Demon Bound

Chapter Thirty-seven

Trixie watched Jack and Pete carefully when they came into the bar. Her hands worked over drinks and glasses, but her eyes stayed on him. You all right? she mouthed. Jack waved her off.

“Seems a silly thing to bargain your life over,” Pete murmured as they came to the street. “A name.”

“Not among demons,” Jack said. “Names have power—a name is the only thing that separates a demon from the ravening horde, down there in the Pit. Names given by Lucifer are Hell’s currency.”

“And souls are what, Hell’s bus token?” Pete shook her head, lip curling up. “I hate bloody demons. I hate every last one. Cold bastards.”

Jack didn’t correct her. Demons knew the value of cold bastardry better than any being in the Black. He’d taken most of his lessons in merciless self-service from demons. They were good teachers.

“I suppose I can call up some contacts,” Pete said as they walked through the night market, the tide of Patpong parting around them. “Use Ollie to get in touch with Interpol, see if Hornby’s turned up anywhere besides the grave he was supposed to be in.”

“He won’t.” Jack shuddered as the last of the good feeling the fix had brought ran out of him. Now was just roiling guts and headaches and cravings all over again. “Hornby’s too clever to get caught up by the coppers. He’s gone deep underground.”

Pete lifted a shoulder. “Faked his death? That’s never as simple as the telly makes it seem.”

“Simple enough,” Jack said. “Come to a city where the demon’s not welcome, spread around a story of a taxi accident that probably really happened, shove an anonymous gangster’s corpse in the grave in his place, and poof.” He spread his fingers. “No more lightly talented, unlucky musician with a short lifespan for the demon to find.”

Pete pulled a face. “First thing we learn in the Met—people don’t just vanish.”

“No,” Jack agreed. “Even mages.” You could get a new face and a new identity with varying degrees of magic, but to erase other people’s memories of you—that was the trick. Memories were the spine upon which the Black rested its weary flesh and blood. Memories were the only thing truly a man’s if he moved among the creatures of Faerie and Hell.

“People don’t just disappear,” Jack echoed.

“I said it,” she agreed. “Who here might know? What about that git Seth?”

Jack held up his hands. “Not Seth.” His scalpel cut was healing crookedly, puffy and red around the edges. He needed a real hospital, real stitches from a real doctor. “Seth shot his bolt,” he said. “He thinks I’ve gone over to sorcery, and I think he’s a fucking cunt. It’s safe to say we’ve reached an impasse.”

“He did try to kill you.” Pete folded her arms in such a way that Jack knew Seth would be eating through a tube if Pete had reached the scene a few seconds earlier.

“I’ll see him again someday, settle it, probably have to put the mad old man down.” Jack sighed. “Selling me out to the demon of Bangkok . . . I swear. He’s gone senile.”

“Who, then?” Pete stopped walking as her stomach rumbled. “Bloody hell, I’m starving.”

Jack realized they were near Robbie’s stall at the edge of the night market and gestured. “Oi, mate. You got anything to eat around here?”

While Robbie troubled his neighbor, a noodle cart, for two pasteboard containers heavy with spice, Jack rubbed the back of his neck. His head and his muscles ached. His arm hurt at the slash and at the injection site. Pete’s mouth twisted nervously.

“You all right?”

“Falling apart,” Jack said. “I’m discovering that I’m not as young as I once was.”

“Fuck me, I could have told you that,” Pete scoffed. Jack nudged her in the ribs.

“Oi. Watch that mouth, missy.”

“Or what?” Pete cocked her eyebrow, corners of her mouth dancing with a grin. Robbie handed her the noodles and she sucked down a mouthful with her chopsticks, watching him over her food with a hooded gaze.

“Or I might just take it into my head to show you the error of your ways,” Jack said. He was decently sure that Pete, the dedicated and driven inspector, had no idea the effect she had on men. Especially when she gave them that wicked come-hither look while smiling her arse off at their expense.

“I’d like to see you try,” she teased. Jack tasted the noodles, felt his stomach give a warning gurgle, and passed them to Pete.

“There’s a way we might find Hornby,” he said, to distract himself from sicking up all over Robbie’s stall. “It’s not pleasant or easy but it’s a pretty reliable scry if you can get past that.”

“Good.” Pete finished both portions and chucked the cartons in a bin. “When can we do it?”

Jack tilted his head, found the sound of sirens and screaming on the night air. “As soon as I find a corpse.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

The accident was a scooter accident, and the man in the street was broken nearly in half. A lorry idled nearby, the driver arguing with police. Bhat changed hands, and the police returned to their vehicle, inching away from the scene through traffic.

Crowds on the pavement pressed close. A camera flash added its punctuation mark, bleaching the dead man’s skin paper white.

The corpse collectors carried a canvas field stretcher of the type used by the Territorial Army, and they set it on the damp street. Rain water and blood mingled in the gutters, slick black flowing down into the sewer and out to the river.

Jack stepped into the street, boots splashing in the current from the rain, and approached the corpse collectors. “Oi. Speak any English?”

One of them nodded, so Jack produced his wad of bhat. “There was a bloke died earlier today, in the hospital up the road. Name of Jao. Where’d you take him?”

The man shrugged. “I didn’t pick him up. Lemme ask my friend.” After an exchange, he pointed at Jack’s money. “Give us that and you can ride along.”

Jack nodded, but pulled it back when the man reached for it. “Her, too?”

Pete made a face at the small ambulance. It was an ancient Cadillac, insignia blacked out with spray paint, the low chassis and dented fins giving it the visage of a shark. “In that? With the corpse?”

“It’s that or I give up, go home, and get to know the more intimate crevices of Hell,” Jack shrugged. Pete’s jaw twitched, but she nodded.

“All right.”

The ambulance pulled away from the accident site with a jerk that moved Jack, Pete, and the corpse to the left as if they were on strings. Pete let out a breath as the corpse’s bloody hand flopped into her lap. “Jack, when this is over I am going to shove your head so far up your arse . . .”

Jack nudged the corpse back onto the canvas sled with his boot. “Get in line, luv. I’m popular on that score.”

They rode through newly rain-washed streets, neon bouncing off the dew and refracting Bangkok into a thousand shards of glass.

The hospital was larger and newer than Jao’s lair, and Jack caught a glare from a nurse when he and Pete walked through A&E with the corpse delivery.

Morgues, as far as they went, were not Jack’s favorite places on earth, along with police stations and shops that sold a lot of glass figurines. Morgues were cold and their magic was spiky, the layer between the Black and the light world thinned by death and the dead themselves, who crowded in close as he crossed the threshold.

Jack saw ghosts, the first other than the dead GIs since he’d arrived in Bangkok. Most were still and silent, wearing their Y incisions and their last injuries like permanent black and silver tattoos. A few bore the twisting cloaks of ethereal malignancy, pain and rage spilling across the tiles from their sunken black eyes and gaping black mouths.

Jack fought against the nausea that boiled up in his guts. The fix was having its revenge.

At least the dead told him they were in the right place. Jao’s spirit would draw every scrap of dead magic within the vicinity, a necromancer’s soul an irresistible morsel.

If Jao had been a different sort of person in life, Jack might have felt a bit of pity. Then again, his arm was still throbbing and swollen, so perhaps not. Jao and Rahu and the lot of them—they could rot in their miserable little city on their corpulent, stinking river.

The corpse carriers deposited their bundle and the one who spoke English eyed Jack. “You still want to see him?”

Jack cast his eye at the tray of instruments waiting for the return of the unlucky charnel worker in the morning hours. “I want to do more than that.”

The corpse man rolled out a tray, and Jao’s milky, suffocated eyes, shot through with pink spider veins, stared up at the ceiling. The corpse man held out his hand. “I can’t just leave you alone in here, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jack shoved the last of his bhat into the corpse carrier’s hand. “I know the score, mate. Give us a moment for my trouble?”

The man nodded and he and the partner retreated with their sled. Jack pinched the sanitized plastic covering off the instrument tray and picked up the Stryker saw, the whining darling of B-horror directors everywhere.

Pete frowned. “Jack, what are you doing?”

“Something sacrilegious in nearly every way you can think of,” said Jack. “Learnt from a Stygian Brother back when they’d stolen Lawrence’s death—you want to find something, nothing homes in faster than a piece of black magician.”

Pete pressed a hand over her mouth. “Please tell me you’re speaking in terms of a vial of blood or a lock of hair.”

“Petunia, he’s dead,” Jack explained as he gave the saw an experimental rev. “And he was a nasty bugger when alive, so if you’re going to lose your supper over this of all things, go wait outside.”

Pete’s eyes narrowed. “Just because I can stand some of the things you get up to doesn’t mean I like them.”

“Fair enough.” Jack slipped on a cotton mask and a pair of goggles that pinched at the temples. He flipped the switch, and lowered the Stryker saw to Jao’s neck. The blood mist against his goggles was fine, coagulated, and nearly black. The salt-iron tang of it filled the air.

The saw faltered when it reached the spine, and Jack pressed down with all of his strength. He was rewarded when Jao’s head flopped back, nerveless, the skull thunking on the metal tray like Jack had dropped a bowling ball.

Jack looked at Pete, who had backed up against the far wall. Her pulse was pounding in her neck like a jackhammer. “Find me something to carry this in,” he said, indicating Jao’s head.

Pete moved stiffly, and got him an orange biohazard bag, which Jack in turn stuffed into a tote left behind by a morgue worker. Pete’s color hadn’t improved. “I’m going to be sick.”

“If you’re dealing with bastards, sometimes you’ve got to get dirty,” Jack said. “Be a bit of a bastard yourself.”

Pete put as much distance between herself and the bag as possible. “Jack, I don’t think I could do what you just did. Magic, fine. Demons, very well. But things like this . . . I just can’t.”

“You could, Pete.” Jack zipped the bag closed. “Just pray you never have to.”

Jao’s head was leaden, and Jack felt the tendrils of bad magic seeping into the air around him. The ghosts crowded after Jack, Pete, and Jack’s burden as he crossed the threshold back into the hospital, watching him through the swinging doors, their whispers teasing his sight until it felt like a thin needle piercing his brain.

Jack exhaled, massaging the center of his forehead. Pete eyed him. “What is it now?”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “But sometimes, I think I made the wrong bloody deal.”

“By most people’s definition, any deal with a demon is a wrong one,” Pete grumbled.

“Here it comes.” Jack shouldered the bag. “The self-righteous tongue-lashing from your spot of Catholic guilt. Go ahead, luv—I’m ready.”

“I’m not saying a word,” Pete told him, and kept her promise while they left the hospital and found a motorbike taxi. Jack told the driver, “Nearest river bridge, and hurry it up.”

Pete stayed silent while they poked inch by inch through the crush of motorbikes and cars converging on the choke point of the river’s edge. She stayed silent when Jack paid the driver with pounds sterling, and she stayed silent when he walked to the center of the pedestrian walkway and peered into the river.

“How long are you going to be in a snit?” The sewage stink of the river, mixed with salt and cooking oil, wafted up to put greasy little fingers all over his face.

Pete sniffed. “As long as I bloody well please.”

“Look.” Jack let out a sigh. The river was crowded with long boats and water taxis, but this spot looking toward the skyscrapers and away from the slums would do. “Whatever you want to say, let it out and have done. This silent treatment is for twat couples on the telly. It’s not for us.”

“Oh.” Pete’s tone bit down hard and let Jack know that his usual style of git with a bit of arsehole mixed in might have landed him in uncharted territory. “There’s an us now, is there?”

Jack stopped, his hands knotted in the plastic wrapped around Jao’s head, and shut his eyes. “Pete, what do you want me to say? Want me to run into the street and declare me love? Burst into song? I don’t know what we’ve got any more than you do.”

“If I have to tell you what we’ve got, Jack, then fuck it anyway. It’s not bloody worth it.” Pete paced away a few steps and leaned on the railing. “Never was.”

Jack set Jao’s head back in the bag. “You think I don’t know, Pete?” He stood up, went to her, grabbed her arm. His hand slipped against her sweat. “That I’ve been stupid and reckless and deserve what I’ve got coming because I’m a coward and a liar? You think it doesn’t follow me like shadow wherever I walk on this earth?” His fingers pressed down, and they would bruise, but Jack couldn’t stop himself. He’d frayed, and worn, and now he’d broken. “Tell me, Pete. Tell me what exactly you don’t understand about my wasted, wrecked existence, because from where I’m standing it’s not that fucking complicated.”

Her eyes filled but her fist came up, thumped against his chest like a second heartbeat, over and over. “How you could do it!” she shouted. “How you could do it when you’re Jack Winter!” She slumped against him, her fist unclenching. They’d traded bruises, now. Stood square and equal. Pete gave one shuddering breath and drew herself upright. “You’re not supposed to be the one with scars, Jack,” she whispered. “Because if you can be broken, that means I have to pick up the pieces, and it terrifies me, knowing what I know now, to think you won’t be there beside me someday soon.”

Jack conjured a smile. Pete didn’t need to see the dark, twisted, terrified mess inside his chest. She needed to see his armor, the Jack she’d met a dozen years ago. “They haven’t got me yet, luv. And if this goes right, they won’t.” He passed the backs of his knuckles down her cheek. They came away warm, wet, and salty.

Pete looked down, sniffed like she hadn’t let the tears come at all. “You promise me?”

“Promise,” Jack said. And he meant it, for fuck-all a promise from him was worth. For Pete, he’d kick and fight and bare his teeth until the demon dragged him into Hell with claws in his hide. “Now, I need to concentrate on scrying, so what say we kiss and make up?”

Pete choked a laugh. “Because nothing’s romantic as a head in a plastic wrapper. You sweep me of my feet, Jack Winter. Truly.”

He dipped his head and planted a light brush of lips on her forehead. “I do me best.”

Jao’s head still stared at him bug-eyed when he unwrapped it, lips swollen and tongue threatening to pop out from the mouth. Jack forced the jaws open with his finger and dug in his bag for herbs. He stuffed in his scrying mediums, a flat black stone, a twist of feather, and a clump of sage. He gathered Jao’s hair in a clump, attaching a length of linen string in a hardy knot.

Jack cradled the head in his arms and stepped up on the rail, toes hanging into space, black water flowing under his feet like the tide of souls into the Bleak Gates.

He held the head out in front of him like a rugby ball, wrapping the string around his knuckles. He lowered the thing by degrees, until it dangled a few meters above the water, and the feedback of black magic traveled up his arms and across his skin, burrowing deep.

“Someone’s going to see us,” Pete warned.

Jack rocked against the weight of the head, and the heady rush of energy all through his nerves. “’Course they will. However, I wager no one’s going to bother the crazy farang and his severed head.”

Pete made a face, like she’d report him to the coppers herself if she had a choice. “Just be quick. That head is absolutely creepy.”

The string in his fist gave a twitch, and Jack held up his free hand to Pete. “Hush.”

Scrying wasn’t like summoning or exorcism. It was a quiet art, precise and delicate, requiring a steady hand and a steadier mind to keep the sharp pinpoint of focus on whatever it was you sought. Mages used ink, mirrors, or plain stone pendulums to find nearly anything. White witches stared at crystals and sorcerers used the writhing, sticky energy of necromancy to scry with human bodies.

Mages could find ghosts, missing things, lost people, but to find a human being who wanted to stay hidden and cemented their chances with magic—that was the realm of the darker arts.

The head moved. It swayed back and forth in a parabolic arc above the river water. Water, the great current that bound the spirit world and the light one, channeling the sorcerous energy into Jack’s search.

Jack said, “Miles Hornby.”

The head came to a stop at an angle, rigid, white eyes staring north. They rolled back toward Jack.

He felt the magic squirm from his grasp, winding down the string to take up residence in Jao’s skull. Jack’s skin crawled, like it was trying to separate from his flesh and bone.

The sorcery spoke, in a voice that was older than bone and more wicked than any demon. It filled Jack up until it spilled over, and as he watched the head’s jaws began to work, the swollen tongue flopping with the effort needed to form a word.

Jack’s stomach and his balance lurched as the scrying spell gripped him, and he strained to hear the worlds borne on the spell. For a moment, there was only the rushing water and the hiss of the long boats poling underneath the bridge, and then his arm jerked as the spell snapped home.

“Kâo Făn Wat,” the head gasped, and then the string broke and the thing plunged into the river with a splash, disappearing beneath the dark and oily waves.

Jack let go of the string, felt it slip through his fingers and follow the spell down into the depths. The long boats passing by paid no notice to the slowly dying pool of ripples on the river. They paid even less attention to one lone white nutter standing on the rail.

Pete grabbed him when he swayed, and Jack jumped down. The heroin had left behind a feeling of being hollow on the inside, a carapace around a dusty left-behind set of innards, owner long since moved on.

“So?” She let go of him quickly and put an arm’s length between their bodies. They may have made up the fight but he wasn’t forgiven.

“Kâo Făn Wat,” Jack said. “Whatever that means.”

“A wat is a temple,” Pete said. “Learnt that from Tomb Raider. What direction?”

Jack pointed to where the head had come to rest. “That way. Never heard of Kâo Făn Wat. No idea what it is.”

Pete grimaced. “Fantastic. Now what do we do?”

Jack sighed, the feeling of inevitability clenching at his stomach, forcing him to step out to the road and hail a motor taxi. “Now we go and ask someone who does.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

“I have to say, I would have laid a bet that you wouldn’t come back here.” Rahu smiled at Jack, at Pete. Outside, the nighttime smells and sounds of Khlong Toei rose and fell and tantalized, thick and dreamy.

“Not by choice, mate.” Jack fought the urge to remove the smirk from Rahu’s face. Not that he could manage it, but the effort would be cathartic.

“Seth McBride is in the hospital,” Rahu said. “It seems someone fractured his skull.”

“Good,” Pete shot back. “Never met anyone who deserved it more.”

Rahu clucked. “Out of respect for your mistress, Weir, I’ll let it pass. But don’t think I’ll turn my head a second time.”

“The crow woman? She’s not mine.” Pete snorted. “Talk to Jack.”

Jack stepped in, closer to Bangkok’s demon than he would have strictly cared for. He only moved so close to show that after the last time, he wasn’t afraid. “Kâo Făn Wat. Hornby’s hidden out there.”

“And this concerns me how?” The night was wet and warm as saliva on skin, but Rahu neither sweated nor for-went his all-black head-to-toe getup. Jack had learned long ago that you didn’t trust things that didn’t sweat.

“You want me gone, you tell me where he is,” Jack said. “Simple. You want me to hang about, bothering your nec-romancers and your arse-boys like Seth, getting drunk, pissing in your gutters, and generally making a great fat nuisance of meself, then by all means. Pull the other one.”

“Kâo Făn Wat is the Temple in Dreaming,” said Rahu. “And I can’t tell you where it is, mage, because no one knows. No one who knows the location of Kâo Făn Wat has lived in the last five hundred years.”

“I’m not mistaken,” Jack growled. “I scryed for Hornby. I asked the Black.”

“Then perhaps you’ve forgotten that the Black can lie and deceive,” said Rahu. “Just as a treacherous mage can.”

“Fine,” Jack said. “What can you tell me? Or are you useless, like all the other pit-spawned wankers I’ve come up against?”

“Jack, I’m surprised at you.” Rahu beamed. “After what Kartimukha saw in your head, insulting a demon is the last thing you want to play at.”

“I swear,” Jack said, and felt witchfire grow around him like a blue cloud, “I’ll burn this rathole slum to the ground to get what I want.”

Rahu sighed. “Threats are the last refuge of the weak and fearful, Jack. You should know that, too.” He twitched his cuffs straight. “Now, I’m very busy. Have a pleasant evening, Jack.”

“I’ll make a deal.” Jack’s voice came out too loud, rattling the Buddhas and the faded paper sutras that suffocated Rahu’s temple. Pete knocked him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Jack! For Christ’s sake, enough already!”

Rahu, for his part, tilted his head back to gaze at Jack. “You have nothing to deal with, Jack. You’re a scrap that’s already been picked over.”

“You tell me where to find Hornby, and my demon is gone,” Jack said. “The demon who sent you here. I’ll trick him out of my bargain and he’ll fall from favor in Hell. You can go home.”

Rahu shut his eyes. His nostrils flared and a smile played on his lips. “Home, yes. If I thought you could do it, Jack, I’d help you within the beat of my heart.” Rahu opened his eyes. “But you can’t. You’re a rare breed, mage, but you’re not a messiah for the likes of demonkind.”

“I’ll do it,” Jack said softly, “or I’ll die.” Wind came through the open sides of the temple, swirling a cloud of candle-flame shadow and incense. Pete watched him, her eyebrows drawn together. Jack watched Rahu, the demon’s unmoving face like wax in the low light.

“I have not been home in a very long time,” Rahu whispered.

Jack looked at his boots. The exposed steel shone like something precious. “Neither have I, mate.”

Rahu blinked, decision made. “The Kâo Făn Wat supposedly lies in the jungle north of the city. The last to see it were a company of soldiers during the Vietnam War. They disappeared to a man.”

“There, now,” Jack said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Rahu showed his teeth. “Good-bye, Jack Winter. Go and find your way home.”

Chapter Forty

“What’s a Kartimukha?” Pete said, when they’d sat for an hour in silence on hard plastic seats that stuck to the back of Jack’s pants, the train from Bangkok rattling them north. The closest village to Kâo Făn Wat that Pete had been able to find on a map was Grà-jòk Baang, and their tickets, stamped in bleeding ink, held that as a destination.

“Rahu’s pet.” Jack shuddered. “It eats your memories. Picks them over like bones.”

Pete watched him as the train chugged slowly through the city outskirts, pity in her gaze. “What did it take from you?” she said softly.

Jack leaned his forehead against the glass. Bangkok sprawled for miles, a great slumbering organism of light and wire and tumbledown tenement flats. “When Seth offered to instruct me in the Fiach Dubh, I was young. Stupid. I thought I knew better.”

“And?” Pete’s voice held none of the edge she’d had earlier, but she wrapped her arms around herself, like you would at a scary movie.

“I stole something of his, and I got myself into an arseload of trouble,” Jack said. The soft vellum pages of the demon-ology book had crinkled under his fingers like skin. “I ended up in a hotel room in Dublin, tormented by the dead.” Jack scratched at his scar. “I cut my wrists to get away and it wasn’t until I’d almost bled to death that I saw my fate. I’d become one of them—the ghost who saw ghosts.” He shrugged. “Seth tracked me down and I got stitched up. I went home, I learned how not to be a precocious git on my own, and there’s nothing more to talk about.”

A warm, dry touch joined his own and Jack looked over to see Pete tracing the faint old scars under his fresher tracks with a slow, almost reverent touch. “I never knew.”

“It’s not something I shout from the rooftops, luv. It takes a special kind of stupid cunt to top himself.”

She moved her hand into his and shut her eyes, leaning her head on his shoulder. “That’s right it does. Wake me when we get to this stronghold of mysticism. I’m knackered.”

Jack let himself relax a bit, on this moving iron snake, but he didn’t let himself sleep. To sleep now would just invite dreams, screaming nightmares of the deaths that had nearly been his own, and what waited for him when the one with his name finally came to roost.

He watched the lights of the city wink out one by one, the beast shutting its thousand eyes as the train rolled on through the night.

Chapter Forty-one

When Jack woke, dawn had unfolded over the world. Pete nudged him. “It seems we’ve arrived.”

Jack pulled himself to his feet and grabbed his kit, seeing a snatch of gray, cracked train platform sprouting out of a swath of intractable jungle. “Grà-jòk Baang. Somehow I pictured it as being more . . . alive.”

He followed Pete from the car, down the steps onto the platform. The conductor slammed the door and the train whistle hooted as soon as his feet touched concrete.

In a matter of a few moments, they were alone, the train only daytime thunder in the distance.

The heat in the jungle was worse than the city, contained and damp as the canopy closed in air weighted with decaying leaf mold and orchids. A dirt track led away from the train platform and a pocket-sized station house with boarded-over windows. Jack saw curls of smoke and the faint sheen of hazy sun off tin rooftops.

“There’s the village,” he said. “We can ask about the temple.”

“Of course,” Pete muttered. “Because two foreigners walking into a shady village has never ended badly in any of the Indiana Jones films . . .”

They walked down the track in silence, Jack feeling the heat crawl across his skin. The air was thick and it hummed with the same wild magic as the Dartmoor, undercut with sorcery that brushed against his face like sticky fingerprints.

Jack didn’t walk willingly into situations where he knew he was properly fucked. That was for white knights, and he was no kind of knight—white, black, or any other shade.

Pete trailed Jack by a few feet, eyes twitching nervously from trees to path to the hunched shape of the huts ahead. Jack slowed so they walked side by side.

“You hear it?” he asked after a moment. Pete shook her head.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Nothing,” Jack agreed. Sweat coursed down his neck, rivulets meeting and mating to become rivers. “No birds. No beasts.”

Pete pointed her chin toward the village. “No people.”

Jack’s boots squelched in the mud track as they reached the village outskirts. There were no animals in the pens made of corrugated tin and mesh, no smoke rising from the crooked chimneys that poked among the shacks like a cluster of broken finger bones.

Pete cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hello!” Her voice bounced back, but no one replied.

The village square was populated with footprints, sodden newspaper, and one half-deflated soccer ball. An enterprising soul had staked out tarps to collect water, and cloudy clusters of mosquito eggs drifted across the surface.

Jack had already turned to go back to the train platform and call Kâo Făn Wat another dead end when he saw the crows.

The crows sat in a straight line on the sagging telephone wire, eyes unblinking, wings unruffled. They stared at Jack, and he stared in return.

Three black bodies, three sets of feathers gleaming in the hazed-over sun. After two heartbeats the crow on the right turned his head, met Jack’s eye with one made from a bead of black lava glass. The fetch and the mage stared at one another for a few slow, hot breaths.

“Jack.” Pete’s voice floated to him from far off, but the tone was flat and hard as a tombstone. “Jack. You need to see this.”

She stood in the doorway of the largest shack at the square’s edge, a rusty Quonset hut with the markings of the American military thirty years past. Pete was pale, and the sweat on her skin stood out like crystals.

Jack didn’t ask what was inside the hut. The sweet, weighty scent of rotten orchids rolling out from the narrow door answered him. Still, he came to Pete’s shoulder and he looked inside.

The bodies were one or two high, three in the corners. Flies were thicker than air under the arch of the roof. The dirt floor had become mud, darkened with sticky blood that refused to dry in the heat.

Under cover, the smell became a presence, a physical hand that shoved its fingers down Jack’s throat and coated his tongue with sticky offal.

“There’s got to be thirty people here,” Pete said. She clapped a bandanna over her face and pressed a canister from her overnight bag into Jack’s hand. He looked at it. “Makeup remover?”

“Under your nose,” Pete said. “Trust me.”

Jack dabbed the pink cream under his nose and the sharp scent of toner and artificial strawberries cut the cloud of decay. “Thirty people,” he agreed, as Pete clicked on her pen light and flashed it over the corpses. The blank smiles of cut throats stared up at Jack.

“Thirty-three.” The voice spoke from behind him, from the outside, and Jack spun. His heart jumped against his bones, a betrayal that he knew had escalated to his face when the figure smiled.

“You’re here to kill me, you’ll end up like the rest.”

The dark hair, gravelly voice, and stained Radiohead shirt told Jack all he needed to know. “Miles Hornby.”

Hornby ran his hand through his lank mass of brown hair. “I knew they’d send someone with his head pulled out of his ass next time, but I didn’t know it would be Jack Winter.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Heard a lot about you, man.”

“Likewise.” Hornby was taller and wider than Jack himself, but he had a slithering, fey quality to his features that put Jack in mind of a predatory animal skulking through brush.

“You’ve left a very unhappy demon behind in England, mate,” Jack told him. “But I think you know that.”

Hornby instead looked at Pete. “Didn’t expect you.” He held out his hand. “You shouldn’t have to see this. Wait outside, will you? Your boyfriend and I will be over in a minute.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said. “That shirt of yours is the most frightening thing in this hut.”

Hornby’s jaw twitched. “Aren’t you the little pistol.”

“Oi.” Jack put himself between Hornby and Pete. “You don’t talk to her. You talk to me.”

Hornby took a step toward Jack. He was unique in that—most backed away, and still more simply ran when they confronted him. “I’m not going back,” Hornby said.

“Oh?” Jack popped the knuckles in his right hand. They’d separated long ago, at eighteen or nineteen, a club brawl that he could have avoided, or at least won, if he’d been less pissed or less of an arrogant little sod. “I beg to differ, Miles. I think you’re coming with us. And I think you’re going to do it with a smile on your fucking face.”

“You haven’t even asked about the dead bodies,” Miles mused. “Only care about me. Makes you a sick man, Jack. Priorities all screwy.” Underneath the scent of decay and the heat, Jack felt another sensation rise. Older, wickeder. The thrilling pull of black magic.

“You know what did this to them?” Jack jerked his thumb at the corpses. “That’s wonderful. Really fantastic. You can have a cry about it on the plane ride home.”

“Of course I know,” Hornby said. “It was me.”

Pete touched Jack on the wrist. “Maybe we should reconsider this . . .”

Jack didn’t take his eyes off Hornby. It was a gunfight now, as the other man’s magic rose, an ambush he’d walked into. Hornby was playing at the dark arts and Jack hadn’t been ready. “I beg your pardon?”

“The demon sent vargr to take me back,” Hornby said. “So I killed them. Didn’t like it, but there you go.”

Pete leaned toward Jack. “Vargr?” she murmured.

“Hellhounds,” Jack said. “Demon’s scent dogs.” The vargr were shadow, formless, but Jack saw the twisted faces of the villagers, the long black teeth and claws that had begun to grow and usurp their human forms.

“They possessed the village,” Hornby said. “It was them or me and I chose myself.”

Jack shook his head. “Thirty-three people. Cross and crow, you’re cracked. Too much time in the sun.”

“What I am is not going back to England,” Hornby said. “I don’t want to hurt you, Winter, but I will.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Pete said. “You really think you can cheat a demon and get away with it?” Jack wasn’t sure who the question was directed at.

Hornby considered. “Yes.”

“All right, all right.” Jack held up his hands. “I’ll make you an offer—you tell me how you cheated the demon and I won’t drag you out of here with your weaselly little head shoved up your arse.”

Hornby let out a small, hysterical laugh. “You think you scare me, Winter? I told you, I’d heard of you. Maybe twenty years ago you were something, but you’ve lost your step. Got on some bad drugs and some badder company and now you’re just another sad old bastard grasping for the glory days.”

“Right, that’s it.” Jack pulled energy to him, prepared the word of power for a hex. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Jack!” Pete snatched his arm down. “For God’s sake.”

“He listens to you?” Hornby shifted from foot to foot. “Good thing. Tell him I’m not going back, and that if he tries that again I’m going to make him number thirty-four on the pile, okay?”

“Sorry.” Pete’s smile narrowed into something unpleasant. “I’m rather fond of Jack, and I think that if you’ve really got this miracle cure-all for demons, you’d better turn it over, or I’ll kill you.”

Hornby sighed. He wasn’t more than twenty-five or -six but his skin sagged under his eyes and the pale cast of his skin even in the tropics gave the impression of him being sickly, wasting away from the inside out. “I really don’t want to keep doing this, but if it’s the only way he’ll leave me alone . . .” His hand came up, joints knobby from playing guitar spreading in the half-moon of the hex.

Jack didn’t stop to think, to calculate his odds of advance and retreat. He threw his weight between Pete and Hornby, yanking a hex from the well of power inside him. Drawing only on yourself hurt, hurt like peeling your skin off with a dull, hot razor. The hex shimmered, wavered, held as a black tide rushed outward from Hornby’s fingertips.

The jolt of magic knocked Jack on his arse, the mud splashing up to coat him in a gummy mix of dirt and blood. The corpses he landed against gave like deflated rubber rafts, and the smell choked him again.

Jack made it to his knees, wheezing and retching, before Hornby stepped closer and kicked him in the gut, hard and precise, with one trainer-encased foot. Jack’s air went out of him, along with the bile in his stomach. His tongue burned, and he gagged, trying to draw in air.

Pete launched herself at Hornby, putting her full weight into the maneuver. Hornby spun halfway around, staggered, cuffed Pete on the side of the head. “I said to stop! I don’t want to hurt you!” He hit her again, and Pete sat down in the mud next to Jack. Hornby shook out his hand. “Gods. You’d think someone as talented as you’re supposed to be could do more than smack me around, Winter.” Hornby prodded the spot where Pete had hit him. “But then again, what do I know?”

Jack grabbed for Pete when she tucked her legs under her to go at Hornby again. “Not this way. Stay down.” He kept the grip, felt the well of Weir power fall away beneath him. The breathless, weightless feeling of falling into the Black, cut with the heat of the wild magic of the jungle around him. He didn’t think or fret over what touching the Weir could do to him, he just let the hex spill forth.

“Aithinne,” Jack rasped. The second hex he’d learned. The strategy in any mage’s duel was the same: block a spell and then fling one back hard as you could.

Except when the bastard across from you bounced the hex off his protection magic and sent a jet of wild magic-fueled fire bouncing around the shed.

“Shit!” Jack exclaimed, as the clothing of the nearest corpse caught on fire. “Pete, move your arse!” He bolted for the door, and Hornby turned tail as well, the three of them spilling out into the abandoned village square.

Hornby panted, swatting at the soot on his clothes as the fire consumed the hut and the bodies inside. “Fuck, man. You’re strong.”

“And you’re clever,” Jack told him. “The demon was right.” As Hornby gasped, Jack closed the distance between them and put a fist into the younger man’s nose. “But you’re not that clever.”

Hornby yelped and went down, mud splashing up around him. Jack pulled his magic back under his control, and aimed a paralysis hex at Hornby. “Sioctha.”

The mage jerked, veins throbbing at his temples, but his body was rigid as a board. Jack crouched next to him. “Let’s try this once more: I’m Jack Winter, I’m the worst thing your skinny arse has ever clapped eyes on, and you’re going to tell me how you cheated the demon before I do something more than make your legs not work.”

“This village,” Hornby gasped. “This village is in the shadow of the wat. They massacred the villagers during Vietnam. Thought I was safe here. Ghosts and feedback from the massacre . . . like a radio jammer . . .”

Jack clapped his hands above Hornby’s face. “Oi. Not wanting your life story, mate. Just tell me how you did it.”

Hornby let out a misery-laden sigh, and then his eyes rolled back into his head. “Fuck it,” Jack muttered. Pete came and crouched beside him.

“He dead?”

Jack jammed his fingers against Hornby’s neck. “No. Just a coward for pain.” He stood, leaving Pete with Hornby. “Watch him. If he wakes up, give him another tap on the gob.”

Jack prowled through the small houses around the square. Most were covered in layers of dust and mold that spread like fans along the walls, flies and maggots thick on spoiled food left sitting when the vargr took over the residents. Only one house showed any signs of recent occupation. The bed was rumpled, the sheet stained with sweat. Water dripped from a rusty pump in the kitchen in time with Jack’s heartbeat.

He walked back to Hornby and grabbed him by the shirt. “Help me,” he said to Pete. She took Hornby’s other side and they dragged his dead weight into the house, where Jack dumped him unceremoniously on the bed, found a length of cord, and tied Hornby up like a kidnapped teenager in a sex dungeon. For good measure, he stuffed the muddy kerchief from his pocket into Hornby’s mouth.

“Now what?” Pete said, fanning herself with an ancient, wrinkled copy of Rolling Stone printed in Thai.

Jack sat on the single chair in the tiny room, across from Hornby, and stared intently at the other man. Sleeping, he looked like any hapless washed-up musician, in want of a shave, a shower, and a recording contract. Jack thought it was a good thing he knew better.

“We wait,” he said. “And when Sleeping Beauty here sees fit to stir, we make him talk.”

Chapter Forty-two

Night came to the world again before Hornby did anything but twitch and snore on the mattress. Jack had exhausted his supply of both fags and patience.

“Welcome back,” Jack said when Hornby stirred. “You have a pleasant nap, Princess?”

Hornby bucked, struggling like a trussed pig. “Let me go.”

Jack grinned at him. “Tell me how you cheated the demon.”

“Fuck you!” Hornby shouted, loud enough to echo through the village square.

“All right then,” Jack said, standing. “We’ll be off to catch the last train. Pete, remind me how long a body can stand being without water?”

“Thirty-six hours,” she said promptly, from where she leaned against the sill of the open window.

“Thirty-six hours,” Jack murmured. “Less, in this heat. Lose water like a sieve in this country, me. It’s a trial for skinny blokes like us.”

Hornby snorted. “Go ahead and leave me. I’ll just be-spell the knots.”

“Ahead of you on that score,” Jack said. “I already be-spelled them. To stay tied.” He’d done no such thing—a spell like that would have taken supplies and time—but Hornby didn’t know. Jack crouched, taking Hornby by the chin. “Face it, Miles—you may be a hard lad, but I’m older and I’ve had more time to learn how to be a dirty low-down bastard.”

“Just go,” Hornby groaned. “Every minute you’re here, he’s closer to finding me.”

“Should have thought of that before you made the deal,” Jack said, picking up his kit and starting for the door. He fully intended to follow through on his threat if Hornby didn’t cooperate. Jack would be fucked, then, and Hornby might loose the knots in time to survive. Or he might not. Jack would be in Hell either way.

“My sister had lukemia,” Hornby muttered when Jack and Pete reached the door. “My baby sister. I promised to keep her safe and they tell me she has two months to live.”

“So you bargained with the demon,” Jack said. “Not the first sob story I’ve heard, mate.”

“I never did a black magic spell in my life, I never even dabbled in scrying or cursing, until I made the deal.” Hornby sighed. “I used to be a decent guy.”

Jack sighed, grabbed up a kitchen knife, and went back to the bed. “Miles, mate. Take it from me, we all used to be decent sorts.” He sliced Hornby’s ropes and sat him up. “No adorable little curses, now. Just tell me how you got out, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Tell me what you did it for, first,” Hornby insisted. “Because somehow I don’t see you sacrificing your soul for a poor dying kid. Was it for fame? Sex?”

“Mine was for being a fuckwit,” Jack said shortly. “Which is exactly the same as you. Dress it up how you like, but we’re both here because we made a shit choice.”

Hornby shut his eyes, slumping back into the mattress like a puppet. “Suppose I did.”

Jack wasn’t sure whether Hornby moved or whether he merely lashed out with magic and sent Jack sprawling, but he came up with an oblong black shape from under the mattress. “The difference between you and me is,” Hornby said, “I can fix my choice.”

Jack called a shield hex, not fast enough. Hornby swung the gun to bear on Jack, causing Jack to scrabble backward. Hornby didn’t shoot, though. He snapped the pistol up, tucking the barrel under his chin.

“I told you I’m not going back.”

“Miles,” Pete said at the same time. “Don’t do that . . .”

“Don’t be a wanker,” Jack supplied, their voices blending and tripping over one another like tangled strings.

“I will never be free,” Hornby murmured. “I ran but it will find me. I know why I went to it in the first place and you’re right—shitty choice, shitty result.” Hornby met his eyes. “The difference between you and me is that I’m done running.” Hornby sighed, and Jack saw his shoulders relax, all of the tension and fear trickle from his body.

“Miles,” he started. “You stupid fuck . . .”

“And I take back what I said before, Winter,” Hornby told him. “You’re still pretty good. But I’m done now.”

Jack made it a single step before Miles squeezed the trigger, and the gunshot echoed and rolled back from the buildings around the square. In the jungle, birds and creatures took flight with a cacophony of screeching and warbling.

Hornby’s body hit the floor, landing faceup. The gun thumped on the sisal matting next to him. Pete let out a small scream that blended with the jungle birds.

In Jack’s moment of paralysis, a shadow bent over Hornby. Not the same shadow that had come to him thirteen years ago, not the crow woman. Not the demon, either. This shadow had a lion’s mane, teeth, and a twisted body that bled and flowed indistinctly when Jack tried to look at it.

“Don’t . . . ,” Jack croaked, but there was nothing he could do aside from protest. The demon of Bangkok had a new soul. The demon who owned Jack’s had lost it.

And then the sound faded and the world sped up again and Jack realized he was shouting, wordlessly, and that the floor was pitching beneath him as dizziness and nausea and the realization that he, too, had lost came.

Jack followed Hornby down, down to his knees. “You stupid bastard,” he whispered. “You ruddy, stupid bastard. What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

Chapter Forty-two

The hospital ceiling had gone yellow, acoustic tiles stained with the familiar tinge of nicotine. Taped above his bed, a curled-up poster sporting a monkey would, were it in English, have encouraged him to Hang in there!

Jack groaned and pulled the hard foam pillow over his face. It smelled of bleach and the rough casing tickled his nose.

“You’re awake.” Pete herself looked barely that. She was curled in the plastic chair next to his bed, the black circles under her eyes speaking to days, if not weeks, of nights spent in the same place.

“After a fashion.” Jack cast the pillow aside. Sound came back, the chatter of busy people outside the door of his room, the whoop of sirens from outside the walls, the hum and rattle of an overworked air conditioner blocking most of his window. Jack tilted his face toward it and let it dry his sweat. “Fuck me standing up, that’s nice.”

“Brought you in after Hornby killed himself,” Pete said. “You were a bit shocky. That cut of yours was infected with god knows what. Doctor said it’s a miracle you didn’t lose your arm.”

Jack felt himself over. He wasn’t tied down, so he hadn’t been raving crazy when he came in. There was an IV, and the pleasant cotton-wool feeling of sedatives. Jack laughed. “You didn’t tell ’em I’m a smack addict?”

“In this country?” Pete rolled her eyes. “The very last thing I need at this moment is to spring you from some Thai prison, Jack.”

Jack tried to sit up and the wallowing dizziness from the painkillers put him back down. Pete came to his side, laying the back of her hand against his forehead.

“You all right?”

“No,” Jack muttered. “I’m about seven shades of not right at the moment, luv.”

Pete got him a cup of water and a straw and stuck it between his lips. “You’re dehydrated, too. Drink.”

Jack obeyed, because even dubious city water seemed sweet at the moment, and when he’d emptied the pink plastic cup he sank back against the pillow, which gave not a whit. “Hornby’s dead, Pete.”

“I was there, Jack.” Pete settled herself back in her chair. “Precious little to be done. We’ve got a flight home as soon as the infection is out of your system. I didn’t think you wanted to be around when police started asking questions about the dead farang.”

“Hornby did the right thing,” Jack said. “He knew what he was in for and he topped himself. He made sure his soul stayed here. That’s the proper thing to do.”

“Christ, you do say stupid things when you’re on drugs,” Pete said archly. Jack waved his hand. The IV needle scraped against the underside of his skin.

In Jack’s mind, Hornby put his finger in the trigger of the gun and squeezed.

Why had a mage had a gun, anyway? Didn’t he know they were for amateurs?

Stupid sod.

Jack pushed back the itchy coverlet and swung his bare feet to the floor. They stuck to it, and he fished under the bed. “Where are me boots?”

“Jack, don’t be stupid. You need to stay in that bed,” Pete said. She rose, but Jack yanked out his IV needle before she could summon a nurse.

“I need to go home,” he said. “My time’s almost up, Pete. It’ll go badly if the demon thinks I’m trying to do a runner like Miles.”

“Jack . . .” Pete caught him as he swayed. Standing up too fast on downers was like pouring all of the blood out of your head.

“I don’t want to think about what I’m doing and I don’t want a lecture, because I know it’s low and I know it’s fucking weak,” Jack said. “But I haven’t got a better idea, so I’m getting out of this fucking hospital and doing what I must.”

He found his boots, yanked them on with difficulty. He couldn’t begin to manage the laces, so he let the tongues flop free. He was halfway down the corridor when Pete caught up with him.

“Jack, wait!”

“Not changing my mind, Pete,” he said. “You can argue if you like.”

Pete shoved a plastic shopping back into his hands. “You forgot your jacket and your kit, idiot. I think you might need them if you’re intending to challenge this demon of yours.”

“Cheers.” Jack slowed, subdued. “Pete, you don’t have to come with me, you know.”

She sighed, brushing past him to the nurse’s station. “Him. The stupid bloody farang. He needs to sign out.”

After their business with the hospital was complete, Pete walked with him to the street outside, where she hailed a motor taxi. “Let’s get one thing straight, Jack: I’m here until the end. One way or the other, I’ll be with you. So the next time you suggest I might want to preserve my delicate sensibilities, I’m going to punch you right in the gob. Clear?”

“Crystal,” Jack said as he opened the taxi door. The demon waited for him in England. Hornby’s soul was planted here, sure as the stones that paved the bones of Bangkok. His innocent’s soul, which had made his shit deal for the right reasons and not out of paralyzing fear.

Jack wasn’t sure which he regretted more.

Chapter Forty-three

England rose up to meet the jetliner gray and lacy with mist, the kind of silver-green day that poets scribbled about and tourists lost their wits over.

Jack could have gone down and kissed the oily tarmac of Heathrow when the plane touched down, but the chill in his chest wouldn’t allow him that much happiness.

He’d tried to cheat the demon. And he’d lost. He’d doomed Miles Hornby to his time in Hell and himself to go toe-to-toe with the demon.

Pete sat beside him, but silent on the Heathrow express into Paddington. She’d stopped looking at him by the time they boarded the Hammersmith & City Line back to his flat.

Pete thought he was going to die.

Jack didn’t know that she was wrong.

The tube rattled on its way and Jack mounted the steps, past the street market selling hijab and knockoff purses and kebab, past the White Hart pub, the closed-down shop fronts and shady money-changing kiosks, through the ebb and flow of the dark energy of the only place he’d ever really called home.

The demon was waiting for them when they stepped through Jack’s front door.

“Look at you,” it purred. “Home safe and sound, tanned and rested.” It rubbed the fingers and thumb of its left hand together. “I trust you brought me what I need, Jackie boy.”

Pete fetched up against his shoulder, propelling Jack into the flat. His protection hexes hung in useless tatters from the demon’s passage.

“This is him?” Pete said. Her fists curled into small knots of knuckle and bone.

“It,” Jack said. “Not him, no matter what it chose to make itself look like.”

The demon ticked its tongue against its teeth. “I’ll ask again, Jack—where’s my soul?”

Jack ignored the feeling that the floorboards had dropped away from him, ignored that his heart was thudding so loudly it nearly drowned out his own voice. “Did you check the last place you had it? Or—hold up—behind the sofa?”

The demon cocked its head, and Jack was on his knees. Blink, crash, pain. Jack’s air rushed out of him, but he didn’t make any sound. Didn’t let the demon know that it hurt. That was the first thing you learned—never show them that it hurt.

“Where. Is. My. Soul?” The demon knelt and put a finger under Jack’s chin. He felt the nail sink in, and a trickle of blood work its way into the hollow of his throat.

Pete’s shadow fell over them both. “Let him go.”

The demon’s black pits of eyes flicked away from Jack, looked to Pete, and came back to rest. Tiny flames danced in their recesses. “Got a better offer for me, my dear?” He licked his lips. “You offered yourself to Treadwell. You nearly died. Won’t be a near miss with me, I promise you.”

“Pete,” Jack managed. “This isn’t your problem, luv. Get out of here.”

“No,” she said. “It can’t have you.”

The demon’s lip curled back. “If she keeps sassing me, Winter, she’s going to be joining your arse in the Pit. Am I quite clear?”

Pete grabbed Jack’s arm, clung to him, and for once her power didn’t stir him up. The demon’s cold, inhuman, lizard-brained magic curled back from the onslaught of the Weir, and Jack’s sight quieted.

“You can’t have her,” he echoed Pete. The demon laughed.

“I don’t need her, Winter. I’ve got you.”

“No.” Jack raised himself up from the floor with Pete’s help. The demon’s nail scraped across his jaw as he yanked away. “You don’t have me, either.”

The demon stopped smiling. “What are you saying to me, boy?”

Jack shook off the pain of the demon’s magic, made himself stand straight. “Your fucking soul is in Hell, one of Rahu’s charges. He had the right idea—shot himself in the face. You wanted Hornby, that’s where Hornby’s gone to. He didn’t cheat death in the end but he cheated you, right enough.”

The demon’s eyes flamed to twin points. “This is not what we agreed on, Winter.”

“It’s not,” Jack said wearily. “But it’s what you’re getting. You want him, you go and tangle with Rahu. I find myself curiously unmotivated to do anything else you ask.”

He crossed his arms and waited for the demon to absorb the fact that his prize soul had slipped away.

The demon lifted a shoulder. “Ah, well.”

Pete shot Jack a glance. He bored his gaze into the demon. “Well? What?”

“Dead, isn’t he?” the demon said. “Old Rahu is a bitter sod, but I’m sure I can find something he wants for one marginally talented musician who sold himself out of noble selflessness. Fuck me, it’s so boring when they do it for altruism.” It grinned at Jack, as if they shared a secret. “I told you that no one cheats me, Jack.”

“You did,” Jack agreed, trying to ignore the sickness in his throat. The crow landed on his sill, stared in at the proceedings. It opened its beak silently, bared it at the demon.

“Can’t say it hasn’t been fun, Jack,” the demon intoned. “I’ll be seeing you in, oh, about thirty-six hours, yes? Three-thirty p.m. on the day.”

“Not so fast,” Jack snarled. His shakes had started again, withdrawal or simple fatigue he couldn’t tell, but the thing he knew for sure was that this time, it wasn’t fear.

“I think you owe me something,” he told the demon. “We made this bargain for your name.”

“And the bargain was for a whole soul, not a scrap I have to wrestle away from another member of the pack,” the demon said. “I was quite clear. Too bad, Jack. You failed. I’ll see you soon.”

The demon opened the door of the flat, began to exit. Pete and the crow watched Jack with frantic stillness, panic raging through Pete’s eyes.

Jack stepped toward the demon. “Wait.”

The demon turned its head back, mouth flicking in amusement. “Yes, Jack?”

In Jack’s mind, the pages of the grimoire that he’d copied before Seth had ripped it from him floated. The summoning. The safeguards a sorcerer could use.

“I’m calling our bargain before the Triumvirate,” Jack said aloud. The pain from the demon’s magic increased, vibrating through his blood and his bones, making his head ring as if it were made of brass, but Jack held on. “I challenge you before the rulers of Hell for your name, you shite-talking speck of soot. For your name.”

The demon’s face cracked, its expression going waxy and plastic, a lifelike doll with the batteries run down. “Don’t do this, Winter. Your pride is going to eat you alive, boy.”

Jack decided it was his turn to laugh, even though it hurt. “I’m not scared of you, or dying. Not anymore.”

The demon shook its head. “Then you should be, Jack. Because you’re going to Hell, and all that you’ve left behind is bad memories and a broken heart.”

“I challenge you in the view of the Triumvirate,” Jack repeated. “For your name.”

“I heard you the first time,” the demon snarled. “You are making a bad, bad mistake, Jack. I liked you before this, but now you’ve begun to irritate me.”

“You can’t refuse,” Jack said quietly. “You and every other demon of Hell are bound by the same laws.”

The demon rolled its eyes heavenward, a move that Jack would have found infinitely amusing were he not bartering for his life. “Fine. Name the time and place of me thoroughly teaching you the error of your ways.”

“The Naughton manor,” Jack shot back. “One day from now.”

“Very well.” The demon grinned at Pete. “Enjoy the day with him, Weir. It’s your last.”

It was gone when Jack looked back, the Black rippling in its wake. Jack made it to his sofa and slumped. Pete sat next to him, brows drawn together in vast concern.

“Jack, what just happened?”

He put a sofa pillow over his eyes. There had never been sofa pillows—or saucers, scatter rugs, or napkins made of cloth—until Pete had come to live with him. A sofa pillow was good. You could tuck it under your head for a quick kip, or use it to smother yourself when you’d just become the biggest bloody fool you knew.

“I made the shit choice,” Jack said. “To willingly go to Hell and challenge the demon to learn its name before the three ruling members of the Triumvirate.”

Pete chewed on her lip. “Can you win?”

Jack took the pillow away. “Not a chance.”

Pete let her air out, slumping back to mimic his position. “Oh.”

She went to her travel bag, found her fags and lighter, lit one. She offered it to him when she’d taken a drag. Jack accepted it and polluted his lungs for a long breath.

“Cheers.”

“And the Naughton mansion?” Pete asked. Jack scratched under the edge of his bandage, where the cut from Jao was beginning to itch like a particularly virulent venereal disease.

“Blank spot in the Black. Energy is so bollocksed up from the necromancer fucking about I thought it might give me an edge.”

Pete curled against him, surprising him with her weight, and Jack moved to make room for her in the crook of his body. “Thought you said you’d lose,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Jack put his lips on the top of her head. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t go down kicking.”

“Jack.” Pete rotated her head to look at him. “I don’t want you to go.”

“Not keen on visiting Hell myself,” Jack said. “But unless you’ve got a corker, luv . . . I’m out of ideas.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Jack fell asleep with Pete’s breath rising and falling against his chest, setting the pace for his heartbeat and his thoughts.

Everything took on a sharp-edged quality when he woke. Washing up, making tea, having a fag, and restocking his kit to put in the Mini were acts of incredible significance, rife with color and meaning.

The drive to the Dartmoor was no longer arduous and too long. The colors of the moor, the wild magic that embraced him like a prodigal son, it was all irrefutably alive, sharp and vivid enough to pain his senses.

Pete set the brake in the Naughton’s circular drive. “Here we are.”

Jack tried to shake off the hyper awareness, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Death had ripped the veil from his eyes, shown him exactly what he would be seeing no longer, if the demon had his way.

Death, Jack reflected, was a bit of a cunt that way.

While Pete put up her overnight bag and laid in a tea in the Naughton kitchen, Jack laid out his kit on the long table in the formal dining room.

Salt, chalk, herb bags. Black and red and white thread, his scrying mirror, and a butane lighter for starting herbs in his censer.

It wasn’t much, in the scheme of things, but the battered canvas satchel had kept Jack alive thus far.

None of it would do a bit of good against the demon. Jack swept his things back into the satchel and left it on the table. His reflection in the polished wood twisted, distorted and ghostly, pale face crowned by pale hair with sunken black pits for eyes, just as a spirit.

A shape shimmered in the reflection behind him, and Jack snapped his head around. He was prepared for the ghost of June Kemp, or the mansion’s poltergeist, but it was only the owl.

It sat on the branch of the tree near the drive, staring at Jack with unblinking eyes. The sunlight skipped through the clouds on the moor, dark and light slashes across the ground. The owl should be far away from the light, asleep somewhere, but it watched him and when Jack merely stared, twitched its head and wings in irritation.

Jack tilted his head in return, and the owl spread its wingspan wide. A cloud rolled across the sun and the afternoon plunged into iron-gray dark. The owl took flight, alighting at the edge of the garden near the fallen stone wall that bound the estate, kept it from the encroachment of the moor.

Jack went to the wide front doors, left them open in his wake, and crossed the sodden lawn to the tree by the stone wall where the owl had flown.

When the sunlight fell through the clouds again, a woman stood under the tree. Though her hair was gray, her face was young, with the round, pale, unlined freshness of a pubescent girl.

She extended her hand to him, fingers wide, as if tasting the air before his passage.

Hello, Jack. A bar of light fell through her, gray and diffused where it scattered through her form.

A few steps from her, Jack caught a hint of the wild magic that rolled over the moor, the wild magic that had summoned the cu sith and distorted his sight. The power wasn’t coming from the moor this time, though. It came from the gray-wrapped figure in front of him.

She regarded him with her golden creature’s eyes, while the gray mist that clad her pale form writhed and shifted in the Dartmoor’s changeable wind.

“You,” Jack said. “That was you on the airplane.”

Yes. You asked for safe passage. I granted it. She smiled at him, with a coquettish tilt of your head. You’re not an easy man to deny, Jack. I can see why she stays with you.

From behind the tree, in the shadows, Jack heard a rumbling snarl and two cu sith blossomed from the dark spot on the ground, coming to stand at the girl’s flanks. On the tilt of the moor, a herd of sluagh drifted with the wind, howling and grasping at the wild magic of the earth. All around Jack, the world faded as the Black swelled and spilled over the edges of his unconscious, staining his sight like ink.

“Why?” he said, keeping his eyes on the black dogs. “Why send this lot? What do you want from me?”

Nothing. The girl laid a hand on each cu sith’s head.

“I’m confused, then.” Jack shoved his hands into his leather. “You’ve been following me since Paddington, for what? A laugh? Got a crush? Tell me, because I’m out of ideas, luv.”

The girl stepped toward him, and though her countenance was calm and far less terrifying than either the demon or the Morrigan, Jack took a hasty step back.

Her magic wasn’t something he wanted touching him, not a feeling he wanted to remember over and over again in nightmares that shot him screaming back into the waking world.

You feel it, she whispered. You’ve felt it for months, since you found her again. This time she was faster, and she pressed a hand to his cheek, pulling Jack down to her eye level. The gold burned, roiling with liquid witchfire as magic flared in the girl’s gaze.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jack said flippantly. “All I’ve felt is a great and overwhelming desire to stab meself in the forehead to end the visits of things like you.”

Her nails dug into his cheek. Watch yourself, mage. You may be able to speak to the hag so, but I’m a different breed.

Jack flinched, blood dribbling down is jaw. “I know.” He sighed. “I know what you are.”

The girl’s smile curved up at the ends, became predatory. Say it.

Jack shut his eyes, to close off that burning gaze, the triad of youth, magic, and death that marked the girl for what she was. “You’re the Hecate.”

The girl’s tongue flicked over her pale lips, and she withdrew her hand, running her fingers through Jack’s blood and painting streaks down his cheek, covering his scar.

I am the guardian of the gateways. And you are the crow-mage, so I have come to give you this courtesy. She stepped back, cradling the head of the black dog against her. Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it, Jack. Your magic curdling within you. Your sight is clawing your mind to pieces.

Jack looked out toward the moor. The sun was falling, slowly but surely, painting the tops of the hills with pale fire.

“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed it. Same shite, different day, you know?”

It is not the same, crow-mage. The Hecate sighed. The Black is in turmoil. The ways between the worlds are choked with corruption. You know what is coming, Jack, and what you must do.

“I haven’t the faintest, darling,” Jack said. “All you old ones can never just spit it out, can you? Always got to dance in circles until your feet bleed.”

There is war coming, the Hecate whispered. There has been war before, war at the beginning and war since, but this will be the vastest, the bloodiest. The old gods and the old ways are rising, parting the layers of the spirit worlds.

Jack felt a long, slow crawl of unease down his spine. “And I’m supposed to do what about your war, exactly?”

The Hecate bared her teeth. Her canines were pointed, like her dog servants’. You will do nothing. You will stand aside, crow-mage, and you will keep your meddlesome fingers out of what is coming.

Wind stripped the mist from her figure in a sudden gust, leaving her bare before Jack’s eyes. The one who must act is Petunia.

“No,” Jack said instantly. “Pete has nothing to do with any of this.”

You cannot protect her, and to presume is a grave insult, the Hecate snarled. She is a Weir, crow-mage. She is a servant of the gateways just as you are a servant of the dead.

“Pete is an innocent,” Jack snarled. “She doesn’t belong in the Black. She doesn’t deserve your attentions.”

Petunia was a Weir long before she was your consort, the Hecate snapped. She will stand at the head of my army. She will lift us from the hidden place of dreams and place us on the path.

“Like fuck she will,” Jack snarled back. Pete’s talent brought her under the purview of the Hecate, true, but she’d never had a sign. Never seen her fate, like he had with the Morrigan. “You’ve made a mistake,” he said, softer. “It’s another Weir. Not Pete.”

The Hecate’s eyes flared. The Black is rotting, crow-mage. The hag and her consorts, the demons and their bargains, spreading filth through the worlds like poison in a river. Even now, demons dance in anticipation of the world’s end, and necromancers create offerings to their old gods. Sorcery and sin gnaw the bones of magic, of the druid and the Weir and the hearth witch. The Hecate looked away from him, and a tear slipped over her translucent cheek. The world I was born into is gone, crow-mage. But in the fires of war I will rebuild it from ash, and Petunia, my Weir, will open the way. I do not make mistakes.

She turned back on him, and Jack saw the full glory of the Hecate, her triple face and her owl’s wings and the vast, breathless space between the worlds that the girl’s form walked. And if you value the world you live in, crow-mage, you will stand down. You will retreat, forget that you know such a thing as magic, and stay away from my Weir until it’s all over.

Jack felt his jaw twitch. Orders were orders, whether they came from a headmaster or the goddess of the gateways. “Can’t do that,” he said.

You will, the Hecate hissed, or you will burn the world.

Jack turned his back on her, started for the Naughton house.

“If I had a shilling for every time I’ve heard that bollocks.”

Chapter Forty-eight

“Jack?” Pete called to him when he came through the door. “Jack, where’d you go?”

“Having a conversation,” Jack called. The Hecate’s eyes still burned in front of his gaze.

Stay away, mage. Or you will burn the world.

“You left all your things on the table,” Pete said, when he came into the kitchen. She handed him a plate of biscuits. “Expect you’ll be needing them.”

Jack shook his head, putting the biscuits down on the table, stealing one. “Those are yours now.”

Pete’s face tightened. “Jack, no . . .”

“Listen, Pete.” Jack placed his hands on her shoulders. “I haven’t time to explain properly, but suffice to say that there are people and gods in the Black who want you, dead or otherwise. They always will, because of what you are. I’m giving you me kit because you’re going to need it. To defend yourself and not be made to serve someone or something that you don’t want.”

Pete’s mouth quirked. “Fuck off. Who’d want my service besides musty old ghosts like Treadwell?”

“Your patron,” Jack said quietly. “The Hecate. The guardian of the gateway. Weirs are her purview, like the Fiach Dubh are the Morrigan’s.”

Pete sat down hard at the table. “Why does she want me? I haven’t done a thing!”

“You’ve got power,” Jack said. “And there’s some bad shite coming down the road, Pete. Power will be in short supply.” He closed his hand over hers. “Take the satchel. If nothing else, there’s still an unwinding spell needs doing and it’s high time you learned how to cast.” Jack felt about for a fag and lit it, blowing smoke to the ceiling. “And you should probably call that sodding Ollie Heath and have him arrest Nicholas Naughton.”

Pete’s eyebrow crawled upward. “Nick? Why?”

Jack watched the ash grow on the end of his fag. Necromancers make offerings to their old gods. “Because he killed his brother.”

Pete set down her mug. “That’s quite a leap, Jack.”

“This house is the work of a necromancer,” he said. “A line of necromancers. Nicholas Naughton said it was just himself and his brother. One of them’s dead. So, by your very own copper logic, the one that’s still kicking round London in a nonce suit is the necromancer. One who owns a great big country house and estate on which to bury the dead he’s bound.”

“But Naughton is the one who demanded that we cleanse the house!” Pete cried.

Jack stubbed out the end of his fag. “Naughton’s an idiot. You don’t get a poltergeist from a binding ritual. He knew I’d see it. We were probably sent here to be the next juicy mage offerings to his bone gods, seeing as how he’d run out of hapless family members.”

Pete pressed her hands together, put them against her mouth like she were making a brief bid not to smash something. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I sat there and took that git’s money and smiled at him, for fuck’s sake.”

“You’re not the first person he’s fooled,” Jack said. “Think of how poor Danny must have felt swinging from that beam . . .”

“All right.” Pete placed her hands flat on the table. “I’ll keep the kit, for now. And I’ll have Naughton taken care of. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t coming back.” Sheen blossomed in her eyes, and Pete sucked in a long breath. “Tell me you’re coming back.”

Jack got up and pulled Pete up with him. Pete wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek into his shoulder. Jack put one hand on her neck, the silken ends of her hair tickling his palm.

“I’m coming back,” Jack whispered. It wasn’t a lie, really. Just an unknown quantity. “I should go back to work, luv,” he said. He would do what he always did when he was at a loss—smoke, curse, consult his books, and pace until something shook loose and he came up with a way to weasel out of his problem. He was a clever boy, after all.

Pete pulled him back against her instead, small body warming his skin. “No.” She ran her thumb down the scar on his cheek. “I don’t want you to go.”

Jack slid his hands across her waist, pressing his fingers into her hip bones. If he had the chance to look back, he supposed, he would call himself an idiot for spending time with musty books when he could be with Pete. “I suppose it can wait. For a bit.”

Pete pressed her lips against his, firm and warm and insistent. “I suppose it can. Just for a bit.”

Chapter Forty-nine

Jack’s eyes snapped open, and he snatched up Pete’s mobile from the bedside table. Pete stirred next to him, groaning and pulling her pillow over her face.

The numerals spelled out 10:13, and Jack slumped back, forcing his heart to stop pounding.

He had hours. Hours until he faced the demon in Hell.

“Jack?” Pete curled into him, her leg sliding up his thigh to drape across his waist. “Don’t leave yet.” Her hands brushed down his abdomen. “Haven’t had a chance to say a proper good morning.”

Jack’s cock jumped as Pete’s hand wandered into unsafe territory, and her lips brushed over his earlobe. He rolled over and pinned her frame beneath his weight, causing Pete to yelp. Jack grinned. “Good morning, Petunia.”

“I called Ollie Heath while you were sleeping,” she said.

“Ohh, yeah. Nothing’s more erotic than talking about your work mates,” Jack said, nuzzling into her neck.

Pete slapped him on the back of his head. “Don’t be awful.”

Jack sighed, coming up for air. “What did he say?”

“Nicholas Naughton’s done a runner,” Pete murmured. “Cleaned out his flat and his accounts and he’s gone.”

Jack levered himself onto his elbows. “I’m sorry, luv. Looks like he’s not quite the idiot I thought.”

Pete lifted one bare shoulder. “It’s a problem for another day, Jack.” She pulled his face down, and Jack followed willingly.

He kissed her for a long moment, letting his fingers roam over her, memorize her. If it was the last touch he had, it needed to count. Memory was all that mattered, in the Black.

Pete pushed him off gently after a moment, rolling her face to the window. “Jack, there’s a bird watching us.”

Jack followed her eyes and saw the crow nestled on the sill, staring at him.

“Creepy thing,” Pete muttered. Jack rolled over on his back, throwing a hand over his eyes.

“It’s a fetch. A psychopomp.”

Pete quirked her eyebrow. “What’s it fetching?”

Jack laughed. “My soul, if I’m lucky. Everybody has a fetch. All the citizens of the Black.”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t.”

Jack put his feet on the floor, winced at the chill, and reached for his pants. “’Course you do.”

“No,” Pete insisted. “Never had anything like the crow in my life. I don’t have anything that’s stayed with me.” She propped herself up on her elbow and ran her free fingers down Jack’s spine. “Except you.”

Jack shuddered when her fingers, her magic, made contact with his skin. “I can’t say I’ve been that great about sticking around,” he told Pete. “In fact, I’ve been shite.”

“If anyone is going to take my soul down into the Land,” Pete said softly, “I’d rather it be you.”

Jack looked at the crow again. Its eyes gleamed, and it stared back at him, unblinking, piercing him down to the core of his magic.

You know what’s coming, the Hecate whispered. The fires of war.

Jack raised his hand, staring at the crow through splayed fingers, an inkblot on the pristine dawn.

Something uncurled in his chest, behind his sight. It didn’t ache and pound against his mind as it had in recent weeks, it just stayed in his head, heavy and present.

“I meant it, you know,” Pete said. She sat up and wrapped her arms around him, her bare breasts pressing into his ribs.

“I know, luv . . . ,” Jack murmured.

You’re gonna die, Jack, Lawrence whispered. Best you can do is go with your head held high.

Jack stared at the crow. The crow stared at him. Watching, the way it always watched him. Waiting for his soul to float free of his body, so it could carry it to the Land. The way he’d watched Pete, since the first night they’d laid eyes on each other.

“Jack?” Pete said as he got out of bed and pulled on his shorts. “You’re quiet. What is it?”

Jack put a fag in his mouth and started for his books. “ Don’t you worry. I think I may not be going anywhere.”

Chapter Fifty

The demon was on time.

Jack stood under the tree in bare feet, denim, and his tattered Supersuckers shirt. He smoked a fag slowly, letting the burn travel all the way down his throat and warm him against the cool air.

“You ready, Winter?” the demon said. The grass under its polished shoes withered and died, fading away to bare salted ground. “No more excuses. No more tricks. You and I, down into Hell.”

“If you’re that eager to give up your name,” Jack said, flicking his fag away, “then let’s get on with it, mate.”

The demon’s smile twitched into life like a worm on a hook. “Why do I sense another card up your sleeve, Jack?”

Jack lifted his shoulder. “Maybe ’cause I’ve got one.”

Pete stood on the stoop of the Naughton house, watching. Far enough away not to get caught in the edge of a hex. Close enough for what Jack had thought of as he sat with her in bed, watching the crow.

The demon let out an irritated huff. “Let’s see it then, Winter. I’ll kill you that much quicker.”

Jack gave Pete a small smile of reassurance, and she lifted her hand in return. She trusted him, though he hadn’t told her what he intended to do. On the off chance it didn’t work, and the demon peeled his skin off.

Fuck off chance. There was a very good bloody chance it would all go pear-shaped. But Jack wasn’t going to hold his head high. He didn’t have the dignity left to accept his fate, so he might as well fucking fight.

He might live.

And Margaret Thatcher might hop on a broom and do a lap around the Houses of Parliament.

The demon grabbed him by the shirtfront, pulling them close enough to kiss, if Jack were that sort of man. “What the fuck are you grinning at, Winter?”

Jack turned his smile on the demon, and let the spell that he held in his mind unfurl. No kit this time, no salt or iron. Just his talent, coiled in his mind starving and stinging, like a snake.

Jack stared into the demon’s eyes, at the flame dancing there.

“Everyone has a fetch,” he said.

The spell unfolded, caught the wild magic of the moor, and faster—far, far faster than he expected—Jack and the demon tumbled into the whirl pool of his sight.

Everything is black. Everything is pain. Jack is aware that the screams echoing are his.

Light burns through his eyelids, light blotted out by a man’s shadow, and when he opens his eyes, he’s in Ireland. Seth is leaning over him. He’s fallen asleep on the grass, trying to read one of the interminable Latin diaries the older mage foisted on him. He throws the mouldering thing at Seth.

“This is a great load of shit.”

“’Course it’s shit,” Seth tells him. “But it’s shit that might save your wee arse one day, boy, so you best read on. Conjugate some verbs if that will break up the monotony.”

Jack watches a crow land on Seth’s roof, and stare at them. Seth sees it, and his smile grows sly. “You’ve got a fetch, Jackie boy.”

Fetches aren’t something Jack believes in. Jack believes in what he can see, touch—the magic in him that responds to liquor and rage and cigarette burns. The sweet taste of a fag and the sweeter taste of skin under his lips. “Old wives’ tale,” he tells Seth. “It’s probably seen something dead in the field.”

“Old wives could learn you a thing or two, as well,” Seth tells him, and retreats indoors.

Jack shuts his eyes against the sun and he’s on his knees in a circle of stones, wearing the white raiments for the first and last time in his career as a Fiach Dubh. In a few weeks, Seth will catch him with the grimoire. This is the first nail in his coffin.

Seth and his brothers stare in horror, Seth’s athame held at half-mast, as the crows land one by one, on the top of each stone, and before Jack the crow woman stands with her hair made from feathers and her face spattered in blood.

Stare as she touches his forehead, where the white witch gits say the third eye lives.

Stare as she whispers to him, in a language that Jack should not be able to understand, “My mage. Crow-mage.”

Nausea and dizziness grip him as he sees bonfires in her gaze, smells the smoke of funeral pyres, and hears the clash and scream of battles fought up and down the length of the land on which he now kneels. He smells blood and decay, smoke and char, and he sees the spires of the Bleak Gates piercing the fire-lit night.

Jack shuts his eyes as his dinner of mediocre bangers and mash has its revenge while the brotherhood reviles him with whispers and fearful stares.

Opens them, and sees Pete Caldecott. She’s skinny, and hides inside a school uniform that’s at least a size too large. She has her sister’s eyes and hair, but both her face and her gaze are sharper. She looks far more like Inspector Caldecott than the woman Jack supposes was their mother, the one who gave MG the soft face and generous tits. Pete is sixteen, and she’s still all planes and angles. Her eyes are decades older, and they don’t miss much.

When he touches her, he smells the night of the initiation, the scent of battle-wracked earth. The calling card of the crow woman.

Jack Winter vows to stay away from Pete Caldecott, until he’s tempted beyond resistance, breaks his vow, and he’s in the tomb, the cold stone at his back, the demon looking down at him, lips curling back from pointed teeth.

The demon speaks. “Wake up, Jack.”

But Jack holds on to Pete. Holds on to the feeling of the first time he touched her, across the circle in High-gate Cemetery. When Pete has called out to him, Jack has come.

When Pete lay dying on the graveyard earth, Jack was with her. As long as Jack has Pete, nothing can steal his soul away. Jack is bound to her surely as the crow is bound to him. Jack Winter, fetch of the Hecate’s Weir.

Jack presses his face into Pete’s hair, smells the sharp smoky scent of autumn in the graveyard, the penny tang of her blood.

Jack will never leave her, and so he moves in the memory, even though he didn’t on the day, nearly dead from blood loss himself, and takes her face in his hands. “Body and soul,” Jack tells Pete. “I’m yours. I’m the fetch you never had. You and I are bound, by blood and by stone. Bound for all the turns of the earth.”

Pete smiles at him. Reaches up.

Wraps a clawed hand around his throat.

Pete’s face is full of fang and malice. Pete’s smile is the demon.

“Nice try,” the demon hisses. “But you should have woken up when you had the chance, boy.”

Its hand closes down, and Jack can no longer breathe. The demon draws him close, the demon that looks like Pete, and presses its lips against his. “By the by,” it whispers. “The name’s Belial. And you, Jack Winter . . . you’ve tricked me for the last time.”

It releases him, the places where it touched burning Jack up from the inside.

He falls.

And is awake.

Jack thrashed up from the visions of the Black, gasping for air and clawing at his throat. The demon stood over him while Jack lay on the grass. It folded its arms and shook its head. “You failed, Jack. You tried, and you failed.”

It picked his chin up with the toe of its shoe. “You tried to bind yourself to a living soul. Cheat me. That’s trickery, and your challenge is void under those laws you’re so fond of.” The demon grinned, a smile of pure pleasure splitting its waxy face. “So that’s the end for you, bright lad.”

Jack stared up into the demon’s face. Its tongue flicked over crimson lips. Somewhere in the distance, Pete was shouting, and the demon moved its gaze to her.

“She’s trying to save you, Winter. She’s going to throw herself on your pyre, surely enough.”

“I’m her fetch,” Jack said. “Spell or not, I’m hers. You can’t take me if my soul is bound to an innocent’s. It’s the rules.”

“Jack.” Belial crouched, elbows on knees, genuine confusion on his face. “I’m a fucking demon. What makes you think I play by any bloody rules but my own?”

Pete reached them, panting, and launched herself at Belial. The demon spun, caught her about the neck, and shoved her against the tree, lifting her feet off the earth.

“Look what I’ve caught,” he murmured. “A little Weir, very far from hearth and home.”

Jack got to his feet, even though the breaking of his fetch spell had chewed him up and spit him out. With nowhere to go, the wild magic pounded in his head, expelled itself like poison into his muscle and bone. “Let her go,” he warned.

Belial glanced back at him. “I could, Jack. I could let her go and take you instead, as you’re bound by the bargain.” He turned back to Pete, leaning close and scenting her, running his nose and lips up and down her neck. “Or you could try to break the bargain, and I could kill you and take my time with your sweet, sweet piece of meat.”

He dropped Pete to the ground, where she choked. Belial straightened his tie and cuffs. “Your choice, Jack. What do you say?”

Jack looked down at Pete, tears of rage hovering in her eyes. He looked down at his own hands, pale and veined from the feedback of broken magic.

You burn things down, Seth said. Wherever Jack Winter goes, death follows.

Thirteen years to agonize over his shit decision, and suddenly it was no decision at all.

“Pete,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But I’ll see you again.”

“No, Jack!” she screamed, scrabbling to her feet. “No! You promised!”

Jack looked at Belial. “I go with you and you never, ever come to her or anyone I care about again. Clear?”

Belial snorted. “I couldn’t bear less interest toward your little found family, mage. I care about you.”

“Jack!” Pete’s shriek rang against the moor. “What are you doing?”

Jack stepped up and faced Belial.

You can’t cheat Death, boy. You just got to go with your head up high.

No escape. Not for you.

You know it’s coming, mage. The fires of war.

He smiled at Pete. That was the only kind of knight he was—beaten and broken, lying in the mud. “What I should’ve done thirteen years ago,” Jack said to Pete. “You be good to yourself, luv. And don’t waste one moment crying over me.”

Belial put his hand on Jack’s cheek, and leaned close to his ear, whispering the ways and words of the secret passages into Hell. Jack didn’t flinch, as his sight screamed and the magic around them flared. He watched Pete, on her knees by the great tree, arms wrapped around herself, face slick as glass with her tears. He watched her scream, wordless and lost, into the air.

Jack wished he could speak to her, tell her the truth, but before he could do more than raise his hand in farewell, the Dartmoor vanished under an onslaught of the sight.

When his eyes opened, Jack found himself looking up at three triple spires crowned with a lightning-etched sky. Hot wind snaked across his face and brought with it the smell of charnel fields. In the distance, across a blackened marching ground, a thousand pyres burned under the watchful eye of the spires. Thorns tangled around Jack’s bare feet and cinders landed on his skin, leaving fresh red burns.

Next to him, Belial took a deep breath of his native air. “Welcome to Hell, Winter,” the demon said. “We’ve missed you.”