Demon Bound

flicked toward the cockpit and the phone on the wall next to the tamper-proof door.
    “Yes,” Jack said, shifting from foot to foot in an effort to force his blood to expel the drug expediently. His vision still swam in slow circles and his arms felt like logs, but at least he could talk without sounding like a Mancunian Joey Ramone. “Reddish hair, manky clothes, nice face. I need to find her.”
    “Sir.” The attendant reached for the handset. “You were alone in your row.”
    “She said her name was . . .” Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “Never mind. Put the phone down, luv, I’m not crazy or trying to blow you up.”
    The attendant set the phone down reluctantly. “Then what are you on about, sir?”
    Jack sighed, trying to keep his balance on the gently listing jetway. “Nothing, it seems. I’m simply having a royally shite fucking day.”
    When Jack backed away from the wide-eyed attendant and joined the concourse of Suvarnabhumi Airport, it was as full of people as a riverbed after a flash flood. The light scattered through the thousands of windowpanes that entombed Jack in glass as crowds shoved to and fro all around.
    “Like bloody Snow White,” he muttered, watching a 747 take off overhead. The ground under his feet shook.
    Jack let the crowd push him for a bit, drifting while he got his bearings. The demon knew where he was and what was happening, so who’d send the hippie girl on the airplane? The girl with lion eyes, and fingers like fossilized claws that could reach inside him and pull out his dreams like a photo album. The girl who wasn’t a girl at all.
    It could be any number of people—or not-people, Jack reflected. Anyone he’d slagged off in the last twenty years. Any vulture circling who’d heard about the demon and wanted his pound of Jack Winter.
    Or the demon could be a liar, could be stringing him up like a puppet and sending its cronies in the Black for its own amusement. Offer everyone a bit of the crow-mage, soften him up before the day came around so Jack wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t scheme, and would beg the demon for his life like every other stupid fuckwit who’d bound a bargain before him.
    Jack knew this was likely as anything else, but he still let himself join the line for customs and presented the passport the demon had given him. Miles Hornby had tricked the demon, and Miles Hornby was in Bangkok.
    “Reason for visit?” The Thai behind the glass couldn’thave been more disinterested if Jack were a cardboard cutout.
    “Vacation,” Jack said, and fought to keep from laughing.
    “Duration of stay?” The Thai clicked at his computer.
    “Less than a week,” Jack said. “One way or another.”
    His passport slid back at him through the slot. “Very good. Next,” the customs agent said, and the crowd swallowed Jack up again.

Chapter Twenty-three
    Jack boarded a train for the thirty-kilometer ride to downtown Bangkok, pressed in with Thai citizens, their luggage, visiting backpackers, and their burdens. Jack stood and let the gravity of the train pull him from station to station.
    In a crush of people, Jack had always felt the most secure. He could create a bubble of solitude out of the ebb and flow of bodies, and he could find silence while everyone else talked and laughed and shouted. The living could shut out the dead, at least to a degree. The press of overlapping souls was like listening to traffic on the motorway, or the rush of blood through your own ears. Normal people felt like passing a hand through flowing water—gentle and present, but never cold or dreadful, like looking at the Black or standing in a group of other talents.
    In this crowd, though, Jack just felt alone, overwhelmingly so. The air was foreign and the magic was foreign, and it left a hole in him, the gaping black pit of his sight without anything to catch him at the bottom. Thailand’s air was close and hot enough that it felt like a hand over hismouth, and the snatches of smell that Jack caught as the train drew closer to the central city certainly weren’t winning any prizes. The cacophony of voices speaking half a dozen languages rang in his still-fuzzy head, and his abused stomach lurched with every bump on the track.
    If Pete were here, he could lean into her as the train rounded a curve, steal a touch and pretend it was only gravity and not any desire to be against her.
But she’s not
, Jack told himself,
so leave it alone and smarten up.
It wasn’t Pete that he