Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“Hopefully not so far my shoes start leaking. I’m in a foul enough mood already.”

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets, keeping a few steps ahead of Pete. He swept the hills from one side of the road to the other, steps hard and sharp on the gravel, heartbeat sharper. Whatever was out there in the fog stared back. Jack could see nothing except the phantoms of mist wandering aimlessly among the hedges and the hills, but he felt it. His skin went colder than the air, and he curled his fists inside his leather, scrabbling for a little magic to throw behind a shield hex. He wasn’t going to be dragged away like a sod in a fairy tale. Whatever had stalked them to this deserted spot clearly didn’t know what sort of a mood he was in.

Nothing sprang at him as they walked away from the Mini, but the wild power of the moor followed, and the watcher followed with it. Jack resigned himself to a game of seeing which of them broke nerve first—the mage, or the creature.

“You know,” Pete said as they squelched through the dead grass on the shoulder of the road, “this reminds me of that night. You remember the one, where you played the set at Club Bleu . . .”

“And your sister got herself pissed on tequila,” Jack remembered. Pete’s sister MG was a vision in black lace, long Bettie Page curls, wide eyes, and lips made for blow jobs All of which hid a mind that would have done the bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction proud. In other words, she was just Jack’s—old Jack, Bastards frontman Jack—type. If there wasn’t a chance a bird would come at you with a kitchen knife, where was the laugh?

“Right, and she made us walk for miles at three in the morning looking for a curry.” Pete picked up the thread.

“Not just any curry,” Jack said.

“A green curry.” They mimicked MG’s put-on posh accent together.

“Thank God they only made one of her.” Pete sighed. “That’s what our Da used to say.”

Jack had first seen Pete standing at the edge of the pit in Fiver’s, a hole in the wall shitebox, far from Club Bleu as she was from her sister, even though they’d arrived together. Where MG dominated every room she entered, Pete stayed small and pale, worrying a full pint glass between her hands. There was no great lightning bolt, no flash of recognition from past lives. She looked at him, and he looked at her, while the music played.

And suddenly, MG had been the furthest person from his thoughts.

“I . . .” Jack swallowed his words. Whatever he’d seen in the dirty basement club that night was gone now. Now, there was a demon, and a dozen years of growing older and harder in between.

“Yes?” Pete turned back to face him. They were standing close as they’d ever been, save for the night Jack had pulled Pete out of Highgate Cemetery, bleeding for trying to keep him from being swallowed by the hungry ghost of Algernon Treadwell.

Closer even than when she’d kissed him.

Jack reached out and brushed the droplets of mist from her hair. “Not a thing, luv.” He dropped his hand, and stepped back. “Not a bloody thing.”

Behind Pete, in the fog, something moved. Jack didn’t see it, not really. His headache spiked and his skin numbed as if a north wind had blown across his face, and a shadow flicked in and out of his vision faster than the shadow from a nightmare.

Hulking and dark, it moved across his sight, parting the mist. A long, low howl echoed between the hills, lower than the wail of the bansidhe or the scream of the bean nighe .

Pete whipped her head around. Her sixth sense, the part of her connected to the Black, felt it—the soul-stealing cold, the oppressive weight of a creature of magic breaking the barrier between worlds.

“Jack.” She reached back and grabbed for his hand without taking her eyes off the spot where the thing stood. It was indistinct, the size of a small horse, just a black blur of fog surrounded by lighter mist. Whatever Jack had imagined coming when he’d felt the magic of the moor awaken, he hadn’t imagined it would be quite as large.

Or seem quite as slagged off.

“Pete,” he said in return, to let her know he was still there, wasn’t running.

The thing snarled, a sound that cut through his ribs straight to his heart. Twin golden globes blossomed in the fog, as if the creature were all flame inside. Eyes, golden and round, staring at Jack and through him, straight down to the bone.

“Pete,” Jack repeated. “We need to get back to the car.”

The creature in the fog took a step forward, its power brushing up against Jack’s. The creature was cold, the cold of dead skin and frozen iron. Its magic was hard and un-yielding, power borne of the Underworld.

It could cut through Jack’s shield hex like a razor through a wrist.

He wasn’t up for debating the point, either. Maybe twenty years ago, when he was stupid and carried a death wish with him like a scar. But not today. He was too old and too bastard-clever now to engage with something that had crawled straight up from the Land of the Dead. Particularly when that something so clearly wanted to gnaw his bones.

Pete twined her fingers in his, and he felt the flutter of the gateway she carried in her talent. A Weir possessed a direct line to the oldest, sharpest, bloodiest part of the Black. It promised a mage like him power beyond imagination, if only he were willing to burn himself to ash and Pete, too, in the process. When a Weir and a mage met, the uncontrolled magic could eat you alive. Terrible catastrophes had resulted, and the sweet, overwhelming desire to let the magic take him was the reason.

Jack yanked his hand free. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.

Running was nearly always a better option than dying, so Jack turned and pelted for the Mini as if the coppers were chasing him and he had open warrants.

The thing gave chase, cold breath on his back, panting in his ear, and the howl that could rend flesh ululating across the moor.

Jack’s fingers fumbled for the Mini’s door, scrabbled uselessly as Pete dove across the driver’s seat and sprang the latch.

Jack fell in, his sight shrieking, and slammed the door.

“What the bloody fuck is that thing?” Pete shouted, but he barely heard her. She was down a long tunnel, back in the living world. The Black boiled up around him, threatening to drag him under, take him to that primal bloodlust that flowed under the moor. Under the hill, to the old races that waited there.

Jack had seen what lived under the hill.

He wouldn’t go back.

The cut on his hand from Paddington was raw and weeping still, but he turned the flick-knife on the same digits, his off hand. If he needed to work a spell or, fuck, pick a pocket, he needed his left.

He sliced the fat of his palm deep, felt the cold bite of metal and the serpent sting.

The air was so cold now from the encroach of the creature that his blood steamed when it hit the glass. Jack smeared his palm down the car window, leaving a ruddy streak, and when he had enough blood began to draw.

Sigils weren’t something the Fiach Dubh had much faith in. Their magic was gut-deep, physical, the shield hex and the summoning circle. Pretty drawings are for pretty faeries, boy. Seth McBride’s voice, roughened by cigarettes and hard magic, crept in as Jack tried to push magic into the blood. Seth had taught Jack the hard and fast, boot-tothe-bollocks rules. The ways and wicked tricks of the Brothers of the Crow. He came back, unbidden, most often when Jack had gotten himself into a situation that would end either with him a corpse or royally fucked.

“Shut your gob, Seth. Crusty old Mick,” Jack muttered as he finished the cycle. Picked it from the notebook of Declan Disher, a Vatican-trained exorcist who found Wicca and swanned about in a hippie shirt and pentacle until a gang of Stygian Brothers cut out his liver one night in a dark pub washroom and used it as a ceremonial offering to Nergal. Or perhaps Dagon. Jack got the two mixed up sometimes.