Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

“Thank you,” he rasped to Pete. “Even if you did give these posh twats something to hold over our heads.”

Pete moved herself to lie down next to him, putting her hand on his unbandaged leg. “At least you still have a head for them to threaten, thanks to me. You owe me big time, Mr. Winter.”

Jack grinned at her. “As soon as I’m mobile again, I’ll express me gratitude in numerous anatomically improbable ways, don’t you worry.”

Pete gave him a jab. “You’re higher than a pigeon with a jetpack, so I’ll let that one slide.”

Jack pouted at her. “You’re horribly mean to me.”

Pete nodded, nestling her head into his shoulder. “Yeah. And that’s why you love me.”

Jack was going to suggest they express their love with a well-deserved lie-in when the door opened and Morwenna strode into the room. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, with an expression that any bitter old nun would have killed to mimic.

Pete sat up, keeping her hand on Jack. “You found something,” she said. “At that monastery.”

Morwenna exhaled, tapping her fingers against her leg. “How much do you know about this, really? And I warn you, don’t play dumb with me. I’m going to be very upset.”

“You know that scary story you tossed us out for telling you?” Jack said. “Well, that’s where the scary story is currently holed up, with half the kingdom of Faerie as backup, plus enough elemental demons to turn every person in London into their very own beans on toast.”

“It’s considerably more serious than a gathering of ragtag interests,” Morwenna said. “Our sources say the Faerie king himself is there, and that this demon has Fenris guarding him along with a host of lesser elementals. Egregors are patrolling the perimeter and the monastery itself is hemmed in by Fae assassins.”

Pete let out a long breath. “Shit.”

“I don’t know what your ulterior motive is,” Morwenna said. “But going near that place is suicide.” She went to the door and opened it again. “I’m not going to tell you your business, but I assume you do want to stay alive. If you have some idiotic notion about going out like a superhero … please don’t drag the Prometheans into it.”

“I can hardly gad about in a cape like this, can I?” Jack snapped. Morwenna gave a delicate sniff.

“You have until sunset to get yourself together and leave,” she said. “The Prometheans don’t need the kind of trouble you’re bringing.”

Pete gave Morwenna a poisonous glare. “The Prometheans are going to be sipping tea on the ashes of the world if they keep this up,” she said.

“We have endured for a thousand years,” Morwenna said. “The prophecies have us existing for many more.”

Jack managed to sit up, feeling around for his coat and his pants on the floor next to the bed. The weight of the blade was still in his pocket, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “The Prometheans are going to vanish under what’s coming just like me and Pete,” he said. “The difference is, we’re willing to adapt enough to fight back.”

He struggled into his pants. Thanks to the drugs, his leg only twinged a bit. “I think you and I are done, Morwenna. The Prometheans no longer have any claim over Margaret, or us. I wouldn’t be eager to meet us again if I were you.”

“Just goes to show,” Morwenna said. “You do someone of your class a favor, and they repay you with insults.”

“You can send us a fruit basket after we kill Legion for you,” Pete said. “Then you can consider us even.”

Jack sat down on a small stone bench outside the gates of the Prometheans’ country estate, watching the empty road. “What exactly are we going to do now?”

Pete massaged her forehead. “I have no idea. I just didn’t want that bitch to think she got the upper hand.”

“She’s right, though,” Jack said. “Much as I thought those words would never march across my lips. If Legion has a full complement of elementals and Fae, he’ll liquidate us the minute we land within a mile of that monastery.”

Pete pulled out her mobile and dialed up a local cab company. “So what do we do?” she asked while they had her on hold. “I mean, aside from getting hold of a teleport spell. Do those even exist?”

“I met somebody once, in Amsterdam, who said he did it,” Jack said. “Turns out he just ate too many hash brownies and thought he’d walked through a wall. Tried to do it in front of me and knocked himself out.”

“Maybe we could summon him,” Pete said. Jack felt the ache in his bones start up again at the very thought.

“Do we really want to summon Legion? He’s going to be one angry little cult leader when we zap him out of his cozy compound and into our sitting room.”

“When you want to take down a target you have to separate him from the herd and run him to ground,” Pete said. “And I think that’s our best hope.” She frowned at Jack. “If you’re up for it.”

“I could not be less up for anything,” he said. “But sure, why the fuck not? The worst he can do is kill us and burn London to the ground, and wait, that’s already happening.”

He thought about watching Seth vanish in his dream, and rubbed a hand over his face to dispel the cobwebs from his brain. If he was going to work a summoning on this scale, he needed to be sharp.

Pete gave the cab their address and shut her mobile. “Good,” she said. “Tell me what you need from me so we can nail this bastard to the wall.”

Jack put the word out to Mosswood for the materials he couldn’t pick up from his own supplies, and he and Pete stopped at the flat just long enough to grab his kit. The clock was running on when Belial would figure out that Jack hadn’t given over the blade, and the last thing he wanted was not one slagged-off demon but a pair, both gunning for him.

“We need a place to do this other than a flat in the middle of a block with a thousand people,” he said to Pete as they packed up a pair of canvas bags.

Pete pulled out her mobile. “I can probably find a place. I need to check on Margaret and Lily anyway.”

She walked away while she called Ollie Heath, and Jack took a moment to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything he couldn’t live without.

The flat wasn’t much, but it had been home ever since he’d come back from Ireland. Sure, he’d gotten the deed by convincing a senile sorcerer to sign it over, the walls were stained, the windows let in every draft that blew by, and the furniture was mostly picked off various surburban curbs in early mornings before the trash brigade came along, but it was as much a home as any place he’d ever slept.

Pete was here, Lily was here. Most of the good memories of his life wound back to here.

He sat down on their rickety sofa for a moment and looked out the sooty windows, over the rooftop of the place next door. The sky was already fading into dawn. Putting together supplies for the summoning had taken most of the night, but he didn’t feel tired anymore. He found the last of the Percocet that Pete had cadged from Morwenna and dry-swallowed the pills. Just a few more hours, and one way or the other, this would all be over.

He wasn’t sure if the thought was a comfort or a terror.

Pete came in from the kitchen, holding out her mobile so he could see mapped directions to an address. “Ollie says this place is still in limbo with the city government,” she said. “We shouldn’t have any company, and all that’s around it are warehouses and self-storage setups. Nobody in range if something happens.”

Jack nodded. “Good enough,” he said. Pete hefted her bag.

“Ready?”