Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

When Jack opened his eyes, the crow sat on the cross-beams of the station roof, and flicked its beak behind Jack as if to say, Watch your arse, old son.

In the same moment, his sight flared, like someone had put a pipe across the back of his skull.

Jack spun back the way he’d come, so quickly that he dragged Pete around in a drunken dance with him.

Two figures moved through the crowd disgorged from a Bristol train, two men in workman’s coveralls when he looked straight on, and emaciated forms with black, bleeding holes for eyes when he blinked.

Jack skidded to a stop, Pete stumbling against him. “Fuck.”

Pete’s eyes widened. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Those two.” Jack jerked his chin. The figures passed by and through travelers, and where they touched, faces fell and eyes narrowed in anger. Travelers shoved. Babies shrieked. A woman in a green wool coat slapped her lover and ran off in the direction of the loo, sobbing.

“Yeah?” Pete let go of him, dropping her shoulders and curling her fists, like a small but determined bulldog. Jack had witnessed her drop men twice her size, but these were not men. The cold encroachment of their energy prickled the hair on his arms, made the ink in his tattoos dance, made the Black spin in front of his eyes as his sight screamed to show him the true faces of the things before him.

“Sluagh,” he said.

“Gesundheit?” Pete said hopefully. Jack shook his head. An entry from one of Seth McBride’s diaries swam up into his mind. Sluagh. Restless spirits.

Seth may have been a wanker, the bastard child of con man, mage, and roaring Irish drunk, but he knew ghosts, knew them better than any man besides Jack himself. He’d taught Jack enough to stay alive for another nineteen-odd years, at least.

“The restless dead,” Jack said aloud. “Sent away from the Bleak Gates to trouble the living.”

The twinned ghosts opened their mouths in a single, silent scream, and in unison raised arms of dessicated flesh and bone tipped with black nails that curled over with graveyard growth. They pointed at Jack, eyes and teeth spilling black pollution across the psychic space of Paddington.

“I gather they’re not here to have a pint and a laugh?” Pete said.

“No,” Jack said. “The sluagh appear at the moment of a person’s death.” He turned in a slow circle, watching more and more of the silent, howling, and pointing figures appear in the crowd. “And they always travel in packs.”

“They’re here for you?” Pete snugged close against his side, their arms touching along the length. She wasn’t asking him the question except as a courtesy, and Jack was relieved he didn’t have to answer. As a mage, whatever horrid thing crawled from under a rock was most likely there for you and your skin, and Pete had at least learned that much.

Jack watched the sluagh by turns, counted them, felt the chill abrasion of the dead against his sight.

They advanced, in flickers and slithers, leaving a black trail across the floor of Paddington. Cold stole across Jack’s cheeks and burned his lungs, and the sluagh watched, pointed, marked him as the death they’d come to claim.

“Jack!” He became aware of Pete shouting, in a harsh whisper to avoid passersby noticing her panic. Still tight against him, like they were twins sharing a heart. “Shield hex?” she mouthed.

The sluagh were close enough to touch now, if he’d been a madman with a death wish. “No,” Jack said tightly. “No bloody good.” The dead were not tempered or repelled by living magic. Unwanted, the memory of Algernon Treadwell and his overweening hunger came to Jack, borne on the cold air ruffled by the passage of the sluagh.

Don’t just stand there like a knob. Not the fix, now. A little of Seth, a little of Pete, a little of his own survival instinct, battered and bloodied as it was.

Only blood could sate a spirit, and only dead blood could sate the sluagh.

Jack snatched Pete’s hand, and the jolt of her magic, the sight, and his own talent nearly unbalanced him again. “Run,” he ordered. “Run and don’t look back.”

With his free hand, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled forth his flick knife. The blade popped, a gleam of quicksilver obscured by crimson as Jack turned the knife to slice through the back of his opposite hand.

Blood fell to the dirty, mud-crusted floor of the station. One drop, two, three.

“ Go dtáthaí mé tú ,” Jack muttered, and the gray tendrils of the spell feebly sought out the sluagh. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. Jack needed more blood and more time to keep the dead away.

But it was his spell, the ghost box, his strongest magic. As the blood fell, Jack wove the cage of power and sight, holding the spirits back, keeping the dead at bay for just a little longer. The ghost box was the first spell he’d learned, the first, desperate magic that he’d tried when he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t simply succumbing to the same kind of delusion that made his mother talk to her plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary. Jack had first felt the Black enter him alone on the floor of a filthy, leaking squat on the outskirts of Manchester. He’d poxed it up, and was lucky he hadn’t died then and there, but the ghost box, straight from a mouldering “ye olde chaos magicke” tome at the library, had held.

Jack hoped fervently, with a jump of nerves in his chest that hadn’t happened in years, that it held now.

The sluagh drew back from the entanglement of blood magic, their silent mouths growing long, ghostly white teeth.

Jack ducked through a gap in their ranks and ran, towing Pete behind him. She hadn’t obeyed his order to run, but he hadn’t expected her to. Pete was too stubborn to run even for her own bloody good.

Jack took the stairs to the Underground lines two at a time, shoving passengers out of the way. He let go of Pete and vaulted the fare gates, a transit worker shouting at him, just a blur of blue and life next to the overwhelming, encroaching flock of sluagh.

Jack veered into the tunnel for the Bakerloo Line, his heart pulsating like to break his ribs. He had a moment of This is it, you’ve blown your wad as his vision blacked, and then he was on the platform and a train was roaring into the tunnel and Pete snatched his arm and kept him from going over the edge onto the tracks.

The doors sprang open, disgorging their human load, and Jack shoved his way inside.

“ Please stand clear of the doors, ” the robot announced. “ This is a Bakerloo Line train to Elephant and Castle. ”

Jack slumped against the train window as the car pulled out of the station. The sluagh stood on the platform in a cluster of nightmares, hollowed-out eyes following him until the train rounded a corner and they were lost to blackness and reflection.

“Too much iron,” Jack rasped. The need for a fag was vicious, and had claws. “Even for them.”

“What did they want with you?” Pete said. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, palms making a soft hiss against the leather.

“Me dead, I suppose,” Jack said. “’S the only thing sluagh ever want.”

“Because they’re restless?” Pete stepped to the door as the train pulled into the next station, at Edgeware Road. “Unfinished business or some bollocks?”

“Not likely,” Jack said. “The restless dead are them too full of malice and hunger even for the Land of the Dead.” Sluagh were wild spirits, feral dogs feeding on the souls and deaths of the living. Picking spectral bones, until there was nothing left.

They came into the day, out of the tunnels at last, and Jack breathed in a lungful of cold, damp air. It was nearly as good as nicotine. “They’re hungry, plain and simple,” he told Pete. “And they’ve been pointed at me to feed themselves.”