Demon Bound

Chapter Twenty-three

Jack walked back through the tourists to the bar with the music. The band was packing up, and a deejay had taken their place. A pair of drunk Scots were howling a karaoke version of “My Heart Will Go On” in front of a fuzzy monitor scrolling lyrics.

Jack knocked on the bar. “Drink.”

“Anything special?” The bartender was tattooed, and to Jack’s surprise, female.

“Something that will convince me I don’t want to stick a fondue fork in me ear,” he said, giving the Scots a baleful glare.

She laughed, and set him up with a bourbon with a neat flick of her wrist. “You’re not a tourist. Why you in a tourist bar?”

“Waiting on someone,” Jack told her. “Looking for someone else. Ru

“You’re fu

“You’re nosy.” Jack drained his glass. He wasn’t drunk, yet. Just floating a few inches off the ground. “What’s your name?”

“People around here call me Trixie,” she said.

“Like Speed Racer’s girl?” Jack snorted into his glass. “Cute.”

“You probably couldn’t pronounce my given name,” Trixie said. “Or my Thai nickname. Trixie gives the farang something to relate to. They think they know me, I get bigger tips. Simple.”

Jack drained his glass and nudged it back toward her. “You’re not . . .”

“A dancer?” Trixie shook her head. “You guys like the ski

Jack turned his glass between his fingers. “I was going to say you’re not a prozzie, actually, but now I’m a bit intimidated.”

Trixie shrugged. “I get asked a dozen times in a night to put tab A into slot B. I’m not going to knock you in the head.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Jack watched the last trickle of bourbon slide down the side of his glass, like sweat on skin.

Like a raindrop in the hollow of a throat . . .

“You know . . .” Trixie cocked her hip. “You look familiar to me.”

Jack favored her with a incredulous smile. “You say that to all the mysterious good-looking foreigners.”

“No.” Trixie tapped her full lower lip. Coated with waxy pink gloss, it looked swollen, plastic. “I’ve seen you somewhere. In a photograph.”

“Never hit Bangkok in me touring days,” Jack said. “Can’t imagine where you’d know me from, luv, unless you’d spent time in the UK.” Even then, Trixie would have been no more than eight years old when Jack was playing music and getting his mug slapped on posters up and down Mile End Road.

“You’re Jack Winter!” Trixie shrieked, slapping her bar towel down. “You sang in the Poor Dead Bastards!” A huge grin lit up her face. “I have your records, man!”

Jack felt an entirely different kind of buzz grow in his chest. “You’re putting me on.”

“No shit!” Trixie insisted. “I got your Suicide Squad LP off of eBay, signed. Cost me two weeks of tips, and I make fat tips.”

Jack fished in his wallet to find the last of his English money. “Well, you’re very kind, luv, but that was a long fucking time ago indeed.”

Trixie waved off his payment. “On the house, for as long as you’re in Patpong. I’ll take my trade in stories.”

Jack started for the door, but turned back. “There is one thing, luv.” He scratched at his chin. He wanted a shave again. Pete would have reminded him.

“Anything,” Trixie said. “Except what everyone else is giving up around here.”

Jack rocked on his heels. Stay casual, stay charming. Don’t act like you care. The liar’s rules to making others tell the truth. “You know music, yeah? The local scene?”

Trixie nodded. “Most nights off, I’m far from here. There’s a great hardcore club over on Silom if you’re ever in the mood to see the real Bangkok.”

“Miles Hornby,” Jack said. The name was begi

“Well, sure,” Trixie said. “His band was the Lost Souls. Played around here a few times before he got a legit gig. Not bad—sort of an early Nick Cave thing going on.”

Jack’s heart beat faster, cutting through his fatigue and the pleasant slack warmth of the cheap bourbon. “You’ve seen him.”

“Sure,” Trixie said. “Lots of people saw him. He was pretty good. Not as good as you and the Bastards on Nightmares and Strange Days, of course. But he might have gone on a label with a few years of gigging.”

“You said his band was the Lost Souls?” Jack was talking faster now, leaning in close enough to smell Trixie’s cherry perfume and a hint of salt beneath, to see the eyes on the curling dragons of her tattoos. It couldn’t be this easy, not after what the demon had told him. “What d’you mean was?”

“Past tense,” said Trixie. “They’re not anymore.”

Jack gripped her wrist. Her skin was warm and her pulse was fast, and she didn’t try to pull away. “Why not?”

“Because . . .” Trixie’s bee-stung lips turned down. “Miles Hornby’s dead.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Jack found his way back into the street in a haze of bourbon and disbelief. Dead. Hornby couldn’t be dead. The demon wouldn’t have sent him. . . . He slumped against the outside of the Club Hot Miami, head scraping the bricks. Hornby could very well be dead, and the demon still would have sent him. It was exactly the sort of thing the demon would do.

He wanted to sink into the ground, to slip through the layers of the Black and find himself back in his flat, in London, before any of this shit had ever gotten started.

But if he sank into the ground, the only thing he’d find would be the Land of the Dead, the howling of lost souls, the clanging of the Bleak Gates.

The want for a fix crawled up from Jack’s guts with a burning, frenetic intensity like his stomach was going to come up along with his craving. He sca

Sweat ran down his chest under the frayed fabric of his Stooges shirt, and Jack shut his eyes, his sight rolling over him in silvery waves. The pavement of Patpong 2 faded, the sound, and he saw a dumpier, seedier, more dangerous road—GIs in uniforms thirty years out of date on the arms of girls doped out of their minds as they teetered on platform heels, pimps in Western suits and sharp-brimmed hats watching from the shadows like sharks under a reef.

A GI with a knife wound in his gut stared at Jack. “Say, brother, can you help me out? I lost my wallet and I . . .”

Jack scrubbed at his eyes, trying to make it stop. To make it all stop—the sight and the need and the deep, sucking void in his chest that they combined to create.

“Just a few bucks for a cab,” the GI coaxed. “Just a few . . .” Bloody hands grabbed on to Jack, smearing the black miasma of the dead across his skin and up his arms, blotting out his scars and tattoos.

“You know you’re just like us,” the solider pleaded. “Lost and lonely and walking that dark road. Just walk with me, buddy. Just for a few minutes . . .”

Hands yanked him away, and knuckles freshened the bruise on his cheek with a backhanded blow. Jack let out an involuntary yelp. “Fuck me!”

“Not drunk enough for that yet,” Seth said, setting Jack on his feet again. “You all right, Jackie? Looked like you had the ghost on you.”

“I just . . .” Jack’s eyes wandered to the corner of the street again, against his will. The girl was gone. The boy was bobbing his head to his iPod. Everything was right and real and normal about the scene, except him.