Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

Declan had always been a git, but he was a hand with markings. The sigil had saved Jack’s arse before, and now it would save him and Pete one more time.

It had to, because if the creature broke through, he was out of brilliant ideas.

“Jack. Jack!” Pete grabbed his shoulder and shook. “There’s something out there and it’s not stopping for a chat!”

“Give me half a fucking second,” he gritted. The symbols were slippery, transient, escaping his attempt to infuse them with power. Concentration shot, panic rising, wild magic threatening to claw his brain apart—never the best time to draw a complex magical wotsit.

Pete stilled herself with effort, effort that manifested in the widening of her pupils, the cords in her neck pulled taut by fear. “All right. All right. Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Jack put his hand against the symbols. They flopped with faint energy, like dying goldfish. Outside, the creature prowled, circling the car, scenting for life and magic.

Fuck it, he couldn’t take the chance that the sigil would crumble under the creature’s onslaught. He couldn’t chance visiting the Bleak Gates, not when the demon was walking in his shadow. Jack turned to Pete.

“What you can do is take my hand.”

She put her palm in his without hesitation. Warm, sure, alive. Trusting.

Like he’d spun a tap, power rushed through him, making his fingers and toes and everything else tingle. The sigil cycle glowed and then it lapped up his magic, strengthening, locking out the malevolent Black that crawled beyond the glass.

He felt the vast well of the Weir, the doorway to the old magics, the blood and bone and sex magics. It was sweet as bubbling spring water, hot as coal. It filled Jack with the high that only the Black could give.

The creature outside snarled, and then whined. It circled the Mini once more and then with a final throaty growl, it retreated, great fog lamps of eyes fading into the mist.

The power of the moor leached away at a far slower pace—whatever had gotten it up in the first place, called the creature, was strong enough to bend the raw Black to its will, to command a thin space between the worlds to appear and release its denizens.

Jack let out his first breath in what he swore was hours, felt his lungs burn and his head lighten. Pete let go of him. Her face was drawn and she was panting a little, grim circles standing out around her eyes and veins crawling up her face.

The first time her Weir talent had touched his magic, she’d passed out cold on the floor of his flat. This was an improvement, if not a vast one.

He brushed the backs of his knuckles over her cheek, reflexively. Make sure she was still warm and still had blood beating in her. “You all right, luv?”

She took in a breath, let it out, hands gripping her knees, wrinkling the denim hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Fine. What in fucking hell was that thing?”

The mist blew onward, wind rocking the Mini, and behind the mist came the rain, in soft gray sheets that wafted across the moor like wraiths chasing witchfire across the lowland bogs near Seth’s farmhouse in County Cork.

“Nasty,” Jack murmured. “A hungry, nasty creature of the Black.” His blood was drying to sticky paste on the window, and his palm ached. Pushing magic through his own blood always left him cold, fever-achy, and drained like he’d passed out in a pub loo and woken with a crick in his neck.

It left too the faint craving for that floating, golden place where his talent met Pete’s Weir. He wished to drink down every last drop of Pete’s power, ride it forever.

One fix or another, it made no difference.

“That’s it?” Pete jiggled the key and the Mini started on the first crank, purring contentedly as always. “Usually you talk my ear off, Professor. Have you ever seen something like it before?”

“Once,” Jack said, as they turned back onto the paved road and crawled back through the thinning fog to the junction.

He could still hear the howl, echoing off the low stone wall and thatch roof of Seth McBride’s farmhouse. He’d climbed up on the roof and lit a fag, watching the enormous spectral creature pad on four feet across the fields, a purpose in its step so terrible and deliberate that even though the night was warm and soft, the height of an Irish summer, Jack had felt bone-chilled.

The creature had looked at him, great blazing eyes staring across the distance and searing him body and sight. Then it had walked on, over the rise and into the valley, where Seth’s closest neighbors resided.

In the morning an ambulance bumped over the dirt track and into the same valley, left again with cargo wrapped in a yellow hazmat bag.

You got yourself under stone when you heard a cu sith at bay. The black dog scented for blood, and the blood of the soul he’d come for was the only blood that would do.

It was the first time Jack felt real fear toward a creature of the Black. Demons could swallow you down into Hell and Fae could bargain your memories away for a song, but they had rules. They could be tricked. No one bargained with the cu sith , the hound of Death. No mortal could make it see reason, no matter how clever a bastard he might be. Jack didn’t like fear—fear was useless in the Black, the stealthy, laughing killer that made you freeze, forget your hexing words, and piss yourself before something bit your head off.

The cu sith was a subject of fear, of the inexorable human fate that conjured it. You couldn’t look into its lantern eyes and not see death staring back, unblinking and untenable.

“It’s a cu sith ,” Jack said. “Lots of names besides the Irish—black dog, in English. Harbinger of death. Chases down souls and drags them through the Gates.”

They pulled into the circular drive of the Naughton house and Jack had the peculiar sensation again of falling into a vortex, the Black swirling and concentrating in this spot. After the cu sith, though, the state of Naughton’s psychic real estate seemed a minor concern.

“Any particular souls?” Pete climbed out and approached the sucking void, but Jack blinked and it was just a rotted-out, rundown estate again.

“Any it can get its jaws around,” he said. Pete bit her lip as if she wanted to press him, but she merely collected her keys and bag and went inside.

Jack stayed for a moment, reluctant to walk back into Naughton’s eldritch problem.

If the cu sith had only been hungry, it might have happened upon him by accident.

But he was a mage and this was the Black and there weren’t any accidents or fucking coincidences. The cu sith had come for him, had seen the brand of the demon hovering just out of view. Marked for bloody death, and a cu sith ’s favorite snack. Jack had the cold comfort that the cu sith was stepping onto the demon’s turf and that the demon made short work of those who tried to play with its toys.

The only downside to the equation was Jack being the toy.

He watched the crow land on the finial of Naughton’s roof and caw, spreading its wings and widening its beak until it looked grotesque, as if it were trying to answer Pete’s query.

Any particular soul?

Only mine , Jack replied. Jack fucking Winter, dead man bloody walking.

Jack didn’t believe in dwelling on the inevitable. Try to change the future, and the future would just fuck you back, bent over and proper. Instead, he went into the Naughton house, went to his room, and checked his kit for graveyard dirt, coffin nails, herbs, and his scrying mirror. Matches, chalk, and copper wire. The essential tools of Jack Winter, exorcist. Much different than Jack Winter, wrung-out junkie, and much preferable. It gave him something to think about other than the demon’s bargain. He was good at exorcisms, sure of them and himself when he was performing them. If he could solve Naughton’s poxy problem and get Pete some cash in the doing, so much the better.