Street Magic

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.'

He sighed and threw his head back, worrying an unlit cigarette between his lips. 'We're meeting a friend of mine.'

'Are you and this friend on good terms?' Pete wondered. Jack lifted one shoulder.

'Last time I saw him, probably a decade ago, he and I had a slight difference of opinion.'

'About what?' said Pete, feeling the cold breath from the train window on the back of her neck.

'Long story,' said Jack with a lazy grin. 'But it involved two nights in Liverpool and a dancer named Cassidy. She did this bit where she put her leg up over her head…'

Pete held up a hand. 'Is he going to try and bash our skulls in?'

'No,' said Jack. 'Not his style.'

'Thank God for small favors,' said Pete.

They got off the tube at Charing Cross and walked up the center of a nearby mews, the slick cobbles ringing under Pete's boot heels. Big Ben chimed eleven o'clock in the distance, amplified in the mist so that it echoed from every direction. Pete could smell the Thames, the wet rotting atmosphere that soaked into brick and clothing and hair.

'This way,' said Jack, his Parliament springing to life without the aid of a light. Pete blinked. Jack exhaled and held out the fag. 'Care for a taste?'

'I'm quitting,' Pete said perversely. Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough.

'Bloody hell. I hate this fucking wet weather.'

'Move to Arizona, then,' Pete snapped. The row houses got older, arched and leaded windows staring out black and blank into the night. Pete caught movement in the corner of her vision and whipped her head to the left. A woman in black latex that gleamed like bloody skin and a man in an Arsenal jersey disappeared into an alley.

Jack snorted. 'Didn't peg you for an easy shock, Caldecott.'

Pete stopped in the street and crossed her arms. 'I'm not, Jack. I came after you, didn't I? And on that matter, I am not going another step until you tell me what the bloody hell is going on.'

Jack rolled his eyes at her, taking a long drag on his cigarette. 'Anyone ever told you you're too damned stubborn for your own good?'

'Constantly,' said Pete. 'What is this?'

Jack sighed. 'Pete, I told you the night you found me that I only had one condition for doing this, yeah?'

'You did,' Pete agreed cautiously.

'I asked you to believe me,' said Jack. 'So believe me now when I say I can't tell you where we're going and who we're meeting. You're just going to have to hold your knickers on and see.' He turned with a ripple of fog and tobacco smoke and kept walking. Pete swore under her breath and followed, trying to ignore the roiling in her stomach that told her dark things were on their heels, just outside the pools of streetlamp light.

Once or twice she heard a snuffling and squealing, nails clacking on paving stones. She kept her eyes on the uneven blond spikes of Jack's hair and didn't look back.

Then Big Ben chimed midnight.

Pete stopped and cocked her head, listening to the bell ring through to twelve and telling herself she was crazy, or the clock was faulty, or that something logical and sane was going on here.

'You heard it,' Jack stated. Pete sighed and stopped trying to pretend. Clocks that chimed midnight at half-eleven and shadow creatures were what Jack asked of her. So be it.

'I did.' She nodded. 'What does that mean?'

Jack dropped his Parliament to the stones. It hissed and went out as he ground it under his heel. 'It means we're here.'

Chapter Twenty

Jack led Pete up a side passage, not even wide enough for the Mini to squeeze through, to a squat stone building with a red door bound in iron.

'They expecting an invasion?' Pete said, gesturing at the entry.

'The three bands means this is neutral territory,' said Jack. 'The iron is to keep out Fae.'

'Fae,' Pete echoed. 'You mean fairies.'

'Kindly folk,' said Jack. 'Shining ones. Unseelie. Call 'em what you will, nobody here wants the treacherous little buggers in their pub.'

'And just where is 'here'?' Pete asked.

Jack took her lightly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. Calm, they were icy as a glacier under a cloud-covered sky. 'We're in their place now, Pete. It's nearly always midnight and the things from your nightmares are crawling in the shadows.'

'And I'm supposed to be frightened, after seeing you murder somebody casually less than a day ago?' Pete demanded, moving his hands off her ungently.

He grabbed her again, and slammed Pete against the outside wall of the pub hard enough to make breath leave her lungs. She struggled, and Jack locked his bony fingers against her flesh, more than enough to bruise. 'This is not the daytime world that you know, Pete,' he said, his voice grating like he'd just smoked a pack of unfiltered. 'This is the Black. It is a hard realm with little mercy for the unprepared. People die here, Pete, and it's usually because someone else has decided to kill them. It is the way things are. If you can't stomach the truth then go back now.'

Pete's heart danced, scraping her rib cage with panic. She allowed none of it to show on her face, raising her eyes to the sky and inhaling a sharp, cold draught.

Above her, something with stone for skin grumbled and settled itself more comfortably on its perch, ugly dog face serene.

Pete forced herself to look only at Jack. 'I told you, I'd do what was necessary to catch this child-stealing bastard. That we'd end this. Not you, all alone striding into the darkness. We. Now get your bloody hands off me before I have a boot between your balls.'

Jack let go of her arms and lifted the gryffon-headed knocker on the pub's door. He let it fall three times, and the red door swung open with a moan of ill-oiled age. Jack made a courtly gesture to Pete. 'After you, luv.' He grinned as she stepped into oil lamps and noise and smoke. 'Welcome to the Lament Pub,' Jack said. 'And welcome to the Black.'

Pete stepped over the threshold and felt a prickle, not on her skin but across the reflective surface of her consciousness, like a smooth stone stirring ripples in a pool. Ambient power drifted and swirled differently here, the air molecules arranged out of order and the light and shadow slippery. Her eyes refused to focus. She felt an overwhelming pressure on her skull, as though her senses were all overloading at once, smell and taste and sound rising to levels that threatened to drown her. This was worse than when her intuition knifed her mind Worse than her dreams, than the tomb itself, full of ghosts and darkness. The magic of the place reached inside Pete's skull and clawed it clean, leaving her trembling.

Jack's hand closed on her wrist, a touch that was steadying but not rough. 'Easy, luv. It's always worst the first time you cross in.'

Pete shut her eyes and breathed, just as she'd breathed the first time she'd encountered a corpse. A drowned man, a homeless drunk bumping against the pilings on the Thames. Pete shut her eyes and fixed what the pub should be in her mind, just as she'd seen the corpse as it was against the backs of her lids, no life in the black glassy eyes. She gritted her teeth and slowly opened her eyes again.

The low thread of conversation in the pub bubbled, just beyond hearing the words of the individual voices, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung low over the clusters of small round tables and bowed heads, and the massive ebony-topped bar. A man sitting with his back to her flexed his shoulders and Pete saw, just for a moment, the long reach of bone wings before they glimmered and vanished beneath a glamour of a rat-eaten coat. A dance floor and a jukebox with the original 45s crouched awkwardly in one corner, out of place in the old pub, which should have had Shakespeare and Marlowe bending their heads together in a dark nook.

And it was all slightly odd, and very usual, with none of the blurring heart-racing wrongness that had engulfed Pete when she stepped inside. The cries of magic softened, and retreated, taking the pain in her head with them. The staring faces, a few with pointed teeth, turned back to their drinks and conversation.

She glanced back to see Jack with a contemplative half-smile on his face. 'Thought you'd adjust,' he said as if he'd bet against Pete with himself.

'Who's this friend we're here to see?' said Pete.

'The third time you've asked me,' said Jack. 'If I were the devil, I'd be compelled to answer.' He helped Pete out of her jacket and threw it on the curled iron hooks just inside the door. There were several others—a motocross leather, a woolen cape, a fur with the skull of the unfortunate wolf still attached.

'Yes, but you'd take my soul in return,' Pete said with her own smile.