Demon Bound

shoulders. “It was your
brilliant
idea that we become a bloody ITV special made flesh, so don’t give me any of your sass.”
    Pete favored him with a half smile. “However much you complain, Jack, us exorcising spirits and raising the same put this tea on the table, and if you’ve got a better solution for both of us being skint broke and nigh unemployable, I’d love to hear it.”
    “No dice, Petunia,” he said. “Everyone knows you’re the brains of this little operation.” They mounted the narrow stairs, the tread shifting under Jack’s weight. The lift was unreliable at best and Jack preferred the narrow, dim stairway even with lifelong smoker’s lungs. The lift was closed, gated, trapped. If an entity manifested, he’d have nowhere to go, no recourse to banish it, trapped within four walls of iron.
    Living with the sight taught you quickly and with great finality what sorts of places to avoid if you expected to liveto next week. At least, to live in the sorts of places that didn’t have bars on the windows and serve Thorazine smoothies.
    “Stop calling me Petunia,” Pete said. She shrugged off his arm as they reached the second-floor landing. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten about that display in the alley.”
    Jack finished the climb to his flat in silence and waited while Pete unlocked the door. “I told you, it weren’t nothing.” He could shrug off one incident as his own jumpiness now that only tenuous ink, flesh, and a pinch of magic held back his sight. He’d have to be more careful when the demon came back.
    Because it was most definitely fucking
when
, not
if.
    Pete slammed the doors of the kitchen cabinets as she brought out plates, glasses, and napkins. “You have to talk to me sooner or later, Jack. Are you seeing things again? Have you been lying to me since we did the ink?”
    “I’m not bothered by the sight,” Jack said honestly.
Just bedeviled by a demon . . .
    Pete let out a small
humph.
“I was a copper. I know when you’re lying to me, Jack Winter.” She ripped the packaging off her sandwich and sat down, gesturing for him to join her.
    What Jack really wanted was a smoke, needed it with every jangling nerve at the ends of his body, but he forced himself to sit at the dinette table across from Pete, open his tea, and take a bite. He consumed the sandwich in less time than he could have counted. Casting the hex had left him drained. It was a new sensation to be hungry—before, he just wandered the streets nerve-jangled and sleepless until he found a hit and a bed to take it in. His body was like a wrung sponge, magic soaking up his every reserve. And yet now, when he’d kicked, gained weight, and even had someone feeding him, the magic hurt more.
    It was a problem, but not the one set to rip his head off at the moment, so Jack pushed it to the back of his mind.
    “I’m not, luv,” he said after he’d wiped away bits of Brie and cranberry with the back of his hand. “Lying to you. I swear it.” He needed a shave, needed to sleep.
    Needed a fix, needed it like a drowning man needs oxygen
. . .
    “All right,” Pete said, lighting a cigarette and tapping ash onto her sandwich crust, “if you want to shut me out it’s your own bloody funeral.”
    “Isn’t that the bloody truth.” Jack shoved the last of the sandwich into his mouth so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. No magic let Pete detect untruths—just a life as a copper and a copper’s daughter before it.
    “If you feel like talking about it, I’ll listen,” she said at length, her cigarette growing a long crown of ash as she failed to draw on it.
    Jack heard the need to keep pulling, keep interrogating in her voice, but Pete merely reached across the table and slid her hand over his, small and warm. “You know I would, about anything. The truth, heavens forfend. You haven’t scared me off yet, Jack.”
    Jack shut his eyes, pulled his hand from under Pete’s, and pushed back from the table. “I’m going to catch some kip,” he told her. “Been a long day already.”
    Pete whipped her hand back to her side as if she’d only intended to brush away crumbs. “I’ll leave you the washing up, then, since I got the tea.”
    “As long as you don’t mind it taking place at some future date,” Jack said, as he retreated to the flat’s only bedroom. His and Pete’s sleep was cyclical enough that one bed was all they needed, even if she hadn’t agreed to share with him yet. Her