Demon Bound

Chapter Twenty

Jack crammed his few clothes, his lighter and fags, and an ancient Bastards master tape that he carried for luck into his bag, and slipped out of the Naughton house before the sun roused itself.

He’d left plenty of women abed, women with whom he was on varying terms of civility, but he’d never felt quite so much like a fucking cunt about it as he did walking down the muddy lane to the B road.

Leaving Pete a note had nearly been his undoing—he could have sat for hours at the sticky kitchen table holding the pen, trying to find just the right way to say, Sorry I’m a fuckwit in language that wouldn’t make his darling Petunia borrow a pistol from her good friend Inspector Heath and blow Jack’s balls off.

In the end, he’d settled for simplicity—Don’t worry. I’ll be back. He wasn’t sure yet if it was a lie or not.

The road was deserted in the early morning, and Jack walked, listening to the peculiar stillness of a winter dawn, water flowing in some hidden culvert, things rustling in the hedgerow but not seen, the slow sleepy twine of magic around his senses as the sun came up and the moor retreated into itself in the face of the witch’s domain, the sun and the hare and the deer, the psychopomps of what little was pure and good about the Black.

A lorry rumbled in the distance, silver grille flashing intermittently as it dipped behind the curves of the road and found the sun again.

Jack waved the driver down, had to jump aside as the lorry rumbled to a stop with a swish-hiss of air brakes.

“You fancy giving me a ride, mate?” he called.

The youth behind the wheel eyed him with an air of great distaste. “Sure, man. I pick up riders all the time in the arse-end of nowhere in my company truck.”

“I’ll make sure you get taken care of,” Jack assured him. Just a little push, just a little tickle of magic to make him sound truthful, to convince the surly bloke that what he wanted—be it ass, cash, or grass—would be waiting for him at the end of the line. Jack was a gifted liar, and gifts that came naturally were easy to turn into magic.

“I’m going down into Tiverton,” the driver grunted. “After that, you’re shite out of luck, friend.”

“Close enough,” Jack said. He climbed aboard and the lorry driver examined him more closely.

“What are you running away from, then?”

Jack leaned his throbbing forehead against the passenger window as the lorry pulled away.

“Nothing you need to worry about, friend.” He didn’t want to imagine Pete waking up alone, dressing, finding the note. “Nothing at all,” Jack repeated. They left the moor behind, the wild magic with it, and the road smoothed out, taking Jack back to what he supposed was some version of civilization.

Chapter Twenty-one

London bustled and howled and rumbled underfoot like an old friend when Jack got off the train at Paddington. The rustle and caress of the city’s magic felt awkward to Jack’s mind, like a lover you hadn’t seen in weeks, with the perfume of the bird you’d been cheating with still clinging to your collar. After the assault of the ghosts, the primal scream of the moor, the feeling of his and Pete’s magics touching so close and hot they could kindle flame . . .

Jack kicked traitorous thoughts from his head and found a pay phone near the taxi line at the station.

“Yeah, Jack.” Lawrence sounded resigned, like one did when their skint uncle called asking for a loan, again.

“Stop answering the phone like a bloody clairvoyant,” Jack told him. “It’s just showing off, isn’t it?”

“You back already, then?” Lawrence said. “Thought you had a big bad exorcism afoot out there in God’s country.”

“God has a sick fucking sense of humor,” Jack said. “Listen, Lawrence. Cancel your stitch-and-bitch or whatever you have on for today and meet me at Paddington.”

“No. ’M busy, Jack,” Lawrence said. “Got me own life, shocking as I know it be for you to hear.”

“Make it now,” Jack snarled into the phone. “Move your arse. I don’t have a lot of time.”

While he waited for Lawrence, Jack paced back and forth in front of the National Rail boards, and he paced to the ticket machines opposite, and he paced from the Boots to the coffee stand and back, until the transit copper began to look at him like Jack might be contemplating his chances of blowing something up.

Jack sat down and stared at the stains on the floor, islands and peninsulas attesting to the passage of human glaciers. His sight showed him old ghosts, older bodies, flickering in and out of sight as Paddington flowed around him. The Blitz, the bad old days of Thatcher and New Labour, muggings and murders, blood snaking black and gray across the tiles under his feet. Always, the dead came to be with him, just out of sight but never gone.

At length, Lawrence loped up the steps from the tube lines on the lower levels, dreadlocks tucked under a knit cap and his long form encased in a navy coat. He stalked over to Jack and stood, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “All right, man. Here I am. What’s got you so twisted you drag me away from a payin’ client?”

Jack stood up, casting an eye around the crowd out of habit. No one immediately averted their gaze, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. “Not here,” Jack murmured. “Loo.”

“Fuck off,” Lawrence said. “You want them train cops to think we a pair of rent boys?”

“They can think I hail from Suffragette bloody City for all I care,” Jack said, snatching his friend by the arm. “Now come along.”

The men’s loo in Paddington smelled like bleach and was only half lit, fluorescent tubes spitting when Jack passed under them. He locked the door to the outside and faced Lawrence. “I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen and not give me any of your usually granny nonsense, all right?”

Lawrence blinked at him. “What happened since I saw you last, Jack? This shifty business ain’t like you.”

Jack ignored the question, casting about in his leather for a key to his flat. He pressed it into Lawrence’s hand. “My grimoire is on the mantle in the sitting room. Everything I bothered to write down, every spell, every spirit, it’s there.” His pulse pounded, feverish against his temples, and the lights flickered again, casting Lawrence into shadow for a split second. “I have about fifty pounds in a sock in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser. You should give that to Pete. Haven’t anything else, except the flat, and I suppose you and she can decide what to do with that.”

Lawrence held up his hands. “Jack. I know you think the devil’s bargain be pulling you down into the Pit, but it ain’t sure yet. You’re scarin’ me, true.”

“It could be. You know that, too.” Jack fixed Lawrence with a stare that he hoped was penetrating enough to prick his friend’s denial that Jack Winter was fucked, indeed. “Lawrence, if I don’t see you again, I trust you to do what needs to be done. It’s that bloody simple.”

When mages kicked off, there were rules. Rituals, and incantations. A thousand small assurances that your dearly departed friend would not become a plaything of the creatures in the thin spaces, things that were neither Fae or ghost. The mourners of a mage ushered the spirit through the Bleak Gates, locked it up tight where it could never trouble the living.

So if Jack didn’t return, and he admitted it was wholly possible, Lawrence would burn his grimoire, dispose of his assets, and take his body—if there was one—to its final rest, in the tradition of the crow.

Lawrence started shaking his head immediately when Jack stopped speaking, his eyes panicked. “Won’t do it, Jack. You ain’t going through with whatever foolishness you think you up to . . .”

“It’s not foolishness,” Jack snarled, perhaps more harshly than he needed to. His voice echoed off the tile of the loo. “And you’re the only person I fucking trust to do right by me if it is, so shut your gob, take the key, and say you’ll look after Pete if I don’t come back.”

Lawrence screwed up his face, but he tucked the key into his coat pocket. “I don’t like this, Jack. You still thinking you can beat that demon, aren’t you? Still thinking you the wickedest man in the world.”

Jack faced his gaze to Lawrence, staring a hole in the other man until Lawrence squirmed. “I’m fucking rubbish at a lot of it,” Jack said quietly, “but I am the crow-mage and it wouldn’t kill you to have a little fucking faith, Lawrence.”

Lawrence dropped his eyes, giving the small victory to Jack. “I save me faith for the devils and the saints, man.”

Jack felt his fists curl. An ego was something a man of his age and situation could ill afford, but there was still a bit of the flame left in his chest, enough to burn small holes in other people’s good intentions. “You want to say different? Want us to have a little mage’s duel right here in the loo?” Jack set his feet. Lawrence had height and weight on him, but he was a white witch with white witch charms and spells in his arsenal, and Jack wagered he could knock Lawrence on his arse before the magic ever started flying.

“I don’t want to fight wit’ you, Jack,” Lawrence sighed. “I want me best friend in the world not to be dragged into Hell. But me a day late and a pound short on that score.”

“Too right,” Jack said. He left off his planted feet and solid fists, and went to unlock the door and leave. Lawrence could piss and moan the hind legs off of a horse, but he’d do what Jack asked. He always had, from the first day they’d met, in a squat straddling the edges of the Black and a horrid dump in Peckham. Lawrence was a deejay from Birmingham. Jack was a skinny nineteen-year-old git still wearing a Dublin hospital bracelet around his wrist, no more possessions than that and an outsize ability to slag the wrong people off. They’d gotten along immediately.

“You can’t cheat a demon,” Lawrence said softly. “No living soul can manage that. You going to die, Jack, and the best you can hope for is to go with your head up.”

Jack’s guts twisted up. “Thanks. Nothing like knowing my mates are expecting me to come marching home with a smile on my ruddy face.”

“You’re good, Jack,” Lawrence said quietly. “But you’re not that good. I’ll say my farewells, and if you come to your senses . . .” He flashed the flat key, made it disappear again. “You know where to find me.”

“Cheers. And fuck you, Lawrence.” Jack shoved the door open, let the sound and light of the station engulf him once more, like dropping into an ocean of bodies and sound. High above him, on the same rafter, the crow watched. Jack stilled, glaring at it. He’d been seeing entirely too many nosy birds of late. It was like being trapped in one of those insipid talking-animal films, laced with a hit of bad acid.

Lawrence came to his shoulder. “You got a fetch on you, boy.”

Jack rolled his eyes toward the crow. “That animal companion shite is for your type, Lawrence. I call it a bloody obnoxious pest.”

The crow hopped from one foot to the other, flexing its wings to their full length. It stared at Jack. Jack flipped it two fingers.

“Treat your fetch better, Jack.” Lawrence clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Never know when you need that old boy to carry your soul home.”

“Like you said,” Jack told Lawrence. “Too little, too late.”

Lawrence knocked one booted toe against the ground. “Take care of yourself, Jack.”

Jack lifted one corner of his mouth. “You going to miss me, you great pair of knickers? Going to have yourself a cry once I’m gone on my way?”

“I ain’t saying good-bye,” Lawrence told him hotly. “It is what it is. You don’t listen to no demon’s lies and you don’t get yourself in more trouble than you already carrying.”

Jack threw Lawrence a salute. “Just as you say, guv.”

Lawrence gave a nod. “Then I see you later, Jack.”

“Yeah,” Jack told him as Lawrence joined the line of people descending back into the tube. “Much later.”

A garbled call for the Heathrow Express echoed over the PA, and Jack’s headache joined his nervous stomach. He joined the line of people boarding the sleek dove gray train car, passing his fingers over the ticket machine to open the gate to the platform.

The magic tingled, ran through him from head to toe like he’d just grabbed a live socket. Such a small trick shouldn’t send pain up and down his nerves, but then his sight shouldn’t be going haywire and he shouldn’t be dreaming of a ritual that had gone out of fashion with painting yourself blue and chopping the heads off of Picts.

Shouldn’t be feeling the pull of Pete’s Weir talent even when she was miles away. Shouldn’t be going to bloody Thailand on a fool’s errand. Jack would have traded with a demon all over again in that moment to be back in Naughton’s smelly, lumpy bed with his arm over Pete’s waist and her slender leg wrapped around his.

Pete’s leg dug into his thighs, urging him harder, urging him to take what he wanted, needed.

“Oh, fuck off,” Jack gritted as the Heathrow train rolled out of Paddington, gathering speed as it slid through the junkyards and council estates of south London. Not that any vision he’d ever been subjected to had been chased off with a bit of bad language.

“Jack . . . ,” Pete gasped, back arching, body stiffening around him, driving him to the edge. “Jack, stop . . .”

He wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop as the chanting crested, the onlookers watching the pair on the stone, faces blank and eyes glistening with desire.

“Jack.” Pete stilled herself and looked into his eyes. “You have to stop, Jack.”

The chanting fell away and the circle closed in, and Jack saw for the first time the white robes, the silver masks, and the crowns of horn hiding the circle of mages from his view.

Not the Fiach Dubh. Not his brothers. These were strangers, and all at once, the rain and the mist froze against Jack’s skin. Cold. Always the cold. Pete tried to put her hand against his cheek, stopped at the end of the shackle, and sank back to the stone. Jack saw the bruises blossoming under the woad, saw Pete’s starvation thinness and the chafe marks at her wrists from her time on the stone. “Stop, Jack,” she whispered. “Stop running. Stop fighting.”

Jack placed his hand against her cheek. “Can’t, luv. I’m doing it for you.”

She shook her head, a bitter smile thin as a line cut on broken mirror growing on her face. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Jack Winter. And you don’t know me. Not really.”

The circle of mages closed in, their hands snatching at Jack, trying to drag him away, and Pete strained to hold him. “Wake up, Jack,” she whispered. “Open your eyes.”

“We are now arriving at Heathrow, Terminal Three,” the train robot announced. The train jolted, and the doors slid open. “Please mind the gap as you exit the train.”

Jack managed to rise, collect his kit, and leave the car with the rest of the foreigners and travelers shuffling through the dank gray tunnel with their luggage. Then he took a quick turn around the rear of the train, leaned over the edge of the platform, and vomited his guts out. There wasn’t much, just coffee and a few biscuits he’d nicked from the dining car of the Tiverton train.

Jack felt the gnawing ache of an empty stomach, the jittery sick dance of his heart. Jack wanted Pete with him. She’d have made sense of the vision, helped him quiet his sight and his magic. He could talk himself out of the truth, if Pete were with him.

His talent was going haywire. He couldn’t control his sight. As the anniversary of his bargain crept closer, Jack’s power was unwinding. He’d seen mages go off the rails before, when some curse or malice of the Black caused their mind and their talent to diverge, shredding one another as they fought tooth and nail inside the unlucky mage’s meat sack. Those mages ended up in Velcro pajamas. The ones that didn’t top themselves outright.

Wake up, Pete had said. Open your eyes.

“She sees you, Jack Winter, and she says that you can run. . . .” Pete grinned, half with the pain of her shackles and half with malice. “She says you can run far and fast, but you can never hide.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Jack dug his fingers into his armrest when the Malaysia Air plane took off from Heathrow, and kept them there as the jet bounced from cloud to cloud, each jerk designed specifically to keep his guts somewhere in the vicinity of his tongue.

“Bad flight?”

The girl in the middle seat was one of those self-conscious hippie types made of natural fibers and henna dye, who did things like joining the Peace Corps and handing out condoms to third-world Catholics, urged through the poverty-drenched mud and shit because of some deep moral compulsion brought on by not enough hugs from Mummy.

“’M fine,” Jack said. When was the last time he’d flown? American, 1994? The ill-fated trip to Belgium when Lawrence got himself mixed up with the Stygian Brothers and Jack had to go to their necropolis and bargain back Lawrence’s death?

Too bloody long, and he hadn’t liked strapping himself inside a giant lipstick tube and getting suspended five miles above the earth any better in the bad old days.

“You don’t look fine,” the girl said. She eyed the flight attendants in their colorful vests and neckerchiefs moving in the galley and then dipped a hand into her hemp bag. “Here.”

Jack narrowed his eyes at the small round pills. “What’s that, Xanax?”

“Darling, do I look like I carry mother’s little helper?” the girl scoffed. “Take it. You’ll have a nice ride, I guarantee.”

Jack eyed the little pills when she tipped them into his palm. Then the jet bounced again and turned, skimming west over water and on into southern Europe and the Middle East.

The girl unscrewed her complimentary in-flight water bottle and handed it to him. “I’m Chelsea.”

Jack debated for only a moment, until turbulence bounced him against his lap belt once more, and washed the chalky aftertaste of the pills down with nearly half of the water. After months off, his throat had forgotten how to accept copious handfuls of pharmaceuticals.

“I’m Michael,” he said. “Mick.” Giving a fake name was a reflex, when you couldn’t know who you were speaking to. Names were kept back, used for currency and passage, not given out like Chelsea’s mystery drugs. Jack pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He could still taste the pills.

“Why Thailand?” Chelsea asked after they’d watched an announcement about the in-flight films and blood clots that could be forming in one’s legs at this very moment.

“Why did your parents name you after a fucking neighborhood?” Jack returned. She laughed, and washed down her own pills. Three, Jack noted. He must have lost that scraggly addict’s aura, the one that telegraphed he needed at least twice the doctor’s dose of any medicine you chose.

“They loved it there. We couldn’t afford it, of course—they lived out in Chiswick, and I left when I was about fifteen and went wild for a few years before I settled down and got into activist work.”

Sometimes pegging people dead to rights in the first go was extraordinarily boring, Jack reflected. If Chelsea had said she was going to Bangkok to recruit an all-castrato chorus line for the musical production of Trainspotting, the flight wouldn’t be dull, at least.

“You rescue prostitutes and bums, then?” he said. “Turn them into useful members of the human race?” The pills were making themselves known. His head and legs felt swimmy and his heart and lungs felt slow.

“I rescue anyone who asks me,” Chelsea said with a thin smile. “But what happens after that is up to them.” She put two fingers over his eyelids. “Go to sleep, Michael. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

Jack tried to say “time for what,” but he had a feeling he only mumbled vaguely before he drifted into a cotton-wool floating sleep. Chelsea’s image flickered once in his sight, gold lion’s eyes and twin shadows sitting on her shoulders. The Black caressed her sharpened cheekbones and full lips, and her hand that stroked his face was full of talons.

“Oh,” Jack slurred. “Fuck.” Before he could really look at Chelsea, put a barrier of power between her pointed black teeth and himself, a dream opened its jaws and swallowed him down. He saw Irish hills, English cities, Pete’s eyes, and then nothing, until it was much too late to do anything at all.

Chapter Twenty-two

Jack woke, suddenly and with the sensation of falling. He saw long metal arms out of the airplane porthole, metal carts manned by drivers in orange vests. It was a bit like waking up after you’d fallen asleep, stoned and watching something from the sixties about robots.

“Come on.” Chelsea nudged him. “It’s always better if you walk it off.”

Jack stood with her help and every joint in his body from his neck to his ankles protested. “The fuck did you give me?” he mumbled. His tongue was thick and furry, a remake of too many mornings when he’d been on the road with the Bastards. That had been the nicest thing about the heroin—you never got hungry enough to feel the sick afterward.

“Dreamless sleep,” Chelsea said. She stepped into the aisle and shouldered her fuzzy bag. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” She gave him another one of those small half-smiles, the ones that didn’t express anything close to comfort or joy. “That’s what you ask for, Jack. When you think no one can hear you. Not to see.”

Jack watched the way her eyes changed, from pleasant gray to iron slate to gold, pupiless and staring.

“Who are you?” he slurred. “Actually, strike that bollocks—what? What are you?”

Chelsea leaned back and squeezed his hand. “The guardian of the gateways sends her regard, Jack. She grants you safe passage through this land.”

Then she was gone, moving lithely through the crush of people disembarking from the jet where there should have been no space, just elbows and bags and snorts of “Move it!” from the American in the Hawaiian shirt, lugging two roller bags and a camera case.

Jack moved to the side and caught the bloke in the ribs as he chugged passed. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “Bit close in here.”

“Up yours, fuckwad,” the American said, and shoved on down the jetway, tossing smaller Thais and Brits out of the way with a casual swing of his luggage.

“Thank you for flying,” said the flight attendant manning the door. “Have a lovely stay, now.”

“Listen,” Jack said. “The girl sitting next to me on the flight—which way did she go?”

“Girl?” The woman’s eyes flicked toward the cockpit and the phone on the wall next to the tamper-proof door.

“Yes,” Jack said, shifting from foot to foot in an effort to force his blood to expel the drug expediently. His vision still swam in slow circles and his arms felt like logs, but at least he could talk without sounding like a Mancunian Joey Ramone. “Reddish hair, manky clothes, nice face. I need to find her.”

“Sir.” The attendant reached for the handset. “You were alone in your row.”

“She said her name was . . .” Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “Never mind. Put the phone down, luv, I’m not crazy or trying to blow you up.”

The attendant set the phone down reluctantly. “Then what are you on about, sir?”

Jack sighed, trying to keep his balance on the gently listing jetway. “Nothing, it seems. I’m simply having a royally shite fucking day.”

When Jack backed away from the wide-eyed attendant and joined the concourse of Suvarnabhumi Airport, it was as full of people as a riverbed after a flash flood. The light scattered through the thousands of windowpanes that entombed Jack in glass as crowds shoved to and fro all around.

“Like bloody Snow White,” he muttered, watching a 747 take off overhead. The ground under his feet shook.

Jack let the crowd push him for a bit, drifting while he got his bearings. The demon knew where he was and what was happening, so who’d send the hippie girl on the airplane? The girl with lion eyes, and fingers like fossilized claws that could reach inside him and pull out his dreams like a photo album. The girl who wasn’t a girl at all.

It could be any number of people—or not-people, Jack reflected. Anyone he’d slagged off in the last twenty years. Any vulture circling who’d heard about the demon and wanted his pound of Jack Winter.

Or the demon could be a liar, could be stringing him up like a puppet and sending its cronies in the Black for its own amusement. Offer everyone a bit of the crow-mage, soften him up before the day came around so Jack wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t scheme, and would beg the demon for his life like every other stupid fuckwit who’d bound a bargain before him.

Jack knew this was likely as anything else, but he still let himself join the line for customs and presented the passport the demon had given him. Miles Hornby had tricked the demon, and Miles Hornby was in Bangkok.

“Reason for visit?” The Thai behind the glass couldn’t have been more disinterested if Jack were a cardboard cutout.

“Vacation,” Jack said, and fought to keep from laughing.

“Duration of stay?” The Thai clicked at his computer.

“Less than a week,” Jack said. “One way or another.”

His passport slid back at him through the slot. “Very good. Next,” the customs agent said, and the crowd swallowed Jack up again.

Chapter Twenty-three

Jack boarded a train for the thirty-kilometer ride to downtown Bangkok, pressed in with Thai citizens, their luggage, visiting backpackers, and their burdens. Jack stood and let the gravity of the train pull him from station to station.

In a crush of people, Jack had always felt the most secure. He could create a bubble of solitude out of the ebb and flow of bodies, and he could find silence while everyone else talked and laughed and shouted. The living could shut out the dead, at least to a degree. The press of overlapping souls was like listening to traffic on the motorway, or the rush of blood through your own ears. Normal people felt like passing a hand through flowing water—gentle and present, but never cold or dreadful, like looking at the Black or standing in a group of other talents.

In this crowd, though, Jack just felt alone, overwhelmingly so. The air was foreign and the magic was foreign, and it left a hole in him, the gaping black pit of his sight without anything to catch him at the bottom. Thailand’s air was close and hot enough that it felt like a hand over his mouth, and the snatches of smell that Jack caught as the train drew closer to the central city certainly weren’t winning any prizes. The cacophony of voices speaking half a dozen languages rang in his still-fuzzy head, and his abused stomach lurched with every bump on the track.

If Pete were here, he could lean into her as the train rounded a curve, steal a touch and pretend it was only gravity and not any desire to be against her. But she’s not, Jack told himself, so leave it alone and smarten up. It wasn’t Pete that he needed to be thinking of now. What he needed was further back, memories that he’d rather not stir even in his most pissed, most sorry, or most high-as-a-fucking-kite moment. Jack needed his memories of the time before Pete and the fix, before anything except the dead.

The train rattled on, never disgorging a passenger, only packing more in as they wound deeper and deeper into the veins of Bangkok’s heart. Jack found himself pressed against the window, watching the world flow by in snatches of color and stain, high-rise skin reflecting a water-slicked image of the train and slums that stared at him with broken glass eyes.

A female face grinned at him out of the blur of twilight buildings, and his sight showed him a bloody slick on the ground underneath her, her body a mass of sticky meat and her teeth filed to sharp points. Bangkok showed him its Black, clawed at his sight, a teeming and frantic energy that was foreign to his senses as the Thai alphabet that delineated the train’s stops and starts.

Jack blinked and looked away from the woman’s reflection. Sometimes, it was all you could do. Avert your eyes and pray to your gods that whatever It was hadn’t noticed your insignificant scrap of heartbeat and talent.

The train rumbled into Silom Station, and Jack shoved his way off, relieved to finally be able to at least lift his arms. He fished in his pocket and unfolded the scrap of vellum, worn shiny. The remains of a penciled-in map were barely visible. His handwriting in the bad old days had been shit—it was a wonder any of his cantrips or incantations had ever worked the way they should.

On Silom Road, he stopped to get his bearings before plunging into the eternal stream of foot and motor traffic traversing the street between Jack and the crush of Pat-pong.

In Patpong, the Black was different—it spoke to him much like Whitechapel did, as he crossed with a knot of Japanese men in blue polo shirts, some kind of tourist group, cameras and fat rolls of bhat bulging in their pockets and cases. The red-light district was a crush of smell and sound and blurred expanses of flesh glimpsed through streaky nightclub windows, garnished with torn posters advertising sex shows years out of date.

The same dark heartbeat bent and whispered through the tourist and the barkers attempting to entice Jack upstairs to see the girls, or the boys, or the boys dressed as girls take their clothes off, lay themselves upon the altar of sex magic, and send up painted and pierced and fragrant offerings to the gods of such things. The bloody bones of Whitechapel were here, but tinged with sex and spices, the ambient power of the place rolling over Jack’s skin like honey.

A peddler in the night market choking off a street signed as PATPONG 1 ahead of him stretched out a handful of gold chains and watches. “American? Good discounts for Americans.”

“English,” Jack said. “I still get a discount?”

The peddler laughed. “English, I charge you double. See anything you like?”

Jack scanned the table, covered with nylon and anchored at each corner by a statue of the Buddha. There was the usual assortment of knockoff jewelry, but he passed his finger over a chain with a coin attached. His sight returned a thread of magic, small white flames rising off the coin in the Black.

“This one,” Jack said. “It has something.”

“You have a good eye,” the peddler said. “That’s a passage coin—in your culture, you use it to pay the ferryman. To your next world?”

Jack felt his mouth curl up at the corners. “You know what you’re talking about.”

“Around here, mostly tourists,” said the peddler. “But I see enough of you to make it worth my while.”

Jack picked up the necklace, felt the weight of the copper coin on the end of the cheap chain. “How much?”

“Depends on what you have, mage.” The peddler folded his arms and smiled. Jack laughed.

“What’s your name?”

“Banyat. But everyone around here calls me Robbie.” The peddler made a show of counting his money roll. “I’ll sell it to you for a story. Tell me why you’re here.”

Jack slid the chain around his neck. Stories were a good currency, provided you had them to tell. Much better than names, or dreams. “Why do you care?”

“This is my corner,” Robbie said. “I keep my eyes open and if something slithers up from the Black that’s a wrong thing to be walking in this side of the veil, I whisper in the right ears. You, mage—you’re a wrong thing.”

“So for your silence, you get to know my business?” Jack knew when he’d been manipulated—usually it was by flexible and willing girls getting back at their ex-boyfriends after a Bastards gig, but the feeling of vague unbalance was the same.

“That I do,” Robbie said. His English wasn’t accented with American, and Jack turned the coin over his fingers, made it disappear, reappear.

“Fine. I’ll tell you my business here if you tell me why in the hell you’re called Robbie.”

“I did some time in the UK,” Robbie said. “For robbery, get it? As for the chain, Irish bloke lives up on Patpong 2 pawned it to me for some crematory ash and a bootleg of the Stiff Little Fingers.”

“I’m in Bangkok looking for someone,” Jack returned, because a bargain was a bargain whether you were speaking with a demon or a street hustler. “And I have a feeling your Irish friend and I will be meeting over that someone soon enough. That slake your burning curiosity for you, Robbie with the posh boarding school accent?”

Robbie snorted. “What poor bastard got them after you? I saw you coming, I’d turn the other way so fast I’d whiplash meself.”

“A clever boy,” Jack said, echoing the demon’s words even though thinking of those blank black eyes and crimson mouth made him nauseous. Or it could be the comedown from the pills. Treacherous bitch. If he found out who had set these specters of ill fortune on him, they were going to be short their balls.

“Can’t be very clever after all, if you found him,” Robbie said. He jerked his chin at the coin. “Take that. For safe passage wherever you need to go.”

Jack fingered the coin, but he kept the chain around his neck. The weight felt right, solid and warm against his chest, and precious little was solid in this tilting city where the Black screamed rather than hissed. “Cheers, Robbie.”

“This man you’re after,” Robbie said, as he flashed a smile at a passing tourist couple. “What’s his name?”

“Miles Hornby,” Jack said. “You heard of him?”

“Can’t say I have.” Robbie rearranged his fake watch display with the speed and efficiency of a card sharp. “But then again, aren’t you farang all supposed to look alike?”

Jack gave a snort. “Good one. The cranky Irishman, what’s his building?”

“The kathoey bar with the pink flamingo sign down on Patpong 2,” Robbie said. “Got apartments upstairs. Mostly for the ladyboys and their . . . friends, you understand? But he moved in there. Said he liked it. Had a good . . . it’s Chinese.”

“Feng shui?” Jack supplied. Robbie nodded, and Jack shook his head, feeling a true smile grow for the first time since he’d climbed onto the airplane. That was Seth—he took the piss by the bottle, and setting up shop above a transvestite sex club would be his idea of a right long laugh. “Got any idea which apartment? So I don’t interrupt any of the gentlewoman’s business, you understand.”

Robbie returned Jack’s crooked grin. “He’s . . . number three, I think. Don’t blame me if you bust down the wrong door and get an eyeful, though.”

“Furthest thing from me mind.” Jack tipped Robbie a salute and found his way through the night market, past a set of enthusiastic barkers outside a sex show featuring a dancer billed as “Around-the-World Sue,” past a knot of smoking fans and drunks outside a music bar. The band inside wasn’t half bad—a fusion of rockabilly and electronica that’d do well in London. The quintet played with the sort of easy harmonies the Bastards aspired to and never quite found.

If he’d been less wrapped up in trying to be the largest, wickedest mage in London and paid more attention to his music, he might be in that club now, Jack thought. Or he might still be on the floor of a rotting squat in Southwark, with the cold kiss of a needle against the crook of his arm. In his lighter moments, Jack thought that seeing the future would be even worse than seeing the dead. At least the dead couldn’t shake their heads at you and tsk with disappointment for ambition and dream crushed beneath boots and heroin.

Club Hot Miami sat halfway down Patpong 2, nestled like a gaudy tropical bird among swampy trees. Pink flamingos and palm trees described in neon danced across the facade, and a barker grinned at Jack, waving a happy-hour flier under his nose.

“No, thanks,” Jack said. “Just looking for the farang who lives upstairs.” Even though he’d taken pains to remember nothing of Seth McBride, the description rolled out with no pause. “Irritable sod, a little shorter than me. Black hair, blue eyes, got a mouth on him that’d strip the gears on a lorry.”

“Oh yeah, we know him.” The barker looked as if he wished emphatically that he didn’t know anything of the sort.

“He at home?” Jack said. “If not, I could be convinced to come in. Murder a drink of anything, honestly. It could have an umbrella and a goldfish swimming in it after the day I’ve had.”

“He’s always home,” said the barker glumly. “Never goes out. No friends.”

“That sounds right.” Jack mounted the outside stairs of the flat block. The stairs were even more precarious than his fire escape at home, if such a thing were possible. They groaned under his weight, the bolts grinding against cement.

The landing on the second floor was little better, close and closed in by mosquito netting, bug lights fizzing as Jack passed. The doors were unmarked, and moans and pants from behind the thin wood confirmed Jack’s theory that nearly everyone in Bangkok was having a better night than he was.

At the third door, he detected no sound. Jack’s eyes traveled up out of habit—you never crossed a mage’s threshold without looking—and found an iron nail, bound in hair and tied to a crow feather soaked in blood.

Not taking his eyes from the hex, Jack reached out and rapped thrice on the bubbly painted wood with his knuckles. They came away sticky. The city itself was alive in Bangkok, breathing and sweating.

A voice rattled the thin door from within. “Fuck off!”

Jack knocked again. “Open the door, Seth.”

He heard scuffling, as if not Seth but a herd of enormous rats resided behind the door, and half a dozen locks clicking.

An eye, watery blue like a cloud-covered sky, peered through the crack. “How’d you know that name?”

Jack spread his arms. “Like I could forget, you Irish bastard.”

Seth’s eye widened, and his broad flat face went slack. “Jack Winter. Fuck me sideways.”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Jack said. “You never were my type.”

“And you always were a mouthy little cunt, weren’t ya?” Seth demanded. Jack lifted one shoulder.

“No denying it. You miss me, Seth?”

Seth’s hair still stuck up wildly and a pack of Silk Cut still rode shotgun in his front shirt pocket, but he was tan and carrying more weight than the last time Jack had clapped eyes on him. “Yeah, I missed you,” he growled. “Like a case of the clap the peni didn’t chase away.”

“Going to invite me in?” Jack said. “I’m not keen on that hex chewing me up.”

“Right. Worried about the hex.” Seth dropped his shoulder and moved, and pain exploded across Jack’s right cheek. He stumbled, felt himself lose balance and go down in a tangle of mosquito netting.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, boy,” Seth rasped, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. “Remind me why I shouldn’t just kill you now.” He touched his finger to the end of the cigarette, and smoke curled up.

“Fuck.” Jack sat up, shook the cobwebs from his head, and touched the spot where Seth had hit him. It was pulpy and tender, and blood trickled down into the hollow next to his mouth. It left the taste of iron and salt on the tip of Jack’s tongue. “Got it out of your system?” he asked Seth.

The Irishman shook out his fist. His knuckles were pink and pulpy, like a bunch of grapes. “Not hardly. You never did know when you weren’t wanted, Jackie.”

Jack grabbed the rusty rail and pulled himself to his feet. “And you never could throw a punch worth fuck-all, McBride.”

Seth bared his teeth around the Silk Cut. “Why’re you here, Winter?”

Jack pointed up at the hex. “Let me in and I’ll tell you.”

“Shit.” Seth threw his butt down on the cement and stamped on it with one sandal-clad foot. “I wouldn’t invite a fucking demon into my home, so explain to me why I should invite you.”

“I’m looking for a bloke called Miles Hornby to void a bargain with a Named demon of Hell and I’ve got precisely shit to go on, so I’ve come to you, oh wise and generous mentor, for your help.” Jack folded his arms and concentrated on keeping on his feet. His head didn’t ring from the blow, it tolled—slow and rolling, over and over, waves of pain like waves on a shore, threatening to drown him.

“Well.” Seth tipped his head to the side. “Jack Winter asking for my help. I’ve had this dream before.” He looked up and down the walkway.

Jack followed his glance. “What?”

“I’m waiting for Stephen Fry and the talking monkey to come in,” Seth said. “That’s the next bit.”

“Fuck off.” Jack prodded his cheek again. It was roughly twice its normal size and would bear the impression of Seth’s knuckles when the bruise solidified. “I mean it, Seth.”

“So do I, Jack,” Seth snarled. “I don’t want a thing to do with missing bastards, your dodgy troubles, or you. I’d take the talking monkey any fucking day.”

He retreated into the shadow of his flat, and Jack felt the swell of desperation in his chest like Seth had hit him all over again.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Jack had admitted the same truth to Seth close to twenty years ago, when Seth had found him turning conjure tricks on the streets of Dublin, sat him down, gave him a fag, and asked him where he’d come from. The crow spread her wings over Jack that night, folded him into her purview, but he felt no such darkling comfort now.

Seth grumbled out a string of curses, but he moved to the side, jerking his head at Jack. “Fuck it. Come in, then.”

Jack shouldered his bag and stepped cautiously over the threshold. Half expecting to feel the teeth of Seth’s warding hex lock into his skin and his sight, he only relaxed when McBride snorted at his tension. “I wanted you face down, Jackie, you’d be swallowing your teeth now and you know it.”

Jack itched at the back of his neck as his talent prickled at another’s encroachment. “Suppose that’s true.”

“Fucking right, it’s true. I am sorry about that belt, though,” Seth said. He stubbed out his fag into an over-flowing ashtray that lived in the belly of the ubiquitous Buddhas that grinned out at Jack from every corner of Patpong.

“No you’re not,” Jack said. He went in Seth’s minuscule freezer and found a packet of frozen mixed veg that was dated three years past. Sticking it against his face helped with the dull ache, but not the sting. “You haven’t been sorry for a thing since the doctor slapped you on the arse and made you cry.”

“All right, probably not so very much,” Seth admitted. He settled himself in a cracked vinyl armchair in front of a telly crowned in rabbit ears, lines of color wavering up and down the pocket-sized screen over a Thai cricket match.

Jack looked out the back window, down into an alley. Grinning white tourists led along a pair of underage Thai girls, their smiles as pasted on as their plastic dresses. Laughter bounced off the concrete and the air thickened with curls of wayward power as the girls fell behind the pair of men, heads bent together like painted, predatory sharks. Jack caught their extra arms as they passed from street lamp to shadow, the scales that painted themselves onto skin like emerald and onyx tattoo ink, the forked tongues. Served the two wankers right.

“Now,” Seth said, leaning his bulk forward and turning down the volume of the telly. “What the fuck are you babbling about, you owe a demon a bargain?”

Jack talked, keeping the packet against his face. The telly burbled underneath his voice, discordant counterpoint to the story of the demon, the cu sith, the fetch, and Miles Hornby. Seth stayed quiet for a time after Jack finished the whole sordid mess. He changed among four equally distorted channels on the telly, scratched the back of his neck, and finally said, “So what you’re telling me is, you’re buggered and you want old uncle Seth to kiss it and make it go away. Is that it?”

“I just need your help finding the bloke,” Jack said. He wanted to keep his tone even, truly, but he felt restless and itchy inside the cramped little flat that had to be over a hundred degrees even with the arthritic fan in Seth’s window bringing in cooking smells and the low-pitched roar of the city outside.

“Always a just with you, boy.” Seth sighed. “Just needed a little training. Just needed to translate the sorcery grimoire. Just needed to make deals with fucking cocksucking Hellspawn demons . . . ”

“Oi!” Jack dropped the frozen packet on the counter and slammed his hand down with it. “You’re no paragon of virtue, Seth. I saw you do things in the bad old days that would have curled the hair of any respectable sorcerer, so cut out this Catholic schoolboy act and either throw me out on my arse, or get off of yours and sodding help me.”

Seth heaved himself out of his easy chair. “You don’t want help, Jack. You want a fuckin’ miracle.”

“Is that so wrong? Your people pioneered that sort of thing, least that’s what you were always bending my ear on.” Jack touched his cheek again and winced. “You know, for an old man, you’re quite violent. Better watch that. Might break a hip.”

Seth pointed a stubby finger in Jack’s face. “Don’t tempt me to make your other cheek match, you Limey arse-jockey.”

“Like you could land a hit on me again, you cabbage-swilling altar boy–fancier.” Jack sighed. “Does this mean we’re all right?”

“You will never, ever be ‘all right,’ Jack Winter,” Seth growled. “But you and me—that’s for another day.” He grabbed a bottle of cheap scotch with a Thai label from his cabinet and two cloudy glasses. “You take water?”

“’S like asking if I take piss,” Jack said. “Has it really been that long?”

Seth poured Jack two fingers and himself four. Some things never changed. “I heard you’ve bypassed the bottle entirely of late,” he said, tossing back most of the whiskey and wiping a hand across his lips. “Moved on to a more direct method of getting yourself pissed.”

“No,” Jack said, cold crawling over his skin in spite of the damp, close heat. His sweat turned to ice at the thought of the pinch of a syringe, the cool presence of the needle and the hot, sweet rush into his blood when he pushed down the plunger. Can’t ignore me forever, the whisper came. You’ll come home, one day.

“No,” Jack repeated. “I’m clean.” Even true, it sounded like a lie.

“Good.” Seth dropped his glass into the sink, causing a scattering of something alive and gifted with an excess of legs. “You were never that stupid when I knew you, Jackie.”

“That’s because I could still tell what was real and what was a phantom,” Jack muttered. “Those were the fucking golden years, for sure.”

“I don’t know this Miles Hornby, but I’ll make some calls,” Seth said. “Meantime, I suggest you take what time you have and enjoy our fair city.”

Jack took a seat in the only other chair in the room, a suspicious wicker contraption that creaked under his weight. “No offense, mate, but I think the nightlife here might be a bit carnivorous, even for me.”

Seth cocked his eyebrow. “Got someone back home? That’s a new one.”

“No one special.” Jack finished off his whiskey. It burned like drain cleaner going down and no doubt tasted like it coming back up.

Pete would be awake, would have weathered an entire day and night with him gone. Or started a torch brigade to find and burn him. Pete wasn’t sentimental, but she was vindictive. She wouldn’t simply slap him across the face and be done with it.

“If you’re not going to find something to fuck or get pissed, you should sleep,” Seth’s voice broke in. “You look like seven kinds of shite dragged across Dublin, boy.”

Jack looked around the single room and dinette that made up Seth’s mildewed, sweaty flat and felt his skin crawl up the back of his neck. Magic had nothing to do with it—the years of sleeping rough voluntarily were behind him in his twenties and the place reminded him of nothing so much as a squat. Add in a dozen or so junkies and a bucket in the corner and the experience would be authentic.

“On second thought,” he said quietly, “I could use some company.”

“That’s my Jack,” Seth hooted. “An eye for the ladies and a taste for the underbelly.” He slapped Jack on the shoulder. “Enjoy yourself, mate. I’ll send someone for you when I find something out about this Hornby.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Jack walked back through the tourists to the bar with the music. The band was packing up, and a deejay had taken their place. A pair of drunk Scots were howling a karaoke version of “My Heart Will Go On” in front of a fuzzy monitor scrolling lyrics.

Jack knocked on the bar. “Drink.”

“Anything special?” The bartender was tattooed, and to Jack’s surprise, female.

“Something that will convince me I don’t want to stick a fondue fork in me ear,” he said, giving the Scots a baleful glare.

She laughed, and set him up with a bourbon with a neat flick of her wrist. “You’re not a tourist. Why you in a tourist bar?”

“Waiting on someone,” Jack told her. “Looking for someone else. Running away to join the circus. Take your pick.”

“You’re funny,” the bartender said. She flicked her towel over her sculpted shoulder like a proud Fae creature flicking its tail.

“You’re nosy.” Jack drained his glass. He wasn’t drunk, yet. Just floating a few inches off the ground. “What’s your name?”

“People around here call me Trixie,” she said.

“Like Speed Racer’s girl?” Jack snorted into his glass. “Cute.”

“You probably couldn’t pronounce my given name,” Trixie said. “Or my Thai nickname. Trixie gives the farang something to relate to. They think they know me, I get bigger tips. Simple.”

Jack drained his glass and nudged it back toward her. “You’re not . . .”

“A dancer?” Trixie shook her head. “You guys like the skinny girls, the My Asian Barbies.” She held up one arm, the full sleeve of her tattoos rippling. “I do not come in a pink box.”

Jack turned his glass between his fingers. “I was going to say you’re not a prozzie, actually, but now I’m a bit intimidated.”

Trixie shrugged. “I get asked a dozen times in a night to put tab A into slot B. I’m not going to knock you in the head.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Jack watched the last trickle of bourbon slide down the side of his glass, like sweat on skin.

Like a raindrop in the hollow of a throat . . .

“You know . . .” Trixie cocked her hip. “You look familiar to me.”

Jack favored her with a incredulous smile. “You say that to all the mysterious good-looking foreigners.”

“No.” Trixie tapped her full lower lip. Coated with waxy pink gloss, it looked swollen, plastic. “I’ve seen you somewhere. In a photograph.”

“Never hit Bangkok in me touring days,” Jack said. “Can’t imagine where you’d know me from, luv, unless you’d spent time in the UK.” Even then, Trixie would have been no more than eight years old when Jack was playing music and getting his mug slapped on posters up and down Mile End Road.

“You’re Jack Winter!” Trixie shrieked, slapping her bar towel down. “You sang in the Poor Dead Bastards!” A huge grin lit up her face. “I have your records, man!”

Jack felt an entirely different kind of buzz grow in his chest. “You’re putting me on.”

“No shit!” Trixie insisted. “I got your Suicide Squad LP off of eBay, signed. Cost me two weeks of tips, and I make fat tips.”

Jack fished in his wallet to find the last of his English money. “Well, you’re very kind, luv, but that was a long fucking time ago indeed.”

Trixie waved off his payment. “On the house, for as long as you’re in Patpong. I’ll take my trade in stories.”

Jack started for the door, but turned back. “There is one thing, luv.” He scratched at his chin. He wanted a shave again. Pete would have reminded him.

“Anything,” Trixie said. “Except what everyone else is giving up around here.”

Jack rocked on his heels. Stay casual, stay charming. Don’t act like you care. The liar’s rules to making others tell the truth. “You know music, yeah? The local scene?”

Trixie nodded. “Most nights off, I’m far from here. There’s a great hardcore club over on Silom if you’re ever in the mood to see the real Bangkok.”

“Miles Hornby,” Jack said. The name was beginning to sound like an epithet. “He’s apparently a musician. You ever heard of him?”

“Well, sure,” Trixie said. “His band was the Lost Souls. Played around here a few times before he got a legit gig. Not bad—sort of an early Nick Cave thing going on.”

Jack’s heart beat faster, cutting through his fatigue and the pleasant slack warmth of the cheap bourbon. “You’ve seen him.”

“Sure,” Trixie said. “Lots of people saw him. He was pretty good. Not as good as you and the Bastards on Nightmares and Strange Days, of course. But he might have gone on a label with a few years of gigging.”

“You said his band was the Lost Souls?” Jack was talking faster now, leaning in close enough to smell Trixie’s cherry perfume and a hint of salt beneath, to see the eyes on the curling dragons of her tattoos. It couldn’t be this easy, not after what the demon had told him. “What d’you mean was?”

“Past tense,” said Trixie. “They’re not anymore.”

Jack gripped her wrist. Her skin was warm and her pulse was fast, and she didn’t try to pull away. “Why not?”

“Because . . .” Trixie’s bee-stung lips turned down. “Miles Hornby’s dead.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Jack found his way back into the street in a haze of bourbon and disbelief. Dead. Hornby couldn’t be dead. The demon wouldn’t have sent him. . . . He slumped against the outside of the Club Hot Miami, head scraping the bricks. Hornby could very well be dead, and the demon still would have sent him. It was exactly the sort of thing the demon would do.

He wanted to sink into the ground, to slip through the layers of the Black and find himself back in his flat, in London, before any of this shit had ever gotten started.

But if he sank into the ground, the only thing he’d find would be the Land of the Dead, the howling of lost souls, the clanging of the Bleak Gates.

The want for a fix crawled up from Jack’s guts with a burning, frenetic intensity like his stomach was going to come up along with his craving. He scanned the passing crowd, found the youth with greasy hair and a bowed head, the thin girl in the bikini top and ripped denim skirt standing on opposite corners of the intersection, like two poles on a globe. The boy’s slouched gait and Phish T-shirt promised weed, LSD, perhaps peyote, while the girl’s bony legs and bruised arms promised exactly what he needed.

Sweat ran down his chest under the frayed fabric of his Stooges shirt, and Jack shut his eyes, his sight rolling over him in silvery waves. The pavement of Patpong 2 faded, the sound, and he saw a dumpier, seedier, more dangerous road—GIs in uniforms thirty years out of date on the arms of girls doped out of their minds as they teetered on platform heels, pimps in Western suits and sharp-brimmed hats watching from the shadows like sharks under a reef.

A GI with a knife wound in his gut stared at Jack. “Say, brother, can you help me out? I lost my wallet and I . . .”

Jack scrubbed at his eyes, trying to make it stop. To make it all stop—the sight and the need and the deep, sucking void in his chest that they combined to create.

“Just a few bucks for a cab,” the GI coaxed. “Just a few . . .” Bloody hands grabbed on to Jack, smearing the black miasma of the dead across his skin and up his arms, blotting out his scars and tattoos.

“You know you’re just like us,” the solider pleaded. “Lost and lonely and walking that dark road. Just walk with me, buddy. Just for a few minutes . . .”

Hands yanked him away, and knuckles freshened the bruise on his cheek with a backhanded blow. Jack let out an involuntary yelp. “Fuck me!”

“Not drunk enough for that yet,” Seth said, setting Jack on his feet again. “You all right, Jackie? Looked like you had the ghost on you.”

“I just . . .” Jack’s eyes wandered to the corner of the street again, against his will. The girl was gone. The boy was bobbing his head to his iPod. Everything was right and real and normal about the scene, except him.

“I’m fine,” he breathed out. Seth grunted.

“Look worse than you did when I found you, boy. You keep up like this, you’re going to be under the ground before the week’s up. Forget the demon and all his plans, you’re doing a fine job of it yourself.”

“About that.” Jack sighed. “I talked to that bird bartender in the music club. Hornby’s dead.”

Seth felt in his pack and came up empty. “Got a fag?” Jack passed him a Parliament. “Did you hear me? I said that Hornby’s dead.”

“I’m old, not deaf, you sod,” Seth snapped. “Came to tell you I made a few calls and heard the same thing.”

“That’s it, then.” Jack looked at the toes of his boots as he walked. He’d come a long way in these boots. Steel peeped out where the leather had worn away at the toes and the mismatched laces had been broken and reknotted like a map of a B road at home. “The demon played with me. I came here for nothing.”

“Hell.” Seth exhaled into the face of a passing female tourist, who coughed dramatically and then shot him the bird. “I could have told you that, boy. What was lesson one, after you came to me?”

Jack chafed, Seth’s tone snapping him back like a rubber band to when he was young and stupid. “I didn’t come here to be lectured on your musty old crow magic, McBride.”

“Demons lie!” Seth spat. “Lesson. Fucking. One.” His face hardened from anger into something more permanent. Jack decided that if he cared, he’d call it disappointment.

“You were my best, boy,” Seth grumbled. “You had the spark, the talent, and look at you. Pissed it all away, didn’t you? Bloody waste.”

“You’re one to talk,” Jack said. The passing urge to ball up his fist and hit Seth in the jaw to even up his bruises gripped him, but he forced it down. “Look at you—hiding here, living like a retarded pensioner, bored out of your skull. You might as well top yourself and join Hornby, because this ain’t a life, mate—it’s just a prolonged, sweaty death.” He lit a fag of his own and sucked down the smoke, relishing the burn. “Hornby would probably be far better company.”

“You’re so hung up on him, go find his grave and lie on it,” Seth returned. “And good riddance to you.” He turned his back and stomped up the stairs to his landing.

Jack stood for a moment, fuming, before he followed Seth. “That’s it?” he shouted. “You’re just tossing it in? That’s all Seth McBride is good for?”

Seth turned back, his eyes lit from within with witch-fire. His magic was pure white, the white of cleansing fire and sacred incense. “I can’t help you, boy, you understand? Hornby’s beyond our reach.”

Jack rubbed the back of his neck.

The demon had told him to bring Hornby home. The demon had lied. The demon had made the new bargain for his name.

Names had meaning, in the Black. They had power and currency in the great tide of magic that swept along the underside and seeped through the cracks of the waking world.

The demon wouldn’t promise a name, even idly.

“He’s not beyond all reach,” Jack said.

Seth narrowed his eyes, the sun-drenched wrinkles in his redly tanned face bunching up. “What are you on about, boy?”

“If Hornby’s kicked it,” Jack said, “then why was the demon so keen to have him brought back? He’s alive, I understand not coming onto another demon’s patch. He’s a stiff, I’d collect me debt and cross Hornby off the books. I wouldn’t send my arse halfway around the world.”

“Jack.” Seth held up his hand. “Leave it alone. Leave Hell to Hell’s concerns and go home.”

“I can’t do that and you know it,” Jack growled. “Come on, Seth. You can’t say you’re not curious about this. About why a demon would ask me to reel in a dead man.”

“If there’s one thing I know,” Seth said, “it’s that I don’t give two shits about the wherefore and the why of the Black any longer. That’s why I retired.” Seth pushed into his sweltering flat.

“The demon should have collected its debt,” Jack insisted. “It shouldn’t have sent me here. It still needs Hornby.” Jack massaged his temples. “I still have to bring him back.”

Seth tipped his head back, and his eyes went narrow, as if Jack had just suggested setting fire to his own hair.

“I hope you’re talking about a body bag and a slew of customs forms and not what I think you are.”

Jack took up Seth’s seat in the sticky plastic armchair. “The demon was very clear. He wants Hornby. Not just a bag of dead flesh.”

Seth flicked on the telly and sat on the edge of his futon, kicking aside a pile of dirty football jerseys. “Jack, you’re talking about raising the dead. Necromancy. Not just a dip of your toe into a little sorcery, but a full-frontal fuck with the dark side.”

“Spooky,” Jack commented. “You going to scold me, or help me?”

Seth snorted. “As if I’d let you die on me again, boy.”

Jack tipped his head back. “Bloody wonderful. After I catch a few hours of kip, we need to find ourselves Hornby’s corpse.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Pete opened her eyes, staring a hole in Jack as he moved in her. The chanting of the watchers rose. The rain ceased, leaving the air snapping cold against his bare skin.

He could stop, or he could die at the watchers’ hands. The stone would have its blood this night, and Jack’s blood was as sweet as a Weir’s.

Pete’s lips moved, her words lost in Jack’s breath and the sounds of the bespelling song.

Jack bent his head closer as they coupled, and as the ritual flowed toward completion—toward the circle of power that bound him surely as the shackles bound Pete, toward the vile and unnatural completion of a dead ritual, itself a ritual of the dead, Pete’s voice cut through the haze of power and down to his thudding heart.

“Wake up, Jack.”

Jack bolted from his rest. His back and neck screamed at him for passing out, yet again, at odd angles in a chair better suited to employment as a medieval torture device.

“You got that look again,” Seth commented. The light outside the flat was hazy dawn, and the telly had changed from cricket to a Thai cooking show presided over by a cheery woman in a neon pink apron.

Jack cracked the tension from his neck with a sound like a rifle. His head echoed. “What look’s that?”

“Haunted,” Seth said. “You were anyone else, I’d say you’d caught ghost sickness.” He pottered around the kitchenette until he’d installed coffee and filter in an ancient carafe and switched it on. “That you’d got a spirit feeding off you, like you were a fuckin’ milkshake.”

“I’ve seen ghost sickness,” Jack said. “’S not what I have.” Ghost sickness ate a person slowly from the inside. It had showed in Pete’s eyes first, in the haunted cast of her gaze and in the dreams of death that came any time she shut them. She’d carried Algernon Treadwell’s spirit like a black rider on her back, her slight body pale and papery as Treadwell drank of her life.

“Oh?” Seth rummaged in the fridge and found a few eggs, which he cracked into a frying pan. “Always thought it was a load of bollocks, myself. Who’d you know got it?”

“Someone in London,” Jack said, and ended Seth’s probing with a flick of his hand. “We need to find out where Hornby is buried. Dig him up and get on with it.”

“You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Jackie,” Seth told him. “Unless, in the intervening years, you’ve taken it upon yourself to learn the ways and means of calling back the dead.”

Jack shoved his hands into his hair. It was flattened on one side and he attempted to muss it equally again. “You know I’m no fucking sorcerer, Seth. But if we have no body, no necromantic spell we try will do one bit of bloody good, so let’s start at what we do know.”

Seth shook crystallized sugar into his coffee, sipped, and winced. “Fuck me. Can’t brew a cuppa in this country worth shite.”

“Just point me at the cemetery,” Jack said. “I’ll do it myself, since you’re feeling delicate.” As the sun rose, gray-yellow like an old bruise through the haze of smog that hung over Bangkok, Jack felt his time of reprieve slipping away, little by little, like sand against skin.

“It doesn’t work like that here,” Seth muttered.

“Explain, then,” Jack snapped. “Because this might be a bloody amusement for you, but this is my life, Seth. My fucking life and someone else’s besides if I can’t do what the demon wants from me.”

“And who’s fault is that, exactly?” Seth demanded. “You didn’t have to call him, Jackie-boy. You didn’t have to reach out.”

“I suppose you would have had me die.” Jack’s headache began with a renewed vengeance. He wasn’t damply sweating any longer, but cold. Cold like the day he’d lain on the floor of Algernon Treadwell’s tomb and felt the slight warmth of his own blood spread across his chest, his stomach, soaking through his shirt and dribbling onto the stones.

“Yes,” said Seth shortly. “I would have.” He dumped the sludgy coffee down into the drain and slammed his mug onto the porcelain washboard. “But that’s the past and this, unfortunately, is me present so after I find a bite to eat we’ll go see about finding your dead man.”

Chapter Twenty-six

“Hornby couldn’t’ve picked a worse city to die in,” Seth said as they walked down Patpong 2. The road and its citizens lay much subdued in daylight, as the district nursed its hangover. “You got any idea where and when he kicked it?”

“No,” Jack said, spying Trixie unlocking the door of her bar. “But she does.” He raised a hand. “Oi! Luv! Got a minute?”

Trixie smiled when she caught sight of him, but the expression dropped just as quickly when she saw Seth. “I know you. You’re the farang who puts curses on people from your balcony.”

Seth puffed up. “Is that what they say about me?”

“And you had the nerve to jump on my back about black magic?” Jack muttered.

“Shaddup,” Seth told him congenially. “Like you’re bein’ fitted for a halo, boy.”

Jack had almost forgotten how much he wanted to punch Seth in the mouth, but the desire came back sharp and twinging between his knuckles. He looked to Trixie instead. “Luv, we need to know how Miles died. And where.”

“He bit it out on Silom Road.” She jerked a thumb. “Got hit by a taxi walking to the train station after his set. About two weeks ago.”

“Happens a lot around here,” Seth said to Jack’s questioning look. “Taxi drivers willy-nilly, drunk tourists pushin’ and shovin’ . . . recipe for a pavement pancake if I ever heard of one.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Trixie pursed her lips. “He took a long time to die. He was still screaming when the corpse collectors got there.”

“Corpse collectors?” Jack cast a glance up and down the street, sunlight diffused by buildings closing in overhead. He wasn’t looking for a pissing contest with a host of necromancers. If they were thick on the ground in Bangkok, he might have to accept his fate with grace and go home. Which was as bloody likely as Seth joining the Riverdance.

“Bangkok doesn’t have a city ambulance service,” Seth explained. “So when there’s a dead bloke lying in the street, whoever can snatch him up first gets the fee from the hospital morgues. Bloody business, that—quite literally.”

“He’s right,” Trixie said. “But Miles died soon enough after that. They probably took him to Patpong Hospital.” She put one hand on her hip. The forearm bit of her tattoo was a pair of dancing geishas, peering from behind their fans. “Why d’you want to know?”

“Pure academic curiosity,” Jack assured her. “Cheers, luv. Who’s playing tonight?”

“Unicorn Euthanasia,” Trixie said, opening the door into the bar. Jack frowned.

“They any good?”

“They’re shit,” Trixie said. “Good luck finding whatever it is you’re looking for, Jack.” She shut the door on him, and the space where she’d been filled up with a poster advertising go-go dancers and free drinks.

“I know a bloke,” Seth said slowly. “At that hospital. He works in . . . well . . . corpse delivery.”

“And?” Jack cast a look at Seth. He’d never remembered the man looking reluctant to plunge into any sort of dealing with the Black, but Seth was tapping his sandal on the road, eyes darting everywhere but Jack.

“And, nothing,” Seth said too quickly. “He’s a skin trader. Knows words, spells. Things for you to use, to bring Hornby back. Which is still a royally shite fucking idea, by the way.”

Jack stopped at the crush of traffic on Silom Road. “I’ll take me chances.” If he opened his sight he could feel it now, the splashes of blood in the gutters, the shrieks of the dying, the mosquito buzz of small engines carrying motorists right on by. Bangkok’s Black was like a pile of corpses—dead at the core but crawling with layer upon layer of new life.

“This way.” Seth walked through the crush of people on the pavement, and Jack followed, riding the small space of his wake. They passed shops, shoppers, tourists, locals, gangsters covered up with tattoos and Buddhist amulets, and housewives haggling over the price of vegetables.

Once, a crowd of monks passed, and every woman on the street backed up against the nearest wall, allowing them to pass.

“They can’t touch women,” Seth murmured. “Seems a hellish old lot in life, you ask me.”

“Hellish is a word some bastards use entirely too lightly,” Jack said, watching the monks wend their way down the road. They were the only ones who didn’t have to shove, elbow, and shout to make way.

Jack could think of worse lives.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Patpong Hospital resided in a squat brown building that smelled of sickly-sweet cleaning compounds and buzzed with a nervous system of flickering fluorescent tube lights. The air conditioning made an effort, but the black celluloid strips taped to the vent above the doorway into A&E barely fluttered when Jack passed beneath them.

Seth stomped down a narrow corridor past a nurse’s station crowned by a bouquet of wilted daisies, past rooms filled with patients in steel beds surrounded by white mosquito netting.

Jack thought of spirits, floating above their beds, white and lacy, while the ebb and flow of the Black plucked off pieces of their souls and tossed them on the current.

Seth turned through a swinging door marked in Thai. Jack didn’t have to read the language to know a NO ADMITTANCE sign when he saw one. The smell here was different—cloying, heavier. A smell that wasn’t pretending that life was still possible, just covering up the stench of death. The floor under Jack’s feet ran with cracks and water the color of mud dribbled into rusty drains.

One door sat off the narrow corridor, under a broken light that blinked arcane semaphore in shadow and bright. Morgues around the world were the same—silent, stinking, and filled up with the psychic energy of the dead.

“Be easy in here, yeah?” Seth said. “He’s a bit of a skittish bloke and you don’t speak the language anyway, so don’t go off shouting and pitching a temper fit like you do.”

“I’ll be polite as a vicar at a church picnic,” Jack promised.

In the morgue proper, Jack spied a body lying on the single steel table in the center of the room. He’d been around plenty of dead things—both recently deceased and long-rotted—but seeing the man on the table, half-covered by a sheet as if he were about to receive a shady massage instead of an autopsy, made him itch all over, under the skin. Jack didn’t like corpses, and neither did his stomach.

“Heya,” Seth shouted, knocking on the edge of the table. The man under the sheet jumped, limbs going akimbo at his ministrations.

“Christ,” Jack muttered, turning his back on the corpse.

“’Ey, you were the one who’s so keen to truck with these rotters,” Seth said. “Chin up, little camper. It’s not going to bite you.”

Jack cast a baleful eye at the corpse. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

A figure backed out of a small wash closet on the other side of the morgue. The space was spare, just a steel counter covered in surgical instruments and a black nylon doctor’s bag, the washroom, and a row of freezers near it. A hose dangled from the ceiling, fitted with a spray nozzle for washing bodies. The quiet drip-drop-plip of water and blood was the only sound, beyond the humming of the freezers.

“Jao,” Seth said, giving the small pathologist a nod. “Been keeping yourself well, mate?”

Jao looked from Seth to Jack. He fired of a rapid sentence of Thai and Seth spread his hands.

“No, no. He’s a friend. He’s one of us.”

Jack gestured at the dead man on the table. “Hell of a centerpiece, mate. Your work?”

Jao slipped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and picked up a scalpel and forceps, peeling back the skin of the man on the table. His cuts bifurcated tattoos, sutras and dragons tangled together in the hurried flurry that Jack recognized as prison ink.

“So?” he growled finally, hands never pausing as he lifted out a section of sternum that a Stryker saw had separated. “What you want?” Jao wore white at his temples and a scowl on his face like battle scars, and he glared up at Jack from under a thatch of black hair. He resembled more than anything a troll, something small and scuttling that lived under a bridge. Jack knew from hanging about Pete and her work with the Met that it happened when you spent your days prodding dead bodies.

“You had a bloke come in about two weeks ago,” Seth said. “Dead bloke, obviously. Farang who got himself pasted in a man vs. taxi spat. White, probably pale as this cunt right here.” Seth jerked his thumb at Jack.

“He was a singer,” Jack supplied. “And talented.”

“Talented, right.” Seth fingered his packet of Silk Cut, tapped out a fag. Jao curled his lip back.

“Ain’t no smoking in the surgery.”

Jack took the fag from Seth’s fingers and stuck it between his own lips, touching his finger to the end. “Brilliant. You see this dead bloke or not?”

“No,” Jao said instantly. He opened the nylon bag and pulled out a bunch of herbs. “We ain’t had nobody here like that.”

The herbs went under the dead man’s skin and Jao rummaged in his supplies until he found a wide-gauge needle and rough cotton thread.

“That’s hawthorn,” Jack said, puffing out a cloud of smoke and breaking off the burning tip of the fag, for later. “Recognize the leaves.” He poked at the pile of herbs in the dead man’s chest cavity. “Not a lot of hawthorn trees in this part of the world, eh, mate?”

Jao slapped his hand away. “Not for touching.”

“I’m really couldn’t give a flying fuck what you’re doing to this poor bastard,” Jack said. “Although according to Seth here, you people got a real problem with ghost sickness. Seems maybe you’re not so very skilled at your chosen discipline, Jao.”

Jao’s massive eyebrows drew together like a thorny hedgerow. “What you mean ‘you people’?”

“Skin traders,” Jack said evenly. “Necromancers. Liars.”

Seth rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Jack . . .”

“You recognized the description,” Jack said. Jao’s hand, moving the needle in and out of the seam of his Y-incision, burying the hawthorn in the dead man’s chest, missed and he stabbed himself in the thumb.

“You know who he was,” Jack told Jao. He snaked out his hand and snatched the hawthorn bundle from the corpse’s chest. “And now you’re going to tell me what happened to the body.”

Jao’s lip curled. “You think you can order me around?”

“Bet your lying arse, I do,” Jack said. “I’ve come too far and I’ve staked too much. What did you do with Hornby?”

Jao heaved a dramatic sigh and cast a look at Seth. “Don’t look to me,” Seth said. “I’m not his bloody keeper.”

Jao extended his hand to Jack. “Give it back.”

“Nope.” Jack twitched the hawthorn out of Jao’s reach. “Quid pro quo, mate. Where’s Hornby?”

Jao’s jaw muscle knotted under his skin, and his eyes blazed with the sick bruise-purple witchfire endemic to sorcerers. “I make your skin into a handbag, you miserable white bastard. I pull your teeth one by one and string them for conjure necklace . . .”

Jack held up the hawthorn twig. “Too much chatter. Not enough information.”

Jao’s lip pulled back in a sneer. Seth rubbed his forehead. “Jackie, I warned you. . . .”

“I’m waiting,” Jack intoned, pulling his lighter from his pocket and flipping the top. He held the flame just under the hawthorn. “I don’t hear an answer.”

“I can look up,” Jao muttered after a long moment when Jack wasn’t sure if Jao would cooperate or come after him with a scalpel. “Get my log book.” He shuffled over to the steel table and pulled a battered ledger from his bag, flicking over the pages with irritable twitches of his fingers. “Here,” he said finally. “Come here.”

Jack approached but stayed clear of arm’s reach. “You find him.”

In response, Jao spun around and lashed at him with a blood-coated scalpel. Jack slipped on the slick floor, went down, lost the lighter and the hawthorn twig along with his balance. His elbow cracked the concrete and pain radiated from his arm into his chest, hot fingers of flame.

Before he could manage a fresh breath or to take inventory of his smashed bits, Jao lunged for him again, and Jack slid backwards, banging into the surgery table. The corpse shifted, and the whole thing toppled over.

“Seth!” he shouted. “Grab this crazy cunt!”

Nothing answered him except Jao’s hysterical gasping as he raised the scalpel and bore down on Jack. Jack whipped his gaze at the spot where Seth had last stood.

Seth had vanished.

Jao was screaming, face swollen and red as an overfilled balloon. As with the signs on the door, Jack didn’t need to speak a lick of Thai to know hysterical fear when he saw it.

The silver tooth of the scalpel struck. Jack raised his hand and spit out a word of power, throat contracting like there was a cord about his neck.

“Cosain!”

The shield hex didn’t stop Jao, since he was flesh and only tangentially magic, but it slowed him down. The blade slid neatly along the outside of Jack’s arm as the necromancer stumbled and fell over the toppled surgery table, into the embrace of the corpse. Pain sparked in Jack’s muscle and bone, warm blood dripping down his forearm onto the floor to join the dead man’s.

Jack’s hammering heart and blurred vision told him that he didn’t have more than thirty seconds before the blood loss and the blow put him out, and Jao was already up. Panicked and awkward as he was, he was faster than Jack on Jack’s best day.

“I’m not going back!” Jao shrieked. “Not into that mouth! No more!” He slashed at Jack, and Jack felt air part in front of his eyes as the scalpel missed his face by millimeters.

Jack considered that he was an all-right brawler, when the weapons were bottles, fists, or chains. He’d spent enough time in dodgy clubs populated with skinheads looking for a bruising to be fair with his fists. Against a crazed necromancer with a blade, though, he was rubbish.

Jao wouldn’t sit still long enough to be hit with any kind of paralysis hex, and a spell to steal breath or eyesight wasn’t the sort of thing you conjured empty-handed.

Jack had his sight, a flick knife, a pack of cigarettes, and the necklace Robbie had given him. No kit, no spell materials. Jack Winter, mage, had precisely shit.

Jao came for him again, his magic cutting a roiling wake through the Black, and Jack ducked his swing, nearly falling over the corpse. The corpse, lying still, waiting for its fate as the instrument of the necromancer’s black magic.

Or his.

Jack felt his lungs seize as the fags had their revenge, and he let himself fall back, landing next to the clammy sack of flesh on the floor. He clapped one palm on the corpse’s stiff leg, fixing on Jao as the panting necromancer poised over him for the killing blow.

Black oily power floated behind Jao’s gaze, like a burning slick of gasoline on a river. Jack opened his sight to the energies of the morgue, pulled all of the power into him that his body would allow.

When you cast a curse, second chances weren’t given. Curses worked in triads, the words of power, the energy of the mage, the conductor medium. All three balanced exactly, or the curse could snap back and do worse to you than you’d conjured, thrice.

Curses weren’t worth the trouble, by and large, when the same problems could be solved with a boot to the teeth or a cricket bat to the guts. But Jack had seen what they could do when they were applied properly, and he needed to stop Jao, for sure and for good.

He drew in his last bit of air, held it, and expelled it in a fury, putting all of his panic and rage behind it, pushing every ounce of his energy into the words of power while he grasped the corpse hard enough to leave a handprint on the dead man’s splotchy skin. “Cosbriste!”

The corpse jumped under him as its leg bone cracked, and Jao let out a scream. His left leg twisted under him as the curse sprang across the distance between Jack and the necromancer like a starving dog and sank its teeth into his soul. Jao’s leg bone snapped with a clean, crisp sound in the small room, and he dropped.

The scalpel tinkled out of his grasp and landed close to where Jack sat, fighting to pull his heart back under control as it thundered along fit to snap his ribs.

It always took a few seconds to realize you were still alive, when Death put out a hand and clapped it against your face, forced you to look it in the eye.

Seth came pelting through the door with a security man in a blue uniform, and stopped short at the scene before him. “Jackie boy, what the fuck is this?”

“Leg-breaker curse,” Jack said hoarsely. His feet slithered under him on the wet concrete, but he used the slimy tile wall and got to his feet. “What’s it look like, we danced a samba?”

The security guard asked Seth if things were all right, and Seth waved him off in Thai, pressing a few hundred bhat into the man’s hand before he shoved him out of the morgue. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a ménage à trois,” Seth growled. He slammed the door and locked it. “He came after you like a fat schoolboy on a custard cake. Told you not to open your big mouth.”

Jack flipped Seth the bird. “Up yours.” Air passed across his extended arm with a sting. His cut was pumping blood, and the slash neatly bisected his tattoos. Jack grabbed a towel from the wash closet and wrapped it around himself, vines of crimson soaking through the cotton. “That cunt. If I get some sort of infection that makes bits of me fall off . . .”

“You need stitches,” Seth said. “I’m not mopping up after you again, Jackie.”

“After we find Hornby.” Jack took a deep breath through his nose. Willed his heart to stop pumping his life out of the gash Jao had left. Wrestled the magic in the room back under control. It was rough and ugly, like a waterfall from a polluted stream, as his power and the magic left over from the sobbing necromancer’s attack commingled.

He tied off the towel tight as he could stand it, and righted the surgical table with his good hand. “Get him up,” he told Seth, jerking his chin at Jao.

“Jack, he’s a good bloke,” Seth said. “He’s a scared bloke. Whatever’s happening here, it’s not his fault. . . .”

Jack pointed at the table. “Get him up and put him on the fucking table, McBride.” He didn’t have any spare panic now, just a tight black feeling in his chest. He was alive. He’d looked at the blade coming down and he was still standing. Jack didn’t think he’d ever become accustomed to the weightless, breathless feeling of still taking up space in the world when he should be on his way through the Bleak Gates.

Seth wrestled Jao’s limp form onto the table with a grunt. “Jack,” he said. “I’m asking you, properly now . . .”

Jack slammed his good hand down onto the metal next to Jao’s head. The clang echoed round the small room and Jao whimpered.

“Right,” Jack said. “I ask again: where’s Hornby’s fucking corpse?”

Jao’s throat worked. “I can’t . . .” he rasped. “I can’t . . . tell you . . . that.”

Jack turned his back, went to the instrument tray, picked up a rib spreader. “Five seconds and I loosen your jaw, mate. The old-fashioned way. No curses involved.”

“Jackie . . .” Seth looked at him askance. “This is a far cry from you, Winter.”

Jack put the rib spreader against Jao’s lips. “I’m a far cry from meself right now, Seth,” he said. “I’m a desperate man and this cunt is standing between me and my dead vocalist, so either hold him fucking still or walk out now.” He cranked the spreader one turn. “Where’s Hornby?”

“I can’t say it!” Jao screamed. “I can’t!”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Jack ratcheted spreader another turn. “Where’s Hornby?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Jao quavered, his voice distorted by the metal fingers in his mouth.

The pounding in Jack’s head increased to blackout levels, and his hands quivered. He knew the rage. He’d watched it belt him across the mouth, pour whiskey down its throat, and kick him with steel-toed boots for fourteen years before he left Manchester.

And he wanted Jao to share the knowledge, wanted to crank the fucking rib spreader to the maximum and break the sneaky wanker’s jaw.

Instead, he leaned close to Jao’s ear, close enough to smell sweat and the last vestiges of cologne. “You should be,” he hissed.

“You should be,” Jao shouted. “You think you the worst thing to come through my door? You think I’ll tell you when he’s . . .”

Jao choked, and then his face went slack after a moment of struggle. Cloudy, bloody spiderweb drifted into the whites of his eyes, and his body slumped against the table, still.

Seth shoved two fingers against Jao’s sweaty neck. “He’s dead. You’ve fucking killed one of my best customers, Jack. Bloody cheers.”

Jack dropped the rib spreader. “That wasn’t me.”

Seth threw up his hands, like an aggravated mother. “Who the fuck was it, then? Darth fucking Vader?”

Jack wheeled and grabbed Jao’s kit bag, dumped out the necromancy supplies atop Jao’s surgical instruments. “By my guess,” he said, “whoever Jao was afraid enough of to take a slash at me.” Baggies of herbs, a tin of salt, a child’s knucklebones in a velvet sack, a silver dagger blunted on the edge, and a bit of lint fell onto the steel.

Jack slammed his fist into the table. The pain brought him back to himself, a bit, but the rage was still pumping through his veins like cold fire, racing his heart and splitting his skull. “Fuck. He doesn’t have a grimoire.” Jack pressed his hands over his face. He was smeared in blood, his eyes were gritty, and he wanted nothing more than to put his head down and sleep for roughly a decade, until the world made sense again. As much as it ever had.

“Who’s next?” he said instead, dropping his hands to look at Seth. “Who’s the next necromancer you know? One who might actually have some corpse-raising spells lying around instead of trying to cut me fucking throat?”

“Forget that, boy,” Seth said. “After what you just did? You aren’t in any shape to be working magic of this caliber. Can see it right in your face.”

“For fuck’s sake, Seth!” Jack scattered the instrument tray with a sweep of his arm. “This isn’t an academic exercise, this is my fucking life!”

“And what god decrees your life weighs more than his?” Seth pointed at Jao. “Or Miles Hornby’s? What makes you so bloody special, Jack Winter?”

“No god,” Jack snarled. “I belong to a demon, remember?” Jack wished, viciously, for something to take the edge off his panic and pain.

“’S what I thought,” Seth sighed. “Always had to be the chosen one, the one for whom the rules didn’t fucking apply, didn’t you, Jackie?”

“If you’ve got something to say, spit it out.” Jack unlocked the door and slipped out into the hospital corridor. Seth followed him, digging a Silk Cut from his pack and lighting it with a vicious snap of his power.

“You know you shouldn’t be here, Jack. You stole some time from the crow woman by cutting your deal, but her claws are sharp and her gaze is sharper. We all reach the road’s end. There’s nothing you can do to change that.”

“My road doesn’t end here,” Jack snarled. “Unlike you, sad old bastard, I haven’t given up.”

“Why now?” Seth demanded. “You had thirteen years to cheat the demon—why now, at the end, does it become the thing you’re willing to murder and torture over?”

Jack rounded on Seth, fists turning to knots of bone. “Because I have something to live for.” His cut started bleeding again, soaking the worn towel.

Seth gave Jack a wire-thin, resigned smile. “What’s her name?”

Jack started walking again. The A&E suite had filled while they were with Jao, tourists and locals sitting where they could find space on the floor and the metal benches. “You don’t get to know her name.”

“I guarantee the demon does,” Seth said. “The demon knows that she’s your soft underbelly, and that’s why he’s sent you on this doomed errand.” Seth exhaled, sharp, an arrow of smoke. “Don’t do something you can’t wash off for a piece of skirt, boy. Take it from me, it all comes down on your head in the end.”

“In the end,” Jack said quietly, “she’s the only person who gave a shit about me, who held out a hand, who even pretended to care if I lived or died, so if you say one more word about her I swear to the crow woman I’ll bleed you where you stand, Seth. I mean it.”

“You’ve changed, Jack.” Seth shoved his hands into his pockets. “And though I didn’t think it was possible, not for the better.”

“Same to you, mate,” Jack said. “And a big cheery thanks for all of your nonexistent help.”

“Help? Anyone who helps you ends up dead or broken, boy. I learned my lesson on that score twenty fuckin’ years ago.” Seth shook his head. “I’m finished with you, Jackie. You shouldn’t have come to me, caught me up in this. It’s not considerate and it’s not bloody fair.”

“Fair?” Jack rounded on Seth. “Don’t you talk to me about fair, old man. I suppose to you fair is dumping out an apprentice so addled with the sight he’d put out his own eyes to stop the dead coming. Fair is knowing your friend is wandering the street with skag for blood. Fair is sleeping nice and tight every night because you’re lucky enough to be able to forget your sins.” Jack hissed as his arm throbbed. “If that’s what you think, Seth, then you’re right—it was right fucking unfair of me to expect any help from the likes of you.”

Seth took his hands from his pockets, flexed his fists. “You really want to walk this road, Jackie?”

“No, Seth,” Jack sighed. “I want to find Miles Hornby. I want to find him, and give him to the demon, and go home.”

Seth’s posture slumped, and he passed a hand over his face to clear it of sweat. “You were always so bloody stubborn, Jackie. Always had to be right, even when you missed it by a mile.”

“It’s one of me charming traits,” Jack said. “Ask anybody.”

Seth shook his head, his gaze shifting to a point over Jack’s shoulder. “You won’t change your mind.”

“Can’t,” Jack shrugged. “The demon wants Hornby and I want what the demon promised me. I suppose I don’t want to die, either. Silly me.”

Seth dropped his eyes to the stained vinyl floor. “Then I’m sorry, Jackie. Dead sorry.”

Jack only became aware of the two men in sunglasses when they approached from the entrance of A&E, their dark suits and slacks and gold chains giving them away as a creature not normally found in the bowels of a hospital waiting room.

“Help you, gents?” Jack smiled as they glided up on either side of Seth, like two shadow spilling into a lit doorway.

The man on the left smiled at Jack. “Mr. Winter?” His accent was London, and not the part Jack had spent most of his life in. This accent reminded him more of Nicholas Naughton than it did a gangster. The man was surely that, though—gangsters looked the same the world over, once you got past the superficial costumes. Blank eyes, shark smiles, energy too big and pulsing with malice for the space their bodies occupied.

They always thought they were the worst predator on their patch, and the shit bit of it was that outside the Black, they were nearly always right.

“I’m Jack Winter,” Jack confirmed. No point in lying about his name if they already knew it.

“Then we are to extend you an invitation, Mr. Winter,” Lefty said. Rightie was silent. His hand clutched a string of what looked like Buddhist prayer beads, at first glance, but what Jack saw were really tiny skulls, carved from black stone. A fetish or a focus—Jack wasn’t keen to find out, and even less keen to know the gangsters had some talent for sorcery.

“Sorry, mate.” Jack held up his bloodied arm. “I’ve had my dance for today. Unless your invite is for a stitch-up and a stiff drink, thank you but please fuck off.”

The man inclined his head. “Perhaps I wasn’t clear. This is not a request, Mr. Winter.”

Jack felt the electricity up and down his spine that signaled another mage was close. “You said it was an invitation.”

“It can be,” said the one with the beads. “It can be something else if you don’t feel like being sociable.”

Their magic was thick and hard, like scraping your knuckles against stone, leaving blood and skin behind. Jack favored them with a wide smile. Keep smiling, keep the gangsters calm, and work out how the bloody hell he was going to extricate himself from the situation before someone used that hard, ugly magic on him. Think, Winter, the fix mocked him. You’re so clever. Bright boy, always a quicksilver mind.

Jack spread out his hands, so the gangsters could see they were empty and that he was no threat, just another hapless farang. “Who do you work for, then? Or do you run about like superheroes in chavvy gold chains, striking down wicked men like me where you find them?”

Lefty sighed. “Mr. Winter, don’t make this difficult.”

“Difficult?” Jack shook his head, slow and pitying. “Difficult would be me taking the two of you by the bollocks and tossing you headfirst through the waiting-room window. Difficult would be me cursing you into small, bloody smears in front of all of these nice people. I have not begun to be difficult yet, mate.”

Jack felt the light air-brush of witchfire start to spread from his fingers and anywhere his skin was exposed. Everyone in the waiting room had averted their eyes when the men stepped up, but Jack didn’t care. He was never coming back to this bloody city, with its slick snakeskin magic and its crowded, whispering Black.

Lefty’s hand shot out and clamped down on the spot where Jao had cut him. The pain was deep and dull, a rusted blade in his skin, and Jack ground his teeth to keep from yelling. “Mr. Winter,” Lefty said. “I don’t want to do this, but I have my instructions. You need to come with us. Right this moment.”

Righty clicked his beads. The power around the two mages swelled. Jack felt blood from his wound start to drip again, hitting the linoleum floor with dull splats. Blood was a powerful cantrip. A mage could use blood as a conductor, a channel, a focus for almost any magic. If he had the control, and the skill. If he didn’t lose that control, let himself get taken over by a hungry ghost, and end up bleeding to death on the floor of a crypt. There was always a catch with magic. Limitless power, if you didn’t let it burn you alive.

“Jack,” Seth said quietly. “You should do as they say.”

“Thanks, Seth,” Jack said, keeping his eye on Lefty. “But I’m about through taking your advice.”

“Your friend is concerned for your well-being,” Lefty intoned. “And rightly so. You’ve been here less than two days and already you’ve managed to end poor Jao’s life.”

“Wasn’t me, I said,” Jack snarled. “And by the look of poor fucking Jao, he’d had it coming for miles.”

Lefty glanced at the blood on the floor. “You are not in an enviable position, Mr. Winter. You can fight me, it’s true.” His grip tightened, driving iron barbs into Jack’s arm. “You’ll lose.”

Jack watched the blood pool grow, crawling by degrees across the linoleum, adding a new stain to the battered gray surface. He didn’t reach for it with his talent, didn’t grasp the shimmering well of power waiting to fend off the gangster’s ministrations. “I’m not some nonce who’ll fold at the hint of a few hexes.”

Lefty heaved a sigh as if he were being entirely unreasonable, and pulled up his shirt to display the silver butt of a gun—a .45, by Jack’s reckoning. “We already know you bleed, Mr. Winter. Now, walk in front of us out to the car waiting at the curb, and don’t cause a fuss.”

“Magicians who go strapped,” Jack said. “Very Wild West, mate. Phallic, really. Suppose it’s true what they say about you Thais and your love of the ladyboys.”

“It’s loaded with pig-iron bullets,” Lefty said, pleasant smile affixed to his face as if he were a housewife on Valium. “It will rip your insides to shreds and your magic along with it and I will enjoy watching you die slowly. Walk.”

Jack turned around and walked. You didn’t fuck about when someone threatened to shoot you in broad daylight in a hospital. Spells and hexes, he could give as good as he got. Bullets weren’t the same thing at all—and iron bullets, fuck it. You didn’t stick your hand in a spinning fan because you fancied a cooling off.

The gangsters seemed reluctant to damage him, and that worked in his favor. He could kick up a row, and get himself gut-shot, or he could play the cooperative sod and see who, exactly, had fixated on his presence in Bangkok, and why.

“All right, lads,” he said as the doors to A&E swished back, dropping the damp blanket of Bangkok’s heat over his skin. “I can be sweet as custard if the occasion calls. No reason to be shirty.”

Lefty shoved him across the tide of people on the walk and into the street. “Stay quiet and move your arse.”

At the curb, as promised, a smooth black Lexus idled like the riverboat of Charon, waiting to whisk Jack away to the Underworld.

Lefty rapped on a tinted—and to Jack’s eye, bulletproof—window and the boot popped with an oiled click. Righty took out a black cloth sack and unfurled it with a snap.

Jack’s headache returned as if some vicious sod had bounced a bowling ball off his skull. Eight or nine times.

“You’re not bloody serious.”

Lefty put his hand on the pistol again. “Quite, Mr. Winter. I believe the expression is ‘dead serious’? ”

Jack shot Righty a glare. “That thing better not have other people’s spit on the inside.”

The bag slipped over his vision, and Lefty put a firm hand on his shoulder—his power was different from Righty’s. Smooth and cold rather than rough. Lefty had some black magic training, while Righty was crude muscle who probably had little more than what the Black spilled into his blood when he was conceived. Jack put it away for later.

Lefty shoved, and Jack banged his forehead on the boot lid. “Fucking hell!” he exclaimed, muffled by the hood. “You want me cheery, stop treating me like you’re moving fucking furniture!”

Another shove, and Jack was forced to tumble forward or break his neck. He landed in the boot, which stank faintly of cigarettes, just to add insult to injury.

“Have a comfortable ride, Mr. Winter,” Lefty said, and then the boot lid slammed above him, and what light there had been through the hood vanished, leaving Jack alone and in the dark.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Being locked in the boot allowed Jack plenty of time to think. His thoughts didn’t travel anywhere he particularly wanted to be, but all the same, the situation was what it was and there was no point in crying about it.

He’d stopped bleeding, and Jack forced himself to think like Pete, who certainly wouldn’t have gotten herself locked in a boot by a pair of manky sorcerers. The facts unfurled thusly:

Seth had sold him down the river to whoever in Bang-kok resented a nosy mage on their turf.

Seth was a cunt, but Seth wasn’t the one who’d kidnapped him.

Seth was in thrall to the same being who’d put the god’s fear in Jao and snuffed out his life.

The car slowed, and Jack tried kicking at the lid of the boot. His heel skidded off of solid metal. Smashing his way out of this was becoming less possible by the second.

“Solve it, you stupid nonce,” he grumbled to himself. He got a mouthful of head-bag for his trouble. It tasted sour and stale. Who put a bag on your head when you were already stuffed in a boot?

You could tell a lot about a bloke by how he threatened people. Lefty had been polite to a fault, and that posh speech didn’t come from growing up in a place like Manchester. Lefty had some education, and more than a bit of talent, and yet he was an errand boy.

Whoever or whatever had Lefty and Seth in its thrall was worse than the demon. Fiercer. Harder. Someone who knew he owned his patch and fed trespassers to rabid dogs.

The master of Bangkok. The demon that belonged to every city and its Black, just as the city belonged to the demon. Knots of life and death and magic called to demons, some lost and searching for Hell, some coming willingly from the Pit to reap a harvest of human misery.

Jack tried to take a breath, and didn’t manage much more than a gasp of carbon monoxide. If the demon of Bangkok knew who he was, the demon was halfway to knowing why Jack was in its fair city.

At least the errand boys hadn’t tied his hands—and where would he go, if they had? Even if he popped the boot, he’d land in the middle of the thrice-cursed crush of Thai traffic and end up pavement mulch, just like Hornby. If he was lucky enough to avoid getting a necromancy curse shoved up his arse and used as a bizarre Yuletide gift in some sorcerous feud.

He ripped off the stifling hood as the Lexus rolled around a corner and smacked his head against a sharp edge again. Jack cursed the mages, the car, the powers that be, and when he was dizzy from sucking in tainted air, he saved one last curse for that treacherous cunt Seth McBride.

The Lexus inched and bounced through the streets of Bangkok, Jack’s sense of time liquefying and lengthening until it might have been years that he’d spent crushed into the boot rather than minutes or hours. His arm was bound up with dried blood. Jack didn’t bother peeling back the towel. Cuts were like bad memories—aggravate them with enough prodding and they began to hurt and bleed again.

At last, the car jerked to a stop as abruptly as Lefty and his companion had appeared in the waiting room, and light from the outside world dazzled Jack into blindness.

Righty’s hands grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “He took the fucking bag off.”

Lefty sighed. “Like it’s a secret fortress around here. Get him out of there.”

Jack caught a quick snatch of crowds and noise before he was hustled onto his feet and indoors, Righty stopping their procession in a shadowed vestry. Jack chanced a glance backward, into the outside. The small slice of city he could see consisted of stacked flats and Thai faces, devoid of the English signs and foreigners that overran Pat-pong. Jack was the only white man that he could spy, and curious faces peered from the greasy windows of the flats at the Lexus and the gangsters, the only clean things in the street. Clean, shiny sore thumbs.

Righty jerked him along and Jack lost his view. He watched a corridor lined with Japanese-style Shoji screens speed by, alcoves full of gold statues, until they came to a jerky halt again under a gilt archway, beyond which a pair of doors studded with iron nails waited.

“Bit Las Vegas, if you ask me,” Jack said. “The gold paint isn’t doing it any favors.” He couldn’t make out fuckall in the dimness of the place, but air came from somewhere above and the smells drifting in were of sewage and chili oil and sun-warmed concrete, wound up with the cloying musk of nag champa incense.

“We are in Khlong Toei,” said Lefty. “It is . . .”

“A slum?” Jack guessed. Manchester or Bangkok, poverty-ridden streets all smelled the same.

“And a port, and a holy place, among other things,” Lefty said. “Farang assume because a place is one thing it must be only that thing.”

“It smells like one thing,” Jack muttered. “Shit.”

Lefty pointed at Jack’s feet. “Take off your boots.” When Jack didn’t immediately comply, Lefty put a hard, knuckle-ridden fist into his kidneys.

“You poisonous bollock-pustule!” Jack wheezed. “What was that for?”

“I grew up in Khlong Toei,” Lefty said softly. “It’s my home. Just because you see a face does not mean that face is not wearing a mask.”

“Yeah. Many faces, mystical Far-East shite, blah blah blah,” Jack said. He stuck his fingers in his bootlaces and yanked them off. “No offense to your lovely home, mate, but I didn’t ask to be here and I don’t fancy spending any more of my life in slums. Had enough of that already.”

Lefty’s stony face didn’t flicker. “He’s waiting for you. Go through the door and show him the proper respect. Or you can choose not to.” The gangster took the nickel-coated .45 out of his waistband and let it dangle loosely in his hand. “Frankly, I’d like it if you did.”

“Subtle,” Jack told him. “You tell all your dates exactly how long your pan handle is, as well?” Jack’s toes curled on the cool stone seeping through the holes in his socks.

“He is the master of Bangkok,” Lefty said. “And you’ll address him as such. You are a maggot, not fit to get crushed under his foot.”

“I’ve got a fucking pronoun, at least,” Jack said. He’d wanted to be wrong, to have merely fallen in with necromancers, but Seth had set the master of Bangkok on him and Seth didn’t pull punches. McBride always did have a talent for note-perfect screwings-over. Jack fancied that if Seth hadn’t been magically inclined, he would have made a bang-up divorce barrister.

“Get moving,” Lefty said. “He’s not patient.”

“That makes a pair of us,” Jack grumbled before putting his hand on the door within the arch.

The interior of the building whispered with cool shadows, sunlight filtering through cracks in the roof. Votives flickered in lanterns hung from roof beams and a small gold Buddha glowed in the low light at the far end of the room.

Behind the Buddha, the shadows moved. They crawled across the floor and re-formed, spilled into cracks and slithered out again, and at last they twined and formed into a man, who folded his hands at the small of his back and tilted his head to examine Jack with fathomless eyes.

“Hello, Mr. Winter,” the shadow said. “Thank you for your promptness.”

“Well, if you want promptness nothing assures it like stuffing me into a bloody boot,” Jack said.

The shadow laughed. The power that crawled off the man’s shape told Jack it was not a man at all. The magic was not the magic of a human. Thick, cloying, prying at his defenses and his sight with relentless claws, it slipped in around all of Jack’s frayed edges and tried to fill him up with the hot, dry winds of Hell. Jack didn’t like things that he didn’t know how to work over with his talent, or how to exorcise. The master of Bangkok wasn’t an energy he’d felt before, and Jack gave a violent shiver. He was a control freak; he admitted it, owned it, wore it with pride.

That comes from being beaten and spit on and raped by the sight your whole life, Seth had said. Use it, Jackie boy, don’t fight it.

The only voice he’d ever wanted in his head was the one that bent him over and fucked him in the end. Jack let out a small chuckle.

The shadow flowed toward him. “Something amusing to you, Mr. Winter?”

“Just thinking.” Jack shrugged. “If I didn’t have shite luck, I’d have no luck whatsoever.”

“Very apt,” the shadow agreed. “But today, your luck is good. You’re here.”

Jack caught a glimpse, just a flash, of a blackness that went on and on, and a horned figure with a protruding tongue riding on the back of a black ox while behind him came every dark and wretched thing that found refuge in the Black. He tried to shut his sight against the creature in front of him, but the tattoos on his shoulders began to burn and his head felt as if it would split. He ground his teeth together and drew blood from his tongue while the creature laughed, a smooth, velvety sound that made Jack’s skin prickle.

“You can’t stop seeing, Jack. I’m not like one you’ve met before.”

“D’you want me to stick a star on you?” Jack said. He focused on the pain in his arm, the lump forming on his head. Physical pain could hold the sight back—for a little while. Long enough for him to either talk his way out of the temple or find out exactly how deep he was in the shit.

“Introductions, then,” said the creature. It held out a hand, and with a ripple of power its body became flesh. Its hand floated in front of Jack’s face, slim and unscarred, adorned with silver rings and black fingernails. “I am Rahu.”

Jack didn’t take the proffered digit. “You’ll forgive me, but I’m not fucking stupid.”

Rahu lifted a shoulder. “Your friend Seth did pass that tidbit on.” At Jack’s sneer, Rahu grinned. “You’ve noticed a change in your old friend.”

“Seth hasn’t been me friend in a long time,” Jack said. “You’re so all-knowing, you must know that.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that he values his new life here, and if one values life in the currents of the Black river of Bangkok, one eventually crosses paths with me.”

Jack pushed his hands through his hair. It curled around his temples. The heat killed any hope of his usual mess of spikes. “If you’re going to kill me, could we kick on?” Jack said to Rahu. “I’ve never been so damp and miserable as in this city.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” Rahu said. He whipped out his hand and closed it around Jack’s scalpel wound. “I’m going to tell you two facts: this isn’t your city. And it isn’t a scheming demon’s, either. I don’t know why your bargain-binder sent you here, but you’ll tell me. How quickly determines whether you go back to London in a bag or on your own two feet.”

Jack met Rahu’s eyes, and refused to flinch as the creature kept a death grip on his wound. “I didn’t come here to move against you. I just came here to bring Miles Hornby home.”

Rahu’s eyes were black, pupilless. They flickered with power, like Jack’s own eyes when his magic was up. Jack tugged against his grip, but the creature held fast. “I smell it on you, Jack,” Rahu hissed. “I can taste it in the air around you. There’s demon taint on your skin and in your blood. You’re a dog, following a command.” He let go of Jack. “And you’ve just walked into a wolf den.”

A dark handprint stayed in the dried blood on Jack’s arm, and the skin was freezing and burnt, frostbitten from a touch. Fingertips of shiver worked their way across his skin, searching through nerve and tissue and blood.

“Go home,” Rahu said again. “Go back to your demon and tell him whatever coup he sent you to conduct failed. This is your only chance.”

Jack rubbed the burn. Pain could be managed. Pain meant his heart was still beating. Pain was a friend. “I can’t,” he said.

Rahu’s lips drew back. His profile was striking—sharp nose, sharper cheeks, the barest hint of crystalline white fangs protruding over his lower lip. “I don’t think I heard you,” the creature said.

“You did.” Jack swallowed. “I know you’re the master of Bangkok, that the demon won’t step foot here because of you, so I reckon you’re a hard one, but right now I’m something worse.”

Rahu’s perfect eyebrow raised, wrinkling his perfect golden forehead. If the nasty, oily smirk wasn’t in place, he could have been a ringer for the Buddha. “And what are you, Jack?” he purred.

Jack balled his fists. “I’m desperate.” Feeling his rings dig into his flesh and his tattoos flex gave him a grounding, a bit of the real against the vast whirl pool of magic Rahu commanded. “Miles Hornby is a dead man who tricked a demon. The demon sent me to bring him home, and I said I would.”

Rahu twisted the rings on his fingers, methodically, one after the other. “You are not making a compelling case for your continued life and breath, Jack.”

“I have to find Hornby,” Jack said. Telling a demon the truth was always a risk, because most demons wouldn’t know truth if it sat up and offered them tea and a biscuit. “I’m going to make him tell me how he got out of his bargain.” Jack locked his eyes onto Rahu’s, even though staring at the creature made his sight scream. “And then I’m going to do the same thing.”

Rahu ran his fingers along the gilt altar supporting the Buddha. Gold paint curled in flakes under his fingernails. “Ridiculous. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t particularly care,” Jack returned. “I’m going to break my bargain, and to do that I have to find Hornby.”

Rahu merely smiled. Some men Jack knew could smile and make it a thousand times worse than any curse, hex, or blow. Kev. Seth. Treadwell’s ghost.

“You don’t know who you’re bargaining with, Jack. Your demon is older and cleverer than most.” Rahu’s face went jagged, all planes and rage. “I once was master of the whole of the Floating World, the lands beyond the sea and to the mountains. Do you know who took that from me? Do you know who resigned me to this fetid, sweltering trap of an island?”

“We both have something to hate it for, then,” Jack said. “I’d think you’d be dancing in place to help me.”

Rahu’s smile went sharp and cold as the rusty edge of a razor. “And yet, for some odd reason, I don’t trust a man sent to me by the very demon responsible for this misery of an existence.”

“Believe it or not”—Jack lifted a shoulder—“I really don’t give a fuck, mate. May I go?”

“Not yet.” Rahu’s voice stopped Jack as he started to walk away. “You say you’re a desperate man. Desperate men bargain. Am I to understand you correctly?”

Jack cursed inwardly, sensing he’d walked right onto the big red X and let Rahu drop an anvil on him. “I suppose.”

“And you wish the possession of the dead man Hornby.” Rahu tapped his chin with one black-painted nail. “Which explains why you attacked poor Khan Jao.” Rahu tipped Jack a wink. “No sort of necromancer, are you?”

“Call me a madman, but my mum always taught me to leave the dead be,” Jack said.

“Did she?” Rahu advanced on Jack, laid a hand against his temple before Jack could backpedal. Ice crystals sprouted on the spot, feather-light on Jack’s skin and hair. “Or was she a whore and a junkie who abandoned you to a life of terror and misery while she crawled inside her pill bottle?”

Jack laughed. He smiled wide. And then he snapped his forehead down against Rahu’s perfect smirk. He caught the creature in the nose. Black blood fountained, hissing where it hit the stone, smoke curling as if the effluvia were liquid nitrogen.

“Don’t bait me,” Jack said. “You won’t like what you find in the trap.”

Rahu cracked his nose back into place. The sound of cartilage scraping echoed against the domed roof of the small temple. The creature didn’t flinch. “Mage, I am going to send you back to your demon in a box with a bow if you’re lying to me.”

Jack massaged his forehead. There was a lump growing. “And if I’m not?”

“If you’re not,” Rahu purred, “then you need what I have.”

“I sincerely hope it’s not wit or charm.” Jack rubbed at the sore spot on his forehead. Rahu had a skull like a cricket bat. “Because you’re skint on that score.”

“Before this city grew from the mud and the filth of the river’s bank,” Rahu said, “I was a keeper of knowledge. I supped with beings you can only imagine, and I took their secrets as my own. I am the forsaken knowledge of the Black, mage. I can give you the spell that awakens Hornby and delivers to you the means to slip your bargain’s bonds.”

“And in return?” Jack spread his hands. “Let me guess, you just want a little something, a little shred of soul or a little pinch of flesh?” He sat down on the prayer cushion opposite the altar, weary all at once, down to his bones. “I haven’t got anything left for you, mate. I’m spoken for, head to toe.”

“I have a grimoire that will get Hornby home for your task,” Rahu said. “All you have to do to get it is tell the truth.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Jack said. “But I’m not a liar. Yes, I am when it suits me but you really think I’m shining you on at this moment, over this matter? You’re a paranoid git, Rahu.”

“You irreverence no longer diverts me,” Rahu said. “Do you want the grimoire or not?”

“Do you think I’m that stupid?” Jack demanded. “That I’ll make another bargain with the likes of you?”

“No,” Rahu said with a blinding flash of teeth. “But you said it yourself—you are desperate.”

Jack conceded with a kick to the floor that he had a point. His jackboot rang off the stone. “Show me the flaming hoop, then. I’ll jump like a good boy.”

Rahu’s eyes glowed blackly. “No need, mage. He’ll be dying to meet you.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

The world faded from Jack’s sight and hearing, and he saw the temple as it was half a century before. The windows were empty of glass and open, sutras hanging on faded ribbons drooping over the altar around the Buddha. Planes droned overhead, the high-pitched whine of single-prop engines. Jack craned his neck and caught sight of three Zeroes flying in formation, the suns on their noses fresh and bleeding red as if they’d just come off the line.

His sight had shown him slices of the past before, but nothing as vivid. He could smell the smoke, hear the rumble of traffic, shouts, and horn honks from the street outside.

It’s real. The voice slid from the stone and the air, blanketing Jack in pinprick chills.

“You a war buff, then?” Jack asked. He tucked his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “I have to say, I’m more of a 1970s retro man, meself. Go to the 100 Club, walk around Chelsea, see Zeppelin. That sort of thing.”

This is the time I prefer. In other lands, with other men, I have shown them the Crusades, the burning times, the Inquisition. But this place, in a war beyond memory, is where I began.

A shadow hit the floor as one of the planes flying overhead flicked across the sun, and it spread and grew, twin pinpoints of flame snatched from the altar candle becoming eyes. A body twitched forth next, scaly wrinkled skin like a shar-pei dog, paired at an oozing stitch line with the head of a lion. The thing tasted the air with a black tongue.

“You’re an elemental.” Jack fought the urge to bury his face in his hands. “That fuckwit Rahu thinks I’ll piss myself at the sight of an elemental?” He met the thing’s eyes. “Don’t take offense, mate, but you lot were the first thing I exorcised. Practice, like.”

I am not a golem of anger or terror or pain, mage, the thing said. I am not those pieces of child’s play that haunt your isle.

Jack sighed. “Then thrill me. What are you?”

I am all things black and hopeless, it whispered. I am the Kartimuhkha.

When it breathed the name aloud it grew and solidified, the small details of its body resolving like Jack’s gaze had been blurry from a long night of pints, fags, and mood-altering chemicals. The thing in front of him sported long claws that scraped flakes from the stone floor, strings of spittle hanging from its jaws and blazing flames dancing in its sunken eyes.

Jack stopped smiling. He felt a bit as if someone had just wrapped a rope around his neck and the other end around a gallows pole. “You have a name.”

I have yours as well, crow-mage. Your soul is bare before my eyes.

Elemental demons were scavengers, the carrion birds of Hell. They clung to human emotion, to sin and sadness and pain. They didn’t have names of their own.

Jack hissed through his teeth. “What do you want, then, Karti? Begging? Crying? To play fetch?”

Feed me your pain, Kartimuka whispered. It padded closer on bare human feet, its long tongue snaking out to lap at Jack’s skin. Feed me your terror. Where it touched him, a numbness started, one that Jack recognized too well as the paralyzing bliss of a high. Feed me your nightmares, Kartimukha purred, and Jack fell to his knees and felt his sight peel back the layers between his consciousness and the Black.

Tell me the truth, Kartimukha rumbled in his ear. Show me why you’ve come.

He managed to scream once before his mind was stripped bare and Kartimukha plunged his claws in.

Jack saw everything, everything at once, and it overwhelmed his sight like a flash flood. His skull throbbed and filled up with the sensory overload of touching Kartimukha until he was sure it would split wide open.

Kartimukha watched him impassively, one foot planted on his chest. Show me the secret dark and shame inside of you, mage. Feed me. Fill me.

Jack couldn’t breathe. His limbs were lead. His lungs were flat. This was the drifting place, the twilight sliver between life and the Bleak Gates, the place of overdose and suicide, of regret and despair. His heartbeat slowed, a watch with a loose spring and faulty gears.

Yes, Kartimukha breathed. So many memories. So much pain.

Jack felt the claws tighten around him like razor wire, around his sight and his magic and the things—the memories—that made him Jack Winter were sluicing away as the Kartimukha fed.

“You can’t have them,” he whispered. Kartimukha tilted its head.

They cause you pain, mage. I can rid you of them. Why would you keep them?

Jack shut his eyes against the horrible burning gaze. “They’re mine,” he said. “They’re my scars, not yours.”

You have been brave for a long time, Jack. Kartimukha caressed his face with its hot, sour breath. You don’t need to be brave any longer.

“Brave?” Jack wheezed. Drawing a breath was agony. He felt as if someone had put a jackboot into his ribs. “I shoot smack into my arm to forget the things I’ve seen. I wake up screaming because of the things I’ve done. I can’t even look the only person who gives a fuck about me in the eye. I’m not brave, I just survive better than most.”

Then why do you fight? Kartimukha sounded genuinely puzzled. Why not feed me those bleeding dreams? Why live with the scars?

Jack forced himself to look at Kartimukha again. “That’s all I have, mate. Scars. If you want memories, if you want to see that I’m being truthful, then take a look inside my head if you can stand it.” He raised his head. An inch was all he could manage. “I’m not afraid of my own memories.”

Kartimukha snarled. Even now, you lie. The thing raised its paw, brought it down, and struck into Jack’s mind with its power and its magic, stripping him down to the core.

Jack blinked and found himself staring at a stained plaster ceiling, neon light blinking Morse code across the ceiling from the sign bolted to the wall outside.

He was warm—warm from whiskey in his gut and warm from blood dribbling down his arms. A hooked rug, lumpy underneath his body, soaked up the red, stain spreading.

Jack’s blood was black under the blue neon. His fingers went slack, and the razor blade tumbled to the carpet.

Around him, the dead crowded in. A severe man in a celluloid collar and Windsor tie. A mod girl in a leather minidress with handprints on her throat.

They touched him, hissed at him. Stared into his soul with their black eyes and waited for him to be one of them.

This is how it ends, the girl whispered, but her voice wasn’t the strangled rasp Jack remembered. The voice was Kartimukha’s. This is your last moment of life. Come to me, Jack. Leave your misery with your life.

Jack drifted, dreamy. Soon it would be over. Soon he could forget his sight, forget his failed time with Seth and the Fiach Dubh.

Soon, he would be one with the dead instead of fighting them.

The ghost girl stooped and brushed her fingers across his forehead, moving aside strands of sweaty hair with icy fingers. This is how it ends, she breathed. Let go, Jack. Come to me.

This was how it ended. Life bled onto the floor of a cheap hotel room. A razor blade in a straight line up his forearms. The end of Jack Winter.

Faintly, Jack felt his breath slow and the warm, floating sensation of blood loss engulf his senses. A maid would find him, and he’d lay in a freezer for a few months, an anonymous body among the anonymous dead of Dublin, until he was sent to the potter’s field.

He was with the dead. With the dead he would stay.

A sense of wrongness overtook Jack, the last flicker of his magic. This was not how he died. He didn’t lie down and give up. He cut his wrists deep with a shiny new razor and he felt his life draining onto the floor but he didn’t die, he didn’t go over even when the ghosts begged him to join their ranks. . . .

No one’s coming for you, the ghost girl breathed.

Jack turned his face away from her, watching the hotel sign blink outside the glass. Raindrops clung to the windowpane, refracting the blue light, blue like witchfire. A crow landed on the sill outside, flapped its wings. The bird’s profile beat against the glass, beak leaving starburst cracks as it wrecked itself trying to get inside.

The pain of his cuts crawled inside the numbing sensation of the ghosts, the ache from the floorboards and the burning of whiskey in his empty stomach.

Hush. The ghost girl stroked his brow again. Rest, Jack. None of it matters now.

The crow beat at the window, its own black blood smearing the glass.

A pounding started outside the hotel room door. “Jack!” Fists and boots shook the wood. “Jackie, you stupid bastard! Open the fuckin’ door!”

Seth’s voice was the hand that dragged Jack away from the Bleak Gates.

Seth came in. Seth called 999.

Jack curled in on himself, struggling with nerveless fingers to stanch the bleeding from his arms, and the crow watched him, stock-still now. Beak broken and bloody as his own body. Croak sad and empty as Seth’s echoing voice as he wrenched Jack’s arms above his head, tore his own shirt to stop the bleeding.

The crow waited for Jack, waited for his soul until the emergency responders came in, their codes rapid-fire into their radios.

“Attempted suicide. Six minutes out . . .”

“Hang on, Jackie,” Seth whispered. “You stupid prick. You hang on. None of the crows get to check out that easy.”

Jack retched violently. Blood ran from his nose and his guts twisted.

Kartimukha gave a cry. No! Feed me!

Jack struggled to his knees, and then his feet. Breathing was a task, but he could hear the sounds of a modern street, and he felt the Black ebb away, letting go of the strangle-hold on his sight.

Kartimukha stamped its feet, its tongue flapping and its eyes blazing as it snarled. Feed me!

“Oh, fuck off,” Jack panted. “It’ll take more than raking up tattered old nightmares, my son.”

Kartimukha hissed, and tensed to spring. Jack braced himself. Violence, at this late date, would almost be welcome. He was itching to use his fists and feet on something, to take the fight into the tangible world where he could make the creature in front of him hurt and bleed.

“That’s enough.”

Rahu’s voice cut the air, and Kartimukha bowed his head. Rahu ran his hand over the mangy lion’s mane, and turned his eyes on Jack. “Kartimukha ate your memories. What was it like?”

Jack swiped at the blood on his face. “Tickled.”

Rahu sighed. “It appears that you did tell the truth. You are attempting to trick your demon.” He opened the cubby beneath the altar and removed a cloth-bound scroll tied with silk cord. “This is my personal necromancy grimoire. Take it. Your plan won’t work, but take it.”

Jack took the grimoire and shoved it down into his leather where it rested snugly against his ribs.

Rahu inclined his head. “May I ask you a question, mage?”

“After I ask you one.” Jack backed away, so that he could touch the doors of the temple with his palm. “Where’s Hornby?”

“The Christian cemetery north of the city,” Rahu said. “We burn our dead, but Hornby’s bandmates paid for him to be interred. What was left after the taxi finished with him, at any rate.”

Jack shoved the door akimbo, letting in the sounds and scents of Khlong Toei. “All right. Ask yours.”

“Why did you promise yourself to the demon?” Rahu folded his arms. “I’m curious, because your fate must have been beyond imagination to risk challenging Hell so.”

Jack thought of Pete, of the demon’s covetous smile when he said her name. “I had someone needed looking out for,” he told Rahu.

Rahu chuckled. “Lucky them.”

“Take care,” Jack said. “And good luck with the whole memory-eating bit.” He stepped through the door, and back into the light.

“I’ll see you again, mage,” Rahu called. “And next time, Kartimukha will feed.”

“Yeah,” Jack called back. “Shaking in me boots and all that. Virtually pissing in fear. Cheers, Rahu.”

The door shut, and he stood on the street. The Lexus had vanished, along with Rahu’s boys, so Jack began to walk back to the train line, to catch a car to Patpong. He would get his kit, take the grimoire, and go dig up Miles Hornby.

He would make Hornby tell him how he tricked the demon and he’d take the poor sod home so that Jack could get close enough to do the same.

But first, he was going to have a few choice words with Seth McBride.

Chapter Thirty

After the train dropped him at Silom Road, Jack found his way down Patpong 2 and up the stairs by Club Hot Miami. He leaned his head against Seth’s door, and listened for three beats of his heart. Sounds of the telly emanated from within, along with Seth’s voluble cursing against the parentage of the goaltender on the screen.

Jack braced on the railing. He put his boot against the lock and after two kicks the flimsy, rotted door flew inward to dent the damp plaster of the flat wall.

Seth leaped from his armchair, lager can tumbling to the floor and spilling a sticky amber puddle across the boards. “Jack?” he exclaimed. “Crow and cross, boy.”

Jack closed the space between them and hit Seth in the jaw, sitting him down hard in the puddle of lager. “Thought you got rid of me, Seth?”

Seth’s eyes bled to white, and a shield hex rippled at the edges of Jack’s vision. He leaned forward and pulled Seth up by the front of his T-shirt, so that any hex the other mage threw would disintegrate Jack, but put Seth on his arse as well. “You sent them to kill me.”

“Rahu wouldn’t kill you,” Seth scoffed. “He’s the master of Bangkok, not some thug fresh from the Pit. He was supposed to teach you a lesson and send you on your way.”

“You have no idea what he did to me,” Jack snarled. He wanted to smother Seth with magic, break his bones, call a demon to feast on his entrails. But that was the old days talking, the old hates.

Seth had found him, in the end. He’d kept Jack from passing through the Bleak Gates. For that, Jack dropped Seth back into his chair and paced to the window. The sun was setting across Bangkok, lighting the clouds on fire, orange tongues of airy flame scraping the iron sky.

“He did it to me as well, you know,” Seth said after a time. “When I arrived. He judged me worthy to live in this city under his protection.”

Jack leaned his forehead against the sticky glass. “What did he show you?”

“’S not important,” Seth muttered. “A girl, some bad magic, a mistake. It was all a very long time ago.”

“Well, mine wasn’t,” Jack said. His scars were itching, like they hadn’t in a decade. The thin lines were dessicated and covered over by track scars, but they burned now, like a hot razor was parting his flesh all over again.

“Jack.” Seth sighed. “Here’s the truth—you burn things down. After you tried topping yourself and finished disgracing the brothers, I had to leave Ireland. I lost my life because of you, Jack. But I’m content here, and if you come in throwing your weight about, everything will go to ashes because Jack Winter doesn’t leave anything but death in his wake.” Seth stood and held out his hand. “Give me the grimoire.”

Jack shot a glance at the open door, judged the distance, and then folded his arms. “Not in the cards, mate.”

“I’m not letting you bring your feud with Hell to me doorstep,” Seth insisted. “Give me the grimoire or I’ll take it from you.”

Jack spread his hand. “Come on then, old man. Make your best effort.”

A flutter of magic, like feathers across his cheek, and Seth balled his fist. A hex, a black flight of crow’s wings, flew toward Jack.

He’d never been one for duels—silly, antique things for mages who still wore frock coats and wallowed their days away in absinthe halls. Winning a magic slap fight didn’t depend on how much power you commanded or how refined your hexes—it only depended on being the man who could duck faster than the other.

Jack let himself fall, stumbling out the flat’s front door. He rolled to a stop against the railing and Seth’s hex flew overhead, magic screaming against his sight.

Panting, Seth chugged after him, raising his hand again. Seth might be old, but he was mean and tenacious, and fear only made him meaner.

“You stupid sod,” Seth wheezed. “Can’t accept your fate, leave them what still have a life to it and die like a normal bugger . . .”

“Not in my nature.” Jack pulled his own power to him, the slimy magic of the Black slipping between his grasp, shield hex forming and fragmenting before he could cast it. “You of all people know that, Seth.”

“Knew it would come to this, somehow. Always.” Seth’s magic flew to him, settled about his shoulders like a mantle of swirling black energy. Jack felt the cold, spindly fingers of a death curse reach out for him. “Sorry as hell, too. I did like you, boy. You can take that with you when you go.”

A shadow fell across Seth’s face as he raised his hands, and before the death curse flew free, there was a clang of metal on bone and Seth crumpled.

Jack sat up and shook off the first vestiges of the curse, his skin prickling. A figure crouched, and he saw Trixie’s bruise-colored eyeshadow and plum-painted Bettie Page lips, masking an expression of dire worry. “Are you all right?” she demanded.

“Fine.” Jack tested his shoulder, his ribs. They hurt, but he’d survived worse. “Thanks for the assist, luv.”

“Wasn’t me,” Trixie said. She helped him up and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “She came looking for you, and we saw Seth about to do you in.”

Jack looked at the person behind Trixie and felt his guts drop into his boots.

“Jack,” Pete said. “Glad to see you’re still making friends.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Trixie set Jack up with a whiskey and retreated to the far end of the bar. Pete picked at the label of her Thai-brand beer. “Who was that on the landing, then? Jealous boyfriend?”

“Cute.” Jack watched her, and grimaced when Pete’s expression went stony and blank. Her copper expression, used on suspects and scum. Jack drained his glass. “How’d you find me?”

Pete’s expression darkened. “You aren’t as mysterious and unfathomable as you might think, Jack.”

“Seth used to be a friend,” he offered. The warmth of the whiskey burned some of the aches and pains out of his body, but not his mind.

“Your passport tripped a security alert at Heathrow,” Pete said after a time. “I had you flagged. Ollie’s mate at Interpol.” She turned on her stool and faced him, fingers tapping the wood of the bar. “So I knew you came here. Still waiting on the why.”

Jack tipped his empty glass to her. “Sightseeing.”

“Right, that’s fine,” Pete agreed. “Keep treating me like I’m stupid and that your honeyed words are all I need to hear.” She leaned in, close enough that Jack could see the furious pulse beating in her neck. “I thought something had happened to you. That morning, when I woke up alone. I thought you’d gone and gotten yourself killed. I was frantic. I cried, Jack. Over you.”

“Pete . . .” Jack slid his hand over her rattling fingers. “I had to go. I freely admit it was shit of me to leave you like that, but it couldn’t be helped.”

“Very well,” Pete snapped. “Because lord knows your secrets and lies are more important than anyone they might leave behind.” She jerked her hand out from under his, the friction warming his palm. Pete glared. “Put your hand on me again and you’re going to discover exactly how sorry you can be, you ruddy son of a bitch.”

She drained her beer and slammed the bottle on the bar. Jack watched her, re memorizing her hair, the set of her mouth, the way her fingers drummed unconsciously on the bar. Even furious with him, Pete was the best sight he’d clapped eyes on during this whole miserable journey.

Pete sighed, at last. “But as usual, anything I might be feeling gets shoved aside in favor of Jack Winter’s latest disaster. So who’s Seth, and why was he ready to take your head off with a hex?”

Jack shot a look at Trixie. She was too far away to overhear much of anything, and from the vicious way she was rattling glasses about, thought that Jack’s girlfriend had come to reel him back in from his carefree sexual exploration of the exotic Orient. “It was a curse, not a hex,” he told Pete, “and it’s complicated.”

Pete reached behind the bar, snatched another beer from the ice bucket, and banged the cap against the bar edge to take it off. “Ah. I see. Far too complicated for those of use who aren’t Jack Winter.”

Jack avoided her gaze by staring at a bruise forming on his knuckles from where he’d hit Seth. He said, “Luv, it’s nothing for you to worry over,” and would have said more, except Pete hit him.

Her palm left a burning impression on his cheek and snapped his teeth sideways, blood coating his tongue. The last vestiges of the whiskey stung.

“Fuck you, Jack,” Pete said. Her cheeks were bright with blood roses. “You no longer have the privilege of dictating when I bloody worry over anything.”

Jack put his fingers against the spot. It was rigid and tender with a forming bruise. Pete had been kind—if she’d hit him closed fist, she would likely have broken his jaw. And he would have deserved it.

“Well?” she demanded. “Got any other excuses before I walk out of this dump and go home to somewhere the air doesn’t cling to you?”

“I’m out of them,” Jack promised. “I did wrong, Petunia. I’m not arguing.” He wiggled his jaw. His entire skull rang from the blow. “I shouldn’t have left.”

“And you think that makes it all right?” Pete demanded. Jack pressed a hand over his eyes.

“I don’t think it will ever be all right, Pete. But what’s done is done, and I’m glad you’re here.”

Pete sat back on her stool. She looked wrung, sweat forming a V in the front of her cotton shirt. “First truth you’ve told me since I got here.”

“Let’s start over,” Jack said. The lies made his tone smooth and easy, and he felt his throat and guts blacken. This is the only way to save what you have, he reminded himself. This is the only way to keep Pete out of it.

“Seth is the man on the landing,” Pete said. Jack nodded. She swigged her beer and made a face, shoving it away again. “And he tried to knock you off why?”

Jack got a towel from behind the bar, dropped some ice into it, and put it against his face. “We had a disagreement.”

Pete sighed. “Have you ever met someone you didn’t slag off, Jack Winter?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Not yet. But there’s always a thin ray of hope.”

“God help us all. Why it was imperative you leave without so much as a word and run off to Bangkok? Tell me that.”

“I’m looking for a bloke named Miles Hornby,” Jack said. “Actually, found him.”

Pete spread her hands. “So? What about Naughton? What about our job? You can’t just chuck me when it’s conve nient and swan off.”

“Believe me,” Jack muttered, “there is nothing about this situation I’d consider ‘convenient.’ ”

Pete rubbed her thumb over the center of her forehead. Jack saw dark half-moons under her eyes and a drawn thinness in her cheeks. He resisted the urge to reach out and push her lank black hair away from her face, wipe her skin free of sweat, take her back to her hotel, and put her to bed until she felt right.

Those weren’t things Jack Winter did for anyone. He wasn’t the sensitive, loving boyfriend with the kind word and the assurance that no, your arse did not look big in those trousers.

“Tell me,” Pete said. “Tell me everything.”

Jack waved at Trixie for a replay on his drink. “Miles Hornby is dead,” he told Pete. “He has something I need, and to get it I have to perform a necromantic spell on his corpse. A black magic spell. It’d be dangerous for a sorcerer and for me it’ll likely end with me vomiting my lungs out me arse. So if you’re planning to stay around, I could use your help.”

He exhaled. Sipped the new glass of whiskey. Watched Pete, and waited.

“Will you answer one more question for me?” she said at last. Her face wasn’t overtly hostile, her wide eyes guileless. Jack tensed, sensing a trap.

“If I can, luv.”

“When, exactly,” Pete said, “did you become a raving nutter?”

Jack set his glass down. “It’s the truth, Pete. I’m going to dig up his body and raise him from the dead.”

Pete rolled her eyes at Jack. “Bollocks.”

“I dunno what else to tell you, luv.”

Pete slapped her hand on the bar. “How about the bloody truth? What does this Hornby have that you need badly enough to just . . . to just . . .” Her face went red and her eyes took on a sheen. “To just leave.” Pete swiped at her eyes. “Shit.”

Jack reached for her hand, but Pete yanked it away. “You have to believe me,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t run out on you, Petunia. I . . .”

“You would, because you did,” Pete said. Her voice was low and vicious. “It’s exactly the kind of thing you do, Jack. A rough patch comes and you bolt for the bloody hills.”

Jack threw back the last of his whiskey Now it only burned, didn’t numb. “It’s life and death, luv.”

Pete chewed on her lip. “Whose life?”

“My life.”

Pete put her elbows on the bar and her forehead in her hands. “Jack, what have you done?”

Jack reached over and lifted her chin with one finger. The spark of her talent rang sweet along his bones.

All at once, he felt the weight of every lie. Crawling inside his mind, deadening his talent, and hollowing him out until there was no Jack Winter, junkie, mage, or otherwise. There was only a memory of Jack Winter, liar and dead man.

Another lie would twist him irreparably, start a psychic hemorrhage that Jack knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.

He dropped his hand. “I will tell you absolutely everything, Pete, but I am running out of time. Help me raise Hornby’s corpse, and then I’ll tell you anything. Me favorite color, the name of the girl who beat me with her lunch box in first form, why I possess an irrational phobia of John Gielgud. Anything you like.”

Pete blinked away the last of the tears. Her mascara made miniature deltas down her face and Jack ran his thumb lightly over her skin, returning it to pale and pristine. Pete reached up and grabbed his hand, trapping it against her cheek. “You swear?”

Jack nodded. “On me life. What little of it I have left.”

Chapter Thirty-two

The Bangkok Protestant Cemetery was overrun with roses and long grass, the paths barely wide enough for Jack’s boots side by side. No lights watched over the graves, and the dank, ripe smell of the Chao Phraya River mingled with the smell of turned earth.

Pete shone her light at the crooked rows of tombs and graves. “Where is he?”

Jack saw the hump of a newly buried body under the beam, wooden cross stuck crookedly in the earth a few feet ahead of him. “Let’s start there.”

“And if we get the wrong grave?” Pete muttered.

Jack swung his spade to and fro, the iron weight moving like a divining rod. “Then I imagine we’d say, ‘Oh, so sorry, let me just tuck you up and shut your coffin again, guv. Lovely weather we’re having.’ ”

Pete waved him quiet. “You’re a wanker.”

Jack heard a rustle from the bushes and detected silver eyeshine. The small owl stared at him, head twitching back and forth. Jack curled his lip.

“Never liked those things.”

“I don’t mind them,” Pete said. “They used to show up in our garden when I was a girl. Da said they were there to take the bad dreams out of the air before they got to me and my sister.”

Jack prodded the earth over Hornby’s grave and tried to ignore the gaze of the owl. Owls came on an ill wind, harbingers of things that even Jack, with his visions of the dead, didn’t want to imagine too closely. Not psychopomps, like the crow. Only watchers, keepers of the shadows that lived beyond the Black and beyond even the grasp of Death.

“Hold the light steady,” he said to Pete, shoving the spade into the grave mound. The earth was loose and soft, warm still from sunlight. It took him fifteen minutes and a few gallons of sweat to uncover the elongated hexagon of the pauper’s coffin.

“Never liked this,” Pete said. “Exhumations. When I was with the Met, it always seemed wrong, somehow.”

“That’s the Black,” Jack agreed. “Once a soul’s flown from a body, the body has a nasty resonance. Necromancers feed on it.”

“How do they stand it?” Pete brushed her arms off with her hands, as if she were beset by ants.

“They’re evil, foul-smelling necrophiliac idiots,” Jack said. “Reasonable folk know better than to trouble something that belongs to the Bleak Gates.” He swiped the rivers and waterfalls of sweat from his face, and braced himself for the sight of Hornby’s ghost. Magic users, mages particularly, didn’t often go into the underworld quietly and with lack of fanfare. Algernon Treadwell, his worst spook, had been a sorcerer who died bloody and tortured at the hands of witchfinders.

His sight tingling, Jack tapped his spade against the coffin lid. Nothing sprang from the earth in answer. No flutters or cries echoed from the Black. The graveyard was curiously silent, holding its breath in the dense night air of the river. Jack threw the spade aside.

“Be a love and hand me the prybar,” he said to Pete. His bag, at the edge of the grave, pulsed with the looseingredients to the necromancy spell written out in the grimoire. Trixie had translated the Thai for him, and Robbie had sold him most of the ingredients that weren’t already in Jack’s kit. The spell elements hungered for flesh, to dig into skin, for a corpse to weave their magic around even resting separate in his canvas bag.

Black magic felt like cobwebs, like sticky drying blood and the spongy, soggy flesh of a drowned man. Like wearing a wool sweater next to bare skin. Jack’s sight flared, and the graveyard was bathed in silver for a moment before he ground his teeth and felt the sting of his tattoos holding back the dead. It wasn’t an active boneyard like St. Michael’s, but there were bodies under the earth and lately, with Jack’s sight flying haywire at the slightest touch, it was still too much.

Pete handed him the small prybar, wordlessly, and stepped back from the crumbling edge of the grave.

Jack straddled the coffin and shoved the metal in between the wooden seams.

From its branch, the owl watched, unblinking. Jack flicked it off before he bore down on the prybar, straining to open the coffin lid. Nails shrieked, and Jack’s sore shoulders and hands complained as he strained against the coffin lid. It lifted with a dull thud, the release throwing Jack down hard in the dirt.

Pete flashed her light on the contents of the coffin. “Well. He’s a handsome git, isn’t he?”

Jack struggled up, and looked into the coffin.

The figure within stared back at him with empty sockets, blackened skin stretched tight across a skull rife with rotted teeth.

“He’s been dead a lot longer than two weeks,” Pete said. “Even in this heat. Hasn’t got any flesh on.”

Jack leaned down and picked up the gold chain around the figure’s neck, the same gold he’d seen on the gangsters in Patpong, cheap and bleeding to green from moisture. “It’s not Hornby.” His voice echoed from the sides of the grave, hollow.

Pete half-slid down the pile of earth to stand next to him. “Then who is it?”

Jack felt the want of a fix claw into his skull, vicious and sharp. He heard the demon’s laughter. He felt the cold of the Underworld, even in the oppressive heat of Bangkok, like a finger of ice down his back.

“Jack?” Pete touched his shoulder. “Who’s in this grave?”

Jack dropped the pry bar. Over the Chao Phraya, thunder rumbled and twin tongues of lighting licked the underside of black smoke clouds.

The owl took flight as rain started to fall, fat warm droplets the temperature of tears splashing on Jack, on Pete, and over the stone and dirt of the graveyard.

“He’s nobody,” he said finally.

Pete turned her light on his face. “You don’t look well, Jack.”

Which followed, because Jack felt like run-over shite. Felt numb, cold, and nerveless even in the warm rain. “I’m going back to Patpong,” he said. His boots slipped in the graveyard dirt but he pressed on, leaving Pete behind him.

Chapter Thirty-three

The rain fell, steady sideways lines of water, blurring the neon of Patpong into a fever dream. Thunder crashed and rolled above the city like a Sham 69 drum line, and lightning licked forked tongues between skyscraper and cloud.

Jack stalked through puddles, heedless when water seeped into his boots. The girl was still on the corner near Trixie’s bar, hunched under a roof overhang. The tourists had taken cover, and she was virtually alone in the street.

Jack wove through the push of traffic down Patpong 2 and approached, ducking his head against the rain.

“Hey, traveler.” The girl peeled herself away from the wall, her plastic skirt and nylon top slicked with water. “You want something?”

Jack cast a glance over his shoulder out of habit. He wasn’t caging for coppers as much as for Pete, but the few damp pedestrians in evidence hurried on their way and studiously avoided looking at Jack, or the girl. They might as well have been two more oil-slicked stains on the pavement.

“Something sweet?” the girl persisted. “I got party, I got good stuff. You want something?”

Jack dug into his leather and pulled out a crumple of pounds and bhat. “Give me a dose. Of the sweet.”

The girl fished in her voluminous knockoff handbag, and Jack heard the shifting scrape of cellophane bags against bags, the clack of pills. She palmed him a twist of plastic with a nub of brown inside, and made Jack’s money disappear like a magic trick.

“You want a sharp?” She titled her head, hair curled up from the rain. Her makeup was smeared, and she looked a bit like a thrown-away doll.

“Yeah,” Jack muttered, shoving the smack into his pocket. “Give it to me.”

The girl passed him a disposable needle in a sterile wrapper, stamped with a hospital name in English and Thai. “You have fun,” she said, closing his fingers over it. “And come back soon. I’m here every night.”

Jack walked away without answering. He ducked through the door of Trixie’s bar. She was busy serving a trio of Australians who in turn were busy gawping at a pair of go-go dancers divesting themselves of their gold bikinis on the stage. A DJ spun house tunes, and the lights were low and blue.

Jack went straight through the kitchen and into the back alley. The alley was piled with crates and metal garbage cans, quiet except for echoes of raindrops and faraway laugher. Neon signs spread fingers of pink and red and blue across Jack’s skin, turning him from a Fae to a demon to a corpse in the span of a heartbeat.

Demons lie. Lesson. Fucking. One.

He’d been so close. So fucking close to working it all out. Find Hornby, find his secret, find his way out of Hell. At the worst, absolute rock bottom, he’d have the demon’s name.

But there was no Miles Hornby in the grave.

Jack leaned his head back against the slimy exterior wall. The neon beat a heartbeat against the back of his eyelids.

He could run, he could run far and fast, but the sight always caught him. The bargain would never be unwound.

He could pretend that he was clean, an ex-junkie, an ex-liar, and an ex-bastard, but Jack knew who he was. He was Jack Winter.

Junkie. Liar. Sinner. Dead man.

As he unrolled the baggie between his fingers, Jack realized that nothing had changed from the moment he’d bound the bargain in the first place.

The motions came back, like playing a D chord or putting a record on a turntable. Automatic, rote, familiar.

Drop the smack into the spoon. Find your lighter, buried underneath a ball of vellum and an ancient packet of crisps in his jacket pocket. Cook the shit, mindful of your fingers. Jack’s callused fingerprints weren’t only from playing guitar.

He used his teeth to rip open the sharp and his belt to tighten up his arm. The studs cut into his bicep, dull hot pain, but Jack ignored it as he drew the cloudy gold into the belly of the needle. Like watching a mosquito feed, he’d thought the first time. Feed and bloat on the sweetest blood there was.

Jack let the spoon drop into a puddle and he sat himself on a crate, out of the rain.

Slap your arm. Watch the bruise-blue map of heart’s blood float to the surface, pulsing and quivering under the skin. Try to find a spot that will still take a sharp, the black blots of collapsed veins like impassable terrain.

Jack wriggled his arm and slotted it comfortably against his thigh. He bit the cap off of the sharp and spat it out, flat plastic taste on his tongue.

Prime the needle, force all the air out. Embolism will ruin your day, and earn you a stint in rehab when you get found and taken to A&E. If you get found in time.

The tip of the needle bit into his skin, and it hurt a bit, like passing your hand through a lighter. It hadn’t hurt in a long while. Being clean had started a new season in his body, nerves and blood renewed.

Jack tilted his face up to the rain, put his thumb on the needle’s plunger, and pressed down.

For a moment there was nothing, just the slightly foreign sensation of a sharp under his skin. Then the warm tide ran up his arm, across his chest, over to his heart.

It was good shit, pure and strong, and it hit Jack’s brain like plunging into a river of fire, kissed his skin so that he was surprised it didn’t begin to steam under the rain.

Jack felt his head go back and scrape brick, and felt the sharp tumble out of his fingers. He wiggled the belt loose so the dose could work its magic unfettered.

Welcome home, the fix whispered as it wrapped a million fingers of oblivion across his sight and his mind. I’ve missed you.

Jack let the numbness steal over him and didn’t fight. The storm cooled his skin, but inside was warmth and forgetfulness. He slipped beneath the waters of the fix, and let himself drown.

When he opened his eyes, lids heavy with the desire for a nod into the opium dreamland he knew too well, the demon was in front of him.

It wasn’t the demon, not really. His sight didn’t flare and his blood didn’t chill, but seeing the wavering outline in the white suit, black coal eyes boring into him, sent Jack reeling. Acid boiled up in his stomach and he doubled over. Not yet, not yet. Need to sleep, need not to dream. He couldn’t vomit, couldn’t come down so soon.

“Poor little Jack,” the demon purred. “Figured out that you’ve lost, at last.”

“Go . . .” Jack choked down bile, his throat blazing. “Go away. I haven’t yet.”

“No Hornby, no name.” The demon’s tongue caressed its lips like it could already taste Jack. “No name, no saving yourself. Demons lie, but I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a special soul, Jack. I wouldn’t insult you that way.”

“You’re not real,” Jack groaned. “You can’t be here.”

“I will be.” The demon leaned close. Rain fell through him, hissing as it hit the pavement. The heroin was playing hell with Jack’s sight, his neurons exploding against his eyes, allowing the Black to twist and distort into something it wasn’t. The fix was his only shield against his sight for over a decade, and now it was showing him this. If Jack hadn’t felt like he was close to passing out facedown in the garbage-choked puddles at his feet, he might have laughed.

“Go,” he gritted again. “I don’t see you. You’re not . . . you’re not real.”

“Has that ever worked?” The demon chuckled. “I will be real, Jack. I’ll wrap a hand around your heart and the Weir will watch. She’ll weep. And she’ll die along with you, every time she remembers how you tried to change fate and didn’t.”

Slow heavy swells of the fix rolled over Jack, made his speech slow and thick. “Fuck . . . off.”

The door banged, metal on brick, and the demon was gone. In his place, small strong hands propped Jack up and a face dipped into view.

“Jack!” Pete shook him, slapped his face. She peeled back his eyelid and he batted at her. Her touch spread warm tendrils through him, down to the core and the place that got him into more trouble than it got him out of. If he’d been able to stand with any reliability, he would have grabbed Pete in return, put her against the rough brick, and let the rain slick their bare skin.

“’M fine,” he muttered.

“You’re so bloody far from fine I can’t even say.” Pete’s voice shook, her fingers echoing the tremor. She jerked his chin to look, and she was holding the needle. “You went and did it, after everything? Everything I did to get you clean?”

“Pete . . .” He exhaled. His lungs were slow and hot. The air was wet, too thick to move on its own. “You don’t understand.”

Pete tossed the needle away and crouched in front of Jack, gripping his arms. “Make me understand. I want to have followed you here for something worthwhile, Jack.”

Pete’s tears mixed with the raindrops on her skin, cutting furrows in her face. Jack tried to reach for them, wipe them away and make her smile, but he missed her cheek, letting his hand land on her shoulder again, tilting her slight frame under his weight.

“Go home,” Jack said. “You don’t have to see me like this, Petunia. No need.”

Pete brushed him off and Jack’s stomach opened like a pit. He fell sideways, retching, his gut rebelling against the onslaught of skag.

“Fair warning,” Pete said. “Don’t order me about. I’m two seconds from kicking seven colors of shit from you, you bloody idiot.”

Jack tried again to apologize, but his vision tunneled, then spiraled, then became black. When he sat up, scraping a hand across his mouth, the world had started to creep back in. His clothes were soaked and deep-muscle aches had worked their way up his arm from the tie-off and the sloppy injection. Pete watched him silently, crouched on her heels.

She hadn’t left him even now, when he was doubled over puking his guts out in the rankest alley he’d ever found himself in. She hadn’t helped him, either, but if Jack were in her position he would have pushed his head into his own sick and held him there until he drowned.

And he’d lied to her. He’d used the danger of the demon to lie to Pete, likely the only person who wouldn’t leave him in the gutter at the truth. Jack wrapped his arms around himself as shivers wracked him, his stomach bucking again even though there was nothing left to bring up.

“I’m sorry, Pete.” His voice came out a rasp that barely lifted over the rain, and his ruined throat clenched.

Pete scrubbed her hands over her face, blending the rain and tears. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. He reached out and had more success capturing her hand this time. “Please don’t go, Petunia.” He dropped his head back, shut his eyes. His sight was empty, and the bright blazing place where it lived in his mind was cold. “Don’t go,” he said to Pete, so that he could barely hear himself over the drumming rain. “I need you.”

Pete let him close his hand around her palm, but she wouldn’t look at him. “If you really mean that, Jack, and you don’t want me walking away right this moment, then you’d better give me an explanation that isn’t a complete load of bollocks.”

Jack gripped Pete’s hand. “Luv, I never meant to . . .”

Pete slammed her fist into the concrete. “For once in your fucking life Jack, let go of your sodding pride and talk to me!”

Jack jumped at her voice echoing from the alley walls, sat up and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Sweat, vomit, rain. Wasn’t he the picture of recovery. “Fine, luv. Haven’t got any pride left, anyway.”

Pete spread her hands when the silence between them stretched thin.

Jack swallowed down the last lump of nausea in his throat, to put off speaking for another clock-tick. To speak was to confess, and to confess was to lay bare all the black and rotten bits of himself to Pete.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“So am I,” Jack murmured. The rain was a solid sheet of mist and droplet. You could almost discern faces in it, ghostly passengers on the fog that rolled in from the underworld on nights like this one. The neon lit everything, pink and black and blue and black over and over again like a macabre circus. The ghosts pressed close around him, but the fix didn’t let them find a way in. Another twenty minutes, thirty at the outside, and things would be usual—the onslaught of the dead and the new strange makeup of his magic.

But in this moment, his sight was still and the Black was silent. “I guess I’ve been waiting all the time you knew me,” Jack said. He held out his hand to Pete and tilted his head in pleading. “At least let me cage a fag if I’m going to spill me guts, luv?”

Pete sighed as if she were being asked a great service, but she passed him one and gave him a light. Their fingers brushed. Hers were warm and wet, reminders of furrows dug in his shoulders, Jack’s sweat on Pete’s skin.

He coughed as he drew too sharply on the fag. “All in all, I guess I’ve been waiting for thirteen years.”

“Waiting for what?” Pete stubbed hers out and let Jack take up the mantle of polluting the immediate vicinity. A door down the alley opened and a bag of garbage sailed out, along with a snatch of “All Along the Watchtower.”

Jack smiled at Pete and felt the stiffness of it. The smile was the last lie, the only one he had left in him. “For Hell, Petunia.”

Pete’s eyes darkened and widened, like she’d spied a London bus bearing down on her. One last lone curl of smoke drifted from her nostril, and then she blinked and she was a hardened copper again, wearing a hard plastic mask.

“Right,” she said. I think you’d better finish your story.”

Chapter Thirty-four

When the ghost of Algernon Treadwell stuck its hand into his chest on the spring day thirteen years past, Jack was surprised to feel nothing. Not pain, not cold. Just the absence of feeling, a bit of cool wet on his skin from blood, and a glaze of silver across his sight.

Pete was screaming. She was standing on the other side of a tomb a little bigger than a minicab, and she was screaming. Blood dripped from her palms, trickled down her wrist like she’d drawn her veins on, and she was screaming.

Treadwell hissed, wordless pleasure as he filled Jack up with his icy poison. Jack fell, cracking his skull against the tomb floor. Treadwell smiled down at him, an angel borne out of the Land of the Dead.

Keep the ghost from Pete. Treadwell had sunk his claws into her, into the raw Weir talent that lived behind her too-serious face, those drowning-pool eyes. Pete didn’t count him a lover, or fuck, even a friend as far as he knew, but Jack didn’t care. And all that mattered now was keeping the ghost from her. She was innocent in the Black and she was here for him. Because of him. Pete was screaming because of him.

A black candle from the summoning sailed past Jack and broke into three pieces against the tomb wall.

“Go back!” Pete shouted. “Go back!”

Treadwell bared his teeth, and the awful pressure on Jack’s heart intensified. He felt Treadwell grab hold of his magic, of his power, and meld his burning cold corpse energy to it. Blackness filled Jack up like Thames water, until he couldn’t breathe and nothing but feedback screamed in his airs.

Not water.

Blood.

In his lungs, spilling down his chest, spattering a fine mist across his face. Blotting out the logo on the chest of his Replacements shirt. Draining his life onto the stones of Treadwell’s tomb.

As the summoning seal drew Treadwell back to the underworld, the ghost scraped ice fingers down Jack’s face, a final caress. I’ll see you very soon, mage, the ghost hissed. And we’ll share this embrace again. A whisper of the Black, a flux and flow of power, and Algernon Treadwell was gone, exorcised from the world of the living.

Jack’s senses folded in and narrowed down to one point, beyond sight and beyond pain. He floated, a rudderless drifting into nothing. There were no pictures from his life before his eyes. No grand parade of memories. Just Jack Winter, dead man, dissolving little by little like wreckage at the bottom of the sea.

The crow woman came to him. She bent and touched his face, and all of Jack’s instincts flared to life again. The crow woman was never a cause for celebration, or calm, even at this moment. She appeared for one reason and one only.

“No . . . ,” he croaked. “No, I’m not finished.”

The raven woman grinned at him. Blood dripped from between her teeth, painted her lips black-red. I’ll wait.

The blood galvanized Jack. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t slip away because of Treadwell, a fucking ghost, a piece of vapor. He was the crow-mage. When he died, he became the crow woman’s.

“Wait as long as you like,” he rasped. “I have time. I have a life yet . . .”

All warriors meet their end in my arms, the Morrigan whispered. All battles have a loser. Come away to the field with me, Jack. Take your place in my ranks.

“I’m not . . . yours . . . yet . . .” It was getting hard to speak, becoming an effort to suck in anything besides blood. Pete had fled, and the bar of light from the open tomb door lit the Morrigan from the back, casting the shadow of her wings across Jack’s eyes. Outside, in the light world, he heard the flutter of wings, the hollow croak of a crow.

You are my favored son, Jack, she whispered. You are the crow-mage. Called to the Land of the Dead from his day of birth.

“No . . . ,” Jack choked, black borders swirling at the edge of his vision like slowly sinking into a deep well. “I left them. I left you.”

The Fiach Dubh are a construct, Jack. Men and flesh and petty concerns wrapped in the illusion of power. I am Death. I am eternal. Her fingers brushed his cheek, her nails digging into his flesh. He felt nothing except the chill of the stones.

“I won’t go,” he croaked. “Not willingly.”

It is the field, crow-mage, the Morrigan hissed. Or it is Hell. You are a sinner in life, Jack Winter, but I could make you a god in Death.

Jack dipped his shaking fingers into his own blood, felt a clear rough patch on the stones. “Never . . . never wanted to be a god. Just wanted to live me life. . . .”

The pages of the grimoire he’d stolen from Seth’s library floated before his eyes, blurred and half-remembered.

It was enough. It had been enough to expel him from the Fiach Dubh, and it would be enough now.

Jack drew from memory the invocation and the pentagram, the devil’s gateway. The calling card of the Trium virate. The invitation for Hell on earth. A sorcerer’s knowledge, for a mage who had nothing left but a slow ebb and flow of blood and magic.

You fool! The crow woman spread her wings, screeched, spectral wind chilling Jack’s wounds. You can only prolong. You can never escape.

“Yeah, well.” Jack coughed and more blood coated his tongue. That was a bad way to go. His time was slipping down to the last few grains in the hourglass. “Guess it’s Hell for me, hag. So until my time’s up . . .” He extended his two fingers into the crow woman’s face. “Fuck off.”

He let his eyes fall shut, his fingers move across the blood-slicked stone. The words fell from his lips with surprising clarity, words of power from his long-ago glance at the mildewed linen pages Seth kept locked in a metal trunk from his days in the Irish army. Locked with a bespelled lock and a set of hexes, until the clever boy Jack Winter had slipped them.

Mages didn’t deal with demons. Only sorcerers invited the denizens of Hell to their threshold. Only evil men.

Desperate men.

“I call the servants of the Morning Star, the tainted princes, the jackals of judgment,” he whispered. “As your servant, I humbly call.”

He opened his eyes with a struggle, the ceiling of the tomb wobbling and distorting as he stepped to the threshold of dying. It hurt less this time, was colder, stiller than the hotel in Dublin, but dying itself always felt the same. Cold. Always cold.

“With my blood on the stone,” Jack whispered, “I call.”

A shimmer of black in the shadowed air, a thickening of the darkness in the corner of the tomb. Jack listened to his heartbeat, felt the cobweb kiss of black magic across his bloody face.

“With lies in my heart,” Jack rasped. “I call.” This was where a name was supposed to lay, a race of demon or a word of power to bind the encroachment of Hell to the sorcerer’s will.

Jack didn’t know the names of demons. Seth hadn’t taught him. Had expelled him from the order when he’d tried to learn. Had left him to the mercy of his sight.

“Somebody,” Jack rasped. “I’m Jack Winter. And I sodding need your help.”

He didn’t see the demon come, but it was there when his gaze roved back to the floor of the tomb, black suit and dark hair, so ordinary as to cause tears of disappointment.

The demon took a step toward him, and cocked its head. “And what, little mage, is so dark in that heart of yours that you summon whichever of Hell’s Named that feels like making a human a plaything today?”

Jack met its eyes, those dreadful black button eyes that spoke of flayed skin and burnt char, breaking and bleeding and screaming.

“I don’t want to die,” he whispered. “I can’t, yet . . .”

The demon crouched, laid a hand on his wound, Jack’s blood growing vines of red up the immaculate French fold of its white shirt as it ran a finger down his cheek.

“A mage who’s afraid of the afterlife. That’s interesting, that is.”

“Not . . . afraid,” Jack managed. “I can’t. I can’t . . .”

“All right, be still,” the demon purred. “Don’t drain yourself dry before we have a chance to chat with one another.”

“I’m . . . the crow-mage. . . .” Jack managed. “If I die . . .”

Laughter floated around him, dark and poisonous as a sip of cyanide laced into port wine. The demon sat on its heels. “Say the words, mage, and I’ll consider what I can do to help you.” It smiled, and Jack knew he should be scared, terrified, pissing in his shorts.

If he had any sense, he’d be frightened.

If he had any balls, he’d be dying on the floor alone, last words taken away only by the ghosts of Highgate.

But the mages who decreed Thou shalt not bargain with demons, Lawrence and Seth and the rest, they’d never been here. Never felt cold stone under their back and warm blood on their skin. They’d never seen the crow woman, watching and waiting for them to join the ranks of her corpse army.

“Say it,” the demon coaxed. “I want to hear it from your sweet throat, mage.”

The words crawled up with Jack’s last breath. “Please,” he said to the demon. “Save me.”

Chapter Thirty-five

A litter of cigarette nubs lay at Jack’s feet when he finished talking, tiny corpses borne on the rivulets of rain.

Pete wrapped her arms around herself, didn’t look at him, didn’t speak.

Jack exhaled. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the ribs by a jackboot, a fair few times, and left in a gutter to be pissed on. “You’re too bloody quiet,” he muttered. “Say something.”

Pete sniffed, and uncurled her arms. “How long?”

“Thirteen years,” Jack said. “Thirteen years from the day I died.”

“And Hornby? What’s he to you?” Pete chewed on her bottom lip.

Jack stood, worked the kinks from his back. He didn’t used to knot up, to feel the bruises from fights until the day after. Now he felt all of it, down to his worn-out bones. “He’s me chance,” he said. “All I have to do is bring him home.”

Jack climbed up, swayed only a little, decided it was safe to walk inside and find himself a stiff shot of whiskey.

Pete caught his hand. “I should be furious with you. You’ve kept everything from me.”

“I know,” Jack said. “If you weren’t furious, I might think you were some kind of shapeshifter and go looking for an iron needle to kill you with.”

“I just don’t understand why you felt like you couldn’t tell me,” Pete said. “ Were you just going to let me wake up one day and be alone forever? Is that how little you care, Jack?” Pete sniffed hard, the only hint the red in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks.

Jack felt in his pocket for his bandanna, held it out to her. “I suppose I was afraid, Pete.”

Pete’s expression sagged. “Jack, you’re not afraid of anything.”

He felt the ends of his mouth curve up. “I’m a good liar.”

Pete grabbed the bandanna from him and dabbed at her face. “You know I should bloody kill you.”

“I’d deserve it,” Jack agreed.

“Only it won’t do any bloody good and I’ll still end this alone in the Black,” Pete said. After a moment, composure returned to hers features and she blinked the last of the moisture from her eyes. “But if you give Hornby to this demon, you’re free?”

“If I find Hornby, I won’t have to worry about the demon,” he said. “Because I’m not making the mistake of trusting it twice.” Jack got a fresh fag and lit it. “But the thing’s just been playing with me. Hornby wasn’t in that box. He’s not anywhere.” He exhaled. “I’m fucked. It just wanted a laugh. Let’s go home.”

Pete drew in a breath. “Why would the demon promise you something like a name? Why give you a chance at breaking this awful deal if Hornby isn’t who the demon says he is?”

“This is a guess,” Jack said, “but perhaps because it’s a fucking demon and they wank off to human suffering?”

Pete shook her head. “Never saw a gangster at the Met who didn’t keep a promise when there was respect or honor involved. Never saw a hard man who risked his own reputation to make another look bad.” She smiled to herself, eyes narrowing. “Miles Hornby exists. And he’s in this city.”

Jack shook his head, scattering raindrops from his hair. “If he’s alive, he’s going to be even harder to find than dead.”

Pete pushed a finger into his chest. “Then you’d better hope you’re as good as you say you are, hadn’t you?”

He flashed Pete his smile, the one he used on stage and in situations where something larger wanted to beat the shite out of him. “I am that, luv. Every bit as bloody good. ’S how I stayed alive for thirteen years.”

Pete opened the door back into the noise of the bar. “Good to hear. Now let’s find Hornby, because I want to go home.”