Demon Bound

feeling, a bit of cool wet on his skin from blood, and a glaze of silver across his sight.
    Pete was screaming. She was standing on the other side of a tomb a little bigger than a minicab, and she was screaming. Blood dripped from her palms, trickled down her wrist like she’d drawn her veins on, and she was screaming.
    Treadwell hissed, wordless pleasure as he filled Jack up with his icy poison. Jack fell, cracking his skull against the tomb floor. Treadwell smiled down at him, an angel borne out of the Land of the Dead.
    Keep the ghost from Pete. Treadwell had sunk his claws into her, into the raw Weir talent that lived behind her too-serious face, those drowning-pool eyes. Pete didn’t count him a lover, or fuck, even a friend as far as he knew, but Jack didn’t care. And all that mattered now was keeping the ghost from her. She was innocent in the Black and shewas here for him. Because of him. Pete was screaming because of him.
    A black candle from the summoning sailed past Jack and broke into three pieces against the tomb wall.
    “Go back!” Pete shouted. “Go back!”
    Treadwell bared his teeth, and the awful pressure on Jack’s heart intensified. He felt Treadwell grab hold of his magic, of his power, and meld his burning cold corpse energy to it. Blackness filled Jack up like Thames water, until he couldn’t breathe and nothing but feedback screamed in his airs.
    Not water.
    Blood.
    In his lungs, spilling down his chest, spattering a fine mist across his face. Blotting out the logo on the chest of his Replacements shirt. Draining his life onto the stones of Treadwell’s tomb.
    As the summoning seal drew Treadwell back to the underworld, the ghost scraped ice fingers down Jack’s face, a final caress.
I’ll see you very soon, mage
, the ghost hissed.
And we’ll share this embrace again.
A whisper of the Black, a flux and flow of power, and Algernon Treadwell was gone, exorcised from the world of the living.
    Jack’s senses folded in and narrowed down to one point, beyond sight and beyond pain. He floated, a rudderless drifting into nothing. There were no pictures from his life before his eyes. No grand parade of memories. Just Jack Winter, dead man, dissolving little by little like wreckage at the bottom of the sea.
    The crow woman came to him. She bent and touched his face, and all of Jack’s instincts flared to life again. The crow woman was never a cause for celebration, or calm, even at this moment. She appeared for one reason and one only.
    “No . . . ,” he croaked. “No, I’m not finished.”
    The raven woman grinned at him. Blood dripped from between her teeth, painted her lips black-red.
I’ll wait.
    The blood galvanized Jack. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t slip away because of Treadwell, a fucking ghost, a piece of vapor. He was the crow-mage. When he died, he became the crow woman’s.
    “Wait as long as you like,” he rasped. “I have time. I have a life yet . . .”
    All warriors meet their end in my arms
, the Morrigan whispered.
All battles have a loser
.
Come away to the field with me, Jack. Take your place in my ranks.
    “I’m not . . . yours . . . yet . . .” It was getting hard to speak, becoming an effort to suck in anything besides blood. Pete had fled, and the bar of light from the open tomb door lit the Morrigan from the back, casting the shadow of her wings across Jack’s eyes. Outside, in the light world, he heard the flutter of wings, the hollow croak of a crow.
    You are my favored son, Jack,
she whispered.
You are the crow-mage. Called to the Land of the Dead from his day of birth.
    “No . . . ,” Jack choked, black borders swirling at the edge of his vision like slowly sinking into a deep well. “I left them. I left you.”
    The
Fiach Dubh
are a construct, Jack. Men and flesh and petty concerns wrapped in the illusion of power. I am Death. I am eternal.
Her fingers brushed his cheek, her nails digging into his flesh. He felt nothing except the chill of the stones.
    “I won’t go,” he croaked. “Not willingly.”
    It is the field, crow-mage,
the Morrigan hissed.
Or it is Hell. You are a sinner in life, Jack Winter, but I could make you a god in Death.
    Jack dipped his shaking fingers into his own blood, felta clear rough patch on the stones. “Never . . . never wanted to be a god. Just wanted to live me life. . . .”
    The pages of the grimoire he’d stolen from Seth’s library floated before his eyes, blurred and half-remembered.
    It was