by Demon Bound
“Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling her close by their connected hand, his other taking the back of her neck, wrapping his fingers in her hair.
It was nothing like the kiss in the marsh, not hesitant and not slow. Pete’s lips were warm, parted, and breathless. Jack could have drunk her, every drop, and still been parched.
Her hands, trapped as they were against his chest, pushed him back, and they broke apart as abruptly as they’d come together, Pete’s taste in Jack’s mouth, melting and dissolving. Nothing he could do to save it. The bitterness returned when Pete stood up, cheeks flushed to roses and breath ragged.
“I shouldn’t have done that.” She flexed her fingers, fists and not, over and over. “Shit. I really shouldn’t have.”
“Too right,” Jack murmured, though he wasn’t talking about Pete. His own heart was thrumming, speeding along like he’d just choked down a handful of uppers. The drug was power, and the fix was Pete. How he wanted to taste her again, throw her down on the dirty mattress, expose that snow-petal skin, make the blood rush to the surface as she took away his pain quick as any needle.
“It’s not . . . I mean, it wasn’t . . .” Pete slammed her fist against the wall. Plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling. “Bloody hell, Jack. I know there’s something you’re not saying. Until you trust me, I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Quick as it had come upon him, the need subsided and left the same small dirty knot Jack felt in his chest when he stole from Lawrence, or nicked pensioners’ prescriptions, or woke up in a filthy squat with no memory of how he’d come to be there.
Before, the solution was simple—get high again and bollocks to guilt and shame.
Jack rolled the kinks out of his neck and picked up his chalk, short savage slashes on the polished floor drawing the beginnings of his circle. “Let’s just get this done and get back to the city, yeah?”
“Best, I suppose,” Pete said. “What should I do?”
“Just stay out of the way, if you please,” he snapped. Pete’s eyes narrowed and then she took a large, deliberate step back to the window that overlooked the fields beyond the back garden.
“You git,” she said softly.
Jack’s chalk snapped in half from the force of his stroke. “Never claimed I was Prince Charming, did I?”
Pete shook her head, but she stayed where she was, rain lashing the glass behind her. Jack focused on the circle blossoming under his chalk stub, the grit between his fingers and the soft scratch on the wood. It didn’t make him less of a wanker, but it helped dull the facts.
Ghosts were thin and slippery creatures, and a circle for an exorcism was about control more than power. Demons a sorcerer summoned needed power, drank it and craved it. Ghosts a mage tangled with were inevitably hungry and desperate, and they would rush the electric fence until it broke.
The exorcism circle required precision, focus, clarity. The trifecta of things Jack Winter didn’t have and had never held in any quantity.
You’re a selfish little knob, Jackie boy, Seth rasped. No thought and no control for anything, including yourself. Bloody good thing you’ve got charm to spare.
“You’re right,” he said. The magic words. Bollocks to I love you or You look beautiful. You’re right had gotten him off the sofa a hundred times over.
Pete sniffed. “Of course I am.”
“When we’ve done what we came here to do,” Jack said slowly, “I promise I’ll tell you why I’ve been . . .”
“A complete and utter cock-stain?” Pete supplied.
“That,” Jack said. “But it won’t matter if we’re out on the street for want of cash, and right now I need to concentrate. Can we put a hold on the couple drama, please, until I kick this poltergeist back beyond the beyond?”
He expected an argument or maybe a slap—Pete was the kind of woman who slapped rather than sulked—but instead she frowned a little, and then her shoulders dropped and her fists relaxed.
“You called us a couple.”
Jack felt one side of his mouth curl. “Did I? Must have inhaled some of that shite pot you found.”
The baggie smacked him in the side of the head. “Arse-hole.” Pete glared at him as he worked, the circle growing and expanding and building on itself, a framework intricate as any clock, ready to hold the power of cleansing spells.
Jack finished the circle, checked the symbols to make sure he hadn’t cocked up, and dumped incense into the bowl. He added a pinch of galangal to draw any lingering spirits to the smoke. His lighter clicked thrice before he called a flame and touched it to the pile of dry herbs.
The house held its breath, stayed silent and still. Nothing inside his head except echoes and nothing before his sight except darkness.
“Feels normal,” Pete said. “Just a dusty old house.”
“That’s bothersome,” Jack said. “Old place, shouldn’t be so quiet. Old homes, old bones. Echoes.”
“Not every place is a backdrop for Masters of Horror,” Pete said. “The Naughtons may have been happy.”
“Can you look at Sir Nicholas and honestly tell me you believe that sack of wank-leavings was ever happy, for a single moment in his life?” Jack slipped his scrying mirror from the velvet. He set it gently on the floor and pointed at his bag. “Hand me that white candle, would you?”
Pete found it and passed it across, keeping well clear of his chalk markings. Jack lit the white candle and placed it west, the direction of the dead. He set his mirror on the floor and sat, fingers on the glass.
Waited.
The Naughton house was curiously blank, like a dead station on the radio, not music, not static. Just silence, eerie in its stillness and breadth. Jack’s skin crawled all up and down his body.
“Daniel Naughton,” he said, putting a push behind the words. “Master of this house. Come to me, spirit. To the circle, you are called. Tar do mo fhuil beo.”
Pete shifted. “Where is he?”
“It’s not a summoning spell,” Jack said shortly. “Ghost summoning’s what put us here to start, luv, and I don’t fancy another Treadwell.”
“Still . . . if this is a haunting shouldn’t he be doing . . . hauntish things?” Pete glared at all the corners of the room, brow wrinkling like she could will Danny into being.
Jack took in a breath, tried again. “Daniel Naughton. Master of this house. Come, spirit. By the power of circle and crow, come.”
Rain fell, battered the windowpanes. Jack’s heart pumped blood against his ears, all of his extremities vibrating against the power of the spell. His nose detected the sticky-sweet of the incense and the tang of the galangal, and for one perfect moment, his sight and the Black were utterly silent and still.
Then the mirror in the corner shattered into ten thousand snowflakes of glass, scattering across the floor. A piece of glass kissed his cheek, a hot sting and a lick of blood.
“Bloody hell!” Pete shrieked, swiping at the scratches on her own face.
From all the corners of the room a low giggle burbled, scratchy as a needle across vinyl, mad and grating against Jack’s ears.
“Daniel Naughton,” Jack gritted. “By the power of iron and smoke. By the power of the binding words. Show yourself. And quit fucking about,” he added as the sounds of madness increased, the bulbs in the lamp overhead flickering madly.
Jack could see his own breath as the ghost crawled around the perimeter of the circle, drawn by the ritual but too strong to allow the markings to drag it down. Yet.
“Pete,” Jack said. “You try.”
She dabbed at her cheek, lined with thin deep scratches that leaked blood. “Me? I haven’t got a thing to say to the bastard ghost.”
“You’re a speaker for the magic,” Jack said. He felt his power struggling to grasp the ghost, like picking up handfuls of mud, cold and dead and futile.
The sounds rose in pitch, and more voices joined them. One by one the bulbs in the lamps blew, showering down sparks.
Jack could
see his breath as he commanded Pete, “Call him! Before something gets in here and fucks me proper!”
“Daniel Naughton.” Pete drew her spine straight. Her eyes were wide and her body was strung with wire, but Jack gave her credit—her voice was sure and strong. “Master of this house. Come, spirit. Appear and be heard.”
Danny boy can’t play right now. The voice slithered up out of the Black, and on the wall opposite Jack he saw black handprints blossom, bleeding into the plaster as they fought their way toward the shattered mirror’s frame, finger marks and handprints in remembered blood, chromatic as an old horror film.
“Who speaks?” Jack demanded. This part he knew like lines in a well-rehearsed stage play. He’d done plenty of séances when he was skint, and a mage willing to commune with an unknown spirit, to risk possession and ghost sickness, was worth enough coin for a bed and a few weeks of the fix.
“Who calls from the arch of the Bleak Gates?” he said. “Tell me your name.”
You’ll know my name soon enough, crow-mage. The voice wasn’t the sibilant rasp of a fully formed ghost. It was small and high, playful in the way of a child who enjoyed killing small furry things.
In the pit of his stomach, Jack felt a twist. The twist of needing the fix and the twist of a guilty secret. If he were being honest, he’d call it fear, the same fear that came upon him in Highgate. The bastard fear that chewed him up. This voice, this crawling evil on his shoulder, wasn’t a simple poltergeist. There was something else in the house, and it had come out to play with him.
He stiffened his fingers on the mirror. He wouldn’t shake and he wouldn’t show it the fear, not an ounce. “How do you know that name?”
The giggling increased tenfold. Wouldn’t you like to know, grumpy old man.
“Tell me or I exorcise you on the spot,” Jack growled. “I don’t need a name and a lock of hair to do it, and you’re on me last nerve, cunt. Polite or otherwise.”
Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Jack.”
A spirit stood in front of the mirror, framed by jagged reflections of Jack and Pete’s faces. The spirit looked like a girl, in an old-style sailor dress, hair curled into painfully tight sausages against her scalp. Her eyes were black, bleeding hollows and she grinned at him. Laughed at him.
You should mind your tongue, before I take a notion to cut it out.
The walls were covered in the black miasma now, the air choked with malignant strands of the Black. It spread like water stains, and Jack smelled decay as the temperature dropped, the too-sweet stench of rotted orchids.
Such a funny man you are, the spirit hissed. So much fun to cut you open and see what clockwork makes you walk and talk.
She started for him, hollow eyes reaching down into the black howling depths, and Jack felt again the tug on his skull, the vortex of Black energy gathering and swelling until it threatened to burst the bonds of the circle.
“You are not welcome in this house,” Jack said. “Go. Last chance, little one.”
I belong here, the ghost snarled. We belong here. You’re the nasty trespassers.
All around the circle Jack saw more shapes, struggling to form, twisted spirit figures bathed in the same wicked-smelling magic as the little girl.
A man in a waistcoat with a dark slash across his neck that dripped blood. A woman in an apron with burns bubbling across her arms and face. A boy, tall and rangy-limbed with the first spurt of growth, legs twisted to unrecognizable sticks as he pulled himself across the floor on his hands with the sickening thud-thunk of flesh hitting wood.
Jack didn’t grace them with a look. Didn’t even grace them with a sharpening of breath. If you wanted a ghost to obey, it couldn’t see anything except your contempt and your magic. It sure as fuck couldn’t get its teeth into your roiling, rollicking panic.
Jack stared at his mirror. He said, “Pete. Salt.”
She grabbed the leather sack from his bag and tossed it to him. Jack took a handful and flung it in a careless circle. The ghosts drew back, all except the little girl.
You think that’s enough? she mewled. I’ll trim your wings, crow-mage, and chop off your feet to make my curse bags.
“Too much talk, luv,” Jack said. “And no substance.” He threw a fat handful of salt on the ghost and she melted away into nothing with a scream, like a Black-ridden garden slug.
Jack let go of the mirror, let himself slump and feel as if his strings had gotten cut. His muscles trembled and the echoes of the ghosts scraped nails through his skull. Vomit welled in the back of his throat but he breathed, fought the feeling down, and pulled his spine upright at last.
“I don’t think we’re dealing with just a suicide,” Pete said finally. Jack laughed. It came out high and hysterical.
“Do you think so, really?”
“All of them were murdered,” Pete said. “Or they died right quick and nasty.”
Jack extinguished the herbs and opened a window. The rain landed on his face, cold like old tears. It felt good after the touch of the dead. “No arguments. And four of them, plus Danny’s chain-knocker. Lots more than dear old Nancy let on.” He swiped the water from his skin, through his hair where it wilted his usual crop of spikes. “Inbred liar, just like I fancied him.”
“This isn’t Naughton’s fault,” Pete snapped. “This place is terribly haunted, just as he said. Spirits don’t just find a house and say ‘My, this looks lovely. And such a wonderful garden. I think I’ll stay and drive the owner to hang himself.’”
Thunder rolled from the moors, back and forth like the rumble of a cell door.
Jack shut the window and kept his hands on the sash until his fingers could open a lock or lift a wallet again. The shaking retreated—mostly.
“No,” he said. “They surely don’t.”
He left the circle, left the room with its echoes of ghosts and the cloying scent of decay. He wanted fresh air and to be outside the walls of the Naughton’s house.
Pete followed him, as he shoved the front door open and went to the Mini. He held out a hand to her. “Keys.”
She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re fixing to kill something.”
Jack unlocked the boot and pulled a crowbar from the mess of Pete’s tools, blankets, and a battered picnic hamper.
He turned back to the mansion. The deadness of the Black tickled the back of his mind—the Black didn’t simply fade and then flood. It was constant, a current through his brain straight to his core. It was a comfort and a torment, but always, it flowed.
Jack had felt the flow die once before, faced with a necromancer in the United States. The man fancied himself a warlock, one of the city masters of old, who bent themselves over for a demon. He’d eaten up the Black of Savannah, the city of moss and necropolises in Georgia, until he’d knotted the ghosts of the place so tightly that they tore him apart when Jack took his clay necromancy tablets and burned them in a cleansing fire of sage and cedar wood.
What had been the man’s name? Clemens, or Collins. A small man with small delusions who’d managed to grab himself a great gob of power. He’d given Jack a fight, but not a very large one. Not many men, professed wicked men or no, could stare the hungry dead in the eye for long.
Pete grabbed his arm as he re-entered the house. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing stalking around like bloody Jason Voorhees with that thing?”
Jack stomped back up the stairs, taking pleasure at the black marks his boots left on the wood and the plaster that sifted down around him from impact. “You said it yourself—too many ghosts. Things that hungry are territorial, and here there’s at least four all sharing nice as you please.” He kicked open the door to Danny’s bedroom. The doorknob left a fist-sized dent in the wall.
“Spirits like what I called up are bound to a place whether they fancy it or not,” Jack said, “and there’s only a few sure ways I know to do such a thing.”
Jack had dabbled in black magic, of course. Stuck a hand in the
water, felt the currents and the pull of dark, old things, but he’d never immersed himself. Once you were under that water, it filled up your lungs and you drowned. Sorcerers were gits with a short life expectancy and shorter ambitions—they wanted magic. Or money. Or sex. But he’d never met a sorcerer worth the curses he spat. The Fiach Dubh made sure one of theirs could kick the legs out from under a sorcerer without a second thought.
Still, binding ghosts was the work of a soul shot through with desire, the desire for control or the belief that they could outrun Death. And if any sorcerer he’d met had held real knowledge and truth instead of a load of bollocks and a taste for black clothing and theatrical over statement, Jack would have swung down the path of sorcery in a heartbeat, and bugger Seth and all his lessons.
But you couldn’t outwit Death. It was the single constant of magic and mortality. A thread, a measuring, and a cut. Anyone who thought they were a special case was a bloody fool.
Jack swung the crowbar and bashed through the plaster of the wall behind the great mirror. Dust swirled up, a pale imitation of a spirit. Pete coughed and Jack joined her, the horsehair plaster and wooden slats crumbling under his assault.
“I hope there’s a point to this,” Pete choked out. “Because that’s vile dust.”
“Mixed it with arsenic and horsehair in the day,” Jack said. “Lovely stuff.” The wall was rotted through, and he cleared away debris, half hoping he’d find nothing behind the plaster. He’d never be so lucky, though.
Pete held her sleeve over her nose and mouth. “There’s something back there. In the joists.”
Jack stuck his hand into the blank space between the studs and closed around dusty glass, sealed with wax. He drew out the small blue bottle, and another, and another, four in all for the quadrant of spirits his exorcism attempt had attracted. “Yeah. There is,” he growled. The bottles rolled in his hand, clinking in discordant notes with each other.
He held one up to the light, watched the liquid inside slosh back and forth. “Corpse water,” he told Pete. “Used to wash the bodies before burial. Before formaldehyde and all of that shit.”
