Demon Bound

drove?”
    “A Maserati,” Jack said. “For nearly six blocks.”
    Pete cocked her eyebrow. “
You
had a Maserati?”
    “Nah, it belonged to some Italian bloke. Wasn’t using it at the time.”
    Lefty Nottingham, the Bastards’ roadie and later—much later—Jack’s first smack connection, had bet him he wouldn’t. He’d flashed the flat roll of foil, eyed the sports car idling at the curb like an eager beast, and rumbled in his smoker’s
basso,
like the selfsame needle dropping onto a 78, “
Bet you wouldn’t for a day’s worth of hits, Winter.
”
    The Maserati ended its life with a post box in the bonnet and Jack walked away with that flat roll of foil in his pocket. And a concussion, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you worried over when there was half a gram of skag burning a hole in your denim.
    Pete chuckled softly. “I’ll take my chances, I think.”
    Jack put his head back against the rest, trying to drain the tension of Pete’s company from his neck. He preferred birds he could compartmentalize. Friend, fuck, foe. Pete was a combination of all, or none. She wasn’t easy, and the old Jack didn’t like that. The present Jack just felt like a useless wanker for having to lie.
    He didn’t think he could sleep, but the draft of warm air from the heating vents, combined with blood loss and exhaustion, dropped him into a drowse.
    He woke to Pete’s shaking. She pointed out the wind-screen and Jack saw black turrets, dead trees, and a slice of sky tarnished silver by moonlight.
    “That’s the place?” he said. “Christ, where’s the lightning and the sinister albino butler?”
    He put his hand on the door, and it was far as he got.
    The Black shuddered and pulsed around the house, and Jack grabbed his head as a spike of pain split the front of his skull. The Black wasn’t just around the house, it was in the house, a part of it as much as beams and mortar, a great swirling well of magic, dragging him under, dragging him to drowning . . .
    “Jack!” A small cool hand slapped him across the face, and the sting was enough to quiet the scream of the void.
    He’d fallen out of the car and onto damp gravel. The stones dug divots in the side of his face, and a finger-light mist kissed his eyelashes with droplets.
    Pete helped him sit up, and when he looked at the house again it was perfectly silent, just a house surrounded by overgrown gardens and backed by the sweep of the moor. “Fucking hell,” Jack muttered, brushing mud off his cheek.
    “Everything all right?” Pete crouched down with hands on knees to examine his eyes and breathing, like they taught you in a first-aid course.
    “Not sure.” Jack shook himself, shrugging off the last vestiges of the Black. It slithered reluctantly back into the small, secret place inside his head where his talent resided, hissing as it coiled up and went back to sleep.
    Pull yourself together, Winter,
the fix whispered.
Until you can’t any longer, and you come begging for a taste.
    “Fuck off,” Jack grumbled. Pete cocked her head.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Not you,” Jack said. He pulled his boots under him and climbed up to his feet. The maneuver took him several more steps than it had even five years ago. Jack decided creaky knees and a back permanently out of line from sleeping rough on squat floors were the least of his worries at the moment. He could be a vain sod when his head wasn’t breaking apart like an egg. “Let’s get on with this sorry endeavor and see what skeletons Naughton has rattling around his family manse.”

Chapter Eleven
    The interior of Nicholas Naughton’s mansion was much like the exterior—grim, dusty, and unwelcoming. Pete hit the light inside the double front door, igniting exactly two bulbs in the fifty-lamp chandelier looking down on a marble entry so thick with dust even Pete’s petite frame left footprints.
    A grand stairway lead up to a landing of peeling wallpaper and rotting carpet, and two hallways trailed deeper into Naughton’s residence like dark, clotted veins. The place smelled of rot and damp—cemetery smells, with the musical accompaniment of rats and bugs scuttling over the decaying bones in holes Jack couldn’t see.
    He took in the shrouded furniture, the third-rate landscapes hanging from the picture rails in the narrow front parlor, the stained walls and cracked mirrors that reflected jagged, mismatched Jacks back to his gaze. “This is what Danny Naughton lived with? Cross and