Demon Bound

when you couldn’t know who you were speaking to. Names were kept back, used for currency and passage, not given out like Chelsea’s mystery drugs. Jack pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He could still taste the pills.
    “Why Thailand?” Chelsea asked after they’d watched an announcement about the in-flight films and blood clots that could be forming in one’s legs at this very moment.
    “Why did your parents name you after a fucking neighborhood?” Jack returned. She laughed, and washed down her own pills. Three, Jack noted. He must have lost that scraggly addict’s aura, the one that telegraphed he needed at least twice the doctor’s dose of any medicine you chose.
    “They loved it there. We couldn’t afford it, of course—they lived out in Chiswick, and I left when I was about fifteenand went wild for a few years before I settled down and got into activist work.”
    Sometimes pegging people dead to rights in the first go was extraordinarily boring, Jack reflected. If Chelsea had said she was going to Bangkok to recruit an all-castrato chorus line for the musical production of
Trainspotting
, the flight wouldn’t be dull, at least.
    “You rescue prostitutes and bums, then?” he said. “Turn them into useful members of the human race?” The pills were making themselves known. His head and legs felt swimmy and his heart and lungs felt slow.
    “I rescue anyone who asks me,” Chelsea said with a thin smile. “But what happens after that is up to them.” She put two fingers over his eyelids. “Go to sleep, Michael. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”
    Jack tried to say “time for what,” but he had a feeling he only mumbled vaguely before he drifted into a cotton-wool floating sleep. Chelsea’s image flickered once in his sight, gold lion’s eyes and twin shadows sitting on her shoulders. The Black caressed her sharpened cheekbones and full lips, and her hand that stroked his face was full of talons.
    “Oh,” Jack slurred. “Fuck.” Before he could really look at Chelsea, put a barrier of power between her pointed black teeth and himself, a dream opened its jaws and swallowed him down. He saw Irish hills, English cities, Pete’s eyes, and then nothing, until it was much too late to do anything at all.

Chapter Twenty-two
    Jack woke, suddenly and with the sensation of falling. He saw long metal arms out of the airplane porthole, metal carts manned by drivers in orange vests. It was a bit like waking up after you’d fallen asleep, stoned and watching something from the sixties about robots.
    “Come on.” Chelsea nudged him. “It’s always better if you walk it off.”
    Jack stood with her help and every joint in his body from his neck to his ankles protested. “The fuck did you give me?” he mumbled. His tongue was thick and furry, a remake of too many mornings when he’d been on the road with the Bastards. That had been the nicest thing about the heroin—you never got hungry enough to feel the sick afterward.
    “Dreamless sleep,” Chelsea said. She stepped into the aisle and shouldered her fuzzy bag. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” She gave him another one of those small half-smiles, the ones that didn’t express anything close to comfort or joy. “That’s what you ask for, Jack. When you think no one can hear you. Not to see.”
    Jack watched the way her eyes changed, from pleasant gray to iron slate to gold, pupiless and staring.
    “Who are you?” he slurred. “Actually, strike that bollocks—what? What are you?”
    Chelsea leaned back and squeezed his hand. “The guardian of the gateways sends her regard, Jack. She grants you safe passage through this land.”
    Then she was gone, moving lithely through the crush of people disembarking from the jet where there should have been no space, just elbows and bags and snorts of “Move it!” from the American in the Hawaiian shirt, lugging two roller bags and a camera case.
    Jack moved to the side and caught the bloke in the ribs as he chugged passed. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “Bit close in here.”
    “Up yours, fuckwad,” the American said, and shoved on down the jetway, tossing smaller Thais and Brits out of the way with a casual swing of his luggage.
    “Thank you for flying,” said the flight attendant manning the door. “Have a lovely stay, now.”
    “Listen,” Jack said. “The girl sitting next to me on the flight—which way did she go?”
    “Girl?” The woman’s eyes