“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
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
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
“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
“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.
