Demon Bound

inexperienced but enthusiastic lesbian experimentation, I could die a happy man.”
    One of Danny Naughton’s worn-out loafers narrowly missed his head. “You’re a sod,” Pete said, but she was chewing her lip to mask the smile.
    Jack grabbed his baggies of exorcism herbs and patted the spot next to him on the floor. “Come here, luv. First things first.” Protect yourself before you even think about ghosts. An unguarded exorcism was akin to painting yourself with honey and insulting a grizzly bear’s mum.
    Pete folded up into a seat across from him. “If this is anything perverted and unnatural . . .”
    Jack folded the herbs into the silk—camphor, white pine, and garlic root drifting past his nose in waves—andtied them up with a red ribbon. “Perverted and unnatural comes later.” He winked. “This is just a conjure bag. Keeps the ghosts from doing . . . what Treadwell did.”
    “This smells like a Pizza Express,” Pete complained.
    “Lawrence taught it to me,” Jack said, preparing his own bag and slipping it around his neck. “His grandmother uses them back home to keep away the duppies.”
    Pete softened at the mention of Lawrence, and put the cord over her head. “Jack, it’s not going to happen again. Treadwell. Going to the thin spaces. Any of it.” She grabbed his hand, unexpectedly. He’d been shivering since they saw the
cu sith
, colder than the air around him, but her touch warmed.
    “I’m stronger now,” Pete whispered. “And so are you. It’ll never happen again, Jack. I won’t let it.”
    Jack’s memory of the night in Highgate came back in snatches. Treadwell had tried to take his flesh, to cast out Jack’s spirit into the thin spaces, the mists outside the walls of the Underworld. A reverse exorcism, Jack supposed. Throw out the living git and move into his empty meat sack.
    He hadn’t seen anything in the thin spaces besides his own life parading past in reverse, but it had been bad enough.
    Jack knew what was waiting for him, when the clock wound back to zero.
    And then Pete had come, and she’d pulled him back, and she’d banished Treadwell back through the Bleak Gates. Lain bleeding by the gravestones afterward, blood staining the white linen of her shirtfront, eyes clouded over with the pure white of the Weir.
    His palms had gone cold. Blood was supposed to be warm, but when it soaked his fingers it was chill.
    Jack had never had fear like that moment since. Not the kind that put claws into your throat and drained all the hardness and wickedness out of a person.
    In the present, far from the bloody grass of Highgate Cemetery, Pete squeezed his fingers between hers, and Jack nearly told her everything. The only thing that stopped him was the thought that Pete wouldn’t understand she had to leave him, get as far away as possible once she’d heard the true story.
    She’d stay and try to face the demon. And it would end just like it had the first time.
    “I won’t let it,” Pete said again, and Jack heard the desperate strain creep into her voice.
    “Pete . . .” He sighed, but there weren’t words for it. No words could explain that after he’d been walking dead for a decade, she breathed life back into him. No way to explain that Pete was in every heartbeat since the day they’d found each other again, in a filthy Bloomsbury hotel room.
    She made him solid. Pete was the thing keeping the world real. And no one, no matter how hard-bitten and capable they thought they were, deserved to hear that. No woman deserved the responsibility of keeping Jack Winter in one piece.
    Pete’s tongue darted out, licked her lips. “What, Jack? What’s the matter?” In the pale halfling light of the storm, her skin was translucent and her eyes drowning deep. When she looked at him like that, Jack’s fine thread of control snapped at last.
    “Fuck it,” he muttered, pulling her close by their connected hand, his other taking the back of her neck, wrapping his fingers in her hair.
    It was nothing like the kiss in the marsh, not hesitant and not slow. Pete’s lips were warm, parted, and breathless. Jack could have drunk her, every drop, and still been parched.
    Her hands, trapped as they were against his chest, pushed him back, and they broke apart as abruptly as they’d come together, Pete’s taste in Jack’s mouth, melting and dissolving. Nothing he could do to save it. The bitterness returnedwhen Pete stood up, cheeks flushed to roses and breath