Street Magic bl-1 Page 7

  "All right," said Pete. She dug in her bag for her mobile and started to dial Ollie Heath. "What's the part I'm not going to like?"

  Jack made another finger-pass over the bones, and another breath of cold trailed up Pete's spine. "There's black magic around the children," said Jack. "More specifically, them that make use of black magic. Sorcerers."

  Pete kept her expression composed. "I think I can handle a few gits in black capes drawing pentagrams, Jack."

  "You don't understand." He sighed, as if she'd just told him London was the capital of France. "If sorcerers took the children, something is moving. You said Bridget Killigan was blinded?"

  "She's got a kind of amnesia, too," said Pete.

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

  "Ah, tits," Jack muttered. "Be prepared, Pete—the people that snatched the brats are dangerous and probably won't be in the best humor when we find them. Something's up, mark my words. I can feel it shifting in the lines—there's a darkness clustering around these kids, and the first one, too. Only scried for her because the ghost voices were cutting into the fix and I was trying to make 'em shut it." He rubbed his arms, up and down, rhythmic unconscious strokes. "Any idea how strong a shade has to be to break through an opiate high, Pete? Strong enough to light up the O2. Whole land of the dead is buzzing, and it's the thunder of the oncoming storm." His eyes were bright as he talked, and his body vibrated like a string, the frantic energy of a street preacher.

  "What d'you mean 'when we find them'?" she asked Jack. "You're bloody well not coming along on an open investigation."

  Jack smirked, lacing his hands behind his head. A little sweat gleamed on his forehead, and he coughed, but he'd stopped shaking for the time. "Planning to be cavalry all by yourself?"

  "I very well could be," Pete said. "I'm not an incompetent."

  "Yeah, but you won't go on your own," said Jack. He stood up, swaying but walking, and pulled his jackboots on. "You know that I'm right, and there's bad magic running through this entire thing. You'll take me along because you don't want to be staring into the night alone."

  Pete started to protest, but Jack stopped lacing his boots and gave her a pained half-smile. "It's not a weakness, Pete—nobody wants that."

  If it were anyone else, she would swear he was trying to be a comfort.

  It would be far less disconcerting if Jack weren't so often right about her thoughts and secrets, but she didn't very well want to go bursting in on kidnappers alone, in a graveyard, at night. Newell would have her arse for going at this off the book. "Why do you care about these kids?" she demanded. "You didn't even want to help me. Just listening in to ghosts, isn't that right? Nothing selfless about you, not an ounce."

  Jack shook his head. "We're not on about me, now." He lifted one bone-sharp shoulder. "If sorcerers are in the mix I might have a laugh, at least. Tick-tock, Inspector. You're the one banging on about time running out."

  "I hate you," Pete mumbled, grabbing her coat from the hook and a torch from her hall table. After a moment's debate she also plucked her handcuffs out and hooked them to her belt. Feeble protection against what she thought might be waiting for them even in her own mind.

  Jack shrugged into his leather, chains rattling on pyramid spikes, and followed Pete out of the flat. "I'll live with you hating me. At least that way, we're even."

  Chapter Sixteen

  The section of Brompton Jack led her to was small and personal, fallen out of use as London marched ever forward, forgetting its left-behind dead. Back gardens and leaning brick flats crowded in against the mossy walls.

  "Some Goth freak has his dream view, eh?" said Jack as he rattled the padlock on a rusty crypt gate. "You got a wrench in the Mini? I know a few blokes who'd pay cold hard sterling for ground bones and graveyard dust."

  Pete pinched between her eyes. "I'm not even going to dignify that."

  Jack flashed her a closemouthed smile. "Good girl. Guess that's why you're the copper, eh?"

  "I have moments," Pete agreed. She walked again, pushing aside waist-high weeds as the path narrowed and the tombs leaned in, crumbling from their foundations. Jack caught her wrist.

  "Oi. What do you think you're doing? I'll go first."

  "Sod off, it's not the bloody Victorian era," said Pete, swatting away tiny branches clawing for her face and hair. Muttering, Jack followed her through a trampled gap.

  Before them, headstones tilted crazily from dead grass, a path to the two crypts at the back of the plot overgrown with stinging nettles. Pete felt the breath of ghosts brushing her cheeks, the sighs of the long-forgotten dead disturbing this silent patch of earth. She shivered. It had been much better not knowing.

  Jack winced and rubbed his hands over his eyes. "You should've let me have the heroin, Pete."

  "Be quiet," Pete hissed. Though it was almost invisible under the misty glow from the streetlamps, she was sure candlelight flickered from the mausoleum on the left. She touched Jack's arm. "Someone else is here."

  An itchy feeling started between her shoulder blades, that of a convenient setup. Anything could be waiting in the sagging brick structure, none of the possibilities pleasant or inclined to let her go alive.

  Jack squinted at the candlelit crypt. "Got a fag?"

  Pete handed one over. Jack's face flickered briefly skeletal as he lit the Parliament. "Right. Let's go get your bloody brats."

  "Wait!" Pete whipped him around a full one hundred eighty degrees when she snatched at his arm. She'd forgotten for a moment how light he was.

  Jack glared and Pete explained, "We're not just going to rush in. Procedures to follow, plus we don't know what's in there."

  "Black magic," said Jack. "Whole place stinks of it. Feels like cobweb on your face."

  "Whatever the case, we should use caution," said Pete. "In the interest of not getting our bloody heads blown off."

  "Whoever has the kids isn't going to give us a written invite," said Jack. "Sorcerers understand force, Pete, so I'm going to give it to them."

  "But we don't know how many of them there are!" Pete whispered as Jack jerked free and strode across the brown grass crackled with early frost, crushing it under his soles.

  "Damned stupid impulsive arrogant sod," Pete hissed, running after him.

  Jack met the door with a planted foot, black wood shattering under his kick. Dry rot and dust swirled around Jack, turning his skinny dark-clad frame to a ghost in its own right.

  Pete fetched up at his shoulder, shouting "Police!" belatedly, praying that in addition to whatever occult trappings the kidnappers carried, they hadn't gotten their hands on guns.

  The two men at the center of the crypt were young—Pete noticed that first. One still had a rash of pimples up his right cheek, and their faces weren't hard or cold enough to hide the rush of guilty fear in their eyes. In a restaurant or club, they'd be any two university students trying too hard, in expensive black jackets and black denim, silver charms dangling around their necks, identical spinning-wheel shapes that looked like poisonous spiders.

  One found his voice, anger twisting it. "Who the fuck are you lot?"

  Jack smirked. "I'm Jack Winter, and I'm here to make your worst bloody nightmares come true."

  The two black-clad boys looked at Jack in askance, then each other, questioning. The bepimpled one shrugged ignorance. Then they both laughed in Jack's face.

  Pete placed a hand on Jack's shoulder. He shook under her, a leaf raging in the face of a gale. "What have you done with Patrick Dumbershall and Diana Leroy?" she asked evenly. "I warn you, lying at this juncture is only going to make me angry enough to hurt you. Both of you. Badly."

  Looks traded again, a nervous shuffling of feet on the stone floor of the crypt. The sound unpleasantly evoked Pete's dream. Take what is yours, Pete Caldecott.

  "Go bugger yourself," the second spoke up. "We ain't doing anything wrong."

  "I'm an inspector with the Metropolitan Polic
e and my associate has identified you as the kidnappers of two children," said Pete, stepping forward. "Those two facts plus you lot hanging about this tomb add up to me arresting you. Hands on heads, and face the wall."

  Before she could move, Pete felt electricity roil upward from her gut, through her spine, exploding against her brain like a hit to the temple. Power. Like she'd felt only once when she faced Jack across the clumsily chalked circle twelve years before. In her second of hesitation, the sorcerer's magic slammed into her.

  Wind, like a wall, like seeing the closed lid of the empty coffin at Jack's funeral, snatched Pete and sent her tumbling backward to land in the dirt at Jack's feet.

  The sorcerer smiled, folding his hands together like a gun and drawing in a breath to say words of power.

  He never got the chance.

  Jack held out his right hand with fingers splayed, like he was framing a photograph. Then he twisted his hand, and the sorcerer on the right dropped to his knees, face twisted in supplication.

  "I… what…" His words degenerated into breathless gurgling.

  Jack took a step toward the fallen boy, and Pete felt the second sorcerer draw on the black well of magic that swirled just beyond sight and sound. She closed the distance between herself and the sorcerer and put a right cross into his half-shaven jaw. A twinge of separation stabbed her between her first and second knuckle. The sorcerer sat down hard, eyes swimming. Pete flexed her hand and said, "Stay put unless you want to take your means through a plastic straw for the foreseeable future."

  The victim of Jack's attention clawed at his throat, whimpering. Pete perceived a darkness hovering over Jack and the sorcerer, like the thing in the scrying mirror, a hooded and robed figure who stared impassively with obsidian bird's eyes.

  Jack spoke and shattered the vision. "I've stopped your heart, you little cunt-rag. Would you like me to make your blood come out of your eyes next? Your coffin will be closed and padlocked when I'm done." Jack clenched his fingers again and the man screamed, trails of blood oozing from his nose, his mouth, red tears forming and sliding down his face.

  "Still laughing at me now, you boss-eyed wanker?" Jack snarled.

  "Jack," said Pete. The expression of rage on Jack's face she'd never seen, not even when he'd hit a skinhead in Fiver's with his microphone stand during a brawl. Not that the Nazi hadn't deserved it. Not that the kidnapper didn't, now. But watching Jack torture the boy turned Pete's stomach, and she gripped him hard at the elbow. "Jack, stop."

  He blinked at Pete, almost like she'd just turned visible. "Fine," he muttered. "No fun any longer, anyway." He snapped his fingers, and the sorcerer jerked and went still.

  Pete felt as if her own blood had drained right along with the boy's. "Jack," she whispered, papery. "Did you kill him?"

  "Hm? Yeah, probably," Jack said with a thin smile. "Not a great loss to the gene pool, trust me."

  Bloody hell. Bollocks, bugger, and fuck-all to that, Pete's logical half screamed. Jack, innocent and angry Jack, had killed another human being.

  A kidnapper. Someone who would blind an eight-year-old girl. Bridget Killigan turned her face to Pete, and hissed at her to let the sorcerer die.

  "Tell me where the fucking children are before he does worse to you," Pete said aloud to the sorcerer she'd punched. Later, when she was alone and safeguarded, she could break down. Now, Patrick and Diana had no chance without her, the cold and unflappable detective inspector.

  "G-gods…" the sorcerer quavered, looking like nothing but the frightened boy that he was. "We didn't… I mean, you can't just…"

  "Your gods are not here for you," Pete rasped. "Tell me now."

  The sorcerer did what many other criminals of Pete's acquaintance had done before him—he scrambled to his feet and ran, catching his shoulder on the door of the crypt, falling, up and running again for Old Brompton Road.

  Jack raised his right hand and Pete felt power pull against her mind like a tide. "Let him go," she said. Jack considered, the blank slaty look back in his eyes. Coldhearted, Pete identified it. She should chase the git herself, but then she'd leave both Jack and the dead sorcerer unattended. Pete flexed her fists in frustration as she watched the live specimen clear a garden wall and disappear from view.

  "Yeah, all right," Jack said. "Run on, little man. Let him tell all his mates what went on here when they're buggering each other at the disco later on. Or applying eyeliner, or whatever it is those black little bastards do nowadays…"

  "Will you shut up!" Pete shouted. Something skated across her hearing, just beyond her range. A dry, strangled cry. Sobbing, from under the stones. "They're here," Pete breathed with relief. "Patrick and Diana."

  Jack blinked at her, a few tendrils of ice-white curling back from the color in his eyes. Then he was himself. "I don't see anything in this musty place."

  "Under the flags," said Pete by way of explanation, casting around for the trapdoor to the lower level of the crypt.

  "Here," said Jack, bracing himself against a sarcophagus carved with the relief of a small girl, smaller than Bridget Killigan or Diana. Pete joined him and pushed. Something in her back gave and she tried not to think about the next time she'd have to chase down a suspect.

  The sarcophagus moved with a groan and a rending of stone. A huff of stale air greeted Pete, the essence of the long dead rushing into the wider night.

  Crying continued, dry heaving sobs from a body whose tears had long since dried up and was too shattered to speak.

  "Patrick? Diana?" Pete shouted. "It's the police. Call out if you can hear me."

  Nothing greeted her except the whispering sobs, and Pete cursed as she crouched and dropped herself into the darkness. The fall was longer than she expected and she landed hard, going down on one knee. "Bugger all!" Back, knee—she'd be in fantastic shape the next time something nasty showed up while she was helpless in the loo.

  A blue shine blossomed above her, and Jack's face slid over the gap in the ceiling, witchfire dancing lazy ballet around the ringers of his right hand.

  "Thanks," Pete whispered. The bottom level of the crypt was old, lichens and cobwebs undisturbed, warnings to trespassers that no one except the dead resided.

  In the corner, chained to the ancient slabs by a pair of rusty manacles, Patrick and Diana crouched, naked and crying. The relief that coursed through Pete was indescribable, a slackening of muscles and a quickening of the heart.

  Then she saw their eyes. They were gray in the witchfire, but under a good bulb they would be white. Blind. Drained.

  Pete pressed her palms to her face. "Fuck it," she said quietly enough that no one except her and the angel and demon on her shoulders would hear. She had found the children, but their monotone whimpers told the same tale as Bridget Killigan—the fracturing of a mind and the ruination of a life.

  "Anyone alive down there?" Jack called. "I'm going to feel awfully silly having topped this git if it was for nothing. 'Course, he did deserve exactly what he got…"

  "I'm going to throw you my mobile," Pete said. She swallowed her defeat in a hard ball that scraped down her throat, and made sure she was in control. She was Inspector Caldecott. Finder of lost children. Logical. Unemotional.

  And again, too late…

  "Call the number in the memory for DI Heath and tell him you're with me. Give him the address."

  "You're not going to bring the kids up?" Jack said, snatching her mobile out of the air when she threw it. He poked suspiciously at the keypad.

  Pete bit her own lip hard enough to bleed it, steeled herself for the sight and turned back to the blinded children. "No. Not until someone brings the bolt cutters."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "Bloody hell," said Ollie Heath. He passed a hand protectively over his thinning crop of hair and regarded Pete with pity. "We're not having much luck with this, are we, Caldecott?"

  The ambulance carrying Patrick and Diana to A&E had long since pulled away, leaving police and forensics to go about their
grim business. Pete patted herself down for a fag. The packet was empty. She cursed.

  "Er, don't take this wrong," said Ollie, lowering his voice, "but who's the dodgy bloke you were with when you called in?" He inclined his head toward Jack. Jack was slouched against the outside of the graveyard gate, under the arch with the last of Pete's Parliaments in his mouth, eyes closed. Smoke drifted up and wreathed his face. He might have been a ghost himself.

  "He's the tip," said Pete. Ollie's eyebrows crinkled his expansive forehead.

  "Thought you said that was nothing."

  "It turned into something."

  "Not like you to hang about with an informant, Caldecott," said Ollie with concern.

  "I know him," Pete admitted. "He's an all-right bloke." A lie, one that came without thinking. Nobody had asked probing questions about the dead sorcerer yet, and Pete intended to be the one to have the first attempt at Jack on that score. For all of Jack's hostility, she'd thought him harmless, and now the sorcerer's blood was on her.

  "Listen, I'll finish up here if you'd like," said Ollie, laying a hand on her shoulder. Jack's eyes, hooded and black under the sodium light, focused on Ollie and Pete felt a distinct vibration, like a spirit had just breathed on the back of her neck.

  "Thanks, Ollie," she said, ducking out from under his hand. Ollie Heath was truly harmless, slow and dedicated to the job. Pete wouldn't be unleashing Jack on him. "Ring me as soon as the hospital will let us talk to the kids, yeah?"

  "Right," Ollie agreed. "Go get some sleep, Caldecott—you're chalky."

  I just saw a ghost, Pete thought. She smiled at Ollie for appearances, and went to collect Jack.

  "No one's yet asked about the dead man," she told him. He shrugged.

  "I'll just tell 'em you did it. You're allowed to do stuff like that. Line of duty and all that shit, yeah?"