Street Magic

'Will you stop being cryptic?' said Pete. She put her hands on Jack's shoulders and said, 'Tell me what I have to do to save Margaret Smythe. Whatever it is. I'll do it.'

Jack shook his head, staring at the water. 'You call in a favor, Pete. You ask what's already on the other side, the things that crawl in the tunnels between the veils. You call up a demon and cut a deal.'

Pete's carefully practiced expressionlessness, the mask she wore just like Jack wore his devilish smiles, slipped then. She felt her lips part and knew the disbelief had started in her eyes. 'You did say demon. We're talking Faust. 'The Devil and Daniel Webster,' Dorian bloody Gray…'

'The Devil,' said Jack. 'The Devil doesn't exist, Pete. He's the fear in our reptile brains. Demons exist. The Trifold Focus is used to call them and compel them into your will.'

Pete pressed a hand to her forehead and turned her back on Jack. The Thames stirred gently, black ripples shivering like raven feathers.

'I can't let you do this,' she said finally. 'There's got to be another way.'

'No,' said Jack. 'And if you really believed there was, you'd be able to look me in the eye.' He walked over to her, swaying just a little. The air around Pete crackled. 'Was a time I did this sort of thing often,' said Jack quietly.

'Was there a time when you asked me to help you?' Pete whispered. Jack sucked in a breath, then sighed and sat down on the curb. Pete watched him light a Parliament and draw deep. Blue smoke drifted out of his nose to mingle with the haze above the river.

'Not that time,' said Jack. 'Or any other. Not demons. Never you.'

Pete watched him sit, hunched, smoking, his platinum spikes flattened on one side from where he'd slept. She stood the same distance from Jack now that she'd stood from him across the circle in the tomb. Nothing flowed over her skin now. The ripples underneath her thoughts were quiet. Jack hadn't lied to her.

Pete went and sat down next to him, pulling out her own pack of fags. 'All right, then,' she said, lighting hers off the end of Jack's. 'How does one call a demon?'

PART TWO The Black

'It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?'

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

Chapter Twenty-four

Pete took Jack home, put the kettle on, and made two mugs. 'Sugar. No cream.'

Jack accepted the mug and took a sip, then yelped. 'Bloody hell, that's burning hot!'

'It's just come off the boil, ninny,' Pete said, blowing across the surface of her own tea. Jack pulled a pout.

''M not a ninny.'

Pete stirred her own mug. 'I'm sorry, I must have been thinking of another mage.' She let herself smile, and felt a jump against her rib cage when Jack returned it, a brief flicker like a kiss of flame.

Jack dropped his eyes and dug in his jacket pocket, finding a scrap of vellum paper and a pencil. 'Going to need some things for what's ahead. You'll have to take me to the Kings Road.'

A memory of a basement shop fragrant with spices and spiderwebbed with intermingling magics stirred. Pete swallowed and nodded. Margaret. Bridget, Patrick, and Diana. Forget the rest. 'Fine.'

'And there's the matter of getting my hands on a Trifold Focus,' Jack said. Pete stopped her tea mid-sip.

'You don't have one?'

Jack laughed. 'No, Pete. No, I don't happen to have one of those lying about.'

'What's so bloody amusing? How do we get one?' said Pete. 'Buy it?'

Jack snorted. 'Would that it were that simple.'

'Mosswood made it sound simple,' Pete muttered. Mosswood was straight ahead and trusting, solid as an oak. Jack shifted his gaze to his list. He was movable as Mosswood was still, the wind through the sacred grove.

'The only Trifold Focus I know of is in the private collection of a bloke called Travis Grinchley,' Jack said.

'Grinchley not the lending type?' Pete guessed. Jack smiled, a predatory showing of teeth.

'The last man who stole from him floated up in the Thames two weeks later, with his eyes and his tongue missing.'

'Could be worse,' said Pete gamely. Jack stuck his pencil behind his ear.

'They cut out his tongue to make room for his heart to be shoved in.'

'Oh.'

'Yeah.'

'So what's your grand plan?' said Pete. The sitting room had darkened as the fog outside turned from daytime silver to nighttime velvet. She flicked on the nearest lamp and shadows sprang to life on the walls.

'Grinchley will never give it over willingly,' said Jack. 'And you'd be mad to fuck with a collector of dark magics. So that leaves outright treachery and low dealings.'

'You look awfully happy about that,' said Pete.

Jack smiled, dropping her a wink. 'As if I'd be anything else, luv.'

'Still haven't told me the great trick to get the Focus away from this Grinchley person.' Pete lifted an eyebrow, her motherly gesture, used on teenaged shoplifters and errant schoolchildren. Jack scribed a circle in the air with his finger.

'We'll just twist him, luv. Give him a bit of street magic and shift the thing right out from under him. A minor entity of some sort should do the trick.'

'More summoning.' Pete felt a ball of something hard and unpleasant grow just under her heart. 'Jack…'

'Pete.' He closed his hand into a fist. 'This is what I did, very well, for quite a time before I met you. Let me do my work. You promised.'

'I promised to listen to your rot,' Pete shot back. 'I didn't promise bugger-all about this idiotic idea you have to steal from a man who slices out people's hearts.'

'Translocation,' said Jack. 'My idiot idea is translocation. I never have to get within a hundred meters of the man and I'll be done with the Focus before Grinchley even realizes it's missing. Devil knows he has enough arcane shite in his musty old house.'

Think of Margaret, Connor whispered. Think of every night after you find her dead and cold if you don't listen to Jack. 'I just hope I can,' Pete muttered.

'What?' Jack said distractedly. He stood up and sorted through the armload of books Pete had brought to him, paging through the index of the Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities.

'Nothing.' Pete sighed. She set her tea aside. 'I'm going to go do paperwork while you do… whatever it is you're doing.'

'Research,' said Jack. 'Got to figure which sort of entity will be willing to trade with me for this favor. Imps might do it. Imps love sneaking about.'

'You don't just… know?' Pete asked. 'They don't make you memorize that stuff, like?'

Jack shook his head. 'There was no 'they,' Pete. I didn't go to some bloody school and get instructed by gits in robes. You either die quickly because your talent overwhelms you, or you learn quickly and stay a step ahead of whatever wants to chew on your arse.' He thumped the thick black book. 'Research is a mage's best friend. Why would I carry all that dusty knowledge around when I can just rely on the sods who came before me?'

'Fine.' Pete held up her hands. 'Like I said, I'll be upstairs in the office closet. Nothing personal, but the very idea turns my stomach.'

'You'll get used to it,' said Jack. 'You got any chalk in case I need to set a protection hex?'

'In the kitchen drawer with the cling film,' said Pete. 'And no, I won't get used to it.'

She turned and left Jack in the shadows and went into her tiny office—more of an artist's garret than anything, up a flight of stairs barely wide enough for two feet side by side. Her desk and her computer were wrapped in a thin film of dust. Pete clicked on her scrollwork lamp with its bright reading bulb, turning the window facing into the street to a sheet of onyx.

Jack shifted something in the sitting room, and Pete smelled the chalk dust clear as if she were next to him. That dark stirring of deep, old things pushed against the front of her skull. She searched her desk for aspirin to deal with the persistent headache, but found none.

Pete pressed her forehead against the chilled windowpane. Fog thickened and everything past the glass was invisible and gold-tinged, until the streetlight at the end of the block winked out.

She drew back and saw ice crawl across the glass where her breath met it.

Beyond the pane, the fog swirled and parted, as if Avalon were about to reveal itself. Pete felt her body and mind become entranced, the cold seeping down from her bones into her blood and her skin, ice crystals weighing her eyelashes.

Noise and sensation faded, and the fog outside swirled and twisted back on itself and coalesced into a woman's face.

Something whispered, from that dark wellspring that rippled and chattered when Pete touched things not entirely made of earth. A tiny tug on her mind, beyond the cold and the pale, pale face with eyes closed, body clothed in robes of purest silver mist that floated in the night outside.

The whispers rose to the pitch of a scream in the back of Pete's mind, a flock of tiny mouths crying out in concert. Peril.

Pete gasped, taking in air so cold it burned her chest like a gout of flame. The pale face outside opened in a soundless scream, fangs the color of old bone snowing beneath lips stained with blood, warm and steaming against the thing's frozen skin.

Pete let out a scream of her own. 'Fuck me!'

The garret window shattered, throwing a snowstorm of glass inward, and Pete fell, tangling her legs in her chair's and going down hard on her left shoulder. Pain, disorientation, a sensation of fullness in her head, like she'd caught the feedback of an amplifier turned on full.