Demon Bound

idiot.”
    Jack tried again to apologize, but his vision tunneled, then spiraled, then became black. When he sat up, scraping a hand across his mouth, the world had started to creep back in. His clothes were soaked and deep-muscle aches had worked their way up his arm from the tie-off and the sloppy injection. Pete watched him silently, crouched on her heels.
    She hadn’t left him even now, when he was doubled over puking his guts out in the rankest alley he’d ever found himself in. She hadn’t helped him, either, but if Jack were in her position he would have pushed his head into his own sick and held him there until he drowned.
    And he’d lied to her. He’d used the danger of the demonto lie to Pete, likely the only person who wouldn’t leave him in the gutter at the truth. Jack wrapped his arms around himself as shivers wracked him, his stomach bucking again even though there was nothing left to bring up.
    “I’m sorry, Pete.” His voice came out a rasp that barely lifted over the rain, and his ruined throat clenched.
    Pete scrubbed her hands over her face, blending the rain and tears. “What?”
    “I’m sorry,” Jack said. He reached out and had more success capturing her hand this time. “Please don’t go, Petunia.” He dropped his head back, shut his eyes. His sight was empty, and the bright blazing place where it lived in his mind was cold. “Don’t go,” he said to Pete, so that he could barely hear himself over the drumming rain. “I need you.”
    Pete let him close his hand around her palm, but she wouldn’t look at him. “If you really mean that, Jack, and you don’t want me walking away right this moment, then you’d better give me an explanation that isn’t a complete load of bollocks.”
    Jack gripped Pete’s hand. “Luv, I never meant to . . .”
    Pete slammed her fist into the concrete. “For once in your fucking life Jack, let go of your sodding pride and
talk
to me!”
    Jack jumped at her voice echoing from the alley walls, sat up and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sweat, vomit, rain. Wasn’t he the picture of recovery. “Fine, luv. Haven’t got any pride left, anyway.”
    Pete spread her hands when the silence between them stretched thin.
    Jack swallowed down the last lump of nausea in his throat, to put off speaking for another clock-tick. To speak was to confess, and to confess was to lay bare all the black and rotten bits of himself to Pete.
    “I’m waiting,” she said.
    “So am I,” Jack murmured. The rain was a solid sheet ofmist and droplet. You could almost discern faces in it, ghostly passengers on the fog that rolled in from the underworld on nights like this one. The neon lit everything, pink and black and blue and black over and over again like a macabre circus. The ghosts pressed close around him, but the fix didn’t let them find a way in. Another twenty minutes, thirty at the outside, and things would be usual—the onslaught of the dead and the new strange makeup of his magic.
    But in this moment, his sight was still and the Black was silent. “I guess I’ve been waiting all the time you knew me,” Jack said. He held out his hand to Pete and tilted his head in pleading. “At least let me cage a fag if I’m going to spill me guts, luv?”
    Pete sighed as if she were being asked a great service, but she passed him one and gave him a light. Their fingers brushed. Hers were warm and wet, reminders of furrows dug in his shoulders, Jack’s sweat on Pete’s skin.
    He coughed as he drew too sharply on the fag. “All in all, I guess I’ve been waiting for thirteen years.”
    “Waiting for what?” Pete stubbed hers out and let Jack take up the mantle of polluting the immediate vicinity. A door down the alley opened and a bag of garbage sailed out, along with a snatch of “All Along the Watchtower.”
    Jack smiled at Pete and felt the stiffness of it. The smile was the last lie, the only one he had left in him. “For Hell, Petunia.”
    Pete’s eyes darkened and widened, like she’d spied a London bus bearing down on her. One last lone curl of smoke drifted from her nostril, and then she blinked and she was a hardened copper again, wearing a hard plastic mask.
    “Right,” she said. I think you’d better finish your story.”

Chapter Thirty-four
    When the ghost of Algernon Treadwell stuck its hand into his chest on the spring day thirteen years past, Jack was surprised to feel nothing. Not pain, not cold. Just the absence of