Demon Bound

against the swirl of enticement generated by the beating clockwork, forced it into a shape. A focus like the heart, or salt, or stone was important—raw magic pulled from something like a spirit could blow your insides out surely as a shotgun blast.
    A halo, black, gathered around the spirit heart, touched it experimentally, the lightest of caresses, while the spirit heart shot blue sparks through the realm of the dead. Pete couldn’t see them, but she stepped back all the same. “They coming, then?”
    “If I have any say,” Jack answered, and tugged ever so gently at the curiosity, the suggestion of minds and bodies that floated from the graves, and guided them to the spirit heart. Coaxed them, teased them, but never ordered them. Ghosts didn’t like being pushed about.
    Jack had learned that rule the hard way.
    In his hand, the spirit heart stopped.
    It gave a last
click
, and the sides opened to allow the Pooles’ residual energies in. Jack released his grip on the chain, and the spirit heart floated under its own steam, turning gently in the passage of power from the awakened ghosts.
    “Yes? Hello?” Mary Poole stood partly in the earth, ankles cut off by the grave. Her burial clothes clung to her frame in tatters. “Hello, yes? Can you hear me?”
    “What do you want?” Stuart Poole was heavy, a heavy face full of jowls sitting on top of a heavy mound of body. “Who are you?”
    “Jack Winter,” Jack said. “This here’s Petunia Caldecott.”
    He flinched when Pete fetched him a punch in the shoulder. “Tosser.” She faced the ghost, pleasant and pointed as if Stuart Poole were a banker she suspected of defrauding his clientele. “Mr. Poole, we’re here on behalf of your children. Jayne and Stuart, the junior?”
    “Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Can you hear me?”
    “Repeater,” Jack said at Pete’s questioning eyebrow. “Just a fragment of a spirit left behind with the bones. Mary Poole’s been taken on to her eternal reward, if you believe that bollocks.”
    “Comforting to know what’s waiting when I shuffle loose the mortal coil,” Pete muttered.
    “Pardon me, but I’ve asked a question—
who
in blazes
are
you?” Stuart Poole demanded. “This is most irregular.”
    “Pete,” Pete said. “And that’s Jack, like we’ve established. Your children have some questions about your will, Mr. Poole. Seems they’re absent from it?”
    “Your beloved offspring were wondering if perhaps there was some mistake there,” Jack expanded. The dead pressed closer behind him, and he heard the wings, like wind through a grove of trees, but they were wings. Heknew the sound. It was familiar, old, as much a part of him as his tattoos or the vertical scar on his right cheek from the business end of a smashed witch bottle.
    Jack supposed he had stolen that necromancer’s Hand of Glory, and his wife, but he still thought the bloke had overreacted.
    Scars faded, but the rush of wings never did. They always circled back, always came to him when he talked to the dead. A living walker in death’s realm always called to them, the eyes and wings of the Underworld. The crows of Death.
    “Jack . . .,” Pete said, right on cue. She didn’t have the sight, but she did have a connection he didn’t, to the push and pull of power under the world, the constant tide of the Black under their feet.
    “I know, I know,” he snapped. “Wrapping up—how is it, Stu? You cut your brats out of the will, or was it all a terrible misunderstanding that will be resolved with tears and hugging and vows to be a better sort of person because it’s what Mum and Dad would have wanted if they hadn’t kicked off in that lorry collision?”
    Stuart Poole puffed up, his silvery insubstantial form spreading out over the graves. “It most certainly was not a misunderstanding. Jayne and my son were miscreants—Stuart with his embezzling and Jayne with her women.”
    Jack cocked an eyebrow at Pete. “The very nerve.”
    “They’re not getting a penny!” Stuart Poole bellowed. “Not a single cold shilling, you understand?”
    “Perfectly.” Jack dropped a wink at Stuart Poole. “Hope you’re less of a miserable sod in the afterlife, guv.”
    “I never heard such . . . ,” Poole began, but Jack let go of the thin thread of spirit he’d caught, and Stuart sputtered out like a run-down torch.
    The wings were much closer now, ruffling the leaves andthe grass around their feet, filling up the air with