Demon Bound

Dubh.
Not his brothers. These were strangers, and all at once, the rain and the mist froze against Jack’s skin. Cold. Always the cold. Pete tried to put her hand against his cheek, stopped at the end of the shackle, and sank back to the stone. Jack saw the bruises blossoming under the woad, saw Pete’s starvation thinness and the chafe marks at her wrists from her time on the stone. “Stop, Jack,” she whispered. “Stop running. Stop fighting.”
    Jack placed his hand against her cheek. “Can’t, luv. I’m doing it for you.”
    She shook her head, a bitter smile thin as a line cut on broken mirror growing on her face. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Jack Winter. And you don’t know me. Not really.”
    The circle of mages closed in, their hands snatching at Jack, trying to drag him away, and Pete strained to hold him. “Wake up, Jack,” she whispered. “Open your eyes.”

    “
We are now arriving at Heathrow, Terminal Three,
” the train robot announced. The train jolted, and the doors slid open. “
Please mind the gap as you exit the train.
”
    Jack managed to rise, collect his kit, and leave the car with the rest of the foreigners and travelers shuffling through the dank gray tunnel with their luggage. Then he took a quick turn around the rear of the train, leaned over the edge of the platform, and vomited his guts out. There wasn’t much, just coffee and a few biscuits he’d nicked from the dining car of the Tiverton train.
    Jack felt the gnawing ache of an empty stomach, the jittery sick dance of his heart. Jack wanted Pete with him. She’d have made sense of the vision, helped him quiet his sight and his magic. He could talk himself out of the truth, if Pete were with him.
    His talent was going haywire. He couldn’t control his sight. As the anniversary of his bargain crept closer, Jack’s power was unwinding. He’d seen mages go off the rails before, when some curse or malice of the Black caused their mind and their talent to diverge, shredding one another as they fought tooth and nail inside the unlucky mage’s meat sack. Those mages ended up in Velcro pajamas. The ones that didn’t top themselves outright.
    Wake up,
Pete had said.
Open your eyes.
    “She sees you, Jack Winter, and she says that you can run. . . .” Pete grinned, half with the pain of her shackles and half with malice. “She says you can run far and fast, but you can never hide.”

Chapter Twenty-one
    Jack dug his fingers into his armrest when the Malaysia Air plane took off from Heathrow, and kept them there as the jet bounced from cloud to cloud, each jerk designed specifically to keep his guts somewhere in the vicinity of his tongue.
    “Bad flight?”
    The girl in the middle seat was one of those self-conscious hippie types made of natural fibers and henna dye, who did things like joining the Peace Corps and handing out condoms to third-world Catholics, urged through the poverty-drenched mud and shit because of some deep moral compulsion brought on by not enough hugs from Mummy.
    “’M fine,” Jack said. When was the last time he’d flown? American, 1994? The ill-fated trip to Belgium when Lawrence got himself mixed up with the Stygian Brothers and Jack had to go to their necropolis and bargain back Lawrence’s death?
    Too bloody long, and he hadn’t liked strapping himself inside a giant lipstick tube and getting suspended five miles above the earth any better in the bad old days.
    “You don’t look fine,” the girl said. She eyed the flight attendants in their colorful vests and neckerchiefs moving in the galley and then dipped a hand into her hemp bag. “Here.”
    Jack narrowed his eyes at the small round pills. “What’s that, Xanax?”
    “Darling, do I look like I carry mother’s little helper?” the girl scoffed. “Take it. You’ll have a nice ride, I guarantee.”
    Jack eyed the little pills when she tipped them into his palm. Then the jet bounced again and turned, skimming west over water and on into southern Europe and the Middle East.
    The girl unscrewed her complimentary in-flight water bottle and handed it to him. “I’m Chelsea.”
    Jack debated for only a moment, until turbulence bounced him against his lap belt once more, and washed the chalky aftertaste of the pills down with nearly half of the water. After months off, his throat had forgotten how to accept copious handfuls of pharmaceuticals.
    “I’m Michael,” he said. “Mick.” Giving a fake name was a reflex,