Demon Bound

halfway to knowing why Jack was in its fair city.
    At least the errand boys hadn’t tied his hands—and where would he go, if they had? Even if he popped the boot, he’d land in the middle of the thrice-cursed crush of Thai traffic and end up pavement mulch, just like Hornby. If he was lucky enough to avoid getting a necromancy curse shoved up his arse and used as a bizarre Yuletide gift in some sorcerous feud.
    He ripped off the stifling hood as the Lexus rolled around a corner and smacked his head against a sharp edge again. Jack cursed the mages, the car, the powers that be, and when he was dizzy from sucking in tainted air, he saved one last curse for that treacherous cunt Seth McBride.
    The Lexus inched and bounced through the streets of Bangkok, Jack’s sense of time liquefying and lengtheninguntil it might have been years that he’d spent crushed into the boot rather than minutes or hours. His arm was bound up with dried blood. Jack didn’t bother peeling back the towel. Cuts were like bad memories—aggravate them with enough prodding and they began to hurt and bleed again.
    At last, the car jerked to a stop as abruptly as Lefty and his companion had appeared in the waiting room, and light from the outside world dazzled Jack into blindness.
    Righty’s hands grabbed him by the front of his shirt. “He took the fucking bag off.”
    Lefty sighed. “Like it’s a secret fortress around here. Get him out of there.”
    Jack caught a quick snatch of crowds and noise before he was hustled onto his feet and indoors, Righty stopping their procession in a shadowed vestry. Jack chanced a glance backward, into the outside. The small slice of city he could see consisted of stacked flats and Thai faces, devoid of the English signs and foreigners that overran Pat-pong. Jack was the only white man that he could spy, and curious faces peered from the greasy windows of the flats at the Lexus and the gangsters, the only clean things in the street. Clean, shiny sore thumbs.
    Righty jerked him along and Jack lost his view. He watched a corridor lined with Japanese-style Shoji screens speed by, alcoves full of gold statues, until they came to a jerky halt again under a gilt archway, beyond which a pair of doors studded with iron nails waited.
    “Bit Las Vegas, if you ask me,” Jack said. “The gold paint isn’t doing it any favors.” He couldn’t make out fuckall in the dimness of the place, but air came from somewhere above and the smells drifting in were of sewage and chili oil and sun-warmed concrete, wound up with the cloying musk of
nag champa
incense.
    “We are in Khlong Toei,” said Lefty. “It is . . .”
    “A slum?” Jack guessed. Manchester or Bangkok, poverty-ridden streets all smelled the same.
    “And a port, and a holy place, among other things,” Lefty said. “
Farang
assume because a place is one thing it must be only that thing.”
    “It smells like one thing,” Jack muttered. “Shit.”
    Lefty pointed at Jack’s feet. “Take off your boots.” When Jack didn’t immediately comply, Lefty put a hard, knuckle-ridden fist into his kidneys.
    “You poisonous bollock-pustule!” Jack wheezed. “What was that for?”
    “I grew up in Khlong Toei,” Lefty said softly. “It’s my home. Just because you see a face does not mean that face is not wearing a mask.”
    “Yeah. Many faces, mystical Far-East shite, blah blah blah,” Jack said. He stuck his fingers in his bootlaces and yanked them off. “No offense to your lovely home, mate, but I didn’t ask to be here and I don’t fancy spending any more of my life in slums. Had enough of that already.”
    Lefty’s stony face didn’t flicker. “He’s waiting for you. Go through the door and show him the proper respect. Or you can choose not to.” The gangster took the nickel-coated .45 out of his waistband and let it dangle loosely in his hand. “Frankly, I’d like it if you did.”
    “Subtle,” Jack told him. “You tell all your dates exactly how long your pan handle is, as well?” Jack’s toes curled on the cool stone seeping through the holes in his socks.
    “He is the master of Bangkok,” Lefty said. “And you’ll address him as such. You are a maggot, not fit to get crushed under his foot.”
    “I’ve got a fucking pronoun, at least,” Jack said. He’d wanted to be wrong, to have merely fallen in with necromancers, but Seth had set the master of Bangkok on him and Seth didn’t pull punches. McBride always did have a