by Demon Bound
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.”
“This man you’re after,” Robbie said, as he flashed a smile at a passing tourist couple. “What’s his name?”
“Miles Hornby,” Jack said. “You heard of him?”
“Can’t say I have.” Robbie rearranged his fake watch display with the speed and efficiency of a card sharp. “But then again, aren’t you farang all supposed to look alike?”
Jack gave a snort. “Good one. The cranky Irishman, what’s his building?”
“The kathoey bar with the pink flamingo sign down on Patpong 2,” Robbie said. “Got apartments upstairs. Mostly for the ladyboys and their . . . friends, you understand? But he moved in there. Said he liked it. Had a good . . . it’s Chinese.”
“Feng shui?” Jack supplied. Robbie nodded, and Jack shook his head, feeling a true smile grow for the first time since he’d climbed onto the airplane. That was Seth—he took the piss by the bottle, and setting up shop above a transvestite sex club would be his idea of a right long laugh. “Got any idea which apartment? So I don’t interrupt any of the gentlewoman’s business, you understand.”
Robbie returned Jack’s crooked grin. “He’s . . . number three, I think. Don’t blame me if you bust down the wrong door and get an eyeful, though.”
“Furthest thing from me mind.” Jack tipped Robbie a salute and found his way through the night market, past a set of enthusiastic barkers outside a sex show featuring a dancer billed as “Around-the-World Sue,” past a knot of smoking fans and drunks outside a music bar. The band inside wasn’t half bad—a fusion of rockabilly and electronica that’d do well in London. The quintet played with the sort of easy harmonies the Bastards aspired to and never quite found.
If he’d been less wrapped up in trying to be the largest, wickedest mage in London and paid more attention to his music, he might be in that club now, Jack thought. Or he might still be on the floor of a rotting squat in Southwark, with the cold kiss of a needle against the crook of his arm. In his lighter moments, Jack thought that seeing the future would be even worse than seeing the dead. At least the dead couldn’t shake their heads at you and tsk with disappointment for ambition and dream crushed beneath boots and heroin.
Club Hot Miami sat halfway down Patpong 2, nestled like a gaudy tropical bird among swampy trees. Pink flamingos and palm trees described in neon danced across the facade, and a barker grinned at Jack, waving a happy-hour flier under his nose.
“No, thanks,” Jack said. “Just looking for the farang who lives upstairs.” Even though he’d taken pains to remember nothing of Seth McBride, the description rolled out with no pause. “Irritable sod, a little shorter than me. Black hair, blue eyes, got a mouth on him that’d strip the gears on a lorry.”
“Oh yeah, we know him.” The barker looked as if he wished emphatically that he didn’t know anything of the sort.
“He at home?” Jack said. “If not, I could be convinced to come in. Murder a drink of anything, honestly. It could have an umbrella and a goldfish swimming in it after the day I’ve had.”
“He’s always home,” said the barker glumly. “Never goes out. No friends.”
“That sounds right.” Jack mounted the outside stairs of the flat block. The stairs were even more precarious than his fire escape at home, if such a thing were possible. They groaned under his weight, the bolts grinding against cement.
The landing on the second floor was little better, close and closed in by mosquito netting, bug lights fizzing as Jack passed. The doors were unmarked, and moans and pants from behind the thin wood confirmed Jack’s theory that nearly everyone in Bangkok was having a better night than he was.
At the third door, he detected no sound. Jack’s eyes traveled up out of habit—you never crossed a mage’s threshold without looking—and found an iron nail, bound in hair and tied to a crow feather soaked in blood.
Not taking his eyes from the hex, Jack reached out and rapped thrice on the bubbly painted wood with his knuckles. They came away sticky. The city itself was alive in Bangkok, breathing and sweating.
A voice rattled the thin door from within. “Fuck off!”
Jack knocked again. “Open the door, Seth.”
He heard scuffling, as if not Seth but a herd of enormous rats resided behind the door, and half a dozen locks clicking.
An eye, watery blue like a cloud-covered sky, peered through the crack. “How’d you know that name?”
Jack spread his arms. “Like I could forget, you Irish bastard.”
Seth’s eye widened, and his broad flat face went slack. “Jack Winter. Fuck me sideways.”
“I’ll pass, thanks,” Jack said. “You never were my type.”
“And you always were a mouthy little cunt, weren’t ya?” Seth demanded. Jack lifted one shoulder.
“No denying it. You miss me, Seth?”
Seth’s hair still stuck up wildly and a pack of Silk Cut still rode shotgun in his front shirt pocket, but he was tan and carrying more weight than the last time Jack had clapped eyes on him. “Yeah, I missed you,” he growled. “Like a case of the clap the peni didn’t chase away.”
“Going to invite me in?” Jack said. “I’m not keen on that hex chewing me up.”
“Right. Worried about the hex.” Seth dropped his shoulder and moved, and pain exploded across Jack’s right cheek. He stumbled, felt himself lose balance and go down in a tangle of mosquito netting.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, boy,” Seth rasped, sticking a cigarette in his mouth. “Remind me why I shouldn’t just kill you now.” He touched his finger to the end of the cigarette, and smoke curled up.
“Fuck.” Jack sat up, shook the cobwebs from his head, and touched the spot where Seth had hit him. It was pulpy and tender, and blood trickled down into the hollow next to his mouth. It left the taste of iron and salt on the tip of Jack’s tongue. “Got it out of your system?” he asked Seth.
The Irishman shook out his fist. His knuckles were pink and pulpy, like a bunch of grapes. “Not hardly. You never did know when you weren’t wanted, Jackie.”
Jack grabbed the rusty rail and pulled himself to his feet. “And you never could throw a punch worth fuck-all, McBride.”
Seth bared his teeth around the Silk Cut. “Why’re you here, Winter?”
Jack pointed up at the hex. “Let me in and I’ll tell you.”
“Shit.” Seth threw his butt down on the cement and stamped on it with one sandal-clad foot. “I wouldn’t invite a fucking demon into my home, so explain to me why I should invite you.”
“I’m looking for a bloke called Miles Hornby to void a bargain with a Named demon of Hell and I’ve got precisely shit to go on, so I’ve come to you, oh wise and generous mentor, for your help.” Jack folded his arms and concentrated on keeping on his feet. His head didn’t ring from the blow, it tolled—slow and rolling, over and over, waves of pain like waves on a shore, threatening to drown him.
“Well.” Seth tipped his head to the side. “Jack Winter asking for my help. I’ve had this dream before.” He looked up and down the walkway.
Jack followed his glance. “What?”
“I’m waiting for Stephen Fry and the talking monkey to come in,” Seth said. “That’s the next bit.”
“Fuck off.” Jack prodded his cheek again. It was roughly twice its normal size and would bear the impression of Seth’s knuckles when the bruise solidified. “I mean it, Seth.”
“So do I, Jack,” Seth snarled. “I don’t want a thing to do with missing bastards, your dodgy troubles, or you. I’d take the talking monkey any fucking day.”
He retreated into the shadow of his flat, and Jack felt the swell of desperation in his chest like Seth had hit him all over again.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Jack had admitted the same truth to Seth close to twenty years ago, when Seth had found him turning conjure tricks on the streets of Dublin, sat him down, gave him a fag, and asked him where he’d come from. The crow spread her wings over Jack that night, folded him into her purview, but he felt no such darkling comfort now.
Seth grumbled out a string of curses, but he moved to the side, jerking his head at Jack. “Fuck it. Come in, then.”
Jack shouldered his bag and stepped cautiously over the threshold. Half expecting to feel the teeth of Seth’s warding hex lock into his skin and his sight, he only relaxed when McBride snorted at his tension. “I wanted you face down, Jackie, you’d be swallowing your teeth now and you know it.”
Jack itched at the back of his neck as his talent prickled at another’s encroachment. “Suppose that’s true.”
“Fucking right, it’s true. I am sorry about that belt, though,” Seth said. He stubbed out his fag into an over-flowing ashtray that lived in the belly of the ubiquitous Buddhas that grinned out at Jack from every corner of Patpong.
“No you’re not,” Jack said. He went in Seth’s minuscule freezer and found a packet of frozen mixed veg that was dated three years past. Sticking it against his face helped with the dull ache, but not the sting. “You haven’t been sorry for a thing since the doctor slapped you on the arse and made you cry.”
“All right, probably not so very much,” Seth admitted. He settled himself in a cracked vinyl armchair in front of a telly crowned in rabbit ears, lines of color wavering up and down the pocket-sized screen over a Thai cricket match.
Jack looked out the back window, down into an alley. Grinning white tourists led along a pair of underage Thai girls, their smiles as pasted on as their plastic dresses. Laughter bounced off the concrete and the air thickened with curls of wayward power as the girls fell behind the pair of men, heads bent together like painted, predatory sharks. Jack caught their extra arms as they passed from street lamp to shadow, the scales that painted themselves onto skin like emerald and onyx tattoo ink, the forked tongues. Served the two wankers right.
“Now,” Seth said, leaning his bulk forward and turning down the volume of the telly. “What the fuck are you babbling about, you owe a demon a bargain?”
Jack talked, keeping the packet against his face. The telly burbled underneath his voice, discordant counterpoint to the story of the demon, the cu sith, the fetch, and Miles Hornby. Seth stayed quiet for a time after Jack finished the whole sordid mess. He changed among four equally distorted channels on the telly, scratched the back of his neck, and finally said, “So what you’re telling me is, you’re buggered and you want old uncle Seth to kiss it and make it go away. Is that it?”
“I just need your help finding the bloke,” Jack said. He wanted to keep his tone even, truly, but he felt restless and itchy inside the cramped little flat that had to be over a hundred degrees even with the arthritic fan in Seth’s window bringing in cooking smells and the low-pitched roar of the city outside.
“Always a just with you, boy.” Seth sighed. “Just needed a little training. Just needed to translate the sorcery grimoire. Just needed to make deals with fucking cocksucking Hellspawn demons . . . ”
“Oi!” Jack dropped the frozen packet on the counter and slammed his hand down with it. “You’re no paragon of virtue, Seth. I saw you do things in the bad old days that would have curled the hair of any respectable sorcerer, so cut out this Catholic schoolboy act and either throw me out on my arse, or get off of yours and sodding help me.”
Seth heaved himself out of his easy chair. “You don’t want help, Jack. You want a fuckin’ miracle.”
“Is that so wrong? Your people pioneered that sort of thing, least that’s what you were always bending my ear on.” Jack touched his cheek again and winced. “You know, for an old man, you’re quite violent. Better watch that. Might break a hip.”
Seth pointed a stubby finger in Jack’s face. “Don’t tempt me to make your other cheek match, you Limey arse-jockey.”
“Like you could land a hit on me again, you cabbage-swilling altar boy–fancier.” Jack sighed. “Does this mean we’re all right?”
“You will never, ever be ‘all right,’ Jack Winter,” Seth growled. “But you and me—that’s for another day.” He grabbed a bottle of cheap scotch with a Thai label from his cabinet and two cloudy glasses. “You take water?”
“’S like asking if I take piss,” Jack said. “Has it really been that long?”
Seth poured Jack two fingers and himself four. Some things never changed. “I heard you’ve bypassed the bottle entirely of late,” he said, tossing back most of the whiskey and wiping a hand across his lips. “Moved on to a more direct method of getting yourself pissed.”
“No,” Jack said, cold crawling over his skin in s
pite of the damp, close heat. His sweat turned to ice at the thought of the pinch of a syringe, the cool presence of the needle and the hot, sweet rush into his blood when he pushed down the plunger. Can’t ignore me forever, the whisper came. You’ll come home, one day.
“No,” Jack repeated. “I’m clean.” Even true, it sounded like a lie.
“Good.” Seth dropped his glass into the sink, causing a scattering of something alive and gifted with an excess of legs. “You were never that stupid when I knew you, Jackie.”
“That’s because I could still tell what was real and what was a phantom,” Jack muttered. “Those were the fucking golden years, for sure.”
“I don’t know this Miles Hornby, but I’ll make some calls,” Seth said. “Meantime, I suggest you take what time you have and enjoy our fair city.”
Jack took a seat in the only other chair in the room, a suspicious wicker contraption that creaked under his weight. “No offense, mate, but I think the nightlife here might be a bit carnivorous, even for me.”
Seth cocked his eyebrow. “Got someone back home? That’s a new one.”
“No one special.” Jack finished off his whiskey. It burned like drain cleaner going down and no doubt tasted like it coming back up.
Pete would be awake, would have weathered an entire day and night with him gone. Or started a torch brigade to find and burn him. Pete wasn’t sentimental, but she was vindictive. She wouldn’t simply slap him across the face and be done with it.
“If you’re not going to find something to fuck or get pissed, you should sleep,” Seth’s voice broke in. “You look like seven kinds of shite dragged across Dublin, boy.”
Jack looked around the single room and dinette that made up Seth’s mildewed, sweaty flat and felt his skin crawl up the back of his neck. Magic had nothing to do with it—the years of sleeping rough voluntarily were behind him in his twenties and the place reminded him of nothing so much as a squat. Add in a dozen or so junkies and a bucket in the corner and the experience would be authentic.
“On second thought,” he said quietly, “I could use some company.”
