Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

And he’d lied to her. He’d used the danger of the demon to lie to Pete, likely the only person who wouldn’t leave him in the gutter at the truth. Jack wrapped his arms around himself as shivers wracked him, his stomach bucking again even though there was nothing left to bring up.

“I’m sorry, Pete.” His voice came out a rasp that barely lifted over the rain, and his ruined throat clenched.

Pete scrubbed her hands over her face, blending the rain and tears. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. He reached out and had more success capturing her hand this time. “Please don’t go, Petunia.” He dropped his head back, shut his eyes. His sight was empty, and the bright blazing place where it lived in his mind was cold. “Don’t go,” he said to Pete, so that he could barely hear himself over the drumming rain. “I need you.”

Pete let him close his hand around her palm, but she wouldn’t look at him. “If you really mean that, Jack, and you don’t want me walking away right this moment, then you’d better give me an explanation that isn’t a complete load of bollocks.”

Jack gripped Pete’s hand. “Luv, I never meant to . . .”

Pete slammed her fist into the concrete. “For once in your fucking life Jack, let go of your sodding pride and talk to me!”

Jack jumped at her voice echoing from the alley walls, sat up and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sweat, vomit, rain. Wasn’t he the picture of recovery. “Fine, luv. Haven’t got any pride left, anyway.”

Pete spread her hands when the silence between them stretched thin.

Jack swallowed down the last lump of nausea in his throat, to put off speaking for another clock-tick. To speak was to confess, and to confess was to lay bare all the black and rotten bits of himself to Pete.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“So am I,” Jack murmured. The rain was a solid sheet of mist and droplet. You could almost discern faces in it, ghostly passengers on the fog that rolled in from the underworld on nights like this one. The neon lit everything, pink and black and blue and black over and over again like a macabre circus. The ghosts pressed close around him, but the fix didn’t let them find a way in. Another twenty minutes, thirty at the outside, and things would be usual—the onslaught of the dead and the new strange makeup of his magic.

But in this moment, his sight was still and the Black was silent. “I guess I’ve been waiting all the time you knew me,” Jack said. He held out his hand to Pete and tilted his head in pleading. “At least let me cage a fag if I’m going to spill me guts, luv?”

Pete sighed as if she were being asked a great service, but she passed him one and gave him a light. Their fingers brushed. Hers were warm and wet, reminders of furrows dug in his shoulders, Jack’s sweat on Pete’s skin.

He coughed as he drew too sharply on the fag. “All in all, I guess I’ve been waiting for thirteen years.”

“Waiting for what?” Pete stubbed hers out and let Jack take up the mantle of polluting the immediate vicinity. A door down the alley opened and a bag of garbage sailed out, along with a snatch of “All Along the Watchtower.”

Jack smiled at Pete and felt the stiffness of it. The smile was the last lie, the only one he had left in him. “For Hell, Petunia.”

Pete’s eyes darkened and widened, like she’d spied a London bus bearing down on her. One last lone curl of smoke drifted from her nostril, and then she blinked and she was a hardened copper again, wearing a hard plastic mask.

“Right,” she said. I think you’d better finish your story.”

When the ghost of Algernon Treadwell stuck its hand into his chest on the spring day thirteen years past, Jack was surprised to feel nothing. Not pain, not cold. Just the absence of feeling, a bit of cool wet on his skin from blood, and a glaze of silver across his sight.

Pete was screaming. She was standing on the other side of a tomb a little bigger than a minicab, and she was screaming. Blood dripped from her palms, trickled down her wrist like she’d drawn her veins on, and she was screaming.

Treadwell hissed, wordless pleasure as he filled Jack up with his icy poison. Jack fell, cracking his skull against the tomb floor. Treadwell smiled down at him, an angel borne out of the Land of the Dead.

Keep the ghost from Pete. Treadwell had sunk his claws into her, into the raw Weir talent that lived behind her too-serious face, those drowning-pool eyes. Pete didn’t count him a lover, or fuck, even a friend as far as he knew, but Jack didn’t care. And all that mattered now was keeping the ghost from her. She was innocent in the Black and she was here for him. Because of him. Pete was screaming because of him.

A black candle from the summoning sailed past Jack and broke into three pieces against the tomb wall.

“Go back!” Pete shouted. “Go back!”

Treadwell bared his teeth, and the awful pressure on Jack’s heart intensified. He felt Treadwell grab hold of his magic, of his power, and meld his burning cold corpse energy to it. Blackness filled Jack up like Thames water, until he couldn’t breathe and nothing but feedback screamed in his airs.

Not water.

Blood.

In his lungs, spilling down his chest, spattering a fine mist across his face. Blotting out the logo on the chest of his Replacements shirt. Draining his life onto the stones of Treadwell’s tomb.

As the summoning seal drew Treadwell back to the underworld, the ghost scraped ice fingers down Jack’s face, a final caress. I’ll see you very soon, mage , the ghost hissed. And we’ll share this embrace again. A whisper of the Black, a flux and flow of power, and Algernon Treadwell was gone, exorcised from the world of the living.

Jack’s senses folded in and narrowed down to one point, beyond sight and beyond pain. He floated, a rudderless drifting into nothing. There were no pictures from his life before his eyes. No grand parade of memories. Just Jack Winter, dead man, dissolving little by little like wreckage at the bottom of the sea.

The crow woman came to him. She bent and touched his face, and all of Jack’s instincts flared to life again. The crow woman was never a cause for celebration, or calm, even at this moment. She appeared for one reason and one only.

“No . . . ,” he croaked. “No, I’m not finished.”

The raven woman grinned at him. Blood dripped from between her teeth, painted her lips black-red. I’ll wait.

The blood galvanized Jack. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t slip away because of Treadwell, a fucking ghost, a piece of vapor. He was the crow-mage. When he died, he became the crow woman’s.

“Wait as long as you like,” he rasped. “I have time. I have a life yet . . .”

All warriors meet their end in my arms , the Morrigan whispered. All battles have a loser . Come away to the field with me, Jack. Take your place in my ranks.

“I’m not . . . yours . . . yet . . .” It was getting hard to speak, becoming an effort to suck in anything besides blood. Pete had fled, and the bar of light from the open tomb door lit the Morrigan from the back, casting the shadow of her wings across Jack’s eyes. Outside, in the light world, he heard the flutter of wings, the hollow croak of a crow.

You are my favored son, Jack, she whispered. You are the crow-mage. Called to the Land of the Dead from his day of birth.

“No . . . ,” Jack choked, black borders swirling at the edge of his vision like slowly sinking into a deep well. “I left them. I left you.”

The Fiach Dubh are a construct, Jack. Men and flesh and petty concerns wrapped in the illusion of power. I am Death. I am eternal. Her fingers brushed his cheek, her nails digging into his flesh. He felt nothing except the chill of the stones.