He let her wipe his mind and body clean, and then she’d simply vanished. Not for good—she never left him for good. But she’d left him not knowing what she’d done to him, and without any memory of Hell until now. How much worse could Don’s offer be than that?
“You’re a nexus for these things, Jack,” Don said. “Things that shake the foundations of the world. There’ve been other men like you, but none that I could get a face to face with.” His smile dropped. “You know, me being imprisoned in the dark by the ants who call Hell their own.”
“Suppose I was to do this,” Jack hedged. “What’s in it for me?”
“No more demons, of course,” Don said. “No more Hag dogging your steps. You’d be a free man, and all you’d have to do is help us be reborn.”
“You seem all right to me,” Jack said. Teddy groaned, and he felt his stomach flip again. “I mean, aside from Jabba over there.”
“We burn flesh fast,” Don said. “Teddy was supposed to be walking around like the rest of us, but like the song says, you can’t always get what you want. Teddy needs a second chance at a meatsuit, and Levi needs a permanent one. In case you hadn’t noticed, the rest of them can’t exactly cruise up and down Sunset looking for skins. You’d be our agent, in a way. Finding the correct sort of flesh.”
“Yeah, that’s where it falls down for me,” Jack said. “I don’t generally hold with rounding up humans for slaughter and possession.”
“Possession is a demon word,” Don said. “A word for the weak who can’t mold the flesh. We used to have bodies—strong, terrible, beautiful to behold. Now, we have to look like everyone else. We have to blend in. You people are like a virus, and we have to mimic you if we don’t want the pitchfork brigade at our door.”
Jack braced himself for Don’s convivality to die a sudden death. “And if I say no?”
“Then we wouldn’t be friends anymore,” Don said. “And that’d be a real disappointment.”
“I do hate to disappoint anyone,” Jack said, “but yeah—I don’t think I’m the man with the plan, Don. I’m not in it for you or for Belial—I’m in this life for myself. And I don’t respond well when things that crawled up out of Hell threaten it.”
He drew in a breath, held it. Waited for the surge of black magic that would signal that Don had well and truly ended their powwow.
“I’m disappointed, Jack,” Don said. “Very, very disappointed.”
The blow Jack expected didn’t come. The Black didn’t surge and the screaming in his sight abruptly faded. His vision went white, and when he came to a wave of vertigo slammed into him and took him to one knee. “Fuck,” he hissed, feeling as if he’d been full-body slammed into a brick wall. A trickle of fresh blood worked its way out of his nose, and the cuts on his head smeared more blood across his forehead.
He swiped blood away from his eyes. He was in a men’s loo, a single bulb swinging in the draft from his passage. A warped metal mirror reflected his hollow-cheeked reflection, his hair streaked pink from the blood. Jack spun the rusty tap and splashed water on his face, cuts stinging.
“You look like shit.”
He turned sharply, but wasn’t entirely surprised to see Belial leaning against the cinder block wall, head haloed by Spanish gang tags. “Feel like it, too,” he said. “Why, you want to give me a makeover?”
“Sorry about the smash and grab,” Belial said. He pushed himself away from the wall and came to Jack, taking his chin in his hands and turning his head from side to side. Jack tried to pull away, but the demon’s pointed nails dug into his flesh, and Belial dipped his head and pressed his face into the crook of Jack’s neck, inhaling sharply. “Right,” he said. “Just had to check on you. Those blokes have a habit of crawling under your skin.” He stuck his fingers in his mouth and lapped Jack’s blood from under his nails.
Jack swiped at the spots where the demon had touched him. Being close to a citizen of the Pit was like plunging your hand into raw meat—slimy, cold, and unpleasant. “If you fancied me, you should’ve just said something,” he told Belial.
“You’ll have to tell me how old Abaddon is looking these days,” Belial said. “Fuck-ugly, I’ll wager.”
Don. What was it with these cunts and their precious nicknames? Gator had been bad enough. “Healthy, actually,” he said. “Wears flash suit and talks like a cowboy.”
“He always was a pretentious fuck,” Belial muttered. “He give you that speech about destiny and how he and his little band of cunt-faced circus children are the true rulers of Hell?”
“Something like that,” Jack said. “With more big words and dramatic gestures.” He kept an arm’s distance between himself and Belial. The demon was being downright chatty, and Jack didn’t trust that any more than he’d follow a rent boy down a dark alley in Tower Hamlets.
“It’s crap,” Belial announced. “They might’ve been there first, but we outnumbered them. Demons are the true citizens of Hell, and we always will be. Abbadon got loose, but a scrap of memory is all he’s ever going to be in the Black. Sooner or later, things will be back as they should be.”
Belial closed the distance between them faster than blinking, and Jack wondered why he’d even bothered to try and keep them apart. In a contest between mage and demon, the demon would always win. It was simple physics.
Belial slammed Jack into the mirror, and he felt the sink crack under his lower back, along with the associated column of fire blooming up his spine. His skull dented the reflective metal, and his vision doubled. The demon squeezed his throat, and Jack felt the last of his air flutter and die in his lungs.
“Let’s get one thing very fucking clear,” Belial hissed. His lips were so close to Jack’s ear that his breath sounded like the hot wind that never ceased howling across the Pit. “You try to fuck me, Winter, and I won’t care what kind of favored son of the Hag you are. I won’t care what kind of magic you and your little Weir can sling. I won’t care if Jesus Christ himself shows up riding a unicorn, backed up by Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I will end your fucking existence and that of everyone you care about, and your soul will spend the eternity until the Black and Hell both fall into the singularity under my tender loving care.” He let Jack down, and Jack’s knees decided it was a good plan to give out and send him tumbling to the floor amid the shards of the sink. Brown water from the ruptured pipes dribbled around him.
“Do we understand each other, crow-mage?” Belial hissed. “Abbadon has been in the dark for more years than even I can count. Yes, he escaped and managed to break the others out, but he’s not going to win. And you’re mostly certainly going to lose very fucking large if you try and fuck with me on this point.”
Jack laughed, which caused him to cough a little blood. He spat it at Belial’s shoe and missed. “He’s got you good and scared, doesn’t he? Never seen you with so much as a hair out of place, and look at you now.”
Belial’s black eyes were wide, and twin blood flowers had blossomed in his pale, waxy cheeks. Even his pristine suit was wrinkled and looked more like it had spent the night on a street corner than one of Hell’s posh palaces. “You watch your mouth, crow-mage. I doubt you’d be laughing at me if the Hag hadn’t scrubbed your memory all shiny-clean.”
Jack pulled himself to his feet. Belial didn’t know his memory was knitting itself back together, and he intended to keep it that way as long as possible. “For the record, I told Abbadon to go fuck himself, and I’m telling you the same thing. I’ve seen him and those things he hangs about with, and I’m not accustomed to admitting it, but they’re beyond me. You knew there was no way I could put those cunts back underground by myself. You’re just setting Pete up to fail. You probably think this is funny.”
“Trust me,” Belial snarled. “This is not my happy face.”
Jack kicked open the door, into the face of a very surprised bartender with a goatee. “Hey!” he said. “One guy in the john at a time. You two take it somewhere else.”
Belial twitched his cuffs and straightened his tie. “Gladly,” he said. “And might I remind you, Winter, you’re still on the hook, regardless of what you think. I wouldn’t be using you if I had a choice, believe me. Abbadon and his friends belong back in the darkness where we sent them, and you’re the man for the job, whether you know it or not. Get it done.”
“Fuck off,” Jack muttered, but Belial did his peculiar trick where you blinked and he’d simply gone.
“Listen, buddy,” the bloke said. “Either order a drink or get the fuck out, okay? I don’t need the George Michael action in the fucking bathrooms.”
“You’ve got pubic hair on your face,” Jack told him. “Might want to wash.”
The kid opened his mouth, but Jack shoved by him. He was in a dank bar, neon beer signs casting the only
