Demon Bound

simple poltergeist. There was something else in the house, and it had come out to play with him.
    He stiffened his fingers on the mirror. He wouldn’t shake and he wouldn’t show it the fear, not an ounce. “How do you know that name?”
    The giggling increased tenfold.
Wouldn’t you like to know, grumpy old man.
    “Tell me or I exorcise you on the spot,” Jack growled. “I don’t need a name and a lock of hair to do it, and you’re on me last nerve, cunt. Polite or otherwise.”
    Pete pointed over his shoulder. “Jack.”
    A spirit stood in front of the mirror, framed by jagged reflections of Jack and Pete’s faces. The spirit looked like a girl, in an old-style sailor dress, hair curled into painfully tight sausages against her scalp. Her eyes were black, bleeding hollows and she grinned at him. Laughed at him.
    You should mind your tongue, before I take a notion to cut it out.
    The walls were covered in the black miasma now, the air choked with malignant strands of the Black. It spread like water stains, and Jack smelled decay as the temperature dropped, the too-sweet stench of rotted orchids.
    Such a funny man you are
, the spirit hissed.
So much fun to cut you open and see what clockwork makes you walk and talk.
    She started for him, hollow eyes reaching down into the black howling depths, and Jack felt again the tug on his skull, the vortex of Black energy gathering and swelling until it threatened to burst the bonds of the circle.
    “You are not welcome in this house,” Jack said. “Go. Last chance, little one.”
    I belong here,
the ghost snarled. We
belong here.
You’re
the nasty trespassers.
    All around the circle Jack saw more shapes, struggling to form, twisted spirit figures bathed in the same wicked-smelling magic as the little girl.
    A man in a waistcoat with a dark slash across his neck that dripped blood. A woman in an apron with burns bubbling across her arms and face. A boy, tall and rangy-limbed with the first spurt of growth, legs twisted to unrecognizable sticks as he pulled himself across the floor on his hands with the sickening
thud-thunk
of flesh hitting wood.
    Jack didn’t grace them with a look. Didn’t even grace them with a sharpening of breath. If you wanted a ghost to obey, it couldn’t see anything except your contempt and your magic. It sure as fuck couldn’t get its teeth into your roiling, rollicking panic.
    Jack stared at his mirror. He said, “Pete. Salt.”
    She grabbed the leather sack from his bag and tossed it to him. Jack took a handful and flung it in a careless circle. The ghosts drew back, all except the little girl.
    You think that’s enough?
she mewled.
I’ll trim your wings, crow-mage, and chop off your feet to make my curse bags.
    “Too much talk, luv,” Jack said. “And no substance.” He threw a fat handful of salt on the ghost and she melted away into nothing with a scream, like a Black-ridden garden slug.
    Jack let go of the mirror, let himself slump and feel as if his strings had gotten cut. His muscles trembled and the echoes of the ghosts scraped nails through his skull. Vomit welled in the back of his throat but he breathed, fought the feeling down, and pulled his spine upright at last.
    “I don’t think we’re dealing with just a suicide,” Pete said finally. Jack laughed. It came out high and hysterical.
    “Do you think so, really?”
    “All of them were murdered,” Pete said. “Or they died right quick and nasty.”
    Jack extinguished the herbs and opened a window. The rain landed on his face, cold like old tears. It felt good after the touch of the dead. “No arguments. And four of them, plus Danny’s chain-knocker. Lots more than dear old Nancy let on.” He swiped the water from his skin, through his hair where it wilted his usual crop of spikes. “Inbred liar, just like I fancied him.”
    “This isn’t Naughton’s fault,” Pete snapped. “This place
is
terribly haunted, just as he said. Spirits don’t just find a house and say ‘My, this looks lovely. And such a wonderful garden. I think I’ll stay and drive the owner to hang himself.’”
    Thunder rolled from the moors, back and forth like the rumble of a cell door.
    Jack shut the window and kept his hands on the sash until his fingers could open a lock or lift a wallet again. The shaking retreated—mostly.
    “No,” he said. “They surely don’t.”
    He left the circle, left the room with its echoes of ghosts and the cloying scent of decay. He wanted