Street Magic

'Let's just get to the car and drive,' Jack said. 'I'll tell you when we're there.'

Chapter Twenty-five

'Whitechapel,' said Jack as Pete guided the Mini through the midnight streets. 'No place like it.'

'No,' Pete agreed as they slid past a human dealer, slouched on a corner with a windcheater turned up against the damp. Furtive eyeshine glinted at her from farther back in the shadows. 'No, there isn't.'

'Up here,' said Jack, and she saw his body loosen from the wire tension for the first time since the attack. 'Park on the street. We'll take the fire stairs.'

A four-story brick structure with arched windows, slightly Gothic, a bit of rusted ironwork added at some point when the facade became shabby, stared back at Pete with darkened windows. Jack egressed the Mini fast as she'd ever seen him move and started for a rusted set of iron stairs bolted to the bricks, leading up and up into the dark.

'What is this place?' Pete asked as they climbed, the treads under their feet shuddering and groaning like the ghost of Marley. Rust flakes rained onto Pete's head.

Jack stopped at the fourth-floor landing and produced a key from the chain around his neck. He unlocked the French windows in front of them, not without resistance from the rusted latch. 'This is my flat.'

Pete paused on the sill, startled. 'Flat? You let it?'

'Own it. Bought and paid for ages ago,' said Jack, flicking a light switch. Nothing reacted. 'Ah, tits,' he said. 'Well, can't blame the power company, really. I don't think I ever paid a bill.'

'Jack,' said Pete, righting the urge to bang her forehead against the nearest hard flat surface, 'if you own a flat, why the bloody hell were you crashing in a squat miles from here?'

Jack fumbled in the darkness, broken only by the skeletal arches of his flat's windows. His lighter snapped and a moment later his face was illuminated with candle flame, hollow as a death mask. 'Nobody knows about this place,' he said. 'I bought it from a hearth witch named Jerrold. Mad as a hatter, last stages of dementia. I think he thought I was paying him to take a boil off me arse.'

'You con a helpless old man out of a flat and then don't use it,' Pete muttered. 'When it comes to you, Jack, that almost makes sense.'

'Hang about with me a bit longer, Pete, and you'll learn the value of having a place no one knows you go to,' he said. 'Close the shutters. You're letting all the warmth out.'

Pete stepped inside, feeling a pull against her skin as if she'd brushed cobwebs. Jack watched her circumspectly for a moment and then nodded, lighting more candles off the one he held. A mantel, fireplace, and bare wood floors flickered into view along with burial mounds of furniture that smelled like dust and rot.

'What did I just touch?' Pete rubbed her arms, hugging herself.

'The flat's protection hex,' Jack said. 'If you'd been unfriendly you'd experience pain unlike anything I can describe, if you were human. If you were demon, or Fae, well…' He held up his hands and made a poof motion. 'When it comes to home security, it does not pay to fuck about.'

'You would have just watched me fry.' Pete turned her back on him. Tired, sore. Nearly killed inside her own home, and now on Jack's turf completely. Wonderful way to keep in control of your situation, she could almost hear Connor scolding.

'If you'd been out to do the same to me? Absolutely,' said Jack. Candles lit one after the other now, sympathetic flames springing to life of their own accord, and they threw a glow of ancient bonfires against the walls of the flat. Pete shivered. They did little to warm.

The only furniture to speak of was a plaid sofa with springs popping out of the armrests, but there were books everywhere, on the built-in shelves to either side of the fireplace and stacked high as Pete's waist under the windows. Boxes and crates were clustered in a corner, and she squinted to see glass jars, grimoires bound in leather and iron, and the white of bone. She looked away before she caught sight of something that she didn't need to see.

A little over a week with Jack now. She was learning what to do when he put her into these situations.

'I'm going to sleep, if I can,' she said. 'Any beds, or is that reaching for the stars?'

'I think I've got a blanket or two and a mattress that doesn't have anything living in it,' said Jack. 'Bedroom's down the hall. Good night.'

Pete took a fat black candle off the mantel and guided herself to the door, watching Jack for a moment over her shoulder. He went to the window and looked out at the street, silent and pale as a saint's statue waiting in vigilance.

The shrouded man, and Pete felt sure this time that the figure had been a man once, held out his hand, squeezing so tightly to contain the beating thing within that bone showed through his knuckles. Blood, thickened and hot, seeped through his grasp and into the graveyard dirt below. 'Take it,' said the shrouded man. 'Take it before it dies and goes to dust.'

'I…' Pete started to tell him I can't, because she knew that no matter how natural it might seem to stretch out her hand, she could never contain the beating thing in the man's fist. In her grasp, it would gasp and shatter into a thousand pieces because she was weak.

Before she could speak, though, the smoke came out of the shadows and swallowed everything. This time it was in her throat, siphoning off her air and replacing everything with the hot, desert blackness of oblivion.

Pete knew she was dying, that only taking the shrouded man's offering could repel the smoke, and that she could do neither thing. She could just stand and let herself be replaced by the shadow-figure, filled and consumed body and mind by the malignance living in the smoke. It was pain, a slipping away of something that Pete tried to hold, until it tore the skin from her.

The blankets wrapped around Pete when she clawed to the surface of the waking world, smelling of pot smoke and cinnamon, mellowed and musty with age, were damp with her sweat. Her heart thrummed for the seconds it took her to realize she was awake, sun cutting across her face from unshaded windows.

'Christ on a motorbike!' She sighed, falling back and forgetting she had no pillow. 'Ow! Bugger all!'

Jack stuck his head through the door, hair distinctly more spiky on the left side than the right. 'Everything five by five, luv?'

'Bad dream,' said Pete, rubbing her palms over her face. She had broken into a fresh fever sweat, despite seeing her breath on the air and her skin prickling.

'I've got breakfast on,' said Jack. 'Come into the kitchen.'

Pete followed him, padding on bare feet that quickly went numb. 'Thought the electric was off.'

Jack snorted. 'Think I need electric for a simple fry-up?'

Pete conceded he had a point. The kitchen's pink-sprigged wallpaper and clean white countertops reminded Pete of summer visits to her grandmother Caldecott's trim house in Galway. A kettle on the old-fashioned enamel stove radiated heat, steam roiling out of the spout. A frying pan sizzled with eggs and sausages.

'You're awfully chipper,' Pete noticed as Jack fussed with mugs and tea that came from a plastic convenience-mart bag. 'Your sight quiet? I find it hard to believe nobody died in a building this decrepit.'

'Not that,' said Jack. 'It's this place. Whitechapel.' He set a mug with a cartoon purple cow in front of Pete, and shoveled some eggs onto a plate for himself. Jack looked her over, like she was keeping a secret. 'Can you feel it?'

Pete didn't like the way Jack was looking at her. It was that cold look, the one that calculated exactly how much your flesh and spirit were worth in his currency. 'Feel what?' she said neutrally, sipping at her tea. It burned over her tongue.

'Whitechapel has a dark heartbeat,' said Jack. 'It breathes out malevolence and draws in them that need blackness to survive. Dampens the sight, like living under a bridge.'

'But there are shadows under a bridge,' Pete said.

Jack grinned, without humor. 'Just so.'

Chapter Twenty-six

'I'll still need to call an imp for the task at hand,' said Jack later, his back turned as he did the washing-up. Pete was smoking a slow Parliament, mostly watching it burn in a saucer, taking a puff every few minutes as a token effort.

'You found out which one, then,' Pete stated.

'Managed before the bloody bansidhe interrupted me,' Jack said. 'The Dictionary is shredded, though. Lawrence will kick my teeth in for that. Man treats his books like ruddy babies.' He shut off the water and dropped the mugs and plastic plates into the rack to dry. Pete saw him shake once, and grip the counter edge, but the heroin tremors were barely visible any longer, like moth's wings fluttering.

'Look,' Jack said. 'Go get a Times and find a little cafe to read it in. I'll be done by the time you get back. I know how you feel about it, all that—'

'I want to watch,' said Pete. The bansidhe's cuts stung her skin as she squirmed at the thought.

Jack blinked. 'Pardon me?'

'I'm staying,' Pete repeated. 'Do what you have to do, Jack. I'll be here.'

He shrugged. 'Suit yourself. I'll be in the sitting room.'

Pete followed after a moment. Jack was on his knees scratching an uneven chalk circle into the wood floor. In the daytime the flat was shabby in the way of an old woman on pension—faded and stained but not without a grace. The ceilings were twice as high as her own flat, the windows arched like a church with sills a fat cat could curl on. Crown molding, rotted away in places, marched around the ceiling and the lamps were Moorish iron, glass globes sooty from their previous life as gaslights. The building might have been even older than the Blitz, judging by the cracks in the plaster and the leaded panes.

'Bugger!' Jack shouted as his chalk snapped in half. He spat on the marking and erased it with his thumb. The circle encased a five-pointed star and scribbles that looked like chickens had run through a bakery. The whole affair was hopelessly lopsided and scrawled, and Pete put a hand to her mouth to hide a small smile. Jack snarled at her before he went back to drawing.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It's just… I imagined the whole thing would be much more sinister.'

'It's been a long time since I've done this, so you can bugger yourself,' said Jack. 'I could go find some black cats and chicken's blood, if that would improve your experience, milady.'

Pete sat on the sill, pressing her back up against the glass and letting the sunlight warm it. 'Quit being childish and get the bloody imp up here. We're wasting time we could be using to help Margaret. Three days, Jack.'

'All right, all right,' Jack muttered. 'Hold your bloody horses.' He got up, dusting off his hands, and went to root around in the kitchen. He returned with a few white packets in his fist and emptied them into a red puddle at the center of the circle.

'What… ?' Pete started.

'Catsup,' said Jack. 'They're mad for it. I think it's the acidity. Imps eat sulfur, in the pit. Wager this tastes a deal better.'

'And now I know more than I ever wanted about the preferred snack food for denizens of the underworld,' said Pete, tilting her head back and shutting her eyes. 'I feel so broadened.'

'Hell,' said Jack. 'Not the underworld. You're talking about the land of the dead. Hell is another prospect entirely. It's a rather terrible insult to suggest that they're the same.'