Demon Bound

Jack watched the tops of the moors slowly fade away as fog crept over the crest and down the hillside, the sky turning from the peculiar empty blue-white of open spaces to the hard gray iron of rain and storm. “Could explain the poltergeist. Suicide doesn’t usually leave Casper the Friendly Fucking Ghost behind.”

“So?” Pete slowed at a junction and squinted at the signs. Fingers of fog obscured the miles to the next town.

“So, what?” Jack cast a glance at her. They were alone now, just the road and the fog and a bit of stone wall separating them from the windswept nothingness of the Dartmoor.

“What do we do now?” Pete asked, going left. “If it’s only a poltergeist and not a real haunting?” The Mini jolted as the road turned abruptly from paved to gravel.

“Cleanse the house,” Jack said. “If it doesn’t take care of Da

“What we’re dealing with,” Pete said.

Jack rubbed the center of his forehead. “Yeah. ’Course.”

Pete gritted her teeth as the Mini’s undercarriage scraped the track. “It is we, you know.”

Jack debated with himself, and then nodded agreement. He was crap at looking contrite, so he patted himself down for a light but found nothing useful. “You’re right, luv. ‘We’ it is. Forgive me?”

Pete hissed through her teeth. “I’d be a deal more inclined to forgive the sins of the world at large if I knew where the bloody hell we were.”

The road was nearly invisible beyond the Mini’s bo

Pete stopped and set the emergency brake, turning off the car. “I’m lost.”

Jack looked behind them, but there was only fathomless gray, like the mists outside the walls of the Land of the Dead. Endless, cold, and full of lost souls.

“Must have taken a wrong turn in the muck,” he suggested. “It’s all right. All of us get lost at one time or another. The trick is getting found again.”

Pete drummed her fingers on the wheel. “I guess there’s nowhere to go but forward. Have to come out somewhere.”

Jack joined in her drumming, the bass line to “Shut Up and Fuck Off” springing up under his fingers. He’d written the song with Dix McGowan, the Poor Dead Bastards’ drummer, after a night sitting up with more bottles of whiskey than comfortably fit in the bin of Dix’s minuscule flat. Dix was newly dumped, Jack was pissed, and he felt good enough about being too drunk to see the dead that he wrote a song. It hadn’t gone on the Bastards’ single LP, and only hit a few set lists in their club gigs, but it was Jack’s favorite. Simple, uncomplicated. Shut up, fuck off, I’m not your Prince Charming, I’m not your broken heart.

“Jack.” Pete tapped him on the back of his hand. “You with us?” She turned the ignition key, and the Mini coughed and shuddered.

He folded up the memory and put it with all the others that lived in a rat-eaten cardboard box marked Before the Fix. In the Mini, there was no warmth and no biting scent of whiskey, no guitar neck under his hands. Jack felt as if a finger of fog and damp had slipped in and placed a hand on the back of his neck. “Try it again,” he said to Pete, trying to keep the low urgency from his voice even as his chest felt as if a giant had closed its fist about him.

The Black boiled, in the wake of something passing through, large and ancient, that set all of Jack’s mental alarms to screaming.

Pete jiggled the key and then hit the dash. “Bollocks! I knew that bloke who replaced the alternator was dodgy.”

Jack put his fingertips against the Mini’s window. His prints turned the mist to droplets and they slid down the glass, turning his handprint into nothing but streaks on a pane.

Outside, on a lone telephone wire, a crow landed, and stared at him. It darted a gaze left and right, and then took wing, cawing madly.

Magic prickled up and down Jack’s body, and he shivered as the crow’s call faded into nothingness along with all else.

The Black of the Dartmoor was not the Black of London. There were layers in the city, ley lines of abandoned tu

Here, the moor was simply alive, an open wound. Raw power from the Black trickled through Jack’s consciousness, undiluted and primal. The tors and pagan sites scattered across the landscape were like torches in a vast darkness, floating on a sea of raw power.

It was an ancient place, a place of wild magic, and Jack watched his breath make a cloud when he exhaled. Even though it was freezing in the Mini, sweat broke all over Jack’s skin, under his leather. His pulse jittered, and his nerves crept up and down his flesh. The Black of the Dartmoor felt like nothing so much as ghost sickness. Jack shut his eyes, tried to push against the tide of the sight. Had to, because if he left Pete alone out here by checking out they’d both be fucked.

“I’m going to check the motor,” Pete said, climbing out. “Open the bo

Jack did as she asked and followed her. They were in pea soup now, and Jack smelled the icy, freshwater scent of rain on the breeze.

“We shouldn’t linger,” he said. The waves of power only worsened, outside the protective steel bubble of the Mini.

Pete poked at the i

“Sorry, luv,” Jack told her. “My manly prowess is confined to picking locks, smoking, and being ridiculously good looking.”

“You’re bent.” Pete shook her head, fighting a smile.

Jack returned it. Seeing Pete smile started a small fire under his stomach, and it helped mute the buzzing of the Black, for a moment. “I don’t hear you disagreeing, luv.”

Pete sighed, at him or the car, he wasn’t sure, and shut the bo

Jack looked into the fog, where he knew the hills were watching them. Gathering magic. Waiting.

“How far can it be?” he said gamely. Pete got her bag and jacket, locked the Mini, and joined him on the edge of the road.

“Hopefully not so far my shoes start leaking. I’m in a foul enough mood already.”

Jack shoved his hands into his pockets, keeping a few steps ahead of Pete. He swept the hills from one side of the road to the other, steps hard and sharp on the gravel, heartbeat sharper. Whatever was out there in the fog stared back. Jack could see nothing except the phantoms of mist wandering aimlessly among the hedges and the hills, but he felt it. His skin went colder than the air, and he curled his fists inside his leather, scrabbling for a little magic to throw behind a shield hex. He wasn’t going to be dragged away like a sod in a fairy tale. Whatever had stalked them to this deserted spot clearly didn’t know what sort of a mood he was in.

Nothing sprang at him as they walked away from the Mini, but the wild power of the moor followed, and the watcher followed with it. Jack resigned himself to a game of seeing which of them broke nerve first—the mage, or the creature.

“You know,” Pete said as they squelched through the dead grass on the shoulder of the road, “this reminds me of that night. You remember the one, where you played the set at Club Bleu . . .”