Demon Bound

“I don’t think we’re dealing with just a suicide,” Pete said finally. Jack laughed. It came out high and hysterical.

“Do you think so, really?”

“All of them were murdered,” Pete said. “Or they died right quick and nasty.”

Jack extinguished the herbs and opened a window. The rain landed on his face, cold like old tears. It felt good after the touch of the dead. “No arguments. And four of them, plus Da

“This isn’t Naughton’s fault,” Pete snapped. “This place is terribly haunted, just as he said. Spirits don’t just find a house and say ‘My, this looks lovely. And such a wonderful garden. I think I’ll stay and drive the owner to hang himself.’”

Thunder rolled from the moors, back and forth like the rumble of a cell door.

Jack shut the window and kept his hands on the sash until his fingers could open a lock or lift a wallet again. The shaking retreated—mostly.

“No,” he said. “They surely don’t.”

He left the circle, left the room with its echoes of ghosts and the cloying scent of decay. He wanted fresh air and to be outside the walls of the Naughton’s house.

Pete followed him, as he shoved the front door open and went to the Mini. He held out a hand to her. “Keys.”

She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re fixing to kill something.”

Jack unlocked the boot and pulled a crowbar from the mess of Pete’s tools, blankets, and a battered picnic hamper.

He turned back to the mansion. The deadness of the Black tickled the back of his mind—the Black didn’t simply fade and then flood. It was constant, a current through his brain straight to his core. It was a comfort and a torment, but always, it flowed.

Jack had felt the flow die once before, faced with a necromancer in the United States. The man fancied himself a warlock, one of the city masters of old, who bent themselves over for a demon. He’d eaten up the Black of Sava

What had been the man’s name? Clemens, or Collins. A small man with small delusions who’d managed to grab himself a great gob of power. He’d given Jack a fight, but not a very large one. Not many men, professed wicked men or no, could stare the hungry dead in the eye for long.

Pete grabbed his arm as he re-entered the house. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing stalking around like bloody Jason Voorhees with that thing?”

Jack stomped back up the stairs, taking pleasure at the black marks his boots left on the wood and the plaster that sifted down around him from impact. “You said it yourself—too many ghosts. Things that hungry are territorial, and here there’s at least four all sharing nice as you please.” He kicked open the door to Da

“Spirits like what I called up are bound to a place whether they fancy it or not,” Jack said, “and there’s only a few sure ways I know to do such a thing.”

Jack had dabbled in black magic, of course. Stuck a hand in the water, felt the currents and the pull of dark, old things, but he’d never immersed himself. Once you were under that water, it filled up your lungs and you drowned. Sorcerers were gits with a short life expectancy and shorter ambitions—they wanted magic. Or money. Or sex. But he’d never met a sorcerer worth the curses he spat. The Fiach Dubh made sure one of theirs could kick the legs out from under a sorcerer without a second thought.

Still, binding ghosts was the work of a soul shot through with desire, the desire for control or the belief that they could outrun Death. And if any sorcerer he’d met had held real knowledge and truth instead of a load of bollocks and a taste for black clothing and theatrical over statement, Jack would have swung down the path of sorcery in a heartbeat, and bugger Seth and all his lessons.

But you couldn’t outwit Death. It was the single constant of magic and mortality. A thread, a measuring, and a cut. Anyone who thought they were a special case was a bloody fool.

Jack swung the crowbar and bashed through the plaster of the wall behind the great mirror. Dust swirled up, a pale imitation of a spirit. Pete coughed and Jack joined her, the horsehair plaster and wooden slats crumbling under his assault.

“I hope there’s a point to this,” Pete choked out. “Because that’s vile dust.”

“Mixed it with arsenic and horsehair in the day,” Jack said. “Lovely stuff.” The wall was rotted through, and he cleared away debris, half hoping he’d find nothing behind the plaster. He’d never be so lucky, though.

Pete held her sleeve over her nose and mouth. “There’s something back there. In the joists.”

Jack stuck his hand into the blank space between the studs and closed around dusty glass, sealed with wax. He drew out the small blue bottle, and another, and another, four in all for the quadrant of spirits his exorcism attempt had attracted. “Yeah. There is,” he growled. The bottles rolled in his hand, clinking in discordant notes with each other.

He held one up to the light, watched the liquid inside slosh back and forth. “Corpse water,” he told Pete. “Used to wash the bodies before burial. Before formaldehyde and all of that shit.”

Pete plucked one of the bottles from his hand. “And this binds the ghosts?”

Jack set the bottles in a row amidst the broken glass and crouched before them. “It’s a very old trick. A nasty one. Keep the last thing you touched in this world close and keep you from the Underworld.”

Pete knelt next to him. “Did you ever do anything like this?”

Jack shook his head. “No. Never fancied keeping a ghost that close to me.” The thought of attracting a ghost on purpose was laughable. They’d found good old Jack Winter all on their own.

Jack had thought he was simply going crazy. Madness would have been a welcome reprieve from the chill, breathless feeling that overcame him when the dead reached out, tried to make him see, to make him their instrument to finish whatever scraps of life they’d left behind.

He’d found magic first in books and then as a failed experiment to make the voices and the sight stop. He hadn’t properly understood until he’d met Seth that the ability to speak with the dead marked him as a servant of the crow. Seth had taught him about things like corpse water, bound spirits, and how Jack Winter would never stop seeing—he could only hope to keep the dead at bay until the crow woman came for him, as well.

Seth wasn’t one to paint a rosy future where only ash existed.

He stayed silent, staring at the little bottles for long enough that Pete chewed on her lip. “Well, what now? We get rid of them, yeah?”

Jack stood, his boots crushing the mirror shards to sand. His immediate reaction was to flee the Naughton house and never come back, but that was the boy in him, the death-fear that sat on his shoulder and whispered in the demon’s voice. More than half of being a successful exorcist was simply not cutting and fleeing like your arse was on fire when the spook show started.

“These specters died here, on the grounds,” he said. “And whoever bound them was here, on the grounds.”

Pete looked relieved to be back in a domain she understood. “I can check with the local council about suspicious deaths, get a record of property ownership to see if this place always belonged to Naughton.”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “But this wasn’t recent, some spousal dust-up or a kiddie-fiddler hiding his shame. Going by the clothes alone, we’re looking at fifty or sixty years gone for the newest.”