by Demon Bound
He held the head out in front of him like a rugby ball, wrapping the string around his knuckles. He lowered the thing by degrees, until it dangled a few meters above the water, and the feedback of black magic traveled up his arms and across his skin, burrowing deep.
“Someone’s going to see us,” Pete warned.
Jack rocked against the weight of the head, and the heady rush of energy all through his nerves. “’Course they will. However, I wager no one’s going to bother the crazy farang and his severed head.”
Pete made a face, like she’d report him to the coppers herself if she had a choice. “Just be quick. That head is absolutely creepy.”
The string in his fist gave a twitch, and Jack held up his free hand to Pete. “Hush.”
Scrying wasn’t like summoning or exorcism. It was a quiet art, precise and delicate, requiring a steady hand and a steadier mind to keep the sharp pinpoint of focus on whatever it was you sought. Mages used ink, mirrors, or plain stone pendulums to find nearly anything. White witches stared at crystals and sorcerers used the writhing, sticky energy of necromancy to scry with human bodies.
Mages could find ghosts, missing things, lost people, but to find a human being who wanted to stay hidden and cemented their chances with magic—that was the realm of the darker arts.
The head moved. It swayed back and forth in a parabolic arc above the river water. Water, the great current that bound the spirit world and the light one, channeling the sorcerous energy into Jack’s search.
Jack said, “Miles Hornby.”
The head came to a stop at an angle, rigid, white eyes staring north. They rolled back toward Jack.
He felt the magic squirm from his grasp, winding down the string to take up residence in Jao’s skull. Jack’s skin crawled, like it was trying to separate from his flesh and bone.
The sorcery spoke, in a voice that was older than bone and more wicked than any demon. It filled Jack up until it spilled over, and as he watched the head’s jaws began to work, the swollen tongue flopping with the effort needed to form a word.
Jack’s stomach and his balance lurched as the scrying spell gripped him, and he strained to hear the worlds borne on the spell. For a moment, there was only the rushing water and the hiss of the long boats poling underneath the bridge, and then his arm jerked as the spell snapped home.
“Kâo Fn Wat,” the head gasped, and then the string broke and the thing plunged into the river with a splash, disappearing beneath the dark and oily waves.
Jack let go of the string, felt it slip through his fingers and follow the spell down into the depths. The long boats passing by paid no notice to the slowly dying pool of ripples on the river. They paid even less attention to one lone white nutter standing on the rail.
Pete grabbed him when he swayed, and Jack jumped down. The heroin had left behind a feeling of being hollow on the inside, a carapace around a dusty left-behind set of innards, owner long since moved on.
“So?” She let go of him quickly and put an arm’s length between their bodies. They may have made up the fight but he wasn’t forgiven.
“Kâo Fn Wat,” Jack said. “Whatever that means.”
“A wat is a temple,” Pete said. “Learnt that from Tomb Raider. What direction?”
Jack pointed to where the head had come to rest. “That way. Never heard of Kâo Fn Wat. No idea what it is.”
Pete grimaced. “Fantastic. Now what do we do?”
Jack sighed, the feeling of inevitability clenching at his stomach, forcing him to step out to the road and hail a motor taxi. “Now we go and ask someone who does.”
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 Fn 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 Fn 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 Fn 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 Fn 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 Fn 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.
Jack didn’t walk willingly into situations where he knew he was properly fucked. That was for white knights, and he was no kind of knight—white, black, or any other shade.
Pete trailed Jack by a few feet, eyes twitching nervously from trees to path to the hunched shape of the huts ahead. Jack slowed so they walked side by side.
“You hear it?” he asked after a moment. Pete shook her head.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Nothing,” Jack agreed. Sweat coursed down his neck, rivulets meeting and mating to become rivers. “No birds. No beasts.”
Pete pointed her chin toward the village. “No people.”
Jack’s boots squelched in the mud track as they reached the village outskirts. There were no animals in the pens made of corrugated tin and mesh, no smoke rising from the crooked chimneys that poked among the shacks like a cluster of broken finger bones.
Pete cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hello!” Her voice bounced back, but no one replied.
The village square was populated with footprints, sodden newspaper, and one half-deflated soccer ball. An enterprising soul had staked out tarps to collect water, and cloudy clusters of mosquito eggs drifted across the surface.
Jack had already turned to go back to the train platform and call Kâo Fn Wat another dead end when he saw the crows.
The crows sat in a straight line on the sagging telephone wire, eyes unblinking, wings unruffled. They stared at Jack, and he stared in return.
Three black bodies, three sets of feathers gleaming in the hazed-over sun. After two heartbeats the crow on the right turned his head, met Jack’s eye with one made from a bead of black lava glass. The fetch and the mage stared at one another for a few slow, hot breaths.
“Jack.” Pete’s voice floated to him from far off, but the tone was flat and hard as a tombstone. “Jack. You need to see this.”
She stood in the doorway of the largest shack at the square’s edge, a rusty Quonset hut with the markings of the American military thirty years past. Pete was pale, and the sweat on her skin stood out like crystals.
Jack didn’t ask what was inside the hut. The sweet, weighty scent of rotten orchids rolling out from the narrow door answered him. Still, he came to Pete’s shoulder and he looked inside.
The bodies were one or two high, three in the corners. Flies were thicker than air under the arch of the roof. The dirt floor had become mud, darkened with sticky blood that refused to dry in the heat.
Under cover, the smell became a presence, a physical hand that shoved its fingers down Jack’s throat and coated his tongue with sticky offal.
“There’s got to be thirty people here,” Pete said. She clapped a bandanna over her face and pressed a canister from her overnight bag into Jack’s hand. He looked at it. “Makeup remover?”
“Under your nose,” Pete said. “Trust me.”
Jack dabbed the pink cream under his nose and the sharp scent of toner and artificial strawberries cut the cloud of decay. “Thirty people,” he agreed, as Pete clicked on her pen light and flashed it over the corpses. The blank smiles of cut throats stared up at Jack.
“Thirty-three.” The voice spoke from behind him, from the outside, and Jack spun. His heart jumped against his bones, a betrayal that he knew had escalated to his face when the figure smiled.
“You’re here to kill me, you’ll end up like the rest.”
The dark hair, gravelly voice, and stained Radiohead shirt told Jack all he needed to know. “Miles Hornby.”
Hornby ran his hand through his lank mass of brown hair. “I knew they’d send someone with his head pulled out of his ass next time, but I didn’t know it would be Jack Winter.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Heard a lot about you, man.”
“Likewise.” Hornby was taller and wider than Jack himself, but he had a slithering, fey quality to his features that put Jack in mind of a predatory animal skulking through brush.
“You’ve left a very unhappy demon behind in England, mate,” Jack told him. “But I think you know that.”
Hornby instead looked at Pete. “Didn’t expect you.” He held out his hand. “You shouldn’t have to see this. Wait outside, will you? Your boyfriend and I will be over in a minute.”
“Fuck off,” Pete said. “That shirt of yours is the most frightening thing in this hut.”
Hornby’s jaw twitched. “Aren
’t you the little pistol.”
“Oi.” Jack put himself between Hornby and Pete. “You don’t talk to her. You talk to me.”
Hornby took a step toward Jack. He was unique in that—most backed away, and still more simply ran when they confronted him. “I’m not going back,” Hornby said.
“Oh?” Jack popped the knuckles in his right hand. They’d separated long ago, at eighteen or nineteen, a club brawl that he could have avoided, or at least won, if he’d been less pissed or less of an arrogant little sod. “I beg to differ, Miles. I think you’re coming with us. And I think you’re going to do it with a smile on your fucking face.”
“You haven’t even asked about the dead bodies,” Miles mused. “Only care about me. Makes you a sick man, Jack. Priorities all screwy.” Underneath the scent of decay and the heat, Jack felt another sensation rise. Older, wickeder. The thrilling pull of black magic.
“You know what did this to them?” Jack jerked his thumb at the corpses. “That’s wonderful. Really fantastic. You can have a cry about it on the plane ride home.”
“Of course I know,” Hornby said. “It was me.”
Pete touched Jack on the wrist. “Maybe we should reconsider this . . .”
Jack didn’t take his eyes off Hornby. It was a gunfight now, as the other man’s magic rose, an ambush he’d walked into. Hornby was playing at the dark arts and Jack hadn’t been ready. “I beg your pardon?”
“The demon sent vargr to take me back,” Hornby said. “So I killed them. Didn’t like it, but there you go.”
Pete leaned toward Jack. “Vargr?” she murmured.
“Hellhounds,” Jack said. “Demon’s scent dogs.” The vargr were shadow, formless, but Jack saw the twisted faces of the villagers, the long black teeth and claws that had begun to grow and usurp their human forms.
“They possessed the village,” Hornby said. “It was them or me and I chose myself.”
