Demon Bound

language that wouldn’t make his darling Petunia borrow a pistol from her good friend Inspector Heath and blow Jack’s balls off.
    In the end, he’d settled for simplicity—
Don’t worry. I’ll be back.
He wasn’t sure yet if it was a lie or not.
    The road was deserted in the early morning, and Jack walked, listening to the peculiar stillness of a winter dawn, water flowing in some hidden culvert, things rustling in the hedgerow but not seen, the slow sleepy twine of magicaround his senses as the sun came up and the moor retreated into itself in the face of the witch’s domain, the sun and the hare and the deer, the psychopomps of what little was pure and good about the Black.
    A lorry rumbled in the distance, silver grille flashing intermittently as it dipped behind the curves of the road and found the sun again.
    Jack waved the driver down, had to jump aside as the lorry rumbled to a stop with a
swish-hiss
of air brakes.
    “You fancy giving me a ride, mate?” he called.
    The youth behind the wheel eyed him with an air of great distaste. “Sure, man. I pick up riders all the time in the arse-end of nowhere in my company truck.”
    “I’ll make sure you get taken care of,” Jack assured him. Just a little push, just a little tickle of magic to make him sound truthful, to convince the surly bloke that what he wanted—be it ass, cash, or grass—would be waiting for him at the end of the line. Jack was a gifted liar, and gifts that came naturally were easy to turn into magic.
    “I’m going down into Tiverton,” the driver grunted. “After that, you’re shite out of luck, friend.”
    “Close enough,” Jack said. He climbed aboard and the lorry driver examined him more closely.
    “What are you running away from, then?”
    Jack leaned his throbbing forehead against the passenger window as the lorry pulled away.
    “Nothing you need to worry about,
friend
.” He didn’t want to imagine Pete waking up alone, dressing, finding the note. “Nothing at all,” Jack repeated. They left the moor behind, the wild magic with it, and the road smoothed out, taking Jack back to what he supposed was some version of civilization.

Chapter Twenty-one
    London bustled and howled and rumbled underfoot like an old friend when Jack got off the train at Paddington. The rustle and caress of the city’s magic felt awkward to Jack’s mind, like a lover you hadn’t seen in weeks, with the perfume of the bird you’d been cheating with still clinging to your collar. After the assault of the ghosts, the primal scream of the moor, the feeling of his and Pete’s magics touching so close and hot they could kindle flame . . .
    Jack kicked traitorous thoughts from his head and found a pay phone near the taxi line at the station.
    “Yeah, Jack.” Lawrence sounded resigned, like one did when their skint uncle called asking for a loan, again.
    “Stop answering the phone like a bloody clairvoyant,” Jack told him. “It’s just showing off, isn’t it?”
    “You back already, then?” Lawrence said. “Thought you had a big bad exorcism afoot out there in God’s country.”
    “God has a sick fucking sense of humor,” Jack said. “Listen, Lawrence. Cancel your stitch-and-bitch or whatever you have on for today and meet me at Paddington.”
    “No. ’M busy, Jack,” Lawrence said. “Got me own life, shocking as I know it be for you to hear.”
    “Make it now,” Jack snarled into the phone. “Move your arse. I don’t have a lot of time.”
    While he waited for Lawrence, Jack paced back and forth in front of the National Rail boards, and he paced to the ticket machines opposite, and he paced from the Boots to the coffee stand and back, until the transit copper began to look at him like Jack might be contemplating his chances of blowing something up.
    Jack sat down and stared at the stains on the floor, islands and peninsulas attesting to the passage of human glaciers. His sight showed him old ghosts, older bodies, flickering in and out of sight as Paddington flowed around him. The Blitz, the bad old days of Thatcher and New Labour, muggings and murders, blood snaking black and gray across the tiles under his feet. Always, the dead came to be with him, just out of sight but never gone.
    At length, Lawrence loped up the steps from the tube lines on the lower levels, dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap and his long form encased in a navy coat. He stalked over to Jack and stood, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “All