Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

“You think you’re here forever?” Belial said. “I’m showing you it could be much worse.”

It was hard to think how. Belial’s torments were endless and creative. Jack didn’t understand how his body could keep taking punishment. The small bit of his mind that hadn’t shut down told him that he’d go completely around the bend soon, and then he’d belong to Belial. He’d forget his own name, that he’d ever been alive, and everything about his life before. Pete, everything.

Had she buried him? Was she even still thinking of him?

“Prince Azrael tortures these four endlessly,” Belial said. “As punishment for daring to stand against the demons. You don’t always have to be this pathetic smear of shit you are now, Jack.”

Jack turned his head with effort. Below his feet, the ground shook and the screaming reached a fever pitch. “What?”

“Eventually, you’ll give up on what you remember of your life,” Belial said. “And then you might be useful to Hell, Jack. Nobody would own you here. Not the smack, not your sight, and not the Morrigan.”

“No,” Jack mumbled. “Just you.”

Belial’s claws grazed the back of his neck. “For now. But someday, I have a feeling you and I could be great friends.”

That small part of Jack that had recognized he was sliding downhill fast spoke. “I’d rather be down in that pit with Azrael.”

Belial’s lip twisted down. “So be it,” he said. “You’ll break, Winter. Sooner or later they all do.”

Something cold and wet hit him in the face and slithered down his throat. Jack choked and swiped at his lips.

“Jeez, man,” Sliver said. “You scared the hell out of me.”

He knelt beside Jack, holding an empty pitcher with a few ice cubes lingering in the bottom. Jack watched rivulets of pink trickle across the white tile floor and slip away down a drain. He was soaked from chest to head, but he was awake. “You should see the other bloke,” he said.

Sliver set the pitcher aside and sat him up. “Funny. You want to tell me why you fall out of a cab in front of my bar, mumbling crazy shit, and then pass out on me in my back room?”

“Long story,” Jack said. “Someday I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll be amazed.” He tried to stand, but his feet went out from under him, and he fell back to the tile.

“Dude,” Sliver said. “You need to settle. You’re fucked up.”

“I’ll be all right,” Jack said. “Just need to rest for a moment…”

He wasn’t all right. Blood loss had made a black border around his vision, and his ribs were on fire.

“I’ll get somebody,” Sliver said. “Just hang in there, all right?”

He left, and Jack passed in and out of consciousness for what could have been hours or weeks. The single bare bulb in the pub’s back room swung back and forth, light and dark. Usually, this was when the Morrigan would show her face, when he was in the shadow land between the daylight world and the Land of the Dead. But she knew she had him now. There was no reason to attend his last hours when he’d be delivered to her at the end.

He couldn’t help Pete. He couldn’t even help himself.

“Shit,” somebody said. “This guy is hamburger. Why the hell didn’t you take him to a hospital?”

“Like I could explain this to somebody in a hospital,” Sliver snapped. “I thought you said you could help him.”

“Look,” the second voice said, “this guy is beyond help.” Chubby fingers gouged against Jack’s neck. “His pulse is barely even there.”

“Do what you can.” A desperate edge crept into Sliver’s voice. “I can’t have a dead fucking body in my bar, Mayhew.”

“Really, you of all people are more equipped to deal with a corpse than most,” Mayhew said.

“Fuck you,” Sliver said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Clear my tab, and I’ll see if I can keep him breathing,” Mayhew said.

“Are you shitting me? You owe me four hundred bucks.”

Mayhew’s fingers went away. “Hey, you want to put this fucker out with the trash after last call, you can argue with me. You want my help and expertise, clear my fucking tab.”

“Fine.” Shiver sighed. “I think his ribs are busted. He keeps making these wheezes when he tries to breathe.”

A cold stethoscope pressed against Jack’s chest, and Mayhew made a disapproving sound. “He’s got fluid in his lungs. Probably internal bleeding.” Jack’s leather was stripped away, and a bandage went around his ribs. The pain intensified tenfold, and he cried out.

“Good sign,” Mayhew said. He peeled back Jack’s eyelid and Jack was blinded by a pocket torch. “Hello in there,” Mayhew said, and Jack swiped at the light.

“Fuck off.”

“Listen,” Mayhew said. “You’ve got cracked ribs and a nasty head wound. Probably a concussion too. I’m going to give you something for the pain, but you need to stay still, all right?”

“No needles,” Jack said. “No drugs.”

Mayhew ignored him, fitting a sterile needle onto a syringe and drawing from a bottle of clear liquid that proclaimed SALINAS VET SUPPLY across the label in broad letters.

“No…” Jack tried. If he was doped, he had no chance. Pete would die, the baby would die. Hell, he’d probably die in the bargain, since Mayhew seemed to have learned first aid while drunk and standing on his head.

The needle slid in, small and cold, and the cold soon spread across all his limbs. Jack felt his heartbeat slow down, and he drifted on the opiate tide, the familiar fuzzy sensation of the high unfurling its wings and lifting him toward the ceiling.

He looked down, at the top of Sliver’s head and Mayhew’s orange Hawaiian shirt.

“I think you gave him too much,” Sliver said. Mayhew zipped up his case and shoved the rest of his supplies back into a duffel bag.

“You want to do this?”

Sliver shook his head. Mayhew stood up and brushed off his knees. “I’ll hang out in the front. Call me if anything changes.”

“Don’t you dare drink all the good shit,” Sliver called after him, and then crouched beside Jack’s body again. From this vantage, he really did look like shit. His face was gray, and the dried blood and the cut on his forehead made him look like some kind of film zombie. His bare chest, wrapped in bandages, was covered in old bruises and new cuts from where Abbadon had flung him into the tomb.

He’d come close to dying before—and had, when Belial took him. He knew the detachment, the gentle untethering of soul from flesh. But he couldn’t die, not now. Pete needed him. More importantly, he needed her. The only kindness if he kicked now would be to the kid. Better to have a dead father you could idolize than a living one who was shit.

“ You don’t have to let it end like this, you know. ”

Jack looked up at the shadows near the ceiling, cast by the swaying bulb. “Oh,” he said. “Now you show up.” He wasn’t sure if he was really speaking, or just echoing his thoughts, but the crow woman glided down from the ceiling and put her hands on either side of his face.

“ You have the ability to make this stop right now, Jack. You have the means to help the little Weir. If you really want to. ”

Jack looked down at his body. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m already dead. We’re just waiting out the formalities now.”

The Morrigan dug her claws into his cheeks. She could be extraordinarily beautiful, pale skin and eyes like drowning pools, long hair drifting on spectral wind, body encased in a diaphanous black shroud. And then her face could change, could become the face of the crow woman, or the Hag, and she was the most terrifying thing he’d ever clapped eyes on.