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
“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.
“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.”
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.”
Jack sighed. “Then thrill me. What are you?”
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.”
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?”
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.
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.
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.
Jack shut his eyes against the horrible burning gaze. “They’re mine,” he said. “They’re my scars, not yours.”
“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.”
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.
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.
This is how it ends,
