Devil's Business

He left, and Jack passed in and out of consciousness for what could have been hours or weeks. The single bare bulb in the pub’s back room swung back and forth, light and dark. Usually, this was when the Morrigan would show her face, when he was in the shadow land between the daylight world and the Land of the Dead. But she knew she had him now. There was no reason to attend his last hours when he’d be delivered to her at the end.

He couldn’t help Pete. He couldn’t even help himself.

“Shit,” somebody said. “This guy is hamburger. Why the hell didn’t you take him to a hospital?”

“Like I could explain this to somebody in a hospital,” Sliver snapped. “I thought you said you could help him.”

“Look,” the second voice said, “this guy is beyond help.” Chubby fingers gouged against Jack’s neck. “His pulse is barely even there.”

“Do what you can.” A desperate edge crept into Sliver’s voice. “I can’t have a dead fucking body in my bar, Mayhew.”

“Really, you of all people are more equipped to deal with a corpse than most,” Mayhew said.

“Fuck you,” Sliver said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Clear my tab, and I’ll see if I can keep him breathing,” Mayhew said.

“Are you shitting me? You owe me four hundred bucks.”

Mayhew’s fingers went away. “Hey, you want to put this fucker out with the trash after last call, you can argue with me. You want my help and expertise, clear my fucking tab.”

“Fine.” Shiver sighed. “I think his ribs are busted. He keeps making these wheezes when he tries to breathe.”

A cold stethoscope pressed against Jack’s chest, and Mayhew made a disapproving sound. “He’s got fluid in his lungs. Probably internal bleeding.” Jack’s leather was stripped away, and a bandage went around his ribs. The pain intensified tenfold, and he cried out.

“Good sign,” Mayhew said. He peeled back Jack’s eyelid and Jack was blinded by a pocket torch. “Hello in there,” Mayhew said, and Jack swiped at the light.

“Fuck off.”

“Listen,” Mayhew said. “You’ve got cracked ribs and a nasty head wound. Probably a concussion too. I’m going to give you something for the pain, but you need to stay still, all right?”

“No needles,” Jack said. “No drugs.”

Mayhew ignored him, fitting a sterile needle onto a syringe and drawing from a bottle of clear liquid that proclaimed SALINAS VET SUPPLY across the label in broad letters.

“No…” Jack tried. If he was doped, he had no chance. Pete would die, the baby would die. Hell, he’d probably die in the bargain, since Mayhew seemed to have learned first aid while drunk and standing on his head.

The needle slid in, small and cold, and the cold soon spread across all his limbs. Jack felt his heartbeat slow down, and he drifted on the opiate tide, the familiar fuzzy sensation of the high unfurling its wings and lifting him toward the ceiling.

He looked down, at the top of Sliver’s head and Mayhew’s orange Hawaiian shirt.

“I think you gave him too much,” Sliver said. Mayhew zipped up his case and shoved the rest of his supplies back into a duffel bag.

“You want to do this?”

Sliver shook his head. Mayhew stood up and brushed off his knees. “I’ll hang out in the front. Call me if anything changes.”

“Don’t you dare drink all the good shit,” Sliver called after him, and then crouched beside Jack’s body again. From this vantage, he really did look like shit. His face was gray, and the dried blood and the cut on his forehead made him look like some kind of film zombie. His bare chest, wrapped in bandages, was covered in old bruises and new cuts from where Abbadon had flung him into the tomb.

He’d come close to dying before—and had, when Belial took him. He knew the detachment, the gentle untethering of soul from flesh. But he couldn’t die, not now. Pete needed him. More importantly, he needed her. The only kindness if he kicked now would be to the kid. Better to have a dead father you could idolize than a living one who was shit.

“You don’t have to let it end like this, you know.”

Jack looked up at the shadows near the ceiling, cast by the swaying bulb. “Oh,” he said. “Now you show up.” He wasn’t sure if he was really speaking, or just echoing his thoughts, but the crow woman glided down from the ceiling and put her hands on either side of his face.

“You have the ability to make this stop right now, Jack. You have the means to help the little Weir. If you really want to.”

Jack looked down at his body. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m already dead. We’re just waiting out the formalities now.”

The Morrigan dug her claws into his cheeks. She could be extraordinarily beautiful, pale skin and eyes like drowning pools, long hair drifting on spectral wind, body encased in a diaphanous black shroud. And then her face could change, could become the face of the crow woman, or the Hag, and she was the most terrifying thing he’d ever clapped eyes on.

“I gave you the gift, Jack. I pulled you back from the Bleak Gates, and all you’ve done is deny me. I’m getting very tired of it, Jack. I won’t save you this time. Either you save yourself and use what I gave you, or you’ll never see your little Weir again.”

She pressed her lips against his, and her teeth sliced into his lip, their blood mingling. “You’re mine, Jack. You can lie to yourself, but you can’t lie to me. Now do what you know you want to. Take control of this.”

She retreated, and Jack had to wonder if she’d ever been there. It wouldn’t be even close to the first time he’d hallucinated the Morrigan. Bad enough when she actually did visit him.

He felt the cold, even from the vantage point of his stoned dream. It started in his hands again, and as he watched his body he saw his tattoos begin to writhe. He could try to hold it back, try to deny that the Morrigan had changed him, made him into what he’d tried not to be ever since he’d seen her the first time, back when she was just the lady in black who dogged his dreams night after night, when he finally drifted off after his mum and Kevin had stopped fighting or fucking in the other room.

He could try, but he didn’t want to any more. He wasn’t going to let Pete die. He wasn’t going to let Abbadon steal her. And if that meant giving in to the Morrigan, than so be it. She’d changed him. Without her he’d be dead. Whatever he dealt with later, well. He’d cross that bridge when he got there.

He didn’t fight the cold this time, like he had when he’d killed Parker. He embraced it, let it rush through him like a freight train, and felt the Black spasm as his soul reeled back from the Land of the Dead.

Waking up felt like knives, or like he’d just been smacked with a defibrillator. He bolted upright, the cold expelling from his lungs in a rush of air, and then he promptly vomited, even though there was nothing in his stomach except a little bile.

“Fuck!” Sliver bellowed. “What the fuck, man!”

Jack felt himself jerked sharply to one side as his ribs snapped back into place. Vague, dull pain in his guts told him that whatever blood had been leaking was sealed. Even his forehead was smooth when he touched it.

His tattoos came to rest in a new configuration, no longer aimless swirls but feathers, boldly up each arm and reaching across his back and chest. Sliver stared, unblinking. “You, uh … you okay, man?”

Jack stood. The painkiller was gone along with the pain, but he had a new sense of detachment now, and it was nothing to do with the Morrigan or the Black or anything except the fact that Abbadon, that bastard, had taken Pete. “Never better,” he said to Sliver. He grabbed a T-shirt off a shelf, advertising the pub, and shrugged into it. It was too large by half, but it covered him and that was all that mattered.

Jack banged the door to the pub open, garnering a stare from everyone in the place. Sliver’s tinny sound system, pumping out the Marshall Tucker Band, was the only sound. Jack walked over to Mayhew, took away the whiskey bottle the fat arse was cradling like a baby, and took a long pull. The whiskey felt good, warmed him up a bit, and Jack slammed the bottle back down and pointed his finger in Mayhew’s face.

“You need to get me a gun.”