Demon Bound

fresh air and to be outside the walls of the Naughton’s house.
    Pete followed him, as he shoved the front door open and went to the Mini. He held out a hand to her. “Keys.”
    She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’re fixing to kill something.”
    Jack unlocked the boot and pulled a crowbar from the mess of Pete’s tools, blankets, and a battered picnic hamper.
    He turned back to the mansion. The deadness of the Black tickled the back of his mind—the Black didn’t simply fade and then flood. It was constant, a current through his brain straight to his core. It was a comfort and a torment, but always, it flowed.
    Jack had felt the flow die once before, faced with a necromancer in the United States. The man fancied himself a warlock, one of the city masters of old, who bent themselvesover for a demon. He’d eaten up the Black of Savannah, the city of moss and necropolises in Georgia, until he’d knotted the ghosts of the place so tightly that they tore him apart when Jack took his clay necromancy tablets and burned them in a cleansing fire of sage and cedar wood.
    What had been the man’s name? Clemens, or Collins. A small man with small delusions who’d managed to grab himself a great gob of power. He’d given Jack a fight, but not a very large one. Not many men, professed wicked men or no, could stare the hungry dead in the eye for long.
    Pete grabbed his arm as he re-entered the house. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing stalking around like bloody Jason Voorhees with that thing?”
    Jack stomped back up the stairs, taking pleasure at the black marks his boots left on the wood and the plaster that sifted down around him from impact. “You said it yourself—too many ghosts. Things that hungry are territorial, and here there’s at least four all sharing nice as you please.” He kicked open the door to Danny’s bedroom. The doorknob left a fist-sized dent in the wall.
    “Spirits like what I called up are bound to a place whether they fancy it or not,” Jack said, “and there’s only a few sure ways I know to do such a thing.”
    Jack had dabbled in black magic, of course. Stuck a hand in the water, felt the currents and the pull of dark, old things, but he’d never immersed himself. Once you were under that water, it filled up your lungs and you drowned. Sorcerers were gits with a short life expectancy and shorter ambitions—they wanted magic. Or money. Or sex. But he’d never met a sorcerer worth the curses he spat. The
Fiach Dubh
made sure one of theirs could kick the legs out from under a sorcerer without a second thought.
    Still, binding ghosts was the work of a soul shot through with desire, the desire for control or the belief that they could outrun Death. And if any sorcerer he’d met had heldreal knowledge and truth instead of a load of bollocks and a taste for black clothing and theatrical over statement, Jack would have swung down the path of sorcery in a heartbeat, and bugger Seth and all his lessons.
    But you couldn’t outwit Death. It was the single constant of magic and mortality. A thread, a measuring, and a cut. Anyone who thought they were a special case was a bloody fool.
    Jack swung the crowbar and bashed through the plaster of the wall behind the great mirror. Dust swirled up, a pale imitation of a spirit. Pete coughed and Jack joined her, the horsehair plaster and wooden slats crumbling under his assault.
    “I hope there’s a point to this,” Pete choked out. “Because that’s vile dust.”
    “Mixed it with arsenic and horsehair in the day,” Jack said. “Lovely stuff.” The wall was rotted through, and he cleared away debris, half hoping he’d find nothing behind the plaster. He’d never be so lucky, though.
    Pete held her sleeve over her nose and mouth. “There’s something back there. In the joists.”
    Jack stuck his hand into the blank space between the studs and closed around dusty glass, sealed with wax. He drew out the small blue bottle, and another, and another, four in all for the quadrant of spirits his exorcism attempt had attracted. “Yeah. There is,” he growled. The bottles rolled in his hand, clinking in discordant notes with each other.
    He held one up to the light, watched the liquid inside slosh back and forth. “Corpse water,” he told Pete. “Used to wash the bodies before burial. Before formaldehyde and all of that shit.”
    Pete plucked one of the bottles from his hand. “And this binds the