Jack fished in his wallet to find the last of his English money. “Well, you’re very kind, luv, but that was a long fucking time ago indeed.”
Trixie waved off his payment. “On the house, for as long as you’re in Patpong. I’ll take my trade in stories.”
Jack started for the door, but turned back. “There is one thing, luv.” He scratched at his chin. He wanted a shave again. Pete would have reminded him.
“Anything,” Trixie said. “Except what everyone else is giving up around here.”
Jack rocked on his heels. Stay casual, stay charming. Don’t act like you care. The liar’s rules to making others tell the truth. “You know music, yeah? The local scene?”
Trixie nodded. “Most nights off, I’m far from here. There’s a great hardcore club over on Silom if you’re ever in the mood to see the real Bangkok.”
“Miles Hornby,” Jack said. The name was beginning to sound like an epithet. “He’s apparently a musician. You ever heard of him?”
“Well, sure,” Trixie said. “His band was the Lost Souls. Played around here a few times before he got a legit gig. Not bad—sort of an early Nick Cave thing going on.”
Jack’s heart beat faster, cutting through his fatigue and the pleasant slack warmth of the cheap bourbon. “You’ve seen him.”
“Sure,” Trixie said. “Lots of people saw him. He was pretty good. Not as good as you and the Bastards on Nightmares and Strange Days, of course. But he might have gone on a label with a few years of gigging.”
“You said his band was the Lost Souls?” Jack was talking faster now, leaning in close enough to smell Trixie’s cherry perfume and a hint of salt beneath, to see the eyes on the curling dragons of her tattoos. It couldn’t be this easy, not after what the demon had told him. “What d’you mean was?”
“Past tense,” said Trixie. “They’re not anymore.”
Jack gripped her wrist. Her skin was warm and her pulse was fast, and she didn’t try to pull away. “Why not?”
“Because . . .” Trixie’s bee-stung lips turned down. “Miles Hornby’s dead.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Jack found his way back into the street in a haze of bourbon and disbelief. Dead. Hornby couldn’t be dead. The demon wouldn’t have sent him. . . . He slumped against the outside of the Club Hot Miami, head scraping the bricks. Hornby could very well be dead, and the demon still would have sent him. It was exactly the sort of thing the demon would do.
He wanted to sink into the ground, to slip through the layers of the Black and find himself back in his flat, in London, before any of this shit had ever gotten started.
But if he sank into the ground, the only thing he’d find would be the Land of the Dead, the howling of lost souls, the clanging of the Bleak Gates.
The want for a fix crawled up from Jack’s guts with a burning, frenetic intensity like his stomach was going to come up along with his craving. He scanned the passing crowd, found the youth with greasy hair and a bowed head, the thin girl in the bikini top and ripped denim skirt standing on opposite corners of the intersection, like two poles on a globe. The boy’s slouched gait and Phish T-shirt promised weed, LSD, perhaps peyote, while the girl’s bony legs and bruised arms promised exactly what he needed.
Sweat ran down his chest under the frayed fabric of his Stooges shirt, and Jack shut his eyes, his sight rolling over him in silvery waves. The pavement of Patpong 2 faded, the sound, and he saw a dumpier, seedier, more dangerous road—GIs in uniforms thirty years out of date on the arms of girls doped out of their minds as they teetered on platform heels, pimps in Western suits and sharp-brimmed hats watching from the shadows like sharks under a reef.
A GI with a knife wound in his gut stared at Jack. “Say, brother, can you help me out? I lost my wallet and I . . .”
Jack scrubbed at his eyes, trying to make it stop. To make it all stop—the sight and the need and the deep, sucking void in his chest that they combined to create.
“Just a few bucks for a cab,” the GI coaxed. “Just a few . . .” Bloody hands grabbed on to Jack, smearing the black miasma of the dead across his skin and up his arms, blotting out his scars and tattoos.
“You know you’re just like us,” the solider pleaded. “Lost and lonely and walking that dark road. Just walk with me, buddy. Just for a few minutes . . .”
Hands yanked him away, and knuckles freshened the bruise on his cheek with a backhanded blow. Jack let out an involuntary yelp. “Fuck me!”
“Not drunk enough for that yet,” Seth said, setting Jack on his feet again. “You all right, Jackie? Looked like you had the ghost on you.”
“I just . . .” Jack’s eyes wandered to the corner of the street again, against his will. The girl was gone. The boy was bobbing his head to his iPod. Everything was right and real and normal about the scene, except him.
“I’m fine,” he breathed out. Seth grunted.
“Look worse than you did when I found you, boy. You keep up like this, you’re going to be under the ground before the week’s up. Forget the demon and all his plans, you’re doing a fine job of it yourself.”
“About that.” Jack sighed. “I talked to that bird bartender in the music club. Hornby’s dead.”
Seth felt in his pack and came up empty. “Got a fag?” Jack passed him a Parliament. “Did you hear me? I said that Hornby’s dead.”
“I’m old, not deaf, you sod,” Seth snapped. “Came to tell you I made a few calls and heard the same thing.”
“That’s it, then.” Jack looked at the toes of his boots as he walked. He’d come a long way in these boots. Steel peeped out where the leather had worn away at the toes and the mismatched laces had been broken and reknotted like a map of a B road at home. “The demon played with me. I came here for nothing.”
“Hell.” Seth exhaled into the face of a passing female tourist, who coughed dramatically and then shot him the bird. “I could have told you that, boy. What was lesson one, after you came to me?”
Jack chafed, Seth’s tone snapping him back like a rubber band to when he was young and stupid. “I didn’t come here to be lectured on your musty old crow magic, McBride.”
“Demons lie!” Seth spat. “Lesson. Fucking. One.” His face hardened from anger into something more permanent. Jack decided that if he cared, he’d call it disappointment.
“You were my best, boy,” Seth grumbled. “You had the spark, the talent, and look at you. Pissed it all away, didn’t you? Bloody waste.”
“You’re one to talk,” Jack said. The passing urge to ball up his fist and hit Seth in the jaw to even up his bruises gripped him, but he forced it down. “Look at you—hiding here, living like a retarded pensioner, bored out of your skull. You might as well top yourself and join Hornby, because this ain’t a life, mate—it’s just a prolonged, sweaty death.” He lit a fag of his own and sucked down the smoke, relishing the burn. “Hornby would probably be far better company.”
“You’re so hung up on him, go find his grave and lie on it,” Seth returned. “And good riddance to you.” He turned his back and stomped up the stairs to his landing.
Jack stood for a moment, fuming, before he followed Seth. “That’s it?” he shouted. “You’re just tossing it in? That’s all Seth McBride is good for?”
Seth turned back, his eyes lit from within with witch-fire. His magic was pure white, the white of cleansing fire and sacred incense. “I can’t help you, boy, you understand? Hornby’s beyond our reach.”
Jack rubbed the back of his neck.
The demon had told him to bring Hornby home. The demon had lied. The demon had made the new bargain for his name.
Names had meaning, in the Black. They had power and currency in the great tide of magic that swept along the underside and seeped through the cracks of the waking world.
The demon wouldn’t promise a name, even idly.
“He’s not beyond all reach,” Jack said.
Seth narrowed his eyes, the sun-drenched wrinkles in his
redly tanned face bunching up. “What are you on about, boy?”
“If Hornby’s kicked it,” Jack said, “then why was the demon so keen to have him brought back? He’s alive, I understand not coming onto another demon’s patch. He’s a stiff, I’d collect me debt and cross Hornby off the books. I wouldn’t send my arse halfway around the world.”
“Jack.” Seth held up his hand. “Leave it alone. Leave Hell to Hell’s concerns and go home.”
“I can’t do that and you know it,” Jack growled. “Come on, Seth. You can’t say you’re not curious about this. About why a demon would ask me to reel in a dead man.”
“If there’s one thing I know,” Seth said, “it’s that I don’t give two shits about the wherefore and the why of the Black any longer. That’s why I retired.” Seth pushed into his sweltering flat.
“The demon should have collected its debt,” Jack insisted. “It shouldn’t have sent me here. It still needs Hornby.” Jack massaged his temples. “I still have to bring him back.”
Seth tipped his head back, and his eyes went narrow, as if Jack had just suggested setting fire to his own hair.
“I hope you’re talking about a body bag and a slew of customs forms and not what I think you are.”
Jack took up Seth’s seat in the sticky plastic armchair. “The demon was very clear. He wants Hornby. Not just a bag of dead flesh.”
Seth flicked on the telly and sat on the edge of his futon, kicking aside a pile of dirty football jerseys. “Jack, you’re talking about raising the dead. Necromancy. Not just a dip of your toe into a little sorcery, but a full-frontal fuck with the dark side.”
“Spooky,” Jack commented. “You going to scold me, or help me?”
Seth snorted. “As if I’d let you die on me again, boy.”
Jack tipped his head back. “Bloody wonderful. After I catch a few hours of kip, we need to find ourselves Hornby’s corpse.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Pete opened her eyes, staring a hole in Jack as he moved in her. The chanting of the watchers rose. The rain ceased, leaving the air snapping cold against his bare skin.
He could stop, or he could die at the watchers’ hands. The stone would have its blood this night, and Jack’s blood was as sweet as a Weir’s.
Pete’s lips moved, her words lost in Jack’s breath and the sounds of the bespelling song.
Jack bent his head closer as they coupled, and as the ritual flowed toward completion—toward the circle of power that bound him surely as the shackles bound Pete, toward the vile and unnatural completion of a dead ritual, itself a ritual of the dead, Pete’s voice cut through the haze of power and down to his thudding heart.
“Wake up, Jack.”
Jack bolted from his rest. His back and neck screamed at him for passing out, yet again, at odd angles in a chair better suited to employment as a medieval torture device.
“You got that look again,” Seth commented. The light outside the flat was hazy dawn, and the telly had changed from cricket to a Thai cooking show presided over by a cheery woman in a neon pink apron.
Jack cracked the tension from his neck with a sound like a rifle. His head echoed. “What look’s that?”
“Haunted,” Seth said. “You were anyone else, I’d say you’d caught ghost sickness.” He pottered around the kitchenette until he’d installed coffee and filter in an ancient carafe and switched it on. “That you’d got a spirit feeding off you, like you were a fuckin’ milkshake.”
“I’ve seen ghost sickness,” Jack said. “’S not what I have.” Ghost sickness ate a person slowly from the inside. It had showed in Pete’s eyes first, in the haunted cast of her gaze and in the dreams of death that came any time she shut them. She’d carried Algernon Treadwell’s spirit like a black rider on her back, her slight body pale and papery as Treadwell drank of her life.
“Oh?” Seth rummaged in the fridge and found a few eggs, which he cracked into a frying pan. “Always thought it was a load of bollocks, myself. Who’d you know got it?”
“Someone in London,” Jack said, and ended Seth’s probing with a flick of his hand. “We need to find out where Hornby is buried. Dig him up and get on with it.”
“You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Jackie,” Seth told him. “Unless, in the intervening years, you’ve taken it upon yourself to learn the ways and means of calling back the dead.”
Jack shoved his hands into his hair. It was flattened on one side and he attempted to muss it equally again. “You know I’m no fucking sorcerer, Seth. But if we have no body, no necromantic spell we try will do one bit of bloody good, so let’s start at what we do know.”
Seth shook crystallized sugar into his coffee, sipped, and winced. “Fuck me. Can’t brew a cuppa in this country worth shite.”
“Just point me at the cemetery,” Jack said. “I’ll do it myself, since you’re feeling delicate.” As the sun rose, gray-yellow like an old bruise through the haze of smog that hung over Bangkok, Jack felt his time of reprieve slipping away, little by little, like sand against skin.
“It doesn’t work like that here,” Seth muttered.
“Explain, then,” Jack snapped. “Because this might be a bloody amusement for you, but this is my life, Seth. My fucking life and someone else’s besides if I can’t do what the demon wants from me.”
“And who’s fault is that, exactly?” Seth demanded. “You didn’t have to call him, Jackie-boy. You didn’t have to reach out.”
“I suppose you would have had me die.” Jack’s headache began with a renewed vengeance. He wasn’t damply sweating any longer, but cold. Cold like the day he’d lain on the floor of Algernon Treadwell’s tomb and felt the slight warmth of his own blood spread across his chest, his stomach, soaking through his shirt and dribbling onto the stones.
“Yes,” said Seth shortly. “I would have.” He dumped the sludgy coffee down into the drain and slammed his mug onto the porcelain washboard. “But that’s the past and this, unfortunately, is me present so after I find a bite to eat we’ll go see about finding your dead man.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Hornby couldn’t’ve picked a worse city to die in,” Seth said as they walked down Patpong 2. The road and its citizens lay much subdued in daylight, as the district nursed its hangover. “You got any idea where and when he kicked it?”
“No,” Jack said, spying Trixie unlocking the door of her bar. “But she does.” He raised a hand. “Oi! Luv! Got a minute?”
Trixie smiled when she caught sight of him, but the expression dropped just as quickly when she saw Seth. “I know you. You’re the farang who puts curses on people from your balcony.”
Seth puffed up. “Is that what they say about me?”
“And you had the nerve to jump on my back about black magic?” Jack muttered.
“Shaddup,” Seth told him congenially. “Like you’re bein’ fitted for a halo, boy.”
Jack had almost forgotten how much he wanted to punch Seth in the mouth, but the desire came back sharp and twinging between his knuckles. He looked to Trixie instead. “Luv, we need to know how Miles died. And where.”
“He bit it out on Silom Road.” She jerked a thumb. “Got hit by a taxi walking to the train station after his set. About two weeks ago.”
“Happens a lot around here,” Seth said to Jack’s questioning look. “Taxi drivers willy-nilly, drunk tourists pushin’ and shovin’ . . . recipe for a pavement pancake if I ever heard of one.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Trixie pursed her lips. “He took a long time to die. He was still screaming when the corpse collectors got there.”
“Corpse collectors?” Jack cast a glance up and down the street, sunlight diffused by buildings closing in overhead. He wasn’t looking for a pissing contest with a host of necromancers. If they were thick on the ground in Bangkok, he might have to accept his fate with grace and go home. Which was as bloody likely as Seth joining the Riverdance.
“Bangkok doesn’t have a city ambulance se
rvice,” Seth explained. “So when there’s a dead bloke lying in the street, whoever can snatch him up first gets the fee from the hospital morgues. Bloody business, that—quite literally.”
“He’s right,” Trixie said. “But Miles died soon enough after that. They probably took him to Patpong Hospital.” She put one hand on her hip. The forearm bit of her tattoo was a pair of dancing geishas, peering from behind their fans. “Why d’you want to know?”
“Pure academic curiosity,” Jack assured her. “Cheers, luv. Who’s playing tonight?”
“Unicorn Euthanasia,” Trixie said, opening the door into the bar. Jack frowned.
“They any good?”
“They’re shit,” Trixie said. “Good luck finding whatever it is you’re looking for, Jack.” She shut the door on him, and the space where she’d been filled up with a poster advertising go-go dancers and free drinks.
“I know a bloke,” Seth said slowly. “At that hospital. He works in . . . well . . . corpse delivery.”
“And?” Jack cast a look at Seth. He’d never remembered the man looking reluctant to plunge into any sort of dealing with the Black, but Seth was tapping his sandal on the road, eyes darting everywhere but Jack.
“And, nothing,” Seth said too quickly. “He’s a skin trader. Knows words, spells. Things for you to use, to bring Hornby back. Which is still a royally shite fucking idea, by the way.”
Jack stopped at the crush of traffic on Silom Road. “I’ll take me chances.” If he opened his sight he could feel it now, the splashes of blood in the gutters, the shrieks of the dying, the mosquito buzz of small engines carrying motorists right on by. Bangkok’s Black was like a pile of corpses—dead at the core but crawling with layer upon layer of new life.
“This way.” Seth walked through the crush of people on the pavement, and Jack followed, riding the small space of his wake. They passed shops, shoppers, tourists, locals, gangsters covered up with tattoos and Buddhist amulets, and housewives haggling over the price of vegetables.
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