, Jack. You belong to me, you wear my marks. By the end of this affair, you’ll beg me to accept you into my embrace.
“I’ll be holding my breath,” Jack snarled, shoving away from her. “Or rather, I won’t, because you’ll still be stuck in the Land of the Dead and I’ll be here, where you can’t touch me.”
The Morrigan ran her talons along his tattoos, which flared and responded with blinding pain. Don’t be so sure.
He came back to himself in a flood of cold and wet, as Pete poured a bottle of water over his head.
“Fuck me!” he shouted, swiping the droplets out of his nose and eyes. “Did you have to go and do that?”
“You were twitching and moaning,” Pete said. “It was that or someone calling 999 about the nutter rolling around on the grass frightening the children.”
She pulled him to his feet. A wave of nausea passed over him, and Jack fought it down. Somebody among the law-abiding citizens of London had already called the police, and he didn’t need to waste time while Pete talked her way out of trouble using her copper connections.
“You going to tell me what that was all about?” she asked when they were sitting in the Mini again.
“The usual,” Jack said. “The Hag wants me to fall in line.”
“Jesus,” Pete said. “You’d think at a time like this even she’d change the fucking record for a few minutes.”
Jack shifted in the tiny seat. He always felt wrung out after his sight had been plaguing him, and this was no exception. He’d lost track of how many hours he’d been awake, how many times he’d been shifted between the barriers of worlds. It wore on you, tore you down bit by bit, crawled inside your head until you had a hard time telling what was real and what was just a shadow.
“She did make me think of something, though,” he said. “Speaking of folks I’d rather never see again.”
Pete nodded. “I’m listening.”
“There is one mage sect I know Legion would never get his hooks into,” Jack said. “Bastards bigger than even him.”
Pete swallowed hard, putting a hand on his leg. “I know what you’re talking about, and you don’t have to do it.”
“That’s the thing,” Jack said. “It’s them or the Morrigan, so I do have to do it. In fact, the only choice I have is to go to them, or sit back right in this park with a picnic basket while we watch London burn.”
CHAPTER 23
As much as he hated flying, Jack passed the flight to Dublin unconscious, snapping awake when the plane touched down. It was only a little over two hours from Heathrow, but he felt like a new man when he and Pete cleared customs. Lily was in the care of his mate Lawrence, Margaret had gone to stay with Morwenna, and they were both safe for now. He could focus on the task at hand.
“Haven’t been here in so long,” Pete said. “Not since I was thirteen or fourteen. Last summer we spent with my grandmother before she died.”
“You in the country,” Jack said. “That must have been something.”
“I handled it fine,” Pete said. “My sister spent the entire summer sneaking off down to the pub and sobbing to her boyfriend at the pay phone at the end of the road leading up to our gran’s farm. She never could deal with solitude.”
Pete’s sister was a terror in heavy eyeliner, the sort of girl who floated around the fringes of real magic without knowing exactly what she was toying with. Pete had never been that way. She’d been painfully, acutely aware that there was another world out there from the moment he met her.
“I haven’t been back since I was twenty or so,” he offered. After the emergency workers had scraped him off the floor of a flea-ridden hotel room, he’d been sectioned for a few months. Time in the mental ward, with no way to pass it except chatting with the ghosts he saw with more clarity than the living, had made him realize what utter shit all the training he’d received from his old mage order had been. Nothing could control his sight. Nothing could change the fact that he was marked by an old god, the kind of creature that could reach him no matter how far he ran.
He’d gone back to England, and he’d met Pete. Then he’d died, briefly, crawled inside a smack syringe, and never looked back.
Dublin didn’t hold a lot of fond memories, that was for sure. And he wanted to be here even less than he had the first time, as a scared fourteen-year-old kid with nowhere else to go.
Pete stayed quiet most of the way into the city from the airport, but she spoke up when they got off the train. “What do you need me to do?”
“Stay close,” Jack said. “Seth and I didn’t exactly part on good terms, and he didn’t leave the brothers on ones that were any better.”
“Brothers,” Pete snorted. “Never had any use for those stodgy boys’ clubs. Just an excuse to sit around, smoking and whingeing even though your lives are bought and paid for.”
Jack laughed. The idea of the crow brothers as some sort of gentleman’s establishment was funny enough; the idea of Seth McBride, the mage who’d trained him to use his sight, as a member of one even more so.
“Seth and them are more the pie and a pint, kick you in the teeth if you cross them, loose collection of vagrants types.”
Pete wrinkled her nose. “They sound lovely.”
“Oh, they’ll hex you into next week first chance they get if they think there’s a few euros and a decent bottle of whiskey in it for ’em,” Jack said. “The crow brothers don’t exactly follow the white hat system. They’re suspicious and dangerous, and they’re not big on loyalty.”
“Then why should we trust them at all?” Pete said.
“Because the crow brothers, above all else, teach their number to be survivors,” Jack said. “And they’re all so petty and backstabbing that they know the nasty tricks no other human mages do. If we want to find a way to knock down Legion without a demon’s help, then they’re our best bet.” He lit a cigarette, careful to keep the smoke away from Pete. “Now I just have to reintroduce myself without getting knocked on my arse.”
There was a pub tucked away in the warren of streets around Trinity College where Seth had taken him when they’d first come to Ireland. Jack had considered running back then. No adult ever took an interest in him unless they wanted something. And he was out of England, away from the grasp of his mother and anyone else who might have a use for a teenage boy with a talent for magic and nobody to look out for him. He could disappear, go back to roughing it and stealing to get by.
“You’ll be sleeping upstairs.” Seth favored black jackets and skinny ties, and he had the nervous tic of a former smoker, tapping his fingers on whatever flat surface was handy.
Jack narrowed his eyes. “With you?”
Seth sighed. “We’ve been over this. I’m not into rough trade, and even if I was, you’r
e not my type. I’m trying to help you, the way nobody helped me when I was like you. So, you’ll be sleeping upstairs, on your own, and during the day you’ll help Wallace run the pub.”
Wallace had been about a thousand years old, a grizzled veteran who hated the fact that Jack was English almost as much as he hated his hair and his music and everything else about him. It was 1985, the Troubles were still a long shadow over everyone’s day, and Jack had adopted an Irish accent as quickly as he could.
Seth hadn’t reappeared for weeks, and when he did, he sat down at a table near the back and started doing sleight of hand tricks. “Quickness of the hand is quickness of the mind, boyo,” he said. “Have a seat.”
That was how it went, for two long years of pushing a mop and listening to Wallace scream at footie matches on the pub’s single, miniature black and white television. Jack worked and tried to keep the psychic episodes to a minimum, and Seth would show up with weeks or months between visits, show him card tricks and simple hexes, talk to him about things like necromancy and scrying and what to do if you ran afoul of either, always at the same table in the corner.
It was still there, still covered in the same sticky varnish, the same wrinkled Guinness coasters. The telly was new, flatscreen and gleaming above the bar, but everything else could have been exactly as Jack had left it when he walked out the door twenty years ago.
Pete sniffed. Jack felt the scent of bleach and stale alcohol tickle his nostrils. “It grows on you,” he said, easing the door shut behind him.
“We’re closed!”
Jack started at the voice, more a rumble of lorry tires over rocks than a sound made by a human throat. “Wallace?” he said.
The old man grumped from behind the bar, clutching a cane in one hand and a cricket bat in the other. “Who the fuck wants to know?”
Jack blinked. Wallace had been old when Jack had come to Dublin—now, he looked rather like a walking, talking, slagged-off mummy, a few strands of white hair clinging to his spotted scalp. Still, the hand holding the bat never wavered.
“It’s Jack Winter,” he said. “Put that down before you break a hip, old man.”
Wallace sneered. “Jack fucking Winter. Now I want to hit you more than ever.”
“Oh look, a man after my own heart,” Pete said. Wallace glared at her. One eye was cloudy with cataracts, but the effect was still rather like being stared down by a bridge troll.
“And you might be, Miss Posh? Come down from Blighty to gaze at the peasants, have we?”
“I’ve done plenty of gazing,” Pete said. “My father came over from Galway when he was a boy. Spent every summer as a girl with my grandmother Megan, listening to her tell stories of the old Irish heroes and the indepedence war in 1915. Still, it’s stupendous to meet somebody who was actually there to witness it firsthand.”
Jack flinched. If Wallace had ever had a sense of humor, he’d lost it when he’d started doing favors for the Fiach Dubh.
Wallace’s face flushed, but he started croaking and lowered the bat. “I like her, Jack,” he said. “Much more than I ever liked you.” He sank into the nearest chair, the cane creaking under the weight it supported. “Why the fuck did you come back here?”
“Desperate times and all that,” Jack said. “I need to talk to the brothers, Wallace. The ones still in good standing, that is, still with access to the archives.”
Wallace jerked his head at the other chairs around his table. “Sit yourselves down, then. Can’t very well have you standing there with your thumb in your arse, can I?”
Jack had hated Wallace—the old sod had never liked him, never even tolerated him for most of the time he’d slept in the attic, on a military cot sandwiched between cases of whiskey and the spare odds and ends of Wallace’s life before the pub. Wallace had made no secret that he thought Jack was a piss stain, and Jack supposed he’d done a poor job hiding what he, arrogant English bastard that he was, thought of a worn-out old Irishman who still teared up at the strains of “Danny Boy.”
He guessed that people really could change. He, at least, wasn’t nearly as arrogant as he’d been. Death had a way of taking the wind out of your sails.
“You look like hammered shit,” Wallace said.
Then again, maybe they didn’t ever change as much as you hoped they would. “You want to flap your gums, or you want to call the brothers and get me out of your hair?” he said.
“Already called,” Wallace said. “Minute you tripped the protection hexes around my establishment. Sloppy of you, Jack.”
Pete gave Jack a black look. He rubbed his face with his hands, feeling the tiredness creep back behind his eyes. Wallace was right, that was sloppy. There was a time he would have at least noticed that the same musty old hexes from twenty years ago were still in place.
This was what he wanted—to see the crow brothers. Why, then, was his stomach flipping as if he’d just swallowed a fifth of tequila and chased it with a questionable curry?
Pete’s head snaked around as a shadow passed between the pub’s window and the streetlamp outside. “Somebody’s watching us,” she said.
“More than somebody,” Jack said. The Black pulsed, just a bit, as if someone had thrown a stone into a pond.
“They’re outside,” Wallace said, standing again. “Don’t make a mess in my establishment, you hear? I’ll be upstairs.”
“Are we okay?” Pete asked as Wallace stumped away. Jack turned to watch the pub door swing open.
“Doubt it,” he said.
Three mages, two men and one woman. None of them looked happy to see him, but on the bright side there was no one he recognized, either. The chance of any of the crow brothers he’d slagged off directly being in the pack was low, but he had exactly that sort of shit luck.
“Well, well,” Pete murmured. “I see they’re not just brothers any longer.”
“Yeah, that is new.” Jack stood, extending his hand to the female mage. “Hello, sweetheart. Jack Winter. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Keep that paw to yourself, ’fore I snap it off,” the woman growled. Jack dropped his hand back to his side.
Pete gave a small giggle as she stood up and came to rest just behind Jack’s shoulder. “The more I meet of your old friends, Jack, the more I like them.”
“We are not friends with this bastard,” the bigger of the two men growled. He was rangy, with narrow eyes and a crooked nose, the epitome of Black Irish good looks that Jack was sure had the ladies all aflutter. It was the other mage that grabbed his attention, though—small and stocky, quiet, glaring at Jack like a dog aching to be let off the chain. If this went into the shit, that was the one he’d need to take down first. One good leg-locker hex to make sure he couldn’t pound Jack’s skull into powder should do the trick.
“Nor do I have any desire to lock hands with you in the bonds of brotherhood,” Jack said. “Just need to ask you lot a favor.” He looked the tall mage up and down. The man’s leather jacket bulged at the ribs, as did the right ankle of his ill-fitting trousers. Mages going about like it was the Wild West was new—the Fiach Dubh Jack had known would have laughed themselves sick at the idea of toting around a gun.
“You’re not in any position to ask for anything,” the woman said. “You turned your back on the brotherhood a long time ago, Jack Winter. Now fuck off back to England before we decide to get unfriendly.”
Witchfire, green and hazy, crackled around the woman’s fists. Jack held up his own hands. It was three against two, but he’d at least get the big bastard before he went down. “I don’t give a shit about what happened twenty years ago, and neither should you. I doubt you were even out of diapers when I had my falling out with your colleagues,” he said. The woman’s nostrils flared.
“But,” Jack continued, “you lot taught me to be a survivor, and I wouldn’t come back here unless this was truly life and death. Not just for me, for all of us.”
“Not interested,” said the tall mage. “And since you c
an’t seem to follow directions, I’m going to have Moira here show you out.”
“You move one hair on your head and you’re going to be one very sorry girl,” Pete said from behind him. Jack glanced around to see a small black box in her hands, her fingers curled around the stubby butt and yellow trigger.
Moira bared her teeth. “What do you think you’re going to do with that? I command magic, girl.”
“And this is a stun gun,” Pete said. “Metropolitan Police riot gear, standard issue, brought through the hell of airport security just because I know not to trust you. As to what I’m going to do with it, if you try to hex either me or Jack, I’m going to shoot you with it, watch as you twitch around, pee yourself, and pass out, and then I may well take a few photos for posterity, just because I don’t particularly like you.”
She raised the stun gun to bear between Moira’s eyes. “Let’s all be civil adults,” Pete said. “Or at least pretend we’re capable of such behavior.”
Moira dropped her hand after a moment and kicked the nearest chair over. “Why’d you have to come back here?” she snapped. “Bad enough the way things have been going without Jack Winter in the mix.”
“Let me guess.” Jack took a seat. If he wasn’t in immediate danger of being hexed, he was going to save his energy. “Upsets, critters popping up where they shouldn’t, necromancers wreaking havoc on decent folks just trying to sell a few ancient demonic grimoires and make a semihonest living?”
Seth had kept a rare book shop as a nominal profession when Jack had known him. Seth had also run off after Jack’s suicide attempt, chucked in his contacts and reputation in Dublin, and gone to wait out his lifespan and destroy his liver in the slums of Bangkok. Jack didn’t blame him. At the time, it had sounded like an excellent idea. He tried to quash the idea that always popped up when he thought of Seth that he’d ruined his only friend’s life right along with his own by trying to top himself. Seth had vouched for him to the bigwig brothers, and Jack had flamed out in spectacular fashion. Seth wasn’t any more welcome here, now.
Dark Days bl-6 Page 12