Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

Belial pointed down toward the City spread out before Jack like a dissected corpse. “Look!” he shouted above the wailing wind.

Jack had been to the City before, and while it had been full of smoke and chaos and suffering then, now it looked as if it were actually burning, the figures on the elevated streets and tracks and into the open sewers below churning in a panicked mass.

It was a lot like his vision, Jack realized. People—or demons—with their lives reduced to destruction and misery struggling to survive just long enough to get away.

Gazing down at the broad avenue leading up to the spire, hundreds of feet below, Jack saw a mass of demons, elementals, and even the damned frothing outside the gates of the palace. Vehicles and shops were burning, and even from here he could hear the crunch of bone and the screams of pain as the crowd tore into both one another and the black-suited thugs arrayed in a line before the gates. The guards were Baal’s troops, the Fenris, bone-breakers who were probably having the time of their lives.

Belial took Jack’s arm again and guided him inside, down the lifts, and back to Belial’s flat. The demon stalked across the empty space and poured out two glasses of ruby-red liquid from a black decanter. “Drink?”

Jack eyed the liquid. It moved in a suspicious, oily manner remniscent of spoiled salad dressing. “You think I’m stupid?”

Belial lifted one dark eyebrow. “You really want me to answer that?”

Jack waved the glass off. Belial shrugged and sipped from it. “Your loss.”

“I know you’re never going to give me a straight answer without that babbling brook of bullshit you relish so dearly,” Jack said. “So I’m just going to guess this bloke who has your knickers in a twist started that riot down there?”

He watched Belial, but the demon had a good poker face even for a resident of the Pit. He just drank his drink, staring unblinkingly back at Jack. Jack sighed. “I’m further going to guess he’s someone who didn’t take kindly to you plopping yourself down in the vacant seat on the Triumvirate.” The ruling body of Hell had been unchanged for millennia, until Belial had stuck his upwardly mobile nose into it. The demon who’d once been a bottom-feeding soul-scrounger was now one of the most powerful beings in the universe. Jack had to admit that he was impressed with Belial’s acumen. Say what you wanted about the bastard, but he knew how to step on you to get up the ladder.

Belial sucked his teeth, his ruby tongue flicking over his pale lips. “Maybe.”

“You take out the oldest Prince, and his loyalists bash your windows in?” Jack said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but what’d you expect? A gift basket?”

Belial gave a smile that wasn’t directed at Jack, but at the chaos below. “Those aren’t Azrael’s boys.”

Jack shrugged. “No offense, but it’s hard to tell you bastards apart.”

“Some are, of course,” Belial said. “He commanded more legions than anyone. But there are the Egregors—that’s Dagon—and every other kind of fuckwit follower you could name.” He turned that smile on Jack now, and Jack felt the chill in his gut that would never go away, as his warm, beating human heart let him know that no matter how slick and mannered Belial’s demeanor, he was a predator and Jack was a meat sack.

“This isn’t a little upset that can be solved with a few thousand bodies and somebody’s head served up at the dinner table,” Belial said. “This is just a slice. It’s everywhere in Hell, Jack. Do you think anything that’s happened in the last year would have been allowed if everything was fine and dandy?”

Jack shrugged. “Considering the way you lot blather on about the end times, I figured you weren’t too worried.”

That was a lie. Things upstairs had been fucked for a long time. Old gods wandered with impunity; the original demon, Abbadon, escaped his prison to try to kickstart the apocalypse; slices of Purgatory, the one spot uncontrollable by demon, man, or force of nature, seeped into the daylight world and nearly sucked all of England into a plane filled with wild magic and ancient entities starving for human flesh.

“Hell used to rule all,” Belial said. He didn’t sound angry, or even boastful. “The Princes and the Named would never allow anything—in the Black, the daylight world, or anywhere else—to happen without weighing the impact. And if it didn’t serve our interests, it wasn’t allowed. That’s gone now. And it’s not just outside the Pit, it’s at our doorstep.” He pointed at the crowd. “Half of Baal’s Fenris have gone rogue. The damned everywhere have started turning on the Named who rule them. And the Named … they’re all too busy figuring out how they’re going to axe me from my seat to pay the slightest fucking bit of attention. Not to mention that those two soft-headed shite-for-brains I sit on the Triumvirate with think the way to make all this unseemly upset go away is to cut this fucker a deal.” He knocked back the drink and handed it to a stooped, bat-winged creature who appeared with a tray.

“Still not getting how your problem controlling your people translates to the end of my world,” Jack said. “And frankly, if this is a demon-on-demon problem, I couldn’t care less. You lot have always been squabblers.”

Belial braced himself on the railing. “We can’t rule from the shadows any longer, it’s true,” he said. “And the world is going to end, sooner rather than later. But if Hell falls, Jack … it will be so much worse than even I can imagine. Hell is the one constant of existence, from as far back as anything has a memory. If the realm collapses, then everything will. Every plane will blend into one, and then everything will go dark.”

“Waiting to hear what you think I can do to stop this,” Jack said. He knew Belial was right, of course—if too much magic was allowed to bleed into the daylight world from the Black, or too much of the Land of the Dead was allowed to bleed into the living, and you got things like … well, exactly like what had been going on for the last year. If Hell ceased to be Hell, that didn’t even bear thinking about.

“Everything you see before you is the result of soft-headed fanaticism,” Belial said. “The result of one demon—not even a Named, mind you—who has somehow convinced an astounding swath of idiots that he will be the one ruler of the Pit. That the Triumvirate was never meant to rule, and that the Princes, me especially, need to be skinned alive.”

“Welcome to my world,” Jack said. “Every one has its share of zealots.”

“I don’t know how he’s turning these people to his side,” Belial said. “Named, legions, everyone. But I’m going to find out, with your help. And then I’m going to make a tartare out of his balls in the public square, and all of this is going to stop.”

“Again,” Jack said, “this bloke sounds rather more muscular than what somebody walking around in a human body, with bones and internal organs and whatnot, would be smart to tangle with.”

“That’s the trick,” Belial said. “He’s hiding out on Earth, and sometime in the near future, something he does while hiding there sets off those nasty little clips that have been playing in your head. But I don’t know what, and in order to find out I need someone he won’t see coming. It can’t be a demon, and for a human, you’re pretty useful.”

He grabbed Jack and dug his nails into Jack’s palm, drawing a little blood. Jack started to protest, but his mind filled with images, like photographs falling down into a chaotic pile, and his tongue tasted of burning penny. He felt vomit boil up into his throat and tried to scream, but the onslaught stopped as quickly as it had begun.