Demon Bound

“Must you shoot down everything I say?”

Jack spread his hands. “It’s called being a realist, luv. Worked well for me so far.”

Pete slammed her mug into the sink. “It also makes you a sod.”

He went quiet, the elaborate apathy that drove Pete up the wall in full force as he slouched at the table and smoked.

“Tell me about necromancers,” Pete said instead. “And why one would do something like this.”

“Not just one,” Jack said. “Even if he ate his veg and gave up smoking, no sorcerer would live to be a hundred and thirty years old on his best day.” Usually, they died well before their time. Sorcerers were like roaches—a vile existence and a short life expectancy. Not that Jack and his ilk had any better hope. If you were made of flesh, the Black was predisposed to be fatal to your health.

Seth had said that human beings were never meant to touch magic, but that it was a good joke while it lasted.

“Who knows why a bone-shaker would do something like this.” Jack sighed. “And more important, who bloody cares? Bound spirits keep everything that was with them at their moment of death—all the fear, all the pain, all the rage. That’s why you need a violent death. Aunt Martha going peacefully in her sleep makes a crap poltergeist.”

“And the binding?” Pete said. “We need something to show Nicholas, otherwise we won’t get a bloody shilling out of him. It’ll be the Pooles on repeat.”

Jack pushed back from the table. “Need some supplies. Assuming we can keep the ghosties out of our hair long enough, binding’s not a difficult thing to undo.”

He waved her back when she started to follow him. “We have to wait for sunset. What I need’s best done in the dark, at midnight.”

Pete snorted indelicately. “Are you quite serious?”

“Have you ever known me to put one over on you, luv?” Jack held up a hand when Pete started to answer. “Never mind. This time I’m not. We’d do better at a new moon but tonight’ll have to do.”

“We’ve got a few hours,” Pete said. “No telly, no internet service . . . what do you suggest we do until then?”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Jack said, winking at her. He could stop touching her, stop letting his eyes linger on her, but to ask him to stop flirting was akin to asking him to hold his breath for the next ten years. It wasn’t bloody happening. Jack had few joys left, and making Pete blush and smack him in the head was one of them.

“If that’s all that’s on your mind I’m going for a walk,” she snapped.

Jack sobered. “I think after that cu sith showed its lumpy face we’d be safer together, luv.”

Pete sighed, fingers twitching up to scratch the back of her neck. “I just feel so . . . locked up in here. It’s not a good place to be.”

“You feel the binding,” Jack said. It niggled him as well, the subtle sting of black magic crawling up and down his back. It was like a cold draft, the scrape of a thorn against his flesh, not painful but not pleasant either. Jack jerked his chin at Pete. “Come on, I’ll teach you something to take your mind off it.”

She folded her arms. “If this is another excuse to be a pervert . . .”

“Luv, I never need an excuse. Move your little arse into the parlor and I’ll teach you a trick. With me clothes on.”

Pete’s lips twitched up. “Promise?”

Jack made a poor attempt at crossing himself. “Cross my heart, Petunia.”

She followed him into the parlor, where Jack lit on a music box—a dreadful Rococo concoction of pink enamel and gilt scrollwork. It had a lock, though, and it was the lock that interested him.

“Here.” He set the thing on the table and gestured Pete into the armchair opposite. An occasional table, his mother had called these things. All spindly legs and round top. She’d kept figurines on the one in their flat. Kev liked to kick it over during their fights.

“That is hideous,” Pete said. “Are we transmogrifying it into tea and biscuits? Please say we are.”

“You don’t need a key to open a lock,” Jack said. He put his fingers against the small metal opening and whispered a word of power. The music box sprang open and a snatch of “Greensleeves” drifted out of the musty interior before Jack snapped the lid shut again.

“Magic isn’t all circles and chants, Pete,” he said. “Magic is the ability to bend the world to your will. That’s why it’s frightening and that’s why it’s powerful. Magic means the rules of the human race don’t apply.”

Pete shied away from the music box. “I don’t like the rules any more than the next human, but the way you put it makes you sound like a bloody sociopath.”

“Oh, no, luv,” Jack said softly, opening and closing the box again. There was a tiny ballerina figure in a satin dress that danced when her gears spun. “Magic isn’t freedom. There’s another set of rules entirely, and they’re swift and immutable as a guillotine blade.”

“So why do it?” Pete said. “Why not just live a normal, human life?”

Jack shrugged. “It’s my blood. Yours, too. You can’t ignore the Black once it’s chosen you, Pete. You can just try to exist.”

He turned the box to face her. “Try it. Open the lock.”

Pete’s brow crinkled. “Thought you said that was black magic.”

Jack drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “You wanted to learn, and I shouldn’t have put you off. Open the lock.”

Her jaw set, Pete admitted tightly, “It doesn’t work that way for me.”

Jack folded his arms. “You open doorways to the Land of the Dead. You pull power through you when I do me spells. How is this any different?”

“It just bloody is!” Pete snapped. She shoved the box back at him. “I can’t do fancy tricks. I just have this awful, deep, dark hole inside of me and sometimes the monster inside it wakes up. I can’t control it, Jack. I’m not touched with magic like you. I’m stained with it and it doesn’t wash off.”

“Pete . . .” Jack wanted to reach for her and stop the encroaching tears he saw in her too-bright gaze, but he held himself in. “Pete, you need to listen to me now. You have to learn a few things. Enough so the Black doesn’t swallow you alive.” He took one of her hands, put it on the lid of the music box. “You’re not a monster, Pete. You’re something rare, and there’s them that will come for you and try to abuse your talent.”

“Look.” Pete sighed, pulling her hand back into her lap. “I know that I can’t hide behind Jack Winter. My whole sodding life has been self-reliance, ever since my mum walked out and left me in charge of my sister and our da.” She gave a shrug. “But this isn’t me.”

Jack felt his jaw begin to twitch. How did you explain to the only person who mattered that you wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t be able to help her, so she had to help herself?

“Just try it?” he said finally, softening his frown and giving Pete one of his smiles. “For my humor, luv?”

When Jack had nothing else, he still had his snake’s charm, even if it made him feel like a low-down hustler to use it on Pete. He reverted back to the clever animal he’d been on the streets, fixing, with the false face and the predator’s smile.

And Pete finally nodded, and touched the music box again. “I feel stupid as anything.”

“Don’t think about that. Don’t trouble yourself over anything,” Jack said. “Just feel. Bend the lock to your will, and say the words. Tell it oscail.”

Pete’s lips pursed and she shut her eyes. In the curious void that the necromancer’s magic left around the house, her power sent out waves like a stone in a pool, like a bell in misty dawn air. It played across his skin like the light drag of fingers and Jack shivered.

After a moment, Pete blew out a breath. “It’s no good. I feel it but every time it gets away from me. Like trying to grab a greased cat.”

Jack set his hand next to hers. But not touching. Not when her magic was up. He didn’t fancy sending either of them into a coma. “Try it again. It takes doing but if you can open a lock, you can call flame and if you can call a flame you can . . . well . . . do practically anything.”