Street Magic bl-1 Page 8

  Pete pressed her lips into a line. "You won't be telling anyone anything, because we're going home." For once, Jack was silent and he slouched obediently back to the Mini. Pete couldn't decide if it was providence or bad luck that Jack was staying with her a time longer.

  They drove through Chelsea's midnight streets in silence. The Mini's lights barely sliced the fog, and more than once Pete saw black shapes move among the swirling gloom. Her spine danced as the Mini bounced over cobbles in the old, walled part of the city, the cold heart hushed and damp as a shallow grave.

  "There's something out there," she said aloud, not really knowing why the words came, but knowing she was right.

  "Yeah," said Jack, leaning his forehead against the glass. "There is."

  "You killed someone tonight," said Pete. "We should get it clear now—don't you dare do a thing like that again while you're on my watch. Do you want to land us both in jail?"

  Jack sighed and managed to look mightily annoyed with his eyes closed and his head tilted back. "Anyone ever mention you're a terrible nag? You're going to put a husband straight into an early grave."

  "I bloody well mean it, Jack!" Pete cried. "What gives you the right to be executioner?"

  Jack opened his eyes and sat up. "Pull over."

  "You all right?" asked Pete. The Mini's headlights illuminated windowless flat blocks and closed-down shops. She wasn't stopping unless there was a dire emergency.

  "Just pull over and don't argue!" Jack snapped. Pete jerked the Mini to the curb and set the brake with a squeal.

  "What?"

  Jack pointed to a tumbledown doorway with an unassuming lit sign over the frame: royal oaks public house. "If you insist on moralizing at me about the dead toerag, I need a drink." He unfolded his skeleton from the Mini's passenger seat and stepped into the street, crossing in front of the car. Pete felt the passing urge to press on the gas and run him over, but instead she shut off the engine and dogged his heels into the pub.

  It was low and smoky inside, but older than Pete realized—the long bartop was carved from the trunk of a single tree, all the knots and scars, and mellowed paneling held in ancient cigarette smoke. Concentric rings stained the plaster ceiling and a jukebox that looked like it had weathered the Blitz burbled out Elvis Costello. The basso bounce of "Watching the Detectives" blanketed conversation in secrecy.

  Jack landed on the nearest stool with a clatter of feet and bony elbows. "Pint of bitters," he told the publican, "and a whisky."

  "Just the whisky," Pete said, digging for her wallet. The publican was big and shave-headed, Latin phrases in ink cascading up both of his arms under his cutoff shirt. He grunted when he caught sight of Pete's warrant card as she paid the bill.

  "Mother's milk." Jack sighed as he downed the whisky.

  "Don't think you can get pissed enough to avoid talking to me," Pete warned.

  "Fucking hell!" Jack said, slamming his glass on the bar. "What d'you want me to do, Pete, rush up to midnight mass and confess my sins? Would it help if I sent a tin of biscuits to the wake? What?"

  "I'm not saying he didn't deserve it." Pete sighed. "He kidnapped those two children, and he was going to give us a bad time. Jack, I can't tell you how often I've wanted to do just what you did, to some wankstick or other I find on the job. But you can't—"

  Jack's hand snaked out and wrapped around Pete's wrist, drawing her in until she could smell the old Parliaments and the new whisky that drifted off his skin. He squeezed until her bones grated and Pete cried out, attempting to pull free. But for that second, Jack was strong again, his eyes burning with the fire that consumed whatever it touched.

  "Can't what, Pete?" he whispered with a snarl. "Can't go around killing people? Can't because that's what's good and right and proper? Well, Pete, I'll tell you a secret." And his eyes went from flaming to the deepest dark, inky and wicked. "We're not dealing with everyday thieves and killers any longer. This is the world of magic. People murder in this world, and people die, and it's the bloody way of things. I'm not sorry for putting a cold fist around that git's heart and he wouldn't be sorry if it were the reverse. Magic kills, Pete. Get used to it."

  After a long moment when all she heard was her heartbeat, Pete said, "You're hurting me."

  Jack made a disgusted noise and released her. "'Sides, was I supposed to let those tossers laugh at me and do nothing? My name used to mean something to those demon-buggering gits. Bloody kids should learn some bloody respect."

  Pete's hands still shook from the memory of the boy's face. She wrapped them around the whisky glass and downed her drink in a swallow. "Bit late for that, seeing as how one is on his way to the morgue."

  "I mean," Jack continued, speaking more to his pint than to Pete, "in a way they were doing me a favor—I didn't realize until tonight how bad of a state things were in. I've been sodding forgotten, Pete! Do you have any idea what that means?"

  "No fans accosting you in lifts?" Pete ventured. The whisky spread warm fingers through her and she was able to tamp down the tangle of fear and incomprehension that Jack's actions of the night had birthed.

  Jack's mouth twisted upward on the left side. "You really had no idea, did you? About what I did before."

  "No," said Pete honestly. Vaguely, she'd been aware that a lot of Jack's friends were older and more serious than one would typically suspect fans of the Poor Dead Bastards to be. And that Jack's tattoos never seemed exactly the same twice, and that when he was around the air tasted different, like just before a lightning storm.

  "Makes no difference now, apparently," Jack grumbled in disgust.

  "I'm just having a bloody hard time believing those two kids arranged this entire thing, and had the stomach to blind three children," said Pete.

  "They didn't," said Jack. "Sorcerers are the outsourced labor of magic—where there's a sorcerer, there's something jerking the strings and often as not it's something hungry and not human."

  "Who would they be working for, then?" Pete said. "Tell me what I need to know to catch this bastard, Jack."

  He drew on his pint and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand before he spoke. "I will say, those two were a deal more experienced than your bottom-level eclectic who stumbles into magic because he read some dusty book out of the library and is slagged off at life. The one who set you on your arse had talent."

  "Wasted talent, seeing as he's dead," Pete muttered.

  "Bugger, Pete, are we back to that already?" Jack rolled his eyes and emptied his pint, catching the publican's eye for another.

  Pete made herself consider: If the sorcerer had been a Russian mafiya thug with a black-market gun, and he'd shot at Jack, would she have hesitated before she took the gun away and spent three shells in the man's heart? She would not. "I'll let it go for now," she told Jack. "But that better have been the first person you did in, Jack. If I find out this is a habit…"

  "The first in a very long time," said Jack, holding up a hand to stop her. "Death follows me and I do my best to keep a hand's-breadth ahead, but it doesn't always work. You've seen direct evidence of that."

  Pete nodded. "For the time being, I'll take that as at least partial truth. Who do you believe is giving the orders to snatch the children? And why children?"

  "Aside from the fact that they're small and fit snug in the boot of a car?"

  Pete glared at him. Jack's mouth curved on one side. "You need to grow back that amputated sense of humor, Inspector. The Yard's got it locked in a box."

  "Talk, Jack," Pete snapped. "You don't enjoy my company—you've made that much clear—so let's get this done as quickly as possible. Someone-or-thing who likes to mutilate children is still out there." How she would convince Ollie and DCI Newell of that fact was a bridge she'd build later.

  "Fine, fine," he said. "Children are life. Vitality. Innocence. What have you. Some things, some hungry eldritch things, feed on it. They take away everything that keeps a child's soul unstained and when they've sucked the husk dry they
take that vitality and they use it to make themselves strong again. Like taking all the blood and life from an unwilling donor, with side effects black enough to drive the donor mad."

  We went to see the old Cold Man …

  "What could it be, Jack?"

  "Could be a lot of things. A more powerful sorcerer's flesh construct. A psychic feeder—someone who has the sight like me, but they give a touch along with their look." He rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound with his fingers against the dark stubble there. "But if it's taking children, it's probably an entity. A nonhuman, which means that you don't fuck about with it unless you want your sanity and soul siphoned out."

  "Insane" would be Pete's definition for the entire evening up to this point, but she merely nodded because Jack seemed so relaxed and sure of his words, for the first time since she'd seen him again. "How do we find it? And stop it in its tracks?"

  "Not easy," said Jack. "But I'll do it all the same. This beastie, this ghostly twat, seems to think that I'm awfully easy to tromp over and kick into the gutter for the sweepers. Tosser." He slammed his empty pint glass down. "It's my own fault, but no more—now I'm on the bloody warpath. Nobody dismisses me that easily."

  "Why did you start looking for a fix?" Pete asked abruptly. "If things were so sodding wonderful, why did you chuck it?"

  Jack regarded her for a long time, not with the burning fury of before but with a sadness, the expression of someone looking back through a photo album of much happier times. "I was alone, Pete. Alone with none but the dead for company. At the time it seemed like the only way to keep meself from going insane," he said. "And it still does."

  Pete felt an uncomfortable prickle down her spine as she saw the desire for a fix pass over Jack's face and alight in his reddened eyes. Here he was, wielding something akin to an Uzi with the flick of his fingers, and she had just kicked away his remaining support. Was she bloody insane?

  No, she firmly reminded herself. No, Jack had survived suffering before, and he would again, because the alternative ended with Pete in a bloody mess on the floor of her flat while Jack roamed the streets of London with his sanity in long tatters and heroin burning a path through his blood.

  "I'm on now," Jack said, his high dudgeon restored. "I'm not resting until I kick this cock-smear back into beyond the beyond." He raised an eyebrow. "If you're up for it, Pete, I could use the assist."

  Pete laughed, and to her surprise carried on laughing for several moments. "You? You want my help?"

  Jack swirled the dregs of his drink, shoulders hunching. "Don't see what's so bloody amusing."

  Pete rubbed her forehead. No one in Scotland Yard would ever believe this was the real reason behind the blinded children. But it was what it was, and it also wasn't like she could let Jack go gallivanting off on his own. Who knew what kind of dark territory he'd go toward, on the warpath as he was?

  "Thought you hated me," Pete said to him. "Thought the very sight of me made you sick, or some rot. That's what's funny, and also begs a question: Why should I put up with your shite a moment longer than I have to?"

  The corners of his mouth twitched. The lager and the whisky had made him more expansive. "Not every woman will fetch a sorcerer a punch across the gob when it gets thick. You could tell me to fuck off if you like. I'd probably deserve it."

  "Make that definitely." Pete tapped her fingers on the knotty wood of the bar, knowing that she should leave Jack to his path and go back to her life.

  But if she left him now, it would never be finished. She'd have her nightmares until the day she died. "But you helped me," she continued. "And I still have a case to close. So yes, I'll stay with you for now."

  Just like time had flickered on a faulty circuit, the devil-grin spread over Jack's face and he was young again. "Brilliant. Knew you would."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Just as before, Pete stood in front of the bleeding shrouded figure and he extended his hand, the waxy flesh dripping red as the thing in his fist beat desperately to be free.

  "Take what belongs to you, Pete Caldecott," he hissed. "Take it before it destroys your tattered heart."

  "I don't know what you want!" Pete cried desperately. She was very cold and looked down to find herself in her nightdress. So much for convenient dreaming.

  "Take it," said the shroud-man. "It belongs to you. It has always belonged."

  "She won't listen," purred a second voice, and from over the shrouded figure's shoulder the smoke rolled, gathering around Pete's ankles and forming into a human figure. "She won't see or hear. She's taken out her own eye with a hot poker made of memory. She's blind and dumb to us forever."

  Pete knew it was impossible for a column of smoke to grin, but this one did, and its voice grated against her brain, like a thousand tiny screams echoed beneath it. "Run while you can, little girl," the figure hissed. "Run far and fast and don't ever sleep."

  Then he reached for Pete—she knew instinctively that slit-throat voice and long grasping hands made it a he—and she screamed and fell backward, the ridiculous Victorian nightdress tangling her feet, sending her down into the graveyard earth. It was soft and dozens of rotting hands wrapped around her arms and legs and everywhere. The shrouded figure drew a sword from the belt of his bloody armor and tried to save her, but she was pulled inward, into the grave, and the last thing she heard as she woke was the wicker man, the smoke, laughing and laughing and laughing.

  "Pete!" Jack was shaking her, hard enough to snap teeth together.

  She blinked, saw her flat, saw her sitting room, which really needed a good scrubbing. Cobwebs hung in all the corners.

  Jack let go of her. "You were screaming in your sleep."

  Pete pressed her fingers against her eyes. "I was dreaming about something worth screaming at."

  Jack pressed a businesslike hand against her forehead. "You're burning up, luv," he said. "Sure it was a frightening dream and not a hot one?"

  Pete swatted him on the arm when the mischief showed in his smile. "You're a great bloody help, you are."

  "Can't have you keeling over in the middle of a dustup, can I?" said Jack. "However I may feel about you personally. Not worth seeing you get your time card punched when my arse is on the line."

  Pete slammed her feet onto the floor, curving her hands in what she guessed was a subconscious desire to strangle Jack. "What the bloody hell is your problem with me, Winter?"

  He snorted and swung his eyes to the window. The sun was high, catching motes of dust across the panes, and Pete knew she was already late for work.

  "Like you don't know," Jack said finally with a shrug so disaffected Iggy and all of the Stooges would have burst into tears of envy.

  "That's just it," said Pete. "I don't know, Jack." She stood up and he met her, looked down with that bitter quirk to his mouth that warned of rage just beneath. She shouldn't press, but Pete did, because she was damned if she let Jack linger on with his contempt and his silence. "What happened that day, in the tomb?" she asked softly. "I've thought and dreamed about it so much, Jack, but I never really remember. What happened that made you hate me this much?"

  Jack's lip curled and his eyes blackened again, and Pete steeled herself for something, she didn't know exactly what, but the air between them had charged.

  "You really don't remember?" Jack said, that predatory cold flickering in the depths. Pete shook her head, throat dry.

  "How about that," Jack murmured. "If you're telling the truth."

  "What reason would I have to lie?" Pete said.

  "You know more than you're admitting to yourself," Jack said. "You saw him, same as me. You were there, until you let go." The last two words could have cut flesh.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about," Pete said automatically, although images of the smoke man flamed behind her eyes.

  Jack considered her for a moment, as if he weren't sure what to do with an inconveniently dead body, and then his anger slipped back over his face and he threw up his hand
s. "Then bloody well figure it out, Pete," he snarled. He went into the toilet and slammed the door.

  "Bollocks," Pete swore, slumping back on the sofa and pressing her pillow over her face.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Pete waded through the day of papers and questions and frowning stares from Chief Inspector Newell and took the tube home next to a beautiful Indian couple who smelled of sweat and spices.

  "Home, Jack," Pete called reflexively as she entered her front hall. The flat was dark and she saw the glow of a cigarette tip coming from the sofa. Jack exhaled a cloud of smoke and it shone blue-white in the reflection from the streetlamp.

  "About time," he said, swinging himself upright. "We've got places to go."

  "Where?" said Pete. She didn't flick on the light. Talking to Jack, seeing only the ember of his fag and the flash of his eyes was oddly appropriate, a mirror of hundreds of dreams where he appeared as nothing more than shadow with bits of substance.

  Jack grinned and she saw the ivory gleam of his teeth. "You'll see."

  They took the tube at Jack's insistence. He jumped the gates and then threw up his hands when Pete glared at him and swiped her Oyster card twice. "Come on, Caldecott, don't give me that look."

  "Where are we going?" Pete asked again as the train roared through the tunnel, slicking back Jack's hair. They were the only people in the Mornington Crescent station, alone under the flickering fluorescent tubes with smoke and graffiti on the tiles.

  "You'll know when we get there," said Jack, holding the door for her. The tube rattled past Euston, on into stations that were barely lit, the humps of dozing bums flashing past, leather-clad youths staring out into the tunnel with shining animal eyes, transit police wrapped in blue nylon armor like weary sentinels. Pete wrapped her coat around her, crossing her arms across her stomach.

  "Don't worry about them, luv," Jack whispered. "I'm here."

  Pete turned to look at him in the intermittent flashes from the tunnel lights, each exposure imprinting Jack in stark relief. "That's why I'm worried, Jack."