Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

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.”

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.”