Demon Bound by Caitlin Kittredge Read Free Book Online

he saw the blank-eyed face in every passerby and felt the inexorable tide of the Black stronger than ever under the dark heartbeat of Whitechapel.
    He walked through the street market outside the Whitechapel tube station, hunched old women in saris picking over fruit, men in long caftans shouting in three different languages, competing with the white newsagent bleating about the latest footballer scandal and the music drifting out from the kebab shops and money changer’s.
    A breath of hot wind on his face, a whisper of sand, and Jack turned his head to see a man in a stall selling knock-off handbags stare back at him with flaming eyes, his skin flowing from brown to burnished gold. “Have a care, crow-mage,” he said. “They’ve been here. Searching for you.”
    Jack blinked as a pair of Japanese tourists who’d undoubtedly gotten off at entirely the wrong stop on their way to the British Museum jostled past him, and when he could see again the djinn was gone, just a swirl of gold dust dislodged into the gutter and flung asunder by a passing lorry.
    “Well,” Jack said to no one in the cacophony outside the tube station, “bollocks.”

Chapter Eight
    He felt eyes on him the entire way to Bayswater. You didn’t have to walk up to a bloke and knock him one in the teeth to make him feel uncomfortable. Jack knew there were things in the train tunnels, things that liked the dark, that waited and watched for the scraps and leavings of humanity to fall down to them.
    He knew that if they were hungry enough, sometimes they wouldn’t wait at all. The older the tube stations got, the more he sweated inside his jacket. At one time—too long ago to be anything but a middle-aged sot and his nostalgia—the pyramid spikes and patches and hand-painted slogans had been his armor, a clear warning to anything even half-human that he wasn’t to be fucked with. He wore the boots, the leather, and the black hair bleached startling blond everywhere but the roots still, but the hungry things were older and wiser, too, and they saw behind his mask.
    Jack just felt older in that moment, and wrung out. He hated being underground. It reminded him too much of when he’d taken peyote on his single trip to the UnitedStates, when he’d seen the Bleak Gates, stood in front of them and felt the terrible weight of the dead on his inner mind, his mage’s mind, and knew that his sight and his magic were linked in a way that wasn’t normal or natural, even for the Black. Hated being underground. Too close to the dead for comfort, entirely.
    Baker Street passed, and he caught a skittering on the train roof over the clatter of the track, small nails and paws, and the hiss of tongues that couldn’t form words any human ear understood.
    Jack closed his hand around the flick-knife in his pocket, closed his mind around a protection hex, waited.
    The next station passed, tunnels growing newer and shallower, and the whispers retreated. They hadn’t been hungry enough, in broad daylight, but they’d known he was there and that was bad enough.
    “Fucking demons,” Jack muttered aloud, garnering a look from the girl in the nearest seat. She was holding a guidebook, her thumb loosely marking her page, and had short red hair and large eyes, like a fey creature. A bit of blood, long ago, Jack thought, when her family still lived in the Isles. “Where are you going, then?” he asked her.
    “Tower Bridge,” she said. “Meeting my friend.” Her accent was American, the rounded vowels of the Midwest. Jack had never seen a place so flat, or so devoid of decent drugs.
    “You want the next, then,” he said out loud. “Change to the Circle Line and it’ll take you straight over.”
    “Thanks!” the girl said brightly, tucking her guidebook into her canvas bag. “You take care.”
    Jack watched her long legs and shapely back end exit the car, and felt only the barest interest. Americans were like fish in a barrel, and he wasn’t even going after