Demon Bound

see, to make him their instrument to finish whatever scraps of life they’d left behind.

He’d found magic first in books and then as a failed experiment to make the voices and the sight stop. He hadn’t properly understood until he’d met Seth that the ability to speak with the dead marked him as a servant of the crow. Seth had taught him about things like corpse water, bound spirits, and how Jack Winter would never stop seeing—he could only hope to keep the dead at bay until the crow woman came for him, as well.

Seth wasn’t one to paint a rosy future where only ash existed.

He stayed silent, staring at the little bottles for long enough that Pete chewed on her lip. “Well, what now? We get rid of them, yeah?”

Jack stood, his boots crushing the mirror shards to sand. His immediate reaction was to flee the Naughton house and never come back, but that was the boy in him, the death-fear that sat on his shoulder and whispered in the demon’s voice. More than half of being a successful exorcist was simply not cutting and fleeing like your arse was on fire when the spook show started.

“These specters died here, on the grounds,” he said. “And whoever bound them was here, on the grounds.”

Pete looked relieved to be back in a domain she understood. “I can check with the local council about suspicious deaths, get a record of property ownership to see if this place always belonged to Naughton.”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “But this wasn’t recent, some spousal dust-up or a kiddie-fiddler hiding his shame. Going by the clothes alone, we’re looking at fifty or sixty years gone for the newest.”

“Except for Danny,” Pete reminded him. Jack looked at the mirror, ten fractured images staring back where glass clung to the frame.

“You’d think Naughton might have mentioned wholesale murder going on amongst the family heirlooms,” he grumbled.

“I’m sure he didn’t know,” Pete protested. Jack felt a surge of heat against his heart that she was in any way defending the ponce. He didn’t think it was irrational—when a woman like Pete stepped in for a waste of flesh like Nicholas Naughton, Jack thought his feelings were entirely fucking rational.

“I’ll drop you wherever it is you need to go,” Pete said, jingling the Mini’s keys.

“Town,” Jack said, turning his back on the reflections. Jealousy wouldn’t matter for much longer, if the demon had his way. Nothing that Jack currently held dear would. Demons thrived on stripping you down to the bone, when they bargained with you, stealing a life and leaving you hollowed out for Hell to fill back up.

Jack said to Pete, “I’ve got some more ghosts to talk with.”

Chapter Sixteen

St. Michael and All Angels crouched on a hillock staring down upon the hulk of Dartmoor Prison. The mica in the cell house stones gleamed in the sunlight after the rain, and Jack squinted and turned his back on the grim edifice. He’d heard that they’d faced the windows toward the moor deliberately, so that a prisoner could contemplate the great heather-choked nothingness and despair of ever leaving the place alive.

The church itself was disused, friendly plaques posted by the Anglicans explaining that services were now held in the next town due to budgetary concerns.

Jack wasn’t interested in churches. There hadn’t been a time, even a sliver of a second, when he’d truly believed a benevolent God would lift him out of Manchester, away from his mother, her pills, and the endless parade of dingy council flats and dingier boyfriends. What could an invisible man in the sky do against thrown bottles, drunken rages, fists and words and touches that did their level best to reduce him to a shadow?

Bloody nothing, that was what. And all the while the church charities that came to the Winter flat wearing their good hats and shoes, carrying their boxes of musty hand-me-downs, had told him, God helps those who help themselves. A grand fucking joke if he’d ever heard one.

The graveyard around the church was what drew Jack to the place. Overgrown with shaggy weeds, toothy gravestones poking every which way from the dirt, right up to the edges of the church wall, the place seethed with spirit energy. A grotesque of life, a mockery of the feeling he got in a crowded tube or shoving along Oxford Street at holiday time.

Teeming ghosts meant at least one chatty soul in the mix, and Jack drew out his spirit heart over a likely-looking grave. The name was nearly washed from the limestone from forty years of winter rain and year-round wind howling off the moor, but Jack brushed the moss away and spoke it loud.

“Jonathan Lovett.”

The spirit heart began to spin instantly. The ghosts in the churchyard, bound by the iron fence, were bored and restless and any hint of magic drew them in like flies on flayed skin.

Jonathan Lovett, plump and serious in life, appeared in a blue uniform and peaked cap that didn’t entirely hide a gaping black dent full of hair and brains in his ethereal skull. “Yes? You want something, boy?”

Jack grimaced. A bloody prison guard. Just his luck.

“Thought maybe you could help a bloke with a bit of knowledge,” Jack said. Lovett’s face crinkled.

“I’ll have you know I don’t care for Northerners. One of ’em stove my skull in, winter of 1966. A thrice-damned Geordie.”

“Can’t imagine why he’d want to go and do a thing like that,” Jack muttered. “Anyway, I hail from Manchester, so we’ve nothing to fuss about.”

Lovett huffed. His cheeks rippled, like he was made out of sail cloth. “I suppose. Get on with it.”

Jack let the chain of the spirit heart twine in his fingers, but he kept it between himself and the spirit. Even cordial ghosts could turn. The mage who thought they couldn’t was the mage who had a spirit reach into his chest and stop his heart like a cheap watch.

“You know a house, about twelve miles from here as the crow flies?” Jack asked Lovett. “The Naughton estate?”

Lovett shivered. “I certainly do, and I wouldn’t go up that lane if you paid me.”

“Oh?” Jack feigned disinterest. “And why is that?”

“When I was . . . how d’you say . . .” The spirit chewed on its lower lip.

“Alive?” Jack prompted.

Lovett twitched his cuffs in irritation. “Yes, well. All sorts of stories about the place back then. Sacrifices, naked dancing about bonfires, screams in the night. Old women around town said Aleister Crowley himself came and stayed for a summer, long way back. Said the crops died and the virgins of the village got themselves in a family way, down to the girl. Not to be crude, you understand.”

“I think me heart can take it,” Jack said. Aside from the tick of the spirit heart and the whistle of the wind, the only sound was his breath and the rustle and hiss of ghosts at the edges of his mind. They didn’t like Lovett getting all the attention. Jack had to finish with Lovett before their attention turned to demands.

“After . . .” Lovett shivered, tucking his several chins down into the collar of his uniform. “After I got into this state, I didn’t wander far from the churchyard. That Naughton place is cold, and the moors will blow you all to pieces, scatter you every which way. There’s a bad thing in those groomed gardens and fancy turrets, my son. Hungry, howling, and cold.”

“Cold?” Jack thought of the sucking quiet that surrounded the house—when it wasn’t trying to drown him in a wellspring of the Black. “Second time you’ve said cold. Cold how?”

“Ice cold and rotten,” Lovett murmured. “Spreading out black fingers, feeling in the dark for anything it can catch. All knotted up in the bones of that house, that cold. Such an awful feeling. Burns, it’s so cold.”

Jack’s skin prickled in sympathy, even though he was shielded from the wind by the wall of the church.

“Didn’t used to be this way.” Lovett sighed, his form flickering like dirt on celluloid. “But now there’s badness gathered there, and blackness. And the cold, always the cold.”

Jack stopped the spirit heart, metal running cool and dimpled under his fingertip. “Much obliged, Officer Lovett.”

“Wait!” Lovett wavered, losing cohesion as Jack’s spell spun to a stop. “My wife . . . she never found the necklace. My mother’s necklace. It was Valentine’s Day.” Lovett reached for Jack and Jack took a fast step, nearly tumbling over another headstone. “The day I died . . .”

“Sorry, mate.” Jack snapped the spirit heart shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Guess us Northerners are all the same.”

Lovett faded with a sigh, just another formless silver shade drifting among the tombstones and weeds, and Jack made his way back to the iron gate, which hung open at an angle that imitated a cheap paperback gothic.

“Shame on you, Jack Winter.” The voice was far too smug and solid to come from a spirit throat. “Leaving that poor soul with his noncey unfinished business.”

Jack turned sharply, saw nothing. “Leave off your games,” he snarled. “If you’ve got something to say, look at me face. If not, bloody well fuck off. I still have time.”

“Do you really?” the demon purred. He was there, in the slice of shadow cast by the gate, same suit but sporting white on black this time and the same black, black eyes. “Or do you only have as much time as I give you?”

Jack jerked his chin. “This how all you gits dress in the Pit? Or did you lose your way en route to the Clockwork Orange fancy-dress party?”

The demon narrowed its eyes. “You should take care how you’re speaking to me, Jack Winter. What’s that the little black book says? As above, so below? Show me fealty now and I could perhaps find some little time to spare you. Time with Miss Caldecott, just for instance.”

“You’re not screwing me with that particular dildo, not again,” Jack snapped. He turned to walk away, because he knew it would slag the demon off. Demons were creatures of ritual and respect to the point of compulsion. Jack tipped a salute over his shoulder. “Do give my regards to the other droogs.”

“You don’t want her?”

Jack stopped in the middle of the road that ran by the church, looked back. The demon smirked, rocking back and forth on the balls of its feet like it was waiting for the punchline of a joke. Jack sneered in return, contempt he didn’t feel except as a nervous boil in his guts.

“You know exactly what I want, you bastard.”

The demon smiled, tongue flicking out between its teeth. “I suppose that’s why we’re here, isn’t it, Jack?”

“It is,” Jack agreed. “But the difference between you and me is that me, I don’t care about my moth-eaten old soul. But I’ll be thrice-damned if I drag Pete down with me, so if you show your face again before it’s my time, I’ll exorcise you so far back into Hell you won’t even have a name.”

“Ohhh.” The demon shut its eyes and breathed deep, nostrils flaring, as if Jack’s belly-deep, sweaty fear was a heady perfume. “Jack, Jack. You shouldn’t threaten me so, old son. You know that I can visit you any time I like. Can do anything to you that might come into my little head.”

“Fuck. Off,” Jack said plainly, putting the rest of the road between the demon’s grin and his person.

The demon raised its hand as if to say farewell, and Jack felt the breathless, vertiginous sensation of magic, demon magic, too late as it gripped hold of his mind and dug its claws in deep.

Pete shivered in the night air, the rain causing the torches at the edge of the stones to spit and smoke. Her hands tugged against the iron restraints, small delicate fingers begging to return the gesture as Jack’s hands searched over her stomach, her ribs, coming to rest on her breasts. His finger pads stroked her nipples, smearing the blue paint in time with his thrusts.

This was raw magic, how it had always been, since the first druid and the first Weir long ago. Layers of power wrapped Jack, sweat grown cold against his skin. Pete circled her legs about his waist. Her heels dug into his thighs and her lips parted, panting wordless cries that urged him on to finish, to bind the spell their bodies wove, to take her magic as his own, by force. . . .