Caitlin Kittredge - Dark Days

Belial wiped his fingers on the lapel of his suit. “Like that? I can transfer memories via blood now. Perks of being a Prince.”

“Fuck you,” Jack groaned, clutching his forehead.

“Lucky you have that second sight,” Belial said. “Only works on psychics. Normal blokes would have beans on toast for brain if I did that.”

“I feel so special,” Jack grumbled.

“Everything my spies have been able to gather about where he’s hiding is there,” Belial said. “I need you to find him, and I need you to use your particular talent for being a sneaky cunt to help me smack this bastard back to the Middle Ages before whatever he’s got planned goes down, and he flips the switch on the end of everything.”

“If he figures out that I’m spying on him and turns me into a leather jacket?” Jack said. “I have a wife and kid, you know.”

Belial shrugged. “I suggest you don’t let him figure it out,” he said. “Because I don’t think I need to spell out what’ll happen to your lovely wife and darling daughter if this fuckwit manages to bring down Hell.”

He didn’t. Odd as it was to know his survival depended on a race of creatures as despicable as demons, in a place as dark and dingy as Hell, Jack didn’t argue that Belial had a point.

But that didn’t mean he was going to his mission with a smile on his face.

“If you want me to tangle with the demonic version of Jerry Falwell, I’ll need something to defend myself with besides my good looks and charm,” he said.

Belial inclined his head. “Of course. This way to the armory.”

Jack cast one more look out over the city before they went inside. Thunderheads had built up over the desert, and they rushed in on the screaming winds, bathing the street below in rain, sending rioters scurrying for cover and washing the black blood into the gutters.

Belial led him deeper into the palace than Jack had ever wanted to go. The whole place was like slices of different centuries stacked as high as the low black and red clouds that constantly roiled above the City. One floor was as opulent as an art deco hotel, one floor was the dirty lino and buzzing light tubes of a dole office, one floor was the sterile white of a laboratory. Belial brought him to one of the white floors, through a door that recoiled soundlessly into the floor.

Inside a narrow room, Jack saw a variety of objects on glass pedestals. Weapons, chunks of stone carved in demonic languages, books, an eyeball that blinked at him from its nest of flesh and severed optic nerve.

Belial stopped next to one of the cases and pressed his thumb against the pad. Within lay a flat black disc that looked like lava rock, with a hole in the center for a strap or chain.

“You’re one of the only living men ever to see this place,” Belial said. “The Princes’ vaults are secret, even from the Named.”

Jack shivered. He could feel the black energy creeping off most of the things under those glass domes, and he didn’t want to get any closer than he had to. “The armory is only a small part of the vaults,” Belial said. “But this is all you’ll need.”

He handed Jack the disc. It was oddly light and sat flat in his palm, not giving off any particular sting of magic, demon-spawned or otherwise.

“This is cute and all,” Jack said, “but are you sure I couldn’t have a knife or a gun or something? Even that eyeball would be better for shock value.”

“If you touched the Allfather’s Eye, your tiny little dish sponge of a brain would come straight out your nose,” Belial said. “That’s not for you, boyo. This will ensure that once you’ve found our little self-proclaimed Messiah, you can bring him straight home for a spanking.”

Belial folded Jack’s fingers around the disc, and Jack fought not to pull away. Belial’s skin was cold and dry like a snake’s, none of the warmth Jack associated with a living thing. “The first demons carved the gates of Hell from living rock,” Belial said. “And they bound the rock with spells to make it indestructible. Any man who possesses a piece of those gates may pass in and out of Hell freely.”

The demon let go of him, and Jack sucked in a deep breath, ordering himself not to throw up on the spotless white floor. Belial swiped his thumb over the dome again and gave Jack one of those grins that would have made the shark from Jaws weep. “You’ve got the keys to the kingdom now, Jackie. Don’t make me regret giving them to you.”

The first thing Jack did when he returned to London was find a pay phone and call Pete. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know that I worried you, and I’m all right.” He paused, flinching a little. “You going to scream at me?”

“Just get home,” Pete sighed after a moment. “I can’t even begin to express how sick I was when you went running out of there, but I hope you feel bad.”

“You have no idea,” Jack said. The memory Belial had given him rested in his mind like a splinter in his foot, aching and sharp and causing his vision to blur. “I’ll be home soon,” he said, and hung up.

When he was still shooting up, Jack had frequented the south side of the river, crappy little shooting galleries from Southwark to Peckham. He didn’t need smack, but he needed privacy, a place where he could behave like a freak without anyone caring.

The last time he’d let his sight have free rein, he was much younger, living in Dublin, and the things he’d seen had driven him to try for suicide rather than keep seeing the parade of dead that were drawn by his talent.

This has to be different, Jack thought as he walked from the Queen’s Road station to Rye Lane. Peckham had been a tip for as long as he’d been in London, but this was a city where you could never really fight the creeping disease of gentrification. Where there’d once been fly-tips and vacant lots there were now wine bars and shops selling precious little trinkets for you, your flat, or your pet. The street-level folk were recent immigrants or working-class, and the gangs and yobs had been pushed back onto the borders of the council estates that rose like drab monuments to a bygone London, though one less than the ancient London of the Tower or Newgate Prison.

Jack left the shopping high street and moved toward those estates, the ones that had once made North Peckham the British equivalent of Watts or Cabrini-Green. Posh folks—the ones who weren’t quite posh enough to afford flats in that thin belt of yuppie paradise north of the Thames but south of the sooty gray expanse of North London—hadn’t ventured here yet, and broken-out windows and bums stared at Jack as he walked.

He cut down a narrow walkway between two townhouse flats, both just brick husks but gamely plastered with estate agent’s listing signs. Two bedrooms, an en suite, and three junkies living in your kitchen, Jack thought. Just the sort of “colorful” venue some twat from the City would snap up in another six months or so.

Now, though, it served his purpose. He kicked in the back door, which was rotten, the latch hanging by a few splinters, and stepped inside. One thin body wrapped in an overcoat slumbered in the back hall, and Jack surprised a prostitute and a blobby, sweaty john in the front room.

“Never mind,” he said, seeing the look of outrage on the man’s face. “Just looking for the loo.”

He climbed the creaking steps as far as he could go and found the skeleton of an armchair in an upstairs bedroom that looked toward the river and the council estate towers to the north.

More than anything, Jack wanted to grab Belial by the neck and shake him until there was no life left. The demon must have known what he was doing, making Jack use his talent to find the demon that had Belial’s knickers in such a twist. Belial probably thought it would be funny.