by Demon Bound
Pete’s brow wrinkled. “Will you be all right?”
Jack flashed her a grin. It was a cold comfort as she stepped away and adjusted the shirt to cover the flash and curve of skin on her exposed shoulder. “’Course. Go back to bed, darling. I’ll sit up for a bit to make sure me brain stays inside its house.”
Pete started up the stairs, and then turned back and went on tiptoe, planting a kiss on his bruised cheek.
Jack watched her go and then shut off the arthritic light and sat on the stairs in the dark, watching the ember of his last fag glow like a dying, faraway sun.
In a way, the poltergeist shoving him arse over teakettle had been a gift. It meant there was something in Naughton’s house, something dead and full of screaming, clawing rage. The dead silence lied to him, just as he was lying to Pete. It hid the thing that crept and crawled in the Black, exposed itself and vanished again like a movie-screen phantom. The intermittent magic of the Naughton house was a puzzle, but it wasn’t one that could distract him from exorcising a poltergeist. Poltergeists were solid, a good fight and good practice for exorcism. Plus, he could ratchet the charge into the stratosphere for that cunt Naughton, if only to make up for nearly turning his brain into pudding in the man’s grand entry.
Jack exhaled and watched the smoke rise and curl its fingers around the air until it disappeared, his own small spirit that was soon vanquished.
The ghost meant he was needed, for at least a little longer. It meant the company of the dead, the only presence Jack had relied on since he was fourteen years old. He had its scent, and even though his sight was changeable and treacherous in this curious vortex of Black and nothing, Jack was going to run it to ground.
If nothing else, the ghost meant he wasn’t alone.
Chapter Thirteen
Pete moved under him, her body arched against the iron shackles that held her wrists above her head, flush against the stone. The air tingled, chill, drops of dew collecting in the hollows of her clavicle, the planes of her stomach, crowning her nipples in crystal tears.
A ring of torches and a ring of watchers closed Jack and Pete inside surely as a lover’s embrace. On the stone within a circle of stones, Jack touched her, put his mouth on her skin, tasted sweat and bitterness from the blue woad the women had painted on her, before she was brought to him, in the circle, on the stone, with the scent of rowan in the air.
Pete met his eyes, her slim pale thighs bruising under the pressure of his hands. Jack knew this place, in the primal sense memory of his magic, and from the same memory the ritual power curled around him, whispered what it wanted, begged him to close the circle.
Pete struggled as Jack moved her legs akimbo, gasped as he placed himself against her, warm wet burning him against the cold contrast of the stone.
Pete held his gaze, her own eyes wide and pooling. “Please. Please, Jack . . .”
The chanting crested, the power of the place with it, and Jack fell over the edge, into the swirling vortex of the Black . . .
The Mini’s car horn cut through the fog of sleep, and Jack winced as light and sound hooked their claws in his consciousness and dragged him into the waking world.
He felt wrung out and stiff, hungover without the fuzzy memory or naked bird in his bed to make it at all worthwhile.
“Jack!” Pete shouted at him from mansion drive. “It’s not a bloody hotel, so rouse yourself before noon, if it pleases you, and let’s get this done!”
He stumbled to the window and saw Pete standing with her hand in the car window. She hit the horn again. Jack slid up the sash and stuck his head out.
“One fucking moment, Your Highness! Some of us don’t roll from slumber ready for telly!”
“Hurry up!” Pete shouted. “I’m starving and the Naugh-tons hadn’t any food.”
“I’d be a deal faster if you’d stop blowing that fucking horn,” Jack returned, and shut the window. He had aches in every part of his torso, a throbbing in his head, and a raging hard-on. A morning at some point in the distant past might have started off worse, but Jack couldn’t think of it offhand.
He pulled on boots, dungarees, decided the undershirt he’d worn the day before—and the day before that—was still in service. He rooted through the drawers for something to keep out the cold.
The last occupant of the room had lived in the mansion during a time when lapels had sat wide enough to take flight and ties were made to blind oncoming pedestrians, but Jack found a flannel that smelled of stale tobacco and staler pot, shrugged his leather over it. Flick-knife, fags, lighter. The essential kit Jack Winter required to face the cold, cruel world.
Briefly, he debated asking for Pete’s help with the hard-on, and decided it would only get him smacked in his already tender head.
“Jack!” More of the horn. “I’m not a taxi!”
Before he left, Jack risked a look into the bedroom mirror. Nothing stared back at him except his bruised reflection, and that was terrifying enough.
He limped down the stairs and out to Pete, collapsing into the Mini with a grateful sigh. Normally, he despised the little car that folded up his more than generous legs like he was inside a Christmas cracker, but today it was a chariot of the gods moving him toward caffeine and civilization.
“Sleep all right?” Pete said, once they were out of the drive and on a road that could have doubled as a ride at Euro Disney. In the daylight, hedgerows stripped of foliage bent over the car, scraping the Mini’s paint job like bone fingers.
“Slept like the dead,” Jack lied.
“I had terrible nightmares, myself,” Pete said. Jack watched her profile as she downshifted to take them up a hill and around a hairpin turn, where the road narrowed from something chancy to drive to a route that should only be traversed by hobbits.
“Nothing like . . .” He winced as the wheels pitched them sideways into the ditch that grooved next to the road. “Nothing like the ghost dreams?”
“No,” Pete said quietly. “Not like that. Cold eyes, mostly. Silver eyes, pairs and pairs of them just . . . staring. Not blinking. Like they were waiting.”
Weirs like Pete could see the truth in dreams, and Jack was gratified that her dream-sense, at least, also believed the mansion was bedeviled by a haunt.
“It wasn’t anything like the things Treadwell made me see, but it was damn spooky,” Pete continued. “So much cold, predatory attention . . .” She stomped on the brake pedal as a lorry materialized from around a bend. “Fuck!”
Jack ricocheted off the dash, which set his aches aflame anew. “How does anyone bloody live here without becoming a statistic?”
“They’re fucking hermits, I suppose,” Pete fumed, reversing until she found a pull-off to let the lorry by. “No wonder Heathcliff went mad.”
After a time, during which Jack found himself gripping his seat in panic more than he’d ever admit to in public, they arrived in Princetown.
“There’s the police station,” Pete said. “I’ll go introduce myself and you—” she looked Jack over. He looked at the trickle of morning shoppers in turn, most in windcheaters and wellington boots, checkered caps or overcoats. He stood out like a Sikh at a skinhead rally.
“I’ll try not to set any fires,” he promised.
Pete crossed the street and entered the small tan police headquarters. As soon as she was out of sight, Jack unfolded himself from the Mini’s interior and lit a fag, leaning on the fender.
Princetown held a small market square, the usual compliment of pubs and a chip shop, the Jubilee and Memorial Railway Inn, which looked like a fine place to get yourself murdered in a cozy mystery on the BBC, and a tourist information center manned by a teenage girl with blue stripes in her hair and a surly look on her face.
Jack checked for cars, and quickly crossed the square, slipping down a side street. If he was quick, he could be back before Pete knew he’d been gone. This wasn’t the sort of social call he wanted to explain to anyone, least of all her. And honestly, Jack thoug
ht, asking him to sit in the car like a sidekick in a place like Princetown was simply cruel and unusual.
He walked past house after house topped with damp thatch, surrounded by dead flowers, and populated by stony-eyed moor folk who glared at the platinum blond sore thumb from behind faded sprigged curtains. No cinema, no decent pub, and not even a newsagent’s where one could indulge in the bored country vices of smoking, cheap lager, and porno mags.
“Cruel, Pete,” he said. “Definitely cruel.”
The house Jack sought out was how he remembered it, perhaps a little sadder, a little more sag along the roof line and a few more feet of dead, tangled grass in the front garden.
Sidestepping a drift of newspapers and mail, Jack mounted the steps and pounded on the door with the flat of his fist.
A youth in an overcoat, iPod buds dangling from his ears, opened the door and stared Jack over with bloodshot eyes before he shifted the wad of gum in his mouth and spoke. “Yeah? What do you want, then?”
Jack flicked his fag into the bushes. “Looking for Elsie. Her folks still live here?”
“Nope,” said the youth. “They kicked.”
“Simon!” A voice that could pierce a pit full of drunken punks twenty men thick echoed from inside the house. “Who’s at the door?”
“Oi, Elsie!” Jack shouted, shoving the youth out of the way. “Elsie Dinsmore!”
“Jack?” Elsie came barreling from somewhere in the shadowed interior, beyond the beaded curtains and head-high stacks of magazines. Her shawl and layers of skirt flapped behind her and enveloped him as she threw her arms around his neck. It was rather like being embraced by an enthusiastic parrot. “Jack fucking Winter! Always knew you weren’t dead, you sly skinny bastard!”
“Elsie Dinsmore,” Jack said with a grin. “You still look beautiful as when you wore your hair three feet high and wrapped yourself in DIY tape.”
She laughed from deep in smoke-scraped lungs. “You’re a flatterer, you are, but it’s Elsie Boote now. Haven’t used that shite stage name in ages.”
Elsie took Jack’s face between her hands, turned his head from side to side. “But you’re still Jack Winter, aren’t you?”
“Some of us are rubbish at moving on,” Jack said.
“Well don’t just stand there like a knob!” Elsie cried, grabbing his arm. “Come have yourself seat. SIMON!” she bellowed at earsplitting volume. “Put on the kettle for our guest and get some of them chocolate biscuits I bought on a plate.”
Jack let himself be gently dragged into a sitting room smothered in tapestries and furniture made entirely out of pillows braced on wooden frames. Herbs hung in dusty clusters, so thick the ceiling beams looked like furrows of earth. Dozens of birdcages blocked the light from the window, full of dead birds with glass eyes that stared balefully at Jack.
The only bare surface in the entire space was a round table covered in purple velvet. A box made of carved bone sat at the center, scenes of nymphs and harvest orgies parading around the edge of its lid.
Elsie settled herself with a groan into an armchair opposite the table. Jack perched on the edge of the pillows and tried not to lose his balance or sneeze at the overwhelming cinnamon incense that blanketed the room in a sticky amber miasma.
“Jack, Jack, Jack.” Elsie grinned at him. “Tell me everything about you. Last time we were together . . .”
“Leeds, 1997,” Jack said.
Elsie nodded. “You were down the rabbit hole, lovie.” Her gravel-pit voice and avalanche of platinum hair, the two assets that made her the post-apocalyptic stunner vocalist for the Razor Babies a dozen years before, were both present now but greatly diminished. Her hair was long, knotted, going gray at the roots, and she’d covered herself in the same garish gypsy getup as her snug house.
She was a far cry from the girl who wrapped herself in tape and cut it off with razor blades throughout the set, for certain. The shine was still in her eyes, though, and the smirk still on her lips. Elsie hadn’t lost her fire and Jack was relieved, because he needed something burned.
“Only climbed out recently,” he admitted. “Spent too many years in Wonderland, I suppose.”
Elsie shifted her bulk, which had grown considerably in the intervening years. Jack supposed that was fair—he’d diminished nearly as much.
“I don’t think you’d be here at the family sprawl on a social call, once I’ve considered.” Her mouth turned down. “You’d never come by just to see old Elsie getting on.” She snorted. “Then again, neither would I.”
Simon skulked in and set down a tray of tea and biscuits.
“Your mum and dad gone away, then?” Jack asked. Simon simply stood, in his overcoat and fingerless gloves, staring dumbly at Jack.
“Far away,” Elsie said. “Mum passed nearly five years ago now. Dad followed her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you ain’t.” Elsie hooted. “You weren’t sorry when Death crossed your path, Jack. Not once.”
“Things change,” he said shortly, and turned his worst glare on Simon. “You need something, my son, or are you just holding up that bit of wall?”
“He’s harmless,” Elsie assured Jack. “Got a snip of talent and not much of a brain. Simon, go feed the cats and take in the wash. There’s a fog brewing up.”
Simon shuffled away like an enormous carrion bird, and Jack turned his eyes back to Elsie.
“I need you to read for me.”
Elsie’s tea stopped halfway to her lips. “Thought you didn’t believe in the future, Jack. You said there was no point.”
“And I told you, things change.” Jack reached out and put his hand on the bone box. “Afraid of my future, Elsie?”
“You had any sense, wanker, you’d be afraid, too.” Elsie set down her teacup with a bone-on-bone clink. “Give it here. Of course I’ll read for you. One old conjurer to another.”
She opened the bone box and drew out her tarot cards. Elsie hadn’t had much beyond a filthy shirt, ripped tights, and a skirt that barely kept her decent when Jack had met her, but she’d had the cards, rolled in purple velvet in her knapsack. She’d had the magic to make them dance under her stubby fingers, to unfurl the future with the ink and paper and quicksilver dance of the seventy-two images that she turned into windows on the mind and soul.
Elsie shuffled once, twice, thrice. No ceremony—she was fast and hard as a dealer in Monte Carlo. She slapped the cards in front of Jack. “Cut.”
Jack did as she said, making sure to touch the cards only with his fingertips. They weren’t a new-age scam that you could buy in any Waterstone’s. Elsie’s deck was at least a hundred and fifty years old, stiff paper inked by hand. A Death’s deck, every card a representation of the Bleak Gates, the Land of the Dead, or Death itself, in all its guises from Thanatos to the pale Horseman.
In her band days, Elsie claimed the deck was inked in sorcerer’s ink and colored in human blood. Feeling the pinprick shock of foreign magic, old magic that did not brook disturbance, Jack was only half sure she’d been jerking him off.
Elsie held the cards between her palms and then with a snap, laid the first one face up on the velvet.
“Death,” Jack said. “Shocking, I tell you.”
“Death right side up is a change,” Elsie said. “Transition. Evolution. The painful birth of the new.”
“And the Fool card is a stubborn sod and the Lovers mean everybody hug,” Jack muttered. Crystals and tarot and candles only served to allow the weak talents to think they had more than their share, and the non-talents to fuck about where they had no business. Objects of magic threw Jack off balance, made his stomach lurch and his skin crawl. They were never good omens, and frequently the harbinger of a royal cocking-up on the part of the owner.
Elsie flipped the next card. The Devil leered up at Jack as he copulated with a pale-skinned virgin on a funeral pyre.
“Well,” she said. “You’re off to a strong fucking start, my darling. Death and destruction.”<
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“Just another day, luv.” Jack shrugged, although a faint prickle of unease crawled through him. The Black woven through Elsie’s smothering house grew restless, like ghostly wings against his cheeks, and the dead birds swayed in their cages as a wind blew in.
“Storm’s coming!” Simon shouted from the kitchen, slamming a door and a basket. “Laundry’s all gone to shit.”
Elsie didn’t stir. Her eyes were distant, gray mist drifting across the surface of her pupils while her fingers, nubby with arthritis, communed with her cards. Jack’s eyes did something similar when he was in the throes of a spell. Pete said it made him look “like one of those bloody kids from that spooky village movie.”
The next card flipped, and Jack’s breath stopped.
Death, his skeletal form standing atop the highest tower in the Land of the Dead.
Death stared him down with hollow eyes. “No,” Elsie rasped.
“No, no . . .” Her eyes snapped back in her head, and the fog of energy stole her gaze until something fathomless and old, something Not-Elsie stared out.
Her fingers moved of their own accord, laying down card after card. Death, and the Devil. Across the velvet they marched, death and destruction cutting a swath like an execution squad.
Jack reached out and grabbed Elsie’s wrist. “That’s enough.”
Elsie’s lip curled back and she snarled, hands continuing to twitch spasmodically, card after card after card glaring up at Jack from the velvet. Skull and horn. Death and the Devil.
“Oi.” Jack grabbed her by the shoulder, shook her. “Elsie!”
She slammed the last card down with a bang and stared into his eyes. Her face was a skull with skin stretched over bone like a death masque. Her eyes were storm clouds hiding lightning.
“No escape,” Elsie croaked. “Not for you.”
Her voice was the demon’s voice. Jack jerked, his knee slamming the underside of the table, sending it tumbling. Seventy-two Deaths and Devil fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves.
“Run, Jack.” The demon grinned at him as Elsie shuddered, head thrown back and legs twitching in convulsion as the demon rode her body. “Run while you still can.”
