Demon Bound

demon tumbled into the whirl pool of his sight.
    Everything is black. Everything is pain. Jack is aware that the screams echoing are his.
    Light burns through his eyelids, light blotted out by a man’s shadow, and when he opens his eyes, he’s in Ireland. Seth is leaning over him. He’s fallen asleep on the grass, trying to read one of the interminable Latin diaries the older mage foisted on him. He throws the mouldering thing at Seth.
    “
This is a great load of shit
.”
    “’
Course it’s shit,” Seth tells him. “But it’s shit that might save your wee arse one day, boy, so you best read
on. Conjugate some verbs if that will break up the monotony.”
    Jack watches a crow land on Seth’s roof, and stare at them. Seth sees it, and his smile grows sly. “You’ve got a fetch, Jackie boy.”
    Fetches aren’t something Jack believes in. Jack believes in what he can see, touch—the magic in him that responds to liquor and rage and cigarette burns. The sweet taste of a fag and the sweeter taste of skin under his lips. “Old wives’ tale,” he tells Seth. “It’s probably seen something dead in the field.”
    “Old wives could learn you a thing or two, as well,” Seth tells him, and retreats indoors.
    Jack shuts his eyes against the sun and he’s on his knees in a circle of stones, wearing the white raiments for the first and last time in his career as a
Fiach Dubh.
In a few weeks, Seth will catch him with the grimoire. This is the first nail in his coffin.
    Seth and his brothers stare in horror, Seth’s
athame
held at half-mast, as the crows land one by one, on the top of each stone, and before Jack the crow woman stands with her hair made from feathers and her face spattered in blood.
    Stare as she touches his forehead, where the white witch gits say the third eye lives.
    Stare as she whispers to him, in a language that Jack should not be able to understand, “My mage. Crow-mage.”
    Nausea and dizziness grip him as he sees bonfires in her gaze, smells the smoke of funeral pyres, and hears the clash and scream of battles fought up and down the length of the land on which he now kneels. He smells blood and decay, smoke and char, and he sees the spires of the Bleak Gates piercing the fire-lit night.
    Jack shuts his eyes as his dinner of mediocre bangers and mash has its revenge while the brotherhood reviles him with whispers and fearful stares.
    Opens them, and sees Pete Caldecott. She’s skinny, and hides inside a school uniform that’s at least a size too large. She has her sister’s eyes and hair, but both her face and her gaze are sharper. She looks far more like Inspector Caldecott than the woman Jack supposes was their mother, the one who gave MG the soft face and generous tits. Pete is sixteen, and she’s still all planes and angles. Her eyes are decades older, and they don’t miss much.
    When he touches her, he smells the night of the initiation, the scent of battle-wracked earth. The calling card of the crow woman.
    Jack Winter vows to stay away from Pete Caldecott, until he’s tempted beyond resistance, breaks his vow, and he’s in the tomb, the cold stone at his back, the demon looking down at him, lips curling back from pointed teeth.
    The demon speaks. “Wake up, Jack.”
    But Jack holds on to Pete. Holds on to the feeling of the first time he touched her, across the circle in High-gate Cemetery. When Pete has called out to him, Jack has come.
    When Pete lay dying on the graveyard earth, Jack was with her. As long as Jack has Pete, nothing can steal his soul away. Jack is bound to her surely as the crow is bound to him. Jack Winter, fetch of the Hecate’s Weir.
    Jack presses his face into Pete’s hair, smells the sharp smoky scent of autumn in the graveyard, the penny tang of her blood.
    Jack will never leave her, and so he moves in the memory, even though he didn’t on the day, nearly dead from blood loss himself, and takes her face in his hands. “Body and soul,” Jack tells Pete. “I’m yours. I’m the fetch you never had. You and I are bound, by blood and by stone. Bound for all the turns of the earth.”
    Pete smiles at him. Reaches up.
    Wraps a clawed hand around his throat.
    Pete’s face is full of fang and malice. Pete’s smile is the demon.
    “Nice try,” the demon hisses. “But you should have woken up when you had the chance, boy.”
    Its hand closes down, and Jack can no longer breathe. The demon draws him close, the demon that looks like Pete, and