Jack felt the gnawing ache of an empty stomach, the jittery sick dance of his heart. Jack wanted Pete with him. She’d have made sense of the vision, helped him quiet his sight and his magic. He could talk himself out of the truth, if Pete were with him.
His talent was going haywire. He couldn’t control his sight. As the anniversary of his bargain crept closer, Jack’s power was unwinding. He’d seen mages go off the rails before, when some curse or malice of the Black caused their mind and their talent to diverge, shredding one another as they fought tooth and nail inside the unlucky mage’s meat sack. Those mages ended up in Velcro pajamas. The ones that didn’t top themselves outright.
Wake up, Pete had said. Open your eyes.
“She sees you, Jack Winter, and she says that you can run. . . .” Pete grinned, half with the pain of her shackles and half with malice. “She says you can run far and fast, but you can never hide.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Jack dug his fingers into his armrest when the Malaysia Air plane took off from Heathrow, and kept them there as the jet bounced from cloud to cloud, each jerk designed specifically to keep his guts somewhere in the vicinity of his tongue.
“Bad flight?”
The girl in the middle seat was one of those self-conscious hippie types made of natural fibers and henna dye, who did things like joining the Peace Corps and handing out condoms to third-world Catholics, urged through the poverty-drenched mud and shit because of some deep moral compulsion brought on by not enough hugs from Mummy.
“’M fine,” Jack said. When was the last time he’d flown? American, 1994? The ill-fated trip to Belgium when Lawrence got himself mixed up with the Stygian Brothers and Jack had to go to their necropolis and bargain back Lawrence’s death?
Too bloody long, and he hadn’t liked strapping himself inside a giant lipstick tube and getting suspended five miles above the earth any better in the bad old days.
“You don’t look fine,” the girl said. She eyed the flight attendants in their colorful vests and neckerchiefs moving in the galley and then dipped a hand into her hemp bag. “Here.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at the small round pills. “What’s that, Xanax?”
“Darling, do I look like I carry mother’s little helper?” the girl scoffed. “Take it. You’ll have a nice ride, I guarantee.”
Jack eyed the little pills when she tipped them into his palm. Then the jet bounced again and turned, skimming west over water and on into southern Europe and the Middle East.
The girl unscrewed her complimentary in-flight water bottle and handed it to him. “I’m Chelsea.”
Jack debated for only a moment, until turbulence bounced him against his lap belt once more, and washed the chalky aftertaste of the pills down with nearly half of the water. After months off, his throat had forgotten how to accept copious handfuls of pharmaceuticals.
“I’m Michael,” he said. “Mick.” Giving a fake name was a reflex, when you couldn’t know who you were speaking to. Names were kept back, used for currency and passage, not given out like Chelsea’s mystery drugs. Jack pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He could still taste the pills.
“Why Thailand?” Chelsea asked after they’d watched an announcement about the in-flight films and blood clots that could be forming in one’s legs at this very moment.
“Why did your parents name you after a fucking neighborhood?” Jack returned. She laughed, and washed down her own pills. Three, Jack noted. He must have lost that scraggly addict’s aura, the one that telegraphed he needed at least twice the doctor’s dose of any medicine you chose.
“They loved it there. We couldn’t afford it, of course—they lived out in Chiswick, and I left when I was about fifteen and went wild for a few years before I settled down and got into activist work.”
Sometimes pegging people dead to rights in the first go was extraordinarily boring, Jack reflected. If Chelsea had said she was going to Bangkok to recruit an all-castrato chorus line for the musical production of Trainspotting, the flight wouldn’t be dull, at least.
“You rescue prostitutes and bums, then?” he said. “Turn them into useful members of the human race?” The pills were making themselves known. His head and legs felt swimmy and his heart and lungs felt slow.
“I rescue anyone who asks me,” Chelsea said with a thin smile. “But what happens after that is up to them.” She put two fingers over his eyelids. “Go to sleep, Michael. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”
Jack tried to say “time for what,” but he had a feeling he only mumbled vaguely before he drifted into a cotton-wool floating sleep. Chelsea’s image flickered once in his sight, gold lion’s eyes and twin shadows sitting on her shoulders. The Black caressed her sharpened cheekbones and full lips, and her hand that stroked his face was full of talons.
“Oh,” Jack slurred. “Fuck.” Before he could really look at Chelsea, put a barrier of power between her pointed black teeth and himself, a dream opened its jaws and swallowed him down. He saw Irish hills, English cities, Pete’s eyes, and then nothing, until it was much too late to do anything at all.
Chapter Twenty-two
Jack woke, suddenly and with the sensation of falling. He saw long metal arms out of the airplane porthole, metal carts manned by drivers in orange vests. It was a bit like waking up after you’d fallen asleep, stoned and watching something from the sixties about robots.
“Come on.” Chelsea nudged him. “It’s always better if you walk it off.”
Jack stood with her help and every joint in his body from his neck to his ankles protested. “The fuck did you give me?” he mumbled. His tongue was thick and furry, a remake of too many mornings when he’d been on the road with the Bastards. That had been the nicest thing about the heroin—you never got hungry enough to feel the sick afterward.
“Dreamless sleep,” Chelsea said. She stepped into the aisle and shouldered her fuzzy bag. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” She gave him another one of those small half-smiles, the ones that didn’t express anything close to comfort or joy. “That’s what you ask for, Jack. When you think no one can hear you. Not to see.”
Jack watched the way her eyes changed, from pleasant gray to iron slate to gold, pupiless and staring.
“Who are you?” he slurred. “Actually, strike that bollocks—what? What are you?”
Chelsea leaned back and squeezed his hand. “The guardian of the gateways sends her regard, Jack. She grants you safe passage through this land.”
Then she was gone, moving lithely through the crush of people disembarking from the jet where there should have been no space, just elbows and bags and snorts of “Move it!” from the American in the Hawaiian shirt, lugging two roller bags and a camera case.
Jack moved to the side and caught the bloke in the ribs as he chugged passed. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “Bit close in here.”
“Up yours, fuckwad,” the American said, and shoved on down the jetway, tossing smaller Thais and Brits out of the way with a casual swing of his luggage.
“Thank you for flying,” said the flight attendant manning the door. “Have a lovely stay, now.”
“Listen,” Jack said. “The girl sitting next to me on the flight—which way did she go?”
“Girl?” The woman’s eyes flicked toward the cockpit and the phone on the wall next to the tamper-proof door.
“Yes,” Jack said, shifting from foot to foot in an effort to force his blood to expel the drug expediently. His vision still swam in slow circles and his arms felt like logs, but at least he could talk without sounding like a Mancunian Joey Ramone. “Reddish hair, manky clothes, nice face. I need to find her.”
“Sir.” The attendant reached for the handset. “You were alone in your row.”
“She said her name was . . .” Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “Never mind. Put the phone down, luv, I’m not crazy or trying to blow you up.”
The attendant set the phone down reluctantly. “Then what are yo
u on about, sir?”
Jack sighed, trying to keep his balance on the gently listing jetway. “Nothing, it seems. I’m simply having a royally shite fucking day.”
When Jack backed away from the wide-eyed attendant and joined the concourse of Suvarnabhumi Airport, it was as full of people as a riverbed after a flash flood. The light scattered through the thousands of windowpanes that entombed Jack in glass as crowds shoved to and fro all around.
“Like bloody Snow White,” he muttered, watching a 747 take off overhead. The ground under his feet shook.
Jack let the crowd push him for a bit, drifting while he got his bearings. The demon knew where he was and what was happening, so who’d send the hippie girl on the airplane? The girl with lion eyes, and fingers like fossilized claws that could reach inside him and pull out his dreams like a photo album. The girl who wasn’t a girl at all.
It could be any number of people—or not-people, Jack reflected. Anyone he’d slagged off in the last twenty years. Any vulture circling who’d heard about the demon and wanted his pound of Jack Winter.
Or the demon could be a liar, could be stringing him up like a puppet and sending its cronies in the Black for its own amusement. Offer everyone a bit of the crow-mage, soften him up before the day came around so Jack wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t scheme, and would beg the demon for his life like every other stupid fuckwit who’d bound a bargain before him.
Jack knew this was likely as anything else, but he still let himself join the line for customs and presented the passport the demon had given him. Miles Hornby had tricked the demon, and Miles Hornby was in Bangkok.
“Reason for visit?” The Thai behind the glass couldn’t have been more disinterested if Jack were a cardboard cutout.
“Vacation,” Jack said, and fought to keep from laughing.
“Duration of stay?” The Thai clicked at his computer.
“Less than a week,” Jack said. “One way or another.”
His passport slid back at him through the slot. “Very good. Next,” the customs agent said, and the crowd swallowed Jack up again.
Chapter Twenty-three
Jack boarded a train for the thirty-kilometer ride to downtown Bangkok, pressed in with Thai citizens, their luggage, visiting backpackers, and their burdens. Jack stood and let the gravity of the train pull him from station to station.
In a crush of people, Jack had always felt the most secure. He could create a bubble of solitude out of the ebb and flow of bodies, and he could find silence while everyone else talked and laughed and shouted. The living could shut out the dead, at least to a degree. The press of overlapping souls was like listening to traffic on the motorway, or the rush of blood through your own ears. Normal people felt like passing a hand through flowing water—gentle and present, but never cold or dreadful, like looking at the Black or standing in a group of other talents.
In this crowd, though, Jack just felt alone, overwhelmingly so. The air was foreign and the magic was foreign, and it left a hole in him, the gaping black pit of his sight without anything to catch him at the bottom. Thailand’s air was close and hot enough that it felt like a hand over his mouth, and the snatches of smell that Jack caught as the train drew closer to the central city certainly weren’t winning any prizes. The cacophony of voices speaking half a dozen languages rang in his still-fuzzy head, and his abused stomach lurched with every bump on the track.
If Pete were here, he could lean into her as the train rounded a curve, steal a touch and pretend it was only gravity and not any desire to be against her. But she’s not, Jack told himself, so leave it alone and smarten up. It wasn’t Pete that he needed to be thinking of now. What he needed was further back, memories that he’d rather not stir even in his most pissed, most sorry, or most high-as-a-fucking-kite moment. Jack needed his memories of the time before Pete and the fix, before anything except the dead.
The train rattled on, never disgorging a passenger, only packing more in as they wound deeper and deeper into the veins of Bangkok’s heart. Jack found himself pressed against the window, watching the world flow by in snatches of color and stain, high-rise skin reflecting a water-slicked image of the train and slums that stared at him with broken glass eyes.
A female face grinned at him out of the blur of twilight buildings, and his sight showed him a bloody slick on the ground underneath her, her body a mass of sticky meat and her teeth filed to sharp points. Bangkok showed him its Black, clawed at his sight, a teeming and frantic energy that was foreign to his senses as the Thai alphabet that delineated the train’s stops and starts.
Jack blinked and looked away from the woman’s reflection. Sometimes, it was all you could do. Avert your eyes and pray to your gods that whatever It was hadn’t noticed your insignificant scrap of heartbeat and talent.
The train rumbled into Silom Station, and Jack shoved his way off, relieved to finally be able to at least lift his arms. He fished in his pocket and unfolded the scrap of vellum, worn shiny. The remains of a penciled-in map were barely visible. His handwriting in the bad old days had been shit—it was a wonder any of his cantrips or incantations had ever worked the way they should.
On Silom Road, he stopped to get his bearings before plunging into the eternal stream of foot and motor traffic traversing the street between Jack and the crush of Pat-pong.
In Patpong, the Black was different—it spoke to him much like Whitechapel did, as he crossed with a knot of Japanese men in blue polo shirts, some kind of tourist group, cameras and fat rolls of bhat bulging in their pockets and cases. The red-light district was a crush of smell and sound and blurred expanses of flesh glimpsed through streaky nightclub windows, garnished with torn posters advertising sex shows years out of date.
The same dark heartbeat bent and whispered through the tourist and the barkers attempting to entice Jack upstairs to see the girls, or the boys, or the boys dressed as girls take their clothes off, lay themselves upon the altar of sex magic, and send up painted and pierced and fragrant offerings to the gods of such things. The bloody bones of Whitechapel were here, but tinged with sex and spices, the ambient power of the place rolling over Jack’s skin like honey.
A peddler in the night market choking off a street signed as PATPONG 1 ahead of him stretched out a handful of gold chains and watches. “American? Good discounts for Americans.”
“English,” Jack said. “I still get a discount?”
The peddler laughed. “English, I charge you double. See anything you like?”
Jack scanned the table, covered with nylon and anchored at each corner by a statue of the Buddha. There was the usual assortment of knockoff jewelry, but he passed his finger over a chain with a coin attached. His sight returned a thread of magic, small white flames rising off the coin in the Black.
“This one,” Jack said. “It has something.”
“You have a good eye,” the peddler said. “That’s a passage coin—in your culture, you use it to pay the ferryman. To your next world?”
Jack felt his mouth curl up at the corners. “You know what you’re talking about.”
“Around here, mostly tourists,” said the peddler. “But I see enough of you to make it worth my while.”
Jack picked up the necklace, felt the weight of the copper coin on the end of the cheap chain. “How much?”
“Depends on what you have, mage.” The peddler folded his arms and smiled. Jack laughed.
“What’s your name?”
“Banyat. But everyone around here calls me Robbie.” The peddler made a show of counting his money roll. “I’ll sell it to you for a story. Tell me why you’re here.”
Jack slid the chain around his neck. Stories were a good currency, provided you had them to tell. Much better than names, or dreams. “Why do you care?”
“This is my corner,” Robbie said. “I keep my eyes open and if something slithers up from the Black that’s a wrong thing to be walking in this side of the veil, I whisper in the right ears. You, mage—you’re a
wrong thing.”
“So for your silence, you get to know my business?” Jack knew when he’d been manipulated—usually it was by flexible and willing girls getting back at their ex-boyfriends after a Bastards gig, but the feeling of vague unbalance was the same.
“That I do,” Robbie said. His English wasn’t accented with American, and Jack turned the coin over his fingers, made it disappear, reappear.
“Fine. I’ll tell you my business here if you tell me why in the hell you’re called Robbie.”
“I did some time in the UK,” Robbie said. “For robbery, get it? As for the chain, Irish bloke lives up on Patpong 2 pawned it to me for some crematory ash and a bootleg of the Stiff Little Fingers.”
“I’m in Bangkok looking for someone,” Jack returned, because a bargain was a bargain whether you were speaking with a demon or a street hustler. “And I have a feeling your Irish friend and I will be meeting over that someone soon enough. That slake your burning curiosity for you, Robbie with the posh boarding school accent?”
Robbie snorted. “What poor bastard got them after you? I saw you coming, I’d turn the other way so fast I’d whiplash meself.”
“A clever boy,” Jack said, echoing the demon’s words even though thinking of those blank black eyes and crimson mouth made him nauseous. Or it could be the comedown from the pills. Treacherous bitch. If he found out who had set these specters of ill fortune on him, they were going to be short their balls.
“Can’t be very clever after all, if you found him,” Robbie said. He jerked his chin at the coin. “Take that. For safe passage wherever you need to go.”
Jack fingered the coin, but he kept the chain around his neck. The weight felt right, solid and warm against his chest, and precious little was solid in this tilting city where the Black screamed rather than hissed. “Cheers, Robbie.”
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