Demon Bound

arcane semaphore in shadow and bright. Morgues around the world were the same—silent, stinking, and filled up with the psychic energy of the dead.
    “Be easy in here, yeah?” Seth said. “He’s a bit of a skittish bloke and you don’t speak the language anyway, so don’t go off shouting and pitching a temper fit like you do.”
    “I’ll be polite as a vicar at a church picnic,” Jack promised.
    In the morgue proper, Jack spied a body lying on the single steel table in the center of the room. He’d been around plenty of dead things—both recently deceased and long-rotted—but seeing the man on the table, half-covered by a sheet as if he were about to receive a shady massage instead of an autopsy, made him itch all over, under the skin. Jack didn’t like corpses, and neither did his stomach.
    “Heya,” Seth shouted, knocking on the edge of the table. The man under the sheet jumped, limbs going akimbo at his ministrations.
    “Christ,” Jack muttered, turning his back on the corpse.
    “’Ey, you were the one who’s so keen to truck with these rotters,” Seth said. “Chin up, little camper. It’s not going to bite you.”
    Jack cast a baleful eye at the corpse. “That’s a matter of opinion.”
    A figure backed out of a small wash closet on the other side of the morgue. The space was spare, just a steel counter covered in surgical instruments and a black nylon doctor’s bag, the washroom, and a row of freezers near it. A hose dangled from the ceiling, fitted with a spray nozzle for washing bodies. The quiet
drip-drop-plip
of water and blood was the only sound, beyond the humming of the freezers.
    “Jao,” Seth said, giving the small pathologist a nod. “Been keeping yourself well, mate?”
    Jao looked from Seth to Jack. He fired of a rapid sentence of Thai and Seth spread his hands.
    “No, no. He’s a friend. He’s one of us.”
    Jack gestured at the dead man on the table. “Hell of a centerpiece, mate. Your work?”
    Jao slipped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and picked up a scalpel and forceps, peeling back the skin of the man on the table. His cuts bifurcated tattoos, sutras and dragons tangled together in the hurried flurry that Jack recognized as prison ink.
    “So?” he growled finally, hands never pausing as he lifted out a section of sternum that a Stryker saw had separated. “What you want?” Jao wore white at his temples and a scowl on his face like battle scars, and he glared up at Jack from under a thatch of black hair. He resembled more than anything a troll, something small and scuttling that lived under a bridge. Jack knew from hanging about Pete and her work with the Met that it happened when you spent your days prodding dead bodies.
    “You had a bloke come in about two weeks ago,” Seth said. “Dead bloke, obviously.
Farang
who got himself pasted in a man vs. taxi spat. White, probably pale as this cunt right here.” Seth jerked his thumb at Jack.
    “He was a singer,” Jack supplied. “And talented.”
    “Talented, right.” Seth fingered his packet of Silk Cut, tapped out a fag. Jao curled his lip back.
    “Ain’t no smoking in the surgery.”
    Jack took the fag from Seth’s fingers and stuck it between his own lips, touching his finger to the end. “Brilliant. You see this dead bloke or not?”
    “No,” Jao said instantly. He opened the nylon bag and pulled out a bunch of herbs. “We ain’t had nobody here like that.”
    The herbs went under the dead man’s skin and Jaorummaged in his supplies until he found a wide-gauge needle and rough cotton thread.
    “That’s hawthorn,” Jack said, puffing out a cloud of smoke and breaking off the burning tip of the fag, for later. “Recognize the leaves.” He poked at the pile of herbs in the dead man’s chest cavity. “Not a lot of hawthorn trees in this part of the world, eh, mate?”
    Jao slapped his hand away. “Not for touching.”
    “I’m really couldn’t give a flying fuck what you’re doing to this poor bastard,” Jack said. “Although according to Seth here, you people got a real problem with ghost sickness. Seems maybe you’re not so very skilled at your chosen discipline, Jao.”
    Jao’s massive eyebrows drew together like a thorny hedgerow. “What you mean ‘you people’?”
    “Skin traders,” Jack said evenly. “Necromancers. Liars.”
    Seth rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Jack . . .”
    “You recognized the description,” Jack said. Jao’s hand, moving the needle in