Demon Bound

bone sat at the center, scenes of nymphs and harvest orgies parading around the edge of its lid.
    Elsie settled herself with a groan into an armchair opposite the table. Jack perched on the edge of the pillows and tried not to lose his balance or sneeze at the overwhelming cinnamon incense that blanketed the room in a sticky amber miasma.
    “Jack, Jack, Jack.” Elsie grinned at him. “Tell me everything about you. Last time we were together . . .”
    “Leeds, 1997,” Jack said.
    Elsie nodded. “You were down the rabbit hole, lovie.” Her gravel-pit voice and avalanche of platinum hair, the two assets that made her the post-apocalyptic stunner vocalist for the Razor Babies a dozen years before, were both present now but greatly diminished. Her hair was long, knotted, going gray at the roots, and she’d covered herself in the same garish gypsy getup as her snug house.
    She was a far cry from the girl who wrapped herself in tape and cut it off with razor blades throughout the set, for certain. The shine was still in her eyes, though, and the smirk still on her lips. Elsie hadn’t lost her fire and Jack was relieved, because he needed something burned.
    “Only climbed out recently,” he admitted. “Spent too many years in Wonderland, I suppose.”
    Elsie shifted her bulk, which had grown considerably in the intervening years. Jack supposed that was fair—he’d diminished nearly as much.
    “I don’t think you’d be here at the family sprawl on a social call, once I’ve considered.” Her mouth turned down. “You’d never come by just to see old Elsie getting on.” She snorted. “Then again, neither would I.”
    Simon skulked in and set down a tray of tea and biscuits.
    “Your mum and dad gone away, then?” Jack asked. Simon simply stood, in his overcoat and fingerless gloves, staring dumbly at Jack.
    “Far away,” Elsie said. “Mum passed nearly five years ago now. Dad followed her.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “No, you ain’t.” Elsie hooted. “You weren’t sorry when Death crossed your path, Jack. Not once.”
    “Things change,” he said shortly, and turned his worst glare on Simon. “You need something, my son, or are you just holding up that bit of wall?”
    “He’s harmless,” Elsie assured Jack. “Got a snip of talent and not much of a brain. Simon, go feed the cats and take in the wash. There’s a fog brewing up.”
    Simon shuffled away like an enormous carrion bird, and Jack turned his eyes back to Elsie.
    “I need you to read for me.”
    Elsie’s tea stopped halfway to her lips. “Thought you didn’t believe in the future, Jack. You said there was no point.”
    “And I told you, things change.” Jack reached out and put his hand on the bone box. “Afraid of my future, Elsie?”
    “You had any sense, wanker, you’d be afraid, too.” Elsie set down her teacup with a bone-on-bone clink. “Give it here. Of course I’ll read for you. One old conjurer to another.”
    She opened the bone box and drew out her tarot cards. Elsie hadn’t had much beyond a filthy shirt, ripped tights, and a skirt that barely kept her decent when Jack had met her, but she’d had the cards, rolled in purple velvet in her knapsack. She’d had the magic to make them dance under her stubby fingers, to unfurl the future with the ink and paper and quicksilver dance of the seventy-two images that she turned into windows on the mind and soul.
    Elsie shuffled once, twice, thrice. No ceremony—she was fast and hard as a dealer in Monte Carlo. She slapped the cards in front of Jack. “Cut.”
    Jack did as she said, making sure to touch the cards only with his fingertips. They weren’t a new-age scam that you could buy in any Waterstone’s. Elsie’s deck was at least a hundred and fifty years old, stiff paper inked by hand. A Death’s deck, every card a representation of the Bleak Gates, the Land of the Dead, or Death itself, in all its guises from Thanatos to the pale Horseman.
    In her band days, Elsie claimed the deck was inked in sorcerer’s ink and colored in human blood. Feeling the pinprick shock of foreign magic, old magic that did not brook disturbance, Jack was only half sure she’d been jerking him off.
    Elsie held the cards between her palms and then with a snap, laid the first one face up on the velvet.
    “Death,” Jack said. “Shocking, I tell you.”
    “Death right side up is a change,” Elsie said. “Transition. Evolution. The painful birth of the new.”
    “And the Fool