Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“Jack.” Pete’s voice floated to him from far off, but the tone was flat and hard as a tombstone. “Jack. You need to see this.”

She stood in the doorway of the largest shack at the square’s edge, a rusty Quonset hut with the markings of the American military thirty years past. Pete was pale, and the sweat on her skin stood out like crystals.

Jack didn’t ask what was inside the hut. The sweet, weighty scent of rotten orchids rolling out from the narrow door answered him. Still, he came to Pete’s shoulder and he looked inside.

The bodies were one or two high, three in the corners. Flies were thicker than air under the arch of the roof. The dirt floor had become mud, darkened with sticky blood that refused to dry in the heat.

Under cover, the smell became a presence, a physical hand that shoved its fingers down Jack’s throat and coated his tongue with sticky offal.

“There’s got to be thirty people here,” Pete said. She clapped a bandanna over her face and pressed a canister from her overnight bag into Jack’s hand. He looked at it. “Makeup remover?”

“Under your nose,” Pete said. “Trust me.”

Jack dabbed the pink cream under his nose and the sharp scent of toner and artificial strawberries cut the cloud of decay. “Thirty people,” he agreed, as Pete clicked on her pen light and flashed it over the corpses. The blank smiles of cut throats stared up at Jack.

“Thirty-three.” The voice spoke from behind him, from the outside, and Jack spun. His heart jumped against his bones, a betrayal that he knew had escalated to his face when the figure smiled.

“You’re here to kill me, you’ll end up like the rest.”

The dark hair, gravelly voice, and stained Radiohead shirt told Jack all he needed to know. “Miles Hornby.”

Hornby ran his hand through his lank mass of brown hair. “I knew they’d send someone with his head pulled out of his ass next time, but I didn’t know it would be Jack Winter.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Heard a lot about you, man.”

“Likewise.” Hornby was taller and wider than Jack himself, but he had a slithering, fey quality to his features that put Jack in mind of a predatory animal skulking through brush.

“You’ve left a very unhappy demon behind in England, mate,” Jack told him. “But I think you know that.”

Hornby instead looked at Pete. “Didn’t expect you.” He held out his hand. “You shouldn’t have to see this. Wait outside, will you? Your boyfriend and I will be over in a minute.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said. “That shirt of yours is the most frightening thing in this hut.”

Hornby’s jaw twitched. “Aren’t you the little pistol.”

“Oi.” Jack put himself between Hornby and Pete. “You don’t talk to her. You talk to me.”

Hornby took a step toward Jack. He was unique in that—most backed away, and still more simply ran when they confronted him. “I’m not going back,” Hornby said.

“Oh?” Jack popped the knuckles in his right hand. They’d separated long ago, at eighteen or nineteen, a club brawl that he could have avoided, or at least won, if he’d been less pissed or less of an arrogant little sod. “I beg to differ, Miles. I think you’re coming with us. And I think you’re going to do it with a smile on your fucking face.”

“You haven’t even asked about the dead bodies,” Miles mused. “Only care about me. Makes you a sick man, Jack. Priorities all screwy.” Underneath the scent of decay and the heat, Jack felt another sensation rise. Older, wickeder. The thrilling pull of black magic.

“You know what did this to them?” Jack jerked his thumb at the corpses. “That’s wonderful. Really fantastic. You can have a cry about it on the plane ride home.”

“Of course I know,” Hornby said. “It was me.”

Pete touched Jack on the wrist. “Maybe we should reconsider this . . .”

Jack didn’t take his eyes off Hornby. It was a gunfight now, as the other man’s magic rose, an ambush he’d walked into. Hornby was playing at the dark arts and Jack hadn’t been ready. “I beg your pardon?”

“The demon sent vargr to take me back,” Hornby said. “So I killed them. Didn’t like it, but there you go.”

Pete leaned toward Jack. “ Vargr ?” she murmured.

“Hellhounds,” Jack said. “Demon’s scent dogs.” The vargr were shadow, formless, but Jack saw the twisted faces of the villagers, the long black teeth and claws that had begun to grow and usurp their human forms.

“They possessed the village,” Hornby said. “It was them or me and I chose myself.”

Jack shook his head. “Thirty-three people. Cross and crow, you’re cracked. Too much time in the sun.”

“What I am is not going back to England,” Hornby said. “I don’t want to hurt you, Winter, but I will.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Pete said. “You really think you can cheat a demon and get away with it?” Jack wasn’t sure who the question was directed at.

Hornby considered. “Yes.”

“All right, all right.” Jack held up his hands. “I’ll make you an offer—you tell me how you cheated the demon and I won’t drag you out of here with your weaselly little head shoved up your arse.”

Hornby let out a small, hysterical laugh. “You think you scare me, Winter? I told you, I’d heard of you. Maybe twenty years ago you were something, but you’ve lost your step. Got on some bad drugs and some badder company and now you’re just another sad old bastard grasping for the glory days.”

“Right, that’s it.” Jack pulled energy to him, prepared the word of power for a hex. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Jack!” Pete snatched his arm down. “For God’s sake.”

“He listens to you?” Hornby shifted from foot to foot. “Good thing. Tell him I’m not going back, and that if he tries that again I’m going to make him number thirty-four on the pile, okay?”

“Sorry.” Pete’s smile narrowed into something unpleasant. “I’m rather fond of Jack, and I think that if you’ve really got this miracle cure-all for demons, you’d better turn it over, or I’ll kill you.”

Hornby sighed. He wasn’t more than twenty-five or -six but his skin sagged under his eyes and the pale cast of his skin even in the tropics gave the impression of him being sickly, wasting away from the inside out. “I really don’t want to keep doing this, but if it’s the only way he’ll leave me alone . . .” His hand came up, joints knobby from playing guitar spreading in the half-moon of the hex.

Jack didn’t stop to think, to calculate his odds of advance and retreat. He threw his weight between Pete and Hornby, yanking a hex from the well of power inside him. Drawing only on yourself hurt, hurt like peeling your skin off with a dull, hot razor. The hex shimmered, wavered, held as a black tide rushed outward from Hornby’s fingertips.

The jolt of magic knocked Jack on his arse, the mud splashing up to coat him in a gummy mix of dirt and blood. The corpses he landed against gave like deflated rubber rafts, and the smell choked him again.

Jack made it to his knees, wheezing and retching, before Hornby stepped closer and kicked him in the gut, hard and precise, with one trainer-encased foot. Jack’s air went out of him, along with the bile in his stomach. His tongue burned, and he gagged, trying to draw in air.

Pete launched herself at Hornby, putting her full weight into the maneuver. Hornby spun halfway around, staggered, cuffed Pete on the side of the head. “I said to stop! I don’t want to hurt you!” He hit her again, and Pete sat down in the mud next to Jack. Hornby shook out his hand. “Gods. You’d think someone as talented as you’re supposed to be could do more than smack me around, Winter.” Hornby prodded the spot where Pete had hit him. “But then again, what do I know?”