Demon Bound (20 page)

Lawrence screwed up his face, but he tucked the key into his coat pocket. “I don’t like this, Jack. You still thinking you can beat that demon, aren’t you? Still thinking you the wickedest man in the world.”

Jack faced his gaze to Lawrence, staring a hole in the other man until Lawrence squirmed. “I’m fucking rubbish at a lot of it,” Jack said quietly, “but I am the crow-mage and it wouldn’t kill you to have a little fucking faith, Lawrence.”

Lawrence dropped his eyes, giving the small victory to Jack. “I save me faith for the devils and the saints, man.”

Jack felt his fists curl. An ego was something a man of his age and situation could ill afford, but there was still a bit of the flame left in his chest, enough to burn small holes in other people’s good intentions. “You want to say different? Want us to have a little mage’s duel right here in the loo?” Jack set his feet. Lawrence had height and weight on him, but he was a white witch with white witch charms and spells in his arsenal, and Jack wagered he could knock Lawrence on his arse before the magic ever started flying.

“I don’t want to fight wit’ you, Jack,” Lawrence sighed. “I want me best friend in the world not to be dragged into Hell. But me a day late and a pound short on that score.”

“Too right,” Jack said. He left off his planted feet and solid fists, and went to unlock the door and leave. Lawrence could piss and moan the hind legs off of a horse, but
he’d do what Jack asked. He always had, from the first day they’d met, in a squat straddling the edges of the Black and a horrid dump in Peckham. Lawrence was a deejay from Birmingham. Jack was a skinny nineteen-year-old git still wearing a Dublin hospital bracelet around his wrist, no more possessions than that and an outsize ability to slag the wrong people off. They’d gotten along immediately.

“You can’t cheat a demon,” Lawrence said softly. “No living soul can manage that. You going to die, Jack, and the best you can hope for is to go with your head up.”

Jack’s guts twisted up. “Thanks. Nothing like knowing my mates are expecting me to come marching home with a smile on my ruddy face.”

“You’re good, Jack,” Lawrence said quietly. “But you’re not that good. I’ll say my farewells, and if you come to your senses . . .” He flashed the flat key, made it disappear again. “You know where to find me.”

“Cheers. And fuck you, Lawrence.” Jack shoved the door open, let the sound and light of the station engulf him once more, like dropping into an ocean of bodies and sound. High above him, on the same rafter, the crow watched. Jack stilled, glaring at it. He’d been seeing entirely too many nosy birds of late. It was like being trapped in one of those insipid talking-animal films, laced with a hit of bad acid.

Lawrence came to his shoulder. “You got a fetch on you, boy.”

Jack rolled his eyes toward the crow. “That animal companion shite is for your type, Lawrence. I call it a bloody obnoxious pest.”

The crow hopped from one foot to the other, flexing its wings to their full length. It stared at Jack. Jack flipped it two fingers.

“Treat your fetch better, Jack.” Lawrence clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Never know when you need that old boy to carry your soul home.”

“Like you said,” Jack told Lawrence. “Too little, too late.”

Lawrence knocked one booted toe against the ground. “Take care of yourself, Jack.”

Jack lifted one corner of his mouth. “You going to miss me, you great pair of knickers? Going to have yourself a cry once I’m gone on my way?”

“I ain’t saying good-bye,” Lawrence told him hotly. “It is what it is. You don’t listen to no demon’s lies and you don’t get yourself in more trouble than you already carrying.”

Jack threw Lawrence a salute. “Just as you say, guv.”

Lawrence gave a nod. “Then I see you later, Jack.”

“Yeah,” Jack told him as Lawrence joined the line of people descending back into the tube. “Much later.”

A garbled call for the Heathrow Express echoed over the PA, and Jack’s headache joined his nervous stomach. He joined the line of people boarding the sleek dove gray train car, passing his fingers over the ticket machine to open the gate to the platform.

The magic tingled, ran through him from head to toe like he’d just grabbed a live socket. Such a small trick shouldn’t send pain up and down his nerves, but then his sight shouldn’t be going haywire and he shouldn’t be dreaming of a ritual that had gone out of fashion with painting yourself blue and chopping the heads off of Picts.

Shouldn’t be feeling the pull of Pete’s Weir talent even when she was miles away. Shouldn’t be going to bloody Thailand on a fool’s errand. Jack would have traded with a demon all over again in that moment to be back in Naughton’s smelly, lumpy bed with his arm over Pete’s waist and her slender leg wrapped around his.

Pete’s leg dug into his thighs, urging him harder, urging him to take what he wanted, needed.

“Oh, fuck off,” Jack gritted as the Heathrow train rolled out of Paddington, gathering speed as it slid through the junkyards and council estates of south London. Not that
any vision he’d ever been subjected to had been chased off with a bit of bad language.

“Jack . . . ,” Pete gasped, back arching, body stiffening around him, driving him to the edge. “Jack, stop . . .”

He wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop as the chanting crested, the onlookers watching the pair on the stone, faces blank and eyes glistening with desire.

“Jack.” Pete stilled herself and looked into his eyes. “You have to stop, Jack.”

The chanting fell away and the circle closed in, and Jack saw for the first time the white robes, the silver masks, and the crowns of horn hiding the circle of mages from his view.

Not the
Fiach Dubh.
Not his brothers. These were strangers, and all at once, the rain and the mist froze against Jack’s skin. Cold. Always the cold. Pete tried to put her hand against his cheek, stopped at the end of the shackle, and sank back to the stone. Jack saw the bruises blossoming under the woad, saw Pete’s starvation thinness and the chafe marks at her wrists from her time on the stone. “Stop, Jack,” she whispered. “Stop running. Stop fighting.”

Jack placed his hand against her cheek. “Can’t, luv. I’m doing it for you.”

She shook her head, a bitter smile thin as a line cut on broken mirror growing on her face. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Jack Winter. And you don’t know me. Not really.”

The circle of mages closed in, their hands snatching at Jack, trying to drag him away, and Pete strained to hold him. “Wake up, Jack,” she whispered. “Open your eyes.”

“
We are now arriving at Heathrow, Terminal Three,
” the train robot announced. The train jolted, and the doors slid open. “
Please mind the gap as you exit the train.
”

Jack managed to rise, collect his kit, and leave the car with the rest of the foreigners and travelers shuffling through the dank gray tunnel with their luggage. Then he took a quick turn around the rear of the train, leaned over the edge of the platform, and vomited his guts out. There wasn’t much, just coffee and a few biscuits he’d nicked from the dining car of the Tiverton train.

Jack felt the gnawing ache of an empty stomach, the jittery sick dance of his heart. Jack wanted Pete with him. She’d have made sense of the vision, helped him quiet his sight and his magic. He could talk himself out of the truth, if Pete were with him.

His talent was going haywire. He couldn’t control his sight. As the anniversary of his bargain crept closer, Jack’s power was unwinding. He’d seen mages go off the rails before, when some curse or malice of the Black caused their mind and their talent to diverge, shredding one another as they fought tooth and nail inside the unlucky mage’s meat sack. Those mages ended up in Velcro pajamas. The ones that didn’t top themselves outright.

Wake up,
Pete had said.
Open your eyes.

“She sees you, Jack Winter, and she says that you can run. . . .” Pete grinned, half with the pain of her shackles and half with malice. “She says you can run far and fast, but you can never hide.”

Jack dug his fingers into his armrest when the Malaysia Air plane took off from Heathrow, and kept them there as the jet bounced from cloud to cloud, each jerk designed specifically to keep his guts somewhere in the vicinity of his tongue.

“Bad flight?”

The girl in the middle seat was one of those self-conscious hippie types made of natural fibers and henna dye, who did things like joining the Peace Corps and handing out condoms to third-world Catholics, urged through the poverty-drenched mud and shit because of some deep moral compulsion brought on by not enough hugs from Mummy.

“’M fine,” Jack said. When was the last time he’d flown? American, 1994? The ill-fated trip to Belgium when Lawrence got himself mixed up with the Stygian Brothers and Jack had to go to their necropolis and bargain back Lawrence’s death?

Too bloody long, and he hadn’t liked strapping himself inside a giant lipstick tube and getting suspended five miles above the earth any better in the bad old days.

“You don’t look fine,” the girl said. She eyed the flight attendants in their colorful vests and neckerchiefs moving in the galley and then dipped a hand into her hemp bag. “Here.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at the small round pills. “What’s that, Xanax?”

“Darling, do I look like I carry mother’s little helper?” the girl scoffed. “Take it. You’ll have a nice ride, I guarantee.”

Jack eyed the little pills when she tipped them into his palm. Then the jet bounced again and turned, skimming west over water and on into southern Europe and the Middle East.

The girl unscrewed her complimentary in-flight water bottle and handed it to him. “I’m Chelsea.”

Jack debated for only a moment, until turbulence bounced him against his lap belt once more, and washed the chalky aftertaste of the pills down with nearly half of the water. After months off, his throat had forgotten how to accept copious handfuls of pharmaceuticals.

“I’m Michael,” he said. “Mick.” Giving a fake name was a reflex, when you couldn’t know who you were speaking to. Names were kept back, used for currency and passage, not given out like Chelsea’s mystery drugs. Jack pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He could still taste the pills.

“Why Thailand?” Chelsea asked after they’d watched an announcement about the in-flight films and blood clots that could be forming in one’s legs at this very moment.

“Why did your parents name you after a fucking neighborhood?” Jack returned. She laughed, and washed down her own pills. Three, Jack noted. He must have lost that scraggly addict’s aura, the one that telegraphed he needed at least twice the doctor’s dose of any medicine you chose.

“They loved it there. We couldn’t afford it, of course—they lived out in Chiswick, and I left when I was about fifteen
and went wild for a few years before I settled down and got into activist work.”

Sometimes pegging people dead to rights in the first go was extraordinarily boring, Jack reflected. If Chelsea had said she was going to Bangkok to recruit an all-castrato chorus line for the musical production of
Trainspotting
, the flight wouldn’t be dull, at least.

“You rescue prostitutes and bums, then?” he said. “Turn them into useful members of the human race?” The pills were making themselves known. His head and legs felt swimmy and his heart and lungs felt slow.

“I rescue anyone who asks me,” Chelsea said with a thin smile. “But what happens after that is up to them.” She put two fingers over his eyelids. “Go to sleep, Michael. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

Jack tried to say “time for what,” but he had a feeling he only mumbled vaguely before he drifted into a cotton-wool floating sleep. Chelsea’s image flickered once in his sight, gold lion’s eyes and twin shadows sitting on her shoulders. The Black caressed her sharpened cheekbones and full lips, and her hand that stroked his face was full of talons.

“Oh,” Jack slurred. “Fuck.” Before he could really look at Chelsea, put a barrier of power between her pointed black teeth and himself, a dream opened its jaws and swallowed him down. He saw Irish hills, English cities, Pete’s eyes, and then nothing, until it was much too late to do anything at all.

Jack woke, suddenly and with the sensation of falling. He saw long metal arms out of the airplane porthole, metal carts manned by drivers in orange vests. It was a bit like waking up after you’d fallen asleep, stoned and watching something from the sixties about robots.

“Come on.” Chelsea nudged him. “It’s always better if you walk it off.”

Jack stood with her help and every joint in his body from his neck to his ankles protested. “The fuck did you give me?” he mumbled. His tongue was thick and furry, a remake of too many mornings when he’d been on the road with the Bastards. That had been the nicest thing about the heroin—you never got hungry enough to feel the sick afterward.

“Dreamless sleep,” Chelsea said. She stepped into the aisle and shouldered her fuzzy bag. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” She gave him another one of those small half-smiles, the ones that didn’t express anything close to comfort or joy. “That’s what you ask for, Jack. When you think no one can hear you. Not to see.”

Jack watched the way her eyes changed, from pleasant gray to iron slate to gold, pupiless and staring.

“Who are you?” he slurred. “Actually, strike that bollocks—what? What are you?”

Chelsea leaned back and squeezed his hand. “The guardian of the gateways sends her regard, Jack. She grants you safe passage through this land.”

Then she was gone, moving lithely through the crush of people disembarking from the jet where there should have been no space, just elbows and bags and snorts of “Move it!” from the American in the Hawaiian shirt, lugging two roller bags and a camera case.

Jack moved to the side and caught the bloke in the ribs as he chugged passed. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “Bit close in here.”