Dark Days bl-6

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Same as everywhere else,” said the stocky mage. “Same as it ever was.” His voice was as rough as the rest of him, more Belfast than a local boy, and he had the short haircut, steel-toed boots, and aggressive set to his shoulders of ex-military. SAS, Jack guessed, the type of bloke who was used to being ready to kill the man across the table from him.

  “You know,” Jack said. “Knew another crow brother who loved the Talking Heads, insufferable bloke by the name of Jimmy Donelly, had one of those half-and-half haircuts. Looked like a Shetland pony.”

  The stocky mage glared. “Jimmy Donelly was my father.”

  “Ah,” Jack said. “Lovely that you two have so much in common.”

  “What do you want?” the tall mage asked. “You wouldn’t be here unless you wanted something, so get to it.”

  “I have a problem for you, but a solution, too,” Jack said. “The things you’ve been seeing, the storm that’s shaking things up all over the Black, that’s the work of a demon named Legion. He’s a villain, hard to kill, has the Fae on his side, and I figure if anyone in the wide world knows how to even the pitch with this bloke, it’s you lot. I just need a peek at the goodies, and then I’ll leave you well enough alone.”

  “Can’t do it,” said the tall mage. Jack favored him with a narrow glare.

  “And who died and left you in charge?”

  “My brother,” the tall mage said evenly. “His name was Roger McAmmon. I’m Keith. He was the one who’d been in the longest. Most of the old guard is retired or dead, except for Wallace. It’s been a rough couple of decades on this side of the pond. Turf wars with the necromancers, a lycanthropy outbreak, a smartarse trying to raise an army of golems from bits and bobs in the local graveyards…”

  Jack held up his hand. “I get it. So you’re telling me no.”

  “I’m telling you we’ve got our own problems, Jack, and we don’t need your particular brand of trouble muddying things up.”

  “Listen,” Pete said. “I know that you and Jack aren’t on good terms. I’ve heard that song from every dirty secret in his past that I’ve run across. But this isn’t about him. For once, he’s trying to do right, stop something that’s worse than any of your local concerns, and I’d consider it a real favor if you’d just let him do what he needs to do.”

  “We know who you are, too, you know,” said the stocky mage. “Petunia Caldecott, the Weir.”

  “Now you’ve done it,” Jack said. “No one calls her Petunia and lives to tell the tale.”

  “I’m glad you know who I am, because it means you know what I can do,” Pete said. “I’d consider it a personal kindness if you’d just help Jack out.”

  Jack waited, watching the three mages. They were young, but they were battle-hard and suspicious, and territorial as hell. If their positions were flipped, he wouldn’t be keen on some dinosaur with a penchant for demon trouble stomping all over his city, either.

  Keith McAmmon sighed. “I can’t let you look at the archives.”

  “Why—” Jack started, but Keith cut him off.

  “The archives were destroyed. About eight years ago, there was a dustup with a sect of necromancers trying to raise hungry ghosts on our turf, and they burned our archive as retaliation.”

  “I thought a brother’s—sister’s—whatever’s books were his own,” Jack said. “Whose bright idea was it to centralize the lot?”

  “My brother’s.” Keith coughed, and Jack was gratified to see Jimmy the younger and Moira shift their glares to him.

  “Then no offense to your dead brother, but he was a great bloody idiot,” Jack said.

  “All that’s left is Declan,” said Moira.

  Pete lifted an eyebrow. “And Declan is?”

  “A psychic, like you,” Keith said. “He’s just, um, a bit more involved in his talent than you seem to be.”

  “Translation: He’s off his rocker,” Jack said to Pete. This had been a thin idea to start with, really just a hope that maybe something from the time he’d spent with Seth, the few short years when things had started to look up for him, would be the key to kicking Legion in the arse.

  “Sounds like fun,” Pete said. “I always did enjoy talking to a crazy mage.”

  Moira shrugged. “We can take you over to his flat, but you’re not going to get a word of sense out of him. He’s been deep under for at least a decade.”

  “Trust me,” Jack said, pushing back from the table. “Crazed ramblings and I are old friends. It’ll be like coming home.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Declan lived in a bedsit over a closed-down chip shop, and the odor of stale cooking oil and fish permeated the plaster and the narrow staircase. A naked bulb swayed as Jack and Pete mounted the stairs. “We’ll wait here,” Keith said. “Declan doesn’t like too many people in at once, and he gets on best with Moira. Any sign of trouble, though, and you’re done. I’ll see your carcass on a boat back to England myself.”

  “Yeah, yeah, shaking in me boots, rest assured,” Jack said, following Moira up the stairs. Pete brought up the rear.

  “I don’t like this,” she murmured. “It’s a bottleneck if anything goes wrong.”

  “Things have already gone wrong,” Jack said in an undertone. “But this is going to turn out all right, I promise. Just let me talk to this Declan and we’ll see if he can help us.”

  “I wouldn’t expect too much,” Moira said. “He doesn’t make any sense on a good day, and on a bad day, good luck getting a word in edgewise.”

  She knocked on the single door at the top of the stairs, soft and unthreatening. “Declan? It’s Moira. I’ve brought visitors, if that’s all right.”

  They waited for a long minute, Jack listening to the buzzing of the light, and then the door rattled with the sound of half a dozen bolts being undone. “Moira?” The voice was small and hesitant, sounding more like a scared kid than a full-grown psychic.

  “Yes, luv,” she said. “Do you think you might let us in?”

  Declan peered around the doorframe. He had owlish eyes behind black-rimmed glasses and a shock of dark hair that looked as if he spent most of his time sleeping on the left side of it. His face was soft, rounded, and covered in dark stubble. He blinked shyly when he saw Pete and Jack.

  “Why Moira,” he said. “You’ve brought the storm with you.”

  “These nice folks just have some questions,” Moira said. She reached in through the crack and laid a hand on Declan’s arm. Jack expected the psychic to kick up a fuss, but instead he smiled at her and pulled the door open.

  “Then you bring the wind and rain inside, yes?” His voice had the singsong quality that Jack had encountered in quite a few folks he’d met in the mental ward, the kind of dreamy voice that was focused on things only the owner could see.

  “Thank you,” Pete said, as Declan stepped back to allow them in. “This means a lot to us, truly.”

  Declan frowned at her. “You are a hole, full of light. You are the sun exploding. I can’t look at you. You burn me.”

  Pete gave Jack a raised eyebrow, but she shrugged. “I suppose that’s fair.”

  “What about me, Declan?” Jack said. He tried to keep his tone soothing and even, though that had rarely worked on the psychics and schizophrenics he knew. You just had to play in their world, go along with what they saw, until you learned what you needed and could drop back into reality.

  Often enough, he’d been the one off in dreamland, and so he didn’t begrudge going along with Declan.

  “You?” Declan examined Jack, through his glasses and then closer, lifting the lenses and bringing their noses almost to touching. “Your wings are lifted by the storm. You are in the dark but you are not the darkness.”

  “No?” Jack tilted his head. Declan blinked, then shook his head to and fro hard enough to give himself whiplash.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Declan,” Jack said, as gently as he could manage. “What else do you see around me?”

  Declan cock
ed his head, as if he were listening to a dog whistle, and then he reached out quicker than a cobra and grabbed Jack’s chin between his pudgy fingers.

  Jack stayed still. Dealing with psychics was tricky, especially one in the throes of a severe break from reality. As if there were any other kind, when you could see things that would drive the average plod on the street screaming into the nearest nuthouse.

  Declan breathed, eyes screwed up behind his streaky glasses, and Jack glanced around the man’s one-room flat, seeing what his options were if this little trust exercise didn’t go his way.

  One corner was taken up by a bed, just a mattress and box spring up on cement blocks, covered in a rumpled sleeping bag and more crisp wrappers than Jack had previously believed one man could generate.

  The wall opposite the bed was entirely taken up with televisions—small, large, old, new, all square old-fashioned sets that buzzed quietly, tuned to a dozen different channels. They heated the room to a temperature that made sweat roll down Jack’s spine, and he saw Pete wipe at her forehead.

  The ceiling of the flat was plastered with newspapers, which also covered the windows in layers thick enough that even the streetlight outside didn’t penetrate. The four corners of the room were strung with dusty herb bundles, red thread, all the trappings of every sort of protection hex Jack could think of.

  “You scared of something, Declan?” he asked, keeping his voice even and low. “Worried about something getting in here?”

  “Oh,” Declan breathed, turning Jack’s head to and fro in his vise grip. “He’s already inside. He’s in my head. He’s in your head, too.”

  Jack frowned, and Declan mirrored his expression. “Don’t be sad, Jack,” he said. “Soon he’ll be everywhere, and then you and I won’t feel so lonely, seeing his shadow falling across our footsteps.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, easing out of Declan’s grip. “That can’t happen. Do you see anything else? A way that Legion doesn’t end up with the world in his hands?”

  Declan sat down in a rickety rolling chair arranged in front of the TV screens and spun around. “Nope,” he singsonged. “Nothing. Nothing but the darkness, the storm, and then when he comes, you’ll all be like me.”

  Jack fought the urge to slam his fist through one of the screens. “So you’re telling me to just lie down. That there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop this?”

  “Ashes, ashes,” Declan whispered. “We all fall down.”

  Jack did bang his fist into the wall, rattling the detritus littering the shelves and the floor. Moira started toward him, her hand raised. “Enough. He did as you asked. He gets tired.”

  Jack watched the look that passed between Declan and Moira. He gave her a sweet smile, before crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue.

  “You two together long before he went off the deep end?” he asked. Moira went to Declan and stroked the sweaty strands of dark hair away from his forehead.

  “Five years,” she said. “Then, about eighteen months back, things got really bad. Got so he couldn’t sleep, because he’d wake up screaming, and when he was awake he couldn’t tell the difference between me and one of his visions.”

  “Nergal,” Pete murmured. “Hate that ancient bastard a little more with each passing day.”

  “There’s nothing here,” Jack said. “Sorry to have troubled you and Declan, Moira.” He rubbed his forehead, throbbing from the buzz of the screens. The Fiach Dubh weren’t what he remembered. Hell, not much was what he remembered in these strange times. Seth never would have lain down and accepted the end of the world.

  But Seth wasn’t here. He was probably sloshed in some karaoke bar halfway around the world, if he wasn’t dead in the gutter outside it.

  The crow brothers couldn’t help him. He was on his own.

  “Don’t be sad,” Declan said. “Don’t cry out loud, the lady says. That’s not thunder you hear. That’s the wings, the wings beating the drums, and the drums are the heartbeat of the dead.” He looked up again and pointed at Jack. “I know you hear it, crow-mage. I know you.…”

  Something skittered outside the window, flashing across the paper cover, almost too fast for the eye. Moira and Pete both wheeled around, hands dropping inside their coats, Pete’s for her stun gun and Moira’s for a small leather-wrapped bundle. A focus for some sort of hex, Jack wagered, something strong enough to blow a hole in the wall of the flat.

  He would have liked Moira and Declan if he’d met them under different conditions. They reminded him of himself and Pete, if things had just gone a bit differently, and he’d replaced his penchant for smack with one for greasy snack foods.

  “What the fuck was that?” Moira said.

  Declan wrapped his arm around himself and started to rock. “All around,” he said. “Cold and fire, all around, muddy blood and black eyes, staring at me … stop staring at me … stop stop stop stop…”

  His voice rose into an incoherent scream, and Moira grabbed his arm as more shadows filled up the window frame, scratching and chittering as they tried to find a way in.

  Jack heard a pane shatter, and he jerked his head at Pete. “We need to go.”

  They thundered down the rickety staircase, Declan clinging to Moira and babbling. At the door, Keith met them with a frown. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “But your boy here has gone full throttle around the bend, so whatever it is, I assume it’s not here to cuddle.”

  Jimmy pointed into the close shadows around them as the street lamp blinked out under the onslaught of the small, chittering creatures. “They’re everywhere. Those flying bastards are just the start.”

  Jack saw the three pale figures fold out of the shadows. He saw the Fae’s arm come up, too late. By the time he’d figured out what they were, it was already far, far too late.

  Keith went down first, the black glass blade embedded in his throat so he couldn’t even scream. Jimmy lasted a bit longer, firing off a hex that spat currents of electricity all over the street, striking one of the Fae assassins in the chest and knocking him to the ground.

  The swarm with them, though, was relentless; tiny bodies with oily, translucent wings covered Jimmy, stripping his flesh even before he fell to the pavement, writhing in agony.

  Pete yanked Jack back inside and slammed the door as the swarm landed against it, the sound of a thousand tiny nails on the wood like sandpaper against Jack’s ears. Pete wheeled on Moira. “Is there another way out of here?”

  “There’s a basement,” Moira managed. “But I’m not leaving him.”

  Declan sat curled in a ball, staring at the door with wide eyes. Jack stooped in front of him and repeated the gesture of grabbing the man’s chin in his fingers. “Oi. Listen. I’ve been where you are, mate. Those are Fae soldiers outside, cold-blooded killers, and I know they’re playing hell with your sight right now. But forget them, mate. Moira’s not leaving without you, and if we don’t move, she dies. Even you can’t be so far gone, yeah?”

  Declan swallowed hard, blinked, and stared up at Jack. “Your fingers are cold.”

  Jack helped Moira sling the pudgy psychic to his feet, and together they got Declan down to the basement. Moira pointed at a grate in the floor. “That goes down to the storm drains. Lots of iron—they’ll have a hard time following us.”

  Pete flipped the grate off and gestured at Moira and Declan. “You two first.”

  She grabbed Jack’s arm after the pair dropped into the wet, dank black space below. “What is going on? What do the Fae want?”

  “Damned if I know,” Jack said. “But they seem pretty insistent on getting it, so let’s keep moving.”

  He dropped and grabbed Pete around the waist so she wouldn’t break her ankle in the drop. She landed hard and cursed. “I hate being short.”

  “But you’re so adorable,” Jack said.

  Pete shot him a look that he could tell, even in the near pitch dark, was poisonous. A green glow lit the way ahead of t
hem, and Jack saw Moira standing at the junction of the drain and a larger pipe, gesturing them along while witchfire writhed around her.

  “These drains let out down at the piers,” she said. “From there, we can make it out to sea.”

  “Fae hate salt water,” Jack told Pete. “If we can get to a boat we’ll be safe.”

  “I know that,” Pete hissed as they walked single file, hugging the wall to stay out of the worst of the waste water. “I have spent almost five years tagging after you now, you know.”

  Footsteps rattled in the tunnel behind them, and Moira waved her hand. “Keep it down,” she said.

  They walked in silence for another few hundred yards, and then Moira breathed a sigh of relief. “I think that’s done it. If I never see another Fae again it’ll be too soon—”

  She choked, and her knees buckled. Moira went face-first into the water, her red hair spreading around her head like a billow of blood. The witchfire she’d conjured flickered and went out.

  Declan gave a wail, the sound of an animal in excruciating pain, crumpling against the tunnel wall.

  Jack conjured a light of his own, and the harsh blue glow illuminated the blade in Moira’s back. A good hit, jammed squarely into the center of her back, next to the spine. A nick of the heart, a near-instant bleeding out.

  “Jack,” Pete said softly. He looked up to meet the eyes of one of the Fae, who leaned down and retrieved his knife from Moira’s body.

  “I track warm-blooded things like you,” the Fae said. His voice was musical and low, like listening to a snake try to speak English. “No matter how far underground you burrow.”

  Pete pulled her stun gun, but Jack waved her off. “Don’t bother, luv. He’s an experienced killer, and he’ll have a blade between your eyes before you can pull that trigger.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “But at least I’ll give him something to think about.”

  “Try to harm me,” the Fae said. “I would relish the kill of a Weir. It would be very good to return home with such a trophy.”

  “You don’t want to do this,” Pete said. She was using her copper voice, the voice designed to calm killers and free hostages. “I’m a friend to the Queen. I—”