Demon Bound

ghosts?”
    Jack set the bottles in a row amidst the broken glass andcrouched before them. “It’s a very old trick. A nasty one. Keep the last thing you touched in this world close and keep you from the Underworld.”
    Pete knelt next to him. “Did you ever do anything like this?”
    Jack shook his head. “No. Never fancied keeping a ghost that close to me.” The thought of attracting a ghost on purpose was laughable. They’d found good old Jack Winter all on their own.
    Jack had thought he was simply going crazy. Madness would have been a welcome reprieve from the chill, breathless feeling that overcame him when the dead reached out, tried to make him see, to make him their instrument to finish whatever scraps of life they’d left behind.
    He’d found magic first in books and then as a failed experiment to make the voices and the sight stop. He hadn’t properly understood until he’d met Seth that the ability to speak with the dead marked him as a servant of the crow. Seth had taught him about things like corpse water, bound spirits, and how Jack Winter would never stop seeing—he could only hope to keep the dead at bay until the crow woman came for him, as well.
    Seth wasn’t one to paint a rosy future where only ash existed.
    He stayed silent, staring at the little bottles for long enough that Pete chewed on her lip. “Well, what now? We get rid of them, yeah?”
    Jack stood, his boots crushing the mirror shards to sand. His immediate reaction was to flee the Naughton house and never come back, but that was the boy in him, the death-fear that sat on his shoulder and whispered in the demon’s voice. More than half of being a successful exorcist was simply not cutting and fleeing like your arse was on fire when the spook show started.
    “These specters died here, on the grounds,” he said. “And whoever bound them was here, on the grounds.”
    Pete looked relieved to be back in a domain she understood. “I can check with the local council about suspicious deaths, get a record of property ownership to see if this place always belonged to Naughton.”
    “That’s fine,” Jack said. “But this wasn’t recent, some spousal dust-up or a kiddie-fiddler hiding his shame. Going by the clothes alone, we’re looking at fifty or sixty years gone for the newest.”
    “Except for Danny,” Pete reminded him. Jack looked at the mirror, ten fractured images staring back where glass clung to the frame.
    “You’d think Naughton might have mentioned wholesale murder going on amongst the family heirlooms,” he grumbled.
    “I’m sure he didn’t know,” Pete protested. Jack felt a surge of heat against his heart that she was in any way defending the ponce. He didn’t think it was irrational—when a woman like Pete stepped in for a waste of flesh like Nicholas Naughton, Jack thought his feelings were entirely fucking rational.
    “I’ll drop you wherever it is you need to go,” Pete said, jingling the Mini’s keys.
    “Town,” Jack said, turning his back on the reflections. Jealousy wouldn’t matter for much longer, if the demon had his way. Nothing that Jack currently held dear would. Demons thrived on stripping you down to the bone, when they bargained with you, stealing a life and leaving you hollowed out for Hell to fill back up.
    Jack said to Pete, “I’ve got some more ghosts to talk with.”

Chapter Sixteen
    St. Michael and All Angels crouched on a hillock staring down upon the hulk of Dartmoor Prison. The mica in the cell house stones gleamed in the sunlight after the rain, and Jack squinted and turned his back on the grim edifice. He’d heard that they’d faced the windows toward the moor deliberately, so that a prisoner could contemplate the great heather-choked nothingness and despair of ever leaving the place alive.
    The church itself was disused, friendly plaques posted by the Anglicans explaining that services were now held in the next town due to budgetary concerns.
    Jack wasn’t interested in churches. There hadn’t been a time, even a sliver of a second, when he’d truly believed a benevolent God would lift him out of Manchester, away from his mother, her pills, and the endless parade of dingy council flats and dingier boyfriends. What could an invisible man in the sky do against thrown bottles, drunken rages, fists and words and touches that did their level best to reduce him to a shadow?
    Bloody nothing, that was what. And all the while thechurch charities that came to the