Demon Bound (7 page)

“The restless dead,” Jack said aloud. “Sent away from the Bleak Gates to trouble the living.”

The twinned ghosts opened their mouths in a single, silent scream, and in unison raised arms of dessicated flesh and bone tipped with black nails that curled over with graveyard growth. They pointed at Jack, eyes and teeth spilling black pollution across the psychic space of Paddington.

“I gather they’re not here to have a pint and a laugh?” Pete said.

“No,” Jack said. “The sluagh appear at the moment of a person’s death.” He turned in a slow circle, watching more and more of the silent, howling, and pointing figures appear in the crowd. “And they always travel in packs.”

“They’re here for you?” Pete snugged close against his side, their arms touching along the length. She wasn’t asking him the question except as a courtesy, and Jack was relieved he didn’t have to answer. As a mage, whatever horrid thing crawled from under a rock was most likely there for you and your skin, and Pete had at least learned that much.

Jack watched the sluagh by turns, counted them, felt the chill abrasion of the dead against his sight.

They advanced, in flickers and slithers, leaving a black trail across the floor of Paddington. Cold stole across Jack’s cheeks and burned his lungs, and the sluagh watched, pointed, marked him as the death they’d come to claim.

“Jack!” He became aware of Pete shouting, in a harsh whisper to avoid passersby noticing her panic. Still tight against him, like they were twins sharing a heart. “Shield hex?” she mouthed.

The sluagh were close enough to touch now, if he’d been a madman with a death wish. “No,” Jack said tightly. “No bloody good.” The dead were not tempered or repelled by living magic. Unwanted, the memory of Algernon Treadwell and his overweening hunger came to Jack, borne on the cold air ruffled by the passage of the sluagh.

Don’t just stand there like a knob.
Not the fix, now. A little of Seth, a little of Pete, a little of his own survival instinct, battered and bloodied as it was.

Only blood could sate a spirit, and only dead blood could sate the sluagh.

Jack snatched Pete’s hand, and the jolt of her magic, the sight, and his own talent nearly unbalanced him again. “Run,” he ordered. “Run and don’t look back.”

With his free hand, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled forth his flick knife. The blade popped, a gleam of quicksilver obscured by crimson as Jack turned the knife to slice through the back of his opposite hand.

Blood fell to the dirty, mud-crusted floor of the station. One drop, two, three.

“
Go dtáthaí mé tú
,” Jack muttered, and the gray tendrils of the spell feebly sought out the sluagh. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t nearly enough. Jack needed more blood and more time to keep the dead away.

But it was
his
spell, the ghost box, his strongest magic. As the blood fell, Jack wove the cage of power and sight, holding the spirits back, keeping the dead at bay for just a little longer. The ghost box was the first spell he’d learned, the first, desperate magic that he’d tried when he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t simply succumbing to the same kind of delusion that made his mother talk to her plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary. Jack had first felt the Black enter him alone on the floor of a filthy, leaking squat on the outskirts of Manchester. He’d poxed it up, and was lucky he hadn’t died then and there, but the ghost box, straight from a mouldering “ye olde chaos magicke” tome at the library, had held.

Jack hoped fervently, with a jump of nerves in his chest that hadn’t happened in years, that it held now.

The sluagh drew back from the entanglement of blood magic, their silent mouths growing long, ghostly white teeth.

Jack ducked through a gap in their ranks and ran, towing Pete behind him. She hadn’t obeyed his order to run, but he hadn’t expected her to. Pete was too stubborn to run even for her own bloody good.

Jack took the stairs to the Underground lines two at a time, shoving passengers out of the way. He let go of Pete and vaulted the fare gates, a transit worker shouting at him,
just a blur of blue and life next to the overwhelming, encroaching flock of sluagh.

Jack veered into the tunnel for the Bakerloo Line, his heart pulsating like to break his ribs. He had a moment of
This is it, you’ve blown your wad
as his vision blacked, and then he was on the platform and a train was roaring into the tunnel and Pete snatched his arm and kept him from going over the edge onto the tracks.

The doors sprang open, disgorging their human load, and Jack shoved his way inside.

“
Please stand clear of the doors,
” the robot announced. “
This is a Bakerloo Line train to Elephant and Castle.
”

Jack slumped against the train window as the car pulled out of the station. The sluagh stood on the platform in a cluster of nightmares, hollowed-out eyes following him until the train rounded a corner and they were lost to blackness and reflection.

“Too much iron,” Jack rasped. The need for a fag was vicious, and had claws. “Even for them.”

“What did they want with you?” Pete said. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, palms making a soft hiss against the leather.

“Me dead, I suppose,” Jack said. “’S the only thing sluagh ever want.”

“Because they’re restless?” Pete stepped to the door as the train pulled into the next station, at Edgeware Road. “Unfinished business or some bollocks?”

“Not likely,” Jack said. “The restless dead are them too full of malice and hunger even for the Land of the Dead.” Sluagh were wild spirits, feral dogs feeding on the souls and deaths of the living. Picking spectral bones, until there was nothing left.

They came into the day, out of the tunnels at last, and Jack breathed in a lungful of cold, damp air. It was nearly as good as nicotine. “They’re hungry, plain and simple,” he
told Pete. “And they’ve been pointed at me to feed themselves.”

“Maybe we should put off this job.” Pete worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “I could tell Naughton something’s come up.”

Jack hunched inside his leather. The rain had ceased, but the thick iron clouds crouched overhead promised a proper storm when they’d finished massing. “No,” he said. “We should take the fucking job.”

Pete cocked one eyebrow, and Jack spread his hands in return. “We need it, yeah?”

The scene in Paddington had cemented his resolve to leave London until he could figure out what to do with the demon. Lawrence was right, as Lawrence often was—the Smoke wasn’t his place now, not while he was marked so.

“Well, if you’re so keen all of a sudden,” Pete said, “the car’s this way.”

In Pete’s Mini, with the window down, Jack let the air wash over him, keep him awake. Keep him from drifting. His fag flared as the wind caught it, trailing ash along the M5.

“You’ve barely said a word since we left,” Pete said. “Long face for such a little person, my da would say.”

Jack crinkled his nose. “’M not little.”

“Something’s on your mind all the same,” Pete replied. “What is it?”

“Not a thing, luv,” Jack lied. Lying was easy when only your own reflection was staring back.

The Black rippled and churned as they drew farther and farther from the tangled and teeming knot of energies, ghosts, and monsters that was London. City of plague pits and cemeteries, of iron, smoke, and bells. All of it faded, like a radio station under the shadow of a hill.

“All right.” Pete hit the flat of her hand against the wheel. “You don’t want to talk to me, suit yourself. Don’t come whingeing to me when your dark magely secrecy bites you in the arse, all right?”

“Believe me,” Jack snapped, “You’re the last person I’ll be whingeing to.”

“Good,” Pete said, and turned the dial on the Mini’s ancient stereo. “Good Times Bad Times” floated around Jack and closed him off in a wall of sound.

“Good,” he agreed, unheard.

He’d had a 78 turntable when he was ten or twelve, from a jumble sale at the church his mum sometimes stumbled into. His Uncle Ned took it when no one wanted it, and gave it to Jack. No one wanted records, either—it was all bootleg Walkman tapes and CDs if you didn’t live in the rotting council flats beside the church, as Jack did. Jack took custody of his mother’s few albums that she hadn’t pawned, and played them over and over until Kev, the pimp boyfriend and man of the house—as he never tired of telling Jack—took them out in the car park and smashed them.

Jack had owned albums since, master tapes for the Bastards, free CDs from friends with recording contracts, but he never forgot the hiss and scratch of the needle on the vinyl, the particular magic of wringing sound from a thin slice of nothing.

He touched his head to the now-cool glass of the Mini’s window, looked into the depths of the passing darkness. Something loped beside the car, long and lean with teeth that caught the moonlight. Jack’s skin went cold, needles and pins all over like it should have with the sluagh, in the station.

That wasn’t his fault. Too much iron and distraction. A desire not to see or think about what waited for him making him careless. Didn’t mean he was slipping loose from his power as the thirteen years came closer, that using magic was agony as his talent shut down and that even his sight was giving him up for dead.

The demon wasn’t waiting. It would drag Jack to its side by any means. And Pete would be there when it came to
collect him, and she’d know. She’d see his sins, count them by turns, and cast him out.

Or the demon would kill her, drain her, use her like Algernon Treadwell had tried to use her, the ancient and terrible talent of the Weirs and their line to the old gods a sweet too tempting to resist.

Jack slid a fingernail under the plaster on his cut, scratched. Wished for a fag. Looked over at Pete. She hid a yawn as the motorway unfurled in the Mini’s headlamps.

“I could drive for a bit,” he suggested. “Let you catch some kip.”

“Jack, you haven’t a license,” Pete protested. “What was the last thing you drove?”

“A Maserati,” Jack said. “For nearly six blocks.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “
You
had a Maserati?”

“Nah, it belonged to some Italian bloke. Wasn’t using it at the time.”

Lefty Nottingham, the Bastards’ roadie and later—much later—Jack’s first smack connection, had bet him he wouldn’t. He’d flashed the flat roll of foil, eyed the sports car idling at the curb like an eager beast, and rumbled in his smoker’s
basso,
like the selfsame needle dropping onto a 78, “
Bet you wouldn’t for a day’s worth of hits, Winter.
”

The Maserati ended its life with a post box in the bonnet and Jack walked away with that flat roll of foil in his pocket. And a concussion, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you worried over when there was half a gram of skag burning a hole in your denim.

Pete chuckled softly. “I’ll take my chances, I think.”

Jack put his head back against the rest, trying to drain the tension of Pete’s company from his neck. He preferred birds he could compartmentalize. Friend, fuck, foe. Pete was a combination of all, or none. She wasn’t easy, and the old Jack didn’t like that. The present Jack just felt like a useless wanker for having to lie.

He didn’t think he could sleep, but the draft of warm air from the heating vents, combined with blood loss and exhaustion, dropped him into a drowse.

He woke to Pete’s shaking. She pointed out the wind-screen and Jack saw black turrets, dead trees, and a slice of sky tarnished silver by moonlight.

“That’s the place?” he said. “Christ, where’s the lightning and the sinister albino butler?”

He put his hand on the door, and it was far as he got.

The Black shuddered and pulsed around the house, and Jack grabbed his head as a spike of pain split the front of his skull. The Black wasn’t just around the house, it was in the house, a part of it as much as beams and mortar, a great swirling well of magic, dragging him under, dragging him to drowning . . .

“Jack!” A small cool hand slapped him across the face, and the sting was enough to quiet the scream of the void.

He’d fallen out of the car and onto damp gravel. The stones dug divots in the side of his face, and a finger-light mist kissed his eyelashes with droplets.

Pete helped him sit up, and when he looked at the house again it was perfectly silent, just a house surrounded by overgrown gardens and backed by the sweep of the moor. “Fucking hell,” Jack muttered, brushing mud off his cheek.

“Everything all right?” Pete crouched down with hands on knees to examine his eyes and breathing, like they taught you in a first-aid course.

“Not sure.” Jack shook himself, shrugging off the last vestiges of the Black. It slithered reluctantly back into the small, secret place inside his head where his talent resided, hissing as it coiled up and went back to sleep.

Pull yourself together, Winter,
the fix whispered.
Until you can’t any longer, and you come begging for a taste.

“Fuck off,” Jack grumbled. Pete cocked her head.

“Excuse me?”

“Not you,” Jack said. He pulled his boots under him and climbed up to his feet. The maneuver took him several more steps than it had even five years ago. Jack decided creaky knees and a back permanently out of line from sleeping rough on squat floors were the least of his worries at the moment. He could be a vain sod when his head wasn’t breaking apart like an egg. “Let’s get on with this sorry endeavor and see what skeletons Naughton has rattling around his family manse.”

The interior of Nicholas Naughton’s mansion was much like the exterior—grim, dusty, and unwelcoming. Pete hit the light inside the double front door, igniting exactly two bulbs in the fifty-lamp chandelier looking down on a marble entry so thick with dust even Pete’s petite frame left footprints.

A grand stairway lead up to a landing of peeling wallpaper and rotting carpet, and two hallways trailed deeper into Naughton’s residence like dark, clotted veins. The place smelled of rot and damp—cemetery smells, with the musical accompaniment of rats and bugs scuttling over the decaying bones in holes Jack couldn’t see.