Demon Bound

All at once, he felt the weight of every lie. Crawling inside his mind, deadening his talent, and hollowing him out until there was no Jack Winter, junkie, mage, or otherwise. There was only a memory of Jack Winter, liar and dead man.

Another lie would twist him irreparably, start a psychic hemorrhage that Jack knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.

He dropped his hand. “I will tell you absolutely everything, Pete, but I am ru

Pete blinked away the last of the tears. Her mascara made miniature deltas down her face and Jack ran his thumb lightly over her skin, returning it to pale and pristine. Pete reached up and grabbed his hand, trapping it against her cheek. “You swear?”

Jack nodded. “On me life. What little of it I have left.”

Chapter Thirty-two

The Bangkok Protestant Cemetery was overrun with roses and long grass, the paths barely wide enough for Jack’s boots side by side. No lights watched over the graves, and the dank, ripe smell of the Chao Phraya River mingled with the smell of turned earth.

Pete shone her light at the crooked rows of tombs and graves. “Where is he?”

Jack saw the hump of a newly buried body under the beam, wooden cross stuck crookedly in the earth a few feet ahead of him. “Let’s start there.”

“And if we get the wrong grave?” Pete muttered.

Jack swung his spade to and fro, the iron weight moving like a divining rod. “Then I imagine we’d say, ‘Oh, so sorry, let me just tuck you up and shut your coffin again, guv. Lovely weather we’re having.’ ”

Pete waved him quiet. “You’re a wanker.”

Jack heard a rustle from the bushes and detected silver eyeshine. The small owl stared at him, head twitching back and forth. Jack curled his lip.

“Never liked those things.”

“I don’t mind them,” Pete said. “They used to show up in our garden when I was a girl. Da said they were there to take the bad dreams out of the air before they got to me and my sister.”

Jack prodded the earth over Hornby’s grave and tried to ignore the gaze of the owl. Owls came on an ill wind, harbingers of things that even Jack, with his visions of the dead, didn’t want to imagine too closely. Not psychopomps, like the crow. Only watchers, keepers of the shadows that lived beyond the Black and beyond even the grasp of Death.

“Hold the light steady,” he said to Pete, shoving the spade into the grave mound. The earth was loose and soft, warm still from sunlight. It took him fifteen minutes and a few gallons of sweat to uncover the elongated hexagon of the pauper’s coffin.

“Never liked this,” Pete said. “Exhumations. When I was with the Met, it always seemed wrong, somehow.”

“That’s the Black,” Jack agreed. “Once a soul’s flown from a body, the body has a nasty resonance. Necromancers feed on it.”

“How do they stand it?” Pete brushed her arms off with her hands, as if she were beset by ants.

“They’re evil, foul-smelling necrophiliac idiots,” Jack said. “Reasonable folk know better than to trouble something that belongs to the Bleak Gates.” He swiped the rivers and waterfalls of sweat from his face, and braced himself for the sight of Hornby’s ghost. Magic users, mages particularly, didn’t often go into the underworld quietly and with lack of fanfare. Algernon Treadwell, his worst spook, had been a sorcerer who died bloody and tortured at the hands of witchfinders.

His sight tingling, Jack tapped his spade against the coffin lid. Nothing sprang from the earth in answer. No flutters or cries echoed from the Black. The graveyard was curiously silent, holding its breath in the dense night air of the river. Jack threw the spade aside.

“Be a love and hand me the prybar,” he said to Pete. His bag, at the edge of the grave, pulsed with the looseingredients to the necromancy spell written out in the grimoire. Trixie had translated the Thai for him, and Robbie had sold him most of the ingredients that weren’t already in Jack’s kit. The spell elements hungered for flesh, to dig into skin, for a corpse to weave their magic around even resting separate in his canvas bag.

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 thud, the release throwing Jack down hard in the dirt.

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.