Demon Bound

Trixie’s bee-stung lips turned down. “Miles Hornby’s dead.”

Chapter Twenty-four
    Jack found his way back into the street in a haze of bourbon and disbelief. Dead. Hornby couldn’t be dead. The demon wouldn’t have sent him. . . . He slumped against the outside of the Club Hot Miami, head scraping the bricks. Hornby could very well be dead, and the demon still would have sent him. It was exactly the sort of thing the demon would do.
    He wanted to sink into the ground, to slip through the layers of the Black and find himself back in his flat, in London, before any of this shit had ever gotten started.
    But if he sank into the ground, the only thing he’d find would be the Land of the Dead, the howling of lost souls, the clanging of the Bleak Gates.
    The want for a fix crawled up from Jack’s guts with a burning, frenetic intensity like his stomach was going to come up along with his craving. He scanned the passing crowd, found the youth with greasy hair and a bowed head, the thin girl in the bikini top and ripped denim skirt standing on opposite corners of the intersection, like two poles on a globe. The boy’s slouched gait and Phish T-shirtpromised weed, LSD, perhaps peyote, while the girl’s bony legs and bruised arms promised exactly what he needed.
    Sweat ran down his chest under the frayed fabric of his Stooges shirt, and Jack shut his eyes, his sight rolling over him in silvery waves. The pavement of Patpong 2 faded, the sound, and he saw a dumpier, seedier, more dangerous road—GIs in uniforms thirty years out of date on the arms of girls doped out of their minds as they teetered on platform heels, pimps in Western suits and sharp-brimmed hats watching from the shadows like sharks under a reef.
    A GI with a knife wound in his gut stared at Jack.
“Say, brother, can you help me out? I lost my wallet and I . . .”
    Jack scrubbed at his eyes, trying to make it stop. To make it all stop—the sight and the need and the deep, sucking void in his chest that they combined to create.
    “Just a few bucks for a cab,”
the GI coaxed.
“Just a few . . .”
Bloody hands grabbed on to Jack, smearing the black miasma of the dead across his skin and up his arms, blotting out his scars and tattoos.
    “You know you’re just like us,”
the solider pleaded.
“Lost and lonely and walking that dark road. Just walk with me, buddy. Just for a few minutes . . .”
    Hands yanked him away, and knuckles freshened the bruise on his cheek with a backhanded blow. Jack let out an involuntary yelp. “Fuck me!”
    “Not drunk enough for that yet,” Seth said, setting Jack on his feet again. “You all right, Jackie? Looked like you had the ghost on you.”
    “I just . . .” Jack’s eyes wandered to the corner of the street again, against his will. The girl was gone. The boy was bobbing his head to his iPod. Everything was right and real and normal about the scene, except him.
    “I’m fine,” he breathed out. Seth grunted.
    “Look worse than you did when I found you, boy. You keep up like this, you’re going to be under the ground beforethe week’s up. Forget the demon and all his plans, you’re doing a fine job of it yourself.”
    “About that.” Jack sighed. “I talked to that bird bartender in the music club. Hornby’s dead.”
    Seth felt in his pack and came up empty. “Got a fag?” Jack passed him a Parliament. “Did you hear me? I said that Hornby’s dead.”
    “I’m old, not deaf, you sod,” Seth snapped. “Came to tell you I made a few calls and heard the same thing.”
    “That’s it, then.” Jack looked at the toes of his boots as he walked. He’d come a long way in these boots. Steel peeped out where the leather had worn away at the toes and the mismatched laces had been broken and reknotted like a map of a B road at home. “The demon played with me. I came here for nothing.”
    “Hell.” Seth exhaled into the face of a passing female tourist, who coughed dramatically and then shot him the bird. “
I
could have told you that, boy. What was lesson one, after you came to me?”
    Jack chafed, Seth’s tone snapping him back like a rubber band to when he was young and stupid. “I didn’t come here to be lectured on your musty old crow magic, McBride.”
    “Demons lie!” Seth spat. “Lesson. Fucking. One.” His face hardened from anger into something more permanent. Jack decided that if he cared, he’d call it disappointment.
    “You were my best, boy,” Seth grumbled. “You