Demon Bound

cheer up,” Jack returned. “Unless you’re keeping so slim because your bloke fancies a bit of necrophilia.”
    “Cretin!” the woman snapped, and stomped away, boot heels clacking like bones on the station’s tile floor.
    “I think she likes you,” Pete said. “The two of you could share bleaching tips.”
    “Sod off,” Jack said, and Pete rewarded him by smiling. No Naughton, this time. Just him.
    The secret of the demon grew larger and sharper, pushing on Jack’s heart and his guts.
    “What is it?” Pete said. “You look peaked.”
    “Nothing,” Jack said. “Just fancy a fag, is all.”
    “Can it wait?” Pete worried the zip on her jacket. “We should get to driving if we want to make Naughton’s by midnight.”
    “’Course.” Jack shrugged. He could do apathetic, do it well. He’d been a punk frontman, after all.
    Pete slipped her arm through his and her sudden proximity, her smell of clean linen shampoo and perfume and a little sweat, nearly made him stagger. He rolled his eyes upward in an effort to stave off a word, or a touch, or fuck it, a thought that would betray him as nowhere near cool and in control, the diametric opposite of what Pete and the world at large thought him. He was nearly forty—he shouldn’t be fainting at a girl’s touch. But the problem came again: it wasn’t a girl. It was Pete.
    When Jack opened his eyes, the crow sat on the cross-beams of the station roof, and flicked its beak behind Jack as if to say,
Watch your arse, old son.
    In the same moment, his sight flared, like someone had put a pipe across the back of his skull.
    Jack spun back the way he’d come, so quickly that he dragged Pete around in a drunken dance with him.
    Two figures moved through the crowd disgorged from a Bristol train, two men in workman’s coveralls when he looked straight on, and emaciated forms with black, bleeding holes for eyes when he blinked.
    Jack skidded to a stop, Pete stumbling against him. “Fuck.”
    Pete’s eyes widened. “What is it? What’s happened?”
    “Those two.” Jack jerked his chin. The figures passed by and through travelers, and where they touched, faces fell and eyes narrowed in anger. Travelers shoved. Babies shrieked. A woman in a green wool coat slapped her lover and ran off in the direction of the loo, sobbing.
    “Yeah?” Pete let go of him, dropping her shoulders and curling her fists, like a small but determined bulldog. Jack had witnessed her drop men twice her size, but these were not men. The cold encroachment of their energy prickled the hair on his arms, made the ink in his tattoos dance, made the Black spin in front of his eyes as his sight screamed to show him the true faces of the things before him.
    “Sluagh,” he said.
    “Gesundheit?” Pete said hopefully. Jack shook his head. An entry from one of Seth McBride’s diaries swam up into his mind.
Sluagh. Restless spirits.
    Seth may have been a wanker, the bastard child of con man, mage, and roaring Irish drunk, but he knew ghosts, knew them better than any man besides Jack himself. He’d taught Jack enough to stay alive for another nineteen-odd years, at least.
    “The restless dead,” Jack said aloud. “Sent away from the Bleak Gates to trouble the living.”
    The twinned ghosts opened their mouths in a single, silent scream, and in unison raised arms of dessicated flesh and bone tipped with black nails that curled over with graveyard growth. They pointed at Jack, eyes and teeth spilling black pollution across the psychic space of Paddington.
    “I gather they’re not here to have a pint and a laugh?” Pete said.
    “No,” Jack said. “The sluagh appear at the moment of a person’s death.” He turned in a slow circle, watching more and more of the silent, howling, and pointing figures appear in the crowd. “And they always travel in packs.”
    “They’re here for you?” Pete snugged close against his side, their arms touching along the length. She wasn’t asking him the question except as a courtesy, and Jack was relieved he didn’t have to answer. As a mage, whatever horrid thing crawled from under a rock was most likely there for you and your skin, and Pete had at least learned that much.
    Jack watched the sluagh by turns, counted them, felt the chill abrasion of the dead against his sight.
    They advanced, in flickers and slithers, leaving a black trail across the floor of Paddington. Cold stole across Jack’s cheeks and burned his lungs, and the sluagh