Demon Bound Read online

  Jack cocked an eyebrow at Pete. “The very nerve.”

  “They’re not getting a penny!” Stuart Poole bellowed. “Not a single cold shilling, you understand?”

  “Perfectly.” Jack dropped a wink at Stuart Poole. “Hope you’re less of a miserable sod in the afterlife, guv.”

  “I never heard such . . . ,” Poole began, but Jack let go of the thin thread of spirit he’d caught, and Stuart sputtered out like a run-down torch.

  The wings were much closer now, ruffling the leaves and the grass around their feet, filling up the air with hisses and cries.

  “Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Shove off, luv,” Jack said. “Your ticket’s pulled. Run on and frolic up in God’s heaven, now.”

  “Jack, honestly,” Pete said, rolling her eyes. She snapped the camera shut and tucked it back into the bag.

  Jack reached out and gently cradled the heart as the clockwork slowed to nothing. The sound of ghosts leaving the living was almost never a howl, an explosion, or a dramatic dying gasp. Like most things, the dead just faded away.

  The wings went with them. The ravens of the Bleak Gates, the guards of the entrance to death, had found their quarry, and it hadn’t been him. Today.

  “Good job of that,” Pete said. “Quick and quiet, and the Poole family can’t dispute it.”

  “Pete, people will always dispute what they don’t want to hear,” Jack said. “Although if you’re desperate enough to call on a shady ghost-raising sod like meself, I really don’t think you can dispute much of anything. Certainly not that you’re a tosser.”

  “And I thought I was a pessimist.” Pete folded the camera into its case and handed him the bag. Jack shoved his spirit heart inside and shouldered the weight. He’d never had to drag around a bloody satchel when he was living as a mage. A little salt and chalk in the pocket, a sliver of mirror or silver, and it was enough to curse or hex his way out of and into most trouble. He’d carried more kit to shoot up than to work magic.

  “Let’s call on the Pooles and get this over with, shall we?” he asked Pete, ignoring her last comment. You couldn’t spend any time at all in the Black and not lose faith in men, gods, and basic decency. The only ones who didn’t were the prize idiots who soon got themselves topped, if the older, hungrier citizens of his world were merciful.

  “Now we’re eager to work?” Pete shoved her hands into her jacket. “This isn’t going to be a pleasant scene, you know.”

  “Yes, well. The less time I have to spend doing parlor tricks for rich twats, the better off we’ll all be.” Jack added extra weight to his step as they reached Old Brompton Road and started for the tube station. His jackboots rang against the pavement like funeral knells.

  Pete let the twat remark pass, and for that Jack was grateful. His temper had returned with a vengeance when he kicked his habit, and lost the thing keeping his sight at bay. The sight was no longer intermittent and faulty, forcing him to live rough and desperate as he used to keep the dead where the dead belonged. Now it was raw, like a fire eating through the paper of his mind, and it played hell with his control.

  Pete got the brunt of it, and though she bore it with sharpness and a frown like a Victorian nursemaid, she didn’t deserve it. The heroin hadn’t eaten away enough of his brain to mask that fact. He was a twat himself for the things he said and did to her, but she’d chosen to stay with him, chosen the Black over her old, safe life, and Jack wasn’t so noble he would force her away for her own good.

  The truth was, if he didn’t have the fix he needed her. And needing anything wasn’t a luxury a mage of his situation could afford.

  But it was the truth, and Jack knew that in the Black, there was no changing truth.

  Chapter Two

  The Pooles lived in Kensington, in a million-pound row house that Jack would have happily vandalized at a point in the not-so-distant past. Pete stepped up and rang the bell, the camera dangling from her fist. “Let me talk to them, right? Let’s have a minimum of interrupting and an absence of swearing until the check’s in hand.”

  Jack sighed, irritation spiking like acid in his guts. “I know how to play nicely, Pete. I’m not going to steal the silver or insult the Queen.”

  “The Pooles’ kids are not going to be pleased,” Pete said. “The last thing I need is you making things worse.”

  “Oi, who’s the teacher and who’s the apprentice, luv?” Jack said. “I’ve been raising ghosts since you were in nappies.”

  “You’re the teacher, it’s true and you’re brilliant,” Pete said, with that deceptively sweet smile, the one that would take your head off like a razor if you got too close to it. “But you have the social skills of a chimpanzee on match day, and I’ll be doing the talking.”

  “Well and good,” Jack grumbled in assent, since he’d probably say something to get the police called with the mood his headache and the effort of raising the spirits had fetched.

  Jayne Poole opened the door and drew back, like one did when they found salesmen on the stoop. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve found something?” Jayne Poole had a pinched, anxious air to her, like a thin, nervous dog with thin, nervous blood.

  “We did, Ms. Poole,” Pete said. “May we come in?”

  Jayne Poole stepped aside and gestured them into the dank bowels of the house, which still smelled like her parents even after the nearly full year since their deaths. Jack couldn’t blame her entirely for the grim memorializing that was going on—death by runaway beer lorry wasn’t the most dignified end a couple of posh twats could come to.

  Pete walked ahead of Jayne Poole, who moved slow and sloppy with pills or gin, or both. Jack would wager there was a regular Sid and Nancy doing a dance in her bloodstream.

  “We made contact with your mum and dad,” Pete said, “and spoke about the issue of the will. . . .”

  “Yes?” Jayne Poole chewed on her bloodless lower lip, one long square nail tapping her overbite. All that money, Jack thought, and the Pooles couldn’t fix their daughter’s traditional English teeth.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Pete said. Jayne Poole put her hand on her throat, covering the large emerald pendant that sat in the hollow like a wart on a wicked witch.

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean, Miss Caldecott? I was Father’s favorite. I paid you good money . . .”

  Jack cleared his throat. “Not to split hairs, but your brother paid us, and it don’t change the result—you and he both get nothing. And incidentally, the old man? Not such a fan of yours.”

  Jayne Poole’s mouth flapped open, snapped shut, and she jabbed her finger at Pete. “How dare he speak to me that way? How dare the both of you take our money and deliver this . . . this . . . shite?”

  Pete opened the camcorder and pressed the playback. Stuart Poole’s voice rattled through the sitting room, the windy, eldritch sound that ghosts on film took on.

  Two heat flowers blossomed on Jayne Poole’s cheeks. “It’s fake,” she said hotly. “You must have faked it. Father would never say such things. Patently ridiculous.”

  “Ms. Poole, we’ve done the job you paid us for,” Pete said, “and we’d like the rest of the money now.”

  Jayne Poole clopped over to the door on her spiked shoes, heels digging divots out of the soft wood floors. Jack thought of his flesh, and flinched. “Get out,” Jayne Poole snapped, flinging the door wide to let in the muted daytime sounds of Kensington. “You’ll get not one red cent from me, and you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.”

  “Ms. Poole,” Pete warned, her eyes going jewel-hard. “I advise you to think carefully before you decide not to pay us.”

  “What are you going to do?” Jayne Poole’s horsey lip curled back. “Put a curse on me?”

  “Don’t bloody tempt me,” Jack muttered, and grunted at the sharp pain when Pete jabbed him in the ribs.

  “I’ll deal with this,” she said, low. “Ms. Poole . . .”

  “Out!” Jayne Poole cried. “
Out, right now, before I call the police.”

  Pete threw up her hands. “I would love to see you do that,” she told Jayne Poole. She shut the camera with a slap and shoved it into the bag. “Come on, Jack. We’re finished.”

  Jack followed Pete to the door, stopping on the threshold and turning his eyes back to Jayne Poole, who stood in the center of the foyer huffing like a well-coiffed freight train. “Your father hated you,” he told Jayne. “Right down to your greedy, rotten core, and it’s easy to see why. You’ll see him again sooner than you think, so perhaps you should spend your remaining years trying to become a bit less of a cunt.”

  Jayne Poole’s fists curled, and she let out a sound of fury, but Jack ducked out before she could land a blow. “You take care, now, Ms. Poole.”

  Pete rubbed her forehead as the door slammed behind them, leaving them with curious looks from the pavement population, tourists and posh types browsing in the nearby antique shop. Jack 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 voi
ce. 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.