Demon Bound

ragged.
    “I shouldn’t have done that.” She flexed her fingers, fists and not, over and over. “Shit. I really shouldn’t have.”
    “Too right,” Jack murmured, though he wasn’t talking about Pete. His own heart was thrumming, speeding along like he’d just choked down a handful of uppers. The drug was power, and the fix was Pete. How he wanted to taste her again, throw her down on the dirty mattress, expose that snow-petal skin, make the blood rush to the surface as she took away his pain quick as any needle.
    “It’s not . . . I mean, it wasn’t . . .” Pete slammed her fist against the wall. Plaster dust sifted down from the ceiling. “Bloody hell, Jack. I know there’s something you’re not saying. Until you trust me, I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
    Quick as it had come upon him, the need subsided and left the same small dirty knot Jack felt in his chest when he stole from Lawrence, or nicked pensioners’ prescriptions, or woke up in a filthy squat with no memory of how he’d come to be there.
    Before, the solution was simple—get high again and bollocks to guilt and shame.
    Jack rolled the kinks out of his neck and picked up his chalk, short savage slashes on the polished floor drawing the beginnings of his circle. “Let’s just get this done and get back to the city, yeah?”
    “Best, I suppose,” Pete said. “What should I do?”
    “Just stay out of the way, if you please,” he snapped. Pete’s eyes narrowed and then she took a large, deliberate step back to the window that overlooked the fields beyond the back garden.
    “You git,” she said softly.
    Jack’s chalk snapped in half from the force of his stroke. “Never claimed I was Prince Charming, did I?”
    Pete shook her head, but she stayed where she was, rain lashing the glass behind her. Jack focused on the circle blossoming under his chalk stub, the grit between his fingers and the soft scratch on the wood. It didn’t make him less of a wanker, but it helped dull the facts.
    Ghosts were thin and slippery creatures, and a circle for an exorcism was about control more than power. Demons a sorcerer summoned needed power, drank it and craved it. Ghosts a mage tangled with were inevitably hungry and desperate, and they would rush the electric fence until it broke.
    The exorcism circle required precision, focus, clarity. The trifecta of things Jack Winter didn’t have and had never held in any quantity.
    You’re a selfish little knob, Jackie boy,
Seth rasped.
No thought and no control for anything, including yourself. Bloody good thing you’ve got charm to spare.
    “You’re right,” he said. The magic words. Bollocks to
I love you
or
You look beautiful. You’re right
had gotten him off the sofa a hundred times over.
    Pete sniffed. “Of course I am.”
    “When we’ve done what we came here to do,” Jack said slowly, “I promise I’ll tell you why I’ve been . . .”
    “A complete and utter cock-stain?” Pete supplied.
    “That,” Jack said. “But it won’t matter if we’re out on the street for want of cash, and right now I need to concentrate. Can we put a hold on the couple drama, please, until I kick this poltergeist back beyond the beyond?”
    He expected an argument or maybe a slap—Pete was the kind of woman who slapped rather than sulked—but instead she frowned a little, and then her shoulders dropped and her fists relaxed.
    “You called us a couple.”
    Jack felt one side of his mouth curl. “Did I? Must have inhaled some of that shite pot you found.”
    The baggie smacked him in the side of the head. “Arse-hole.” Pete glared at him as he worked, the circle growing and expanding and building on itself, a framework intricate as any clock, ready to hold the power of cleansing spells.
    Jack finished the circle, checked the symbols to make sure he hadn’t cocked up, and dumped incense into the bowl. He added a pinch of galangal to draw any lingering spirits to the smoke. His lighter clicked thrice before he called a flame and touched it to the pile of dry herbs.
    The house held its breath, stayed silent and still. Nothing inside his head except echoes and nothing before his sight except darkness.
    “Feels normal,” Pete said. “Just a dusty old house.”
    “That’s bothersome,” Jack said. “Old place, shouldn’t be so quiet. Old homes, old bones. Echoes.”
    “Not every place is a backdrop for
Masters of Horror
,” Pete said. “The Naughtons may have been