by Demon Bound
“No Hornby, no name.” The demon’s tongue caressed its lips like it could already taste Jack. “No name, no saving yourself. Demons lie, but I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a special soul, Jack. I wouldn’t insult you that way.”
“You’re not real,” Jack groaned. “You can’t be here.”
“I will be.” The demon leaned close. Rain fell through him, hissing as it hit the pavement. The heroin was playing hell with Jack’s sight, his neurons exploding against his eyes, allowing the Black to twist and distort into something it wasn’t. The fix was his only shield against his sight for over a decade, and now it was showing him this. If Jack hadn’t felt like he was close to passing out facedown in the garbage-choked puddles at his feet, he might have laughed.
“Go,” he gritted again. “I don’t see you. You’re not . . . you’re not real.”
“Has that ever worked?” The demon chuckled. “I will be real, Jack. I’ll wrap a hand around your heart and the Weir will watch. She’ll weep. And she’ll die along with you, every time she remembers how you tried to change fate and didn’t.”
Slow heavy swells of the fix rolled over Jack, made his speech slow and thick. “Fuck . . . off.”
The door banged, metal on brick, and the demon was gone. In his place, small strong hands propped Jack up and a face dipped into view.
“Jack!” Pete shook him, slapped his face. She peeled back his eyelid and he batted at her. Her touch spread warm tendrils through him, down to the core and the place that got him into more trouble than it got him out of. If he’d been able to stand with any reliability, he would have grabbed Pete in return, put her against the rough brick, and let the rain slick their bare skin.
“’M fine,” he muttered.
“You’re so bloody far from fine I can’t even say.” Pete’s voice shook, her fingers echoing the tremor. She jerked his chin to look, and she was holding the needle. “You went and did it, after everything? Everything I did to get you clean?”
“Pete . . .” He exhaled. His lungs were slow and hot. The air was wet, too thick to move on its own. “You don’t understand.”
Pete tossed the needle away and crouched in front of Jack, gripping his arms. “Make me understand. I want to have followed you here for something worthwhile, Jack.”
Pete’s tears mixed with the raindrops on her skin, cutting furrows in her face. Jack tried to reach for them, wipe them away and make her smile, but he missed her cheek, letting his hand land on her shoulder again, tilting her slight frame under his weight.
“Go home,” Jack said. “You don’t have to see me like this, Petunia. No need.”
Pete brushed him off and Jack’s stomach opened like a pit. He fell sideways, retching, his gut rebelling against the onslaught of skag.
“Fair warning,” Pete said. “Don’t order me about. I’m two seconds from kicking seven colors of shit from you, you bloody idiot.”
Jack tried again to apologize, but his vision tunneled, then spiraled, then became black. When he sat up, scraping a hand across his mouth, the world had started to creep back in. His clothes were soaked and deep-muscle aches had worked their way up his arm from the tie-off and the sloppy injection. Pete watched him silently, crouched on her heels.
She hadn’t left him even now, when he was doubled over puking his guts out in the rankest alley he’d ever found himself in. She hadn’t helped him, either, but if Jack were in her position he would have pushed his head into his own sick and held him there until he drowned.
And he’d lied to her. He’d used the danger of the demon to lie to Pete, likely the only person who wouldn’t leave him in the gutter at the truth. Jack wrapped his arms around himself as shivers wracked him, his stomach bucking again even though there was nothing left to bring up.
“I’m sorry, Pete.” His voice came out a rasp that barely lifted over the rain, and his ruined throat clenched.
Pete scrubbed her hands over her face, blending the rain and tears. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. He reached out and had more success capturing her hand this time. “Please don’t go, Petunia.” He dropped his head back, shut his eyes. His sight was empty, and the bright blazing place where it lived in his mind was cold. “Don’t go,” he said to Pete, so that he could barely hear himself over the drumming rain. “I need you.”
Pete let him close his hand around her palm, but she wouldn’t look at him. “If you really mean that, Jack, and you don’t want me walking away right this moment, then you’d better give me an explanation that isn’t a complete load of bollocks.”
Jack gripped Pete’s hand. “Luv, I never meant to . . .”
Pete slammed her fist into the concrete. “For once in your fucking life Jack, let go of your sodding pride and talk to me!”
Jack jumped at her voice echoing from the alley walls, sat up and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sweat, vomit, rain. Wasn’t he the picture of recovery. “Fine, luv. Haven’t got any pride left, anyway.”
Pete spread her hands when the silence between them stretched thin.
Jack swallowed down the last lump of nausea in his throat, to put off speaking for another clock-tick. To speak was to confess, and to confess was to lay bare all the black and rotten bits of himself to Pete.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“So am I,” Jack murmured. The rain was a solid sheet of mist and droplet. You could almost discern faces in it, ghostly passengers on the fog that rolled in from the underworld on nights like this one. The neon lit everything, pink and black and blue and black over and over again like a macabre circus. The ghosts pressed close around him, but the fix didn’t let them find a way in. Another twenty minutes, thirty at the outside, and things would be usual—the onslaught of the dead and the new strange makeup of his magic.
But in this moment, his sight was still and the Black was silent. “I guess I’ve been waiting all the time you knew me,” Jack said. He held out his hand to Pete and tilted his head in pleading. “At least let me cage a fag if I’m going to spill me guts, luv?”
Pete sighed as if she were being asked a great service, but she passed him one and gave him a light. Their fingers brushed. Hers were warm and wet, reminders of furrows dug in his shoulders, Jack’s sweat on Pete’s skin.
He coughed as he drew too sharply on the fag. “All in all, I guess I’ve been waiting for thirteen years.”
“Waiting for what?” Pete stubbed hers out and let Jack take up the mantle of polluting the immediate vicinity. A door down the alley opened and a bag of garbage sailed out, along with a snatch of “All Along the Watchtower.”
Jack smiled at Pete and felt the stiffness of it. The smile was the last lie, the only one he had left in him. “For Hell, Petunia.”
Pete’s eyes darkened and widened, like she’d spied a London bus bearing down on her. One last lone curl of smoke drifted from her nostril, and then she blinked and she was a hardened copper again, wearing a hard plastic mask.
“Right,” she said. I think you’d better finish your story.”
Chapter Thirty-four
When the ghost of Algernon Treadwell stuck its hand into his chest on the spring day thirteen years past, Jack was surprised to feel nothing. Not pain, not cold. Just the absence of feeling, a bit of cool wet on his skin from blood, and a glaze of silver across his sight.
Pete was screaming. She was standing on the other side of a tomb a little bigger than a minicab, and she was screaming. Blood dripped from her palms, trickled down her wrist like she’d drawn her veins on, and she was screaming.
Treadwell hissed, wordless pleasure as he filled Jack up with his icy poison. Jack fell, cracking his skull against the tomb floor. Treadwell smiled down at him, an angel borne out of the Land of the Dead.
Keep the ghost from Pete. Treadwell had sunk his claws into her, into the raw Weir talent that lived behind her too-serious face, those drowning-pool eyes. Pete didn’t count him a lover, or fuck, even a friend as far as he knew, but Jack didn’t care.
And all that mattered now was keeping the ghost from her. She was innocent in the Black and she was here for him. Because of him. Pete was screaming because of him.
A black candle from the summoning sailed past Jack and broke into three pieces against the tomb wall.
“Go back!” Pete shouted. “Go back!”
Treadwell bared his teeth, and the awful pressure on Jack’s heart intensified. He felt Treadwell grab hold of his magic, of his power, and meld his burning cold corpse energy to it. Blackness filled Jack up like Thames water, until he couldn’t breathe and nothing but feedback screamed in his airs.
Not water.
Blood.
In his lungs, spilling down his chest, spattering a fine mist across his face. Blotting out the logo on the chest of his Replacements shirt. Draining his life onto the stones of Treadwell’s tomb.
As the summoning seal drew Treadwell back to the underworld, the ghost scraped ice fingers down Jack’s face, a final caress. I’ll see you very soon, mage, the ghost hissed. And we’ll share this embrace again. A whisper of the Black, a flux and flow of power, and Algernon Treadwell was gone, exorcised from the world of the living.
Jack’s senses folded in and narrowed down to one point, beyond sight and beyond pain. He floated, a rudderless drifting into nothing. There were no pictures from his life before his eyes. No grand parade of memories. Just Jack Winter, dead man, dissolving little by little like wreckage at the bottom of the sea.
The crow woman came to him. She bent and touched his face, and all of Jack’s instincts flared to life again. The crow woman was never a cause for celebration, or calm, even at this moment. She appeared for one reason and one only.
“No . . . ,” he croaked. “No, I’m not finished.”
The raven woman grinned at him. Blood dripped from between her teeth, painted her lips black-red. I’ll wait.
The blood galvanized Jack. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t slip away because of Treadwell, a fucking ghost, a piece of vapor. He was the crow-mage. When he died, he became the crow woman’s.
“Wait as long as you like,” he rasped. “I have time. I have a life yet . . .”
All warriors meet their end in my arms, the Morrigan whispered. All battles have a loser. Come away to the field with me, Jack. Take your place in my ranks.
“I’m not . . . yours . . . yet . . .” It was getting hard to speak, becoming an effort to suck in anything besides blood. Pete had fled, and the bar of light from the open tomb door lit the Morrigan from the back, casting the shadow of her wings across Jack’s eyes. Outside, in the light world, he heard the flutter of wings, the hollow croak of a crow.
You are my favored son, Jack, she whispered. You are the crow-mage. Called to the Land of the Dead from his day of birth.
“No . . . ,” Jack choked, black borders swirling at the edge of his vision like slowly sinking into a deep well. “I left them. I left you.”
The Fiach Dubh are a construct, Jack. Men and flesh and petty concerns wrapped in the illusion of power. I am Death. I am eternal. Her fingers brushed his cheek, her nails digging into his flesh. He felt nothing except the chill of the stones.
“I won’t go,” he croaked. “Not willingly.”
It is the field, crow-mage, the Morrigan hissed. Or it is Hell. You are a sinner in life, Jack Winter, but I could make you a god in Death.
Jack dipped his shaking fingers into his own blood, felt a clear rough patch on the stones. “Never . . . never wanted to be a god. Just wanted to live me life. . . .”
The pages of the grimoire he’d stolen from Seth’s library floated before his eyes, blurred and half-remembered.
It was enough. It had been enough to expel him from the Fiach Dubh, and it would be enough now.
Jack drew from memory the invocation and the pentagram, the devil’s gateway. The calling card of the Trium virate. The invitation for Hell on earth. A sorcerer’s knowledge, for a mage who had nothing left but a slow ebb and flow of blood and magic.
You fool! The crow woman spread her wings, screeched, spectral wind chilling Jack’s wounds. You can only prolong. You can never escape.
“Yeah, well.” Jack coughed and more blood coated his tongue. That was a bad way to go. His time was slipping down to the last few grains in the hourglass. “Guess it’s Hell for me, hag. So until my time’s up . . .” He extended his two fingers into the crow woman’s face. “Fuck off.”
He let his eyes fall shut, his fingers move across the blood-slicked stone. The words fell from his lips with surprising clarity, words of power from his long-ago glance at the mildewed linen pages Seth kept locked in a metal trunk from his days in the Irish army. Locked with a bespelled lock and a set of hexes, until the clever boy Jack Winter had slipped them.
Mages didn’t deal with demons. Only sorcerers invited the denizens of Hell to their threshold. Only evil men.
Desperate men.
“I call the servants of the Morning Star, the tainted princes, the jackals of judgment,” he whispered. “As your servant, I humbly call.”
He opened his eyes with a struggle, the ceiling of the tomb wobbling and distorting as he stepped to the threshold of dying. It hurt less this time, was colder, stiller than the hotel in Dublin, but dying itself always felt the same. Cold. Always cold.
“With my blood on the stone,” Jack whispered, “I call.”
A shimmer of black in the shadowed air, a thickening of the darkness in the corner of the tomb. Jack listened to his heartbeat, felt the cobweb kiss of black magic across his bloody face.
“With lies in my heart,” Jack rasped. “I call.” This was where a name was supposed to lay, a race of demon or a word of power to bind the encroachment of Hell to the sorcerer’s will.
Jack didn’t know the names of demons. Seth hadn’t taught him. Had expelled him from the order when he’d tried to learn. Had left him to the mercy of his sight.
“Somebody,” Jack rasped. “I’m Jack Winter. And I sodding need your help.”
He didn’t see the demon come, but it was there when his gaze roved back to the floor of the tomb, black suit and dark hair, so ordinary as to cause tears of disappointment.
The demon took a step toward him, and cocked its head. “And what, little mage, is so dark in that heart of yours that you summon whichever of Hell’s Named that feels like making a human a plaything today?”
Jack met its eyes, those dreadful black button eyes that spoke of flayed skin and burnt char, breaking and bleeding and screaming.
“I don’t want to die,” he whispered. “I can’t, yet . . .”
The demon crouched, laid a hand on his wound, Jack’s blood growing vines of red up the immaculate French fold of its white shirt as it ran a finger down his cheek.
“A mage who’s afraid of the afterlife. That’s interesting, that is.”
“Not . . . afraid,” Jack managed. “I can’t. I can’t . . .”
“All right, be still,” the demon purred. “Don’t drain yourself dry before we have a chance to chat with one another.”
“I’m . . . the crow-mage. . . .” Jack managed. “If I die . . .”
Laughter floated around him, dark and poisonous as a sip of cyanide laced into port wine. The demon sat on its heels. “Say the words, mage, and I’ll consider what I can do to help you.” It smiled, and Jack knew he should be scared, terrified, pissing in his shorts.
If he had any sense, he’d be frightened.
If he had any balls, he’d be dying on the floor alone, last words taken away only by the ghosts of Highgate.
But the mages who decreed Thou shalt not bargain with demons, Lawrence and Seth and the rest, they’d never been here. Never felt cold stone under their back and warm blood on their skin. They’d never seen the crow woman, watching and waiting for them to join the ranks of her corpse army.
“Say it,” the demon coaxed. “I want to hear it from your sweet throat, mage.”
The words crawled up with Jack’s last breath. “Please,” he said to
the demon. “Save me.”
Chapter Thirty-five
A litter of cigarette nubs lay at Jack’s feet when he finished talking, tiny corpses borne on the rivulets of rain.
Pete wrapped her arms around herself, didn’t look at him, didn’t speak.
Jack exhaled. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the ribs by a jackboot, a fair few times, and left in a gutter to be pissed on. “You’re too bloody quiet,” he muttered. “Say something.”
Pete sniffed, and uncurled her arms. “How long?”
“Thirteen years,” Jack said. “Thirteen years from the day I died.”
“And Hornby? What’s he to you?” Pete chewed on her bottom lip.
Jack stood, worked the kinks from his back. He didn’t used to knot up, to feel the bruises from fights until the day after. Now he felt all of it, down to his worn-out bones. “He’s me chance,” he said. “All I have to do is bring him home.”
Jack climbed up, swayed only a little, decided it was safe to walk inside and find himself a stiff shot of whiskey.
Pete caught his hand. “I should be furious with you. You’ve kept everything from me.”
“I know,” Jack said. “If you weren’t furious, I might think you were some kind of shapeshifter and go looking for an iron needle to kill you with.”
“I just don’t understand why you felt like you couldn’t tell me,” Pete said. “ Were you just going to let me wake up one day and be alone forever? Is that how little you care, Jack?” Pete sniffed hard, the only hint the red in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks.
Jack felt in his pocket for his bandanna, held it out to her. “I suppose I was afraid, Pete.”
Pete’s expression sagged. “Jack, you’re not afraid of anything.”
He felt the ends of his mouth curve up. “I’m a good liar.”
Pete grabbed the bandanna from him and dabbed at her face. “You know I should bloody kill you.”
“I’d deserve it,” Jack agreed.
“Only it won’t do any bloody good and I’ll still end this alone in the Black,” Pete said. After a moment, composure returned to hers features and she blinked the last of the moisture from her eyes. “But if you give Hornby to this demon, you’re free?”