Demon Bound
(The second book in the Black London series)
Caitlin Kittredge
PART I
Clockwork
—The Poor Dead Bastards,
“Dead Man Marching”
Chapter One
A crow sat on the dead branch of the dead tree that watched over two gravestones in the corner of Brompton Cemetery. It watched Jack Winter with its black eyes like beads, and he watched the crow in turn, with eyes that most people called ice, but that he called simply blue.
Jack drew a Parliament out of the air and touched his finger to the tip. He sucked a lungful of smoke and blew it at the crow, which flapped its wings and snapped its beak in irritation. “Fuck off, then,” Jack told it. “Not like I want you hanging about.”
“Leave that bird alone,” said his companion. “If the map I got from tourist information is right, the graves are close by here.” Her circular ramble through the headstones came to a stop next to Jack. “Oh. You found them.”
“Mary and Stuart Poole,” Jack said, flicking his fag at Mary’s headstone. “Who says the gods don’t have the occasional bout of humor?”
Pete Caldecott gave Jack what he’d describe as a dirty look, and not dirty in the manner that led to being naked and sweaty. She strode over and picked up his litter, shoving it into her coat pocket. “You’re a bloody child, you know that? Emotionally twelve. Thirteen at the most.”
Jack shrugged. “Been accused of worse.” He felt in the inside pocket of his motorbike jacket for another Parliament, but thought better of it when Pete put a hand on her hip.
“We’ve a job to do, and if we don’t do it, we don’t get paid, so are you going to stand there all day with your thumb in your arse or are you going to get to work?”
Jack withdrew his hand from his coat slowly, feeling rather like a nun had caught him with a dirty magazine. Pete was, at the first look, not a She Who Must Be Obeyed sort, but Jack knew better. Shorter than him by a head, she had green eyes straight from the Emerald Isle, and dark hair and sun-shy skin that turned her to Snow White in torn denim and an army jacket. Lips plump like rubyfruit, a body that a bloke could spend hours on and still feel like he was starving for it.
But at moments like now, when she glared at him and tapped her foot on the dead grass over the Pooles’ final rest, Jack had learned he was better off doing as he was told. Unless he felt like a smack in the head, and it was too early in the day for kinky foreplay.
Jack picked up the black canvas tote they’d brought along and crouched between the Pooles’ headstones. The entire practice of raising the dead for things like “closure” and “peace” was a load of bollocks, but Pete’s Irish temper kept him from articulating the thought, and she was right, besides—they did have a job.
“’S still a bloody stupid request from the family,” Jack told her. “Just like I said when you took them on.”
Pete folded her arms. “I spent near a decade of my life pushing paper around a desk at the Metropolitan Police, so once you’ve dealt with expense reports and a DCI who thinks that equipment that works is a luxury, not a necessity, you can jabber on about bloody stupid, all right?”
Jack grimaced. “I’m not a party trick, luv. This here is my talent and using it thusly . . . well . . . frankly, it’s demeaning.”
Pete pointed down at the grave. “Get to work, Winter. Before I lay you a smack.”
“I should have been a fucking fortune teller,” Jack grumbled. “The future is an open book compared to this shite.” He heaved a sigh for effect while he unzipped the satchel and pulled out his spirit heart. Pete merely folded her arms, her expression ever the impassive copper.
In Jack’s hand, the clockwork contraption weighed no more than a melon and was of comparable size. Round, made from brass, and hung from a chain, the spirit heart held a small hollowed- out chamber in its bottom. Jack dug the plastic baggie of galangal root out of the satchel and breathed on a pinch of the stuff.
Just a touch of sorcery, just enough to wake up the strands of magic that lived in the galangal. Jack rubbed the pinch between his fingers and tamped it into the chamber of the spirit heart. A stab of pressure hit him in the temple and he rubbed his forehead before standing. His talent knew what was coming, even if his mind didn’t, and Jack braced himself to take the punch of spirit energy the galangal root conducted.
Pete reached out and touched him on the arm, the lightest of touches, on his leathers no less, but he still felt it, dancing down through his blood and nerves to his bones. Her own talent felt like gooseflesh, like being touched by a girl you fancied for the first time, every time. It was different from his own slippery, slithering magic as a tube tunnel from a sewer. Similar functions, separated by miles of intent.
“You all right, Jack?” she said.
He lied to her with a small, tight nod and a smile. His head throbbed harder. “Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, luv. Let’s have this over with.”
Pete wasn’t fooled, and the twin lines between her eyes said so, but she had the grace to step back and pretend that Jack was as skillful a liar as he claimed.
Jack supposed if he had any sense, he’d be worried. Using magic wasn’t supposed to hurt. Not him, not a mage of the
Many of them were that. Jack was not. And if he
No one had ever accused him of having sense, though. Of being a wanker, yes. A thief, a sinner, and a murderer, certainly. But sensible, no. Jack thought that the day someone
“All right, you dusty lot,” he murmured, so low only the dead could hear. “Come and give me a haunt.”
Pete drew her small digital video kit from the bag and readied it, training the lens on Jack and the graves.
For his part, Jack held the spirit heart straight out above the earth, arm rigid as a divining rod. The clockwork pendulum swung gently, aimlessly. Jack inhaled and held the air. Panic chewed on the ends of his guts, scratched at his neck, and wormed into his brain. His body knew what he was about to do, and it was screaming.
Times like this, Jack felt the longing for a fix like the grasp of a familiar lover—tight, hot, gathered behind his eyes, knotting him up, making him cold, telling him,
The hiss of need had only grown louder since he’d kicked heroin, begging and pleading to have a chance, just one more chance to make it right.
All Jack could do was tighten his grip on the spirit heart, the cold brass warming to the same degree as his palm, and drown the murmuring of the fix in a tide of other whispers, crying and shouting, faint and fierce, buried and so old no one knew they were buried any longer.
The dead came to Jack as they always came, and he let himself see, do what he’d started fixing to avoid in the first place. Sight was his curse, and the one thing he could never fully erase.
In his hands, the spirit heart gave a
Jack’s second sight found ghosts, thick here as a crowd in Trafalgar Square. They stood, for the most part, silent and staring at the living intruder in their pale, witch-lit world. A few hissed at him, black-eyed revenants with their flesh hanging off their bones. Revenants fed on the malice of their lives, which followed them in death like a shroud of black, twisting magic, spots on celluloid film.
Pete moved nearer to him. She couldn’t see what he saw, but she knew all the same, perhaps better than Jack, the chill of having the dead always just out of view. “Want me to start it?” she asked quietly. Giving him a way out, a way to pretend that merely looking through his sight wasn’t causing him the sort of headache normally found only after strong whiskey and passing out on something hard.
The spirit heart gave another
“Mary and Stuart Poole.” Pete raised her voice and pitched it sharp. Jack flinched as a ghost drifted closer to Pete, a girl with dark wet hair still tangled with the garbage she’d drowned in. The salt-sour stink of the Thames at low tide tickled his nostrils.
The girl ran her hand longingly across Pete’s cheek. Jack narrowed his eyes. “Oi. Shove off, miss. That’s not yours to take.”
Pete shivered, but continued. “Mary and Stuart Poole, we call you to this resting place. Come back to your bones.”
The drowned ghost drifted away, her torn dress and lank hair trailing behind her in a remembered river current. Jack felt a pull at his arm, and the spirit heart began to tick faster and faster, clockwork innards spinning like the earth was revolving too fast. He planted his feet and concentrated on staying merely upright. It shouldn’t be a task during a simple spirit raising
“Mary and Stuart Poole,” Pete said again. “Come back to your bones.”
There was power in triplets. Jack had taught her that. Pete never forgot something when you told her once.
A tug on his arm warned Jack that his insistence on going ahead while his magic was spinning out of control may have cost him his arse. The spirit heart was twirling now, as if someone had spun a globe and walked away. The brass caught the low afternoon sun and threw off light, the whirring of the clockwork like a bird’s heartbeat. Too fast. Too fast and too soon. The Pooles were coming to his summons, and they could get loose if he didn’t rein the power in.
Jack pushed against the swirl of enticement generated by the beating clockwork, forced it into a shape. A focus like the heart, or salt, or stone was important—raw magic pulled from something like a spirit could blow your insides out surely as a shotgun blast.
A halo, black, gathered around the spirit heart, touched it experimentally, the lightest of caresses, while the spirit heart shot blue sparks through the realm of the dead. Pete couldn’t see them, but she stepped back all the same. “They coming, then?”
“If I have any say,” Jack answered, and tugged ever so gently at the curiosity, the suggestion of minds and bodies that floated from the graves, and guided them to the spirit heart. Coaxed them, teased them, but never ordered them. Ghosts didn’t like being pushed about.
