Demon Bound Read online

  Praise for Caitlin Kittredge’s Nocturne City series

  PURE BLOOD

  “Pure Blood pounds along hard on the heels of Night Life, and is every bit as much fun as the first in the series. With a gutsy, likable protagonist and a well-made fantasy world, Pure Blood is real enough to make you think twice about locking your doors at night. A swiftly paced plot, a growing cast of solid supporting characters, and a lead character you can actually care about—Kittredge is a winner.”

  —Jim Butcher

  “ With enough supernatural death and romance to keep readers glued to the pages…Jump in with both feet and hang on tight because Pure Blood is an emotion-filled ride.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “The pacing is rapid and the peril imminent…This is a series and an author that are definitely going places!”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “The unexpected plot twists and high-octane action of Pure Blood kept me turning the pages until the wee hours of the morning.”

  —Romance Junkies

  NIGHT LIFE

  “Dark and cutting-edge.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “I loved the mystery and the smart, gutsy heroine.”

  —Karen Chance, New York Times bestselling author of Claimed by Shadow

  “Don’t go to bed with this book—it will keep you up all night. It’s that good.”

  —Lilith Saintcrow, national bestselling author of Working for the Devil

  “Luna is tough, smart, and fierce, hiding a conflicted and insecure nature behind her drive for justice and independence, without falling into cliché. It's also just a lot of fun to read.”

  —Kat Richardson, national bestselling author of Greywalker

  “Fast-paced, sexy, and witty with many more interesting characters than I have time to mention. I'm looking forward to reading more stories in the exciting Nocturne City series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Wow, I am still thinking about this book. The last time I reacted to a book this way, it was the first Mercy Thompson book by Patricia Briggs. If you are looking for a book that seamlessly blends a police procedural with a paranormal, go out and get this book.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “A tense, gritty urban fantasy that grips the audience from the onset.”

  —Mystery Gazette

  “Night Life dived right into the action, and carried me along for the ride…If the following books are written with the same care and interest as Night Life, they will be a welcome addition to this fantasy genre.”

  —Armchair Interviews

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles by

  Caitlin Kittredge

  BLACK LONDON SERIES

  Street Magic

  Demon Bound

  NOCTURNE CITY SERIES

  Night Life

  Pure Blood

  Second Skin

  Witch Craft

  Demon Bound

  CAITLIN KITTREDGE

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DEMON BOUND

  Copyright © 2009 by Caitlin Kittredge.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN 978-0-312-94363-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / December 2009

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PART I

  Clockwork

  Listen to the army march across my coffin lid

  Fire in the east and sunrise in the west

  I’m just a dead man, walking with the rest

  —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 Fiach Dubh. The brothers of the crow were the rock stars of a magic trade often fraught with blood and blackness, hard and wicked men whom no one crossed.

  Many of them were that. Jack was not. And if he did have sense, he’d stop before his talent burned a hole in him.

  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 did accuse him of sense, it would likely be time to hang up his spurs.

  “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, I have what you need. Take it and warm yourself, save yourself, taste the golden delights of the floating world.

  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 tick.

  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 tick, louder, stronger, and Jack nodded. “Wake them up.”

  “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.

  Jack had learned that rule the hard way.

  In his hand, the spirit heart stopped.

  It gave a last click, and the sides opened to allow the Pooles’ residual energies in. Jack released his grip on the chain, and the spirit heart floated under its own steam, turning gently in the passage of power from the awakened ghosts.

  “Yes? Hello?” Mary Poole stood partly in the earth, ankles cut off by the grave. Her burial clothes clung to her frame in tatters. “Hello, yes? Can you hear me?”

  “What do you want?” Stuart Poole was heavy, a heavy face full of jowls sitting on top of a heavy mound of body. “Who are you?”

  “Jack Winter,” Jack said. “This here’s Petunia Caldecott.”

  He flinched when Pete fetched him a punch in the shoulder. “Tosser.” She faced the ghost, pleasant and pointed as if Stuart Poole were a banker she suspected of defrauding his clientele. “Mr. Poole, we’re here on behalf of your children. Jayne and Stuart, the junior?”

  “Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Can you hear me?”

  “Repeater,” Jack said at Pete’s questioning eyebrow. “Just a fragment of a spirit left behind with the bones. Mary Poole’s been taken on to her eternal reward, if you believe that bollocks.”

  “Comforting to know what’s waiting when I shuffle loose the mortal coil,” Pete muttered.

  “Pardon me, but I’ve asked a question—who in blazes are you?” Stuart Poole
demanded. “This is most irregular.”

  “Pete,” Pete said. “And that’s Jack, like we’ve established. Your children have some questions about your will, Mr. Poole. Seems they’re absent from it?”

  “Your beloved offspring were wondering if perhaps there was some mistake there,” Jack expanded. The dead pressed closer behind him, and he heard the wings, like wind through a grove of trees, but they were wings. He knew the sound. It was familiar, old, as much a part of him as his tattoos or the vertical scar on his right cheek from the business end of a smashed witch bottle.

  Jack supposed he had stolen that necromancer’s Hand of Glory, and his wife, but he still thought the bloke had overreacted.

  Scars faded, but the rush of wings never did. They always circled back, always came to him when he talked to the dead. A living walker in death’s realm always called to them, the eyes and wings of the Underworld. The crows of Death.

  “Jack . . .,” Pete said, right on cue. She didn’t have the sight, but she did have a connection he didn’t, to the push and pull of power under the world, the constant tide of the Black under their feet.

  “I know, I know,” he snapped. “Wrapping up—how is it, Stu? You cut your brats out of the will, or was it all a terrible misunderstanding that will be resolved with tears and hugging and vows to be a better sort of person because it’s what Mum and Dad would have wanted if they hadn’t kicked off in that lorry collision?”

  Stuart Poole puffed up, his silvery insubstantial form spreading out over the graves. “It most certainly was not a misunderstanding. Jayne and my son were miscreants—Stuart with his embezzling and Jayne with her women.”