Demon Bound

corpse, lying still, waiting for its fate as the instrument of the necromancer’s black magic.
    Or his.
    Jack felt his lungs seize as the fags had their revenge, and he let himself fall back, landing next to the clammy sack of flesh on the floor. He clapped one palm on the corpse’s stiff leg, fixing on Jao as the panting necromancer poised over him for the killing blow.
    Black oily power floated behind Jao’s gaze, like a burning slick of gasoline on a river. Jack opened his sight to the energies of the morgue, pulled all of the power into him that his body would allow.
    When you cast a curse, second chances weren’t given. Curses worked in triads, the words of power, the energy of the mage, the conductor medium. All three balanced exactly, or the curse could snap back and do worse to you than you’d conjured, thrice.
    Curses weren’t worth the trouble, by and large, when the same problems could be solved with a boot to the teeth or a cricket bat to the guts. But Jack had seen what they could do when they were applied properly, and he needed to stop Jao, for sure and for good.
    He drew in his last bit of air, held it, and expelled it in a fury, putting all of his panic and rage behind it, pushing every ounce of his energy into the words of power while he grasped the corpse hard enough to leave a handprint on the dead man’s splotchy skin. “
Cosbriste!
”
    The corpse jumped under him as its leg bone cracked, and Jao let out a scream. His left leg twisted under him as the curse sprang across the distance between Jack and the necromancer like a starving dog and sank its teeth into his soul. Jao’s leg bone snapped with a clean, crisp sound in the small room, and he dropped.
    The scalpel tinkled out of his grasp and landed close to where Jack sat, fighting to pull his heart back under control as it thundered along fit to snap his ribs.
    It always took a few seconds to realize you were stillalive, when Death put out a hand and clapped it against your face, forced you to look it in the eye.
    Seth came pelting through the door with a security man in a blue uniform, and stopped short at the scene before him. “Jackie boy, what the fuck is this?”
    “Leg-breaker curse,” Jack said hoarsely. His feet slithered under him on the wet concrete, but he used the slimy tile wall and got to his feet. “What’s it look like, we danced a samba?”
    The security guard asked Seth if things were all right, and Seth waved him off in Thai, pressing a few hundred
bhat
into the man’s hand before he shoved him out of the morgue. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a ménage à trois,” Seth growled. He slammed the door and locked it. “He came after you like a fat schoolboy on a custard cake. Told you not to open your big mouth.”
    Jack flipped Seth the bird. “Up yours.” Air passed across his extended arm with a sting. His cut was pumping blood, and the slash neatly bisected his tattoos. Jack grabbed a towel from the wash closet and wrapped it around himself, vines of crimson soaking through the cotton. “That cunt. If I get some sort of infection that makes bits of me fall off . . .”
    “You need stitches,” Seth said. “I’m not mopping up after you again, Jackie.”
    “After we find Hornby.” Jack took a deep breath through his nose. Willed his heart to stop pumping his life out of the gash Jao had left. Wrestled the magic in the room back under control. It was rough and ugly, like a waterfall from a polluted stream, as his power and the magic left over from the sobbing necromancer’s attack commingled.
    He tied off the towel tight as he could stand it, and righted the surgical table with his good hand. “Get him up,” he told Seth, jerking his chin at Jao.
    “Jack, he’s a good bloke,” Seth said. “He’s a scared bloke. Whatever’s happening here, it’s not his fault. . . .”
    Jack pointed at the table. “Get him up and put him on the fucking table, McBride.” He didn’t have any spare panic now, just a tight black feeling in his chest. He was alive. He’d looked at the blade coming down and he was still standing. Jack didn’t think he’d ever become accustomed to the weightless, breathless feeling of still taking up space in the world when he should be on his way through the Bleak Gates.
    Seth wrestled Jao’s limp form onto the table with a grunt. “Jack,” he said. “I’m asking you, properly now . . .”
    Jack slammed his good hand down onto the metal next to Jao’s head. The clang