Demon Bound

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 telephonewire, 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