Demon Bound

but Jack yanked out his IV needle before she could summon a nurse.
    “I need to go home,” he said. “My time’s almost up, Pete. It’ll go badly if the demon thinks I’m trying to do a runner like Miles.”
    “Jack . . .” Pete caught him as he swayed. Standing up too fast on downers was like pouring all of the blood out of your head.
    “I don’t want to think about what I’m doing and I don’t want a lecture, because I know it’s low and I know it’s fucking weak,” Jack said. “But I haven’t got a better idea, so I’m getting out of this fucking hospital and doing what I must.”
    He found his boots, yanked them on with difficulty. He couldn’t begin to manage the laces, so he let the tongues flop free. He was halfway down the corridor when Pete caught up with him.
    “Jack, wait!”
    “Not changing my mind, Pete,” he said. “You can argue if you like.”
    Pete shoved a plastic shopping back into his hands. “You forgot your jacket and your kit, idiot. I think you might need them if you’re intending to challenge this demon of yours.”
    “Cheers.” Jack slowed, subdued. “Pete, you don’t have to come with me, you know.”
    She sighed, brushing past him to the nurse’s station. “Him. The stupid bloody
farang.
He needs to sign out.”
    After their business with the hospital was complete,Pete walked with him to the street outside, where she hailed a motor taxi. “Let’s get one thing straight, Jack: I’m here until the end. One way or the other, I’ll be with you. So the next time you suggest I might want to preserve my delicate sensibilities, I’m going to punch you right in the gob. Clear?”
    “Crystal,” Jack said as he opened the taxi door. The demon waited for him in England. Hornby’s soul was planted here, sure as the stones that paved the bones of Bangkok. His innocent’s soul, which had made his shit deal for the right reasons and not out of paralyzing fear.
    Jack wasn’t sure which he regretted more.

Chapter Forty-three
    England rose up to meet the jetliner gray and lacy with mist, the kind of silver-green day that poets scribbled about and tourists lost their wits over.
    Jack could have gone down and kissed the oily tarmac of Heathrow when the plane touched down, but the chill in his chest wouldn’t allow him that much happiness.
    He’d tried to cheat the demon. And he’d lost. He’d doomed Miles Hornby to his time in Hell and himself to go toe-to-toe with the demon.
    Pete sat beside him, but silent on the Heathrow express into Paddington. She’d stopped looking at him by the time they boarded the Hammersmith & City Line back to his flat.
    Pete thought he was going to die.
    Jack didn’t know that she was wrong.
    The tube rattled on its way and Jack mounted the steps, past the street market selling
hijab
and knockoff purses and kebab, past the White Hart pub, the closed-down shop fronts and shady money-changing kiosks, through the ebband flow of the dark energy of the only place he’d ever really called home.

    The demon was waiting for them when they stepped through Jack’s front door.
    “Look at you,” it purred. “Home safe and sound, tanned and rested.” It rubbed the fingers and thumb of its left hand together. “I trust you brought me what I need, Jackie boy.”
    Pete fetched up against his shoulder, propelling Jack into the flat. His protection hexes hung in useless tatters from the demon’s passage.
    “This is him?” Pete said. Her fists curled into small knots of knuckle and bone.
    “It,” Jack said. “Not him, no matter what it chose to make itself look like.”
    The demon ticked its tongue against its teeth. “I’ll ask again, Jack—where’s my soul?”
    Jack ignored the feeling that the floorboards had dropped away from him, ignored that his heart was thudding so loudly it nearly drowned out his own voice. “Did you check the last place you had it? Or—hold up—behind the sofa?”
    The demon cocked its head, and Jack was on his knees. Blink, crash, pain. Jack’s air rushed out of him, but he didn’t make any sound. Didn’t let the demon know that it hurt. That was the first thing you learned—never show them that it hurt.
    “Where. Is. My. Soul?” The demon knelt and put a finger under Jack’s chin. He felt the nail sink in, and a trickle of blood work its way into the hollow of his throat.
    Pete’s shadow fell over them both. “Let him go.”
    The demon’s black pits of eyes flicked away from Jack, looked to