Demon Bound

medieval torture device.
    “You got that look again,” Seth commented. The light outside the flat was hazy dawn, and the telly had changedfrom cricket to a Thai cooking show presided over by a cheery woman in a neon pink apron.
    Jack cracked the tension from his neck with a sound like a rifle. His head echoed. “What look’s that?”
    “Haunted,” Seth said. “You were anyone else, I’d say you’d caught ghost sickness.” He pottered around the kitchenette until he’d installed coffee and filter in an ancient carafe and switched it on. “That you’d got a spirit feeding off you, like you were a fuckin’ milkshake.”
    “I’ve seen ghost sickness,” Jack said. “’S not what I have.” Ghost sickness ate a person slowly from the inside. It had showed in Pete’s eyes first, in the haunted cast of her gaze and in the dreams of death that came any time she shut them. She’d carried Algernon Treadwell’s spirit like a black rider on her back, her slight body pale and papery as Treadwell drank of her life.
    “Oh?” Seth rummaged in the fridge and found a few eggs, which he cracked into a frying pan. “Always thought it was a load of bollocks, myself. Who’d you know got it?”
    “Someone in London,” Jack said, and ended Seth’s probing with a flick of his hand. “We need to find out where Hornby is buried. Dig him up and get on with it.”
    “You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Jackie,” Seth told him. “Unless, in the intervening years, you’ve taken it upon yourself to learn the ways and means of calling back the dead.”
    Jack shoved his hands into his hair. It was flattened on one side and he attempted to muss it equally again. “You know I’m no fucking sorcerer, Seth. But if we have no body, no necromantic spell we try will do one bit of bloody good, so let’s start at what we do know.”
    Seth shook crystallized sugar into his coffee, sipped, and winced. “Fuck me. Can’t brew a cuppa in this country worth shite.”
    “Just point me at the cemetery,” Jack said. “I’ll do it myself, since you’re feeling delicate.” As the sun rose, gray-yellowlike an old bruise through the haze of smog that hung over Bangkok, Jack felt his time of reprieve slipping away, little by little, like sand against skin.
    “It doesn’t work like that here,” Seth muttered.
    “Explain, then,” Jack snapped. “Because this might be a bloody amusement for you, but this is my life, Seth.
My
fucking life and someone else’s besides if I can’t do what the demon wants from me.”
    “And who’s fault is that, exactly?” Seth demanded. “You didn’t have to call him, Jackie-boy. You didn’t have to reach out.”
    “I suppose you would have had me die.” Jack’s headache began with a renewed vengeance. He wasn’t damply sweating any longer, but cold. Cold like the day he’d lain on the floor of Algernon Treadwell’s tomb and felt the slight warmth of his own blood spread across his chest, his stomach, soaking through his shirt and dribbling onto the stones.
    “Yes,” said Seth shortly. “I would have.” He dumped the sludgy coffee down into the drain and slammed his mug onto the porcelain washboard. “But that’s the past and this, unfortunately, is me present so after I find a bite to eat we’ll go see about finding your dead man.”

Chapter Twenty-six
    “Hornby couldn’t’ve picked a worse city to die in,” Seth said as they walked down Patpong 2. The road and its citizens lay much subdued in daylight, as the district nursed its hangover. “You got any idea where and when he kicked it?”
    “No,” Jack said, spying Trixie unlocking the door of her bar. “But she does.” He raised a hand. “Oi! Luv! Got a minute?”
    Trixie smiled when she caught sight of him, but the expression dropped just as quickly when she saw Seth. “I know you. You’re the
farang
who puts curses on people from your balcony.”
    Seth puffed up. “Is that what they say about me?”
    “And you had the nerve to jump on my back about black magic?” Jack muttered.
    “Shaddup,” Seth told him congenially. “Like you’re bein’ fitted for a halo, boy.”
    Jack had almost forgotten how much he wanted to punch Seth in the mouth, but the desire came back sharp and twinging between his knuckles. He looked to Trixie instead. “Luv, we need to know how Miles died. And where.”
    “He bit it out on Silom Road.” She jerked a thumb. “Got hit by a taxi walking to the train station after his