The man glared, trying to swallow under Jack’s grip. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it. My soul is right with my gods.”
Jack wiped his hand clean on the man’s wrinkled yellow shirt and opened the door. “Get out.”
He did, and stood with his hands dangling at his sides, lip poking out like a sullen teenager. “What’s the matter, Winter? Never thought you’d be the type who needed to look someone in the eye before you topped them. Way I heard, you’re more the kind to creep up with a knife in the dark and put it in a bloke’s kidney.”
“What the fuck are you on about, me killing you?” Jack demanded. He had a reputation as a wanker, certainly—shifty, disreputable, untrustworthy. Americans would probably sum it all up with
“You almost killed every single person this side of the Black and the other,” the man spat. “Wouldn’t think one more would matter.”
It all made sense then. “Ah, you’re miffed I almost let Nergal out to play,” Jack said. “Well, I’ve got news. You’re not the first and you’re miles from the last. You want a shot at me? Take a fucking number, mate, and join the queue.”
The driver drew himself up. Balding and barrel-chested, he wouldn’t have rated a second glance if Jack had passed him on the street, but the fury in his eyes belonged to a much younger, angrier man. “You don’t get to nearly destroy the world as we know it and laugh it off, Winter.” He jabbed his finger into Jack’s chest. “You’ve seen it now. We can find you anywhere, at any time, outside the Black or in it. The Stygian Brothers remember their enemies, and the mark will never fade.”
Jack felt the point between his eyes begin to throb. “Seriously, mate? You expect me to believe you’re a Stygian? Somebody’s creepy uncle, maybe, but that’s as far as I’d go.”
The Brother rolled up his sleeve in response, and exposed the many-lined tattoo all initiates received after they’d had what the Brotherhood called the Dream—the prophetic vision, brought on by hallucinogenic compounds rubbed into the skin—of the Stygian’s many-eyed, tentacled Nameless Ones that stood as an excuse for their adventures in flesh-crafting, self-mutilation rituals, and mind-control spells. A Stygian’s idea of a fun night out.
“Fuck,” Jack muttered. He’d been hoping the bloke was a lone outlier, a nutter who’d gotten a flowerpot smashed during the riots and taken it out on him at the expense of the poor checkout girl, but he was a Stygian, true enough.
“It’s not just us,” said the Brother. “It’s everyone, Winter.” He smirked, revealing a mouthful of missing molars. Jack couldn’t be sure if they were a result of ritual mutilation or NHS dentistry. “Our bounty will never expire. The sorcerers, the white magic cabals, even the fucking kitchen witches—they know what you did. It doesn’t matter that you decided you’d rather play hero at the eleventh hour. What’s to stop you from changing your mind, the next time that pea-sized brain of yours decides to go Hulk smash? You destroyed half the city, and you ripped holes in the Black, and nobody is safe while you’re about.” He stabbed Jack in the chest again. “I may not be able to toe up to you one on one, but soon enough somebody will. And that’ll solve the problem.”
The man got back into his car and slammed the door. More glass fell to the pavement while he revved the engine. “You want to stay breathing, stay out of London. You are no longer welcome.”
He pulled away into traffic, and Jack cut through an alley when he saw the blue lights of a police car swing around the corner.
The Stygian Brothers. And more, from the sound of it. Nobody could keep track of every sect and small-time group of magic users that proliferated around London like a particularly stubborn venereal disease, but if the Stygians had marked Jack as an undesirable, he was in enough trouble.
He kept to side streets until he came out at the Aldgate East tube station, and waited in the shadows for another ten minutes, until he was sure with both his eyes and his second sight that he hadn’t been followed. Nobody and nothing was watching him.
The cuts on his neck and all of the assorted bruises had begun to ache and sting while he’d been walking. Not to mention his fucking midnight snack was lying crushed on the floor of Sainsbury’s.
Nobody followed him on the tube, and nobody followed him down the Mile End Road to his flat, but Jack didn’t allow himself to relax until the door was shut and locked behind him. The flat was layered in hexes, cobwebs of spellcraft that floated in front of his sight and then flickered and disappeared. He’d shored them up nearly every other day since the riots had died down—not because he was afraid of looters or marauding packs of hoodie teenagers, but because of the exact thing that had just happened at the shop. It hadn’t done one fucking bit of good, though—they’d just waited until he’d left the safety of his flat, like properly smart vengeful psychopaths.
He couldn’t stay shut up in Whitechapel for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t risk another incident like tonight. If the Stygian Brothers had made a move on him in public, outside the Black, then it’d only be a matter of time before somebody with their shit together and their brain clear of low-grade peyote finished the job. It could be necromancers (although the ones who’d tried to wake up Nergal were mostly little bits of flesh and bone in a London mortuary) or it could be the light side—druids or Wiccans or just a pack of particularly slagged-off hippies. And how humiliating would that be?
“Jack?” Pete Caldecott appeared in the hallway from the bedroom, rubbing her eyes. They fell on his empty hands. “Where’s the food?”
“About that,” Jack said. “Anyone been by while I was out? Anything unusual?”
Pete’s gazed closed up and became calculating. “What did you do now?”
“Me? I’ll have you know I’m the victim here,” Jack muttered. “For once.” He got his bottle of Jameson from the old record cabinet that served as a liquor stash, because all at once that seemed like an excellent idea.
“You’re bleeding.” Pete came into the light and tilted his head with a finger, examining the scratches on his neck.
“Not the first time, likely not the last,” Jack said. He tried to keep it lighthearted, but Pete just sighed and went into the kitchen to fetch her first-aid kit. She was silent while she disinfected the scratches and put a large plaster over the spot on his neck. She was silent entirely too much since they’d put Nergal back where he belonged.
“What’s my diagnosis, doctor?” he tried.
Pete shut the metal lid of the kit. “You’re an idiot, but you’ll live.”
She got up and went back into the bedroom without another word. Jack spread out on the sofa, after swallowing a handful of aspirin with his whiskey. It was easier than going to bed and listening to more of the silence.
It hadn’t happened all at once—after the rioting had mostly died down and it was safe for Jack to leave the hospital, where he’d checked himself into the psychiatric unit to set up a psychic buffer between himself and various types who wanted inside his head—things had been rather normal.
No, they hadn’t. That was a comfortable lie, as was the fact that he’d only committed himself to use the psychic static of the other nutters in the place to block out both Nicholas Naughton, necromancer and cunt of the first order, and other, darker, less human things that wanted him. Wanted him to awaken Nergal, wanted him to order the oldest of the old gods to wash the world clean, and leave it slick and bloody for her advance.
Jack mashed his thumbs into the center of his forehead, massaging the point between his eyes. He hadn’t seen her, or dreamed of her, since he’d refused to do what she asked. But it was only a matter of time—she couldn’t die, and she wouldn’t be put off forever. She was the maiden of death, the bride of war, and the hag of the ashes and dust that came after. The Morrigan had marked him when he was only a teenager, and eventually, she’d get her pound of flesh. The fact he’d disobeyed her and her mad plan to cleanse the Black of all but her faithful would only make it a far longer and more painful carving.
But he had more important things to worry about than some bitch and her army of the dead, so he drained the whiskey and shut the light off. Pete had gone quiet by degrees, first about the baby and then about everything else. She was only a few months along, but Jack could already see the endgame. She was realizing that despite her own talents, she couldn’t raise a kid in their lifestyle. Would be mad to try.
Jack agreed—nobody deserved to grow up in the sort of life he’d found himself in. Pete was being practical, letting him down by degrees, slowly cutting off circulation to each part of them rather than throwing crockery in a spectacular breakup. She’d move out in another month or two, go live with her sister, and that would be that. Weekends, alternate bank holidays, and carefully e-mailed pictures to mark each waypoint of the spawn’s growing up. If he was lucky. If he wasn’t, he’d be exactly like his own father—ignorant and happy to stay that way.
