Demon Bound

“Jack,” Seth said quietly. “You should do as they say.”

“Thanks, Seth,” Jack said, keeping his eye on Lefty. “But I’m about through taking your advice.”

“Your friend is concerned for your well-being,” Lefty intoned. “And rightly so. You’ve been here less than two days and already you’ve managed to end poor Jao’s life.”

“Wasn’t me, I said,” Jack snarled. “And by the look of poor fucking Jao, he’d had it coming for miles.”

Lefty glanced at the blood on the floor. “You are not in an enviable position, Mr. Winter. You can fight me, it’s true.” His grip tightened, driving iron barbs into Jack’s arm. “You’ll lose.”

Jack watched the blood pool grow, crawling by degrees across the linoleum, adding a new stain to the battered gray surface. He didn’t reach for it with his talent, didn’t grasp the shimmering well of power waiting to fend off the gangster’s ministrations. “I’m not some nonce who’ll fold at the hint of a few hexes.”

Lefty heaved a sigh as if he were being entirely unreasonable, and pulled up his shirt to display the silver butt of a gun—a .45, by Jack’s reckoning. “We already know you bleed, Mr. Winter. Now, walk in front of us out to the car waiting at the curb, and don’t cause a fuss.”

“Magicians who go strapped,” Jack said. “Very Wild West, mate. Phallic, really. Suppose it’s true what they say about you Thais and your love of the ladyboys.”

“It’s loaded with pig-iron bullets,” Lefty said, pleasant smile affixed to his face as if he were a housewife on Valium. “It will rip your insides to shreds and your magic along with it and I will enjoy watching you die slowly. Walk.”

Jack turned around and walked. You didn’t fuck about when someone threatened to shoot you in broad daylight in a hospital. Spells and hexes, he could give as good as he got. Bullets weren’t the same thing at all—and iron bullets, fuck it. You didn’t stick your hand in a spi

The gangsters seemed reluctant to damage him, and that worked in his favor. He could kick up a row, and get himself gut-shot, or he could play the cooperative sod and see who, exactly, had fixated on his presence in Bangkok, and why.

“All right, lads,” he said as the doors to A&E swished back, dropping the damp blanket of Bangkok’s heat over his skin. “I can be sweet as custard if the occasion calls. No reason to be shirty.”

Lefty shoved him across the tide of people on the walk and into the street. “Stay quiet and move your arse.”

At the curb, as promised, a smooth black Lexus idled like the riverboat of Charon, waiting to whisk Jack away to the Underworld.

Lefty rapped on a tinted—and to Jack’s eye, bulletproof—window and the boot popped with an oiled click. Righty took out a black cloth sack and unfurled it with a snap.

Jack’s headache returned as if some vicious sod had bounced a bowling ball off his skull. Eight or nine times.

“You’re not bloody serious.”

Lefty put his hand on the pistol again. “Quite, Mr. Winter. I believe the expression is ‘dead serious’? ”

Jack shot Righty a glare. “That thing better not have other people’s spit on the inside.”

The bag slipped over his vision, and Lefty put a firm hand on his shoulder—his power was different from Righty’s. Smooth and cold rather than rough. Lefty had some black magic training, while Righty was crude muscle who probably had little more than what the Black spilled into his blood when he was conceived. Jack put it away for later.

Lefty shoved, and Jack banged his forehead on the boot lid. “Fucking hell!” he exclaimed, muffled by the hood. “You want me cheery, stop treating me like you’re moving fucking furniture!”

Another shove, and Jack was forced to tumble forward or break his neck. He landed in the boot, which stank faintly of cigarettes, just to add insult to injury.

“Have a comfortable ride, Mr. Winter,” Lefty said, and then the boot lid slammed above him, and what light there had been through the hood vanished, leaving Jack alone and in the dark.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Being locked in the boot allowed Jack plenty of time to think. His thoughts didn’t travel anywhere he particularly wanted to be, but all the same, the situation was what it was and there was no point in crying about it.

He’d stopped bleeding, and Jack forced himself to think like Pete, who certainly wouldn’t have gotten herself locked in a boot by a pair of manky sorcerers. The facts unfurled thusly:

Seth had sold him down the river to whoever in Bang-kok resented a nosy mage on their turf.

Seth was a cunt, but Seth wasn’t the one who’d kidnapped him.

Seth was in thrall to the same being who’d put the god’s fear in Jao and snuffed out his life.

The car slowed, and Jack tried kicking at the lid of the boot. His heel skidded off of solid metal. Smashing his way out of this was becoming less possible by the second.

“Solve it, you stupid nonce,” he grumbled to himself. He got a mouthful of head-bag for his trouble. It tasted sour and stale. Who put a bag on your head when you were already stuffed in a boot?

You could tell a lot about a bloke by how he threatened people. Lefty had been polite to a fault, and that posh speech didn’t come from growing up in a place like Manchester. Lefty had some education, and more than a bit of talent, and yet he was an errand boy.

Whoever or whatever had Lefty and Seth in its thrall was worse than the demon. Fiercer. Harder. Someone who knew he owned his patch and fed trespassers to rabid dogs.

The master of Bangkok. The demon that belonged to every city and its Black, just as the city belonged to the demon. Knots of life and death and magic called to demons, some lost and searching for Hell, some coming willingly from the Pit to reap a harvest of human misery.

Jack tried to take a breath, and didn’t manage much more than a gasp of carbon monoxide. If the demon of Bangkok knew who he was, the demon was halfway to knowing why Jack was in its fair city.

At least the errand boys hadn’t tied his hands—and where would he go, if they had? Even if he popped the boot, he’d land in the middle of the thrice-cursed crush of Thai traffic and end up pavement mulch, just like Hornby. If he was lucky enough to avoid getting a necromancy curse shoved up his arse and used as a bizarre Yuletide gift in some sorcerous feud.

He ripped off the stifling hood as the Lexus rolled around a corner and smacked his head against a sharp edge again. Jack cursed the mages, the car, the powers that be, and when he was dizzy from sucking in tainted air, he saved one last curse for that treacherous cunt Seth McBride.

The Lexus inched and bounced through the streets of Bangkok, Jack’s sense of time liquefying and lengthening until it might have been years that he’d spent crushed into the boot rather than minutes or hours. His arm was bound up with dried blood. Jack didn’t bother peeling back the towel. Cuts were like bad memories—aggravate them with enough prodding and they began to hurt and bleed again.

At last, the car jerked to a stop as abruptly as Lefty and his companion had appeared in the waiting room, and light from the outside world dazzled Jack into blindness.

Righty’s hands grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “He took the fucking bag off.”

Lefty sighed. “Like it’s a secret fortress around here. Get him out of there.”

Jack caught a quick snatch of crowds and noise before he was hustled onto his feet and indoors, Righty stopping their procession in a shadowed vestry. Jack chanced a glance backward, into the outside. The small slice of city he could see consisted of stacked flats and Thai faces, devoid of the English signs and foreigners that overran Pat-pong. Jack was the only white man that he could spy, and curious faces peered from the greasy windows of the flats at the Lexus and the gangsters, the only clean things in the street. Clean, shiny sore thumbs.