Demon Bound

by Demon Bound

  “Must you shoot down everything I say?”

  Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”

  Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”

  He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.

  “Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”

  “Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.

  Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.

  “Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”

  “And the binding?” Pete said. “We need something to show Nicholas, otherwise we won’t get a bloody shilling out of him. It’ll be the Pooles on repeat.”

  Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”

  He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”

  Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”

  “Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”

  “We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”

  “I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.

  “If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.

  Jack sobered. “I think after that cu sith showed its lumpy face we’d be safer together, luv.”

  Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . . locked up in here. It’s not a good place to be.”

  “You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”

  She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”

  “Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”

  Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”

  Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”

  She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.

  “Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.

  “That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”

  “You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.

  “Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”

  Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”

  “Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”

  “So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”

  Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”

  He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”

  Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”

  Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”

  Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

  Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”

  “It just bloody is!” Pete snapped. She shoved the box back at him. “I can’t do fancy tricks. I just have this awful, deep, dark hole inside of me and sometimes the monster inside it wakes up. I can’t control it, Jack. I’m not touched with magic like you. I’m stained with it and it doesn’t wash off.”

  “Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”

  “Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”

  Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?

  “Just try it?” he said finally, softening his frown and giving Pete one of his smiles. “For my humor, luv?”

  When Jack had nothing else, he still had his snake’s charm, even if it made him feel like a low-down hustler to use it on Pete. He reverted back to the clever animal he’d been on the streets, fixing, with the false face and the predator’s smile.

  And Pete finally nodded, and touched the music box again. “I feel stupid as anything.”

  “Don’t think about that. Don’t trouble yourself over anything,” Jack said. “Just feel. Bend the lock to your will, and say the words. Tell it oscail.”

  Pete’s lips pursed and she shut her eyes. In the curious void that the necromancer’s magic left around the house, her power sent out waves like a stone in a pool, like a bell in misty dawn air. It played across his skin like the light drag of fingers and Jack shivered.

  After a moment, Pete blew out a breath. “It’s no good. I feel it but every time it gets away from me. Like trying to grab a greased cat.”

  Jack set his hand next to hers. But not touching. Not when her magic was up. He didn’t fancy sending either of them into a coma. “Try it again. It ta
kes doing but if you can open a lock, you can call flame and if you can call a flame you can . . . well . . . do practically anything.”

  “Make someone spit toads?” Pete’s lips parted in a smile but her eyes stayed shut.

  “I suppose, if that’s what gets you off,” Jack said.

  “I’ve a few old schoolmates who deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.

  Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”

  Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”

  “So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the Fiach Dubh. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.

  “When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”

  “I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”

  “Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”

  “Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”

  “More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.

  Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was beginning to set behind the moor, and soon enough it would be time to go to work. For now, all he could do was sit and think about Pete, his wicked, wild Pete, and the running hourglass of time ticking off his moments with her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.

  There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.

  He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.

  Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.

  Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London, stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and crannies where he could see it coming. Not to mention there wasn’t a decent pub or curry stand for miles in any direction.

  Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”

  “Coffee and a pain au chocolat,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.

  He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”

  “No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.

  “You take care of Pete, you hear?” Ollie’s Midlands brogue reminded Jack of a council worker who’d sneaked about in the dead of night and shagged his mother for a reduction in their electric bill. “Lord knows, she deserves better than you.”

  Jack didn’t know if he disliked Ollie because the man was a prick or because he was right. Most likely both.

  He pulled out the crinkled tourist map of the Dartmoor that Pete had procured on her visit to the archives and breathed onto his palm.

  Witchfire blossomed, blue and spectral, from his skin, the gentle burn-off of extra magic against the night air. The flames drifted lazily into the twilit sky, the silvery glow lighting the map, just. Jack turned west. “Not much farther.”

  “What are we looking for?” Pete asked. Wind swept down from the crest of the hill and lifted her hair like a flight of black feathers against her cheek. Rain followed it, in a soft ice-cold sheet, and Jack cursed as it dribbled into his eyes.

  “A road.”

  “Jack,” Pete grumbled, “there’s a bloody road running right in front of the bloody house. Fuck me.”

  “Not that road.” Jack felt his feet sink into mud as his boots found another ditch, and then gained a roadbed that was little more than gravel and dirt turning rapidly to sludge.

  Pete cursed and stumbled against him. Between the witchfire gently bathing them in a bubble of blue and the sideways rain, Jack was none too balanced, but he caught her. She didn’t weigh much, but she was undeniably present.

  Pete looked up at him, skin translucent and eyes black pebbles in the light. “Thanks.”

  “Just up here,” Jack said, as the moor whispered to him, licked at him with teasing tongues of power. It wanted him to join in the wild celebration, in the mud and the rain. The Black here teased him with memories of what the demon had made him see. Such a place as this was made for the oldest rituals of the Fiach Dubh. The deep magic, the old magic that had fallen to the wayside as the people and their power hid in cities, curled up behind iron walls, in front of tellys instead of bonfires, and no longer needed to spill blood into the good soil to procure crops, children, and rebirth.

  “This feels wrong,” Pete said, dropping her voice so that it blended with the rain. Jack also felt the urge to be silent, creep like a mouse under floorboards. The wild magic around him rose, gathered, and in the back of his consciousness he sensed the prickle of warning that had kept him alive as long as he’d managed the trick thus far.

  “We should go back,” Pete said, more forcefully. She’d stopped walking, her gaze roving beyond the confines of the witchfire, too much white about the pupil. Fear-white. Her hands clutched her jacket at the neck, knuckles tight.

  Jack’s heart sped up, warned him that they should go back, that they weren’t wanted here, that whatever was hunting on the moor tonight was bigger, older, and hungrier than he.

  Cold, Jonathan Lovett’s ghost hissed. Always the cold.

  “Fuck off,” Jack growled under his breath. The day he turned tail was the day he might as well take a razor to his own wrists. It was the single quality that he could lay claim to as a mage—he might not be as strong or quick as a sorcerer but he’d fight. And the fight he gave would be dirty and mean.

  The crossroad loomed out of the rain and the gathering mist, a road sign knocked onto its side in the dying grass the only signal of human occupation.

  Jack knelt and opened his bag, pulling out a battered tin and unscrewing the top. He pulled out his flick-knife and scraped up a layer of damp dirt, another. He filled the tin halfway, more than enough for the unwinding spell, but proper crossroads dirt, touched by no human hand, was difficult to come by and he could sell it. When he was back in London. Home.

  Pete shivered and she hadn’t stopped looking around, but she crouched and watched him. “MG said once that you bury things at the crossroads and a demon comes to grant you a wish.”

  “They buried murderers at a crossroads,” Jack said. “Couldn’t have them in a consecrated cemetery. The demon story is a load of shit.” Like so much of what MG said. Just enough truth in the lie to be destru
ctive.

  “Demons exist, though,” Pete murmured. Jack slapped the lid back on the tin with more force than he needed.

  “Yes, they do. And calling them is much, much simpler than burying some ruddy box in a crossroads at the dark of the moon.”

  He shoved the dirt into his bag and folded up the knife. They were walking a dangerous edge, and he needed to steer Pete away. “Now if we’re done talking about it, may I suggest you don’t try to summon anything from the crossroad, and that we get the unwinding over with so we can find June Kemp?”

  Pete sighed. “My sister said a lot of things. I’m not messing about with Hell, Jack. You don’t need to worry.”

  He breathed in, out, tried to get the panicky tremors in his hands to stop. This deception deep under his skin was like detoxing all over again, shaking and stuttering and freezing to death even in a warm bed. “I’m not worried for you, luv. You’re much brighter than me and mine.”

  Pete smiled, but even that couldn’t warm him. “I’m soaked. Let’s get back and get this nasty business done so we can go home.”

  Jack’s witchfire faded as his concentration stuttered and they were swept up into the blue-black of moonless night and rain. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he watched and tried to keep the rain off, not succeeding. Mud worked its way into his boots, water between his toes, rain down the sides of his face.

  Pete stumbled and cursed. “Hold on.” She felt in her pockets. “I’ve got my light here somewhere.”

  Jack looked back to the crossroads as a thin beam of weak gold sprang to life from Pete’s penlight. In the witch-fire, which gave everything deceptive sharp edges, he might have missed a section of shadow peeling off its fellows and padding forward into the roadbed, but he didn’t miss it now.

  “Fuck,” he hissed, as the wild magic rose to a roar in his head, drowning out even the rain.

  “Jack?” Pete spun around, training her light on the spot where something moved.

  “Pete,” he said softly. “You need to listen to me now.” His brain clicked over like he’d just snorted a straight hit of crystal—it was too far to the house, they’d never make it in time. Not both of them, at any rate. His bag just held herbs and the odd tin of dirt, not salt, not iron.