Demon Bound

the street.
    Jack wove through the push of traffic down Patpong 2 and approached, ducking his head against the rain.
    “Hey, traveler.” The girl peeled herself away from the wall, her plastic skirt and nylon top slicked with water. “You want something?”
    Jack cast a glance over his shoulder out of habit. He wasn’t caging for coppers as much as for Pete, but the few damp pedestrians in evidence hurried on their way and studiously avoided looking at Jack, or the girl. They might as well have been two more oil-slicked stains on the pavement.
    “Something sweet?” the girl persisted. “I got party, I got good stuff. You want something?”
    Jack dug into his leather and pulled out a crumple of pounds and
bhat
. “Give me a dose. Of the sweet.”
    The girl fished in her voluminous knockoff handbag, and Jack heard the shifting scrape of cellophane bags against bags, the clack of pills. She palmed him a twist of plastic with a nub of brown inside, and made Jack’s money disappear like a magic trick.
    “You want a sharp?” She titled her head, hair curled up from the rain. Her makeup was smeared, and she looked a bit like a thrown-away doll.
    “Yeah,” Jack muttered, shoving the smack into his pocket. “Give it to me.”
    The girl passed him a disposable needle in a sterile wrapper, stamped with a hospital name in English and Thai. “You have fun,” she said, closing his fingers over it. “And come back soon. I’m here every night.”
    Jack walked away without answering. He ducked through the door of Trixie’s bar. She was busy serving a trio of Australians who in turn were busy gawping at a pair of go-go dancers divesting themselves of their gold bikinis on the stage. A DJ spun house tunes, and the lights were low and blue.
    Jack went straight through the kitchen and into the back alley. The alley was piled with crates and metal garbage cans, quiet except for echoes of raindrops and faraway laugher. Neon signs spread fingers of pink and red and blue across Jack’s skin, turning him from a Fae to a demon to a corpse in the span of a heartbeat.
    Demons lie. Lesson. Fucking. One.
    He’d been so close. So fucking close to working it all out. Find Hornby, find his secret, find his way out of Hell. At the worst, absolute rock bottom, he’d have the demon’s name.
    But there was no Miles Hornby in the grave.
    Jack leaned his head back against the slimy exterior wall. The neon beat a heartbeat against the back of his eyelids.
    He could run, he could run far and fast, but the sight always caught him. The bargain would never be unwound.
    He could pretend that he was clean, an ex-junkie, an ex-liar, and an ex-bastard, but Jack knew who he was. He was Jack Winter.
    Junkie. Liar. Sinner. Dead man.
    As he unrolled the baggie between his fingers, Jack realized that nothing had changed from the moment he’d bound the bargain in the first place.
    The motions came back, like playing a D chord or putting a record on a turntable. Automatic, rote, familiar.
    Drop the smack into the spoon. Find your lighter, buried underneath a ball of vellum and an ancient packet of crisps in his jacket pocket. Cook the shit, mindful of your fingers. Jack’s callused fingerprints weren’t only from playing guitar.
    He used his teeth to rip open the sharp and his belt to tighten up his arm. The studs cut into his bicep, dull hot pain, but Jack ignored it as he drew the cloudy gold into the belly of the needle. Like watching a mosquito feed, he’d thought the first time. Feed and bloat on the sweetest blood there was.
    Jack let the spoon drop into a puddle and he sat himself on a crate, out of the rain.
    Slap your arm. Watch the bruise-blue map of heart’s blood float to the surface, pulsing and quivering under the skin. Try to find a spot that will still take a sharp, the black blots of collapsed veins like impassable terrain.
    Jack wriggled his arm and slotted it comfortably against his thigh. He bit the cap off of the sharp and spat it out, flat plastic taste on his tongue.
    Prime the needle, force all the air out. Embolism willruin your day, and earn you a stint in rehab when you get found and taken to A&E. If you get found in time.
    The tip of the needle bit into his skin, and it hurt a bit, like passing your hand through a lighter. It hadn’t hurt in a long while. Being clean had started a new season in his body, nerves and blood renewed.
    Jack tilted his face up to the rain, put his thumb on the needle’s plunger, and