Demon Bound

“Make someone spit toads?” Pete’s lips parted in a smile but her eyes stayed shut.

“I suppose, if that’s what gets you off,” Jack said.

“I’ve a few old schoolmates who deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.

Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”

Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”

“So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the Fiach Dubh. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.

“When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”

“I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”

“Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”

“Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”

“More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.

Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was begi

Chapter Seventeen

After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.

There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.

He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.

Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.

Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London, stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and cra

Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”

“Coffee and a pain au chocolat,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.

He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”

“No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.

“You take care of Pete, you hear?” Ollie’s Midlands brogue reminded Jack of a council worker who’d sneaked about in the dead of night and shagged his mother for a reduction in their electric bill. “Lord knows, she deserves better than you.”

Jack didn’t know if he disliked Ollie because the man was a prick or because he was right. Most likely both.

He pulled out the crinkled tourist map of the Dartmoor that Pete had procured on her visit to the archives and breathed onto his palm.

Witchfire blossomed, blue and spectral, from his skin, the gentle burn-off of extra magic against the night air. The flames drifted lazily into the twilit sky, the silvery glow lighting the map, just. Jack turned west. “Not much farther.”

“What are we looking for?” Pete asked. Wind swept down from the crest of the hill and lifted her hair like a flight of black feathers against her cheek. Rain followed it, in a soft ice-cold sheet, and Jack cursed as it dribbled into his eyes.

“A road.”

“Jack,” Pete grumbled, “there’s a bloody road ru

“Not that road.” Jack felt his feet sink into mud as his boots found another ditch, and then gained a roadbed that was little more than gravel and dirt turning rapidly to sludge.

Pete cursed and stumbled against him. Between the witchfire gently bathing them in a bubble of blue and the sideways rain, Jack was none too balanced, but he caught her. She didn’t weigh much, but she was undeniably present.

Pete looked up at him, skin translucent and eyes black pebbles in the light. “Thanks.”

“Just up here,” Jack said, as the moor whispered to him, licked at him with teasing tongues of power. It wanted him to join in the wild celebration, in the mud and the rain. The Black here teased him with memories of what the demon had made him see. Such a place as this was made for the oldest rituals of the Fiach Dubh. The deep magic, the old magic that had fallen to the wayside as the people and their power hid in cities, curled up behind iron walls, in front of tellys instead of bonfires, and no longer needed to spill blood into the good soil to procure crops, children, and rebirth.

“This feels wrong,” Pete said, dropping her voice so that it blended with the rain. Jack also felt the urge to be silent, creep like a mouse under floorboards. The wild magic around him rose, gathered, and in the back of his consciousness he sensed the prickle of warning that had kept him alive as long as he’d managed the trick thus far.

“We should go back,” Pete said, more forcefully. She’d stopped walking, her gaze roving beyond the confines of the witchfire, too much white about the pupil. Fear-white. Her hands clutched her jacket at the neck, knuckles tight.

Jack’s heart sped up, warned him that they should go back, that they weren’t wanted here, that whatever was hunting on the moor tonight was bigger, older, and hungrier than he.

Cold, Jonathan Lovett’s ghost hissed. Always the cold.

“Fuck off,” Jack growled under his breath. The day he turned tail was the day he might as well take a razor to his own wrists. It was the single quality that he could lay claim to as a mage—he might not be as strong or quick as a sorcerer but he’d fight. And the fight he gave would be dirty and mean.

The crossroad loomed out of the rain and the gathering mist, a road sign knocked onto its side in the dying grass the only signal of human occupation.

Jack knelt and opened his bag, pulling out a battered tin and unscrewing the top. He pulled out his flick-knife and scraped up a layer of damp dirt, another. He filled the tin halfway, more than enough for the unwinding spell, but proper crossroads dirt, touched by no human hand, was difficult to come by and he could sell it. When he was back in London. Home.

Pete shivered and she hadn’t stopped looking around, but she crouched and watched him. “MG said once that you bury things at the crossroads and a demon comes to grant you a wish.”

“They buried murderers at a crossroads,” Jack said. “Couldn’t have them in a consecrated cemetery. The demon story is a load of shit.” Like so much of what MG said. Just enough truth in the lie to be destructive.