“Doctor? More like some fly-by-night veterinarian, based on how these stitches feel,” he said. The wound felt hot and jagged, and he hoped that Morwenna’s pet surgeon had slipped in some antibiotics along with the good drugs.
“Whoever he was, you’re alive,” Pete said. “And because I asked so nicely, I got Morwenna to send someone to check on Legion without us having to lift a finger.”
Jack groaned. “What did we end up owing her for that, I wonder?”
Pete offered him a paper cup of water. “I’m thinking that’s one of those bridges we cross after we avert the apocalypse, myself.”
Jack swallowed the water in one go. The inside of his mouth felt like a gravel pit, and his throat was swollen and hot. Going through surgery was somewhere on his list of fun Friday nights after getting hit by a taxi and listening to chamber music while sober.
“Thank you,” he rasped to Pete. “Even if you did give these posh twats something to hold over our heads.”
Pete moved herself to lie down next to him, putting her hand on his unbandaged leg. “At least you still have a head for them to threaten, thanks to me. You owe me big time, Mr. Winter.”
Jack grinned at her. “As soon as I’m mobile again, I’ll express me gratitude in numerous anatomically improbable ways, don’t you worry.”
Pete gave him a jab. “You’re higher than a pigeon with a jetpack, so I’ll let that one slide.”
Jack pouted at her. “You’re horribly mean to me.”
Pete nodded, nestling her head into his shoulder. “Yeah. And that’s why you love me.”
Jack was going to suggest they express their love with a well-deserved lie-in when the door opened and Morwenna strode into the room. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, with an expression that any bitter old nun would have killed to mimic.
Pete sat up, keeping her hand on Jack. “You found something,” she said. “At that monastery.”
Morwenna exhaled, tapping her fingers against her leg. “How much do you know about this, really? And I warn you, don’t play dumb with me. I’m going to be very upset.”
“You know that scary story you tossed us out for telling you?” Jack said. “Well, that’s where the scary story is currently holed up, with half the kingdom of Faerie as backup, plus enough elemental demons to turn every person in London into their very own beans on toast.”
“It’s considerably more serious than a gathering of ragtag interests,” Morwenna said. “Our sources say the Faerie king himself is there, and that this demon has Fenris guarding him along with a host of lesser elementals. Egregors are patrolling the perimeter and the monastery itself is hemmed in by Fae assassins.”
Pete let out a long breath. “Shit.”
“I don’t know what your ulterior motive is,” Morwenna said. “But going near that place is suicide.” She went to the door and opened it again. “I’m not going to tell you your business, but I assume you do want to stay alive. If you have some idiotic notion about going out like a superhero … please don’t drag the Prometheans into it.”
“I can hardly gad about in a cape like this, can I?” Jack snapped. Morwenna gave a delicate sniff.
“You have until sunset to get yourself together and leave,” she said. “The Prometheans don’t need the kind of trouble you’re bringing.”
Pete gave Morwenna a poisonous glare. “The Prometheans are going to be sipping tea on the ashes of the world if they keep this up,” she said.
“We have endured for a thousand years,” Morwenna said. “The prophecies have us existing for many more.”
Jack managed to sit up, feeling around for his coat and his pants on the floor next to the bed. The weight of the blade was still in his pocket, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “The Prometheans are going to vanish under what’s coming just like me and Pete,” he said. “The difference is, we’re willing to adapt enough to fight back.”
He struggled into his pants. Thanks to the drugs, his leg only twinged a bit. “I think you and I are done, Morwenna. The Prometheans no longer have any claim over Margaret, or us. I wouldn’t be eager to meet us again if I were you.”
“Just goes to show,” Morwenna said. “You do someone of your class a favor, and they repay you with insults.”
“You can send us a fruit basket after we kill Legion for you,” Pete said. “Then you can consider us even.”
CHAPTER 35
Jack sat down on a small stone bench outside the gates of the Prometheans’ country estate, watching the empty road. “What exactly are we going to do now?”
Pete massaged her forehead. “I have no idea. I just didn’t want that bitch to think she got the upper hand.”
“She’s right, though,” Jack said. “Much as I thought those words would never march across my lips. If Legion has a full complement of elementals and Fae, he’ll liquidate us the minute we land within a mile of that monastery.”
Pete pulled out her mobile and dialed up a local cab company. “So what do we do?” she asked while they had her on hold. “I mean, aside from getting hold of a teleport spell. Do those even exist?”
“I met somebody once, in Amsterdam, who said he did it,” Jack said. “Turns out he just ate too many hash brownies and thought he’d walked through a wall. Tried to do it in front of me and knocked himself out.”
“Maybe we could summon him,” Pete said. Jack felt the ache in his bones start up again at the very thought.
“Do we really want to summon Legion? He’s going to be one angry little cult leader when we zap him out of his cozy compound and into our sitting room.”
“When you want to take down a target you have to separate him from the herd and run him to ground,” Pete said. “And I think that’s our best hope.” She frowned at Jack. “If you’re up for it.”
“I could not be less up for anything,” he said. “But sure, why the fuck not? The worst he can do is kill us and burn London to the ground, and wait, that’s already happening.”
He thought about watching Seth vanish in his dream, and rubbed a hand over his face to dispel the cobwebs from his brain. If he was going to work a summoning on this scale, he needed to be sharp.
Pete gave the cab their address and shut her mobile. “Good,” she said. “Tell me what you need from me so we can nail this bastard to the wall.”
CHAPTER 36
Jack put the word out to Mosswood for the materials he couldn’t pick up from his own supplies, and he and Pete stopped at the flat just long enough to grab his kit. The clock was running on when Belial would figure out that Jack hadn’t given over the blade, and the last thing he wanted was not one slagged-off demon but a pair, both gunning for him.
“We need a place to do this other than a flat in the middle of a block with a thousand people,” he said to Pete as they packed up a pair of canvas bags.
Pete pulled out her mobile. “I can probably find a place. I need to check on Margaret and Lily anyway.”
She walked away while she called Ollie Heath, and Jack took a moment to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything he couldn’t live without.
The flat wasn’t much, but it had been home ever since he’d come back from Ireland. Sure, he’d gotten the deed by convincing a senile sorcerer to sign it over, the walls were stained, the windows let in every draft that blew by, and the furniture was mostly picked off various surburban curbs in early mornings before the trash brigade came along, but it was as much a home as any place he’d ever slept.
Pete was here, Lily was here. Most of the good memories of his life wound back to here.
He sat down on their rickety sofa for a moment and looked out the sooty windows, over the rooftop of the place next door. The sky was already fading into dawn. Putting together supplies for the summoning had taken most of the night, but he didn’t feel tired anymore. He found the last of the Percocet that Pete had cadged from Morwenna and dry-swallowed the pills. Just a few more hours, and one way or the other, this would all be over.
He wasn’t s
ure if the thought was a comfort or a terror.
Pete came in from the kitchen, holding out her mobile so he could see mapped directions to an address. “Ollie says this place is still in limbo with the city government,” she said. “We shouldn’t have any company, and all that’s around it are warehouses and self-storage setups. Nobody in range if something happens.”
Jack nodded. “Good enough,” he said. Pete hefted her bag.
“Ready?”
“No, but that’s never stopped me before,” Jack told her. Pete went out, and he looked around the flat one more time, acutely aware that it might be the last time he did so, then he shut the door behind him.
CHAPTER 37
The warehouse Ollie sent them to had been used as an illegal casino by the Russians, and Jack felt a heavy stone settle in his guts as the Mini crunched over gravel to the wide oversized doors.
“Of course,” he murmured, looking up at the broken-down four-story building.
“Something wrong?” Pete said. “Ollie said attorneys and the city are still fighting over this place after the seizure, and they’re too cheap to send a detail around to check on it. Quiet, out of the way … I thought it was what you wanted.”
“No,” Jack said, climbing out of the Mini and trying to work the stiffness out of his wounded leg. “It’s perfect.”
The warehouse looked just as it had in his vision, except that the sun wasn’t yet up. It was close, though. Close to the time when Legion would stride to the roof and bring everything crashing down.
Jack started for the door. “We need to move,” he said to Pete. “Legion’s going to make his play soon.”
Pete didn’t question him. She pulled the ragged yellow Met tape off the door. The padlock had already been clipped by hoodies looking for a place to loot or shoot up in, and the interior loading bay blossomed with graffiti.
Jack hopped onto the platform and surveyed the vast interior space. The floor was rough boards covered in decades of dust, and light beamed in from lacy holes in glass skylights. A few crates and boxes had tumbled on their sides, spilling their straw innards, but the contents were gone. In the far corner of the warehouse, a pair of dirty mattresses and a craps table turned on its side didn’t bear closer inspection.
Jack set down his kit bag and turned in a slow circle. Plenty of iron to keep out interference, and plenty of space to keep himself at arm’s length from Legion.
“All right,” he said to Pete. “Let’s get started.”
They chalked a wide circle, at least twenty feet in circumference. He needed to be able to move in any direction without breaking the lines. Jack sprinkled salt as an extra bit of electric fence, then set all the barrier sigils he knew around the edges. He held off sketching the symbol Belial had planted in his mind. No need to start the party early.
“None of these barriers will do fuck-all, likely” he told Pete. “So stay sharp. Won’t be easy to contain him.”
Pete sat on her heels, brushing chalk dust from her palms. “It’s no fun if it’s easy. We need anything else?”
Jack looked back toward the double doors. “Just some herbs and one particular extra I asked Mosswood to bring.”
Pete stepped carefully, so as not to disturb the chalk and salt line, and went to her own bag, taking out her collapsible metal baton. “Brought my own extras,” she said. “Just in case Legion decides he wants to make this physical.”
Jack thought about his tenderized state he’d seen in his vision. “I think that’s a distinct possibility.”
He jumped when the booming knock sounded at the door, his heart giving a painful thud. He was doing all right hiding his nerves from Pete, but he was doing a shit job of making himself believe he didn’t have them.
“I hope you know you’ve gone insane,” Mosswood said when Jack peered through the gap in the door.
“You would be far from the first to think that,” Jack said. Mosswood passed over a canvas-wrapped package, and then a glass vial carefully cushioned inside a small box.
“I know what these herbs are for, so I’m going to skip the foreplay of You don’t know what you’re doing and Are you bloody stupid? and just say that I hope I’m wrong. I hope you come out of this in one piece.”
Jack felt the electric shock of his fear and his own gnawing doubts subside a bit. “Thanks, Ian. That actually means something coming from you.”
“I’ll say goodbye,” Mosswood said. “And though it’s probably futile, I’ll hope it’s not for the last time.”
“Oh, come on,” Jack said, giving Mosswood’s tweed-clad shoulder a slap. “How many times have you seen the world end, Ian? This is nothing.”
“Even so,” Mosswood said sadly. “I think my time here among mortals is at an end. I will be going home, Jack. If we pass one another in the mist some day, I probably won’t know your name. Fae-lands have that effect.” He pressed his hand briefly on Jack’s shoulder. “We were good friends, but that is past, and as Hartley says, ‘The past is a foreign country.’”
Jack felt a sharp, sudden sensation just behind his eyes. He would be sad when the Green Man was gone, he realized. Sad in the way you’re sad to lose a favorite teacher or a really top-notch bartender. “Well, they also say ‘Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’” he said, pushing down the prickle. Moping around was a luxury he didn’t have right now. Later, he could think about exactly what Legion had taken from him—his fellow crow brothers, Mosswood, his own sense of security—but now he had to kick the bastard’s arse.
“Very poetic,” Mosswood said. “Dostoyevsky?”
“Cinderella,” Jack said. “The band, not the princess. You take care of yourself, Mosswood.”
The Green Man nodded and backed away, and Jack shut the door. He gave Pete the herbs to start burning, and he turned the vial in his hands.
“Do I want to know?” Pete said.
“It’s blood,” Jack said. “I somehow doubt Legion has a handy little call button like Hrathetoth, and blood is the most powerful conductor there is for ritual.”
Pete wrinkled her nose at the vial. “Please tell me that’s not human.”
“No,” Jack said. “Demon.” He uncorked the vial and poured the sticky black substance into the metal bowl he kept in his kit, placing it at the center of the circle. “And before you ask, I don’t know where Mosswood got it, and I know enough not to pry.”
“You know, there was a time when this sort of thing would make my skin crawl,” Pete said. “How things change, eh?”
Jack rolled his shoulders and his neck. It had been a while since he’d been in a stand-up fight, but he had no illusion that this summoning would be anything but. No room to be clever, no way to cut and run. Either he or Legion wouldn’t be leaving this circle.
He was going to prove his vision wrong, or he was going to die trying.
Looking over at Pete, standing just outside the circle, stun gun at the ready, he gave her a smile. “It’ll be all right,” he said.
“Liar,” she said.
Jack turned back into the center of the circle, pulling on the deep well of the Black that lay beneath London. It rushed up at him faster than it ever had before. The barriers were thin everywhere, thin as wet paper, and the tide of magic rushed up and covered him. Witchfire blossomed not just from his body but all around the warehouse, sparking off every surface and racing between the rafters like lightning jumping from cloud to cloud.
He touched the Morrigan’s blade once more for reassurance, and then started talking.
Words didn’t matter so much as intent with magic. Keep it simple, Seth always said. Simple is best. That way there’s no mistaking your intention to perform some feat of power.
Jack usually came up with a little phrase, something designed to tickle the frequencies of whatever or whoever he was trying to cast or summon for or against. This time, though, he only had one intent. Only needed one word.
“Legion,” he whispered. “Legion, Legion, Legion…”
/> He took all the power, all of the witchfire running off him like a flood, and he dipped deep down into the well, pushing the power into the circle, through the demon’s blood. That was his link to Legion. That was what made him strong.
“Legion,” he said. “Come here, you bastard. You and I haven’t finished yet.”
When he called up demons, there was always a moment of contact, a sense of presence when you’d latched on to the other side of the equation, wherever the demon happened to be. Demons weren’t human, and they felt a certain way. He could almost see their outlines wrought on the very fabric of the Black, their own personal magic signature that granted them enough power to flatten any human mage, but also made it possible to pull their body and magic into summoning circles.
But with Legion, there was nothing.
No spark, no sense of tapping into the demon’s feed. The Black was on, roaring through Jack like a turbine pushing on full power, screaming through the summoning circle so that the herbs withered into ash and the blood in the metal bowl started to boil before the vessel melted into slag and sent liquid metal and demon blood running across the wood floor.
“What’s wrong?” Pete shouted, and Jack realized he was pulling down so much power he’d kicked up his very own whirlwind, the witchfire racing in a cyclone around the warehouse, whipping Pete’s hair and Jack’s coat but leaving the salt and the summoning tools untouched.
“I don’t know!” he shouted back. “I’ve never had this happen with a demon before!”
“That’s because I’m not a demon,” Legion said. His shadow loomed up, his body filling Jack’s vision, and then Jack was flying through the air, feeling wind and grit on his face before he smashed through the crates and hit a steel girder holding up the wall behind it.
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