Demon Bound

Now, with the job, he could put the cu sith and the ghosts in Paddington out of his mind. At least for the few moments it took to cleanse Da

The room Da

The bed was stripped bare, a stained mattress the only sign anyone had recently slept atop it. Drawers stood half open, clothes trailing out and across the floor like shed skin. Nancy Nick had been in a whirlwind hurry to get out of the place after Da

A massive mirror opposite the bed was covered with a sheet, and Pete moved to snatch it off. Jack stopped her with a hand up.

“Leave it. Mirrors could let something watch us that we don’t want.”

Pete frowned. “Do you think he knew? Da

Jack kicked an empty plastic bottle, and it rolled to join three more fellows under the bed. “I think he liked his vodka cheap and by the quart.”

Pete examined the empty closet, jangling wire hangers the only residents. She was methodical, sifting through the detritus atop the dresser and each drawer with quick, professional fingers. Jack could imagine her in a pants suit and blue nitrile gloves, standing in this same room while white-suited crime scene technicians moved around her like explorers on a foreign moon.

Her hair would be pulled back in the low, efficient ballerina twist she’d worn during her time at the Met. Her warrant card and badge clipped to her belt along with handcuffs and pepper spray. A low heel, nothing flashy or trampy, just enough to elevate her petite frame to eye level with the male detectives of the squad.

“You’re staring at me,” Pete said. “Keep it up and I’m going to think I have something growing out of my forehead.”

She wriggled the bedside drawer. “This one’s locked.”

“Let me,” Jack said. He passed his fingers over the lock, and then pulled his ring of skeleton keys from his leather. They wore an enchantment, just the smallest charm to conduct a spell. Jack found them years ago at a bazaar in Leeds, mixed in with a box of mundane junk. He sometimes wondered about the mage who’d lost such a valuable tool, but not often.

Jack stuck the smallest key into the lock and whispered the words inscribed around the hilt and down the shaft of each skeleton key.

There was a click and the drawer popped open, over-flowing with small squares of paper.

“You should teach me that one,” Pete said.

“You wouldn’t want it,” Jack said. Pete took a handful of the slips and shuffled through them.

“Wouldn’t I?”

“Lockpicking is transmutation. Transmutation is black magic,” Jack said. “You don’t want to have that on your first try, luv.”

Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You do it. I’ve seen you crack open a lock a dozen times.”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “I’ve got an affinity for breaking and entering, luv. Has more to do with nicking things when I was a stupid kid than magic, truth be told.”

“Of course,” Pete snapped. “You have the ease of everything. I’d just pox it up, like some stupid kid. Not like bloody Jack Winter.” She crumpled the slips viciously.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Jack protested. Pete’s temper, like her freckles, was Irish and her glare could have cut glass. “You have an affinity, luv. You find things like no one I’ve ever seen.” Jack stepped back and let Pete examine the drawer. “Lost papers. Lost children.” He swallowed, his tongue dry in the closed-up room. “Lost souls.”

Pete’s anger faded, replaced by half of a small smile. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at,” she said at last. Jack nodded.

“It’s the truth. What have you found, then?”

“They’re betting slips,” Pete said. “From all over the country. Losing bets, mostly.”

“So Da

“He might not have known,” Pete said. “You’d be surprised what families can keep from one another. Met a bloke once, had a mistress living one flat block over from his wife and children. They used to pass each other in the street and nod hello. Did it for years.”

“Why’d you get involved, then?” Jack dropped to one knee and started setting up his supplies. Ritual was familiarity as much as magic. Setting out the tools of exorcism quieted the mind, readied it for the things an exorcist would see pulling in wayward ghosts.

“His wife puzzled it out and blew his head off with a skeet rifle,” Pete said. “Can’t say I blamed her overly much.”

“That’s a secret for you,” Jack said. “Like vicious little dogs. Never know when they’ll turn around and bite.”

Pete stopped her searching and cast her gaze on him. Her eyes could cut you like broken green glass if she meant to get the truth.

“Indeed,” was all she said.

Jack put out his scrying mirror, a black ceramic bowl, and matches for burning herbs, a nub of chalk for the circle. He sat down cross-legged even though he felt a groan in the hinges of his knees and fingered a piece of chalk, deciding what to draw into the varnish-bubbled floorboards. Spells and hexes ran wild in a mage’s blood, scrawled on car windows and dripped onto tube station floors, but exorcisms had to be orderly.

Seth had shown him the results when they weren’t orderly and measured. When an exorcist lost his cool.

Once Jack had finished vomiting his breakfast into Seth’s loo, he’d paid attention to the lessons, and he hadn’t let a ghost get over on him yet. Until Algernon Treadwell’s ghost. But that time, Pete had been there. She’d yanked him back from the Gates with her talent, and anchored him to the living world.

He owed Pete a favor, no question. And such a favor wasn’t lying about the demon’s bargain. Jack could deceive others with ease but lying to Pete always took on a hollow quality, made him feel rotted and twisted up inside like a car wreck.

“Find anything else? More rattling skeletons?” he asked as Pete poked about in the wardrobe, so that she wouldn’t take his silence for what it was and ask him, in the ma

“Aside from a baggie of extraordinarily mediocre pot and the slips? No.” Pete sat on the edge of the mattress. “Just the usual leftovers of life.”

“Pot?” Jack perked up. “Mediocre or not, at least the lad  wasn’t completely boring.” He winked at Pete. “Give it here.”

“Not a chance.” Pete stuffed the dusty baggie into her jeans.

“You don’t have the slightest idea what to do with that stuff,” Jack teased her.

Pete rolled her eyes. “Please. I went to university.”

“Did you, now.” Jack found the black silk squares and cord at the bottom of his bag. “Smoking marijuana, getting up to mischief—if you tell me there was inexperienced but enthusiastic lesbian experimentation, I could die a happy man.”

One of Da

Jack grabbed his baggies of exorcism herbs and patted the spot next to him on the floor. “Come here, luv. First things first.” Protect yourself before you even think about ghosts. An unguarded exorcism was akin to painting yourself with honey and insulting a grizzly bear’s mum.

Pete folded up into a seat across from him. “If this is anything perverted and u