“Subtle,” Jack told him. “You tell all your dates exactly how long your pan handle is, as well?” Jack’s toes curled on the cool stone seeping through the holes in his socks.
“He is the master of Bangkok,” Lefty said. “And you’ll address him as such. You are a maggot, not fit to get crushed under his foot.”
“I’ve got a fucking pronoun, at least,” Jack said. He’d wanted to be wrong, to have merely fallen in with necromancers, but Seth had set the master of Bangkok on him and Seth didn’t pull punches. McBride always did have a talent for note-perfect screwings-over. Jack fancied that if Seth hadn’t been magically inclined, he would have made a bang-up divorce barrister.
“Get moving,” Lefty said. “He’s not patient.”
“That makes a pair of us,” Jack grumbled before putting his hand on the door within the arch.
The interior of the building whispered with cool shadows, sunlight filtering through cracks in the roof. Votives flickered in lanterns hung from roof beams and a small gold Buddha glowed in the low light at the far end of the room.
Behind the Buddha, the shadows moved. They crawled across the floor and re-formed, spilled into cracks and slithered out again, and at last they twined and formed into a man, who folded his hands at the small of his back and tilted his head to examine Jack with fathomless eyes.
“Hello, Mr. Winter,” the shadow said. “Thank you for your promptness.”
“Well, if you want promptness nothing assures it like stuffing me into a bloody boot,” Jack said.
The shadow laughed. The power that crawled off the man’s shape told Jack it was not a man at all. The magic was not the magic of a human. Thick, cloying, prying at his defenses and his sight with relentless claws, it slipped in around all of Jack’s frayed edges and tried to fill him up with the hot, dry winds of Hell. Jack didn’t like things that he didn’t know how to work over with his talent, or how to exorcise. The master of Bangkok wasn’t an energy he’d felt before, and Jack gave a violent shiver. He was a control freak; he admitted it, owned it, wore it with pride.
That comes from being beaten and spit on and raped by the sight your whole life, Seth had said. Use it, Jackie boy, don’t fight it.
The only voice he’d ever wanted in his head was the one that bent him over and fucked him in the end. Jack let out a small chuckle.
The shadow flowed toward him. “Something amusing to you, Mr. Winter?”
“Just thinking.” Jack shrugged. “If I didn’t have shite luck, I’d have no luck whatsoever.”
“Very apt,” the shadow agreed. “But today, your luck is good. You’re here.”
Jack caught a glimpse, just a flash, of a blackness that went on and on, and a horned figure with a protruding tongue riding on the back of a black ox while behind him came every dark and wretched thing that found refuge in the Black. He tried to shut his sight against the creature in front of him, but the tattoos on his shoulders began to burn and his head felt as if it would split. He ground his teeth together and drew blood from his tongue while the creature laughed, a smooth, velvety sound that made Jack’s skin prickle.
“You can’t stop seeing, Jack. I’m not like one you’ve met before.”
“D’you want me to stick a star on you?” Jack said. He focused on the pain in his arm, the lump forming on his head. Physical pain could hold the sight back—for a little while. Long enough for him to either talk his way out of the temple or find out exactly how deep he was in the shit.
“Introductions, then,” said the creature. It held out a hand, and with a ripple of power its body became flesh. Its hand floated in front of Jack’s face, slim and unscarred, adorned with silver rings and black fingernails. “I am Rahu.”
Jack didn’t take the proffered digit. “You’ll forgive me, but I’m not fucking stupid.”
Rahu lifted a shoulder. “Your friend Seth did pass that tidbit on.” At Jack’s sneer, Rahu grinned. “You’ve noticed a change in your old friend.”
“Seth hasn’t been me friend in a long time,” Jack said. “You’re so all-knowing, you must know that.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that he values his new life here, and if one values life in the currents of the Black river of Bangkok, one eventually crosses paths with me.”
Jack pushed his hands through his hair. It curled around his temples. The heat killed any hope of his usual mess of spikes. “If you’re going to kill me, could we kick on?” Jack said to Rahu. “I’ve never been so damp and miserable as in this city.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Rahu said. He whipped out his hand and closed it around Jack’s scalpel wound. “I’m going to tell you two facts: this isn’t your city. And it isn’t a scheming demon’s, either. I don’t know why your bargain-binder sent you here, but you’ll tell me. How quickly determines whether you go back to London in a bag or on your own two feet.”
Jack met Rahu’s eyes, and refused to flinch as the creature kept a death grip on his wound. “I didn’t come here to move against you. I just came here to bring Miles Hornby home.”
Rahu’s eyes were black, pupilless. They flickered with power, like Jack’s own eyes when his magic was up. Jack tugged against his grip, but the creature held fast. “I smell it on you, Jack,” Rahu hissed. “I can taste it in the air around you. There’s demon taint on your skin and in your blood. You’re a dog, following a command.” He let go of Jack. “And you’ve just walked into a wolf den.”
A dark handprint stayed in the dried blood on Jack’s arm, and the skin was freezing and burnt, frostbitten from a touch. Fingertips of shiver worked their way across his skin, searching through nerve and tissue and blood.
“Go home,” Rahu said again. “Go back to your demon and tell him whatever coup he sent you to conduct failed. This is your only chance.”
Jack rubbed the burn. Pain could be managed. Pain meant his heart was still beating. Pain was a friend. “I can’t,” he said.
Rahu’s lips drew back. His profile was striking—sharp nose, sharper cheeks, the barest hint of crystalline white fangs protruding over his lower lip. “I don’t think I heard you,” the creature said.
“You did.” Jack swallowed. “I know you’re the master of Bangkok, that the demon won’t step foot here because of you, so I reckon you’re a hard one, but right now I’m something worse.”
Rahu’s perfect eyebrow raised, wrinkling his perfect golden forehead. If the nasty, oily smirk wasn’t in place, he could have been a ringer for the Buddha. “And what are you, Jack?” he purred.
Jack balled his fists. “I’m desperate.” Feeling his rings dig into his flesh and his tattoos flex gave him a grounding, a bit of the real against the vast whirl pool of magic Rahu commanded. “Miles Hornby is a dead man who tricked a demon. The demon sent me to bring him home, and I said I would.”
Rahu twisted the rings on his fingers, methodically, one after the other. “You are not making a compelling case for your continued life and breath, Jack.”
“I have to find Hornby,” Jack said. Telling a demon the truth was always a risk, because most demons wouldn’t know truth if it sat up and offered them tea and a biscuit. “I’m going to make him tell me how he got out of his bargain.” Jack locked his eyes onto Rahu’s, even though staring at the creature made his sight scream. “And then I’m going to do the same thing.”
Rahu ran his fingers along the gilt altar supporting the Buddha. Gold paint curled in flakes under his fingernails. “Ridiculous. I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t particularly care,” Jack returned. “I’m going to break my bargain, and to do that I have to find Hornby.”
Rahu merely smiled. Some men Jack knew could smile and make it a thousand times worse than any curse, hex, or blow. Kev. Seth. Treadwell’s ghost.
“You don’t know who you’re bargaining with, Jack. Your demon is older and cleverer than most.” Rahu’s face went jagged, all planes and rage. “I once was master of the whole of the Floating World, the lands beyond th
e sea and to the mountains. Do you know who took that from me? Do you know who resigned me to this fetid, sweltering trap of an island?”
“We both have something to hate it for, then,” Jack said. “I’d think you’d be dancing in place to help me.”
Rahu’s smile went sharp and cold as the rusty edge of a razor. “And yet, for some odd reason, I don’t trust a man sent to me by the very demon responsible for this misery of an existence.”
“Believe it or not”—Jack lifted a shoulder—“I really don’t give a fuck, mate. May I go?”
“Not yet.” Rahu’s voice stopped Jack as he started to walk away. “You say you’re a desperate man. Desperate men bargain. Am I to understand you correctly?”
Jack cursed inwardly, sensing he’d walked right onto the big red X and let Rahu drop an anvil on him. “I suppose.”
“And you wish the possession of the dead man Hornby.” Rahu tapped his chin with one black-painted nail. “Which explains why you attacked poor Khan Jao.” Rahu tipped Jack a wink. “No sort of necromancer, are you?”
“Call me a madman, but my mum always taught me to leave the dead be,” Jack said.
“Did she?” Rahu advanced on Jack, laid a hand against his temple before Jack could backpedal. Ice crystals sprouted on the spot, feather-light on Jack’s skin and hair. “Or was she a whore and a junkie who abandoned you to a life of terror and misery while she crawled inside her pill bottle?”
Jack laughed. He smiled wide. And then he snapped his forehead down against Rahu’s perfect smirk. He caught the creature in the nose. Black blood fountained, hissing where it hit the stone, smoke curling as if the effluvia were liquid nitrogen.
“Don’t bait me,” Jack said. “You won’t like what you find in the trap.”
Rahu cracked his nose back into place. The sound of cartilage scraping echoed against the domed roof of the small temple. The creature didn’t flinch. “Mage, I am going to send you back to your demon in a box with a bow if you’re lying to me.”
Jack massaged his forehead. There was a lump growing. “And if I’m not?”
“If you’re not,” Rahu purred, “then you need what I have.”
“I sincerely hope it’s not wit or charm.” Jack rubbed at the sore spot on his forehead. Rahu had a skull like a cricket bat. “Because you’re skint on that score.”
“Before this city grew from the mud and the filth of the river’s bank,” Rahu said, “I was a keeper of knowledge. I supped with beings you can only imagine, and I took their secrets as my own. I am the forsaken knowledge of the Black, mage. I can give you the spell that awakens Hornby and delivers to you the means to slip your bargain’s bonds.”
“And in return?” Jack spread his hands. “Let me guess, you just want a little something, a little shred of soul or a little pinch of flesh?” He sat down on the prayer cushion opposite the altar, weary all at once, down to his bones. “I haven’t got anything left for you, mate. I’m spoken for, head to toe.”
“I have a grimoire that will get Hornby home for your task,” Rahu said. “All you have to do to get it is tell the truth.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Jack said. “But I’m not a liar. Yes, I am when it suits me but you really think I’m shining you on at this moment, over this matter? You’re a paranoid git, Rahu.”
“You irreverence no longer diverts me,” Rahu said. “Do you want the grimoire or not?”
“Do you think I’m that stupid?” Jack demanded. “That I’ll make another bargain with the likes of you?”
“No,” Rahu said with a blinding flash of teeth. “But you said it yourself—you are desperate.”
Jack conceded with a kick to the floor that he had a point. His jackboot rang off the stone. “Show me the flaming hoop, then. I’ll jump like a good boy.”
Rahu’s eyes glowed blackly. “No need, mage. He’ll be dying to meet you.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
The world faded from Jack’s sight and hearing, and he saw the temple as it was half a century before. The windows were empty of glass and open, sutras hanging on faded ribbons drooping over the altar around the Buddha. Planes droned overhead, the high-pitched whine of single-prop engines. Jack craned his neck and caught sight of three Zeroes flying in formation, the suns on their noses fresh and bleeding red as if they’d just come off the line.
His sight had shown him slices of the past before, but nothing as vivid. He could smell the smoke, hear the rumble of traffic, shouts, and horn honks from the street outside.
It’s real. The voice slid from the stone and the air, blanketing Jack in pinprick chills.
“You a war buff, then?” Jack asked. He tucked his hands in his pockets, rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “I have to say, I’m more of a 1970s retro man, meself. Go to the 100 Club, walk around Chelsea, see Zeppelin. That sort of thing.”
This is the time I prefer. In other lands, with other men, I have shown them the Crusades, the burning times, the Inquisition. But this place, in a war beyond memory, is where I began.
A shadow hit the floor as one of the planes flying overhead flicked across the sun, and it spread and grew, twin pinpoints of flame snatched from the altar candle becoming eyes. A body twitched forth next, scaly wrinkled skin like a shar-pei dog, paired at an oozing stitch line with the head of a lion. The thing tasted the air with a black tongue.
“You’re an elemental.” Jack fought the urge to bury his face in his hands. “That fuckwit Rahu thinks I’ll piss myself at the sight of an elemental?” He met the thing’s eyes. “Don’t take offense, mate, but you lot were the first thing I exorcised. Practice, like.”
I am not a golem of anger or terror or pain, mage, the thing said. I am not those pieces of child’s play that haunt your isle.
Jack sighed. “Then thrill me. What are you?”
I am all things black and hopeless, it whispered. I am the Kartimuhkha.
When it breathed the name aloud it grew and solidified, the small details of its body resolving like Jack’s gaze had been blurry from a long night of pints, fags, and mood-altering chemicals. The thing in front of him sported long claws that scraped flakes from the stone floor, strings of spittle hanging from its jaws and blazing flames dancing in its sunken eyes.
Jack stopped smiling. He felt a bit as if someone had just wrapped a rope around his neck and the other end around a gallows pole. “You have a name.”
I have yours as well, crow-mage. Your soul is bare before my eyes.
Elemental demons were scavengers, the carrion birds of Hell. They clung to human emotion, to sin and sadness and pain. They didn’t have names of their own.
Jack hissed through his teeth. “What do you want, then, Karti? Begging? Crying? To play fetch?”
Feed me your pain, Kartimuka whispered. It padded closer on bare human feet, its long tongue snaking out to lap at Jack’s skin. Feed me your terror. Where it touched him, a numbness started, one that Jack recognized too well as the paralyzing bliss of a high. Feed me your nightmares, Kartimukha purred, and Jack fell to his knees and felt his sight peel back the layers between his consciousness and the Black.
Tell me the truth, Kartimukha rumbled in his ear. Show me why you’ve come.
He managed to scream once before his mind was stripped bare and Kartimukha plunged his claws in.
Jack saw everything, everything at once, and it overwhelmed his sight like a flash flood. His skull throbbed and filled up with the sensory overload of touching Kartimukha until he was sure it would split wide open.
Kartimukha watched him impassively, one foot planted on his chest. Show me the secret dark and shame inside of you, mage. Feed me. Fill me.
Jack couldn’t breathe. His limbs were lead. His lungs were flat. This was the drifting place, the twilight sliver between life and the Bleak Gates, the place of overdose and suicide, of regret and despair. His heartbeat slowed, a watch with a loose spring and faulty gears.
Yes, Kartimukha breathed. So many memories
. So much pain.
Jack felt the claws tighten around him like razor wire, around his sight and his magic and the things—the memories—that made him Jack Winter were sluicing away as the Kartimukha fed.
“You can’t have them,” he whispered. Kartimukha tilted its head.
They cause you pain, mage. I can rid you of them. Why would you keep them?
Jack shut his eyes against the horrible burning gaze. “They’re mine,” he said. “They’re my scars, not yours.”
You have been brave for a long time, Jack. Kartimukha caressed his face with its hot, sour breath. You don’t need to be brave any longer.
“Brave?” Jack wheezed. Drawing a breath was agony. He felt as if someone had put a jackboot into his ribs. “I shoot smack into my arm to forget the things I’ve seen. I wake up screaming because of the things I’ve done. I can’t even look the only person who gives a fuck about me in the eye. I’m not brave, I just survive better than most.”
Then why do you fight? Kartimukha sounded genuinely puzzled. Why not feed me those bleeding dreams? Why live with the scars?
Jack forced himself to look at Kartimukha again. “That’s all I have, mate. Scars. If you want memories, if you want to see that I’m being truthful, then take a look inside my head if you can stand it.” He raised his head. An inch was all he could manage. “I’m not afraid of my own memories.”
Kartimukha snarled. Even now, you lie. The thing raised its paw, brought it down, and struck into Jack’s mind with its power and its magic, stripping him down to the core.
Jack blinked and found himself staring at a stained plaster ceiling, neon light blinking Morse code across the ceiling from the sign bolted to the wall outside.
He was warm—warm from whiskey in his gut and warm from blood dribbling down his arms. A hooked rug, lumpy underneath his body, soaked up the red, stain spreading.
Jack’s blood was black under the blue neon. His fingers went slack, and the razor blade tumbled to the carpet.
Around him, the dead crowded in. A severe man in a celluloid collar and Windsor tie. A mod girl in a leather minidress with handprints on her throat.
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