Demon Bound

deserve to cough up an amphibian or two,” Pete said.
    Jack nudged her foot with his. “You’re supposed to be concentrating.”
    Pete went quiet again, and after ten minutes opened her eyes. “It’s no good, Jack. You’re a fine mage but you’re a lousy Mr. Miyagi.”
    “So I am,” he said. A part of him, small and traitorous, was happy that Pete hadn’t mastered in an afternoon a cantrip that had taken him weeks to perfect when he was with the
Fiach Dubh
. A larger part just felt the deadening pressure of his final days, rushing headlong, faster and faster. Too much to tie up, too little bloody rope to do it with.
    “When it goes dark we’ll try the flame,” he said. “For now, keep practicing.”
    “I do know how to pick a lock,” Pete said. “The old-fashioned way.” She stood up and put the music box back on the mantle. “And hotwire a car, and cheat at cards.”
    “Why, DI Caldecott,” Jack said, feigning shock. “What a wicked, wicked woman you are.”
    “Wicked, yeah.” Pete laughed. “That’s me.”
    “More than you know,” Jack told her. He lit a fag and watched her cheeks color pink at the comment, before she ducked her head and pretended to be interested in the expanse of dead and muddied lawn outside the front window.
    Jack watched her until she noticed, and then looked away. The sun was beginning to set behind the moor, and soon enough it would be time to go to work. For now, all he could do was sit and think about Pete, his wicked, wild Pete, and the running hourglass of time ticking off his moments with her.

Chapter Seventeen
    After sunset, and too many fags to count, when his throat felt raw and scraped and his heart thrummed uneasily in his chest, Jack shrugged into his leather and opened the front door.
    There was a mean sliver of moon overhead, but blowing clouds covered and uncovered it, like the blinking iris of a predatory bird riding the air currents high above his head.
    He slung his kit over his shoulder and turned to look at Pete. “You don’t have to come along.”
    “Don’t be silly,” she replied, small body hunched inside her jumper and overcoat against the cold.
    Truthfully, Jack was relieved she’d decided to come along. At night, against a waxing moon, the raw energy of the moor curled around his ankles and echoed in his head, whispering tales of blood and lust and moonlit hunts.
    Jack was reminded, as he squelched through the mud, of why he was a city boy and would remain so. The brush of the Black, always so close and present, was like living next door to a slaughterhouse and hearing the animals scream day and night, smelling the flesh and offal. He missed London,stone under his boots and the Black tucked away in hollows and crannies where he could see it coming. Not to mention there wasn’t a decent pub or curry stand for miles in any direction.
    Jack muttered, “I’d murder for a beer and a chicken tikka.”
    “Coffee and a
pain au chocolat
,” Pete murmured back, sticking close and just behind him as they left the semblance of civilization offered by the long grass of the estate’s lawn and crossed a barely flowing stream into the moor.
    He flashed her a grin in the moonlight. “We’ll be done after tonight, luv. Once we find little Junie and lay her to rest.”
    “No word from my friend at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. “But he’ll come through.” Ollie Heath, Pete’s rotund former desk mate at the Met, excelled at coming through. Bulbous and sloe-eyed as a Yorkshire sheep, Ollie and Jack had only one brief exchange, but he came away with an enduring dislike for the man.
    “
You take care of Pete, you hear?
” Ollie’s Midlands brogue reminded Jack of a council worker who’d sneaked about in the dead of night and shagged his mother for a reduction in their electric bill. “
Lord knows, she deserves better than you.
”
    Jack didn’t know if he disliked Ollie because the man was a prick or because he was right. Most likely both.
    He pulled out the crinkled tourist map of the Dartmoor that Pete had procured on her visit to the archives and breathed onto his palm.
    Witchfire blossomed, blue and spectral, from his skin, the gentle burn-off of extra magic against the night air. The flames drifted lazily into the twilit sky, the silvery glow lighting the map, just. Jack turned west. “Not much farther.”
    “What are we looking for?” Pete asked. Wind swept down from the crest of the hill and lifted her hair like aflight of