Demon Bound

glared at the nearest group. “Take a photo or piss off.”

“Must you do that?” Pete said. “To everyone we meet? Must you play the villain?”

“Jayne Poole? That rotted-out bitch had it coming,” Jack said. He went around to the street and climbed in the passenger side of Pete’s battered Mini Cooper. Pete climbed behind the wheel, slinging the bag into the rear seat with force. The spirit heart rattled, reminding Jack with a few ticks of clockwork how badly the day so far had gone, and warning it wasn’t over yet. He stood by his words, though. The Jayne Pooles of the world did have it coming, the fate they thought couldn’t apply to them rushing up from the next life. Jack knew better than most that Death could tread your tracks for a very long time, until you got tired and gave out. He’d seen Death do that very thing, to a score of people a far better class of soul than Jayne Poole.

“We needed that money,” Pete said, her fingers tight on the steering. “As if I needed the reminder, my savings are nearly out and you’ve got the shirt on your back, if that.” She cast a look at the red slogan splashed across Jack’s chest, the one that read NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF. “And did it have to be that shirt, in particular?”

“Hasn’t got any holes,” Jack protested. “No visible stains. What’s wrong with it?”

“Forget I said it,” Pete muttered, jamming the Mini into gear and lurching into traffic with a wheeze of abused cylinders. Jack thought better of saying anything else, like they may need Jayne Poole’s bloody money but he’d be fucked by a priest, face-first up against the confessional, if he wanted anything to do with this spooks-for-hire business at all. It was risky, and silly, and it was only going to end with somebody getting their head jammed up their arse by an angry ghost.

Pete headed them back across the city toward White-chapel, and Jack sat still in the passenger seat, not saying all of the bitter things sitting on his tongue. They’d dissolve eventually, as they always did, and he’d swallow them back down and let them rot his guts a bit more.

Chapter Three

Pete parked in the alley next to Jack’s flat in the Mile End Road, and went inside without a word to him. Jack sat on the Mini’s bonnet and lit a fag, drawing it deep into his lungs, feeling the hiss and whisper of the Black fade in the face of something darker, more present.

Roman citizens burned their dead on the fields of Whitechapel, to the east of the City walls. Eighty thousand souls crouched there during the reign of Victoria, all of them steeped in magic and misery as Jack the Ripper stalked among them, blood trickling through his fingers to the smooth-rubbed cobblestones, while just behind him, the far larger and more terrifying specter of poverty and a smoke-tinged, stinking death marched, implacable and inexorable.

Whitechapel was the only place in London where Jack found a little relief from his sight. The dark and bloody veins of power that ran through the place masked the vibrations of the Black, put the volume down so he could at least sleep, if he had a fix in him. He’d first found the place going on twenty years ago, fresh off the train from Manchester and sleeping rough.

Whitechapel became home, an odd sort of home, dirty and sooty and filled up with past misery. But you didn’t choose where you rested your bones, the place chose you. Whitechapel was in Jack’s blood surely as the fix had once been.

Jack worked a hand under his collar and scratched at the tattoo on his left collarbone, one of the twin eyes of Horus resting under his skin. Pete had imbued them with power, the kind only someone of her talent could draw to a thing. And it held, mostly. The ink did as the skag had before it. But never enough, never as completely nor as quietly, never with the feeling of wrapping cotton wool over his third eye.

Shutting his eyes, Jack let the sounds of the real London, the real world, cover him. Slamming doors from his building, shouts in Urdu from his neighbor’s children, the flow of traffic on Mile End Road, the rumble of a train in the Hammersmith & City Line under his feet.

A window slid open four landings above, and Pete stuck her head out. “Jack, you coming up?”

He exhaled a last halo of blue smoke and ground the burning butt out under his boot. “In a minute, yeah.”

“You fancy tea?” Pete, though she lived here, in what many still considered a slum, with him, who most would consider a bum, kept her middle-class habits. Jack found his mouth quirking. The fact that she assumed civility of him was oddly charming, though he’d put a boot in the face of anyone who suggested such a thing.

“I suppose,” Jack said.

“I’ll get something in from Tesco, then,” Pete said, and disappeared, shutting the window. Jack felt her power waver away from him, descend the lift, and drift up the street to the Tesco Express before it slipped away, so much sand through fingertips. Jack ran a hand over his face. Told himself the noise of the street and the muted dark heartbeat of Whitechapel was all he heard.

It helped, for the moment, but it was always temporary. Always, the Black clawed at his mind, and the dead, which came to Jack because he radiated power like a torn electrical cable, hovered. The madness that had caused him to shove a needle in his arm in the first place sat in the corner with its face hidden, and it laughed.

The laughter turned and twisted, lapped back on itself until it bounced off the brick around his head, and Jack felt a sharp pain like a hot iron blade cut through his skull, behind his eyes.

He had enough time to think, This isn’t right.

Briefly, he was seventeen again and face-down on a carpet that smelled like dust and pipe tobacco as the dead danced around him, a funeral procession for any shred of his mind that remained protected from the sight. For a single clock tick, the dead reached out their hands and begged Jack to join them as they had that day.

The Black couldn’t invade consciousness, couldn’t move him from one place to another, up and down through time. Jack ground his knuckles into his forehead, hoping pain would bring him back to the present.

He was in the alley behind his flat.

He was thirty-eight years old.

And he was clean. The things the Black showed him weren’t real, they were only memories birthed from dreams.

Even though he whispered the mantra to himself, over and over—Not real, not real, I’m clean, I’m clean—the laughter became corporeal, a velvet touch on the back of his neck.

Belatedly, Jack knew the pain for what it was, and anger burned the panic out of him. Panic was for common people, those who had never touched the Black. Panic was death. He recognized the pain in his skull, greeted the sensation as one he’d hoped never to feel again.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve crawling up out of Hell in me backyard, whoever you are,” he told the demon.

“Always a kind word for your friends, Jack,” the demon purred, and Jack felt his admittedly ill-used heart give a jump against his bones. The voice, the voice that came out of the haze in his head, through the memory of blood gone cold against skin, and of broken bones that pressed against nerve.

The voice. When Jack dreamed of the deed, he dreamed of the voice. The voice that whispered secrets, terrible secrets into his ear, and called him . . .

“Jack,” the demon said again, running black-painted nails over a black silk tie. Its shirt was white, too white for the real London, its suit coal, eyes and hair to match. In them an ember burned, the flicker of visible power Jack recognized from his own eyes. The demon’s were crimson with corruption, like oil fire floating on a darkened sea.

“Jack,” the demon said a third time, because it knew the power of names and of triads, had taught them to the first member of the Fiach Dubh a thousand years past. It drew its bloodied lips back over twin, pointed front teeth. “Don’t say you’re surprised to see me.”

Chapter Four

For all he prided himself on quick reflexes and quicker wits, Jack froze. He froze like a man caught out, with his sins on display like scars.

“You thought we wouldn’t meet, on the eve of the deed?” the demon questioned. He took a step toward Jack, his gait gliding as if he moved on a snake’s belly. Jack felt his heartbeat slow, his blood thump through his ears like the bass on stage during one of his sets with the Poor Dead Bastards, back in the bad old days. The edges of the world smoothed out, and he felt a cold, empty well open up behind his eyes.

“It’s been thirteen years for you, Jack Winter,” the demon said. Its tongue flicked its lips, crimson like it had just been dipped in blood. “Or nearly so.”

Jack didn’t allow himself the luxury of more than a few seconds of shock. That was all you got, and then the bastards ripped your spine out because you’d stood there catching flies, insensible with fear.

He dug deep, grabbed a great handful of magic, and flung it outward, toward the demon.

The protection hex came to life in a flare of blue witch-fire, the excess energy curling around Jack’s hands like tongues of flame around a tree branch. The air between the demon and himself rippled as the hex took hold. It wasn’t elegant and it wasn’t solid, but it was strong and rolled over the demon like a wave on rock.

The demon shook its head as if it had been caught up in a nest of cobwebs, and gave Jack a reproachful frown. “Still the same old Jack, jumping at shadows.” It glided forward again, like the snap of a camera lens—one heartbeat, one flicker of movement, and the demon was close enough to embrace him. Jack felt its thick, smoky aura brush up against his hex, heavy and dense. It was a fifty-fifty shot as to whether the hex would hold. Jack was mortal, and the demon was a creature of Hell. A thing made of magic against a bag of flesh with an unusual talent. This was usually the bit where the mage died horribly.

“If I didn’t know you so well, Jackie, I’d feel insulted,” the demon said. It smoothed a hand over its tie. The veins under the flesh stood out black as roads on a map. “But I do know you, boy. Paranoid as a schizophrenic on the corner. Impotent as a rapist with a bird who fights back.”

The demon chuckled to itself, and Jack found his voice. “I have time.”

“Ah, true,” the demon purred. “But how much? Have you counted? Have you marked a thick black X across the remaining days?”

“I have time,” Jack repeated. “And you and I have no business before that day. Threaten me again and you’ll find exactly how unpleasant I can be when some sulfur-scented bastard comes onto me home turf.”

“Your better half appears absent,” said the demon. “You won’t be able to do to me as you did to poor, foolish Talshebeth.” It sucked on its teeth, whistling against the air. “Pity, that is. Rumor has it she’s soft, supple, and willing. That true, Winter?”

Jack knew that the demon was toying with him, down in the hard and rational part of himself that kept him from getting into fights he couldn’t win over exactly this—a girl, an insult, or a petty threat. The demon was only exacting torment for Jack and Pete’s banishment of its mate, Talshebeth. Jack had called the demon of lost things to find a little girl who’d been stolen by the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell. Treadwell hadn’t taken kindly to this, and Talshebeth had tried to make Jack into a meal when their arrangement went pear shaped.

Jack knew this, but the witchfire around his hands flared and the hex vibrated like it had been struck. Black rage boiled up, filling the space between the demon and Jack, hot and throbbing on his skin like he’d hit a brick wall at full speed. The rage chased away rationality, and Jack started talking before he fully knew the words. “You don’t fucking speak about her. I’ll peel your skin off, roll it up, and shove it down your fucking throat, you cunt.”

Twin flames in its eyes dancing, the demon laughed again. Jack felt his hex waver as his rage warred with his concentration. His own arse was one thing, but Pete . . . enough of the Black already wanted the both of them on spikes. The demon would not touch Pete while Jack was drawing down air.