Demon Bound by Caitlin Kittredge Read Free Book Online Page B

Lawrence? Keep me from doing something foolish?” Lawrence’s spell was subtle, smell, sound, and tactile sensation, but it was there, pressing on him gently as a helping hand.
    “Anyone got eyes can see you wound up tight, boy,” Lawrence said calmly. “You clean now, I can’t offer you a toke, so I’m doing you the favor. Be gracious, now.”
    “Trust me, you’re the only bastard who cares about that,” Jack said. “The cleanliness or lack thereof of my bloodstream.” He rubbed his chin. He still needed the shave. “I may be fucked, Lawrence.” The spell made it easy to talk, a safe sound booth with the world locked out.
    Lawrence rolled his bottle in his hands. “Wouldn’t be him first time, being fucked.”
    “Not this way,” Jack muttered darkly. “Not this hard.”
    “True?” Lawrence said. “Tell me.”
    Jack sighed. Lawrence was a stand-up white witch, and he operated strictly on the daylit side of the Black. Jack might well get himself punched in the balls and thrown out of the flat when he told Lawrence his problem. Hearth witches didn’t deal with demons. In the bad times, the bloody times, they’d hunted those who did by the side ofthe witchfinders. Jack rolled his bottle across the back of his neck. The flat was close and too warm, smothering him all at once. That had been war. This was Lawrence. Lawrence had to at least hear him out. Jack hoped.
    “What would you say if I told you I owed a very bad bloke?” he asked Lawrence. “The kind who doesn’t fuck about.”
    Lawrence lifted one shoulder. “How bad we talking, mate?”
    “Peel the skin off of adorable household pets in front of your kiddies, bad,” Jack said. “And not patient, and not kind.”
    Lawrence nodded once, slowly. “Bad, yes. That is. Three times bad for you, Jack Winter.”
    “He’s put the word on the infernal wires,” Jack said. “So I can’t even try to reason with . . . him.” Demons favored certain bodies, but Jack had never known one with a definite set of gear. “I’ve got my bloody foot clamped right in a bear trap,” he told Lawrence, “and I can’t see my way to chewing it off.”
    Lawrence set his beer down, pressed his hands together like he was in church. He didn’t look at Jack until he finally asked, “How much time you got?”
    “Some,” Jack said. “Not enough.”
    “Let’s Stay Together” ended and the record hissed softly in the space between music.
    “I had ideas, mind,” Lawrence said. “You got a duppy on you back, Jack Winter, sure as any man I ever met. I seen the hints, little things you say and do.”
    “Like go shambling around London stoned to me gills?” Jack quirked a grin, an entirely fake one. Lawrence didn’t return it.
    The telephone buzzed from under a pile of Aramaic scrolls, and on the third ring Lawrence stirred himself and plucked the old rotary handset from the mess. “Hail.”
    After a moment he passed the set to Jack. “It’s your woman.”
    “She’s not my anything,” Jack said. “Oi, Pete.”
    Pete’s voice came from far away, down a well full of other souls. In the background Jack heard the cool female robot of the Underground announce, “
This is a Hammersmith & City Line to Hammersmith
.”
    “I spoke with Inspector Patel at New Scotland Yard,” Pete said. A bus horn blatted in the background as she ascended from tube sounds to traffic sounds.
    “Where are you?” Jack said, tucking the phone under his chin.
    “Paddington,” Pete said. “Just fetching a bite before I go home. It was a suicide, Jack. The local coppers cleared it last week.”
    “Doesn’t mean a ghost,” he insisted. “Sometimes a hanging is just a hanging.”
    Pete huffed. “Fine. Do you want to give back the five hundred quid, or should I?’
    “It’s a questionable job, Pete, and I’m not bounding over the Moor like sodding Heathcliff on some nonce’s say-so,” he said.
    Lawrence shook his head, drawing a finger across his throat. Jack threw him the