Jack stared past her into the middle distance before he returned her gaze. His was clouded and almost mourning. 'What makes you think I haven't, luv?'
Pete rolled her eyes. 'I'm getting a drink.' She took a stool and gestured to the publican, a palely beautiful young man with black spiked hair and silver piercings cascading up both ears and gleaming in his nose. He dipped his head to acknowledge her and Pete saw flashes of Celtic warriors, branded and painted for sacrifice and battle.
'What'll you have, luv?' he intoned with a slow-burning smile and a bare muscled arm placed on the bar in front of Pete. His skin was whiter than alabaster, white as dead skin, and it fairly glowed against the dark bar top.
'I'll… a pint of…' Pete blinked. His eyes were black… a moment ago they'd been green.
'A pint of what, miss?' Amusement crinkled his mouth and lit those black stone animal eyes. Pete's throat, when she tried to swallow and speak, scraped painfully.
'A… I… lager on tap?' The necessary connective tissue for a complete sentence eluded her.
'Would you like mead? Or maybe an oaken ale,' said the publican. He leaned in and Pete could hear the drums, smell the smoke of the Beltane fires and the bloody screams of the rival tribesmen who had died under his blade.
'Oaken ale,' Pete murmured, thinking with that sensation of being outside herself that she was very, very close to a man whom she didn't know at all, thinking wild savage thoughts about him, and that she couldn't be arsed to care, because he was beautiful. Wild. 'What's that?'
'Something you don't want,' said Jack, leaning on the bar next to her.
With an audible snap, whatever was holding Pete in the publican's eye broke and she sat up straight, her cheeks hot.
'I was just having a bit of fun, mate,' said the publican with an amused look that telegraphed unbearable smugness. 'Didn't know she was spoken for.'
'You do now,' Jack snarled. 'And the next time you try to pass off your bloody Fae nectar on a human, I'll shove your little horned head up your arse and hold it there until you stop twitching.'
'No harm done!' the publican exclaimed, holding up his hands. 'Didn't realize she was mortal. Take your ease, old-timer, and have something to drink.'
Jack's hand flashed out, like a fatal serpent, and gripped the publican by the throat, fingers digging into his voice box. 'Do you know who I am, you sodding barn animal?' he hissed. The publican gurgled. 'I'm Jack fucking Winter,' Jack said, releasing him with a push that rattled clean glasses on the bar back.
The publican bleached even paler than he already was, if it were possible. 'I—I didn't know, sir. Forgive me, mage.' He dipped his head again, this time to avoid eye contact with Jack.
'Give me two pints of the Newcastle,' said Jack, 'and piss off.'
The publican filled his order and retreated to the opposite end of the bar, where he assiduously pretended to polish glasses.
'Creepy wanker,' Pete muttered, shaking off the last vestiges of the publican's cold, ancient aura.
'Just a satyr,' Jack said. 'Walking bollocks with a brain-stem attached. Pay that one no mind.'
'Please tell me he is not who we are here to see,' Pete muttered. She felt like she'd touched rotted meat, or a brick wall slick with mold and moss.
'No.' Jack gestured over his shoulder. 'He's back there, alone. As usual.'
Pete's gaze was drawn to the back corner of the pub, where roof beams and lamplight conspired to create a slice of shadow. A solitary figure sat, fragrant green-tinged smoke from his pipe rising to create the shape of a crown of young spring leaves before dissipating.
Jack nudged her arm. 'Come on.' He picked up the two pints of Newcastle Brown and started toward the table with a measured step. If Pete didn't know better she'd call it reluctance, or a sort of respect.
The man seated alone and smoking was unremarkable, as far as men went. Pete would pass him boarding the tube or in a queue at the news agent's without a glance, although he did have lines of mischief at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and they glowed pleasantly brown. He was older than Jack, wearing a well-trimmed black beard and a soft sport coat patched at the elbows.
Jack set the pints down on his table and grinned. 'Been a long time, Knight.'
When the man turned to look at them, Pete heard a rushing sound, as if a spring wind had disturbed a sacred grove, and with great clarity she saw a tree, ancient, branches piercing the sky while the roots reached down and grasped the heart of the earth.
'Well,' said the man. 'Jack Winter. I next expected to see you lying in state at your premature funeral, yet here you are disturbing my evening. Well done.'
Shaking his head, Jack gestured between the man and Pete. 'Detective Inspector Caldecott, Ian Mosswood. Mosswood, this is Pete.'
Mosswood raised one eyebrow in an arch so critical Pete felt the urge to stand up straight and comb her hair. 'Pete. How frightfully unusual.'
'You know, Mosswood,' said Jack, slapping his shoulder, 'in this ever-changing world, it's good to know you're still…' He gestured to encompass Mosswood's jacket. 'Tweed.'
'I presume,' said Mosswood, eyeing the pint of ale, 'that since you came over here and bothered me you have some reason.' He turned his pipe over and tapped it out against the table's edge. Fragrances of grass and cut wheat filled Pete's nostrils.
'Bloody right,' said Jack, pulling out a chair and straddling it backward. 'I need to pick your leafy brain, Mosswood. Brought you the requisite offering and everything, just like a proper druid. Sorry for the lack of white robe and virgin, but Pete's sheets are all striped and I wouldn't presume to guess as to her eligibility for virgin.'
'Sod you,' Pete responded, flicking Jack the bird.
Mosswood picked up the ale and sniffed it with distaste, his prominent nose crinkling.
'Get off it,' said Jack. 'You know it's your favorite.'
'It is a sad day when a Green Man's allegiance can be bought for an inadequately washed pint glass of malted hops and stale yeast,' said Mosswood with a disapproving curl of his lip. 'But such is the way of the world, sadly. I accept your offering. What the bloody hell are you bothering me over, Jack?'
'Problems,' said Jack. 'Got a nasty, nasty ghost or hungry beastie on the prowl—some misty tosser with an appetite for little children. I need to find him, and find a way to hurt him bad before I exorcise the bastard back to the Inquisition.'
Mosswood looked up at Pete, who stood awkwardly by his elbow, not sure she was invited into a conversation that had obviously picked up just where it left off the last time the two men had seen each other.
'Sit down, my dear,' he said with a small smile. 'Don't let this foolish mage's ramblings inhibit you.'
'Oh,' said Pete, 'I don't.' She pulled out the remaining chair and sat. 'Thank you.'
'She is considerably lovely,' Mosswood told Jack. 'And polite. What in the world is she doing with you?'
'Funny, you git,' said Jack with a humorless smirk. 'How about telling me what I need to do to flush out this bugger?'
Mosswood relit his pipe, taking tobacco that smelled like shaved bark from a leather pouch and tamping it down carefully with his thumb. The pipe was carved from a black wood, slightly glossy, the nicks from the knife that had wrought it visible, a tiny story along the well-rubbed stem and barrel. 'What you want to begin your search is a Trifold Focus. I do not know of any in existence, but I'm sure one of your other… sources will be more than happy to oblige the information for the price of an immortal soul or two.'
Jack drained his Newcastle and gave Pete a satisfied grin. 'I told you he'd come through.'
Chapter Twenty-one
They walked out of the fog and found the Mini waiting. Big Ben chimed midnight once more and Pete said a silent thank-you to be away from places where the air was not the same and she could feel invisible eyes on her all the time.
Jack sat closemouthed during the ride and he was chalk colored by the time they reached Pete's flat. 'You all right?' she inquired when he stumbled and fetched against the wall just inside her door.
'Yeah…' Jack's jaw set. 'No. No, I'm not.' He made a run for the bathroom and Pete heard him retching miserably.
It was so easy to forget, when Jack was sarcastic and smoking a Parliament, throwing out smiles and pinning her with his hard eyes, how she'd found him less than a week ago. Skinny, wasted, and his body still screamed for a fix even now.
Pete hesitated for a few more seconds, listening to Jack choke, then nudged the bathroom door open with her toe and crouched beside him, placing a hand on the back of his neck. Jack's skin was cold and slick, like he'd just been pulled from a pool of oily, lifeless water.
'Don't… don't…' he gasped, finally managing to draw a breath. The loo stank of old ale and sweat with an undertone of something darker, burned from crossing a barrier that flesh was not meant to. 'I'm all right,' Jack muttered, sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat away with the flats of his palms from his face. 'It takes a lot out of you. Crossing to and from the Black. I'd forgotten how fucking difficult that is.'
'I feel fine,' said Pete quietly.
'Well, aren't you bloody well special,' Jack snapped. Pete stood and held out her right hand, trying not to let it shake with anger that Jack might take for timidity.
'Give it to me.'
'Give what to you?' Jack muttered, leaning his head back against the tile wall and breathing through his nose. He hadn't stopped sweating even though rain was washing the windows of the flat with intermittent sleet and Pete's fingers were cold because the radiators were turned down.
'Your goddamned stash, Jack!' Pete bellowed, picking up her container of hairbrushes and clips off the basin and flinging it at him. Her anger rushed up from the iron-banded box where she kept it through her workdays and ever since Connor had died. Really, since Jack had died for the first time. She threw the pink ceramic cup at his lying face and felt relief, like she had just destroyed the visage of an oppressive stone idol.
Jack ducked and was pelted with clips and pins. 'Oi!' he shouted. 'What the in the seven bleeding hells is your problem, woman?'
'You're my problem!' Pete shouted. 'You're a fucking junkie liar is my problem!' She grabbed his jacket from where it lay on the floor and dug into the pockets, her fingers shaking and still slicked with Jack's sweat.
Pete prayed again. She prayed to find nothing, to be irrational and tired and overloaded from the graveyard and the blind children and walking down the cobble street where it was always midnight.
Her fingers closed around an empty cellophane bag, gritty with a powder that felt like ground glass and a capped syringe, full of cloudy cooked heroin that three long years as a PC pulling junkies off the street prophesied she would find. Pete dropped the baggie on the tiles next to Jack. 'God damn you,' she said quietly. 'You've been fixing the entire time.'
'No,' said Jack, pulling himself up and bracing one arm against the wall. Fine purple webs traveled up his forearm, spread out from red-black pinpricks, bloody spiders living under the skin. 'No,' Jack repeated. 'That was my last dose, and my first shot in five days, which is why I'm vomiting my fucking guts out now and could do without you screaming at me. Harpy.'
Pete poked Jack in the chest with her index finger. Fever heat rolled off him in a whisky-scented wave. 'Don't you ever sodding lie to me again, Jack, or I will jam my boot in your arse so far I'll knock out your back teeth.'
Jack dropped his head. 'You asked me to
