Demon Bound

exhaled. Sipped the new glass of whiskey. Watched Pete, and waited.
    “Will you answer one more question for me?” she saidat last. Her face wasn’t overtly hostile, her wide eyes guileless. Jack tensed, sensing a trap.
    “If I can, luv.”
    “When, exactly,” Pete said, “did you become a raving nutter?”
    Jack set his glass down. “It’s the truth, Pete. I’m going to dig up his body and raise him from the dead.”
    Pete rolled her eyes at Jack. “Bollocks.”
    “I dunno what else to tell you, luv.”
    Pete slapped her hand on the bar. “How about the bloody
truth
? What does this Hornby have that you need badly enough to just . . . to just . . .” Her face went red and her eyes took on a sheen. “To just
leave.
” Pete swiped at her eyes. “Shit.”
    Jack reached for her hand, but Pete yanked it away. “You have to believe me,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t run out on you, Petunia. I . . .”
    “You would, because you did,” Pete said. Her voice was low and vicious. “It’s exactly the kind of thing you do, Jack. A rough patch comes and you bolt for the bloody hills.”
    Jack threw back the last of his whiskey Now it only burned, didn’t numb. “It’s life and death, luv.”
    Pete chewed on her lip. “Whose life?”
    “My life.”
    Pete put her elbows on the bar and her forehead in her hands. “Jack, what have you done?”
    Jack reached over and lifted her chin with one finger. The spark of her talent rang sweet along his bones.
    All at once, he felt the weight of every lie. Crawling inside his mind, deadening his talent, and hollowing him out until there was no Jack Winter, junkie, mage, or otherwise. There was only a memory of Jack Winter, liar and dead man.
    Another lie would twist him irreparably, start a psychic hemorrhage that Jack knew he wouldn’t be able to stop.
    He dropped his hand. “I will tell you absolutely everything, Pete, but I am running out of time. Help me raise Hornby’s corpse, and then I’ll tell you anything. Me favorite color, the name of the girl who beat me with her lunch box in first form, why I possess an irrational phobia of John Gielgud. Anything you like.”
    Pete blinked away the last of the tears. Her mascara made miniature deltas down her face and Jack ran his thumb lightly over her skin, returning it to pale and pristine. Pete reached up and grabbed his hand, trapping it against her cheek. “You swear?”
    Jack nodded. “On me life. What little of it I have left.”

Chapter Thirty-two
    The Bangkok Protestant Cemetery was overrun with roses and long grass, the paths barely wide enough for Jack’s boots side by side. No lights watched over the graves, and the dank, ripe smell of the Chao Phraya River mingled with the smell of turned earth.
    Pete shone her light at the crooked rows of tombs and graves. “Where is he?”
    Jack saw the hump of a newly buried body under the beam, wooden cross stuck crookedly in the earth a few feet ahead of him. “Let’s start there.”
    “And if we get the wrong grave?” Pete muttered.
    Jack swung his spade to and fro, the iron weight moving like a divining rod. “Then I imagine we’d say, ‘Oh, so sorry, let me just tuck you up and shut your coffin again, guv. Lovely weather we’re having.’ ”
    Pete waved him quiet. “You’re a wanker.”
    Jack heard a rustle from the bushes and detected silver eyeshine. The small owl stared at him, head twitching back and forth. Jack curled his lip.
    “Never liked those things.”
    “I don’t mind them,” Pete said. “They used to show up in our garden when I was a girl. Da said they were there to take the bad dreams out of the air before they got to me and my sister.”
    Jack prodded the earth over Hornby’s grave and tried to ignore the gaze of the owl. Owls came on an ill wind, harbingers of things that even Jack, with his visions of the dead, didn’t want to imagine too closely. Not psychopomps, like the crow. Only watchers, keepers of the shadows that lived beyond the Black and beyond even the grasp of Death.
    “Hold the light steady,” he said to Pete, shoving the spade into the grave mound. The earth was loose and soft, warm still from sunlight. It took him fifteen minutes and a few gallons of sweat to uncover the elongated hexagon of the pauper’s coffin.
    “Never liked this,” Pete said. “Exhumations. When I was with the Met, it always seemed wrong, somehow.”
    “That’s the Black,” Jack agreed. “Once a soul’s flown from a body,