Demon Bound

tie. A mod girl in a leather minidress with handprints on her throat.
    They touched him, hissed at him. Stared into his soul with their black eyes and waited for him to be one of them.
    This is how it ends,
the girl whispered, but her voice wasn’t the strangled rasp Jack remembered. The voice was Kartimukha’s
. This is your last moment of life. Come to me, Jack. Leave your misery with your life.
    Jack drifted, dreamy. Soon it would be over. Soon he could forget his sight, forget his failed time with Seth and the
Fiach Dubh.
    Soon, he would be one with the dead instead of fighting them.
    The ghost girl stooped and brushed her fingers across his forehead, moving aside strands of sweaty hair with icy fingers
. This is how it ends,
she breathed
. Let go, Jack. Come to me.
    This was how it ended. Life bled onto the floor of a cheap hotel room. A razor blade in a straight line up his forearms. The end of Jack Winter.
    Faintly, Jack felt his breath slow and the warm, floating sensation of blood loss engulf his senses. A maid would find him, and he’d lay in a freezer for a few months, an anonymous body among the anonymous dead of Dublin, until he was sent to the potter’s field.
    He was with the dead. With the dead he would stay.
    A sense of wrongness overtook Jack, the last flicker of his magic. This was not how he died. He didn’t lie down and give up. He cut his wrists deep with a shiny new razor and he felt his life draining onto the floor but he didn’t die, he didn’t go over even when the ghosts begged him to join their ranks. . . .
    No one’s coming for you,
the ghost girl breathed.
    Jack turned his face away from her, watching the hotel
sign blink outside the glass. Raindrops clung to the windowpane, refracting the blue light, blue like witchfire. A crow landed on the sill outside, flapped its wings. The bird’s profile beat against the glass, beak leaving starburst cracks as it wrecked itself trying to get inside.
    The pain of his cuts crawled inside the numbing sensation of the ghosts, the ache from the floorboards and the burning of whiskey in his empty stomach.
    Hush.
The ghost girl stroked his brow again
. Rest, Jack. None of it matters now.
    The crow beat at the window, its own black blood smearing the glass.
    A pounding started outside the hotel room door. “Jack!” Fists and boots shook the wood. “Jackie, you stupid bastard! Open the fuckin’ door!”
    Seth’s voice was the hand that dragged Jack away from the Bleak Gates.
    Seth came in. Seth called 999.
    Jack curled in on himself, struggling with nerveless fingers to stanch the bleeding from his arms, and the crow watched him, stock-still now. Beak broken and bloody as his own body. Croak sad and empty as Seth’s echoing voice as he wrenched Jack’s arms above his head, tore his own shirt to stop the bleeding.
    The crow waited for Jack, waited for his soul until the emergency responders came in, their codes rapid-fire into their radios.
    “Attempted suicide. Six minutes out
. . .”
    “
Hang on, Jackie,” Seth whispered. “You stupid prick. You hang on. None of the crows get to check out that easy.”
    Jack retched violently. Blood ran from his nose and his guts twisted.
    Kartimukha gave a cry.
No! Feed me!
    Jack struggled to his knees, and then his feet. Breathingwas a task, but he could hear the sounds of a modern street, and he felt the Black ebb away, letting go of the strangle-hold on his sight.
    Kartimukha stamped its feet, its tongue flapping and its eyes blazing as it snarled.
Feed me!
    “Oh, fuck off,” Jack panted. “It’ll take more than raking up tattered old nightmares, my son.”
    Kartimukha hissed, and tensed to spring. Jack braced himself. Violence, at this late date, would almost be welcome. He was itching to use his fists and feet on something, to take the fight into the tangible world where he could make the creature in front of him hurt and bleed.
    “That’s enough.”
    Rahu’s voice cut the air, and Kartimukha bowed his head. Rahu ran his hand over the mangy lion’s mane, and turned his eyes on Jack. “Kartimukha ate your memories. What was it like?”
    Jack swiped at the blood on his face. “Tickled.”
    Rahu sighed. “It appears that you did tell the truth. You are attempting to trick your demon.” He opened the cubby beneath the altar and removed a cloth-bound scroll tied with silk cord. “This is my personal necromancy grimoire. Take it. Your plan won’t work, but take it.”
    Jack took the