Demon Bound

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 can you tell me? Or are you useless, like all the other pit-spawned wankers I’ve come up against?”

“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 Fiach Dubh, I was young. Stupid. I thought I knew better.”

“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.

Chapter Forty-one

When Jack woke, dawn had unfolded over the world. Pete nudged him. “It seems we’ve arrived.”

Jack pulled himself to his feet and grabbed his kit, seeing a snatch of gray, cracked train platform sprouting out of a swath of intractable jungle. “Grà-jòk Baang. Somehow I pictured it as being more . . . alive.”

He followed Pete from the car, down the steps onto the platform. The conductor slammed the door and the train whistle hooted as soon as his feet touched concrete.

In a matter of a few moments, they were alone, the train only daytime thunder in the distance.

The heat in the jungle was worse than the city, contained and damp as the canopy closed in air weighted with decaying leaf mold and orchids. A dirt track led away from the train platform and a pocket-sized station house with boarded-over windows. Jack saw curls of smoke and the faint sheen of hazy sun off tin rooftops.

“There’s the village,” he said. “We can ask about the temple.”

“Of course,” Pete muttered. “Because two foreigners walking into a shady village has never ended badly in any of the Indiana Jones films . . .”

They walked down the track in silence, Jack feeling the heat crawl across his skin. The air was thick and it hummed with the same wild magic as the Dartmoor, undercut with sorcery that brushed against his face like sticky fingerprints.