Demon Bound

transmutation. Transmutation is black magic,” Jack said. “You don’t want to have that on your first try, luv.”
    Pete cocked her eyebrow. “You do it. I’ve seen you crack open a lock a dozen times.”
    Jack lifted his shoulder. “I’ve got an affinity for breaking and entering, luv. Has more to do with nicking things when I was a stupid kid than magic, truth be told.”
    “Of course,” Pete snapped. “You have the ease of everything. I’d just pox it up, like some
stupid kid.
Not like bloody Jack Winter.” She crumpled the slips viciously.
    “You know that’s not what I meant,” Jack protested. Pete’s temper, like her freckles, was Irish and her glare could have cut glass. “You have an affinity, luv. You find things like no one I’ve ever seen.” Jack stepped back and let Pete examine the drawer. “Lost papers. Lost children.” He swallowed, his tongue dry in the closed-up room. “Lost souls.”
    Pete’s anger faded, replaced by half of a small smile. “I suppose it’s what I’m good at,” she said at last. Jack nodded.
    “It’s the truth. What have you found, then?”
    “They’re betting slips,” Pete said. “From all over the country.
Losing
bets, mostly.”
    “So Danny boy spent the time he wasn’t getting pissed and seeing ghosts betting on the ponies?” Jack said. As far as skeletons in a rich twat’s closet went, it was fairly mundane. Nobody was even wearing lady’s underthings. “Nicky might have mentioned that,” he murmured. “Seems quite a thing to omit.”
    “He might not have known,” Pete said. “You’d be surprised what families can keep from one another. Met a bloke once, had a mistress living one flat block over fromhis wife and children. They used to pass each other in the street and nod hello. Did it for
years
.”
    “Why’d you get involved, then?” Jack dropped to one knee and started setting up his supplies. Ritual was familiarity as much as magic. Setting out the tools of exorcism quieted the mind, readied it for the things an exorcist would see pulling in wayward ghosts.
    “His wife puzzled it out and blew his head off with a skeet rifle,” Pete said. “Can’t say I blamed her overly much.”
    “That’s a secret for you,” Jack said. “Like vicious little dogs. Never know when they’ll turn around and bite.”
    Pete stopped her searching and cast her gaze on him. Her eyes could cut you like broken green glass if she meant to get the truth.
    “Indeed,” was all she said.
    Jack put out his scrying mirror, a black ceramic bowl, and matches for burning herbs, a nub of chalk for the circle. He sat down cross-legged even though he felt a groan in the hinges of his knees and fingered a piece of chalk, deciding what to draw into the varnish-bubbled floorboards. Spells and hexes ran wild in a mage’s blood, scrawled on car windows and dripped onto tube station floors, but exorcisms had to be orderly.
    Seth had shown him the results when they weren’t orderly and measured. When an exorcist lost his cool.
    Once Jack had finished vomiting his breakfast into Seth’s loo, he’d paid attention to the lessons, and he hadn’t let a ghost get over on him yet. Until Algernon Treadwell’s ghost. But that time, Pete had been there. She’d yanked him back from the Gates with her talent, and anchored him to the living world.
    He owed Pete a favor, no question. And such a favor wasn’t lying about the demon’s bargain. Jack could deceive others with ease but lying to Pete always took on a hollowquality, made him feel rotted and twisted up inside like a car wreck.
    “Find anything else? More rattling skeletons?” he asked as Pete poked about in the wardrobe, so that she wouldn’t take his silence for what it was and ask him, in the manner of nosy coppers, what he was thinking about.
    “Aside from a baggie of extraordinarily mediocre pot and the slips? No.” Pete sat on the edge of the mattress. “Just the usual leftovers of life.”
    “Pot?” Jack perked up. “Mediocre or not, at least the lad wasn’t completely boring.” He winked at Pete. “Give it here.”
    “Not a chance.” Pete stuffed the dusty baggie into her jeans.
    “You don’t have the slightest idea what to do with that stuff,” Jack teased her.
    Pete rolled her eyes. “Please. I went to university.”
    “Did you, now.” Jack found the black silk squares and cord at the bottom of his bag. “Smoking marijuana, getting up to mischief—if you tell me there was