Demon Bound

with force. The spirit heart rattled, reminding Jack with a few ticks of clockwork how badly the day so far had gone, and warning it wasn’t over yet. He stood by his words, though. The Jayne Pooles of the world did have it coming, the fate they thought couldn’t apply to them rushing up from the next life. Jack knew better than most that Death could tread your tracks for a very long time, until you got tired and gave out. He’d seen Death do that very thing, to a score of people a far better class of soul than Jayne Poole.
    “We
needed
that money,” Pete said, her fingers tight on the steering. “As if I needed the reminder, my savings are nearly out and you’ve got the shirt on your back, if that.” She cast a look at the red slogan splashed across Jack’s chest, the one that read NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF . “And did it have to be
that
shirt, in particular?”
    “Hasn’t got any holes,” Jack protested. “No visible stains. What’s wrong with it?”
    “Forget I said it,” Pete muttered, jamming the Mini intogear and lurching into traffic with a wheeze of abused cylinders. Jack thought better of saying anything else, like they may
need
Jayne Poole’s bloody money but he’d be fucked by a priest, face-first up against the confessional, if he
wanted
anything to do with this spooks-for-hire business at all. It was risky, and silly, and it was only going to end with somebody getting their head jammed up their arse by an angry ghost.
    Pete headed them back across the city toward White-chapel, and Jack sat still in the passenger seat, not saying all of the bitter things sitting on his tongue. They’d dissolve eventually, as they always did, and he’d swallow them back down and let them rot his guts a bit more.

Chapter Three
    Pete parked in the alley next to Jack’s flat in the Mile End Road, and went inside without a word to him. Jack sat on the Mini’s bonnet and lit a fag, drawing it deep into his lungs, feeling the hiss and whisper of the Black fade in the face of something darker, more present.
    Roman citizens burned their dead on the fields of Whitechapel, to the east of the City walls. Eighty thousand souls crouched there during the reign of Victoria, all of them steeped in magic and misery as Jack the Ripper stalked among them, blood trickling through his fingers to the smooth-rubbed cobblestones, while just behind him, the far larger and more terrifying specter of poverty and a smoke-tinged, stinking death marched, implacable and inexorable.
    Whitechapel was the only place in London where Jack found a little relief from his sight. The dark and bloody veins of power that ran through the place masked the vibrations of the Black, put the volume down so he could at least sleep, if he had a fix in him. He’d first found the place going on twenty years ago, fresh off the train from Manchester and sleeping rough.
    Whitechapel became home, an odd sort of home, dirty and sooty and filled up with past misery. But you didn’t choose where you rested your bones, the place chose you. Whitechapel was in Jack’s blood surely as the fix had once been.
    Jack worked a hand under his collar and scratched at the tattoo on his left collarbone, one of the twin eyes of Horus resting under his skin. Pete had imbued them with power, the kind only someone of her talent could draw to a thing. And it held, mostly. The ink did as the skag had before it. But never enough, never as completely nor as quietly, never with the feeling of wrapping cotton wool over his third eye.
    Shutting his eyes, Jack let the sounds of the real London, the real world, cover him. Slamming doors from his building, shouts in Urdu from his neighbor’s children, the flow of traffic on Mile End Road, the rumble of a train in the Hammersmith & City Line under his feet.
    A window slid open four landings above, and Pete stuck her head out. “Jack, you coming up?”
    He exhaled a last halo of blue smoke and ground the burning butt out under his boot. “In a minute, yeah.”
    “You fancy tea?” Pete, though she lived here, in what many still considered a slum, with him, who most would consider a bum, kept her middle-class habits. Jack found his mouth quirking. The fact that she assumed civility of him was oddly charming, though he’d put a boot in the face of anyone who suggested such a thing.
    “I suppose,” Jack said.
    “I’ll get something in from Tesco, then,” Pete said, and disappeared, shutting the window. Jack felt her power waver