Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

This was the end, the period on his sentence. And this time, there was no way to pretend he was going to live out the life he’d pretended he could have.

Jack looked up at Pete, reached up with the last of his air to touch her cheek. “It will be all right,” he said. “I promise I’ll see you again.”

Pete choked, but she put her hand over his. “You don’t get to go leaving me,” she managed, squeezing his fingers as tight as she could. “That’s not on, I hope you know.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jack whispered. He gave her hand a squeeze in return. “You’re stronger than I ever was, Pete. Don’t change that.”

Pete lowered his hand gently to his chest, and put her hand against his cheek. “I love you, Jack Winter.”

Jack gave her a smile as the ravens landed all around them, and the Morrigan advanced, and he could see that Pete saw her now, but she raised her chin and refused to show any fear. “I love you,” she repeated, looking only at Jack.

He stood and joined the Morrigan, the ravens surrounding them. He looked back at Pete and gave her a nod. “I know, luv.”

The ravens surrounded him, the Morrigan’s feathers blending with the flock, the darkness sweeping in, and Jack found himself surprised that death didn’t feel like coldness, like hotness, like pain, like a release. Death didn’t feel like anything. He just felt his connection to Pete sever as the Black spasmed for a third time, and then everything was gone.

The cloud of ravens lifted to reveal that they stood over the Thames, the scrollwork of Blackfriars Bridge dividing the river from the sky.

Jack looked down at himself. His tattoos were gone, his skin unblemished for the first time since he’d gotten ink from a shady friend of one of his bandmates who wanted someone to practice on. His scars were gone, the wound in his leg, and instead of being planted in his chest, the Morrigan’s blade rested in his hand.

She looked at him. “I’m a woman of my word.”

Her voice didn’t rasp and echo. It sounded more like a stone being dropped into a deep well, hollow and inhuman, just as her face and eyes were. The blood still dribbled from her mouth, but Jack only half noticed it.

What he did see, with shocking clarity, were the dead. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the bridge, along the banks of the Thames, the riverfront promenades, everywhere that Jack looked, as far as he could see.

And they all looked at him, all stared at him, unblinking, their silver-black forms fizzing and winking as their spirit energies interfered with the sputtering, fritzing wild magic of the Black.

Jack turned to the Morrigan. “What are they waiting for?”

The Morrigan gestured to Jack. “Their orders.”

Jack was going to breathe, try to keep calm, until he realized that his heart didn’t beat and his lungs didn’t inflate. Why should they? he thought. He was dead.

He belonged to the Morrigan now, as her right hand. Her dead army was waiting. Waiting for him to tell them to march forth upon the world, unleash themselves on the living.

Jack scanned the bridge, the river banks. Parts of the city were in flames, sirens screamed, and the living were leaving in droves, abandoning their cars and flooding away from the City center.

“We have to do something,” he said to the Morrigan. “The Black is starting to spill over. Things might already be too unstable to stop it.”

“Then tell your soldiers,” the Morrigan said. “Tell them of the man you wish to deliver unto death.”

Jack gripped the broken blade tight in his fist. “Legion,” he said. “I want Legion.”

For a moment, nothing happened. The dead stared at him, unblinking, and then they began to move. They turned as one and marched north into the heart of the city that Jack had thought of as home for most of his life.

The Morrigan gave Jack a smile, her teeth stained with blood. “You’re learning quickly,” she said. “I knew I was right to choose you, Jack.”

“I’m only doing this to end Legion,” Jack said. “I don’t care what you think.”

“You should,” the Morrigan said. “Because after this, you and I are going to be together for a very long time.”

She passed her talons down his cheek, and it should have hurt, but Jack felt nothing. “Go,” the Morrigan said. “Have your moment of revenge. Plant the blade into the treacherous heart that stole it from me. I wish you well.”

Jack followed the dead, who passed straight through walls and buildings, not needing the benefit of streets and pavement as he did. He still had a body as the Morrigan did, but now he was inhuman as her.

London was in chaos. Emergency vehicles clogged the streets, and looting had already started along Oxford Street. Fires raged, people screamed, and the wounded tried to pull themselves to safety.

He saw creatures of the Black—zombies, lycanthropes, lesser things, dark-dwelling things. They ran through the daylight world with impunity, and the people of London panicked. The city had turned itself inside out, and Legion had barely started.

Jack walked faster.

The dead had stopped, arrayed in columns across the plaza in front of Buckingham Palace. The crown of the palace was on fire, and the Territorial Army had set up tanks in front of the gates, soldiers firing on rioters and zombies with equal prejudice if they came too close.

Legion watched the chaos around him with a bemused expression. Even though the entire city was eating itself alive, burning and screaming, spinning out toward the ashes-and-dust future that Jack’s talent had shown him, nobody came within a hundred feet of Legion. He stood alone, holding Azrael’s device, watching everything with the delight of a small child.

“You really couldn’t be more obvious, could you?” Jack said. “Buckingham Palace, really? Is your ego that massive?”

Legion turned on him, face going from serene to poisonous in a split heartbeat. “I killed you.”

“Oh, right and proper,” Jack assured him. “You put that knife right in the sticking spot, and I died in agony. No need to feel bad on that score.”

Legion turned in a slow circle, looking at the dead, then at Jack, and finally down at the device. His shoulders began to shake and Jack sighed. The Joker routine was getting old.

He didn’t feel the rage, though, that he’d felt when he was alive. There wasn’t any feeling, really, just as there was no air in his lungs. He was devoid of life, and only life brought the sort of rage that had gotten him killed.

“Jack, you still don’t get it,” Legion sighed. “You never did. I made you. Mage kind. My blood is the blood that gave the human race the spark. Azrael saw the wild magic of this world when it was new, and when he saw what sprang forth when he fused that magic into flesh, when he made me, he panicked. He saw his end in my eyes, and in the eyes of my line, of every human mage to come. When I escaped Azrael’s vault, I came here. I saw the things that were thrashing in the mud and shit to become human, and I gave them a gift. It nearly ended me, but I knew I had to plant the seed that would grow into the race that toppled the Princes, toppled Hell itself. I waited and I hid among the elementals, and when I finally took Azrael’s prize, I went to each of his pressure points and I squeezed. Nergal and Abbadon, and fostering mage-kind, pushing them along. Even making sure that a little council rat from Manchester found a shady Irish book dealer to teach him how his talent could aid my cause.”

Jack tilted his head. What he remembered from life said Legion was trying to bait him, to torment him one last time before he ripped the universe apart.

Legion turned the orb in his hands. “I am not the end, Jack. I am life. A new world will come, and it will be better. Just as it was after I came here the first time. You see…”