by Demon Bound
Words couldn’t prepare you for the embrace of magic. Only magic could do it, and sometimes a mind wasn’t meant to see. Those who couldn’t handle it lost their grip, became the screaming psychotics in state hospitals or gibbering madmen on street corners. The junkies with the needles and the hollowed-out eyes.
Naughton sighed, in the seat that should be Jack’s, and took an irritable sip of his tea.
“I have to admit, this isn’t what I expected when I came calling on a couple of ghost hunters.”
Jack exhaled, flicking ash onto the fire escape. “What were you expecting, then? Foot rub to go along with your tea? Happy ending with the sandwiches and cakes?”
“Jack,” Pete hissed at him, and then gave Naughton another one of the smiles that Jack knew were to be hoarded like treasures, but that Naughton lapped up as if they were his due. “You’ll have to excuse my colleague.”
“It’s no matter,” said Naughton, moving closer to her. “I’ve heard Jack Winter could help me, and you’re just a pleasant surprise.”
Pete cocked an eyebrow, and crossed her legs primly at the ankle. “What seems to be your problem, Mr. Naughton?”
“Please,” he said. “It’s Nicholas, or Nick.”
“Nick, then,” Pete said, tapping her pen irritably against her chin. “The question stands.”
Jack pinched out the end of his smoke and disappeared it back into a pocket. “Here’s how it works, Nicky boy,” he told Naughton. “You give us your story of old Gran knocking about up in the attic, waking the baby and frightening the missus, we take care of the problem, if you’re not just jerking us off, and you pay. If you are jerking us off, well . . .”
“What Mr. Winter is trying to say,” Pete said, reaching over and whacking Jack on the knee with her notepad, “is that we take this seriously and we expect you to as well.”
“My family owns a country home in the Dartmoor forest,” Nick said. “It’s always been a spooky, dank old place since my brother Danny and I would summer there as children, but lately . . .” He sighed. “It’s not right there, Miss Caldecott. I live in the city home, taking care of Mother, and Danny . . . well. Danny was in charge of the estate.”
Jack watched Nick Naughton’s mask peel away in layers as he talked, the charm and the breeding and the manners stripping back to reveal something thin and desperate, the kind of deep fear that only people who had touched the Black and not understood it possessed. Naughton may be a ponce, but he wasn’t lying.
Pete’s pen scratched away, ever the Detective Inspector. “And you and your brother each witnessed phenomena at your estate?”
“Voices,” Nick said quietly, as if he were relaying bad news. “Cold spots, writing on the wall, sooty handprints that appear and disappear. Laughing. Danny’s always been the drinker, the odd party drug or two, so at first I thought he was getting worse. Then I saw and heard it—them—too.”
“Right,” Pete said, scratching notes absently along the margins of the pad. “This is how we conduct an investigation, Nick: we’ll need access to your estate to do some research, and we discuss payment when we’ve determined what we’re dealing with. Should you want us to proceed with an exorcism, or if more investigation is needed, payment is half up front and half when the case is . . . resolved. Plus a retainer now.”
“And you might want to let your brother know we’re coming,” Jack said, “in case he wants to set up the bleeding walls and rattling chains in advance.”
Pete mimed stabbing him with her pen, but Naughton didn’t rise to the bait.
“There’s no need of that,” he said. “Danny hanged himself two weeks ago from the crossbeams in the attic. He’s dead.”
Chapter Seven
After Nick Naughton finally quit the flat, leaving behind a check for five hundred pounds and the key to his family’s Dartmoor estate, Jack watched a crow land on the wires outside the flat block and stare at him with one black, reflective eye. Psychopomps, his treacherous rote memory recited. Harbingers of death and war. Ushers to the Land of the Dead. The crow preened its feathers and tucked its head down against its breast. It could ferry souls to the Bleak Gates, but now it was content to merely stare a hole through Jack.
It took Jack several seconds of glaring back at the crow to realize Pete was talking to him. “Sorry, luv. What’s that?”
Pete took the check, folded it in precise quarters, and slipped it into her hip pocket. “I said, what do you think?”
Jack shook his head. “Dodgy, at best. Ghosts don’t just cause a bloke to hang himself for no good reason. They don’t stir up like a mixed drink after a hundred years of silence, either. Personally, I’d give Sir Ponce his check back and tell him to sod off.”
“Personally, would you happen to take exception to Naughton being a wealthy and attractive man?” Pete inquired.
“I take exception to liars,” Jack said. “Rich, poor, fuck-ugly, or otherwise.” Although really, today Jack and Naughton were just alike. Minus the fuck-ugly bit on Jack’s part.
Pete came over and put her hands on Jack’s shoulders. “I’m not an idiot, you know,” she said. Her touch was cool, vibrating with power, not altogether unpleasant. Jack had a flash of second sight, of lips crushed against his and pale, pale skin turning rosy under his hands.
He shifted so Pete wouldn’t see his face or any other traitorous part of him. “I know that, Petunia,” he said softly.
“Then tell me what the bloody hell is wrong with you. You’re pale as a ghost, you’re puking in the loo, you’re surly to a paying client—surly for you, and that’s saying something, and now you don’t want a job you would have jumped on with a rugby tackle a few weeks ago.” Her mouth lifted at one side. “You’re Jack fucking Winter. You chase the monsters, not vice versa.”
Jack felt Death’s specter following him patiently, ticking off the seconds on the gears that unfurled the Bleak Gates to allow a new soul through. Jack would stop the clock as long as he could, had to, even if it meant becoming ten times worse a liar than Naughton.
“Nothing’s wrong, Pete,” he said, making sure not to look her directly in the eye, nor look away. The stare of Truth, practiced over a hundred arrests and a hundred more dodgy meetings with mages and Fae in the Black. “Tea was past its date, or I could be catching the flu—as for Naughton, I think he’s a sanctimonious cunt and nothing more. There’s no monsters in his mansion. Bats in the belfry, maybe. You know how the landed gentry love their inbreeding.”
Pete rolled her eyes and went on tiptoe to brush her lips across his forehead. “He’s giving us five hundred quid to go chase his bats, so speak for yourself, but I’m packing up and heading to Dartmoor tomorrow. Just as soon as I check with my friend in the murder squad about Danny Naughton.”
Jack lifted one shoulder. The money was the thing—he was flat broke and Pete’s savings were what you’d expect from an ex-civil servant. If he wanted to keep his new-found habit of eating, Nancy Naughton was his meal ticket. He’d just have to deal with the demon afterward. And Pete would need the money, if he was gone . . .
Not if, the fix whispered. When, Jack. When.
“Guess there’s no harm in it,” he said. Famous last words. No harm in it. How many disasters had he preceded with just those words?
“And you were the one whingeing about parlor tricks and useless jobs,” Pete said. “This might be real. Think of that. A real spook-house instead of this inheritance and last wishes tripe, which, I admit, gets on my last nerve as much as yours.”
“Bloody Algernon Treadwell all over again,” Jack muttered, rubbing at the center of his forehead. The pain had retreated a little, but only a little.
Pete sobered immediately.
“I didn’t mean it like that. Jack, I don’t blame . . .”
He held up his hand to stop her. “Go cash the check before Duke Nancy changes his mind. I’ll round up a few exorcism tools from Lawrence while you check with CID.”
Pete nodded her assent and backed out of
the room too quickly. She grabbed her bag and her jumper, and a moment later the door slammed. She was fleeing a discussion of Algernon Treadwell and her ghost sickness, and Jack didn’t blame her in the slightest.
He went to the kitchen, fishing in the cramped cabinets for a bottle of vinegar. Pete wouldn’t allow hard liquor in the flat since she’d moved in. All roads led to the fix.
Jack personally thought it was bloody stupid—he’d been a junkie, not an alcoholic, and right now he’d murder a pint of anything. But he washed his mouth out and pulled on his leather to go visit Lawrence in Bayswater Road. He thought walking to the tube station might shake the breath of the demon off his neck, but he saw the blank-eyed face in every passerby and felt the inexorable tide of the Black stronger than ever under the dark heartbeat of Whitechapel.
He walked through the street market outside the Whitechapel tube station, hunched old women in saris picking over fruit, men in long caftans shouting in three different languages, competing with the white newsagent bleating about the latest footballer scandal and the music drifting out from the kebab shops and money changer’s.
A breath of hot wind on his face, a whisper of sand, and Jack turned his head to see a man in a stall selling knock-off handbags stare back at him with flaming eyes, his skin flowing from brown to burnished gold. “Have a care, crow-mage,” he said. “They’ve been here. Searching for you.”
Jack blinked as a pair of Japanese tourists who’d undoubtedly gotten off at entirely the wrong stop on their way to the British Museum jostled past him, and when he could see again the djinn was gone, just a swirl of gold dust dislodged into the gutter and flung asunder by a passing lorry.
“Well,” Jack said to no one in the cacophony outside the tube station, “bollocks.”
Chapter Eight
He felt eyes on him the entire way to Bayswater. You didn’t have to walk up to a bloke and knock him one in the teeth to make him feel uncomfortable. Jack knew there were things in the train tunnels, things that liked the dark, that waited and watched for the scraps and leavings of humanity to fall down to them.
He knew that if they were hungry enough, sometimes they wouldn’t wait at all. The older the tube stations got, the more he sweated inside his jacket. At one time—too long ago to be anything but a middle-aged sot and his nostalgia—the pyramid spikes and patches and hand-painted slogans had been his armor, a clear warning to anything even half-human that he wasn’t to be fucked with. He wore the boots, the leather, and the black hair bleached startling blond everywhere but the roots still, but the hungry things were older and wiser, too, and they saw behind his mask.
Jack just felt older in that moment, and wrung out. He hated being underground. It reminded him too much of when he’d taken peyote on his single trip to the United States, when he’d seen the Bleak Gates, stood in front of them and felt the terrible weight of the dead on his inner mind, his mage’s mind, and knew that his sight and his magic were linked in a way that wasn’t normal or natural, even for the Black. Hated being underground. Too close to the dead for comfort, entirely.
Baker Street passed, and he caught a skittering on the train roof over the clatter of the track, small nails and paws, and the hiss of tongues that couldn’t form words any human ear understood.
Jack closed his hand around the flick-knife in his pocket, closed his mind around a protection hex, waited.
The next station passed, tunnels growing newer and shallower, and the whispers retreated. They hadn’t been hungry enough, in broad daylight, but they’d known he was there and that was bad enough.
“Fucking demons,” Jack muttered aloud, garnering a look from the girl in the nearest seat. She was holding a guidebook, her thumb loosely marking her page, and had short red hair and large eyes, like a fey creature. A bit of blood, long ago, Jack thought, when her family still lived in the Isles. “Where are you going, then?” he asked her.
“Tower Bridge,” she said. “Meeting my friend.” Her accent was American, the rounded vowels of the Midwest. Jack had never seen a place so flat, or so devoid of decent drugs.
“You want the next, then,” he said out loud. “Change to the Circle Line and it’ll take you straight over.”
“Thanks!” the girl said brightly, tucking her guidebook into her canvas bag. “You take care.”
Jack watched her long legs and shapely back end exit the car, and felt only the barest interest. Americans were like fish in a barrel, and he wasn’t even going after her to find out why she’d come to the UK, where she was staying, if she had a boyfriend and whether she was open to experimenting with a bloke who could say bloody hell, football and fancy a shag? authentically.
It wasn’t like he was married to Pete.
Jack swapped for the District Line, pressed up against the window amid a gaggle of be-knapsacked Germans.
It wasn’t like he’d done anything to Pete, except a single kiss, sitting on the edge of a swamp in Blackpool. A fine kiss, to be sure, probably one of the best since he’d still been new enough at it to find them all fine, but still. There was no ribbon around their hands. And Pete had made it crystal clear that she wasn’t keen to pick up her old flirtation with a middle-aged junkie ex-boyfriend, which Jack wouldn’t blame her for even if he could and not be a great bloody hypocrite.
It wasn’t Pete, he argued. The old days of the chase, the hunt, and the parade of women were just that—old. He wasn’t that Jack Winter any longer. The demon and the smack had made sure of that.
The tube doors slid shut with a sigh and a breath of coal-scented air, and the train moved on.
Everything and everyone in the Black knew what happened when a debt to Hell went unpaid, and they knew better what happened when the debtor tried to be clever and weasel out in any of the usual ways. Jack could try to be a clever boy, but it would be a try and nothing else.
Clever boys’ bodies ended up in gutters. Their souls ended up on trial before the three ruling demons of Hell for breaking a bond as sacred as any church vow. No one who owed a demon a bargain was stupid enough to risk it.
But Jack still got off the train at Queensway and walked to Lawrence’s flat, taking comfort in the crush of tourists and foreigners working the cheap souvenir shops and chain restaurants, and in the smell of sweat, smoke, diesel fumes, and humans. The feeling of being watched retreated, but only a little. Jack had to get out of London before someone or -thing decided to speed his bargain along to the main event by putting claws or a bullet in his back.
Jack guessed that Nancy Naughton had been good for something, after all.
Chapter Eight
Lawrence folded his arms when he answered Jack’s knock, eyes glittering hard as gems. “Jack Winter, why you always bringin’ trouble to my door?”
Jack took a step back, out of choking distance. “I’ve only just bloody gotten here, Lawrence. Give me a few minutes to work up a proper trouble for you.”
Lawrence’s face broke into a grin. “Come you in, Jack. Always did like to take the piss from you, old devil.”
“No such thing,” Jack said, returning the smile, not meaning it. Lawrence stepped aside and let Jack in. There were no protection hexes in his flat, none of the dove-gray magic Jack trafficked in. Lawrence’s hearth magic enfolded his flat, created a glimmering wall of power that ugly and hungry things in the Black could never claw through. Being a white witch did have its rewards.
Jack shut the door after himself while Lawrence went to take the needle off his record. Jack stood in the center of Lawrence’s smothered living room, rugs and books and hunched furniture giving the place the air of a fussy old woman, not a six-foot-odd Rastafarian.
“You be wanting a beer?” Lawrence said, shuffling into his pocket-sized kitchen and rooting in the icebox.
Jack grinned. “Is the Pope a skin-changing incubus?”
Lawrence tossed him a bottle of Newcastle. Jack un-screwed the top with the tail of his shirt and sank into Lawrence’s armchair, downing the beer faster than was
strictly gentle to his empty stomach.
“So tell me, Jack Winter, what trouble be vexing you this fine day?” Lawrence opened his own bottle and changed the record. Soft strains of Al Green floated through the thick air of the flat, scented with incense and high-quality marijuana. Jack grimaced around his mouthful of ale.
“You trying to calm me down, Lawrence? Keep me from doing something foolish?” Lawrence’s spell was subtle, smell, sound, and tactile sensation, but it was there, pressing on him gently as a helping hand.
“Anyone got eyes can see you wound up tight, boy,” Lawrence said calmly. “You clean now, I can’t offer you a toke, so I’m doing you the favor. Be gracious, now.”
“Trust me, you’re the only bastard who cares about that,” Jack said. “The cleanliness or lack thereof of my bloodstream.” He rubbed his chin. He still needed the shave. “I may be fucked, Lawrence.” The spell made it easy to talk, a safe sound booth with the world locked out.
Lawrence rolled his bottle in his hands. “Wouldn’t be him first time, being fucked.”
“Not this way,” Jack muttered darkly. “Not this hard.”
“True?” Lawrence said. “Tell me.”
Jack sighed. Lawrence was a stand-up white witch, and he operated strictly on the daylit side of the Black. Jack might well get himself punched in the balls and thrown out of the flat when he told Lawrence his problem. Hearth witches didn’t deal with demons. In the bad times, the bloody times, they’d hunted those who did by the side of the witchfinders. Jack rolled his bottle across the back of his neck. The flat was close and too warm, smothering him all at once. That had been war. This was Lawrence. Lawrence had to at least hear him out. Jack hoped.
