Demon Bound

the
Fiach Dubh
. The brothers of the crow were the rock stars of a magic trade often fraught with blood and blackness, hard and wicked men whom no one crossed.
    Many of them were that. Jack was not. And if he
did
have sense, he’d stop before his talent burned a hole in him.
    No one had ever accused him of having sense, though. Of being a wanker, yes. A thief, a sinner, and a murderer, certainly. But sensible, no. Jack thought that the day someone
did
accuse him of sense, it would likely be time to hang up his spurs.
    “All right, you dusty lot,” he murmured, so low only the dead could hear. “Come and give me a haunt.”
    Pete drew her small digital video kit from the bag and readied it, training the lens on Jack and the graves.
    For his part, Jack held the spirit heart straight out above the earth, arm rigid as a divining rod. The clockwork pendulum swung gently, aimlessly. Jack inhaled and held the air. Panic chewed on the ends of his guts, scratched at his neck, and wormed into his brain. His body knew what he was about to do, and it was screaming.
    Times like this, Jack felt the longing for a fix like the grasp of a familiar lover—tight, hot, gathered behind his eyes, knotting him up, making him cold, telling him,
I have what you need. Take it and warm yourself, save yourself, taste the golden delights of the floating world.
    The hiss of need had only grown louder since he’d kicked heroin, begging and pleading to have a chance, just one more chance to make it right.
    All Jack could do was tighten his grip on the spirit heart, the cold brass warming to the same degree as hispalm, and drown the murmuring of the fix in a tide of other whispers, crying and shouting, faint and fierce, buried and so old no one knew they were buried any longer.
    The dead came to Jack as they always came, and he let himself see, do what he’d started fixing to avoid in the first place. Sight was his curse, and the one thing he could never fully erase.
    In his hands, the spirit heart gave a
tick.
    Jack’s second sight found ghosts, thick here as a crowd in Trafalgar Square. They stood, for the most part, silent and staring at the living intruder in their pale, witch-lit world. A few hissed at him, black-eyed revenants with their flesh hanging off their bones. Revenants fed on the malice of their lives, which followed them in death like a shroud of black, twisting magic, spots on celluloid film.
    Pete moved nearer to him. She couldn’t see what he saw, but she knew all the same, perhaps better than Jack, the chill of having the dead always just out of view. “Want me to start it?” she asked quietly. Giving him a way out, a way to pretend that merely looking through his sight wasn’t causing him the sort of headache normally found only after strong whiskey and passing out on something hard.
    The spirit heart gave another
tick
, louder, stronger, and Jack nodded. “Wake them up.”
    “Mary and Stuart Poole.” Pete raised her voice and pitched it sharp. Jack flinched as a ghost drifted closer to Pete, a girl with dark wet hair still tangled with the garbage she’d drowned in. The salt-sour stink of the Thames at low tide tickled his nostrils.
    The girl ran her hand longingly across Pete’s cheek. Jack narrowed his eyes. “Oi. Shove off, miss. That’s not yours to take.”
    Pete shivered, but continued. “Mary and Stuart Poole, we call you to this resting place. Come back to your bones.”
    The drowned ghost drifted away, her torn dress andlank hair trailing behind her in a remembered river current. Jack felt a pull at his arm, and the spirit heart began to tick faster and faster, clockwork innards spinning like the earth was revolving too fast. He planted his feet and concentrated on staying merely upright. It shouldn’t be a task during a simple spirit raising
    “Mary and Stuart Poole,” Pete said again. “Come back to your bones.”
    There was power in triplets. Jack had taught her that. Pete never forgot something when you told her once.
    A tug on his arm warned Jack that his insistence on going ahead while his magic was spinning out of control may have cost him his arse. The spirit heart was twirling now, as if someone had spun a globe and walked away. The brass caught the low afternoon sun and threw off light, the whirring of the clockwork like a bird’s heartbeat. Too fast. Too fast and too soon. The Pooles were coming to his summons, and they could get loose if he didn’t rein the power in.
    Jack pushed