Jack set his glass down. “It’s the truth, Pete. I’m going to dig up his body and raise him from the dead.”
Pete rolled her eyes at Jack. “Bollocks.”
“I dunno what else to tell you, luv.”
Pete slapped her hand on the bar. “How about the bloody truth? What does this Hornby have that you need badly enough to just . . . to just . . .” Her face went red and her eyes took on a sheen. “To just leave.” Pete swiped at her eyes. “Shit.”
Jack reached for her hand, but Pete yanked it away. “You have to believe me,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t run out on you, Petunia. I . . .”
“You would, because you did,” Pete said. Her voice was low and vicious. “It’s exactly the kind of thing you do, Jack. A rough patch comes and you bolt for the bloody hills.”
Jack threw back the last of his whiskey Now it only burned, didn’t numb. “It’s life and death, luv.”
Pete chewed on her lip. “Whose life?”
“My life.”
Pete put her elbows on the bar and her forehead in her hands. “Jack, what have you done?”
Jack reached over and lifted her chin with one finger. The spark of her talent rang sweet along his bones.
All at once, he felt the weight of every lie. Crawling inside his mind, deadening his talent, and hollowing him out until there was no Jack Winter, junkie, mage, or otherwise. There was only a memory of Jack Winter, liar and dead man.
Another lie would twist him irreparably, start a psychic hemorrhage that Jack knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.
He dropped his hand. “I will tell you absolutely everything, Pete, but I am running out of time. Help me raise Hornby’s corpse, and then I’ll tell you anything. Me favorite color, the name of the girl who beat me with her lunch box in first form, why I possess an irrational phobia of John Gielgud. Anything you like.”
Pete blinked away the last of the tears. Her mascara made miniature deltas down her face and Jack ran his thumb lightly over her skin, returning it to pale and pristine. Pete reached up and grabbed his hand, trapping it against her cheek. “You swear?”
Jack nodded. “On me life. What little of it I have left.”
Chapter Thirty-two
The Bangkok Protestant Cemetery was overrun with roses and long grass, the paths barely wide enough for Jack’s boots side by side. No lights watched over the graves, and the dank, ripe smell of the Chao Phraya River mingled with the smell of turned earth.
Pete shone her light at the crooked rows of tombs and graves. “Where is he?”
Jack saw the hump of a newly buried body under the beam, wooden cross stuck crookedly in the earth a few feet ahead of him. “Let’s start there.”
“And if we get the wrong grave?” Pete muttered.
Jack swung his spade to and fro, the iron weight moving like a divining rod. “Then I imagine we’d say, ‘Oh, so sorry, let me just tuck you up and shut your coffin again, guv. Lovely weather we’re having.’ ”
Pete waved him quiet. “You’re a wanker.”
Jack heard a rustle from the bushes and detected silver eyeshine. The small owl stared at him, head twitching back and forth. Jack curled his lip.
“Never liked those things.”
“I don’t mind them,” Pete said. “They used to show up in our garden when I was a girl. Da said they were there to take the bad dreams out of the air before they got to me and my sister.”
Jack prodded the earth over Hornby’s grave and tried to ignore the gaze of the owl. Owls came on an ill wind, harbingers of things that even Jack, with his visions of the dead, didn’t want to imagine too closely. Not psychopomps, like the crow. Only watchers, keepers of the shadows that lived beyond the Black and beyond even the grasp of Death.
“Hold the light steady,” he said to Pete, shoving the spade into the grave mound. The earth was loose and soft, warm still from sunlight. It took him fifteen minutes and a few gallons of sweat to uncover the elongated hexagon of the pauper’s coffin.
“Never liked this,” Pete said. “Exhumations. When I was with the Met, it always seemed wrong, somehow.”
“That’s the Black,” Jack agreed. “Once a soul’s flown from a body, the body has a nasty resonance. Necromancers feed on it.”
“How do they stand it?” Pete brushed her arms off with her hands, as if she were beset by ants.
“They’re evil, foul-smelling necrophiliac idiots,” Jack said. “Reasonable folk know better than to trouble something that belongs to the Bleak Gates.” He swiped the rivers and waterfalls of sweat from his face, and braced himself for the sight of Hornby’s ghost. Magic users, mages particularly, didn’t often go into the underworld quietly and with lack of fanfare. Algernon Treadwell, his worst spook, had been a sorcerer who died bloody and tortured at the hands of witchfinders.
His sight tingling, Jack tapped his spade against the coffin lid. Nothing sprang from the earth in answer. No flutters or cries echoed from the Black. The graveyard was curiously silent, holding its breath in the dense night air of the river. Jack threw the spade aside.
“Be a love and hand me the prybar,” he said to Pete. His bag, at the edge of the grave, pulsed with the looseingredients to the necromancy spell written out in the grimoire. Trixie had translated the Thai for him, and Robbie had sold him most of the ingredients that weren’t already in Jack’s kit. The spell elements hungered for flesh, to dig into skin, for a corpse to weave their magic around even resting separate in his canvas bag.
Black magic felt like cobwebs, like sticky drying blood and the spongy, soggy flesh of a drowned man. Like wearing a wool sweater next to bare skin. Jack’s sight flared, and the graveyard was bathed in silver for a moment before he ground his teeth and felt the sting of his tattoos holding back the dead. It wasn’t an active boneyard like St. Michael’s, but there were bodies under the earth and lately, with Jack’s sight flying haywire at the slightest touch, it was still too much.
Pete handed him the small prybar, wordlessly, and stepped back from the crumbling edge of the grave.
Jack straddled the coffin and shoved the metal in between the wooden seams.
From its branch, the owl watched, unblinking. Jack flicked it off before he bore down on the prybar, straining to open the coffin lid. Nails shrieked, and Jack’s sore shoulders and hands complained as he strained against the coffin lid. It lifted with a dull thud, the release throwing Jack down hard in the dirt.
Pete flashed her light on the contents of the coffin. “Well. He’s a handsome git, isn’t he?”
Jack struggled up, and looked into the coffin.
The figure within stared back at him with empty sockets, blackened skin stretched tight across a skull rife with rotted teeth.
“He’s been dead a lot longer than two weeks,” Pete said. “Even in this heat. Hasn’t got any flesh on.”
Jack leaned down and picked up the gold chain around the figure’s neck, the same gold he’d seen on the gangsters in Patpong, cheap and bleeding to green from moisture. “It’s not Hornby.” His voice echoed from the sides of the grave, hollow.
Pete half-slid down the pile of earth to stand next to him. “Then who is it?”
Jack felt the want of a fix claw into his skull, vicious and sharp. He heard the demon’s laughter. He felt the cold of the Underworld, even in the oppressive heat of Bangkok, like a finger of ice down his back.
“Jack?” Pete touched his shoulder. “Who’s in this grave?”
Jack dropped the pry bar. Over the Chao Phraya, thunder rumbled and twin tongues of lighting licked the underside of black smoke clouds.
The owl took flight as rain started to fall, fat warm droplets the temperature of tears splashing on Jack, on Pete, and over the stone and dirt of the graveyard.
“He’s nobody,” he said finally.
Pete turned her light on his face. “You don’t look well, Jack.”
Which followed, because Jack felt like run-over shite. Felt numb, cold, and nerveless even in the warm rain. �
��I’m going back to Patpong,” he said. His boots slipped in the graveyard dirt but he pressed on, leaving Pete behind him.
Chapter Thirty-three
The rain fell, steady sideways lines of water, blurring the neon of Patpong into a fever dream. Thunder crashed and rolled above the city like a Sham 69 drum line, and lightning licked forked tongues between skyscraper and cloud.
Jack stalked through puddles, heedless when water seeped into his boots. The girl was still on the corner near Trixie’s bar, hunched under a roof overhang. The tourists had taken cover, and she was virtually alone in the street.
Jack wove through the push of traffic down Patpong 2 and approached, ducking his head against the rain.
“Hey, traveler.” The girl peeled herself away from the wall, her plastic skirt and nylon top slicked with water. “You want something?”
Jack cast a glance over his shoulder out of habit. He wasn’t caging for coppers as much as for Pete, but the few damp pedestrians in evidence hurried on their way and studiously avoided looking at Jack, or the girl. They might as well have been two more oil-slicked stains on the pavement.
“Something sweet?” the girl persisted. “I got party, I got good stuff. You want something?”
Jack dug into his leather and pulled out a crumple of pounds and bhat. “Give me a dose. Of the sweet.”
The girl fished in her voluminous knockoff handbag, and Jack heard the shifting scrape of cellophane bags against bags, the clack of pills. She palmed him a twist of plastic with a nub of brown inside, and made Jack’s money disappear like a magic trick.
“You want a sharp?” She titled her head, hair curled up from the rain. Her makeup was smeared, and she looked a bit like a thrown-away doll.
“Yeah,” Jack muttered, shoving the smack into his pocket. “Give it to me.”
The girl passed him a disposable needle in a sterile wrapper, stamped with a hospital name in English and Thai. “You have fun,” she said, closing his fingers over it. “And come back soon. I’m here every night.”
Jack walked away without answering. He ducked through the door of Trixie’s bar. She was busy serving a trio of Australians who in turn were busy gawping at a pair of go-go dancers divesting themselves of their gold bikinis on the stage. A DJ spun house tunes, and the lights were low and blue.
Jack went straight through the kitchen and into the back alley. The alley was piled with crates and metal garbage cans, quiet except for echoes of raindrops and faraway laugher. Neon signs spread fingers of pink and red and blue across Jack’s skin, turning him from a Fae to a demon to a corpse in the span of a heartbeat.
Demons lie. Lesson. Fucking. One.
He’d been so close. So fucking close to working it all out. Find Hornby, find his secret, find his way out of Hell. At the worst, absolute rock bottom, he’d have the demon’s name.
But there was no Miles Hornby in the grave.
Jack leaned his head back against the slimy exterior wall. The neon beat a heartbeat against the back of his eyelids.
He could run, he could run far and fast, but the sight always caught him. The bargain would never be unwound.
He could pretend that he was clean, an ex-junkie, an ex-liar, and an ex-bastard, but Jack knew who he was. He was Jack Winter.
Junkie. Liar. Sinner. Dead man.
As he unrolled the baggie between his fingers, Jack realized that nothing had changed from the moment he’d bound the bargain in the first place.
The motions came back, like playing a D chord or putting a record on a turntable. Automatic, rote, familiar.
Drop the smack into the spoon. Find your lighter, buried underneath a ball of vellum and an ancient packet of crisps in his jacket pocket. Cook the shit, mindful of your fingers. Jack’s callused fingerprints weren’t only from playing guitar.
He used his teeth to rip open the sharp and his belt to tighten up his arm. The studs cut into his bicep, dull hot pain, but Jack ignored it as he drew the cloudy gold into the belly of the needle. Like watching a mosquito feed, he’d thought the first time. Feed and bloat on the sweetest blood there was.
Jack let the spoon drop into a puddle and he sat himself on a crate, out of the rain.
Slap your arm. Watch the bruise-blue map of heart’s blood float to the surface, pulsing and quivering under the skin. Try to find a spot that will still take a sharp, the black blots of collapsed veins like impassable terrain.
Jack wriggled his arm and slotted it comfortably against his thigh. He bit the cap off of the sharp and spat it out, flat plastic taste on his tongue.
Prime the needle, force all the air out. Embolism will ruin your day, and earn you a stint in rehab when you get found and taken to A&E. If you get found in time.
The tip of the needle bit into his skin, and it hurt a bit, like passing your hand through a lighter. It hadn’t hurt in a long while. Being clean had started a new season in his body, nerves and blood renewed.
Jack tilted his face up to the rain, put his thumb on the needle’s plunger, and pressed down.
For a moment there was nothing, just the slightly foreign sensation of a sharp under his skin. Then the warm tide ran up his arm, across his chest, over to his heart.
It was good shit, pure and strong, and it hit Jack’s brain like plunging into a river of fire, kissed his skin so that he was surprised it didn’t begin to steam under the rain.
Jack felt his head go back and scrape brick, and felt the sharp tumble out of his fingers. He wiggled the belt loose so the dose could work its magic unfettered.
Welcome home, the fix whispered as it wrapped a million fingers of oblivion across his sight and his mind. I’ve missed you.
Jack let the numbness steal over him and didn’t fight. The storm cooled his skin, but inside was warmth and forgetfulness. He slipped beneath the waters of the fix, and let himself drown.
When he opened his eyes, lids heavy with the desire for a nod into the opium dreamland he knew too well, the demon was in front of him.
It wasn’t the demon, not really. His sight didn’t flare and his blood didn’t chill, but seeing the wavering outline in the white suit, black coal eyes boring into him, sent Jack reeling. Acid boiled up in his stomach and he doubled over. Not yet, not yet. Need to sleep, need not to dream. He couldn’t vomit, couldn’t come down so soon.
“Poor little Jack,” the demon purred. “Figured out that you’ve lost, at last.”
“Go . . .” Jack choked down bile, his throat blazing. “Go away. I haven’t yet.”
“No Hornby, no name.” The demon’s tongue caressed its lips like it could already taste Jack. “No name, no saving yourself. Demons lie, but I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a special soul, Jack. I wouldn’t insult you that way.”
“You’re not real,” Jack groaned. “You can’t be here.”
“I will be.” The demon leaned close. Rain fell through him, hissing as it hit the pavement. The heroin was playing hell with Jack’s sight, his neurons exploding against his eyes, allowing the Black to twist and distort into something it wasn’t. The fix was his only shield against his sight for over a decade, and now it was showing him this. If Jack hadn’t felt like he was close to passing out facedown in the garbage-choked puddles at his feet, he might have laughed.
“Go,” he gritted again. “I don’t see you. You’re not . . . you’re not real.”
“Has that ever worked?” The demon chuckled. “I will be real, Jack. I’ll wrap a hand around your heart and the Weir will watch. She’ll weep. And she’ll die along with you, every time she remembers how you tried to change fate and didn’t.”
Slow heavy swells of the fix rolled over Jack, made his speech slow and thick. “Fuck . . . off.”
The door banged, metal on brick, and the demon was gone. In his place, small strong hands propped Jack up and a face dipped into view.
“Jack!” Pete shook him, slapped his face. She peeled back his eyelid and he batted at her. Her touch spread warm tendrils through him, down to the co
re and the place that got him into more trouble than it got him out of. If he’d been able to stand with any reliability, he would have grabbed Pete in return, put her against the rough brick, and let the rain slick their bare skin.
“’M fine,” he muttered.
“You’re so bloody far from fine I can’t even say.” Pete’s voice shook, her fingers echoing the tremor. She jerked his chin to look, and she was holding the needle. “You went and did it, after everything? Everything I did to get you clean?”
“Pete . . .” He exhaled. His lungs were slow and hot. The air was wet, too thick to move on its own. “You don’t understand.”
Pete tossed the needle away and crouched in front of Jack, gripping his arms. “Make me understand. I want to have followed you here for something worthwhile, Jack.”
Pete’s tears mixed with the raindrops on her skin, cutting furrows in her face. Jack tried to reach for them, wipe them away and make her smile, but he missed her cheek, letting his hand land on her shoulder again, tilting her slight frame under his weight.
“Go home,” Jack said. “You don’t have to see me like this, Petunia. No need.”
Pete brushed him off and Jack’s stomach opened like a pit. He fell sideways, retching, his gut rebelling against the onslaught of skag.
“Fair warning,” Pete said. “Don’t order me about. I’m two seconds from kicking seven colors of shit from you, you bloody idiot.”
Jack tried again to apologize, but his vision tunneled, then spiraled, then became black. When he sat up, scraping a hand across his mouth, the world had started to creep back in. His clothes were soaked and deep-muscle aches had worked their way up his arm from the tie-off and the sloppy injection. Pete watched him silently, crouched on her heels.
She hadn’t left him even now, when he was doubled over puking his guts out in the rankest alley he’d ever found himself in. She hadn’t helped him, either, but if Jack were in her position he would have pushed his head into his own sick and held him there until he drowned.
And he’d lied to her. He’d used the danger of the demon to lie to Pete, likely the only person who wouldn’t leave him in the gutter at the truth. Jack wrapped his arms around himself as shivers wracked him, his stomach bucking again even though there was nothing left to bring up.
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