Street Magic

pressing your forehead against a cool iron bar on a warm day.

Ms. Smythe appeared with a snuffling and a cloud of smoke. 'What is it now?'

'You painted over something here,' said Pete, pointing to the spot she'd scraped off. 'Who did this?' She'd take a rag of paint thinner to the wall herself, if it would lead to whatever was taking children. She'd go wrestle Jack out of whatever gutter he was napping in and shove it in his face until he'd be forced to give her help.

'Margaret did it.'

Pete froze, felt the prickles over the backs of her hands and the underside of the instincts that she tried to ignore, the electric fence that sparked to life when she got too close to things that were malignant. 'Why on earth?'

'She were a silly child, Inspector. You have to understand that. Always seeing things where there weren't any. She said it was to keep them out.'

Pete looked at the wall. The lumpy sign didn't feel wrong, it was just overwhelmingly present, on a plane that wasn't the three dimensions Pete's mind was accustomed to. She followed the line of sight, to the narrow leaded window overlooking the garden, replete with cobwebs and dead oak leaves. 'Keep who out, Ms. Smythe? Margaret thought someone was trying to hurt her?'

'Something,' Ms. Smythe muttered. 'But you have to understand, she were just given to fancies… too many books, or not enough friends, and I fully blame myself for that part of it; if she were a normal little girl she wouldn't do those things.'

'Ms. Smythe…' Pete rubbed at her forehead. It was starting to throb dully, and it had nothing to do with the magic-thick air of the bedroom. 'Who? Who or what was your daughter afraid of?'

'She said…' Ms. Smythe took a large breath and let it out in a rush. 'She said it were to keep the fairies out. The garden folk that lived down below. She said they whispered to her and kept her awake because she was bright and they were twilight—her words, not mine, Inspector—and they wanted to take her away.' Margaret's mother's eyes glimmered and Pete saw that she'd been wrong, that real grief and desperation were hovering underneath the booze and the television interviews. Things had been wrong in the Smythes' world long before Margaret was taken. 'If only she'd been a normal little girl…'

'It's all right, Ms. Smythe,' said Pete, patting the taller woman on the shoulder. 'Margaret has time yet, if we're dealing with the same individual.'

'She always read books—thick grown-up books, with more of those symbols in them,' said Ms. Smythe. 'She'll be terrible bored if they're not treating her well and giving her a bit of telly and something to read.'

'I'll find your daughter,' said Pete with a conviction she neither felt nor believed. Ms. Smythe just shook her head and slumped slowly downstairs, and Pete followed after she shutter eyes to block the feedback from the sign on the wall out of her mind.

Chapter Twenty-three

After she finished in Bromley, Pete once again drove through the rain-grayed streets of Southwark, searching every bowed face for Jack's familiar planar cheekbones and burning glacial eyes.

She ended up in front of the rotting row house where she'd found him and realized he wasn't a phantom, a remnant of nightmare given flesh. Something tapped on her window and Pete's heart leaped along with her body. 'Bloody hell,' she muttered, rotating the handle to roll the glass down. The youth in the jacket leaned into her face, breathing out sausages and sour mash whisky.

'You on a bust?'

'You think I'd tell you?' Pete arched an eyebrow. He grinned wider.

'Jack's your mate. He told me, you came around, that he was in the Four Horsemen 'round the corner.'

'Thank you,' said Pete, more to get him and his sausage stink away than anything. She didn't want to see Jack nodding in the back booth of some cut-rate goth club. She didn't want to see the fresh needle marks. But she set the parking brake and locked the Mini and walked down the damp bricks to the small black door of the Four Horsemen.

It wasn't like she could do anything else. Jack drew you in, inexorably, like the orbit of a dying star. And besides, she owed him a smack for running off.

The pub—it was a pub, not a club or a dodgy bar—was dark and smelled like damp rot with an overtone of grease baked onto every surface. Jack's bleached head flashed under the half-dark fluorescent tube lights, dipping toward a glass. A bird's bill and a bird's body in the shadows, dark-feathered wings and gleaming eyes.

'Another girl is missing,' said Pete without preamble when she reached his table. Jack raised his head, red-shot eyes and a blurry smile swimming into view.

'Knew you'd come looking for me.'

Pete took the glass out of his hand, the gesture feeling as if it were carved in granite. 'You're drunk.'

'Very good, Inspector.' He grabbed a green bottle with a black label and swigged directly. 'I am pissed, in body and spirit, and I will continue to crawl inside this whisky bottle until that bloke in the corner with the slit throat shuts up about his mother.'

Pete glanced over her shoulder. The corner booth was empty. 'You're not fixing.'

'Aren't we the bright penny,' Jack slurred, taking another drink. Pete grabbed him by the arm, but he slipped it and batted at her. 'No, Inspector, this time we're not making any clever deals. No threats and no banter. You shot your bolt with me and while in a moment of insanity I may have asked for your help, I now fully agree that I am worthless to the world at large. You've put me in my place, right and proper.'

Pete grabbed Jack's bottle and upended it, letting the whisky flow out into his lap. He yelped and jumped up, the amber stain spreading like a gut shot. 'Stop sodding crying,' Pete told him. 'Another girl is missing.'

'So?' Jack muttered, slumping squishily back into his seat. Pete waved at the lurking publican.

'Coffee. Black and hot as you can make it. So, Jack, she was like you. Or at least had the potential to be.'

As if she'd dropped him in a porcelain tub of ice, the unfocused sorrow flowed out of Jack's face and the edge, sharp as a flick-knife, returned. 'Are you sure?'

'I wouldn't be in this bloody place if I wasn't,' Pete said. 'What in bugger-all is that smell?'

'It's kidney pie every lunch hour. Specialty of the house,' Jack said. 'The girl. How old?'

'Ten,' said Pete. 'Her name is Margaret—'

Jack cut the air with a finger. 'I don't care what her name is.' The publican slammed down a dingy cup of coffee in a saucer with sugar and cream packets tottering at his elbow. Jack swigged it and made a face. 'Bloody hell. Could strip paint off your motor, that. What's really important is the significant.'

'What's a significant?' Pete said.

'Novices usually have something around them, an animal or a piece of the earth, a physical piece of the magic that they can cling to. Anything in the room, feathers or odd rocks or a pet poisonous spider?'

Pete closed her eyes and rotated slowly through Margaret's room, the pink bedspread worn thin, the secondhand desk. The little girl's mobile over the bed, gently drifting make-believe constellations that repeated in paint on the ceiling.

'Stars,' she said. 'A star. They were on everything. Pink, mostly, if that makes a difference.'

Jack swore into his coffee. 'What kind of star?'

'Five-pointed,' said Pete. 'Just a usual star.'

'Not usual,' said Jack. 'The star is the witch, a white practitioner and a channel for pure energy. A bloody open line to the white side of the next world.'

'I'm not going to like where this is going,' Pete stated. Already she felt it, the dark undertow of magic against her skin. The thing that blinded children, that ate their memories and their life force, laughed at her quietly from the corner of her dream crypt. 'The girl was drawing symbols on her walls. She said Fae were after her.'

Jack lifted a shoulder. 'Probably are, but this thing isn't a Fae. They have their rules and their ceremonies and their love of shine and innocence, but what's taken the girl isn't Fae, and we've got bigger problems now than those little bastards. If whatever is out there starts feeding on Megan—'

'Margaret.'

'Bloody whatever. It will gain energy like there's no next minute. It will infuse itself with pure magic until it's bright as a dwarf star and then I won't be able to do fuck-all with an exorcism, and we're all buggered.'

'Mosswood told you how to find this thing,' said Pete. She raised her index finger when Jack opened his mouth to object. 'I know that you can find it, so why aren't we looking right now? Before Margaret ends up blind and spiritless?'

'It's not that simple,' Jack grumbled.

'Oh, no,' said Pete, jerking the whisky bottle away as Jack went for it again. 'What happened to 'Poor me, the Robert Smith Fan Club doesn't respect me, now I've to prove what a big strong mage I am?''

Jack glared at her, pursing his lips when she set the whisky bottle out of reach. Finally he said, 'Anyone ever tell you you're a stubborn little bit?'

'You,' said Pete. 'And I knew it already. Come on, then.' She took Jack by the elbow and helped him out of his chair. He stumbled against her and Pete snaked an arm under his. 'Don't you dare try to get a feel.'

'I don't even like you, remember?' said Jack. Pete grumbled under her breath as they came out of the tavern into dim silver sunlight.

'Let's walk for a bit,' said Jack when she pointed them toward the Mini. 'Clear me head.'

Pete nodded. Jack turned them to the river, the salty, laden air seeming to soothe him. He still leaned heavily on Pete and she let the silence stretch, allowing herself to think for a few footsteps rung on brick that there were no missing children, no ghosts. Just her, and Jack, together in a day full of mist.

'This isn't going to be easy, you know,' Jack said. His hand on Pete's shoulder tightened for a pulse beat, and she looked up at him. Jack caught her eye and curled his mouth in a not-quite smile. He looked to Pete as if he were smiling at a story of a grimly ironic death.

'Mosswood said all we needed was the Trifold Focus thing,' said Pete. She didn't like the smile. It shot straight to the same black place where the daylight echoes of her nightmares resided. Her skin chilled where it touched Jack, like she'd brushed the hide of something swampy and old.

'Mosswood says a lot of things, but in all the years I've known him, I've never heard the whole truth,' said Jack. 'The Trifold Focus is a scrying tool, not a magic wand.'

'You use magic wands?'

'Don't be a smartarse,' Jack said. 'The fastest way to find a ghost is to ask something that traffics in them.'

'Something?' Pete demanded.

'A mage on his own could spend years sorting through all the pathetic bits of spirit left behind from suicide and traffic accidents and bugger knows what else,' said Jack. He stopped at the rust- bubbled iron railing at the edge of the Thames, the slimy bricks breathing sea smell over the boiling brown water. 'Mosswood's given me a direct line.'