Demon Bound

bar. “So I knew you came here. Still waiting on the why.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If I can, luv.”

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

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

Pete rolled her eyes at Jack. “Bollocks.”

“I dunno what else to tell you, luv.”

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

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

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

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

Pete chewed on her lip. “Whose life?”

“My life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirty-two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never liked those things.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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