Jack waited, not breathing, and for a moment everything seemed fine. Pete let out a small shiver, her eyes rolling back in her head. “I can see…,” she breathed. “I can see so much, Jack. It’s beautiful.…”
Then she cried out, falling to the ground and clutching at her skull. “It’s too much,” she moaned. “Too much … I can see it … I can see everything.”
Jack dropped to his knees, reaching out before he had time to realize what a royally bad idea that was. He just wanted to make the sounds stop, the moans and the whimpers that quickly built to screams. He touched Pete, and she was still touching the eye.
The shock was worse than electricity, worse than anything he’d ever felt. It was like being struck by lightning and plunging into ice cold water all at once.
He thought he might have screamed, but he wasn’t sure. All he could see for a moment was darkness, and then a million dots of light filled his vision. They weren’t dots, he realized. They were worlds, entire realms, places like the Black and Hell and the world he lived in, all strung across the blackness like diamonds scattered on velvet.
There were so many. Jack felt his eyes fill with tears. The pain was indescribable, the feeling that his brain would burst from the onslaught of information.
This was what Pete was seeing. Her Weir talent was running off the chain and she was channeling him as well as the eye, feeding into his sight like Belial’s memory trick had.
He tried to find her, find any sign that they were still attached to their physical bodies—that they were still alive, and the feedback from Pete’s talent hadn’t turned them both into ash.
Ashes, ashes, Declan whispered in his ear, we all fall down.
The million dots parted, leaving a hundred and then half of that and then less than a dozen, spiralling down until there was only one glowing orb in Jack’s vision, and then it brightened and blinded him, until he saw the vaults of Hell before him.
They were much different than the boring, sterile museum basement that Belial had brought them to. These were old, more ossuary than vault, lined with the skulls and bones of elemental demons, horned and spiked, the long-toothed skulls of wolves mixed in with the ones that looked more human.
A single demon, wrapped only in a black loincloth and the trailing pinion feathers of his black wings, stood before a simple wooden box. He held a blade in his hand. It was broken off halfway down the shaft, coated in sticky black blood and feathers. The demon himself was covered in deep slashes and cuts, like he’d tangled with a giant bird.
“Azrael,” Jack whispered. It was only a memory, what he was seeing, an event the eye had observed impassively. Azrael smiled to himself as he put the knife in the box.
“And if that bitch ever tries anything, we’ll stick the rest of this where the other half went,” he said to someone that Jack couldn’t see. He tried to turn a bit and caught a glimpse of Pete out of the corner of his eye. He tried not to choke, or scream.
Pete had human features, looked like herself, but where her eyes should be was a bright void, a screaming well so deep and wide that it could have consumed every one of the worlds that he’d seen when the eye hooked on to his talent.
It was the most terrifying sight he’d ever witnessed, bar none. His talent was a part of him, in his bone and his blood, but it was a part, just one of the things that made him Jack Winter, like his crooked nose or his bum knee or his complete inability to appreciate music produced after 1994.
Pete’s talent, though—it was her. It was in every atom of her, lived inside her like she was a vessel. That much power shouldn’t be possible for a human body to contain, and yet she did it, without even trying.
The glow grew brighter, and Jack only caught a glimpse of the tall, human-looking figure Azrael had spoken to before he realized the much more urgent problem. Pete’s talent was burning them both up, and he had no way to break the connection.
“What about me?” the figure whispered. “If she finds me…”
“She won’t,” Azrael said, caressing the blade once more before he shut the box and moved to the iron door of the vault. “No one will. Oh, and if you think you’re going to use your little body-hopping trick to get out of here, this place only has one purpose.”
“You wouldn’t…,” the figure started, but Azrael smiled.
“It dampens all magic. Mine, too, which is why I didn’t tell you until just now. Wouldn’t do to have you get it into your head to attack me.”
Blackness started to creep in on Jack as he watched, not the spooky metaphorical darkness he’d heard so much about but the kind of blackness that came with any of the half-dozen times he’d overdosed or lost his air slowly. The first sign from his body that he was on the way. Don’t worry about your eyesight, mate, it whispered to him. You won’t be needing it for much longer.
Jack tried to pull back from what he’d seen of Pete, what the eye had shown him. They were in a room, on a floor, him clutching Pete and her clutching the eye, surrounded by steel and broken glass.…
“No!” the tall figure howled as Azrael slammed the door. “Don’t you leave me here! I swear if you do I’ll find you!”
Azrael gave a laugh that echoed even through the half-inch of iron. “Promises, promises,” the demon’s voice echoed, and then there was silence, except for the raging screams of the thing trapped inside the vault.
Jack used every trick he’d ever tried for breaking the hold of his sight—he had tattoos that were supposed to help, Pete’s idea, and he thought of those, of the sting of the needle when he’d gotten them inked. He still had a body, provided it wasn’t burned to a crisp.
Reaching out with the hand that wasn’t on Pete’s forehead, he felt the cold shards of the smashed glass on the floor all around them. The eye was going ballistic, showing him things in quick succession—the cold stone palaces of the Fae realm, carved from the rocks beneath like living creatures emerging from hibernation, a cold wasteland where things without eyes crawled across a glacier toward a sea filled with frothy blood, the white nothingness between each of the points of light where the worms that had almost been unleashed on the daylight lived, still waiting for the moment when the barriers fell.
Jack grabbed the glass, squeezing it tight and slicing into his palm. The sting helped, causing the visions to flicker like a bad signal, but it wasn’t enough. Only real, immediate physical pain could break through the grip of his talent.
He sucked in a breath, than raised the glass and jammed it deep into his thigh, biting into his jeans and the flesh underneath. He tried to miss the major artery running up the inside of his leg, but at this point, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between letting Pete’s talent devour him and bleeding out.
The lights of the vault room shocked his eyes, and he screwed up his brow against the jolt of pain. Pete lay on the floor, very still, and Jack used the handle of the mace to nudge the eye out of her grasp.
She shuddered, ever so slightly, and her entire body started to glow as white witchfire wreathed it. Whatever power she’d absorbed from the eye was inside her, just waiting to be redirected against whomever got in the way. Which right now, was him.
Jack leaned down next to her mouth, careful not to touch her, and his stomach flipped when she didn’t breathe. His leg hurt like a bastard, but he wasn’t bleeding much as long as he kept the shard embedded in the wound.
“Pete,” he said. The witchfire flickered and then, like mist falling into the hills and valleys of the countryside where Seth had kept his summer cottage back in Ireland, it faded back into her body. It didn’t dissipate, as extra power should. It crawled back inside her and took up residence, just waiting.
“Pete?” he said again. If he touched her, he was going to get vaporized. Not that he cared, if it woke her up.
She jolted upright, and Jack gave an involuntary yell, scrabbling backward and causing a fresh font of blood from his leg.
For a moment her eyes were pure white, and then they faded as he wa
tched, back to the usual dark green. He’d never forgotten that color, since the first time he’d seen her face to face. She had eyes you could drown in. Human eyes.
“Fuck me,” he said, flopping back onto the hard floor. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
Pete examined her hands in response, touched her face and hair lightly. “I don’t feel well,” she told Jack.
“You sucked down enough magic to light up all of Wales,” he said. “That’ll give anyone a tummy rumble.”
“Jack.” Pete stared at him, her pupils wide with fear. “I don’t know if I can hold it down.”
“Look.” He levered himself up and crawled across the floor to her. “Just wait until we get to the vault. You saw what I did, yeah?”
Pete nodded, her cheeks coloring. “This is really bad. This is worse than anything I’ve ever channeled.”
“I know,” Jack said. “Listen, luv, I wouldn’t lie to you—this is bad. But that room can hold in anything—you saw who Azrael left down there. So either he’s still there and you can use your death ray on him, or the room will keep the wave in.”
Pete blinked, and Jack saw her press her hands together to stop them shaking. “What happened to your leg?” she asked abruptly.
“Oh, you know.” Jack grabbed a stick, wider at one end than the other, from the weapons array and used it to prop himself up. “Stabbed my own leg to break out of a psychic vision that was going to leave me brain damaged. The usual.”
He offered Pete a hand, but she shrank away. “Don’t. If you touch me, I’m going to drain you. The Weir just wants more, Jack. It always wants more.”
“It’ll be all right,” he said, with a conviction that he didn’t feel. He couldn’t shake what he’d seen when the eye had gripped him. “You just have to get us to that room, and everything will be all right.”
Pete got to her feet. She moved slowly, keeping her arms close to her, like if she touched anything she’d shatter. “Promise?” she said, her voice sounding more like Margaret’s than her own. Young, scared, looking for any shred of reassurance she could find.
“I do,” Jack lied. “Just walk, Pete, and everything will be fine.”
CHAPTER 30
Pete had no trouble with the myriad twists and turns of the inner vaults, leading them through dozens of hallways, lifts, and stairwells, ever deeper and ever downward once they left the display room. Jack wondered how many hundreds of feet below Hell they were. How many thousands of years it had been since any eye—demon, damned, or human—had rested on the stone walls and dripping, rusted iron doors of the inner sanctum.
“I saw it, you know,” Pete said after a time. Her voice echoed into the upper reaches of the vault, and they both jumped. They were walking along a narrow corridor lined on both sides with vault rooms, dozens of catwalks crisscrossing above their heads like an iron spider web.
“What did you see?” Jack whispered. His own voice taunted him, echoing from the curved walls and ceilings so high above their heads they were invisible in the dark. See, see, see.
“This place,” Pete said. “It’s a circle, a maze really. To build it must have taken hundreds of years. I doubt anyone knows what’s at the center of this thing.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want to find out,” Jack said. “I just want to get the Morrigan’s blade and get out of here.”
Pete stumbled, and Jack fought against his urge to help her up. She grimaced as she stood, pressing her fingers to her temples. “We have to hurry,” she said. “It’s talking to me, trying to convince me to just unleash it, destroy this place. I don’t have much longer before it turns.”
“Fight it,” Jack said. “Just listen to me. Talk to me about anything while we walk, all right?”
Pete moved faster, her gait hitching with pain, but she was still quicker than Jack, whose leg had started to bleed enough to soak his jeans all the way down to his ankle. His vision spun just a bit, but he kept going. He’d be fine. He’d had worse injuries. He wasn’t the one in danger of burning alive.
“Do you know,” she said, “I bought myself a funeral plot. A while ago, my first year in the Met.”
Jack swiped a hand over his face, finding cool droplets of sweat. “Maybe this isn’t the best subject for us.”
“Most officers run a higher risk of dying on the job in their first few years,” Pete said. “They’re inexperienced and arrogant and think they’re untouchable. It was next to my dad’s. Lovely little spot. Knowing it was there kept me sharp, kept me from doing stupid shite that would have gotten me killed.”
“Pete…,” Jack said, as they started down a narrow flight of stone stairs, a spiral carved into the earth like the passage of a great worm.
“I sold it when I found out I was pregnant,” Pete said. “Because I knew then that I was never going to need that plot. I’m not going to die on the street, Jack, because I stopped the wrong plod with a grudge and a black-market gun.”
“Of course not…,” Jack started, but Pete held up her hand.
“I’m not going to die in my bed, either, because if I’ve learned one thing from being with you, it’s that we’re all just specks compared to what’s out there in the universe. And seeing what that thing had to show me confirmed it. I bought that cemetery plot because I was afraid, Jack. I was afraid that I’d see death coming and have no way to stop it, just like my father.”
Jack liked to think he’d learned to keep his mouth shut at the right times over his tenure living with Pete, so he focused on walking without falling over, limping heavily as they moved down a low hall lit with a string of hissing, fizzing Edison bulbs. The iron doors looked familiar, and he hoped they were close.
“I figured out that it’s not about dying,” Pete said. “It’s about living with the time we have, doing what we can to look at ourselves in the mirror, and not being afraid. I made myself look at my death, Jack. I’ve done it a dozen times, and this is the closest I’ve come.”
She stopped in front of the last door in the row, the iron blistered with rust and green fingers of oxidization. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’ll never be afraid again. So don’t worry about me, all right?”
Jack couldn’t look at her. “I can’t help it,” he managed. “I am afraid, Pete. Why do you think I made that deal with Belial?”
“You bought your plot,” Pete said. “Big fucking deal. You were the one who taught me how to not be afraid, Jack. Of anything. You’re not brave because you don’t have any fear. You’re brave because you do what needs to be done.”
She rapped her knuckles against the iron. “Now get this door open, because if you don’t, we’re both getting up close and personal with the Land of the Dead.”
Jack exhaled. It felt as if he had a load of stones in his pocket, and somebody had just reached in and snatched out the heaviest one. Just a small piece, but now he felt like whatever happened next, he could probably come out the other side without breaking down into the sort of mess who’d sell his soul and scramble over everyone else in the world to save his own life.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “No problem, luv.” He dropped the crutch and put his hands on the door. The lock was pretty rudimentary—he guessed the real power of the room came from whatever hexes Azrael had put in place.
No time to worry about that now; the hexes wouldn’t reach out and bite him. Pete was counting on him. Jack pressed his fingers against the lock. Locks had never been difficult for him, even when he’d had a go at picking them the old-fashioned way, without any magic.
The lock clicked, and the door swung open a few inches, the waft of air shut in for a thousand years dry and stale in his face.
Jack flinched for a split second, waiting for whoever Azrael had screwed over to come screaming out of the vault and rip his face off.
Pete moved past him, the white witchfire rising from her skin again. “Come on!” she rasped. “I’m going to nuke whatever’s in here—you better get the blade.”
Jack flipped
his lighter open. He didn’t want to risk any conjuring this close to Pete and her runaway talent. The small flame illuminated the stone table where the wooden box lay, covered in a millennium of dust and the webbing of a creature that Jack didn’t care to imagine.
His light also caught the bones embedded in the walls—whether they were here for burial or more of Azrael’s victims, he guessed he’d never know.
“Jack!” Pete’s voice held the kind of sharp urgency reserved for diffusing bombs, or going into labor. “Get out,” she said.
Jack started to shake his head as he grabbed the box and stuffed it into his coat. “I’m not leaving you here.”
Pete stared at him, the white overtaking her eyes again. “Get … out…,” she groaned, her voice echoing off the walls of the vault. “We can’t both turn to ash down here, so go.”
She was right. Pete was always right. One of them had to make it out of here, for Lily and Margaret, so they would have a world to go back to.
“I love you,” he said, running for the door. Pete managed a thin, pain-filled smile.
“I know.”
Jack bolted from the vault, slamming the door behind him. The iron was thick. It had blocked out everything but darkness for a thousand years, but it couldn’t block out Pete’s screams.
Jack had never been one to pray, even when he was a small boy and his mother had dragged him off to church every Sunday to look good for the neighbors, until the vicar kindly suggested that until she could stop taking hits off a gin flask during the service, the Winter family should probably just stay home.
What was the point? There was nothing out there that would help him out of the goodness of their heart. The gods weren’t altruistic—they were the most selfish, scheming ones of all. There was no magical sky grandfather who would swoop in and make everything all right if he really, really wanted it. Faith was for people who didn’t know better. It was for the small boy he’d been, keeping the faith that someday his life would be more than a council flat, a mother who only made it to the bathroom half the time when chasing her gin with a handful of benzos made her puke her guts up, and a mind full of dead people only he could see, who wouldn’t stop talking no matter what he did.
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