Demon Bound

She was a far cry from the girl who wrapped herself in tape and cut it off with razor blades throughout the set, for certain. The shine was still in her eyes, though, and the smirk still on her lips. Elsie hadn’t lost her fire and Jack was relieved, because he needed something burned.

“Only climbed out recently,” he admitted. “Spent too many years in Wonderland, I suppose.”

Elsie shifted her bulk, which had grown considerably in the intervening years. Jack supposed that was fair—he’d diminished nearly as much.

“I don’t think you’d be here at the family sprawl on a social call, once I’ve considered.” Her mouth turned down. “You’d never come by just to see old Elsie getting on.” She snorted. “Then again, neither would I.”

Simon skulked in and set down a tray of tea and biscuits.

“Your mum and dad gone away, then?” Jack asked. Simon simply stood, in his overcoat and fingerless gloves, staring dumbly at Jack.

“Far away,” Elsie said. “Mum passed nearly five years ago now. Dad followed her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you ain’t.” Elsie hooted. “You weren’t sorry when Death crossed your path, Jack. Not once.”

“Things change,” he said shortly, and turned his worst glare on Simon. “You need something, my son, or are you just holding up that bit of wall?”

“He’s harmless,” Elsie assured Jack. “Got a snip of talent and not much of a brain. Simon, go feed the cats and take in the wash. There’s a fog brewing up.”

Simon shuffled away like an enormous carrion bird, and Jack turned his eyes back to Elsie.

“I need you to read for me.”

Elsie’s tea stopped halfway to her lips. “Thought you didn’t believe in the future, Jack. You said there was no point.”

“And I told you, things change.” Jack reached out and put his hand on the bone box. “Afraid of my future, Elsie?”

“You had any sense, wanker, you’d be afraid, too.” Elsie set down her teacup with a bone-on-bone clink. “Give it here. Of course I’ll read for you. One old conjurer to another.”

She opened the bone box and drew out her tarot cards. Elsie hadn’t had much beyond a filthy shirt, ripped tights, and a skirt that barely kept her decent when Jack had met her, but she’d had the cards, rolled in purple velvet in her knapsack. She’d had the magic to make them dance under her stubby fingers, to unfurl the future with the ink and paper and quicksilver dance of the seventy-two images that she turned into windows on the mind and soul.

Elsie shuffled once, twice, thrice. No ceremony—she was fast and hard as a dealer in Monte Carlo. She slapped the cards in front of Jack. “Cut.”

Jack did as she said, making sure to touch the cards only with his fingertips. They weren’t a new-age scam that you could buy in any Waterstone’s. Elsie’s deck was at least a hundred and fifty years old, stiff paper inked by hand. A Death’s deck, every card a representation of the Bleak Gates, the Land of the Dead, or Death itself, in all its guises from Thanatos to the pale Horseman.

In her band days, Elsie claimed the deck was inked in sorcerer’s ink and colored in human blood. Feeling the pinprick shock of foreign magic, old magic that did not brook disturbance, Jack was only half sure she’d been jerking him off.

Elsie held the cards between her palms and then with a snap, laid the first one face up on the velvet.

“Death,” Jack said. “Shocking, I tell you.”

“Death right side up is a change,” Elsie said. “Transition. Evolution. The painful birth of the new.”

“And the Fool card is a stubborn sod and the Lovers mean everybody hug,” Jack muttered. Crystals and tarot and candles only served to allow the weak talents to think they had more than their share, and the non-talents to fuck about where they had no business. Objects of magic threw Jack off balance, made his stomach lurch and his skin crawl. They were never good omens, and frequently the harbinger of a royal cocking-up on the part of the owner.

Elsie flipped the next card. The Devil leered up at Jack as he copulated with a pale-ski

“Well,” she said. “You’re off to a strong fucking start, my darling. Death and destruction.”

“Just another day, luv.” Jack shrugged, although a faint prickle of unease crawled through him. The Black woven through Elsie’s smothering house grew restless, like ghostly wings against his cheeks, and the dead birds swayed in their cages as a wind blew in.

“Storm’s coming!” Simon shouted from the kitchen, slamming a door and a basket. “Laundry’s all gone to shit.”

Elsie didn’t stir. Her eyes were distant, gray mist drifting across the surface of her pupils while her fingers, nubby with arthritis, communed with her cards. Jack’s eyes did something similar when he was in the throes of a spell. Pete said it made him look “like one of those bloody kids from that spooky village movie.”

The next card flipped, and Jack’s breath stopped.

Death, his skeletal form standing atop the highest tower in the Land of the Dead.

Death stared him down with hollow eyes. “No,” Elsie rasped.

“No, no . . .” Her eyes snapped back in her head, and the fog of energy stole her gaze until something fathomless and old, something Not-Elsie stared out.

Her fingers moved of their own accord, laying down card after card. Death, and the Devil. Across the velvet they marched, death and destruction cutting a swath like an execution squad.

Jack reached out and grabbed Elsie’s wrist. “That’s enough.”

Elsie’s lip curled back and she snarled, hands continuing to twitch spasmodically, card after card after card glaring up at Jack from the velvet. Skull and horn. Death and the Devil.

“Oi.” Jack grabbed her by the shoulder, shook her. “Elsie!”

She slammed the last card down with a bang and stared into his eyes. Her face was a skull with skin stretched over bone like a death masque. Her eyes were storm clouds hiding lightning.

“No escape,” Elsie croaked. “Not for you.”

Her voice was the demon’s voice. Jack jerked, his knee slamming the underside of the table, sending it tumbling. Seventy-two Deaths and Devil fluttered to the floor like autumn leaves.

“Run, Jack.” The demon gri

Chapter Fourteen

Pete was at the car when he returned, leaning on the bo

Pete sliced him with her gaze. “Where the bloody hell were you?”

Jack waved a pack of Parliaments. “I was out. Went over to the pub.”

His heart hammered loudly enough that he was sure they could hear him in the next county, and cold sweat clung to his skin under his clothes. The demon’s message was clear as a churchbell: No escape. Not for you.

“You look pale as the dead,” Pete said. “Are you sure you just went for fags?”

“’Course I’m sure,” Jack said. The words didn’t slide off his tongue easily this time, and Pete’s pretense of believing it cracked as she jerked the car door open and jammed her keys into the Mini’s ignition. Jack climbed in, shut the door, and nearly had his head whipped off as Pete kicked the little car into motion.

“The locals didn’t have much to add,” she said once they’d left the square. The moors rose on either side of the ribbon of road, a petrified sea that could fold over your head and swallow you down.

“He topped himself?” Jack said. Pete nodded.

“No medical examiner here, of course, and no proper morgue, but he most definitely suffocated. Naughton called the locals immediately and the sergeant I spoke to—Hogan—said Da