Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

“Bad girl,” Jack said, a giggle bubbling out of him unbidden. “You know I was a drug addict?”

“Believe me, Mr. Winter,” Morwenna sighed. “I know more about you than I ever wanted to.”

“You lie,” Jack said, giving her a wide smile. “You know you can’t get enough of me, luv. Uptight broads like you always fall for the dark, dangerous types.…”

“All right,” Pete said as Morwenna’s shambling horror, Victor, came into view with a syringe. “If you don’t knock him out with that I’m going to do it with my foot.”

“Calm down,” Morwenna said. “He’ll be dreaming, Ms. Caldecott. Don’t you worry.”

Seth had tried to keep him calm before the initiation, but Jack remembered feeling his heart slam like it hadn’t since he’d come to Ireland and stopped sleeping rough and looking over his shoulder. He’d been in plenty of bad situations since, thanks either to his own penchant for finding trouble or because of messes that Seth brought upon them.

Seth never fled, though. He was always there, always had a plan and a backup to the plan. When Jack fucked up, Seth got him out of it. When Jack couldn’t con or fight his way out of a bad situation with the numerous enemies the Fiach Dubh counted, Seth always had a bright idea.

But now Seth stood in the door of the caravan, staring out into the field, toward the orange glow of the torchlight.

“Just remember, Jack … whatever happens…”

“I promise not to make you look bad,” Jack said. “I’ve got it, all right? It’s an initiation, not a party. I will conduct myself with the utmost dignity.”

“Please.” Seth conjured a lit cigarette and dragged on it. “You wouldn’t know dignity if it jumped up and bit you on the testes, boy.” He passed the cigarette, and Jack took a pull, blue smoke filling the small interior of the caravan.

“I promise,” he said, softer. “I know I fuck up a lot, Seth, but I won’t tonight. I get that this is important to you.”

He was eighteen, and he could join Seth as a full member of the crow brothers, privy to their archives, their secrets, and the bad blood with most other mage sects.

If Jack was honest, he couldn’t fucking wait. He could sling hexes and do simple spells and summonings, but this was the big show. He could learn real showstoppers, have real power. Maybe even find a way to keep his sight from hitting him upside the skull whenever he got within spitting distance of a ghost.

“Not me,” Seth said, gesturing Jack out of the caravan, where a knot of other crow brothers waited. “You, Jack. This night is all about you.”

The brothers stripped him to the waist and painted his torso with blue woad, the symbols signifying that he belonged to the Fiach Dubh, skin and bone and everything in between. Seth had told him to expect a lot of bullshit druid pomp and ceremony, but he’d also warned him that things went wrong all the time at these things. The patron goddess of the crow brothers was mercurial, to say the least, and if she took a dislike to an initiate, they were hamburger.

The brothers led him to the stone circle, into the ring of torchlight. Jack lay on the stone slab in the center, trying to ignore the blood grooves and the stained earth around the altar.

He turned his head and caught sight of Seth, standing outside the circle, his white shirt gleaming in the low light.

The crow bothers circled him. Their robes were cascades of gleaming black feathers, their hoods crowned with silver beaks that hung low, shadowing their brows.

The smoke from the torches was pungent, and that was how he explained it later. A bad trip, brought on by nerves and fear and too much hallucinogenic smoke.

Because behind the crow brothers, a figure moved. Golden-eyed, mouth dripping blood. The Morrigan approached him, and Jack remembered from Seth’s pep talk that she’d either accept or reject him, and that rejection was very fucking bad indeed.

He wasn’t sure how it worked—if she’d drink his blood, look into his head, or ask him the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

What she did, though, he couldn’t have planned for. She came to him, climbed the altar, and stood over him. Then she reached into his chest with her talons, his blood spurting far enough to hit some of the crow brothers, putting her hand around his heart. Putting her mark on him, on the inside where he would always feel it, even if no one could see.

She marked him as her own, and when he woke it was daylight and everyone except Seth had gone. He sat at the base of a stone pillar, surrounded by fag-ends and the ash from the torches, shaking, his eyes sunken and his fingers twitching.

He stood up and came over to Jack, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder as he examined his bare chest. The blue paint was smeared, but his body was intact, heart beating, ribs where they should be. There was no sign of anything he’d experienced in the night.

“What the fuck was that?” he asked Seth, and the mage shook his head.

“You belong to her now, Jack,” he said, lighting the last cigarette in his pack. He dragged hard on it, the cherry flaring, and he didn’t offer to share. “I guess in a way I should have known—with that talent of yours, and all that power you can pull on command, you were never long for this world.”

“Seth…,” Jack started, trying to stand. It didn’t work out so well, and he slid to the muddy ground.

“I’m sorry,” Seth said, backing away from him. “But you’re the crow-mage now. You’ve gone beyond my pay grade. I stay away from the Hag, and she stays away from me.”

“Seth, please…” It hurt to talk. Jack felt as if his limbs were no longer his own, as if there had been some fundamental violation of his body and mind, something he couldn’t remember in detail but felt all the same, right down to his bones.

“I’m sorry,” Seth said again, with more urgency. “But I can never see you again.”

He walked away, Jack would always remember, without any hesitation. Straight back to his car, never once turning back. And he did see Seth again, after his suicide attempt, after he understood what being the crow-mage meant. Saw him more than once, but it was never the same. The Seth McBride he trusted, thought of as a brother, walked away from him that morning, and Jack had never met him again.

That Seth had walked away and left Jack there, broken and alone.

When he woke again it was gentler, floating back down into his mind on the puffy cloud of copious amounts of prescription drugs.

“Whatever they’re giving me, see if you can get some to go,” he said when he saw Pete sitting next to his bed. “Be great to bring out at parties.”

“It’s just some Percocet to tide you over,” Pete said. She pointed at his leg, which was swathed in tight, bloody bandages. More lay in a trash bin near the foot of his bed. “Morwenna says you’re lucky. Your leg looked like the zombie apocalypse after their doctor got the glass out.”

“Doctor? More like some fly-by-night veterinarian, based on how these stitches feel,” he said. The wound felt hot and jagged, and he hoped that Morwenna’s pet surgeon had slipped in some antibiotics along with the good drugs.

“Whoever he was, you’re alive,” Pete said. “And because I asked so nicely, I got Morwenna to send someone to check on Legion without us having to lift a finger.”

Jack groaned. “What did we end up owing her for that, I wonder?”

Pete offered him a paper cup of water. “I’m thinking that’s one of those bridges we cross after we avert the apocalypse, myself.”

Jack swallowed the water in one go. The inside of his mouth felt like a gravel pit, and his throat was swollen and hot. Going through surgery was somewhere on his list of fun Friday nights after getting hit by a taxi and listening to chamber music while sober.