“If you touch her you’ll be dust before you draw your next breath,” Jack promised. The fear had fled with the light and left in its place a flat, hard resolve. The detritus of a retreating tide, sitting jagged in his chest.

Jack Winter wasn’t a man who got dragged to Hell and tortured. Not when the Black was trying to devour a friend, because friends were a rare enough commodity in his life as to be practically mythic.

“You think you stand a chance?” the demon asked, head tilting to catch the beam of morning on its waxy skin, like sunlight touching the face of a corpse with a torn shroud.

“I may not beat you,” Jack said, pulling a little magic to him from the bones of the house. “But I’ll fight you, tooth and nail.” The magic slithered and thrashed, unwilling to be caught. Jack grimaced. It might be a short fight. Many poor sods had the idea just before the end to fight, to cheat, to wriggle free of their bonds, but Jack wagered that none of them were quite as desperate as he. Desperation counted for much, when you dealt with demons.

“You’re a bit peevish, aren’t you?” the demon said. “Not even a proper hello, just moaning and whingeing as usual.” Its gaze drifted past Jack and landed on Pete’s form in the bed, her bare skin pale as the morning light and hair dark as ink spilled on it. The demon’s lips parted. “Was the little Weir slut not everything you hoped for?”

“I’m only going to say this once,” Jack told the demon. Posturing with citizens of Hell never ended well, but acting the hard man was natural camouflage when he was backed against a wall. “Your business is with me, not with Pete. Stop threatening her, and stop sending your fucking Fae emissaries to chase me all over creation. I’m not some bare-breasted twit in a B-grade horror movie, so don’t think you can frighten me with a few loose ghosties in a train station and some chatty cunt of a cu sith on the moor.”

The demon frowned. The expression was unnatural on its face, like watching a dead body try to frown once its muscles had seized in rigor mortis. “I have no idea what you’re babbling about.” It tossed the denim at him. “Put your pants on, mage. You and I have matters to discuss.”

The demon stared out the window, breath making wing-shaped patterns on the glass, while Jack dressed and splashed water on his face. Post-coital warm fuzzies lasted exactly as long as it took him to either realize his girl of the night was three pints south of shaggable or for a boyfriend to burst in.

Or demon, as the case might be.

“This place,” the demon murmured. “It’s a dead place. How do you stand it?”

“Not planning on being here much longer,” Jack said. “Doing what needs doing and going home to London.”

“Enjoying what time you have,” the demon murmured. “Most people would call you a bright lad.”

“Why are you here?” Jack leaned against the sink but he didn’t relax. “You appear to me in the loo to have an idle chat, or, let me guess—you’re lonely.”

“I wanted to speak with you, Jack,” the demon said. “Not as an adversary but as a mage. Can you do that? Put our dealing aside for the moment and listen?”

“You prepared to rescind your claim on me?” Jack asked. “Because I’m not putting anything aside, and if you’re not prepared to offer something, you can fuck right off back to the Pit.”

“Jack.” The demon sighed. It folded its arms, and back-lit against the glass it looked almost angelic, if angels had existed. “I could have left you to die that day when you called for me, and instead I reached out my hand. So I think maybe, just maybe, you should leave off your complaints and show me a bit of fucking respect.”

The air around the demon’s form flared with power, and Jack grabbed his forehead. The demon stretched and grew, a black shadow robed in smoke, the same black stone eyes boring into him like drill bits.

Jack shut his eyes. He let the old mantra pound through his skull. Not there. Not real. Not real. Not real.

The demon gave a soft chuckle. “Just remember who you’re dealing with, boy. Do you want to hear my proposition or not?”

Jack massaged at the throb in his temples, ineffectually. “All right, then,” he said. “Talk. Thrill me.”

“When we met,” the demon said, “I chose to bind a bargain with you because I sensed something of the demon in your nasty, soot-stained little soul.”

“I think your crystal ball needs adjusting, mate,” Jack said. “I’m just plain old flesh and blood.”

“Mostly blood, as I recall.” The demon chuckled. “Jack, in spite of your mouth and that sullen mien, I do like you, boy.”

Jack braced himself on the sink. “So you came to me for a lift, is that it?” The door was only two feet from him—if he needed, he could be through it and to his bag of tricks before the demon had time to worm its way past his shield hex.

“I know that even though you’ve got a weakness for flesh and a bigger one for drugs, you’re one of mine, boy.” The demon regurgitated the phrase with a sneer. “You’re a liar and a cheat and you think you’re far cleverer than you actually are—”

“And I am, really,” Jack interjected. “Quite clever. Cause of and solution to all me problems, cleverness.”

The demon gave him the blade edge of a smile. “If you were that clever, Jack, we wouldn’t be talking.”

“If you didn’t have the pressing need to hear your own voice, we wouldn’t be talking either,” Jack muttered.

“Don’t think I don’t know you would wriggle out of my bargain in a moment if you were clever enough,” the demon purred. “Or that I don’t know your little mind is whirring away even now, wondering, How can I flip and flop and squirm out of yet another tight spot?” It reached out and patted Jack on the cheek. “You can’t. And the fact that you haven’t openly tried any foolishness is the only reason you’re still taking up oxygen, Jackie boy. Believe me.”

Jack fished another fag out of the pack. He could only take so much inane chatter from Hell’s denizens before the craving for nicotine made him more than a shade rude. He sucked in smoke, relished the burn as something real to cling to while the demon’s smoky, musky aura swirled around him, poisoning the air breath by breath.

“I sense this is going somewhere,” he said. “In the slow and meandering manner of a London bus in rush hour. Care to cut the journey short? I’ve better things to do, like go downstairs and drop a tire iron on me foot.”

“There’s another,” the demon said. “Another man. Equally desperate when we met.” The demon bared its teeth. “But he fancies himself far, far cleverer than you, Jack Winter, in the most odious way possible.” The demon gave its tie an irritable stroke, smoothing out all its wrinkled edges and glaring at nothing.

Jack grinned around his fag. “I don’t believe it. This bloke found a way to cheat you?”

“That’s a bloody lie!” The demon flared, and the witch-fire in his eyes moved, slick and oily like ripples across a pool of runoff.

“All right, he didn’t.” Jack shrugged. “No skin off me that you’re in denial.”

“Oh, but it will be,” the demon said. “If I lose one of my charges, I will lose all of my charges, and the one who takes them from my cold, lifeless hand will not be a sweet forgiving old sot, like me.”

“I’d hate to see who’s unforgiving in the Pit,” Jack said. “If you’re the nice old granny of the lot.”

“Someone must go among the pagans of his hiding place,” the demon said. “Someone must return him to my patch to face his trial.”

“And this someone can’t be yourself . . . why, exactly?” Jack exhaled. He’d swear, if demons could look put out, his would at that moment.

“It’s not my land,” the demon said stiffly. “It’s not mine to trespass on.”

“Someone bigger ’n’ badder than you runs the patch!” Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough when he sucked smoke down the wrong pipe. He hacked for a moment, eyes watering. One of these days, he should really slap on some of those patches Pete was always buying and abandoning around his flat.