Demon Bound

Jack stopped smiling. He felt a bit as if someone had just wrapped a rope around his neck and the other end around a gallows pole. “You have a name.”

I have yours as well, crow-mage. Your soul is bare before my eyes.

Elemental demons were scavengers, the carrion birds of Hell. They clung to human emotion, to sin and sadness and pain. They didn’t have names of their own.

Jack hissed through his teeth. “What do you want, then, Karti? Begging? Crying? To play fetch?”

Feed me your pain, Kartimuka whispered. It padded closer on bare human feet, its long tongue snaking out to lap at Jack’s skin. Feed me your terror. Where it touched him, a numbness started, one that Jack recognized too well as the paralyzing bliss of a high. Feed me your nightmares, Kartimukha purred, and Jack fell to his knees and felt his sight peel back the layers between his consciousness and the Black.

Tell me the truth, Kartimukha rumbled in his ear. Show me why you’ve come.

He managed to scream once before his mind was stripped bare and Kartimukha plunged his claws in.

Jack saw everything, everything at once, and it overwhelmed his sight like a flash flood. His skull throbbed and filled up with the sensory overload of touching Kartimukha until he was sure it would split wide open.

Kartimukha watched him impassively, one foot planted on his chest. Show me the secret dark and shame inside of you, mage. Feed me. Fill me.

Jack couldn’t breathe. His limbs were lead. His lungs were flat. This was the drifting place, the twilight sliver between life and the Bleak Gates, the place of overdose and suicide, of regret and despair. His heartbeat slowed, a watch with a loose spring and faulty gears.

Yes, Kartimukha breathed. So many memories. So much pain.

Jack felt the claws tighten around him like razor wire, around his sight and his magic and the things—the memories—that made him Jack Winter were sluicing away as the Kartimukha fed.

“You can’t have them,” he whispered. Kartimukha tilted its head.

They cause you pain, mage. I can rid you of them. Why would you keep them?

Jack shut his eyes against the horrible burning gaze. “They’re mine,” he said. “They’re my scars, not yours.”

You have been brave for a long time, Jack. Kartimukha caressed his face with its hot, sour breath. You don’t need to be brave any longer.

“Brave?” Jack wheezed. Drawing a breath was agony. He felt as if someone had put a jackboot into his ribs. “I shoot smack into my arm to forget the things I’ve seen. I wake up screaming because of the things I’ve done. I can’t even look the only person who gives a fuck about me in the eye. I’m not brave, I just survive better than most.”

Then why do you fight? Kartimukha sounded genuinely puzzled. Why not feed me those bleeding dreams? Why live with the scars?

Jack forced himself to look at Kartimukha again. “That’s all I have, mate. Scars. If you want memories, if you want to see that I’m being truthful, then take a look inside my head if you can stand it.” He raised his head. An inch was all he could manage. “I’m not afraid of my own memories.”

Kartimukha snarled. Even now, you lie. The thing raised its paw, brought it down, and struck into Jack’s mind with its power and its magic, stripping him down to the core.

Jack blinked and found himself staring at a stained plaster ceiling, neon light blinking Morse code across the ceiling from the sign bolted to the wall outside.

He was warm—warm from whiskey in his gut and warm from blood dribbling down his arms. A hooked rug, lumpy underneath his body, soaked up the red, stain spreading.

Jack’s blood was black under the blue neon. His fingers went slack, and the razor blade tumbled to the carpet.

Around him, the dead crowded in. A severe man in a celluloid collar and Windsor tie. A mod girl in a leather minidress with handprints on her throat.

They touched him, hissed at him. Stared into his soul with their black eyes and waited for him to be one of them.

This is how it ends, the girl whispered, but her voice wasn’t the strangled rasp Jack remembered. The voice was Kartimukha’s. This is your last moment of life. Come to me, Jack. Leave your misery with your life.

Jack drifted, dreamy. Soon it would be over. Soon he could forget his sight, forget his failed time with Seth and the Fiach Dubh.

Soon, he would be one with the dead instead of fighting them.

The ghost girl stooped and brushed her fingers across his forehead, moving aside strands of sweaty hair with icy fingers. This is how it ends, she breathed. Let go, Jack. Come to me.

This was how it ended. Life bled onto the floor of a cheap hotel room. A razor blade in a straight line up his forearms. The end of Jack Winter.

Faintly, Jack felt his breath slow and the warm, floating sensation of blood loss engulf his senses. A maid would find him, and he’d lay in a freezer for a few months, an anonymous body among the anonymous dead of Dublin, until he was sent to the potter’s field.

He was with the dead. With the dead he would stay.

A sense of wrongness overtook Jack, the last flicker of his magic. This was not how he died. He didn’t lie down and give up. He cut his wrists deep with a shiny new razor and he felt his life draining onto the floor but he didn’t die, he didn’t go over even when the ghosts begged him to join their ranks. . . .

No one’s coming for you, the ghost girl breathed.

Jack turned his face away from her, watching the hotel sign blink outside the glass. Raindrops clung to the windowpane, refracting the blue light, blue like witchfire. A crow landed on the sill outside, flapped its wings. The bird’s profile beat against the glass, beak leaving starburst cracks as it wrecked itself trying to get inside.

The pain of his cuts crawled inside the numbing sensation of the ghosts, the ache from the floorboards and the burning of whiskey in his empty stomach.

Hush. The ghost girl stroked his brow again. Rest, Jack. None of it matters now.

The crow beat at the window, its own black blood smearing the glass.

A pounding started outside the hotel room door. “Jack!” Fists and boots shook the wood. “Jackie, you stupid bastard! Open the fuckin’ door!”

Seth’s voice was the hand that dragged Jack away from the Bleak Gates.

Seth came in. Seth called 999.

Jack curled in on himself, struggling with nerveless fingers to stanch the bleeding from his arms, and the crow watched him, stock-still now. Beak broken and bloody as his own body. Croak sad and empty as Seth’s echoing voice as he wrenched Jack’s arms above his head, tore his own shirt to stop the bleeding.

The crow waited for Jack, waited for his soul until the emergency responders came in, their codes rapid-fire into their radios.

“Attempted suicide. Six minutes out . . .”

“Hang on, Jackie,” Seth whispered. “You stupid prick. You hang on. None of the crows get to check out that easy.”

Jack retched violently. Blood ran from his nose and his guts twisted.

Kartimukha gave a cry. No! Feed me!

Jack struggled to his knees, and then his feet. Breathing was a task, but he could hear the sounds of a modern street, and he felt the Black ebb away, letting go of the strangle-hold on his sight.