Demon Bound

around her eyes and veins crawling up her face.

The first time her Weir talent had touched his magic, she’d passed out cold on the floor of his flat. This was an improvement, if not a vast one.

He brushed the backs of his knuckles over her cheek, reflexively. Make sure she was still warm and still had blood beating in her. “You all right, luv?”

She took in a breath, let it out, hands gripping her knees, wrinkling the denim hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Fine. What in fucking hell was that thing?”

The mist blew onward, wind rocking the Mini, and behind the mist came the rain, in soft gray sheets that wafted across the moor like wraiths chasing witchfire across the lowland bogs near Seth’s farmhouse in County Cork.

“Nasty,” Jack murmured. “A hungry, nasty creature of the Black.” His blood was drying to sticky paste on the window, and his palm ached. Pushing magic through his own blood always left him cold, fever-achy, and drained like he’d passed out in a pub loo and woken with a crick in his neck.

It left too the faint craving for that floating, golden place where his talent met Pete’s Weir. He wished to drink down every last drop of Pete’s power, ride it forever.

One fix or another, it made no difference.

“That’s it?” Pete jiggled the key and the Mini started on the first crank, purring contentedly as always. “Usually you talk my ear off, Professor. Have you ever seen something like it before?”

“Once,” Jack said, as they turned back onto the paved road and crawled back through the thinning fog to the junction.

He could still hear the howl, echoing off the low stone wall and thatch roof of Seth McBride’s farmhouse. He’d climbed up on the roof and lit a fag, watching the enormous spectral creature pad on four feet across the fields, a  purpose in its step so terrible and deliberate that even though the night was warm and soft, the height of an Irish summer, Jack had felt bone-chilled.

The creature had looked at him, great blazing eyes staring across the distance and searing him body and sight. Then it had walked on, over the rise and into the valley, where Seth’s closest neighbors resided.

In the morning an ambulance bumped over the dirt track and into the same valley, left again with cargo wrapped in a yellow hazmat bag.

You got yourself under stone when you heard a cu sith at bay. The black dog scented for blood, and the blood of the soul he’d come for was the only blood that would do.

It was the first time Jack felt real fear toward a creature of the Black. Demons could swallow you down into Hell and Fae could bargain your memories away for a song, but they had rules. They could be tricked. No one bargained with the cu sith, the hound of Death. No mortal could make it see reason, no matter how clever a bastard he might be. Jack didn’t like fear—fear was useless in the Black, the stealthy, laughing killer that made you freeze, forget your hexing words, and piss yourself before something bit your head off.

The cu sith was a subject of fear, of the inexorable human fate that conjured it. You couldn’t look into its lantern eyes and not see death staring back, unblinking and untenable.

“It’s a cu sith,” Jack said. “Lots of names besides the Irish—black dog, in English. Harbinger of death. Chases down souls and drags them through the Gates.”

They pulled into the circular drive of the Naughton house and Jack had the peculiar sensation again of falling into a vortex, the Black swirling and concentrating in this spot. After the cu sith, though, the state of Naughton’s psychic real estate seemed a minor concern.

“Any particular souls?” Pete climbed out and approached the sucking void, but Jack blinked and it was just a rotted-out, rundown estate again.

“Any it can get its jaws around,” he said. Pete bit her lip as if she wanted to press him, but she merely collected her keys and bag and went inside.

Jack stayed for a moment, reluctant to walk back into Naughton’s eldritch problem.

If the cu sith had only been hungry, it might have happened upon him by accident.

But he was a mage and this was the Black and there weren’t any accidents or fucking coincidences. The cu sith had come for him, had seen the brand of the demon hovering just out of view. Marked for bloody death, and a cu sith’s favorite snack. Jack had the cold comfort that the cu sith was stepping onto the demon’s turf and that the demon made short work of those who tried to play with its toys.

The only downside to the equation was Jack being the toy.

He watched the crow land on the finial of Naughton’s roof and caw, spreading its wings and widening its beak until it looked grotesque, as if it were trying to answer Pete’s query.

Any particular soul?

Only mine, Jack replied. Jack fucking Winter, dead man bloody walking.

Chapter Fifteen

Jack didn’t believe in dwelling on the inevitable. Try to change the future, and the future would just fuck you back, bent over and proper. Instead, he went into the Naughton house, went to his room, and checked his kit for graveyard dirt, coffin nails, herbs, and his scrying mirror. Matches, chalk, and copper wire. The essential tools of Jack Winter, exorcist. Much different than Jack Winter, wrung-out junkie, and much preferable. It gave him something to think about other than the demon’s bargain. He was good at exorcisms, sure of them and himself when he was performing them. If he could solve Naughton’s poxy problem and get Pete some cash in the doing, so much the better.

“Cleansing will take an hour or so,” he told Pete when she came to the door and propped herself against the jamb by her shoulder, watching him lay out his kit. “Got to find a setup spot where the poltergeist can’t fling any crockery at me head.”

“I’m going to look in Danny’s room in the meantime,” she said. “See if there’s anything Nick missed.”

“Might be a good spot,” Jack decided. Nick. Christ on a bike. Nothing but bloody Nick. “Close to but not too close to where he kicked off.” Setting up a cleansing on a suicide’s last breathing spot was just asking to have your lungs ripped through your nose by an angry spirit.

Jack gathered his tools and followed Pete to Danny’s room, a large back bedroom that looked out on the rotting, soggy gardens. The rain lashed down in earnest outside, and wind crawled under the slanted eaves of the Naughton house, moaning low and lost. Day outside darkened to the half-night of storms and dreams.

Jack wiggled his eyebrows at Pete when a bad gust rattled the windows. “How apropos. Always did like a bit of mood weather.”

Now, with the job, he could put the cu sith and the ghosts in Paddington out of his mind. At least for the few moments it took to cleanse Danny’s sad, wandering spirit.

The room Danny Naughton had chosen was worse than Jack’s own flat, if that were possible—the peeling plaster and warped floors, the chipped war-era furniture, all attached to a crumbling en suite equipped with the sort of plumbing American comedians cracked jokes about.

The bed was stripped bare, a stained mattress the only sign anyone had recently slept atop it. Drawers stood half open, clothes trailing out and across the floor like shed skin. Nancy Nick had been in a whirlwind hurry to get out of the place after Danny hung himself, Jack thought. That or he’d been keen to erase evidence of something before the emergency crew showed themselves. Jack’d cleaned up enough mates who’d overdosed to know the signs.

A massive mirror opposite the bed was covered with a sheet, and Pete moved to snatch it off. Jack stopped her with a hand up.

“Leave it. Mirrors could let something watch us that we don’t want.”

Pete frowned. “Do you think he knew? Danny? That this place was off?”

Jack kicked an empty plastic bottle, and it rolled to join three more fellows under the bed. “I think he liked his vodka cheap and by the quart.”

Pete examined the empty closet, jangling wire hangers the only residents. She was methodical, sifting through the detritus atop the dresser and each drawer with quick, professional fingers. Jack could imagine her in a pants suit and blue nitrile gloves, standing in this same room while white-suited crime scene technicians moved around her like explorers on a foreign moon.

Her hair would be pulled back in the low, efficient ballerina twist she’d worn during her time at the Met. Her warrant card and badge clipped to her belt along with handcuffs and pepper spray. A low heel, nothing flashy or trampy, just enough to elevate her petite frame to eye level with the male detectives of the squad.

“You’re staring at me,” Pete said. “Keep it up and I’m going to think I have something growing out of my forehead.”

She wriggled the bedside drawer. “This one’s locked.”

“Let me,” Jack said. He passed his fingers over the lock, and then pulled his ring of skeleton keys from his leather. They wore an enchantment, just the smallest charm to conduct a spell. Jack found them years ago at a bazaar in Leeds, mixed in with a box of mundane junk. He sometimes wondered about the mage who’d lost such a valuable tool, but not often.

Jack stuck the smallest key into the lock and whispered the words inscribed around the hilt and down the shaft of each skeleton key.

There was a click and the drawer popped open, over-flowing with small squares of paper.

“You should teach me that one,” Pete said.

“You wouldn’t want it,” Jack said. Pete took a handful of the slips and shuffled through them.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Lockpicking is transmutation. Transmutation is black magic,” Jack said. “You don’t want to have that on your first try, luv.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You do it. I’ve seen you crack open a lock a dozen times.”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “I’ve got an affinity for breaking and entering, luv. Has more to do with nicking things when I was a stupid kid than magic, truth be told.”

“Of course,” Pete snapped. “You have the ease of everything. I’d just pox it up, like some stupid kid. Not like bloody Jack Winter.” She crumpled the slips viciously.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Jack protested. Pete’s temper, like her freckles, was Irish and her glare could have cut glass. “You have an affinity, luv. You find things like no one I’ve ever seen.” Jack stepped back and let Pete examine the drawer. “Lost papers. Lost children.” He swallowed, his tongue dry in the closed-up room. “Lost souls.”

Pete’s anger faded, replaced by half of a small smile. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at,” she said at last. Jack nodded.

“It’s the truth. What have you found, then?”

“They’re betting slips,” Pete said. “From all over the country. Losing bets, mostly.”

“So Danny boy spent the time he wasn’t getting pissed and seeing ghosts betting on the ponies?” Jack said. As far as skeletons in a rich twat’s closet went, it was fairly mundane. Nobody was even wearing lady’s underthings. “Nicky might have mentioned that,” he murmured. “Seems quite a thing to omit.”

“He might not have known,” Pete said. “You’d be surprised what families can keep from one another. Met a bloke once, had a mistress living one flat block over from his wife and children. They used to pass each other in the street and nod hello. Did it for years.”

“Why’d you get involved, then?” Jack dropped to one knee and started setting up his supplies. Ritual was familiarity as much as magic. Setting out the tools of exorcism quieted the mind, readied it for the things an exorcist would see pulling in wayward ghosts.

“His wife puzzled it out and blew his head off with a skeet rifle,” Pete said. “Can’t say I blamed her overly much.”

“That’s a secret for you,” Jack said. “Like vicious little dogs. Never know when they’ll turn around and bite.”

Pete stopped her searching and cast her gaze on him. Her eyes could cut you like broken green glass if she meant to get the truth.

“Indeed,” was all she said.

Jack put out his scrying mirror, a black ceramic bowl, and matches for burning herbs, a nub of chalk for the circle. He sat down cross-legged even though he felt a groan in the hinges of his