Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“And you might want to let your brother know we’re coming,” Jack said, “in case he wants to set up the bleeding walls and rattling chains in advance.”

Pete mimed stabbing him with her pen, but Naughton didn’t rise to the bait.

“There’s no need of that,” he said. “Danny hanged himself two weeks ago from the crossbeams in the attic. He’s dead.”

After Nick Naughton finally quit the flat, leaving behind a check for five hundred pounds and the key to his family’s Dartmoor estate, Jack watched a crow land on the wires outside the flat block and stare at him with one black, reflective eye. Psychopomps , his treacherous rote memory recited. Harbingers of death and war. Ushers to the Land of the Dead. The crow preened its feathers and tucked its head down against its breast. It could ferry souls to the Bleak Gates, but now it was content to merely stare a hole through Jack.

It took Jack several seconds of glaring back at the crow to realize Pete was talking to him. “Sorry, luv. What’s that?”

Pete took the check, folded it in precise quarters, and slipped it into her hip pocket. “I said, what do you think?”

Jack shook his head. “Dodgy, at best. Ghosts don’t just cause a bloke to hang himself for no good reason. They don’t stir up like a mixed drink after a hundred years of silence, either. Personally, I’d give Sir Ponce his check back and tell him to sod off.”

“Personally, would you happen to take exception to Naughton being a wealthy and attractive man?” Pete inquired.

“I take exception to liars,” Jack said. “Rich, poor, fuck-ugly, or otherwise.” Although really, today Jack and Naughton were just alike. Minus the fuck-ugly bit on Jack’s part.

Pete came over and put her hands on Jack’s shoulders. “I’m not an idiot, you know,” she said. Her touch was cool, vibrating with power, not altogether unpleasant. Jack had a flash of second sight, of lips crushed against his and pale, pale skin turning rosy under his hands.

He shifted so Pete wouldn’t see his face or any other traitorous part of him. “I know that, Petunia,” he said softly.

“Then tell me what the bloody hell is wrong with you. You’re pale as a ghost, you’re puking in the loo, you’re surly to a paying client—surly for you , and that’s saying something, and now you don’t want a job you would have jumped on with a rugby tackle a few weeks ago.” Her mouth lifted at one side. “You’re Jack fucking Winter. You chase the monsters, not vice versa.”

Jack felt Death’s specter following him patiently, ticking off the seconds on the gears that unfurled the Bleak Gates to allow a new soul through. Jack would stop the clock as long as he could, had to, even if it meant becoming ten times worse a liar than Naughton.

“Nothing’s wrong, Pete,” he said, making sure not to look her directly in the eye, nor look away. The stare of Truth, practiced over a hundred arrests and a hundred more dodgy meetings with mages and Fae in the Black. “Tea was past its date, or I could be catching the flu—as for Naughton, I think he’s a sanctimonious cunt and nothing more. There’s no monsters in his mansion. Bats in the belfry, maybe. You know how the landed gentry love their inbreeding.”

Pete rolled her eyes and went on tiptoe to brush her lips across his forehead. “He’s giving us five hundred quid to go chase his bats, so speak for yourself, but I’m packing up and heading to Dartmoor tomorrow. Just as soon as I check with my friend in the murder squad about Danny Naughton.”

Jack lifted one shoulder. The money was the thing—he was flat broke and Pete’s savings were what you’d expect from an ex-civil servant. If he wanted to keep his new-found habit of eating, Nancy Naughton was his meal ticket. He’d just have to deal with the demon afterward. And Pete would need the money, if he was gone . . .

Not if, the fix whispered. When, Jack. When.

“Guess there’s no harm in it,” he said. Famous last words. No harm in it . How many disasters had he preceded with just those words?

“And you were the one whingeing about parlor tricks and useless jobs,” Pete said. “This might be real. Think of that. A real spook-house instead of this inheritance and last wishes tripe, which, I admit, gets on my last nerve as much as yours.”

“Bloody Algernon Treadwell all over again,” Jack muttered, rubbing at the center of his forehead. The pain had retreated a little, but only a little.

Pete sobered immediately.

“I didn’t mean it like that. Jack, I don’t blame . . .”

He held up his hand to stop her. “Go cash the check before Duke Nancy changes his mind. I’ll round up a few exorcism tools from Lawrence while you check with CID.”

Pete nodded her assent and backed out of the room too quickly. She grabbed her bag and her jumper, and a moment later the door slammed. She was fleeing a discussion of Algernon Treadwell and her ghost sickness, and Jack didn’t blame her in the slightest.

He went to the kitchen, fishing in the cramped cabinets for a bottle of vinegar. Pete wouldn’t allow hard liquor in the flat since she’d moved in. All roads led to the fix.

Jack personally thought it was bloody stupid—he’d been a junkie, not an alcoholic, and right now he’d murder a pint of anything. But he washed his mouth out and pulled on his leather to go visit Lawrence in Bayswater Road. He thought walking to the tube station might shake the breath of the demon off his neck, but he saw the blank-eyed face in every passerby and felt the inexorable tide of the Black stronger than ever under the dark heartbeat of Whitechapel.

He walked through the street market outside the Whitechapel tube station, hunched old women in saris picking over fruit, men in long caftans shouting in three different languages, competing with the white newsagent bleating about the latest footballer scandal and the music drifting out from the kebab shops and money changer’s.

A breath of hot wind on his face, a whisper of sand, and Jack turned his head to see a man in a stall selling knock-off handbags stare back at him with flaming eyes, his skin flowing from brown to burnished gold. “Have a care, crow-mage,” he said. “They’ve been here. Searching for you.”

Jack blinked as a pair of Japanese tourists who’d undoubtedly gotten off at entirely the wrong stop on their way to the British Museum jostled past him, and when he could see again the djinn was gone, just a swirl of gold dust dislodged into the gutter and flung asunder by a passing lorry.

“Well,” Jack said to no one in the cacophony outside the tube station, “bollocks.”

He felt eyes on him the entire way to Bayswater. You didn’t have to walk up to a bloke and knock him one in the teeth to make him feel uncomfortable. Jack knew there were things in the train tunnels, things that liked the dark, that waited and watched for the scraps and leavings of humanity to fall down to them.

He knew that if they were hungry enough, sometimes they wouldn’t wait at all. The older the tube stations got, the more he sweated inside his jacket. At one time—too long ago to be anything but a middle-aged sot and his nostalgia—the pyramid spikes and patches and hand-painted slogans had been his armor, a clear warning to anything even half-human that he wasn’t to be fucked with. He wore the boots, the leather, and the black hair bleached startling blond everywhere but the roots still, but the hungry things were older and wiser, too, and they saw behind his mask.

Jack just felt older in that moment, and wrung out. He hated being underground. It reminded him too much of when he’d taken peyote on his single trip to the United States, when he’d seen the Bleak Gates, stood in front of them and felt the terrible weight of the dead on his inner mind, his mage’s mind, and knew that his sight and his magic were linked in a way that wasn’t normal or natural, even for the Black. Hated being underground. Too close to the dead for comfort, entirely.