Demon Bound

hisses and cries.
    “Hello?” Mary Poole said. “Yes? Hello?”
    “Shove off, luv,” Jack said. “Your ticket’s pulled. Run on and frolic up in God’s heaven, now.”
    “Jack, honestly,” Pete said, rolling her eyes. She snapped the camera shut and tucked it back into the bag.
    Jack reached out and gently cradled the heart as the clockwork slowed to nothing. The sound of ghosts leaving the living was almost never a howl, an explosion, or a dramatic dying gasp. Like most things, the dead just faded away.
    The wings went with them. The ravens of the Bleak Gates, the guards of the entrance to death, had found their quarry, and it hadn’t been him. Today.
    “Good job of that,” Pete said. “Quick and quiet, and the Poole family can’t dispute it.”
    “Pete, people will always dispute what they don’t want to hear,” Jack said. “Although if you’re desperate enough to call on a shady ghost-raising sod like meself, I really don’t think you can dispute much of anything. Certainly not that you’re a tosser.”
    “And I thought I was a pessimist.” Pete folded the camera into its case and handed him the bag. Jack shoved his spirit heart inside and shouldered the weight. He’d never had to drag around a bloody satchel when he was living as a mage. A little salt and chalk in the pocket, a sliver of mirror or silver, and it was enough to curse or hex his way out of and into most trouble. He’d carried more kit to shoot up than to work magic.
    “Let’s call on the Pooles and get this over with, shall we?” he asked Pete, ignoring her last comment. You couldn’t spend any time at all in the Black and not lose faith in men, gods, and basic decency. The only ones who didn’t were theprize idiots who soon got themselves topped, if the older, hungrier citizens of his world were merciful.
    “Now we’re eager to work?” Pete shoved her hands into her jacket. “This isn’t going to be a pleasant scene, you know.”
    “Yes, well. The less time I have to spend doing parlor tricks for rich twats, the better off we’ll all be.” Jack added extra weight to his step as they reached Old Brompton Road and started for the tube station. His jackboots rang against the pavement like funeral knells.
    Pete let the twat remark pass, and for that Jack was grateful. His temper had returned with a vengeance when he kicked his habit, and lost the thing keeping his sight at bay. The sight was no longer intermittent and faulty, forcing him to live rough and desperate as he used to keep the dead where the dead belonged. Now it was raw, like a fire eating through the paper of his mind, and it played hell with his control.
    Pete got the brunt of it, and though she bore it with sharpness and a frown like a Victorian nursemaid, she didn’t deserve it. The heroin hadn’t eaten away enough of his brain to mask that fact. He was a twat himself for the things he said and did to her, but she’d chosen to stay with him, chosen the Black over her old, safe life, and Jack wasn’t so noble he would force her away for her own good.
    The truth was, if he didn’t have the fix he needed her. And needing anything wasn’t a luxury a mage of his situation could afford.
    But it was the truth, and Jack knew that in the Black, there was no changing truth.

Chapter Two
    The Pooles lived in Kensington, in a million-pound row house that Jack would have happily vandalized at a point in the not-so-distant past. Pete stepped up and rang the bell, the camera dangling from her fist. “Let me talk to them, right? Let’s have a minimum of interrupting and an absence of swearing until the check’s in hand.”
    Jack sighed, irritation spiking like acid in his guts. “I know how to play nicely, Pete. I’m not going to steal the silver or insult the Queen.”
    “The Pooles’ kids are not going to be pleased,” Pete said. “The last thing I need is you making things worse.”
    “Oi, who’s the teacher and who’s the apprentice, luv?” Jack said. “I’ve been raising ghosts since you were in nappies.”
    “You’re the teacher, it’s true and you’re brilliant,” Pete said, with that deceptively sweet smile, the one that would take your head off like a razor if you got too close to it. “But you have the social skills of a chimpanzee on match day, and I’ll be doing the talking.”
    “Well and good,” Jack grumbled in assent, since he’dprobably say something to get the police called with the mood his headache and the effort