Demon Bound

needed to be thinking of now. What he needed was further back, memories that he’d rather not stir even in his most pissed, most sorry, or most high-as-a-fucking-kite moment. Jack needed his memories of the time before Pete and the fix, before anything except the dead.
    The train rattled on, never disgorging a passenger, only packing more in as they wound deeper and deeper into the veins of Bangkok’s heart. Jack found himself pressed against the window, watching the world flow by in snatches of color and stain, high-rise skin reflecting a water-slicked image of the train and slums that stared at him with broken glass eyes.
    A female face grinned at him out of the blur of twilight buildings, and his sight showed him a bloody slick on the ground underneath her, her body a mass of sticky meat and her teeth filed to sharp points. Bangkok showed him its Black, clawed at his sight, a teeming and frantic energy that was foreign to his senses as the Thai alphabet that delineated the train’s stops and starts.
    Jack blinked and looked away from the woman’s reflection. Sometimes, it was all you could do. Avert your eyes and pray to your gods that whatever It was hadn’t noticed your insignificant scrap of heartbeat and talent.
    The train rumbled into Silom Station, and Jack shoved his way off, relieved to finally be able to at least lift hisarms. He fished in his pocket and unfolded the scrap of vellum, worn shiny. The remains of a penciled-in map were barely visible. His handwriting in the bad old days had been shit—it was a wonder any of his cantrips or incantations had ever worked the way they should.
    On Silom Road, he stopped to get his bearings before plunging into the eternal stream of foot and motor traffic traversing the street between Jack and the crush of Pat-pong.
    In Patpong, the Black was different—it spoke to him much like Whitechapel did, as he crossed with a knot of Japanese men in blue polo shirts, some kind of tourist group, cameras and fat rolls of
bhat
bulging in their pockets and cases. The red-light district was a crush of smell and sound and blurred expanses of flesh glimpsed through streaky nightclub windows, garnished with torn posters advertising sex shows years out of date.
    The same dark heartbeat bent and whispered through the tourist and the barkers attempting to entice Jack upstairs to see the girls, or the boys, or the boys dressed as girls take their clothes off, lay themselves upon the altar of sex magic, and send up painted and pierced and fragrant offerings to the gods of such things. The bloody bones of Whitechapel were here, but tinged with sex and spices, the ambient power of the place rolling over Jack’s skin like honey.
    A peddler in the night market choking off a street signed as PATPONG 1 ahead of him stretched out a handful of gold chains and watches. “American? Good discounts for Americans.”
    “English,” Jack said. “I still get a discount?”
    The peddler laughed. “English, I charge you double. See anything you like?”
    Jack scanned the table, covered with nylon and anchored at each corner by a statue of the Buddha. There was theusual assortment of knockoff jewelry, but he passed his finger over a chain with a coin attached. His sight returned a thread of magic, small white flames rising off the coin in the Black.
    “This one,” Jack said. “It has something.”
    “You have a good eye,” the peddler said. “That’s a passage coin—in your culture, you use it to pay the ferryman. To your next world?”
    Jack felt his mouth curl up at the corners. “You know what you’re talking about.”
    “Around here, mostly tourists,” said the peddler. “But I see enough of you to make it worth my while.”
    Jack picked up the necklace, felt the weight of the copper coin on the end of the cheap chain. “How much?”
    “Depends on what you have, mage.” The peddler folded his arms and smiled. Jack laughed.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Banyat. But everyone around here calls me Robbie.” The peddler made a show of counting his money roll. “I’ll sell it to you for a story. Tell me why you’re here.”
    Jack slid the chain around his neck. Stories were a good currency, provided you had them to tell. Much better than names, or dreams. “Why do you care?”
    “This is my corner,” Robbie said. “I keep my eyes open and if something slithers up from the Black that’s a wrong thing to be walking in this side of the veil, I whisper in the right ears.