Demon Bound

my enemies to ash.
    She held out her hand to Jack.
You only have to agree, crow-mage. Take up the mantle of your fate.
    Slowly, with a dull popping in his knuckles, Jackgrasped her hand and held on tight. He saw the battlefield, smelled the blood, heard the screams. Felt his feet sink into bloodied earth. Saw the way spread out before him, spires of London drifting with smoke while sirens wailed and screams twisted in the wind. War and death. The twin desires of the Morrigan, his to bring to the world. Jack Winter, the pale rider. The harbinger of war.
    A war that Pete would face alone, as long as he remained under the yoke of Belial’s bargain. A war that he knew, deep in the small part of him where truth was still alive, that she wouldn’t live survive.
    Not unless Jack finished what he’d started in Seth’s circle. Until he acknowledged the touch of the crow woman on his life, and his sight.
    You are dead, Jack,
the Morrigan whispered.
With the dead you should stay. As the crow-mage’s fate always cycles.
She stroked his blood-caked hair from his face with her free hands, claws tracing his skull.
Will you stay, Jack?
    Jack squeezed the Morrigan’s hand, until his broken knuckles creaked. “Take me,” he told the crow woman. “I’m ready.”