Demon Bound

away from him, descend the lift, and drift up the street to the Tesco Express before it slipped away, so much sand through fingertips. Jack ran a hand over his face. Told himself the noise of the street and the muted dark heartbeat of Whitechapel was all he heard.
    It helped, for the moment, but it was always temporary. Always, the Black clawed at his mind, and the dead, which came to Jack because he radiated power like a torn electrical cable, hovered. The madness that had caused him to shove a needle in his arm in the first place sat in the corner with its face hidden, and it laughed.
    The laughter turned and twisted, lapped back on itself until it bounced off the brick around his head, and Jack felt a sharp pain like a hot iron blade cut through his skull, behind his eyes.
    He had enough time to think,
This isn’t right.
    Briefly, he was seventeen again and face-down on a carpet that smelled like dust and pipe tobacco as the dead danced around him, a funeral procession for any shred of his mind that remained protected from the sight. For a single clock tick, the dead reached out their hands and begged Jack to join them as they had that day.
    The Black couldn’t invade consciousness, couldn’t move him from one place to another, up and down through time. Jack ground his knuckles into his forehead, hoping pain would bring him back to the present.
    He was in the alley behind his flat.
    He was thirty-eight years old.
    And he was clean. The things the Black showed him weren’t real, they were only memories birthed from dreams.
    Even though he whispered the mantra to himself, over and over—
Not real, not real, I’m clean, I’m clean
—the laughter became corporeal, a velvet touch on the back of his neck.
    Belatedly, Jack knew the pain for what it was, and anger burned the panic out of him. Panic was for common people, those who had never touched the Black. Panic was death. He recognized the pain in his skull, greeted the sensation as one he’d hoped never to feel again.
    “You’ve got a lot of nerve crawling up out of Hell in me backyard, whoever you are,” he told the demon.
    “Always a kind word for your friends, Jack,” the demon purred, and Jack felt his admittedly ill-used heart give a jump against his bones. The voice, the voice that came out of the haze in his head, through the memory of blood gone cold against skin, and of broken bones that pressed against nerve.
    The voice. When Jack dreamed of the deed, he dreamed of the voice. The voice that whispered secrets, terrible secrets into his ear, and called him . . .
    “Jack,” the demon said again, running black-painted nails over a black silk tie. Its shirt was white, too white for the real London, its suit coal, eyes and hair to match. In them an ember burned, the flicker of visible power Jack recognized from his own eyes. The demon’s were crimson with corruption, like oil fire floating on a darkened sea.
    “Jack,” the demon said a third time, because it knew the power of names and of triads, had taught them to the first member of the
Fiach Dubh
a thousand years past. It drew its bloodied lips back over twin, pointed front teeth. “Don’t say you’re surprised to see me.”

Chapter Four
    For all he prided himself on quick reflexes and quicker wits, Jack froze. He froze like a man caught out, with his sins on display like scars.
    “You thought we wouldn’t meet, on the eve of the deed?” the demon questioned. He took a step toward Jack, his gait gliding as if he moved on a snake’s belly. Jack felt his heartbeat slow, his blood thump through his ears like the bass on stage during one of his sets with the Poor Dead Bastards, back in the bad old days. The edges of the world smoothed out, and he felt a cold, empty well open up behind his eyes.
    “It’s been thirteen years for you, Jack Winter,” the demon said. Its tongue flicked its lips, crimson like it had just been dipped in blood. “Or nearly so.”
    Jack didn’t allow himself the luxury of more than a few seconds of shock. That was all you got, and then the bastards ripped your spine out because you’d stood there catching flies, insensible with fear.
    He dug deep, grabbed a great handful of magic, and flung it outward, toward the demon.
    The protection hex came to life in a flare of blue witch-fire, the excess energy curling around Jack’s hands like tongues of flame around a tree branch. The air between the demon and himself rippled as the hex took hold. It wasn’t