Collared

by TA Moore

  It smelled worse dead than alive—a sticky, cabbage-water reek that clung to the inside of Jack’s nose and tainted his spit. At least it looked less like a pet as the binding of clumsy spells that had kept it together were pulled apart as they unraveled.

  Jack covered his mouth with the back of his hand and used the side of his boot to kick the rags and tatters of the thing under the Kinney’s untended shrubs. He wiped his boot on the tangled brown grass, and the familiar’s ichor made the already-dead vegetation blanch to gray and shrivel down to the roots.

  There would be a dead spot there for years.

  He glanced at his wrist and grimaced. A lamprey indent of needle teeth stood out raw and open on his wrist. The edges were already inflamed as infection tried to take hold. It wouldn’t work, but the imp-spit was trying its best. Jack fumbled through his pockets for a handkerchief and wrapped the square of bleached cotton around his hand.

  A holdover from the old days, that. The old priest at his church had hated tissues and refused to use them. “Mourning is not disposable.” He’d had a drawer in his office full of neatly pressed, starched handkerchiefs that he would ceremonially dispense before house visits. Jack didn’t have anyone crying on his shoulder anymore, nor a housekeeper to starch and iron them, but he found that a handkerchief was definitely more use in emergencies than tissues.

  He used his teeth to tug the knot tightly under the knob of his thumb. Once it was secure, he crouched down and reached into the back of the kennel. He pulled out a handful of creased, stapled-together pages, bloated and wrinkled from the spellwork written on them, and a lined notebook held together with a child’s pink hair band.

  Jack pulled the hair band off and snapped it absently around his wrist. The elastic had grooved deeply into the sides of the paper and the damp had glued the edges of the pages together. Jack had to pick them apart carefully.

  It wasn’t—exactly—a grimoire.

  Names, lists, price points, all scrawled down in crooked columns in a careful, all-caps hand. Most of them were just for single-digit numbers, but some went up to twenty or higher and had discounts marked down next to them. It was a ledger, albeit a clumsy one.

  Jack thought of the boxes of greasy candles, fat stippled and ripely unwholesome. There were a few staples in the cultist’s handbook—candles, unguent, and paint, all of which required vats of simmered blood and rendered-down pots of fat. It was a cottage industry that was more acceptable when witches and demon worshippers lived in shacks in the woods. These days they had to outsource production to avoid complaints from the neighborhood association.

  The suppliers were usually morticians and butchers, but a diner owner had similar resources.

  Most of the names were unfamiliar, but as Jack ran his thumb down the list, he found one he knew.

  Clem Runnels.

  Jack clenched his jaw until his teeth creaked. He should have expected it. If there was something sleazy going around in town, Clem would be behind it. That had been true even back in Jasper, when he’d just been a garden-variety sleazebag instead of a cut-price warlock.

  He snapped the book shut, twisted the tie around it, and stuck it in his pocket. The imp that Kinney had tied to his familiar had squirmed half out of the meat glove and was just anchored by its foot and ass now. It swore at Jack. He didn’t know the words, but you could still tell.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  Jack braced his good hand against the cracked paving stones and pushed himself to his feet. He could have left, but he headed inside to grab some of the wife’s personal items, just in case. Then he needed to track Clem down.

  The thought of that made Jack grimace sourly. Sometimes it seemed like, no matter how far he ran, Jasper dragged along behind like an anchor.

  Once he got his soul back, maybe he’d finally be able to cut it loose.

  3

  THE THING that wicked people don’t understand is that the demons don’t want their shit souls. If you really want a good exchange rate, be a saint for fifty years and then trade that in.

  BLOOD DRIPPED from Jack’s shoulder and into the basin. It diffused through the water and gave the dirt-filtered liquid a pink tinge. Jack wrung out a threadbare washcloth and roughly scrubbed the mangled flesh of his shoulder. The pus-colored scabs peeled off, and the skin underneath was raw and clean. It would be healed by morning, but for now it ached and itched.

  Jack draped the washcloth over his shoulder, cold against the hot skin, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He looked older than he remembered himself, with crow’s-feet squinked around his eyes and his cheeks hollow under harsh cheekbones, but not as old as he should have been.

  It was the face he showed the world. People had called him handsome, but he’d never seen that. It was his dad’s face and his mom’s mouth, and he had good memories of neither.

  Only the mirror got to see the brand on his throat. Jack lifted his chin and watched the itch-red handprint stretch out on his skin. The thumb lay along the line of his jaw, the palm was scorched under his ear, and long fingers spread back into his hair. He remembered the flash of heat, a jolt of pain as sharp as oil splattered from a pan, but at the time, it had been nothing compared to the heat of Math’s mouth on him.

  He absently rubbed his throat, even though there was no mark there that anyone else could see.

  “I’m going to need to talk to Clem,” he said. It had taken him most of the evening and a freshly killed rabbit for the drude to track the two-faced weasel down. “He’s holed up in the Badends, Hell’s own acre in Craven. I walk in there, how much trouble will I be in right now?”

  Demons didn’t lie. They had a reputation for it, but that was because humans hated to admit they hadn’t read the fine print. When Math said he couldn’t go to Hell, he probably hadn’t meant figuratively.

  “Math?” His fingers pressed down against the mirror scar until he could almost feel the scar-slick flesh against his fingertips. His voice sounded very loud in the small bathroom and bounced off the cracked white tiles, but it seemed he was the only one who heard it. There was a smear of something in the back of the mirror, but that could just have been damp behind the glass.

  Jack growled in frustration, but he was Math’s, not the other way around. If Math didn’t feel like answering him, he had no recourse.

  He peeled the soiled washcloth off his shoulder and tossed it in the garbage. Then he splashed his face with cold, soap-scummed water and ran damp hands around to the back of his neck. It felt as though he should be out there on the streets in search of answers.

  The dead man in the diner had brought it on himself. Beef-fat candles wouldn’t summon anything, except maybe that grease-and-smoke ghost from McDonald’s. Cultists wanted human-fat candles, glue boiled from murderers’ sinews, the soft, gelid bones of stillbirths. Dale Kinney had been Hell-bound even if he hadn’t sold his soul. His wife thought her first husband hung the stars, and then she broke her wedding vows to fuck his brother. She might have worshipped whatever little demon had adopted the goat-head man as its sigil or been innocent of any other sin. Either way, she was a grown woman and not Jack’s responsibility.

  It was the little girl, with her unshadowed eyes and huge smile, who tugged at Jack’s atrophied shepherd’s instincts.

  She wasn’t in any danger from demons. There were rules, and there were consequences. True innocents were usually safe from the Infernal. They could be scared or harried but not hurt. It was the humans who had her Jack didn’t trust.

  He had never needed to chase demons. They—Math—had come to him with an offer already in hand. Cultists were those whose souls weren’t worth the effort—damned or banal. They worshipped devils as a sort of hellish Kickstarter and crowd-sourced their damnation one demon at a time.

  Not the sort of people you’d trust your child—any child—with.

  Water dripped down the back of Jack’s neck and between his shoulder blades. He shuddered and straightened up. The towel behind
the door had been pink once. It was mostly white now with pale pink smears that could have been old blood or older dye. Jack wiped his face on it and hung it around his neck as he glanced back at himself in the mirror.

  He wasn’t going to walk into the Badends after dark with the dubious protection of Math’s ownership flickering like a spent bulb. The days when he’d been enough of a prize to trade for anything were long gone. All he’d get was cut in quarters and buried at the cardinal points, and that wouldn’t do the Kinney girl any good.

  “They took her for a reason,” he told his reflection. “She has some value to them. She’ll be okay.”

  His mirror image didn’t look convinced, but then he’d always been a miserable bastard. Jack believed that, or at least he would until he didn’t have a choice.

  He pulled the plug on the sink. The water took its time to gurgle away as he tossed the towel into the bath and headed to bed. He might as well get some use out of the sheets before someone dropped another corpse on them.

  THERE WAS a glass of sour black whiskey in Jack’s hand, the taste of molasses and sin thick in his throat. The last thing he remembered had been his head on crisp white pillowcases and the thought that he needed new pillows as well. Now he was in….

  Jack set the whiskey down and turned around. His gaze skimmed over book-lined walls to the huge picture window and the honey-ripe heat of a South Carolina afternoon.

  “Here?” he said.

  Math sprawled at ease in a big, leather chair with his feet propped up on the corner of the old, rich walnut desk. He still wore the clothes he’d stolen from Jack, the cuffs of the jeans frayed where they hung down over bare heels.

  Verisimilitude, although he hadn’t gone so far as to commit to dirty feet. The thought made Jack look down to check how dressed he was. Strange what stuck with you over all the years and all the sex. Math had seen everything Jack had, touched it, fucked it, but the thought of being naked during a conversation still made Jack’s stomach knot. The jeans and faded T-shirt—the logo of a bar he’d liked in… where had it been…. Victorville, he thought—

  “Sometimes I miss the old place,” Math said. “The blood on the ice at the fishery, the perfumed hypocrisy of your little church, my parents puking their power into me until I was glutted like a tick. Simpler times. Don’t you ever wish you could go back to the nest?”

  Jack scratched his wrists. The razor hadn’t left any scars, not even in the mirror, but he always expected to feel them like threads under his skin.

  “I did,” he said. “It’s still a shit hole.”

  A wicked grin creased Math’s face. “Wasn’t that the appeal?” He swung his feet off the desk and stood up in one smooth motion. His eyes were blue here, in the strip of the Infernal laid like a fly trap in the space between sleep and dreams. The incubi’s hunting ground. “But the setting is a whim. What did you want, Jack?”

  For a second, caught in the memory of stolen kisses and sun-warmed hands, Jack couldn’t remember. Then he swallowed and tasted the black misdeeds of whiskey in his throat. It grounded him.

  “What did—”

  Math put his finger to his lips. The shush was silent, but it locked Jack’s tongue behind his teeth.

  “Sometimes we like to watch each other work.” Math brushed past Jack and claimed the abandoned whiskey. When he took a drink, Jack felt the press of cool lips against his mouth, the swipe of Math’s tongue as he lapped up the liquid. It made Jack shudder as the pleasure crawled down his spine to catch in his balls. His only recently gathered thoughts threatened to scatter again. “Don’t embarrass me.”

  Jack’s tongue was his own again, but it took him a moment to think of anything other than kissing to do with it.

  “I need to go down to Badends,” he said as he turned to watch Math. “I don’t want to get stuck there.”

  Math chuckled as he took another drink. This time the flick of his tongue was faded, a ghost of sensation, but still enough to make Jack swallow hard.

  “That’s something you should have thought of before you sold your soul,” Math pointed out. He closed his eyes as he savored the last draft of black whiskey, his head tilted appreciatively to the side. The sun, stuck forever at heaviest, stickiest noon, painted his hair an almost-human caramel. “My name has enough weight that no one should bother you, as long as you don’t get into their business. Do you think you can do that?”

  If he counted the Kinneys as his business? “Sure,” Jack said.

  Math laughed and opened his eyes. “Liar,” he said, and the word rolled over his tongue like a compliment. He set the tumbler down on the dresser with a distinct click and reached up to hook his fingers in Jack’s T-shirt collar. The soft fabric stretched under his fingers, down over Jack’s collarbones, and something dark curled in the corners of Math’s smile. “See, that’s another thing I miss. That nice stiff collar had its uses.”

  “Not what you used to say,” Jack said.

  Math showed his teeth in a dangerous smile. “I was younger then. Impatient. I appreciate a good hunt more now, especially when I know I’m going to win eventually.”

  It was hard to argue with that confidence. Jack gave in. He cupped Math’s face in his hand, grazed his thumb over the hard ridge of his cheekbone and ducked his head to kiss him. The glass and liquor ghost kiss had left him hard, but it was nothing compared to the reality of flesh and teeth.

  Math purred satisfaction under his mouth. He slid his free hand down to roughly cup Jack through his jeans. Lust caught hot and hungry under Jack’s ribs as he traced Math’s cold, full lips with his tongue and then dipped into his mouth. It had always seemed like a demon’s breath should be sour, but Math’s was wet and clean. The only taste was the whiskey, sweet now that Math had drained down the sin of it.

  The rough squeeze of hard fingers around Jack’s cock made him groan, and a jolt of pain melted into the heavy want that settled like a weight between his hip bones.

  Lust cracked Jack open like a knife, left him to throb raw and exposed. It had been years, decades, since they’d first fucked—the sharp tangerine scent of hemlock crushed under Jack’s shoulders and his soul in Math’s hands—but that didn’t make it any less… desperate.

  Jack fumbled at Math’s jeans with clumsy, suddenly stupid hands as they stumbled and sneaked quick glances down to try to find the buttons between hard, slashed kisses that bumped their mouths together.

  The back of Math’s thighs hit the edge of the desk, and they stopped. He leaned back against it and shoved Jack’s hands impatiently out of the way so he could unbutton them himself. The waistband sagged around his lean hips as he slid his hand down to grab the flushed, heavy shaft of his erection. He dragged his hand roughly down it, the fine skin wrinkled as he pulled it back from the tight, precome-slick head.

  Math leaned back against his other arm, his muscles tight and defined under night-dweller pale skin.

  “Get on your knees, Jack,” Math told him thickly. With his thumb he traced the thick vein that ran the length of his cock and pressed down against it. “Show me what I’ve won.”

  It probably didn’t matter that Jack didn’t obey him immediately. They both knew he would. Jack leaned in, hands braced against the desk on either side of Math’s hips, and licked the wet curve of Math’s lower lip.

  “What are you going to do for fun once I have my soul back?” he asked.

  Math let go of his cock and reached up to cup Jack’s face. He pressed his thumb against Jack’s mouth, and defiance forgotten, Jack parted his lips and let it into his mouth. It tasted like sex and pennies, sharp and sour against Jack’s tongue.

  “Your soul wasn’t in hock the first time you sucked my cock,” Math reminded him. “You broke your vows for me long before we made any deals. Why should it change now?”

  Jack bit down on the pad of Math’s thumb and then let it slide wetly out of his mouth. Would he even be around? He wasn’t sure what would happen to him without Math’s possession of his soul
to complicate its final disposition.

  Maybe he’d go to Heaven. More likely he’d find out what had driven the demons out of Hell.

  Something to worry about when it came to pass.

  Jack kissed his way down Math’s throat, from the hinge of his jaw to the sharp, bony wing of his collarbone. He sucked a bruise into the taut hollow of skin with his teeth and lips, and the stain of red and blue spread over Math’s neck. Wet, openmouthed kisses left damp patches on the thin blue shirt as Jack worked his way down Math’s chest. He lingered at Math’s nipple and flicked his tongue against the tight bud through the faded cotton until Math grabbed his shoulder and pushed him down.

  Jack laughed with a dark rattle of humor and went down on his knees. His cock ached as his jeans pulled tightly over his crotch with a twist of pleasant pressure that clenched back into his ass. He let it throb as he ran his hands up the back of Math’s thighs, the denim soft under his fingers, and leaned in to drag his tongue from the base of Math’s cock to the head. He dipped his tongue into the crease under the glans and curled against the skin there.

  Math made a noise somewhere between a hiss and a groan. He twisted his fingers into Jack’s hair and slid back to cup the back of his skull. Jack wrapped his mouth around the head of Math’s cock and sucked on it, the glaze of precome heady and penny-sharp as he lapped it up.

  Jack loosely gripped the base of Math’s cock and felt the pulse of it against his fingers. He twisted his hand around the shaft as he slid his head down. He pressed his tongue flat against the cool, hard underside of Math’s cock as his lips stretched around the thickness of it. When he pulled back, he let the head slide out of his mouth with a lewd pop. The twist of his fist dragged Math’s foreskin up to bunch around the glans and then back down again. This time Jack let his teeth graze along the thick length of the cock.

  It wasn’t something that most humans appreciated, in Jack’s experience, but it made Math groan and twist his fingers in Jack’s hair. The tug prickled across Jack’s scalp and down his spine.