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Demon Bound

Demon Bound

Titel: Demon Bound Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Caitlin Kittredge
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black feathers against her cheek. Rain followed it, in a soft ice-cold sheet, and Jack cursed as it dribbled into his eyes.
    “A road.”
    “Jack,” Pete grumbled, “there’s a bloody road running right in front of the bloody house. Fuck me.”
    “Not that road.” Jack felt his feet sink into mud as his boots found another ditch, and then gained a roadbed that was little more than gravel and dirt turning rapidly to sludge.
    Pete cursed and stumbled against him. Between the witchfire gently bathing them in a bubble of blue and the sideways rain, Jack was none too balanced, but he caught her. She didn’t weigh much, but she was undeniably present.
    Pete looked up at him, skin translucent and eyes black pebbles in the light. “Thanks.”
    “Just up here,” Jack said, as the moor whispered to him, licked at him with teasing tongues of power. It wanted him to join in the wild celebration, in the mud and the rain. The Black here teased him with memories of what the demon had made him see. Such a place as this was made for the oldest rituals of the
Fiach Dubh.
The deep magic, the old magic that had fallen to the wayside as the people and their power hid in cities, curled up behind iron walls, in front of tellys instead of bonfires, and no longer needed to spill blood into the good soil to procure crops, children, and rebirth.
    “This feels wrong,” Pete said, dropping her voice so that it blended with the rain. Jack also felt the urge to be silent, creep like a mouse under floorboards. The wild magic around him rose, gathered, and in the back of his consciousness he sensed the prickle of warning that had kept him alive as long as he’d managed the trick thus far.
    “We should go back,” Pete said, more forcefully. She’d stopped walking, her gaze roving beyond the confines of the witchfire, too much white about the pupil. Fear-white. Her hands clutched her jacket at the neck, knuckles tight.
    Jack’s heart sped up, warned him that they
should
go back, that they weren’t wanted here, that whatever was hunting on the moor tonight was bigger, older, and hungrier than he.
    Cold,
Jonathan Lovett’s ghost hissed.
Always the cold.
    “Fuck off,” Jack growled under his breath. The day he turned tail was the day he might as well take a razor to his own wrists. It was the single quality that he could lay claim to as a mage—he might not be as strong or quick as a sorcerer but he’d fight. And the fight he gave would be dirty and mean.
    The crossroad loomed out of the rain and the gathering mist, a road sign knocked onto its side in the dying grass the only signal of human occupation.
    Jack knelt and opened his bag, pulling out a battered tin and unscrewing the top. He pulled out his flick-knife and scraped up a layer of damp dirt, another. He filled the tin halfway, more than enough for the unwinding spell, but proper crossroads dirt, touched by no human hand, was difficult to come by and he could sell it. When he was back in London. Home.
    Pete shivered and she hadn’t stopped looking around, but she crouched and watched him. “MG said once that you bury things at the crossroads and a demon comes to grant you a wish.”
    “They buried murderers at a crossroads,” Jack said. “Couldn’t have them in a consecrated cemetery. The demon story is a load of shit.” Like so much of what MG said. Just enough truth in the lie to be destructive.
    “Demons exist, though,” Pete murmured. Jack slapped the lid back on the tin with more force than he needed.
    “Yes, they do. And calling them is much, much simpler than burying some ruddy box in a crossroads at the dark of the moon.”
    He shoved the dirt into his bag and folded up the knife.They were walking a dangerous edge, and he needed to steer Pete away. “Now if we’re done talking about it, may I suggest you don’t try to summon anything from the crossroad, and that we get the unwinding over with so we can find June Kemp?”
    Pete sighed. “My sister said a lot of things. I’m not messing about with Hell, Jack. You don’t need to worry.”
    He breathed in, out, tried to get the panicky tremors in his hands to stop. This deception deep under his skin was like detoxing all over again, shaking and stuttering and freezing to death even in a warm bed. “I’m not worried for you, luv. You’re much brighter than me and mine.”
    Pete smiled, but even that couldn’t warm him. “I’m soaked. Let’s get back and get this nasty business done so we can go

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