Demon Bound (38 page)

“
This is a great load of shit
.”

“’
Course it’s shit,” Seth tells him. “But it’s shit that might save your wee arse one day, boy, so you best read
on. Conjugate some verbs if that will break up the monotony.”

Jack watches a crow land on Seth’s roof, and stare at them. Seth sees it, and his smile grows sly. “You’ve got a fetch, Jackie boy.”

Fetches aren’t something Jack believes in. Jack believes in what he can see, touch—the magic in him that responds to liquor and rage and cigarette burns. The sweet taste of a fag and the sweeter taste of skin under his lips. “Old wives’ tale,” he tells Seth. “It’s probably seen something dead in the field.”

“Old wives could learn you a thing or two, as well,” Seth tells him, and retreats indoors.

Jack shuts his eyes against the sun and he’s on his knees in a circle of stones, wearing the white raiments for the first and last time in his career as a
Fiach Dubh.
In a few weeks, Seth will catch him with the grimoire. This is the first nail in his coffin.

Seth and his brothers stare in horror, Seth’s
athame
held at half-mast, as the crows land one by one, on the top of each stone, and before Jack the crow woman stands with her hair made from feathers and her face spattered in blood.

Stare as she touches his forehead, where the white witch gits say the third eye lives.

Stare as she whispers to him, in a language that Jack should not be able to understand, “My mage. Crow-mage.”

Nausea and dizziness grip him as he sees bonfires in her gaze, smells the smoke of funeral pyres, and hears the clash and scream of battles fought up and down the length of the land on which he now kneels. He smells blood and decay, smoke and char, and he sees the spires of the Bleak Gates piercing the fire-lit night.

Jack shuts his eyes as his dinner of mediocre bangers and mash has its revenge while the brotherhood reviles him with whispers and fearful stares.

Opens them, and sees Pete Caldecott. She’s skinny, and hides inside a school uniform that’s at least a size too large. She has her sister’s eyes and hair, but both her face and her gaze are sharper. She looks far more like Inspector Caldecott than the woman Jack supposes was their mother, the one who gave MG the soft face and generous tits. Pete is sixteen, and she’s still all planes and angles. Her eyes are decades older, and they don’t miss much.

When he touches her, he smells the night of the initiation, the scent of battle-wracked earth. The calling card of the crow woman.

Jack Winter vows to stay away from Pete Caldecott, until he’s tempted beyond resistance, breaks his vow, and he’s in the tomb, the cold stone at his back, the demon looking down at him, lips curling back from pointed teeth.

The demon speaks. “Wake up, Jack.”

But Jack holds on to Pete. Holds on to the feeling of the first time he touched her, across the circle in High-gate Cemetery. When Pete has called out to him, Jack has come.

When Pete lay dying on the graveyard earth, Jack was with her. As long as Jack has Pete, nothing can steal his soul away. Jack is bound to her surely as the crow is bound to him. Jack Winter, fetch of the Hecate’s Weir.

Jack presses his face into Pete’s hair, smells the sharp smoky scent of autumn in the graveyard, the penny tang of her blood.

Jack will never leave her, and so he moves in the memory, even though he didn’t on the day, nearly dead from blood loss himself, and takes her face in his hands. “Body and soul,” Jack tells Pete. “I’m yours. I’m the fetch you never had. You and I are bound, by blood and by stone. Bound for all the turns of the earth.”

Pete smiles at him. Reaches up.

Wraps a clawed hand around his throat.

Pete’s face is full of fang and malice. Pete’s smile is the demon.

“Nice try,” the demon hisses. “But you should have woken up when you had the chance, boy.”

Its hand closes down, and Jack can no longer breathe. The demon draws him close, the demon that looks like Pete, and presses its lips against his. “By the by,” it whispers. “The name’s Belial. And you, Jack Winter . . . you’ve tricked me for the last time.”

It releases him, the places where it touched burning Jack up from the inside.

He falls.

And is awake.

Jack thrashed up from the visions of the Black, gasping for air and clawing at his throat. The demon stood over him while Jack lay on the grass. It folded its arms and shook its head. “You failed, Jack. You tried, and you failed.”

It picked his chin up with the toe of its shoe. “You tried to bind yourself to a living soul. Cheat me. That’s trickery, and your challenge is void under those laws you’re so fond of.” The demon grinned, a smile of pure pleasure splitting its waxy face. “So that’s the end for you, bright lad.”

Jack stared up into the demon’s face. Its tongue flicked over crimson lips. Somewhere in the distance, Pete was shouting, and the demon moved its gaze to her.

“She’s trying to save you, Winter. She’s going to throw herself on your pyre, surely enough.”

“I’m her fetch,” Jack said. “Spell or not, I’m hers. You can’t take me if my soul is bound to an innocent’s. It’s the rules.”

“Jack.” Belial crouched, elbows on knees, genuine confusion on his face. “I’m a fucking demon. What makes you think I play by any bloody rules but my own?”

Pete reached them, panting, and launched herself at Belial. The demon spun, caught her about the neck, and shoved her against the tree, lifting her feet off the earth.

“Look what I’ve caught,” he murmured. “A little Weir, very far from hearth and home.”

Jack got to his feet, even though the breaking of his fetch spell had chewed him up and spit him out. With nowhere to go, the wild magic pounded in his head, expelled itself like poison into his muscle and bone. “Let her go,” he warned.

Belial glanced back at him. “I could, Jack. I could let her go and take you instead, as you’re bound by the bargain.” He turned back to Pete, leaning close and scenting her, running his nose and lips up and down her neck. “Or you could try to break the bargain, and I could kill you and take my time with your sweet, sweet piece of meat.”

He dropped Pete to the ground, where she choked. Belial straightened his tie and cuffs. “Your choice, Jack. What do you say?”

Jack looked down at Pete, tears of rage hovering in her eyes. He looked down at his own hands, pale and veined from the feedback of broken magic.

You burn things down,
Seth said.
Wherever Jack Winter goes, death follows.

Thirteen years to agonize over his shit decision, and suddenly it was no decision at all.

“Pete,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But I’ll see you again.”

“No, Jack!” she screamed, scrabbling to her feet. “No! You promised!”

Jack looked at Belial. “I go with you and you never, ever come to her or anyone I care about again. Clear?”

Belial snorted. “I couldn’t bear less interest toward your little found family, mage. I care about you.”

“
Jack!
” Pete’s shriek rang against the moor. “What are you
doing
?”

Jack stepped up and faced Belial.

You can’t cheat Death, boy. You just got to go with your head up high.

No escape. Not for you.

You know it’s coming, mage. The fires of war.

He smiled at Pete. That was the only kind of knight he was—beaten and broken, lying in the mud. “What I should’ve done thirteen years ago,” Jack said to Pete. “You be good to yourself, luv. And don’t waste one moment crying over me.”

Belial put his hand on Jack’s cheek, and leaned close to his ear, whispering the ways and words of the secret passages into Hell. Jack didn’t flinch, as his sight screamed and the magic around them flared. He watched Pete, on her knees by the great tree, arms wrapped around herself, face slick as glass with her tears. He watched her scream, wordless and lost, into the air.

Jack wished he could speak to her, tell her the truth, but before he could do more than raise his hand in farewell, the Dartmoor vanished under an onslaught of the sight.

When his eyes opened, Jack found himself looking up at three triple spires crowned with a lightning-etched sky. Hot wind snaked across his face and brought with it the smell of charnel fields. In the distance, across a blackened marching ground, a thousand pyres burned under the watchful eye of the spires. Thorns tangled around Jack’s bare feet and cinders landed on his skin, leaving fresh red burns.

Next to him, Belial took a deep breath of his native air. “Welcome to Hell, Winter,” the demon said. “We’ve missed you.”

The places I see in my nightmare
Ain’t nothing compared to what I see each day

—The Poor Dead Bastards
   “Strange Days and Nightmares”

Jack lay on a damp concrete floor, the floor of his flat in Manchester, the council flat where he and his mum had lived until he’d lit out for London.

He spat a little blood. His jaw wasn’t broken, or maybe it had been. Here in Hell—or Manchester—time lengthened and bent and folded back on itself. What was true today would not be true tomorrow and could be true yesterday. He wouldn’t know until he got there.

Belial made him see. All of the guilt, all of the lies. The beatings and the bar scuffles and the betrayals, from Seth down the line to Pete.

The demon showed it all to him, like a movie reel, and when it was over Belial wound the reel and showed him again.

The pain was physical. It wouldn’t last. Belial was tenderizing his meat, softening Jack for the main event. The memories were what would continue, for all the term of his bargain.

Jack rolled onto his back, stared up at the stained ceiling. He’d memorized the maps of past residents, the water
stains, leaks, and billowing clouds of petrified nicotine in the plaster.

He would stay here for a while, curled on the floor with blood dribbling across his vision.

Then the workings of Hell’s clock would wind backward, and Belial would start over.

A shadow fell across Jack’s gaze, changing the landscape of the ceiling. The familiar whispers crept in around the edges of his sight.

He didn’t shy away from the crow woman as she crouched above him. Even if he’d wanted to move, he couldn’t. His ribs were broken, at least one of his hands. Head swimming with concussion. Her touch was, for once, the least painful thing about his body.

So far you’ve fallen,
the crow woman intoned.
Has this torment salved your conscience, Jack? Has it saved your soul?

“Do I bloody look like my soul is saved?” Jack muttered.

Her skirts floating around her in a rain of feathers, the crow woman placed her lips against his forehead.
I can make it stop, crow-mage. I can lift you from this perdition and elevate you to salvation.

“No thanks, luv,” Jack said. “I’ve had my fill of bargains.” The pit was as low as he could go. The endless loop of his life was the end.

Not a bargain, my child
. The crow woman sighed.
A duty. The duty you were born for.

The Hecate came to Jack’s mind. It was a memory Belial never showed him, because Jack thought of it often enough on his own. “No,” he said to the crow woman. “I have to stay away. Pete . . .”

The Weir has her fate and your fate is twined with hers so tightly that your trees have grown together. You share
the same soil, crow-mage, the same air, the same life. You sacrificed for her and still you cannot pull away.

She stood, her shadow spreading across the room, across the prison of Jack’s memories.

You can stay in Hell, Jack Winter,
the crow woman said.
Or you can take your place on my field, and stand in my ranks as it always should be.

Jack tried to sit up, failed as his ribs stabbed him with pain like a rusty blade. “I don’t belong to you anymore. I belong to Belial now.”

Belial is a pitiful, scrabbling cockroach,
the Morrigan hissed.
I am Death’s walker, the raven of war.
Her wings scraped the walls, rained plaster dust down on Jack.

What do you think will happen to your Weir?
she asked.
When war rips the Black asunder and you are here, locked willingly in Hell? How long will she remain if you are not at her side? Mage and Weir, Jack. As it has been since the beginning. Without you she is bereft, one half of a broken pair of wings.

Jack hadn’t let himself think of Pete, when he could think. Pete would survive. She was made of tension wire underneath the skin, and she could be battered and stripped, but she’d survive. Everyday life, even living life in the Black, she’d survive.

I speak the truth,
the Morrigan intoned.
She will not see the end of what is coming if she is alone.

Jack swallowed, tasted blood. “What do I have to do?”

Come with me,
the Morrigan said.
Stop your running and your hiding from your fate as the crow-mage. Burn the world down and rebuild it in the image of Death. Spread your hand across the sun and turn my enemies to ash.

She held out her hand to Jack.
You only have to agree, crow-mage. Take up the mantle of your fate.

Slowly, with a dull popping in his knuckles, Jack
grasped her hand and held on tight. He saw the battlefield, smelled the blood, heard the screams. Felt his feet sink into bloodied earth. Saw the way spread out before him, spires of London drifting with smoke while sirens wailed and screams twisted in the wind. War and death. The twin desires of the Morrigan, his to bring to the world. Jack Winter, the pale rider. The harbinger of war.

A war that Pete would face alone, as long as he remained under the yoke of Belial’s bargain. A war that he knew, deep in the small part of him where truth was still alive, that she wouldn’t live survive.