Dark Days (16 page)

“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 can’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.

“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 cocked 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.”