Black magic felt like cobwebs, like sticky drying blood and the spongy, soggy flesh of a drowned man. Like wearing a wool sweater next to bare skin. Jack’s sight flared, and the graveyard was bathed in silver for a moment before he ground his teeth and felt the sting of his tattoos holding back the dead. It wasn’t an active boneyard like St. Michael’s, but there were bodies under the earth and lately, with Jack’s sight flying haywire at the slightest touch, it was still too much.
Pete handed him the small prybar, wordlessly, and stepped back from the crumbling edge of the grave.
Jack straddled the coffin and shoved the metal in between the wooden seams.
From its branch, the owl watched, unblinking. Jack flicked it off before he bore down on the prybar, straining to open the coffin lid. Nails shrieked, and Jack’s sore shoulders and hands complained as he strained against the coffin lid. It lifted with a dull
Pete flashed her light on the contents of the coffin. “Well. He’s a handsome git, isn’t he?”
Jack struggled up, and looked into the coffin.
The figure within stared back at him with empty sockets, blackened skin stretched tight across a skull rife with rotted teeth.
“He’s been dead a lot longer than two weeks,” Pete said. “Even in this heat. Hasn’t got any flesh on.”
Jack leaned down and picked up the gold chain around the figure’s neck, the same gold he’d seen on the gangsters in Patpong, cheap and bleeding to green from moisture. “It’s not Hornby.” His voice echoed from the sides of the grave, hollow.
Pete half-slid down the pile of earth to stand next to him. “Then who is it?”
Jack felt the want of a fix claw into his skull, vicious and sharp. He heard the demon’s laughter. He felt the cold of the Underworld, even in the oppressive heat of Bangkok, like a finger of ice down his back.
“Jack?” Pete touched his shoulder. “Who’s in this grave?”
Jack dropped the pry bar. Over the Chao Phraya, thunder rumbled and twin tongues of lighting licked the underside of black smoke clouds.
The owl took flight as rain started to fall, fat warm droplets the temperature of tears splashing on Jack, on Pete, and over the stone and dirt of the graveyard.
“He’s nobody,” he said finally.
Pete turned her light on his face. “You don’t look well, Jack.”
Which followed, because Jack felt like run-over shite. Felt numb, cold, and nerveless even in the warm rain. “I’m going back to Patpong,” he said. His boots slipped in the graveyard dirt but he pressed on, leaving Pete behind him.
Chapter Thirty-three
The rain fell, steady sideways lines of water, blurring the neon of Patpong into a fever dream. Thunder crashed and rolled above the city like a Sham 69 drum line, and lightning licked forked tongues between skyscraper and cloud.
Jack stalked through puddles, heedless when water seeped into his boots. The girl was still on the corner near Trixie’s bar, hunched under a roof overhang. The tourists had taken cover, and she was virtually alone in the street.
Jack wove through the push of traffic down Patpong 2 and approached, ducking his head against the rain.
“Hey, traveler.” The girl peeled herself away from the wall, her plastic skirt and nylon top slicked with water. “You want something?”
Jack cast a glance over his shoulder out of habit. He wasn’t caging for coppers as much as for Pete, but the few damp pedestrians in evidence hurried on their way and studiously avoided looking at Jack, or the girl. They might as well have been two more oil-slicked stains on the pavement.
“Something sweet?” the girl persisted. “I got party, I got good stuff. You want something?”
Jack dug into his leather and pulled out a crumple of pounds and
The girl fished in her voluminous knockoff handbag, and Jack heard the shifting scrape of cellophane bags against bags, the clack of pills. She palmed him a twist of plastic with a nub of brown inside, and made Jack’s money disappear like a magic trick.
“You want a sharp?” She titled her head, hair curled up from the rain. Her makeup was smeared, and she looked a bit like a thrown-away doll.
“Yeah,” Jack muttered, shoving the smack into his pocket. “Give it to me.”
The girl passed him a disposable needle in a sterile wrapper, stamped with a hospital name in English and Thai. “You have fun,” she said, closing his fingers over it. “And come back soon. I’m here every night.”
Jack walked away without answering. He ducked through the door of Trixie’s bar. She was busy serving a trio of Australians who in turn were busy gawping at a pair of go-go dancers divesting themselves of their gold bikinis on the stage. A DJ spun house tunes, and the lights were low and blue.
Jack went straight through the kitchen and into the back alley. The alley was piled with crates and metal garbage cans, quiet except for echoes of raindrops and faraway laugher. Neon signs spread fingers of pink and red and blue across Jack’s skin, turning him from a Fae to a demon to a corpse in the span of a heartbeat.
He’d been so close. So fucking close to working it all out. Find Hornby, find his secret, find his way out of Hell. At the worst, absolute rock bottom, he’d have the demon’s name.
But there was no Miles Hornby in the grave.
Jack leaned his head back against the slimy exterior wall. The neon beat a heartbeat against the back of his eyelids.
He could run, he could run far and fast, but the sight always caught him. The bargain would never be unwound.
He could pretend that he was clean, an ex-junkie, an ex-liar, and an ex-bastard, but Jack knew who he was. He was Jack Winter.
Junkie. Liar. Sinner. Dead man.
As he unrolled the baggie between his fingers, Jack realized that nothing had changed from the moment he’d bound the bargain in the first place.
The motions came back, like playing a D chord or putting a record on a turntable. Automatic, rote, familiar.
Drop the smack into the spoon. Find your lighter, buried underneath a ball of vellum and an ancient packet of crisps in his jacket pocket. Cook the shit, mindful of your fingers. Jack’s callused fingerprints weren’t only from playing guitar.
He used his teeth to rip open the sharp and his belt to tighten up his arm. The studs cut into his bicep, dull hot pain, but Jack ignored it as he drew the cloudy gold into the belly of the needle. Like watching a mosquito feed, he’d thought the first time. Feed and bloat on the sweetest blood there was.
Jack let the spoon drop into a puddle and he sat himself on a crate, out of the rain.
Slap your arm. Watch the bruise-blue map of heart’s blood float to the surface, pulsing and quivering under the skin. Try to find a spot that will still take a sharp, the black blots of collapsed veins like impassable terrain.
Jack wriggled his arm and slotted it comfortably against his thigh. He bit the cap off of the sharp and spat it out, flat plastic taste on his tongue.
Prime the needle, force all the air out. Embolism will ruin your day, and earn you a stint in rehab when you get found and taken to A&E. If you get found in time.
The tip of the needle bit into his skin, and it hurt a bit, like passing your hand through a lighter. It hadn’t hurt in a long while. Being clean had started a new season in his body, nerves and blood renewed.
Jack tilted his face up to the rain, put his thumb on the needle’s plunger, and pressed down.
For a moment there was nothing, just the slightly foreign sensation of a sharp under his skin. Then the warm tide ran up his arm, across his chest, over to his heart.
It was good shit, pure and strong, and it hit Jack’s brain like plunging into a river of fire, kissed his skin so that he was surprised it didn’t begin to steam under the rain.
Jack felt his head go back and scrape brick, and felt the sharp tumble out of his fingers. He wiggled the belt loose so the dose could work its magic unfettered.
Jack let the numbness steal over him and didn’t fight. The storm cooled his skin, but inside was warmth and forgetfulness. He slipped beneath the waters of the fix, and let himself drown.
When he opened his eyes, lids heavy with the desire for a nod into the opium dreamland he knew too well, the demon was in front of him.
It wasn’t the demon, not really. His sight didn’t flare and his blood didn’t chill, but seeing the wavering outline in the white suit, black coal eyes boring into him, sent Jack reeling. Acid boiled up in his stomach and he doubled over.
“Poor little Jack,” the demon purred. “Figured out that you’ve lost, at last.”
“Go . . .” Jack choked down bile, his throat blazing. “Go away. I haven’t yet.”
“No Hornby, no name.” The demon’s tongue caressed its lips like it could already taste Jack. “No name, no saving yourself. Demons lie, but I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a special soul, Jack. I wouldn’t insult you that way.”
“You’re not real,” Jack groaned. “You can’t be here.”
“I will be.” The demon leaned close. Rain fell through him, hissing as it hit the pavement. The heroin was playing hell with Jack’s sight, his neurons exploding against his eyes, allowing the Black to twist and distort into something it wasn’t. The fix was his only shield against his sight for over a decade, and now it was showing him this. If Jack hadn’t felt like he was close to passing out facedown in the garbage-choked puddles at his feet, he might have laughed.
“Go,” he gritted again. “I don’t see you. You’re not . . . you’re not real.”
“Has that ever worked?” The demon chuckled. “I
Slow heavy swells of the fix rolled over Jack, made his speech slow and thick. “Fuck . . . off.”
The door banged, metal on brick, and the demon was gone. In his place, small strong hands propped Jack up and a face dipped into view.
“Jack!” Pete shook him, slapped his face. She peeled back his eyelid and he batted at her. Her touch spread warm tendrils through him, down to the core and the place that got him into more trouble than it got him out of. If he’d been able to stand with any reliability, he would have grabbed Pete in return, put her against the rough brick, and let the rain slick their bare skin.
“’M fine,” he muttered.
“You’re so bloody far from fine I can’t even say.” Pete’s voice shook, her fingers echoing the tremor. She jerked his chin to look, and she was holding the needle. “You went and did it, after everything? Everything I did to get you clean?”
“Pete . . .” He exhaled. His lungs were slow and hot. The air was wet, too thick to move on its own. “You don’t understand.”
Pete tossed the needle away and crouched in front of Jack, gripping his arms. “Make me understand. I want to have followed you here for something worthwhile, Jack.”
Pete’s tears mixed with the raindrops on her skin, cutting furrows in her face. Jack tried to reach for them, wipe them away and make her smile, but he missed her cheek, letting his hand land on her shoulder again, tilting her slight frame under his weight.
