Demon Bound (15 page)

Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.

“Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”

Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.

The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed
Ten fine head of horse flesh.

The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.

June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.

Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”

Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”

“Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”

“What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.

Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache returned, swift and vicious as a Staffordshire terrier latching on to a postman.

“I can undo the necromancer’s bindings. But to get the ghosts out of the house, I have to find their gravesites and set them to rest and if I can’t find little Creepy June’s remains I can’t bloody do that, can I?”

Pete sighed. “Let me see if I can call in a favor with Ollie at the Met. They’ve got some toys for sniffing out cadavers that are quite good.”

“Cadavers that have been under a log for seventy years?” Jack said. Pete sighed.

“Must you shoot down everything I say?”

Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”

Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”

He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.

“Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”

“Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk
had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.

Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.

“Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”

“And the binding?” Pete said. “We need
something
to show Nicholas, otherwise we won’t get a bloody shilling out of him. It’ll be the Pooles on repeat.”

Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”

He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”

Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”

“Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”

“We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.

“If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.

Jack sobered. “I think after that
cu sith
showed its lumpy face we’d be safer together, luv.”

Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . .
locked up
in here. It’s not a good place to be.”

“You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”

She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”

“Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”

Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”

Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”

She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.

“Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.

“That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”

“You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.

“Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic
is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”

Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”

“Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”

“So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”

Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”

He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”

Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”

Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”

Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”

“It just bloody
is
!” Pete snapped. She shoved the box back at him. “I can’t do fancy tricks. I just have this awful, deep, dark hole inside of me and sometimes the monster inside it wakes up. I can’t
control
it, Jack. I’m not touched with magic like you. I’m stained with it and it doesn’t wash off.”

“Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to
learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”

“Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”

Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?

“Just try it?” he said finally, softening his frown and giving Pete one of his smiles. “For my humor, luv?”

When Jack had nothing else, he still had his snake’s charm, even if it made him feel like a low-down hustler to use it on Pete. He reverted back to the clever animal he’d been on the streets, fixing, with the false face and the predator’s smile.

And Pete finally nodded, and touched the music box again. “I feel stupid as anything.”

“Don’t think about that. Don’t trouble yourself over anything,” Jack said. “Just feel. Bend the lock to your will, and say the words. Tell it
oscail
.”

Pete’s lips pursed and she shut her eyes. In the curious void that the necromancer’s magic left around the house, her power sent out waves like a stone in a pool, like a bell in misty dawn air. It played across his skin like the light drag of fingers and Jack shivered.

After a moment, Pete blew out a breath. “It’s no good. I feel it but every time it gets away from me. Like trying to grab a greased cat.”

Jack set his hand next to hers. But not touching. Not when her magic was up. He didn’t fancy sending either of them into a coma. “Try it again. It takes doing but if you
can open a lock, you can call flame and if you can call a flame you can . . . well . . . do practically anything.”

“Make someone spit toads?” Pete’s lips parted in a smile but her eyes stayed shut.

“I suppose, if that’s what gets you off,” Jack said.

“I’ve a few old schoolmates who deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.

Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”

Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”

“So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the
Fiach Dubh
. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.

“When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”

“I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”

“Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”

“Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”

“More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.

Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was beginning to set behind the moor, and soon enough it would be time to go to work. For now, all he could do was sit and think about Pete, his wicked, wild Pete, and the running hourglass of time ticking off his moments with her.

After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.

There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.

He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.

Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.

Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London,
stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and crannies where he could see it coming. Not to mention there wasn’t a decent pub or curry stand for miles in any direction.

Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”

“Coffee and a
pain au chocolat
,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.

He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”

“No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.