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Jack’s senses folded in and narrowed down to one point, beyond sight and beyond pain. He floated, a rudderless drifting into nothing. There were no pictures from his life before his eyes. No grand parade of memories. Just Jack Winter, dead man, dissolving little by little like wreckage at the bottom of the sea.
The crow woman came to him. She bent and touched his face, and all of Jack’s instincts flared to life again. The crow woman was never a cause for celebration, or calm, even at this moment. She appeared for one reason and one only.
“No . . . ,” he croaked. “No, I’m not finished.”
The raven woman gri
The blood galvanized Jack. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t slip away because of Treadwell, a fucking ghost, a piece of vapor. He was the crow-mage. When he died, he became the crow woman’s.
“Wait as long as you like,” he rasped. “I have time. I have a life yet . . .”
All warriors meet their end in my arms, the Morrigan whispered. All battles have a loser. Come away to the field with me, Jack. Take your place in my ranks.
“I’m not . . . yours . . . yet . . .” It was getting hard to speak, becoming an effort to suck in anything besides blood. Pete had fled, and the bar of light from the open tomb door lit the Morrigan from the back, casting the shadow of her wings across Jack’s eyes. Outside, in the light world, he heard the flutter of wings, the hollow croak of a crow.
You are my favored son, Jack, she whispered. You are the crow-mage. Called to the Land of the Dead from his day of birth.
“No . . . ,” Jack choked, black borders swirling at the edge of his vision like slowly sinking into a deep well. “I left them. I left you.”
The Fiach Dubh are a construct, Jack. Men and flesh and petty concerns wrapped in the illusion of power. I am Death. I am eternal. Her fingers brushed his cheek, her nails digging into his flesh. He felt nothing except the chill of the stones.
“I won’t go,” he croaked. “Not willingly.”
It is the field, crow-mage, the Morrigan hissed. Or it is Hell. You are a si
Jack dipped his shaking fingers into his own blood, felt a clear rough patch on the stones. “Never . . . never wanted to be a god. Just wanted to live me life. . . .”
The pages of the grimoire he’d stolen from Seth’s library floated before his eyes, blurred and half-remembered.
It was enough. It had been enough to expel him from the Fiach Dubh, and it would be enough now.
Jack drew from memory the invocation and the pentagram, the devil’s gateway. The calling card of the Trium virate. The invitation for Hell on earth. A sorcerer’s knowledge, for a mage who had nothing left but a slow ebb and flow of blood and magic.
You fool! The crow woman spread her wings, screeched, spectral wind chilling Jack’s wounds. You can only prolong. You can never escape.
“Yeah, well.” Jack coughed and more blood coated his tongue. That was a bad way to go. His time was slipping down to the last few grains in the hourglass. “Guess it’s Hell for me, hag. So until my time’s up . . .” He extended his two fingers into the crow woman’s face. “Fuck off.”
He let his eyes fall shut, his fingers move across the blood-slicked stone. The words fell from his lips with surprising clarity, words of power from his long-ago glance at the mildewed linen pages Seth kept locked in a metal trunk from his days in the Irish army. Locked with a bespelled lock and a set of hexes, until the clever boy Jack Winter had slipped them.
Mages didn’t deal with demons. Only sorcerers invited the denizens of Hell to their threshold. Only evil men.
Desperate men.
“I call the servants of the Morning Star, the tainted princes, the jackals of judgment,” he whispered. “As your servant, I humbly call.”
He opened his eyes with a struggle, the ceiling of the tomb wobbling and distorting as he stepped to the threshold of dying. It hurt less this time, was colder, stiller than the hotel in Dublin, but dying itself always felt the same. Cold. Always cold.
“With my blood on the stone,” Jack whispered, “I call.”
A shimmer of black in the shadowed air, a thickening of the darkness in the corner of the tomb. Jack listened to his heartbeat, felt the cobweb kiss of black magic across his bloody face.
“With lies in my heart,” Jack rasped. “I call.” This was where a name was supposed to lay, a race of demon or a word of power to bind the encroachment of Hell to the sorcerer’s will.
Jack didn’t know the names of demons. Seth hadn’t taught him. Had expelled him from the order when he’d tried to learn. Had left him to the mercy of his sight.
“Somebody,” Jack rasped. “I’m Jack Winter. And I sodding need your help.”
He didn’t see the demon come, but it was there when his gaze roved back to the floor of the tomb, black suit and dark hair, so ordinary as to cause tears of disappointment.
The demon took a step toward him, and cocked its head. “And what, little mage, is so dark in that heart of yours that you summon whichever of Hell’s Named that feels like making a human a plaything today?”
Jack met its eyes, those dreadful black button eyes that spoke of flayed skin and burnt char, breaking and bleeding and screaming.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispered. “I can’t, yet . . .”
The demon crouched, laid a hand on his wound, Jack’s blood growing vines of red up the immaculate French fold of its white shirt as it ran a finger down his cheek.
“A mage who’s afraid of the afterlife. That’s interesting, that is.”
“Not . . . afraid,” Jack managed. “I can’t. I can’t . . .”
“All right, be still,” the demon purred. “Don’t drain yourself dry before we have a chance to chat with one another.”
“I’m . . . the crow-mage. . . .” Jack managed. “If I die . . .”
Laughter floated around him, dark and poisonous as a sip of cyanide laced into port wine. The demon sat on its heels. “Say the words, mage, and I’ll consider what I can do to help you.” It smiled, and Jack knew he should be scared, terrified, pissing in his shorts.
If he had any sense, he’d be frightened.
If he had any balls, he’d be dying on the floor alone, last words taken away only by the ghosts of Highgate.
But the mages who decreed Thou shalt not bargain with demons, Lawrence and Seth and the rest, they’d never been here. Never felt cold stone under their back and warm blood on their skin. They’d never seen the crow woman, watching and waiting for them to join the ranks of her corpse army.
“Say it,” the demon coaxed. “I want to hear it from your sweet throat, mage.”
The words crawled up with Jack’s last breath. “Please,” he said to the demon. “Save me.”