Street Magic bl-1 Page 5

  "I've been with the Met long enough to know what it is to be an addict," said Pete, pulling her chin back, because proximity to Jack did strange things to a person. "And I know when a bloke's trying to manipulate me. No, Jack. Nothing will go wrong and the answer is no."

  One fist went up. "Open the fucking door before I bash your fucking face."

  Pete felt her jaw tighten and her lips compress. All her patience for this new Jack ran out like water. A dozen years of regret and feeling the hole in her heart, and this was what she got?

  Pete used the rage of her wasted nightmares to fuel the snarl in her voice. "You won't do any such thing, Jack, because you're a fucking coward. And sod your deal, by the way. I said I'd get you washed and fed. I didn't agree to anything about your smack."

  His upper lip twisted but under the surface of his sneer the fire flickered and burned out of his eyes.

  Pete gripped the hand bruising her arm and twisted just enough to throw the joints out of prime. "Bollocks!" Jack yelped. Pete gripped his wrist and elbow in a control hold, propelling Jack toward the bathroom.

  "Now we're going to get one thing straight," she said, shoving Jack into her old claw-footed bathtub and spinning the cold tap open all the way.

  "Fuck!" he shouted, collapsing in a heap. "You fleabit-ten whore! That freezes!"

  "I don't care what sort of a problem you've developed in regard to me," Pete said, ticking off on her fingers. "I care about Patrick and Diana and finding them alive and well. And you are going to help me, and you're going to do it without the assistance of your sodding heroin, or so help me, Jack, I will personally beat you senseless and deliver you to the lockup at the Yard."

  He glared up at her, his bleached hair dribbling into his eyes like sodden straw. Pete glared back, watching him shiver and trying to ignore the pity shredding her intentions to be hard.

  After a long rotation of the clock hands, Jack wiped a hand over his face and reached up to turn off the tap. "All right, Caldecott," he said finally. "You got yourself a deal."

  Chapter Ten

  The children's ward at St. John's Hospital made an effort to paint a cheery face on things with bright furniture and murals on the walls, but it had the same effect as a syphilitic prostitute smearing on expensive rouge.

  Bridget Killigan's father—Dexter, "Call me Dex, they all do"—looked up when she swung open the door. "Inspector?"

  "Is she sleeping?" Pete asked. Bridget lay on the hospital bed like a child bride on her funeral pyre.

  "She drifts," said the father. "In and out." He stroked Bridget's hair back from her grave face, like she was a porcelain thing, smashable.

  "Could I have a word?" Pete asked even though a word would get no results. Bridget's mind was gone as the ash on the end of a burning cigarette. But Pete needed groundwork, if she was going to find Patrick and Diana, needed facts to know that Jack wasn't simply wanking off over her discomfiture.

  She needed truth, even if she blended or blurred or broke it, later on. Start with the truth, Connor said, and then you can draw the map, walk anywhere you please. Go to the sodding forbidden forest if you like, but start at true.

  "Bridget?"

  The girl stirred, the white marble eyes flicking toward Pete as if Bridget could still see, even though the doctor in A&E had assured Pete she was totally blind. "Who is it? Mum?"

  "No, love," said Pete, gripping the rail of Bridget's bed. Cold and straight, inhuman. Strength. "No, this is Detective Inspector Caldecott. You can call me Pete."

  Bridget's forehead creased. "Pete's a funny name for a girl."

  "I know," Pete agreed, breathing deep and keeping her tone steady. "It's bloody—er, very funny. You think that's a burden, my sister's name is Morning Glory."

  Bridget made no reaction.

  Pete chewed her lip. "Bridget, I need to ask you about the person who took you."

  Bridget's father pressed his palms together, lips moving silently. Bridget let out a small sigh, as if she'd repeated her story many times.

  "We went to see the old Cold Man. He lives down the murky path, just around the bend."

  Pete took Bridget's hand. Her skin was cooler than the air, dry like parchment. Bridget was a shadow child, a thin husk with nothing beating beneath the surface.

  "Bridget, where is the murky path? Where does it go?"

  "I think you've done quite enough," Dexter Killigan said abruptly, standing and placing his hand protectively on his daughter's shoulder. "She can't tell you anything."

  "Bridget," Pete said again, squeezing the girl's papery hand. "Bridget, what did you see when you went down the murky path?"

  She rolled her head toward Pete and fixed Pete with those white eyes, dead pearls in her tiny corpse-face. "We saw the bone tombs. The dead places where the dreamers go. He strides in the shadows and he reached out his hand to me."

  The hospital room was warm, nearly stuffy, but Pete felt a cold that cut to her bones. Bridget's calm monotone recalled images just beneath the rippling surface of Pete's own memory, black smoke and skeletal phantoms whispering close to her ear.

  "And what does he do, Bridget?" she finally managed. Her voice came out dry, as if she'd been smoking for twenty years hence. "What does the old Cold Man do?"

  Bridget was still for a long moment, breath shallow, pulse beating in her translucent throat. Pete leaned in. "Bridget?"

  The little girl's hand latched around Pete's wrist, touch like frost. Pete jumped.

  Bridget whispered sibilantly. "He's touched both of us, Pete Caldecott. Backward and forward, up and down the years, he sees. And he waits."

  Black pools spun in front of Pete's vision as her blood dropped groundward. "What did you say? How do you…"

  But Bridget was gone again, still and silent and asleep. Her father shook himself and then pointed at the door. "Get out," he told Pete shakily. "Get out and don't come back. Leave my daughter alone."

  Pete moved for the door faster than she admitted to herself. She needed to be outside, and needed a fag, not necessarily in that order. "I'm sorry," she said to Dexter Killigan before the door swished shut on the tableau in the hospital room.

  He didn't answer, mourning Bridget with his stillness and his unblinking, distant stare.

  Chapter Eleven

  At the door to her flat, Pete paused and listened, catching not a sound from inside. "Bloody hell," she muttered. Relief, not worry, that. She'd left Jack cuffed to the headboard of her bed, after he'd passed out on it, and by the sound of things, he'd stayed there.

  Pete believed it, right up until she opened the door. The rug in the front room was crumpled and her hall table had been tipped over. "Shit." Then, "Jack?"

  He'd be gone, and the only question would be how many of her pawnable possessions he could carry.

  Pete jerked a Parliament out of the pack and stomped into the kitchen for a light. She passed the bathroom on her way. Jack lay on his side next to the toilet, the sweat beading on his face the only sign he was alive.

  The unlit fag dropped from Pete's mouth. "Damn you, Jack," she hissed. Then she was on her knees, turning his head, feeling for a pulse, pulling his eyelids back to examine his ice-chip eyes for shock. They were bloodshot but the pupils flexed at her intrusion, and Jack swatted at her weakly.

  "Go 'way."

  "Jesus, Jack," Pete breathed, sitting back on her heels.

  Jack rolled on to his back and moaned, throwing a hand over his eyes.

  "He's got fuck-all to do with this. I'm bloody dying. You're an evil spawn of witches, Pete Caldecott."

  Pete rolled a clean towel and slipped it under Jack's head. "You may be a lot of things, but dying isn't one. And the next time you call me a name, I'm putting my foot up your arse and leaving it there."

  A smile flashed, the devil-grin. "Same little firecracker. Always liked that you weren't afraid of me."

  "I—" Pete started, but Jack's face twisted, and then he lunged for the toilet and was violently sick.

  Pe
te put a hand between Jack's shoulder blades, feeling the bones grind under the skin as he retched. He was burning hot, but his sweat was like ice water.

  "I just need a little," Jack pleaded as he pressed his forehead against the porcelain rim. "Just a little to take the edge off. It's been hours, Pete. Fucking days."

  "No," said Pete without hesitation.

  "Fuck you!" Jack screamed, driving his fists into the tile floor of the bathroom. His knuckles left bloody smears.

  "Fine," Pete said, standing. "You'll either pull through it or you won't. But you did this to yourself, Jack, and if you wanted to keep spiraling down toward the rock fucking bottom, you should have kept your bloody mouth shut about Bridget."

  Jack glared at her, mouth opening to spew another curse, but his jaw slackened. "Pete," he said softly. "Pete, move out of the way."

  Pete glanced behind her, feeling a twinge of ice on the base of her neck. Jack's pupils dilated until his eyes were wormholes rimmed with frost. "Did someone die in your flat?" he whispered. "A man, your height, dark visage and eyes?"

  Because it was Jack, and not anyone else, Pete found herself nodding as the frost fingers spread out to grip her spine. "Yes, but that has to be forty years ago now."

  Jack's thin chest fluttered as he sucked in a wavering breath. "Get away from him," he told Pete. "He's hungry."

  Pete's sensible ballet flats were rooted to the tile, and even though her instincts were screaming in concert, a million pinpricks over her skin and psyche, she couldn't move.

  "Behind me," Jack rasped. "Move your arse, woman!"

  She'd never heard Jack so dead serious, and it snapped the frozen spell. Pete scrabbled across the sweat-slicked tile and crouched behind Jack against the shower curtain, which rustled like a gale had just blown through the bathroom.

  Nothing was behind her. Pete felt instantly ridiculous, the ice on her skin replaced by the flush of a paranoid caught out. "Jack…" She sighed. "Bloody hell, don't do that to me."

  "Shut it," he said urgently, still fixated on the corner near the door. "Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you fucking shadow with teeth. Well, bollocks to you."

  The sense of evil just over the left shoulder returned full-force and Pete saw the air in the spot where she'd stood shimmer, as if something were trying to push into the realm of sight through sheer malevolence. "Oh, God," she said, because He was the first powerful thing that jumped to mind.

  "Forget about that," said Jack. He dipped an index finger in the ruddy smear he'd left on the tiles and began to draw, a radius filled with swirling symbols that shifted and blended into something strong and binding, like the iron scrollwork on a castle's gate.

  The air crackled and rippled, and blackness began to crowd in through the seams in the walls, the drain and faucet of Pete's bathroom sink, a shadowy smoke-ether that brought with it whispers and fluttering cries, phrases that twisted just out of hearing.

  Jack's jaw set, bone jumping under the skin. "Think you're a smart bastard, do you?"

  "I don't think this is working," Pete murmured. Jack was expanding another set of symbols, barely integral when drawn with his shaking fingers.

  The smoke filled the bathroom, always at the edges of Pete's vision, narrowing it down into a tunnel the size of a shilling coin. The babble of unearthly voices was joined by smells, and feelings—turned earth, blood-spattered sheets, tiny fingers on Pete's skin and sliding through her hair.

  She gripped Jack's shoulder. "For fuck's sake, Jack, I do not want to die on the floor of my loo."

  And his hand stopped shaking, and his breathing calmed, and with that the circle resolved as bright and solid as if it had been carved into the tiles. The shimmering malice dissolved like dust motes in a bar of sun, and fast as they'd seeped into the realm of the real, the whispers and the smells and the tiny grasping fingers and fangs were gone.

  Jack slumped. "Bloody hell. You couldn't have brought me someplace safer, like, say, the fucking Tower?"

  "I…" Pete pressed her hands over her nose and mouth and forced herself into a mold of composure she felt ill suited to fit. "I have no idea what that was."

  "That," said Jack, "is what happens when I don't get my fix."

  "You…" Pete looked at the corner where the presense had spread its oily sheen, and back at Jack. "You see… whatever that was?"

  "Shade," said Jack. "Ghost, if you want to be pedestrian about it. A poxy one allowed to hang about for far too long. Bugger all, didn't you have this place cleansed before you moved in?"

  "It never occurred to me," said Pete, although more than once on nights when rain blurred the streetlamps outside into nightmare gloom or the telly turned on by itself, she'd thought about it. The circle of protection Jack could chalk, and grow strong as iron. The five-pointed silver circlet Mum had always worn at her throat.

  Jack rolled on his side, eyes half-closed like he'd just taken the purest hit of his life. "Christ on a motorbike. I'm bloody exhausted. If I get back in the bed, could you restrain your kinky self from handcuffing me again?"

  Having seen what she had, just then, Pete simply nodded. "You won't try to run away?"

  "Pete, I'm two breaths from shaking hands with the reaper. Don't be fucking stupid."

  "Back to being a git, I see," said Pete. "Maybe there is hope, after all."

  Jack slept for a long time after Pete laid him back in her bed, and she sat at awkward angles in the wicker chair next to him, attempting to make sense of departmental e-mails on her laptop and ignore the fact that they had perhaps a day and a half left if the kidnapper worked according to method. Every time she tried to focus on the pixels, her vision shimmered and blurred just like the shade that had almost appeared.

  Just as nebulous were her thoughts, the tails and fragments of questions that wouldn't be answered. Jack moaned in his sleep, his fever dreams gripping his body and causing his hands to lash out under the sheets.

  Pete put a hand on his shoulder. "All right. No one's here except me."

  Dreaming, he didn't have the wherefore to offer venom in return, and Pete found herself curiously saddened by this. She might never find out what had intervened to make Jack hate her, and this illusion was all she had, until Patrick and Diana were found. If they were found.

  The thought stirred a blacker feeling in her than the aura of any shade.

  Chapter Twelve

  In Pete's dream, Patrick and Diana reached out to her with black and sticky fingers, their mouths smeared with offal as they feasted on the long-dead bodies of those who had come to this tomb before her. Pete tried to run but every way was bricked over, a blank wall rife with spiderwebs and scrabble marks dug by human fingernails.

  The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in bloody and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.

  He sees you, Pete Caldecott, whispered Bridget Killigan. And he held out his hand, curled around something that fluttered and oozed blood between his knotty fingers. "Take it. Take what was always yours, tattered girl. Be mine, and whole."

  Pete pressed against the wall, grit working its way down her neck, tiny bugs and specks of graveyard dirt. A rush of wind blew through the crypt, the ends of the robed thing flapping on white bone joints, revealing armor washed clean against his rotted skeleton. Patrick and Diana looked up in concert. Smoke boiled across the floor and coalesced into the form of a man, a man with burning silver eyes that seared Pete's mind, not with heat but with a cold that could stop her heart. She felt a delicate shattering behind her skull, and then her mobile started to ring.

  Pete's laptop slid to the floor as she bolted awake, her mobile trilling and dancing on the bedside table. Jack reached out in his sleep and swatted at it.

  "Hallo," Pete mumbled, trying to sound like she hadn't been nodding. Dreaming.

  "Well, you're hard enough to get hold of!" Terry snapped.

  "Terry." Pete wondered that she was relieved he'd c
alled. He'd woken her up. That was what mattered.

  "I've faxed the new papers to your desk."

  Pete checked on Jack, whose trembling had ceased for the moment, and slipped into the hallway, shutting the bedroom door. "I'm not at work, Terry."

  She could hear the sneer coming down the line. "Then where on earth are you? It's not like you to go anywhere off your little track from flat to work and back again."

  "Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry. Grow up." Pete slapped her mobile shut. Jack groaned, and she returned to the bedside, feeling his pulse and his hot, gleaming forehead. The worst of the withdrawal was past him, please, God, let it be over, and when he woke he'd have raging flu symptoms and a craving like iron claws in his skull, but he'd be sober, and help her, before Patrick and Diana were lost.

  Pete used a washcloth to brush Jack's sweat-soaked hair away from his face, and went into the sitting room to let him sleep for as long as she could allow. She tried to eat what takeaway hadn't gone dodgy. Cold aloo gobi did nothing for the state of her stomach, nervous as a pacing cat. Ollie called, and she let her mobile ring through to voice mail, because she didn't have any answers for him.

  Pete swept up the broken glass from Terry's picture just to move, and after a second of consideration dropped the snapshot into the bin. It had been taken the day after Pete was promoted to detective inspector, and the day before Terry had asked her to marry him. A moment when things were right and good, and they were so no longer. The picture had no place now that Jack had reentered her life, and her flat.

  She straightened up Jack's other messes but she couldn't calm down. Sleeping in the middle of the day had put her at odds, plus the slumbering but screaming presence of the man himself in her bedroom.

  Finally, when she knew she'd go mad if she spent another second pacing the floor, back and forth past the bedroom door, she made up the sofa and lay in the twilight, watching the hands of the clock tick toward midnight.