The road was nearly invisible beyond the Mini’s bonnet, and Jack shivered as the fog formed vines and tangles outside the windscreen. They were alone, closed off, and the road narrowed and turned back on itself.
Pete stopped and set the emergency brake, turning off the car. “I’m lost.”
Jack looked behind them, but there was only fathomless gray, like the mists outside the walls of the Land of the Dead. Endless, cold, and full of lost souls.
“Must have taken a wrong turn in the muck,” he suggested. “It’s all right. All of us get lost at one time or another. The trick is getting found again.”
Pete drummed her fingers on the wheel. “I guess there’s nowhere to go but forward. Have to come out somewhere.”
Jack joined in her drumming, the bass line to “Shut Up and Fuck Off” springing up under his fingers. He’d written the song with Dix McGowan, the Poor Dead Bastards’ drummer, after a night sitting up with more bottles of whiskey than comfortably fit in the bin of Dix’s minuscule flat. Dix was newly dumped, Jack was pissed, and he felt good enough about being too drunk to see the dead that he wrote a song. It hadn’t gone on the Bastards’ single LP, and only hit a few set lists in their club gigs, but it was Jack’s favorite. Simple, uncomplicated. Shut up, fuck off, I’m not your Prince Charming, I’m not your broken heart.
“Jack.” Pete tapped him on the back of his hand. “You with us?” She turned the ignition key, and the Mini coughed and shuddered.
He folded up the memory and put it with all the others that lived in a rat-eaten cardboard box marked Before the Fix. In the Mini, there was no warmth and no biting scent of whiskey, no guitar neck under his hands. Jack felt as if a finger of fog and damp had slipped in and placed a hand on the back of his neck. “Try it again,” he said to Pete, trying to keep the low urgency from his voice even as his chest felt as if a giant had closed its fist about him.
The Black boiled, in the wake of something passing through, large and ancient, that set all of Jack’s mental alarms to screaming.
Pete jiggled the key and then hit the dash. “Bollocks! I knew that bloke who replaced the alternator was dodgy.”
Jack put his fingertips against the Mini’s window. His prints turned the mist to droplets and they slid down the glass, turning his handprint into nothing but streaks on a pane.
Outside, on a lone telephone wire, a crow landed, and stared at him. It darted a gaze left and right, and then took wing, cawing madly.
Magic prickled up and down Jack’s body, and he shivered as the crow’s call faded into nothingness along with all else.
The Black of the Dartmoor was not the Black of London. There were layers in the city, ley lines of abandoned tunnel and underground river, the cool sting of iron railway tracks and bridges binding the wild power of the Thames. London breathed, it fluttered and shouted, wriggled and screamed. A million energies spread across the Black, slithering through smoke and stone, caressing his sight like a lover’s insistent hand.
Here, the moor was simply alive, an open wound. Raw power from the Black trickled through Jack’s consciousness, undiluted and primal. The tors and pagan sites scattered across the landscape were like torches in a vast darkness, floating on a sea of raw power.
It was an ancient place, a place of wild magic, and Jack watched his breath make a cloud when he exhaled. Even though it was freezing in the Mini, sweat broke all over Jack’s skin, under his leather. His pulse jittered, and his nerves crept up and down his flesh. The Black of the Dartmoor felt like nothing so much as ghost sickness. Jack shut his eyes, tried to push against the tide of the sight. Had to, because if he left Pete alone out here by checking out they’d both be fucked.
“I’m going to check the motor,” Pete said, climbing out. “Open the bonnet, would you?”
Jack did as she asked and followed her. They were in pea soup now, and Jack smelled the icy, freshwater scent of rain on the breeze.
“We shouldn’t linger,” he said. The waves of power only worsened, outside the protective steel bubble of the Mini.
Pete poked at the innards of the engine, while Jack lit a fag. “You know,” she said, “you should be doing this, you being the man and all.”
“Sorry, luv,” Jack told her. “My manly prowess is confined to picking locks, smoking, and being ridiculously good looking.”
“You’re bent.” Pete shook her head, fighting a smile.
Jack returned it. Seeing Pete smile started a small fire under his stomach, and it helped mute the buzzing of the Black, for a moment. “I don’t hear you disagreeing, luv.”
Pete sighed, at him or the car, he wasn’t sure, and shut the bonnet. “Well, it’s buggered.” She pulled out her BlackBerry and held it up to the sky. “No service, either. We either walk, or wait to be pancaked by a lorry.”
Jack looked into the fog, where he knew the hills were watching them. Gathering magic. Waiting.
“How far can it be?” he said gamely. Pete got her bag and jacket, locked the Mini, and joined him on the edge of the road.
“Hopefully not so far my shoes start leaking. I’m in a foul enough mood already.”
Jack shoved his hands into his pockets, keeping a few steps ahead of Pete. He swept the hills from one side of the road to the other, steps hard and sharp on the gravel, heartbeat sharper. Whatever was out there in the fog stared back. Jack could see nothing except the phantoms of mist wandering aimlessly among the hedges and the hills, but he felt it. His skin went colder than the air, and he curled his fists inside his leather, scrabbling for a little magic to throw behind a shield hex. He wasn’t going to be dragged away like a sod in a fairy tale. Whatever had stalked them to this deserted spot clearly didn’t know what sort of a mood he was in.
Nothing sprang at him as they walked away from the Mini, but the wild power of the moor followed, and the watcher followed with it. Jack resigned himself to a game of seeing which of them broke nerve first—the mage, or the creature.
“You know,” Pete said as they squelched through the dead grass on the shoulder of the road, “this reminds me of that night. You remember the one, where you played the set at Club Bleu . . .”
“And your sister got herself pissed on tequila,” Jack remembered. Pete’s sister MG was a vision in black lace, long Bettie Page curls, wide eyes, and lips made for blow jobs All of which hid a mind that would have done the bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction proud. In other words, she was just Jack’s—old Jack, Bastards frontman Jack—type. If there wasn’t a chance a bird would come at you with a kitchen knife, where was the laugh?
“Right, and she made us walk for miles at three in the morning looking for a curry.” Pete picked up the thread.
“Not just any curry,” Jack said.
“A green curry.” They mimicked MG’s put-on posh accent together.
“Thank God they only made one of her.” Pete sighed. “That’s what our Da used to say.”
Jack had first seen Pete standing at the edge of the pit in Fiver’s, a hole in the wall shitebox, far from Club Bleu as she was from her sister, even though they’d arrived together. Where MG dominated every room she entered, Pete stayed small and pale, worrying a full pint glass between her hands. There was no great lightning bolt, no flash of recognition from past lives. She looked at him, and he looked at her, while the music played.
And suddenly, MG had been the furthest person from his thoughts.
“I . . .” Jack swallowed his words. Whatever he’d seen in the dirty basement club that night was gone now. Now, there was a demon, and a dozen years of growing older and harder in between.
“Yes?” Pete turned back to face him. They were standing close as they’d ever been, save for the night Jack had pulled Pete out of Highgate Cemetery, bleeding for trying to keep him from being swallowed by the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell.
Closer even than when she’d kissed him.
Jack reached out and brushed the droplets of mist from her hair. “Not a thing, luv.” He dropped
his hand, and stepped back. “Not a bloody thing.”
Behind Pete, in the fog, something moved. Jack didn’t see it, not really. His headache spiked and his skin numbed as if a north wind had blown across his face, and a shadow flicked in and out of his vision faster than the shadow from a nightmare.
Hulking and dark, it moved across his sight, parting the mist. A long, low howl echoed between the hills, lower than the wail of the bansidhe or the scream of the bean nighe.
Pete whipped her head around. Her sixth sense, the part of her connected to the Black, felt it—the soul-stealing cold, the oppressive weight of a creature of magic breaking the barrier between worlds.
“Jack.” She reached back and grabbed for his hand without taking her eyes off the spot where the thing stood. It was indistinct, the size of a small horse, just a black blur of fog surrounded by lighter mist. Whatever Jack had imagined coming when he’d felt the magic of the moor awaken, he hadn’t imagined it would be quite as large.
Or seem quite as slagged off.
“Pete,” he said in return, to let her know he was still there, wasn’t running.
The thing snarled, a sound that cut through his ribs straight to his heart. Twin golden globes blossomed in the fog, as if the creature were all flame inside. Eyes, golden and round, staring at Jack and through him, straight down to the bone.
“Pete,” Jack repeated. “We need to get back to the car.”
The creature in the fog took a step forward, its power brushing up against Jack’s. The creature was cold, the cold of dead skin and frozen iron. Its magic was hard and un-yielding, power borne of the Underworld.
It could cut through Jack’s shield hex like a razor through a wrist.
He wasn’t up for debating the point, either. Maybe twenty years ago, when he was stupid and carried a death wish with him like a scar. But not today. He was too old and too bastard-clever now to engage with something that had crawled straight up from the Land of the Dead. Particularly when that something so clearly wanted to gnaw his bones.
Pete twined her fingers in his, and he felt the flutter of the gateway she carried in her talent. A Weir possessed a direct line to the oldest, sharpest, bloodiest part of the Black. It promised a mage like him power beyond imagination, if only he were willing to burn himself to ash and Pete, too, in the process. When a Weir and a mage met, the uncontrolled magic could eat you alive. Terrible catastrophes had resulted, and the sweet, overwhelming desire to let the magic take him was the reason.
Jack yanked his hand free. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
Running was nearly always a better option than dying, so Jack turned and pelted for the Mini as if the coppers were chasing him and he had open warrants.
The thing gave chase, cold breath on his back, panting in his ear, and the howl that could rend flesh ululating across the moor.
Jack’s fingers fumbled for the Mini’s door, scrabbled uselessly as Pete dove across the driver’s seat and sprang the latch.
Jack fell in, his sight shrieking, and slammed the door.
“What the bloody fuck is that thing?” Pete shouted, but he barely heard her. She was down a long tunnel, back in the living world. The Black boiled up around him, threatening to drag him under, take him to that primal bloodlust that flowed under the moor. Under the hill, to the old races that waited there.
Jack had seen what lived under the hill.
He wouldn’t go back.
The cut on his hand from Paddington was raw and weeping still, but he turned the flick-knife on the same digits, his off hand. If he needed to work a spell or, fuck, pick a pocket, he needed his left.
He sliced the fat of his palm deep, felt the cold bite of metal and the serpent sting.
The air was so cold now from the encroach of the creature that his blood steamed when it hit the glass. Jack smeared his palm down the car window, leaving a ruddy streak, and when he had enough blood began to draw.
Sigils weren’t something the Fiach Dubh had much faith in. Their magic was gut-deep, physical, the shield hex and the summoning circle. Pretty drawings are for pretty faeries, boy. Seth McBride’s voice, roughened by cigarettes and hard magic, crept in as Jack tried to push magic into the blood. Seth had taught Jack the hard and fast, boot-tothe-bollocks rules. The ways and wicked tricks of the Brothers of the Crow. He came back, unbidden, most often when Jack had gotten himself into a situation that would end either with him a corpse or royally fucked.
“Shut your gob, Seth. Crusty old Mick,” Jack muttered as he finished the cycle. Picked it from the notebook of Declan Disher, a Vatican-trained exorcist who found Wicca and swanned about in a hippie shirt and pentacle until a gang of Stygian Brothers cut out his liver one night in a dark pub washroom and used it as a ceremonial offering to Nergal. Or perhaps Dagon. Jack got the two mixed up sometimes.
Declan had always been a git, but he was a hand with markings. The sigil had saved Jack’s arse before, and now it would save him and Pete one more time.
It had to, because if the creature broke through, he was out of brilliant ideas.
“Jack. Jack!” Pete grabbed his shoulder and shook. “There’s something out there and it’s not stopping for a chat!”
“Give me half a fucking second,” he gritted. The symbols were slippery, transient, escaping his attempt to infuse them with power. Concentration shot, panic rising, wild magic threatening to claw his brain apart—never the best time to draw a complex magical wotsit.
Pete stilled herself with effort, effort that manifested in the widening of her pupils, the cords in her neck pulled taut by fear. “All right. All right. Just tell me what you need me to do.”
Jack put his hand against the symbols. They flopped with faint energy, like dying goldfish. Outside, the creature prowled, circling the car, scenting for life and magic.
Fuck it, he couldn’t take the chance that the sigil would crumble under the creature’s onslaught. He couldn’t chance visiting the Bleak Gates, not when the demon was walking in his shadow. Jack turned to Pete.
“What you can do is take my hand.”
She put her palm in his without hesitation. Warm, sure, alive. Trusting.
Like he’d spun a tap, power rushed through him, making his fingers and toes and everything else tingle. The sigil cycle glowed and then it lapped up his magic, strengthening, locking out the malevolent Black that crawled beyond the glass.
He felt the vast well of the Weir, the doorway to the old magics, the blood and bone and sex magics. It was sweet as bubbling spring water, hot as coal. It filled Jack with the high that only the Black could give.
The creature outside snarled, and then whined. It circled the Mini once more and then with a final throaty growl, it retreated, great fog lamps of eyes fading into the mist.
The power of the moor leached away at a far slower pace—whatever had gotten it up in the first place, called the creature, was strong enough to bend the raw Black to its will, to command a thin space between the worlds to appear and release its denizens.
Jack let out his first breath in what he swore was hours, felt his lungs burn and his head lighten. Pete let go of him. Her face was drawn and she was panting a little, grim circles standing out around her eyes and veins crawling up her face.
The first time her Weir talent had touched his magic, she’d passed out cold on the floor of his flat. This was an improvement, if not a vast one.
He brushed the backs of his knuckles over her cheek, reflexively. Make sure she was still warm and still had blood beating in her. “You all right, luv?”
She took in a breath, let it out, hands gripping her knees, wrinkling the denim hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Fine. What in fucking hell was that thing?”
The mist blew onward, wind rocking the Mini, and behind the mist came the rain, in soft gray sheets that wafted across the moor like wraiths chasing witchfire across the lowland bogs near Seth’s farmhouse in County Cork.
“Nasty,” Jack murmured. “A hungry, nasty cre
ature of the Black.” His blood was drying to sticky paste on the window, and his palm ached. Pushing magic through his own blood always left him cold, fever-achy, and drained like he’d passed out in a pub loo and woken with a crick in his neck.
It left too the faint craving for that floating, golden place where his talent met Pete’s Weir. He wished to drink down every last drop of Pete’s power, ride it forever.
One fix or another, it made no difference.
“That’s it?” Pete jiggled the key and the Mini started on the first crank, purring contentedly as always. “Usually you talk my ear off, Professor. Have you ever seen something like it before?”
“Once,” Jack said, as they turned back onto the paved road and crawled back through the thinning fog to the junction.
He could still hear the howl, echoing off the low stone wall and thatch roof of Seth McBride’s farmhouse. He’d climbed up on the roof and lit a fag, watching the enormous spectral creature pad on four feet across the fields, a purpose in its step so terrible and deliberate that even though the night was warm and soft, the height of an Irish summer, Jack had felt bone-chilled.
The creature had looked at him, great blazing eyes staring across the distance and searing him body and sight. Then it had walked on, over the rise and into the valley, where Seth’s closest neighbors resided.
In the morning an ambulance bumped over the dirt track and into the same valley, left again with cargo wrapped in a yellow hazmat bag.
You got yourself under stone when you heard a cu sith at bay. The black dog scented for blood, and the blood of the soul he’d come for was the only blood that would do.
It was the first time Jack felt real fear toward a creature of the Black. Demons could swallow you down into Hell and Fae could bargain your memories away for a song, but they had rules. They could be tricked. No one bargained with the cu sith, the hound of Death. No mortal could make it see reason, no matter how clever a bastard he might be. Jack didn’t like fear—fear was useless in the Black, the stealthy, laughing killer that made you freeze, forget your hexing words, and piss yourself before something bit your head off.
Demon Bound bl-2 Page 8
