Demon Bound

him.
    “Well.” Seth tipped his head to the side. “Jack Winter asking for my help. I’ve had this dream before.” He looked up and down the walkway.
    Jack followed his glance. “What?”
    “I’m waiting for Stephen Fry and the talking monkey to come in,” Seth said. “That’s the next bit.”
    “Fuck off.” Jack prodded his cheek again. It was roughly twice its normal size and would bear the impression ofSeth’s knuckles when the bruise solidified. “I mean it, Seth.”
    “So do I, Jack,” Seth snarled. “I don’t want a thing to do with missing bastards, your dodgy troubles, or you. I’d take the talking monkey any fucking day.”
    He retreated into the shadow of his flat, and Jack felt the swell of desperation in his chest like Seth had hit him all over again.
    “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
    Jack had admitted the same truth to Seth close to twenty years ago, when Seth had found him turning conjure tricks on the streets of Dublin, sat him down, gave him a fag, and asked him where he’d come from. The crow spread her wings over Jack that night, folded him into her purview, but he felt no such darkling comfort now.
    Seth grumbled out a string of curses, but he moved to the side, jerking his head at Jack. “Fuck it. Come in, then.”
    Jack shouldered his bag and stepped cautiously over the threshold. Half expecting to feel the teeth of Seth’s warding hex lock into his skin and his sight, he only relaxed when McBride snorted at his tension. “I wanted you face down, Jackie, you’d be swallowing your teeth now and you know it.”
    Jack itched at the back of his neck as his talent prickled at another’s encroachment. “Suppose that’s true.”
    “Fucking right, it’s true. I am sorry about that belt, though,” Seth said. He stubbed out his fag into an over-flowing ashtray that lived in the belly of the ubiquitous Buddhas that grinned out at Jack from every corner of Patpong.
    “No you’re not,” Jack said. He went in Seth’s minuscule freezer and found a packet of frozen mixed veg that was dated three years past. Sticking it against his face helped with the dull ache, but not the sting. “You haven’t been sorry for a thing since the doctor slapped you on the arse and made you cry.”
    “All right, probably not so very much,” Seth admitted. He settled himself in a cracked vinyl armchair in front of a telly crowned in rabbit ears, lines of color wavering up and down the pocket-sized screen over a Thai cricket match.
    Jack looked out the back window, down into an alley. Grinning white tourists led along a pair of underage Thai girls, their smiles as pasted on as their plastic dresses. Laughter bounced off the concrete and the air thickened with curls of wayward power as the girls fell behind the pair of men, heads bent together like painted, predatory sharks. Jack caught their extra arms as they passed from street lamp to shadow, the scales that painted themselves onto skin like emerald and onyx tattoo ink, the forked tongues. Served the two wankers right.
    “Now,” Seth said, leaning his bulk forward and turning down the volume of the telly. “What the fuck are you babbling about, you owe a demon a bargain?”
    Jack talked, keeping the packet against his face. The telly burbled underneath his voice, discordant counterpoint to the story of the demon, the
cu sith,
the fetch, and Miles Hornby. Seth stayed quiet for a time after Jack finished the whole sordid mess. He changed among four equally distorted channels on the telly, scratched the back of his neck, and finally said, “So what you’re telling me is, you’re buggered and you want old uncle Seth to kiss it and make it go away. Is that it?”
    “I just need your help finding the bloke,” Jack said. He wanted to keep his tone even, truly, but he felt restless and itchy inside the cramped little flat that had to be over a hundred degrees even with the arthritic fan in Seth’s window bringing in cooking smells and the low-pitched roar of the city outside.
    “Always a
just
with you, boy.” Seth sighed. “Just needed a little training. Just needed to translate the sorcery grimoire.Just needed to make deals with fucking cocksucking Hellspawn
demons . . .
”
    “Oi!” Jack dropped the frozen packet on the counter and slammed his hand down with it. “You’re no paragon of virtue, Seth. I saw you do things in the bad old days that would have curled the hair of any respectable sorcerer, so cut out this Catholic