Demon Bound

by Demon Bound

The tube rattled on its way and Jack mounted the steps, past the street market selling hijab and knockoff purses and kebab, past the White Hart pub, the closed-down shop fronts and shady money-changing kiosks, through the ebb and flow of the dark energy of the only place he’d ever really called home.

  The demon was waiting for them when they stepped through Jack’s front door.

  “Look at you,” it purred. “Home safe and sound, tanned and rested.” It rubbed the fingers and thumb of its left hand together. “I trust you brought me what I need, Jackie boy.”

  Pete fetched up against his shoulder, propelling Jack into the flat. His protection hexes hung in useless tatters from the demon’s passage.

  “This is him?” Pete said. Her fists curled into small knots of knuckle and bone.

  “It,” Jack said. “Not him, no matter what it chose to make itself look like.”

  The demon ticked its tongue against its teeth. “I’ll ask again, Jack—where’s my soul?”

  Jack ignored the feeling that the floorboards had dropped away from him, ignored that his heart was thudding so loudly it nearly drowned out his own voice. “Did you check the last place you had it? Or—hold up—behind the sofa?”

  The demon cocked its head, and Jack was on his knees. Blink, crash, pain. Jack’s air rushed out of him, but he didn’t make any sound. Didn’t let the demon know that it hurt. That was the first thing you learned—never show them that it hurt.

  “Where. Is. My. Soul?” The demon knelt and put a finger under Jack’s chin. He felt the nail sink in, and a trickle of blood work its way into the hollow of his throat.

  Pete’s shadow fell over them both. “Let him go.”

  The demon’s black pits of eyes flicked away from Jack, looked to Pete, and came back to rest. Tiny flames danced in their recesses. “Got a better offer for me, my dear?” He licked his lips. “You offered yourself to Treadwell. You nearly died. Won’t be a near miss with me, I promise you.”

  “Pete,” Jack managed. “This isn’t your problem, luv. Get out of here.”

  “No,” she said. “It can’t have you.”

  The demon’s lip curled back. “If she keeps sassing me, Winter, she’s going to be joining your arse in the Pit. Am I quite clear?”

  Pete grabbed Jack’s arm, clung to him, and for once her power didn’t stir him up. The demon’s cold, inhuman, lizard-brained magic curled back from the onslaught of the Weir, and Jack’s sight quieted.

  “You can’t have her,” he echoed Pete. The demon laughed.

  “I don’t need her, Winter. I’ve got you.”

  “No.” Jack raised himself up from the floor with Pete’s help. The demon’s nail scraped across his jaw as he yanked away. “You don’t have me, either.”

  The demon stopped smiling. “What are you saying to me, boy?”

  Jack shook off the pain of the demon’s magic, made himself stand straight. “Your fucking soul is in Hell, one of Rahu’s charges. He had the right idea—shot himself in the face. You wanted Hornby, that’s where Hornby’s gone to. He didn’t cheat death in the end but he cheated you, right enough.”

  The demon’s eyes flamed to twin points. “This is not what we agreed on, Winter.”

  “It’s not,” Jack said wearily. “But it’s what you’re getting. You want him, you go and tangle with Rahu. I find myself curiously unmotivated to do anything else you ask.”

  He crossed his arms and waited for the demon to absorb the fact that his prize soul had slipped away.

  The demon lifted a shoulder. “Ah, well.”

  Pete shot Jack a glance. He bored his gaze into the demon. “Well? What?”

  “Dead, isn’t he?” the demon said. “Old Rahu is a bitter sod, but I’m sure I can find something he wants for one marginally talented musician who sold himself out of noble selflessness. Fuck me, it’s so boring when they do it for altruism.” It grinned at Jack, as if they shared a secret. “I told you that no one cheats me, Jack.”

  “You did,” Jack agreed, trying to ignore the sickness in his throat. The crow landed on his sill, stared in at the proceedings. It opened its beak silently, bared it at the demon.

  “Can’t say it hasn’t been fun, Jack,” the demon intoned. “I’ll be seeing you in, oh, about thirty-six hours, yes? Three-thirty p.m. on the day.”

  “Not so fast,” Jack snarled. His shakes had started again, withdrawal or simple fatigue he couldn’t tell, but the thing he knew for sure was that this time, it wasn’t fear.

  “I think you owe me something,” he told the demon. “We made this bargain for your name.”

  “And the bargain was for a whole soul, not a scrap I have to wrestle away from another member of the pack,” the demon said. “I was quite clear. Too bad, Jack. You failed. I’ll see you soon.”

  The demon opened the door of the flat, began to exit. Pete and the crow watched Jack with frantic stillness, panic raging through Pete’s eyes.

  Jack stepped toward the demon. “Wait.”

  The demon turned its head back, mouth flicking in amusement. “Yes, Jack?”

  In Jack’s mind, the pages of the grimoire that he’d copied before Seth had ripped it from him floated. The summoning. The safeguards a sorcerer could use.

  “I’m calling our bargain before the Triumvirate,” Jack said aloud. The pain from the demon’s magic increased, vibrating through his blood and his bones, making his head ring as if it were made of brass, but Jack held on. “I challenge you before the rulers of Hell for your name, you shite-talking speck of soot. For your name.”

  The demon’s face cracked, its expression going waxy and plastic, a lifelike doll with the batteries run down. “Don’t do this, Winter. Your pride is going to eat you alive, boy.”

  Jack decided it was his turn to laugh, even though it hurt. “I’m not scared of you, or dying. Not anymore.”

  The demon shook its head. “Then you should be, Jack. Because you’re going to Hell, and all that you’ve left behind is bad memories and a broken heart.”

  “I challenge you in the view of the Triumvirate,” Jack repeated. “For your name.”

  “I heard you the first time,” the demon snarled. “You are making a bad, bad mistake, Jack. I liked you before this, but now you’ve begun to irritate me.”

  “You can’t refuse,” Jack said quietly. “You and every other demon of Hell are bound by the same laws.”

  The demon rolled its eyes heavenward, a move that Jack would have found infinitely amusing were he not bartering for his life. “Fine. Name the time and place of me thoroughly teaching you the error of your ways.”

  “The Naughton manor,” Jack shot back. “One day from now.”

  “Very well.” The demon grinned at Pete. “Enjoy the day with him, Weir. It’s your last.”

  It was gone when Jack looked back, the Black rippling in its wake. Jack made it to his sofa and slumped. Pete sat next to him, brows drawn together in vast concern.

  “Jack, what just happened?”

  He put a sofa pillow over his eyes. There had never been sofa pillows—or saucers, scatter rugs, or napkins made of cloth—until Pete had come to live with him. A sofa pillow was good. You could tuck it under your head for a quick kip, or use it to smother yourself when you’d just become the biggest bloody fool you knew.

  “I made the shit choice,” Jack said. “To willingly go to Hell and challenge the demon to learn its name before the three ruling members of the Triumvirate.”

  Pete chewed on her lip. “Can you win?”

  Jack took the pillow away. “Not a chance.”

  Pete let her air out, slumping back to mimic his position. “Oh.”

  She went to her travel bag, found her fags and lighter, lit one. She offered it to him when she’d taken a drag. Jack accepted it and polluted his lungs for a long breath.

  “Cheers.”

  “And the Naughton mansion?” Pete asked. Jack scratched under the edge of his bandage, where the cut from Jao was beginning to itch like a particularly viru
lent venereal disease.

  “Blank spot in the Black. Energy is so bollocksed up from the necromancer fucking about I thought it might give me an edge.”

  Pete curled against him, surprising him with her weight, and Jack moved to make room for her in the crook of his body. “Thought you said you’d lose,” she whispered.

  “Yeah.” Jack put his lips on the top of her head. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t go down kicking.”

  “Jack.” Pete rotated her head to look at him. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “Not keen on visiting Hell myself,” Jack said. “But unless you’ve got a corker, luv . . . I’m out of ideas.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Jack fell asleep with Pete’s breath rising and falling against his chest, setting the pace for his heartbeat and his thoughts.

  Everything took on a sharp-edged quality when he woke. Washing up, making tea, having a fag, and restocking his kit to put in the Mini were acts of incredible significance, rife with color and meaning.

  The drive to the Dartmoor was no longer arduous and too long. The colors of the moor, the wild magic that embraced him like a prodigal son, it was all irrefutably alive, sharp and vivid enough to pain his senses.

  Pete set the brake in the Naughton’s circular drive. “Here we are.”

  Jack tried to shake off the hyper awareness, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Death had ripped the veil from his eyes, shown him exactly what he would be seeing no longer, if the demon had his way.

  Death, Jack reflected, was a bit of a cunt that way.

  While Pete put up her overnight bag and laid in a tea in the Naughton kitchen, Jack laid out his kit on the long table in the formal dining room.

  Salt, chalk, herb bags. Black and red and white thread, his scrying mirror, and a butane lighter for starting herbs in his censer.

  It wasn’t much, in the scheme of things, but the battered canvas satchel had kept Jack alive thus far.

  None of it would do a bit of good against the demon. Jack swept his things back into the satchel and left it on the table. His reflection in the polished wood twisted, distorted and ghostly, pale face crowned by pale hair with sunken black pits for eyes, just as a spirit.

  A shape shimmered in the reflection behind him, and Jack snapped his head around. He was prepared for the ghost of June Kemp, or the mansion’s poltergeist, but it was only the owl.

  It sat on the branch of the tree near the drive, staring at Jack with unblinking eyes. The sunlight skipped through the clouds on the moor, dark and light slashes across the ground. The owl should be far away from the light, asleep somewhere, but it watched him and when Jack merely stared, twitched its head and wings in irritation.

  Jack tilted his head in return, and the owl spread its wingspan wide. A cloud rolled across the sun and the afternoon plunged into iron-gray dark. The owl took flight, alighting at the edge of the garden near the fallen stone wall that bound the estate, kept it from the encroachment of the moor.

  Jack went to the wide front doors, left them open in his wake, and crossed the sodden lawn to the tree by the stone wall where the owl had flown.

  When the sunlight fell through the clouds again, a woman stood under the tree. Though her hair was gray, her face was young, with the round, pale, unlined freshness of a pubescent girl.

  She extended her hand to him, fingers wide, as if tasting the air before his passage.

  Hello, Jack. A bar of light fell through her, gray and diffused where it scattered through her form.

  A few steps from her, Jack caught a hint of the wild magic that rolled over the moor, the wild magic that had summoned the cu sith and distorted his sight. The power wasn’t coming from the moor this time, though. It came from the gray-wrapped figure in front of him.

  She regarded him with her golden creature’s eyes, while the gray mist that clad her pale form writhed and shifted in the Dartmoor’s changeable wind.

  “You,” Jack said. “That was you on the airplane.”

  Yes. You asked for safe passage. I granted it. She smiled at him, with a coquettish tilt of your head. You’re not an easy man to deny, Jack. I can see why she stays with you.

  From behind the tree, in the shadows, Jack heard a rumbling snarl and two cu sith blossomed from the dark spot on the ground, coming to stand at the girl’s flanks. On the tilt of the moor, a herd of sluagh drifted with the wind, howling and grasping at the wild magic of the earth. All around Jack, the world faded as the Black swelled and spilled over the edges of his unconscious, staining his sight like ink.

  “Why?” he said, keeping his eyes on the black dogs. “Why send this lot? What do you want from me?”

  Nothing. The girl laid a hand on each cu sith’s head.

  “I’m confused, then.” Jack shoved his hands into his leather. “You’ve been following me since Paddington, for what? A laugh? Got a crush? Tell me, because I’m out of ideas, luv.”

  The girl stepped toward him, and though her countenance was calm and far less terrifying than either the demon or the Morrigan, Jack took a hasty step back.

  Her magic wasn’t something he wanted touching him, not a feeling he wanted to remember over and over again in nightmares that shot him screaming back into the waking world.

  You feel it, she whispered. You’ve felt it for months, since you found her again. This time she was faster, and she pressed a hand to his cheek, pulling Jack down to her eye level. The gold burned, roiling with liquid witchfire as magic flared in the girl’s gaze.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said flippantly. “All I’ve felt is a great and overwhelming desire to stab meself in the forehead to end the visits of things like you.”

  Her nails dug into his cheek. Watch yourself, mage. You may be able to speak to the hag so, but I’m a different breed.

  Jack flinched, blood dribbling down is jaw. “I know.” He sighed. “I know what you are.”

  The girl’s smile curved up at the ends, became predatory. Say it.

  Jack shut his eyes, to close off that burning gaze, the triad of youth, magic, and death that marked the girl for what she was. “You’re the Hecate.”

  The girl’s tongue flicked over her pale lips, and she withdrew her hand, running her fingers through Jack’s blood and painting streaks down his cheek, covering his scar.

  I am the guardian of the gateways. And you are the crow-mage, so I have come to give you this courtesy. She stepped back, cradling the head of the black dog against her. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it, Jack. Your magic curdling within you. Your sight is clawing your mind to pieces.

  Jack looked out toward the moor. The sun was falling, slowly but surely, painting the tops of the hills with pale fire.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I noticed it. Same shite, different day, you know?”

  It is not the same, crow-mage. The Hecate sighed. The Black is in turmoil. The ways between the worlds are choked with corruption. You know what is coming, Jack, and what you must do.

  “I haven’t the faintest, darling,” Jack said. “All you old ones can never just spit it out, can you? Always got to dance in circles until your feet bleed.”

  There is war coming, the Hecate whispered. There has been war before, war at the beginning and war since, but this will be the vastest, the bloodiest. The old gods and the old ways are rising, parting the layers of the spirit worlds.

  Jack felt a long, slow crawl of unease down his spine. “And I’m supposed to do what about your war, exactly?”

  The Hecate bared her teeth. Her canines were pointed, like her dog servants’. You will do nothing. You will stand aside, crow-mage, and you will keep your meddlesome fingers out of what is coming.

  Wind stripped the mist from her figure in a sudden gust, leaving her bare before Jack’s eyes. The one who must act is Petunia.

  “No,” Jack said instantly. “Pete has nothing to do with any of this.”

  You cannot protect her, and to presume is a grave insult, the Hecate snarled. She is
a Weir, crow-mage. She is a servant of the gateways just as you are a servant of the dead.

  “Pete is an innocent,” Jack snarled. “She doesn’t belong in the Black. She doesn’t deserve your attentions.”

  Petunia was a Weir long before she was your consort, the Hecate snapped. She will stand at the head of my army. She will lift us from the hidden place of dreams and place us on the path.

  “Like fuck she will,” Jack snarled back. Pete’s talent brought her under the purview of the Hecate, true, but she’d never had a sign. Never seen her fate, like he had with the Morrigan. “You’ve made a mistake,” he said, softer. “It’s another Weir. Not Pete.”

  The Hecate’s eyes flared. The Black is rotting, crow-mage. The hag and her consorts, the demons and their bargains, spreading filth through the worlds like poison in a river. Even now, demons dance in anticipation of the world’s end, and necromancers create offerings to their old gods. Sorcery and sin gnaw the bones of magic, of the druid and the Weir and the hearth witch. The Hecate looked away from him, and a tear slipped over her translucent cheek. The world I was born into is gone, crow-mage. But in the fires of war I will rebuild it from ash, and Petunia, my Weir, will open the way. I do not make mistakes.

  She turned back on him, and Jack saw the full glory of the Hecate, her triple face and her owl’s wings and the vast, breathless space between the worlds that the girl’s form walked. And if you value the world you live in, crow-mage, you will stand down. You will retreat, forget that you know such a thing as magic, and stay away from my Weir until it’s all over.

  Jack felt his jaw twitch. Orders were orders, whether they came from a headmaster or the goddess of the gateways. “Can’t do that,” he said.

  You will, the Hecate hissed, or you will burn the world.

  Jack turned his back on her, started for the Naughton house.

  “If I had a shilling for every time I’ve heard that bollocks.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  “Jack?” Pete called to him when he came through the door. “Jack, where’d you go?”