Demon Bound

“Over eager and/or amorous sheep?”
    “Don’t think we won’t discuss this when you’re not sprawled in the dirt,” Pete said, offering him a hand up.
    After what the demon showed him, Jack knew better this time than to take it and expose himself to her talent.Even so, he swayed like he’d downed six pints when he managed to pull his shivery legs under him and stand. “But?” he said as Pete climbed back into the Mini.
    “But I found something at the council that you need to hear about,” she said. “So loosen your corset and try not to swoon again, Mr. Darcy.”
    Jack collapsed into the passenger seat with a grateful sound, rather like someone had punctured him and let the air out. “That’s hurtful, that is. I’m far better looking than Colin Firth.”
    Pete steered them back toward the estate, even though it was the second-to-last place in England and the Black that Jack wanted to go at that moment. He kept that to himself. He had pride.
    “I looked at old newspapers and provincial records, trying to find any deaths that might be our four,” Pete said. “And fended off a sweet old thing who kept trying to give me a biscuit and send me out on a date with her grandson.”
    “Oh yeah?” Jack leaned his head back. “Any potential there?”
    “He stuffs lamb sausages for a living, so no.”
    Jack grinned with his eyes closed. He didn’t have to look at Pete to make her blush. “You know you could never give me up, luv. I’m in your blood like the Black.”
    “The hell you are.” Pete snorted. “Like cheap vodka, maybe. Give me a fag and a coffee and I’m well rid of you.”
    Jack opened his eyes then. Wanted to say,
I could be. If you let me.
But he’d just told off a demon, claimed he was the white knight who wanted for no strength or nobility.
    It was a fucking nightmare, being the knight. No small wonder white witches always looked like they had poles up their bums.
    Pete stayed quiet while they rode back to the estate, and she handed him a sheaf of photocopies when they were in the kitchen. She plugged in the ancient and calcified electrickettle and found two mugs, as well as a box of loose tea. “I’m thinking eating anything in this kitchen is asking for us to join the ranks of the gloopy dead upstairs,” she said.
    Jack lit a fag and offered the last of his pack to Pete. She took it, but he pulled back before their fingers brushed. He didn’t trust himself, not because of the demon’s interference with his sexual energy and by extension his talent, but because watching Pete move assuredly about the manky kitchen, making tea, her petite limbs moving under torn denim and an ancient jumper with moth holes in the elbow, fag dangling between startlingly plump lips, was nearly more than he could take.
    “Fancy lighting me up?” she said, leaning over. Jack called a bit of power and touched his finger to her fag. Pete grinned and exhaled through her nose. “Cheers. Look at the clippings.”
    Jack scanned the cramped lines of print, none too clear when they’d been churned off a drum press, further decayed by microfiche and a cheap laser printer.
    The man with the slit throat was Gilbert Naughton, found on the moor behind the estate in the summer of 1927. No suspects, no witnesses. The burned woman and the mangled boy were a maid and a stable boy, the victims of a barn fire in 1893 that had also killed
Ten fine head of horse flesh.
    The little girl was last. She’d gone missing just after the war’s end, and the papers said her name was June Kemp. June was from Lime house, sent by her family to the Naughton’s largesse to avoid the furor of the Blitz as it rained down on the factories and shipyards of the East End.
    June Kemp had walked away from the estate one afternoon and gone missing. A manhunt larger than any yet formed in Princetown went out after her, but the girl’s body was never found.
    Jack stubbed his fag out viciously against the table. “Fuck.”
    Pete looked at him over the rim of her tea mug. “I’ll take that to mean you figured out who or what did this.”
    “Necromancer,” Jack said, crumpling the A4 sheet so June Kemp wouldn’t stare at him any longer. Even without hollow eyes and black magic pouring off her, she was an eerie child. “That’s not the bad news.”
    “What is?” Pete broke off the end of her cigarette and tucked the unused bit away for later.
    Jack massaged his temples. Ghosts, demons, and now plain aggravation. His headache