Caitlin Kittredge - Demon Bound

“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 Făn 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.”

“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 Făn 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.

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 Făn 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.