Demon Bound

Jack with a hardstare. “The Smoke be no place for you until this is settled. Too many eyes watchin’, too many tongues waggin’. Country air clears the mind. Even inside your thick skull.”
    “Bugger off,” Jack muttered. “You want to be my mum, put on an apron and fix me a meat pie.”
    Lawrence stood and went to the door, flipping the bolt and opening it enough for someone skinny as Jack to slip out. “I have sympathy for what you done, Jack. But now the truth be known, I can’t be your sanctuary.”
    Jack stood. He didn’t feel angry or betrayed, or any of the things you were supposed to feel when one friend of only a few turned his back on you. In a lifetime of doors slamming in his face, the novelty wore off quickly. The stone in his chest just grew a bit heavier. “Thanks for not turning me in, at any rate.”
    “I am a worthy witch,” Lawrence growled. “I bow to no demon’s order.”
    “In a few months we’ll have a pint and a laugh about this,” Jack promised, stepping into the hallway. The Black rushed back, flowing around Lawrence’s flat like water around a bridge piling in the Thames.
    “Jack.” Lawrence bowed his head. “You know you don’t go making promises you can’t keep. How bad is it?”
    “I bargained for my life,” Jack said shortly. “And a life is what I owe it. It’s bad business, Lawrence. Bad all around, up, down, and sideways. But don’t worry your pretty head.” Jack dropped Lawrence a wink. “I’ll get it sorted. I’m still planning on being here at thirteen years and a day.”
    “Don’t you take up no fortune-telling, boy,” Lawrence said. “The future, she not your strong point.”

Chapter Nine
    The rain had started when Jack’s boots hit the pavement, the thin miserable midwinter rain that foreigners thought of when they thought of England. Jack hunched inside his leather, and felt ice slide down his shoulders into the curve of his spine.
    He wound through side streets like a maze rat until the porticoes of Paddington loomed up, and the rain finally ceased.
    Pete waited beside a ticket machine near the National Rail tracks, under the grimy iron braces and the blackened ceiling of the station’s top floor. Being inside Paddington was like being inside a giant lung, black and tarred over from decades of smoke and the resultant soot.
    Pete stood still and watchful in the way that only coppers and psychopaths excelled at. Hands in pockets, head thrown back to give the appearance of indifference, eyes unblinking and sharp as they skipped from the kiosks selling pastries and noodles to the groups of anxious foreign travelers gathered under the bank of National Rail schedule boards to the heavily peroxided Londoner stuffed likean anemic sausage into her slim dungarees, designer boots, and fur jacket.
    “It was
awful,
just
awful,
” the woman intoned into her mobile. “Not a proper vodka tonic anywhere in the hotel. That’s bloody France for you.”
    Jack considered taking a dip inside her handbag, one of those enormous blue sharkskin types that a family of refugees could live inside comfortably for some months, but gave it up in favor of watching Pete.
    She hadn’t seen him yet. One small hand went to her neck, worked the kinks free. Pete’s old gig with the Met had made her a hand at blending, but in recent weeks she’d scuttled her wool pea coat for the canvas army jacket and had begun wearing her hair down instead of in a practical knot at the back of her skull. Little touches—pink lip gloss rather than plain, black nails like the very first time Jack had seen her, a dozen years ago at an underground club in Soho.
    Not a dozen. Nearly thirteen. The weight of the demon’s smile washed away the odd sort of calm Pete carried with her. She had the demeanor of a battlefield nurse, unyielding but a comfort nonetheless simply because she’d ventured into the corpses and laid a hand against your cheek.
    She’s too good for the likes of you
, the fix whispered.
Come with me, luv. I’ll never tell you no.
    The pressure of a rotten and magic-riddled day built up behind Jack’s eyes. At least Paddington was so crushed with life and strapped with iron that the sight was silent.
    He took a step forward, raised a hand. “Pete.”
    The woman with the mobile smacked into him, shoulder to shoulder. Hers was even bonier than Jack’s.
    “Watch
out
,” she snarled. “I’ve a mind to call the policeman over here, you.”
    “Eat a curry, luv, and