Demon Bound

“You did.” Jack swallowed. “I know you’re the master of Bangkok, that the demon won’t step foot here because of you, so I reckon you’re a hard one, but right now I’m something worse.”

Rahu’s perfect eyebrow raised, wrinkling his perfect golden forehead. If the nasty, oily smirk wasn’t in place, he could have been a ringer for the Buddha. “And what are you, Jack?” he purred.

Jack balled his fists. “I’m desperate.” Feeling his rings dig into his flesh and his tattoos flex gave him a grounding, a bit of the real against the vast whirl pool of magic Rahu commanded. “Miles Hornby is a dead man who tricked a demon. The demon sent me to bring him home, and I said I would.”

Rahu twisted the rings on his fingers, methodically, one after the other. “You are not making a compelling case for your continued life and breath, Jack.”

“I have to find Hornby,” Jack said. Telling a demon the truth was always a risk, because most demons wouldn’t know truth if it sat up and offered them tea and a biscuit. “I’m going to make him tell me how he got out of his bargain.” Jack locked his eyes onto Rahu’s, even though staring at the creature made his sight scream. “And then I’m going to do the same thing.”

Rahu ran his fingers along the gilt altar supporting the Buddha. Gold paint curled in flakes under his fingernails. “Ridiculous. I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t particularly care,” Jack returned. “I’m going to break my bargain, and to do that I have to find Hornby.”

Rahu merely smiled. Some men Jack knew could smile and make it a thousand times worse than any curse, hex, or blow. Kev. Seth. Treadwell’s ghost.

“You don’t know who you’re bargaining with, Jack. Your demon is older and cleverer than most.” Rahu’s face went jagged, all planes and rage. “I once was master of the whole of the Floating World, the lands beyond the sea and to the mountains. Do you know who took that from me? Do you know who resigned me to this fetid, sweltering trap of an island?”

“We both have something to hate it for, then,” Jack said. “I’d think you’d be dancing in place to help me.”

Rahu’s smile went sharp and cold as the rusty edge of a razor. “And yet, for some odd reason, I don’t trust a man sent to me by the very demon responsible for this misery of an existence.”

“Believe it or not”—Jack lifted a shoulder—“I really don’t give a fuck, mate. May I go?”

“Not yet.” Rahu’s voice stopped Jack as he started to walk away. “You say you’re a desperate man. Desperate men bargain. Am I to understand you correctly?”

Jack cursed inwardly, sensing he’d walked right onto the big red X and let Rahu drop an anvil on him. “I suppose.”

“And you wish the possession of the dead man Hornby.” Rahu tapped his chin with one black-painted nail. “Which explains why you attacked poor Khan Jao.” Rahu tipped Jack a wink. “No sort of necromancer, are you?”

“Call me a madman, but my mum always taught me to leave the dead be,” Jack said.

“Did she?” Rahu advanced on Jack, laid a hand against his temple before Jack could backpedal. Ice crystals sprouted on the spot, feather-light on Jack’s skin and hair. “Or was she a whore and a junkie who abandoned you to a life of terror and misery while she crawled inside her pill bottle?”

Jack laughed. He smiled wide. And then he snapped his forehead down against Rahu’s perfect smirk. He caught the creature in the nose. Black blood fountained, hissing where it hit the stone, smoke curling as if the effluvia were liquid nitrogen.

“Don’t bait me,” Jack said. “You won’t like what you find in the trap.”

Rahu cracked his nose back into place. The sound of cartilage scraping echoed against the domed roof of the small temple. The creature didn’t flinch. “Mage, I am going to send you back to your demon in a box with a bow if you’re lying to me.”

Jack massaged his forehead. There was a lump growing. “And if I’m not?”

“If you’re not,” Rahu purred, “then you need what I have.”

“I sincerely hope it’s not wit or charm.” Jack rubbed at the sore spot on his forehead. Rahu had a skull like a cricket bat. “Because you’re skint on that score.”

“Before this city grew from the mud and the filth of the river’s bank,” Rahu said, “I was a keeper of knowledge. I supped with beings you can only imagine, and I took their secrets as my own. I am the forsaken knowledge of the Black, mage. I can give you the spell that awakens Hornby and delivers to you the means to slip your bargain’s bonds.”

“And in return?” Jack spread his hands. “Let me guess, you just want a little something, a little shred of soul or a little pinch of flesh?” He sat down on the prayer cushion opposite the altar, weary all at once, down to his bones. “I haven’t got anything left for you, mate. I’m spoken for, head to toe.”

“I have a grimoire that will get Hornby home for your task,” Rahu said. “All you have to do to get it is tell the truth.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Jack said. “But I’m not a liar. Yes, I am when it suits me but you really think I’m shining you on at this moment, over this matter? You’re a paranoid git, Rahu.”

“You irreverence no longer diverts me,” Rahu said. “Do you want the grimoire or not?”

“Do you think I’m that stupid?” Jack demanded. “That I’ll make another bargain with the likes of you?”

“No,” Rahu said with a blinding flash of teeth. “But you said it yourself—you are desperate.”

Jack conceded with a kick to the floor that he had a point. His jackboot rang off the stone. “Show me the flaming hoop, then. I’ll jump like a good boy.”

Rahu’s eyes glowed blackly. “No need, mage. He’ll be dying to meet you.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

The world faded from Jack’s sight and hearing, and he saw the temple as it was half a century before. The windows were empty of glass and open, sutras hanging on faded ribbons drooping over the altar around the Buddha. Planes droned overhead, the high-pitched whine of single-prop engines. Jack craned his neck and caught sight of three Zeroes flying in formation, the suns on their noses fresh and bleeding red as if they’d just come off the line.

His sight had shown him slices of the past before, but nothing as vivid. He could smell the smoke, hear the rumble of traffic, shouts, and horn honks from the street outside.

It’s real. The voice slid from the stone and the air, blanketing Jack in pinprick chills.

“You a war buff, then?” Jack asked. He tucked his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “I have to say, I’m more of a 1970s retro man, meself. Go to the 100 Club, walk around Chelsea, see Zeppelin. That sort of thing.”

This is the time I prefer. In other lands, with other men, I have shown them the Crusades, the burning times, the Inquisition. But this place, in a war beyond memory, is where I began.

A shadow hit the floor as one of the planes flying overhead flicked across the sun, and it spread and grew, twin pinpoints of flame snatched from the altar candle becoming eyes. A body twitched forth next, scaly wrinkled skin like a shar-pei dog, paired at an oozing stitch line with the head of a lion. The thing tasted the air with a black tongue.

“You’re an elemental.” Jack fought the urge to bury his face in his hands. “That fuckwit Rahu thinks I’ll piss myself at the sight of an elemental?” He met the thing’s eyes. “Don’t take offense, mate, but you lot were the first thing I exorcised. Practice, like.”

I am not a golem of anger or terror or pain, mage, the thing said. I am not those pieces of child’s play that haunt your isle.

Jack sighed. “Then thrill me. What are you?”

I am all things black and hopeless, it whispered. I am the Kartimuhkha.

When it breathed the name aloud it grew and solidified, the small details of its body resolving like Jack’s gaze had been blurry from a long night of pints, fags, and mood-altering chemicals. The thing in front of him sported long claws that scraped flakes from the stone floor, strings of spittle hanging from its jaws and blazing flames dancing in its sunken eyes.