Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“Cleansing will take an hour or so,” he told Pete when she came to the door and propped herself against the jamb by her shoulder, watching him lay out his kit. “Got to find a setup spot where the poltergeist can’t fling any crockery at me head.”

“I’m going to look in Danny’s room in the meantime,” she said. “See if there’s anything Nick missed.”

“Might be a good spot,” Jack decided. Nick. Christ on a bike. Nothing but bloody Nick. “Close to but not too close to where he kicked off.” Setting up a cleansing on a suicide’s last breathing spot was just asking to have your lungs ripped through your nose by an angry spirit.

Jack gathered his tools and followed Pete to Danny’s room, a large back bedroom that looked out on the rotting, soggy gardens. The rain lashed down in earnest outside, and wind crawled under the slanted eaves of the Naughton house, moaning low and lost. Day outside darkened to the half-night of storms and dreams.

Jack wiggled his eyebrows at Pete when a bad gust rattled the windows. “How apropos. Always did like a bit of mood weather.”

Now, with the job, he could put the cu sith and the ghosts in Paddington out of his mind. At least for the few moments it took to cleanse Danny’s sad, wandering spirit.

The room Danny Naughton had chosen was worse than Jack’s own flat, if that were possible—the peeling plaster and warped floors, the chipped war-era furniture, all attached to a crumbling en suite equipped with the sort of plumbing American comedians cracked jokes about.

The bed was stripped bare, a stained mattress the only sign anyone had recently slept atop it. Drawers stood half open, clothes trailing out and across the floor like shed skin. Nancy Nick had been in a whirlwind hurry to get out of the place after Danny hung himself, Jack thought. That or he’d been keen to erase evidence of something before the emergency crew showed themselves. Jack’d cleaned up enough mates who’d overdosed to know the signs.

A massive mirror opposite the bed was covered with a sheet, and Pete moved to snatch it off. Jack stopped her with a hand up.

“Leave it. Mirrors could let something watch us that we don’t want.”

Pete frowned. “Do you think he knew? Danny? That this place was off?”

Jack kicked an empty plastic bottle, and it rolled to join three more fellows under the bed. “I think he liked his vodka cheap and by the quart.”

Pete examined the empty closet, jangling wire hangers the only residents. She was methodical, sifting through the detritus atop the dresser and each drawer with quick, professional fingers. Jack could imagine her in a pants suit and blue nitrile gloves, standing in this same room while white-suited crime scene technicians moved around her like explorers on a foreign moon.

Her hair would be pulled back in the low, efficient ballerina twist she’d worn during her time at the Met. Her warrant card and badge clipped to her belt along with handcuffs and pepper spray. A low heel, nothing flashy or trampy, just enough to elevate her petite frame to eye level with the male detectives of the squad.

“You’re staring at me,” Pete said. “Keep it up and I’m going to think I have something growing out of my forehead.”

She wriggled the bedside drawer. “This one’s locked.”

“Let me,” Jack said. He passed his fingers over the lock, and then pulled his ring of skeleton keys from his leather. They wore an enchantment, just the smallest charm to conduct a spell. Jack found them years ago at a bazaar in Leeds, mixed in with a box of mundane junk. He sometimes wondered about the mage who’d lost such a valuable tool, but not often.

Jack stuck the smallest key into the lock and whispered the words inscribed around the hilt and down the shaft of each skeleton key.

There was a click and the drawer popped open, over-flowing with small squares of paper.

“You should teach me that one,” Pete said.

“You wouldn’t want it,” Jack said. Pete took a handful of the slips and shuffled through them.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Lockpicking is transmutation. Transmutation is black magic,” Jack said. “You don’t want to have that on your first try, luv.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You do it. I’ve seen you crack open a lock a dozen times.”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “I’ve got an affinity for breaking and entering, luv. Has more to do with nicking things when I was a stupid kid than magic, truth be told.”

“Of course,” Pete snapped. “You have the ease of everything. I’d just pox it up, like some stupid kid. Not like bloody Jack Winter.” She crumpled the slips viciously.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Jack protested. Pete’s temper, like her freckles, was Irish and her glare could have cut glass. “You have an affinity, luv. You find things like no one I’ve ever seen.” Jack stepped back and let Pete examine the drawer. “Lost papers. Lost children.” He swallowed, his tongue dry in the closed-up room. “Lost souls.”

Pete’s anger faded, replaced by half of a small smile. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at,” she said at last. Jack nodded.

“It’s the truth. What have you found, then?”

“They’re betting slips,” Pete said. “From all over the country. Losing bets, mostly.”

“So Danny boy spent the time he wasn’t getting pissed and seeing ghosts betting on the ponies?” Jack said. As far as skeletons in a rich twat’s closet went, it was fairly mundane. Nobody was even wearing lady’s underthings. “Nicky might have mentioned that,” he murmured. “Seems quite a thing to omit.”

“He might not have known,” Pete said. “You’d be surprised what families can keep from one another. Met a bloke once, had a mistress living one flat block over from his wife and children. They used to pass each other in the street and nod hello. Did it for years .”

“Why’d you get involved, then?” Jack dropped to one knee and started setting up his supplies. Ritual was familiarity as much as magic. Setting out the tools of exorcism quieted the mind, readied it for the things an exorcist would see pulling in wayward ghosts.

“His wife puzzled it out and blew his head off with a skeet rifle,” Pete said. “Can’t say I blamed her overly much.”

“That’s a secret for you,” Jack said. “Like vicious little dogs. Never know when they’ll turn around and bite.”

Pete stopped her searching and cast her gaze on him. Her eyes could cut you like broken green glass if she meant to get the truth.

“Indeed,” was all she said.

Jack put out his scrying mirror, a black ceramic bowl, and matches for burning herbs, a nub of chalk for the circle. He sat down cross-legged even though he felt a groan in the hinges of his knees and fingered a piece of chalk, deciding what to draw into the varnish-bubbled floorboards. Spells and hexes ran wild in a mage’s blood, scrawled on car windows and dripped onto tube station floors, but exorcisms had to be orderly.

Seth had shown him the results when they weren’t orderly and measured. When an exorcist lost his cool.

Once Jack had finished vomiting his breakfast into Seth’s loo, he’d paid attention to the lessons, and he hadn’t let a ghost get over on him yet. Until Algernon Treadwell’s ghost. But that time, Pete had been there. She’d yanked him back from the Gates with her talent, and anchored him to the living world.

He owed Pete a favor, no question. And such a favor wasn’t lying about the demon’s bargain. Jack could deceive others with ease but lying to Pete always took on a hollow quality, made him feel rotted and twisted up inside like a car wreck.

“Find anything else? More rattling skeletons?” he asked as Pete poked about in the wardrobe, so that she wouldn’t take his silence for what it was and ask him, in the manner of nosy coppers, what he was thinking about.