Demon Bound

housewife on Valium. “It will rip your insides to shreds and your magic along with it and I will enjoy watching you die slowly. Walk.”
    Jack turned around and walked. You didn’t fuck about when someone threatened to shoot you in broad daylight in a hospital. Spells and hexes, he could give as good as he got. Bullets weren’t the same thing at all—and iron bullets, fuck it. You didn’t stick your hand in a spinning fan because you fancied a cooling off.
    The gangsters seemed reluctant to damage him, and thatworked in his favor. He could kick up a row, and get himself gut-shot, or he could play the cooperative sod and see who, exactly, had fixated on his presence in Bangkok, and why.
    “All right, lads,” he said as the doors to A&E swished back, dropping the damp blanket of Bangkok’s heat over his skin. “I can be sweet as custard if the occasion calls. No reason to be shirty.”
    Lefty shoved him across the tide of people on the walk and into the street. “Stay quiet and move your arse.”
    At the curb, as promised, a smooth black Lexus idled like the riverboat of Charon, waiting to whisk Jack away to the Underworld.
    Lefty rapped on a tinted—and to Jack’s eye, bulletproof—window and the boot popped with an oiled
click
. Righty took out a black cloth sack and unfurled it with a snap.
    Jack’s headache returned as if some vicious sod had bounced a bowling ball off his skull. Eight or nine times.
    “You’re not bloody serious.”
    Lefty put his hand on the pistol again. “Quite, Mr. Winter. I believe the expression is ‘dead serious’? ”
    Jack shot Righty a glare. “That thing better not have other people’s spit on the inside.”
    The bag slipped over his vision, and Lefty put a firm hand on his shoulder—his power was different from Righty’s. Smooth and cold rather than rough. Lefty had some black magic training, while Righty was crude muscle who probably had little more than what the Black spilled into his blood when he was conceived. Jack put it away for later.
    Lefty shoved, and Jack banged his forehead on the boot lid. “Fucking hell!” he exclaimed, muffled by the hood. “You want me cheery, stop treating me like you’re moving fucking furniture!”
    Another shove, and Jack was forced to tumble forward or break his neck. He landed in the boot, which stank faintly of cigarettes, just to add insult to injury.
    “Have a comfortable ride, Mr. Winter,” Lefty said, and then the boot lid slammed above him, and what light there had been through the hood vanished, leaving Jack alone and in the dark.

Chapter Twenty-eight
    Being locked in the boot allowed Jack plenty of time to think. His thoughts didn’t travel anywhere he particularly wanted to be, but all the same, the situation was what it was and there was no point in crying about it.
    He’d stopped bleeding, and Jack forced himself to think like Pete, who certainly wouldn’t have gotten herself locked in a boot by a pair of manky sorcerers. The facts unfurled thusly:
    Seth had sold him down the river to whoever in Bang-kok resented a nosy mage on their turf.
    Seth was a cunt, but Seth wasn’t the one who’d kidnapped him.
    Seth was in thrall to the same being who’d put the god’s fear in Jao and snuffed out his life.
    The car slowed, and Jack tried kicking at the lid of the boot. His heel skidded off of solid metal. Smashing his way out of this was becoming less possible by the second.
    “Solve it, you stupid nonce,” he grumbled to himself. He got a mouthful of head-bag for his trouble. It tasted sourand stale. Who put a bag on your head when you were already stuffed in a boot?
    You could tell a lot about a bloke by how he threatened people. Lefty had been polite to a fault, and that posh speech didn’t come from growing up in a place like Manchester. Lefty had some education, and more than a bit of talent, and yet he was an errand boy.
    Whoever or whatever had Lefty and Seth in its thrall was worse than the demon. Fiercer. Harder. Someone who knew he owned his patch and fed trespassers to rabid dogs.
    The master of Bangkok. The demon that belonged to every city and its Black, just as the city belonged to the demon. Knots of life and death and magic called to demons, some lost and searching for Hell, some coming willingly from the Pit to reap a harvest of human misery.
    Jack tried to take a breath, and didn’t manage much more than a gasp of carbon monoxide. If the demon of Bangkok knew who he was, the demon was