Pete threw the charge list back at him and grabbed up the nurse’s keycard, going to the third locked room on the ward. She swiped the card and waited for the slow progress of the electronic door.
Jack’s room was bereft of furniture, except for a steel bedframe propped on end against the far wall. He sat in the center of the painted cement, naked, knees drawn up to his chest. “There you are,” Pete said softly. She made a move to step inside, but Jack spoke.
“Don’t come in.”
Pete glanced around the cell-sized space, and saw that every inch of wall and floor, save a small spot for Jack to sit, was painted with ritual symbols. He’d started in marker, black ink jagged and done in shaking hands, and as the symbols flowed toward the center of the floor, they became blood, sticky and gleaming from long exposure to the air.
“Fuck me,” Pete said. “What have you done?”
“Don’t come inside,” Jack said. “Don’t come any closer.”
“You’d hurt me?” Pete said. She stuck an arm out and caught the doorframe. The Black flowing through the writing on the cell walls was like being smacked across the face, and left her skull ringing.
“They’re not for you,” Jack said. “Now go away.”
Pete took a step inside instead, and when nothing happened, sat next to Jack on the clear patch of floor, drawing her own legs up. “Been here long, then?”
“I was going to go and start the ritual and give the raven woman Carver,” Jack said. “Then I went back by the flat to get a few things. You were gone.” He put his forehead on the knobby points of his knees. “Didn’t know if you’d chucked me or Naughton had taken you. But I turned around and I checked into hospital. Figured some anti-psychotics would keep the sight down, thick steel walls. I fucked everyone I know to do this thing and I couldn’t even follow through on that.”
Pete realized that now that she was inside the cell, the Black had gone softer, as if they were behind thick stone walls muting a rush of traffic on the other side.
“I’m a waste,” Jack said. “Eventually she’ll find me, and I won’t go back to Hell. I’ll go to the Underworld, and then even Nicholas fucking Naughton can’t fetch me back.” He breathed deeply, back quivering. “Then it’ll be done.”
“Yeah, well,” Pete told him, lifting his face so she could look at him. “I’m not about lying down and dying, so you better snap the fuck out of it and get on with helping me.”
Jack put his hand over Pete’s, and tangled his fingers tight enough to bruise her. “What the fuck,” he snarled, “ever made you have such blind faith in me?”
“I don’t,” Pete said. “I have no faith in you, Jack. That’s over, and that’s between you and me.” She removed her hand from him. “Now, you promised Carver to the Morrigan?”
“You know I did,” Jack mumbled.
Pete stood, smudging her foot in a wide circle across as many of the symbols as she could. “Then I think it’s time we give her what she wants.”
CHAPTER 35
Jack started to shout at Pete, scrambling up and trying to grab her, but she twisted away from him and smeared at the walls with her hands, ink and blood coating her palms.
He screamed at her, but Pete soon lost the sound amid the wild rushing of wings, hundreds of wings and thousands of feathers, wind across an endless, empty place as the Black convulsed and shifted around them.
She’d seen the Morrigan before, once, when she’d appeared to take Algernon Treadwell’s soul back to the Underworld. Just a glimpse, and that had been enough. The raven woman had feathers for hair and black coals for eyes. Her skin was the skin of a corpse and her fingers dipped to run down Jack’s spine.
I knew you’d come, she whispered, and Jack let out a quiet sob.
“He’s not the one you’re dealing with,” Pete told her. The Morrigan turned her eyes on Pete, and staring at her, Pete felt her talent writhe, filled with the same empty, sharp feeling as when she’d come to the hospital for the last time—not to say goodbye to Connor, but to collect his things after the nurses had cleaned out his bed and packed them up.
The room, devoid of oxygen machines and heart monitors, the crisp pink spread and all of the flowers she and his friends from the Met had brought thrown away. Empty. Nothing.
You think you’re a hero, the Morrigan whispered. A bright soul that will outshine the dark. She put her clawed hands on either side of Pete’s face, and brought their lips so close they nearly brushed, sharing the air. The dark is greater than all of you. And I’ve lived in it for so long, Weir. It’s time the rest of you do as well.
“I know I’m not a hero,” Pete said. “But I wasn’t stupid enough to come alone.”
Belial stepped from the doorway and raised a hand. “Why, look at you. Out in the daylight and everything. Mind your tan.”
The Morrigan hissed, baring her teeth. Her canines were sharp as needles. Belial answered with his shark’s grin. “I like things the way they are,” he said. “The dead should stay dead. So why don’t you hop on your broomstick and leave the world as it is?”
Pete crouched next to Jack, pulling him to his feet. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going.”
The Morrigan turned on them, and Pete put her body between the raven woman and Jack. This changes nothing, the Morrigan snarled. You think I fear a maggot feasting on the flesh of lost souls? I am death. I am the maiden of war and the bride of blood since Nergal’s dragon first crept forth from the old places, the lost places. You won’t stop me.
Belial moved, but the Morrigan was quicker, and she raised her arms. Behind her, Pete saw the great wings rise, the wings that carried souls to the Underworld, and death from it.
The demon flew back into the corridor and slammed the wall. The body he rode let off a small wheeze, and Belial curled into a ball, blood coming from between his lips. Fat drops landed on the gray tile.
The Morrigan stretched out her hand to Jack. Give him to me. Or you go back to how I found you, alone and in Hell. And I will take your Weir to the Bleak Gates, and I will ensure she never sees the daylight world again, until everything goes to ashes.
Jack grabbed his skull, moaning, and then quickly as he’d convulsed, he went limp. Pete saw the symbols on the walls of the cell blur, fall away as the Black pushed through. Gerard Carver’s spirit stood before her, and behind him Pete saw the London of the in-between, burnt and blacked, its back broken.
The shadow she’d seen with the Hecate unfurled, and she became aware the Morrigan was speaking, and that this wasn’t the Black, but somewhere else. Older, buried down deep before the first human or thing that would become human had ever drawn breath.
Son of Nergal, serpent of the world. Eater of death and life, darkness and day, be free. The Morrigan didn’t raise her hands, or even chant. Her lips barely moved as she watched, reverent.
The dragon wasn’t a dragon in the sense of scales, but a shadow that wrapped London around and around, spilling forth from the place Gerard Carver’s ghost connected the hospital cell with. Pete felt it unfurl, saw that it was a prison, this place where the dragon had lain, and heard it scream as it came barreling toward Gerard Carver.
Pete tried to reach for Jack, but she wasn’t near him any longer, wasn’t anywhere. The dragon came, and it swallowed Carver, jerked as the soul cage tugged at it, pulling it down and holding over the burning city, as the spotlights roaming the sky winked out one by one.
Go, child, the Morrigan whispered to it. You have come to me, and because you have come, I offer you the chance to be free.
The dragon howled again, and the Morrigan passed her hand across Jack’s face. He will lead the way. And you will lead the dead, the armies of the Underworld, and the Black will be clean and new. She stroked his hair, ran her claws through it, and Jack shivered under her touch, leaning into it. None of the throbbing masses. None of the filth and sweat and blood. Clean and cold and free of what troubles you. You, crow-mage. You brought this dawn, and I thank you.
P
ete watched as Jack stood, and the Morrigan drew something from her great dress of feathers and blackness. She handed Jack a black blade, and pressed her thumb to his forehead. All over Jack’s naked form new markings blossomed, tattoos that painted themselves onto his skin, burst to the surface like shattered veins. Jack screamed, going to his knees, clutching the blade so that blood flowed from his palms.
Belial was not stirring, and Pete tried to reach for him, but the Black was whirling, colliding with the daylight world. The London outside was burning, and Pete could hear screams and klaxons.
The dragon fed. Unwinding, devouring Carver’s soul, it fed and Pete felt the swell of all the things Belial had spoken of—the plagues of rage and greed and base human nature.
Give them permission to do what they like, and they’re like animals.
Jack’s ink became wings, claws, agonized faces of spirits frozen against his skin. He stood before the Morrigan naked, blood flowing over his hands, and watched as the dragon laid its coils over the city, a darkness so complete not even sound could pierce it.
“Jack,” Pete said. “Please don’t. Remember why you came here.”
“I am,” Jack mumured. “It’s like I told you, Pete. I did it so you could be safe. Aren’t you glad now?”
Come. The Morrigan folded him beneath her wings, pressed their lips together. Blood dribbled from their kiss, down the Morrigan’s chin, where she lapped it up.
Pete looked to Belial again, and saw his eyes open, cloudy and staring. She followed his gaze and saw the owl, sitting on the sill beyond the mesh and bars, amid the rain of ash.
“Jack,” she tried, one last time. He wouldn’t look at her, locked in the embrace of the Morrigan.
“This is what has to happen, Pete,” he said. “You can’t stop it. Nothing can stop it. Worlds have to die for a new world to be born.”
“A world of more death?” Pete whispered.
“I’m a part of it,” Jack said. “You never accepted it, but it’s always been that way. I’m one of the dead, Pete. I just didn’t know it until now.”
Pete felt the Morrigan’s death sense replaced with something else. It was the knowing, the truth she couldn’t lie her way out of.
The owl watched her. Behind it, Pete saw something larger rise, something beyond the dragon, older and larger, a vast intelligence without form, an ill wind blowing the ashes of the old London, the one she’d thought was real until she met Jack, before it.
She took a step toward Jack, then another. Reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. She shook, fingers vibrating, tears flowing thick down her face, running to the corners of her lips, salt in her mouth.
The Morrigan hissed, but Pete pulled Jack to face her. “I know,” she said. “I do. I know what you are, Jack.”
She gripped his wrists, and they were close enough to share a heartbeat. “That’s why I’m sorry,” Pete whispered.
Jack grabbed the back of her neck, pulled them so their foreheads touched. “Don’t be,” he said. Pete kissed him, and tasted his blood on her tongue. She let herself take just a moment, an extra heartbeat, to remember him. His scent, his warmth, the firmness of his hands and the feel of his palm against hers. Then she turned the black blade of the Morrigan, and drove it into Jack’s chest.
The Morrigan screamed, and all around them, in this burning London, thousands of crows took flight.
Do you have any idea, the Morrigan screamed at her, any idea what you’ve done?
Pete saw the owl take flight, join the crows. She felt nothing. Not like screaming, not like weeping, nothing. Jack was gone. Jack had always been gone. Touched by death, his presence in her life was a reprieve, not a certainty. And she’d fought, and refused to let go. Now there was nothing to hold at all, just ashes, and plagues, and the taste of blood in her mouth.
She met the Morrigan’s black, burning eyes, like oil burning on black water. “What I had to,” she whispered.
Beyond the window, the thing retreated, the prison doors rolling shut. The dragon gave a scream that shook the city to its foundations. The crows circled and then shot east, a great flock that could blot out ten suns, straight to the Bleak Gates.
Pete hoped Jack’s soul was among them, borne on to a place that would be, if not better than the one he’d found here, at least a place that wasn’t Hell.
Mark my words, Weir, the Morrigan snarled. You cannot cheat death. You cannot stop it or placate it or bargain with it. You and I, we know this. And someday, you’ll be at the Gates yourself.
Pete let the blade slip from her grasp. It landed by her feet with a dull thunk. “Until that day comes?” she told the Morrigan. “You can fuck right off.”
Tired beyond all reason, battered by the Black like driftwood, Pete felt herself slipping. Back from the Bleak Gates, back from the disturbance caused by the Morrigan, back into the cold, hard edges of the daylight world.
The Morrigan took flight, joining her crows, and the fires in the east winked out.
Pete heard rushing feet, the snap of surgical gloves, the thud of bodies. Shouts.
This one’s conscious!
Check the one in the hall—looks like bloody roadkill.
The fuck’s happening? Who is this git?
She lay on the ground. Jack lay a few feet away, a single long line in his abdomen, straight and thin, trailing surprisingly little blood. A pair of orderlies in white jumpsuits worked over him, bag on his face while the other prepped a defibrillator.
“Clear!” he shouted, and Jack’s body jumped. His new ink covered nearly every inch of him, from neck to feet, and he was still, and pale, and dead.
Pete choked, and that was all she could give. She was too wrung to cry, too spent to even try. A doctor in pink scrubs loomed over her, flashed a light in her eyes, checked her neck.
“You hurt, love?” she said. Pete managed to shake her head. The doctor helped her up.
“Let’s get you down to A&E,” she said. “Stand up, there’s a good girl. The hospital’s going to have some forms it’ll want you to sign about the patient who got out.”
An orderly came up on her left side and took her arm. “I’ll escort Miss Caldecott, Doctor. You tend the wounded.”
The doctor ran back inside the cell, where the other orderly shocked Jack again. She leaned over his chest and then shook her head. “Jolt him again. He’s not going to bleed out just yet, but it won’t do a bit of good if he’s brain-dead, will it?”
Psychic death. Would stop your heart surely as plunging onto concrete. Pete tugged against the orderly’s grasp, trying to be somewhere she didn’t have to look.
Don’t be.
He’d told her to. Told her to let him go. Pete saw the owl again, on the sill as if it had never left, gray and unremarkable in the sun. “Leave me alone,” she whispered. “I did what you wanted. Tell your bitch that.”
He was gone this time. Gone, to the land of the dead. She would never see him, talk to him, touch him. He was gone, and she was still here, and he wasn’t coming back.
The owl blinked, tilted its head, then took flight, as if it had suddenly remembered there was no need to hang about.
In the next moment, one of the machines working over Jack pipped. “I’ve got a rhythm,” the orderly shouted. The doctor took over the bag and pointed out the cell door. “Call trauma and get a surgery prepped. Get me some blood and a fucking surgeon. Fucking git, tries to kill two people and kick himself off. Doesn’t bloody deserve the fuss.”
Pete did sag then, against the orderly who grabbed her. “Best we be going,” Belial said in her ear.
“You’re all right,” she said as he dragged her to the lift. She was flat. Jack was alive. At least for the moment, and she was being dragged from the hospital by a demon.
“I’ve had better days,” Belial said. “Bitch walloped me a good one, tried to push me right out of my skin and back to the pit like a tube of toothpaste. But fortunately she’s only good at swanning about and looking terrifying. Piss-po
or exorcist.” The demon cackled.
“I saw him,” Pete said, as they wound through the packed A&E lobby. “Nergal. I saw the dragon.”
They came out the door, and the scent of smoke went up Pete’s nose and choked her. She saw a motor accident in the street, ambulance versus taxi, and people sitting on the sidewalk, staring, some walking in circles. She heard screams over the klaxons that were no longer in her imagination. Saw two youths in hoodies pick up a rolling garbage can and toss it through a shop window, grabbing handfuls of pocket cameras and MP3 players.
“What the fuck…” Pete started. She was having a hard time standing, her eyes going unfocused in slow, rolling waves.
“The dragon,” Belial said. “Creeping up through the layers. It’ll die down.” He put her off and stood at arm’s length, looking at her. “It’s been fun, Petunia Caldecott,” he said. “And I’ll be dropping by, sooner or later, to collect my end. But until then…” Belial dropped her a wink. “You and Winter have a nice little life.”
“You’re not…” Pete breathed in, out, tried to keep on her feet. “You won’t try for Jack?”
“Winter gave me his soul,” Belial said. “I lost it because I was a stupid twat, and that winged bitch is stronger. For now.” He tipped his head back at the hospital. “Not to worry. I’ll have another try at the crow-mage’s soul, Petunia. You just wait and see.”
Belial faded away into the roiling crowd, and Pete sat down on the curb, holding her head. Jack was alive. The dragon was free, but Nergal was still in whatever hole the old gods had stuffed him in. The Black was shredded—she could feel it rolling and pulsing in her skull even now. She still owed Naughton, Ethan, still had McCorkle’s death hanging over her head.
It was a bad world, sooty and broken and hard. Full of nothing but trouble, if you listened to Jack. But Jack didn’t speak for her.
Pete stood up, and started for the tube. Whatever world she was in now, she reasoned, she would adapt and so would Jack. They would be survivors, together. The way it should be.
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