Street Magic

'I was worried you had been killed,' Pete said severely. She worried her lip with her teeth. 'Something's bothering me…' She couldn't make it come clear with all of the adrenaline from the fight still in her veins, but it roiled her stomach nervously.

'Don't tell me 'It was too easy, Jack,' because there's nothing about five sorcerers busting into my flat and working me over that's bloody easy,' Jack said.

Pete's stomach flip-flopped like she'd gone over the edge of the world. 'Bollocks. Five of them.'

The fifth sorcerer unfolded from a dark corner of the sitting room in a swirl of black, freezing smoke. He aimed a revolver at Pete and Jack. 'You're a fucking wonder with the magic, Winter, but I'm willing to bet even you can't stop a bullet.'

Jack looked at Pete. 'He's right.'

'I told them,' the sorcerer said. 'Told them that we should have found you and plugged your junkie arm with an overdose when we had the chance, but no. You weren't a threat. I can't tell you how happy I am that you finally managed to become one.'

Jack heaved a sigh. 'Sonny boy, do I know you?'

'No,' the sorcerer said, a grin spreading under his mask. 'But soon everyone in the Black will know me—they will turn when I go by and whisper, 'There goes the killer of Jack Winter, the murderer who stood on the body of the crow-mage and claimed his magic for his own.' You've held your talent and your gift long enough, Winter. Time to give up the ghost.'

He started for Jack and Pete, thumb pulling back the hammer of the revolver.

'Wait—' Jack started as the sorcerer's foot displaced the copper wire of the circle. Faster than Pete could see, Talshebeth fell upon the sorcerer, blunt teeth pulling and tearing at the skin, consuming the sorcerer's flesh while his magic was absorbed into the folds and crannies of Talshe-beth's form.

'—mind the circle,' Jack finished.

'Oh, yes,' Talshebeth breathed. 'So much rage. So much shadow inside him.' The copper wire at his feet glowed molten and the circle broke, running into the cracks in the floor.

'Ah, tits.' Jack reached out and shoved Pete behind him without taking his eyes off Talshebeth, with more strength than she would suspect a man twice his size of.

'Oi!' she protested.

'Shut it,' Jack said in a low voice, his eyes on Talshebeth. The demon took one step over the liquid copper, then another, placing his mismatched human and cloven feet right together with a sigh of happiness.

'It appears our bargain is void, crow-mage,' he said, tongue darting out to taste the air.

'If you know what's good for you, you'll take the hand and leave,' Jack said. Talshebeth laughed, gutturally now, pure pleasure in pain.

'Why would I take your offering, crow-mage, when I can have you?'

Jack grabbed Pete's wrist. 'Run,' he said. 'Fast and far as you can, and don't look back, don't come back no matter what you hear or feel.'

'I'm not going anywhere,' Pete muttered. 'You're no good to me dead.'

'Good woman,' said Talshebeth. 'Loyal, brave, and shining to a fault. Stay, little one. Watch what becomes of the crow-mage when he faces a truer evil.'

Jack backed up, almost stumbling over her, and Pete went with him. 'You should have run for it,' said Jack. 'Demons aren't like Fae or like us—they're of another world and there's not a bloody thing I can do to stop him once he's free.'

Talshebeth raised his hands as though he were trying to stop a lorry and a greenish aura of magic blossomed around him. He was no longer awkwardly ugly and misshapen. Freed, he was inhuman and terrible to behold.

Jack threw up a hand in turn and Pete felt the crackle of air around him, the energy that was achingly familiar. Jack turned his head and met her eyes. 'I'll protect you,' he said in an almost earnest tone.

Talshebeth showed his teeth and sent a wave of the sickly green forward, blotting out all the light in Pete's field of vision.

She heard Jack yell and felt the energy around him shudder under the blast. Twisting in his grip on her wrist, Pete grabbed his hand, blind. She wanted to tell Jack so many things and they would all sound trite now. She didn't want to die. She didn't want to be helpless, letting a junkie mage be her human shield when she should be shielding him. She was the bright one, the protector… and she was helpless to stop Talshebeth's fury of toothsome, shrieking magic.

This is the Black. People die here…

I don't want to die, Pete thought, bell clear and solid in the face of the ethereal hurricane. Jack's shoulder shuddered under her cheek where she pressed her face low to keep her eyes off the demon, and like a stinking river rushes through a broken dam she felt his magic give, cracking under the demon's. I don't want to die I don't want to die Idon'twantJacktodieagain…

In the hand holding Jack's, it started, a vibration as if she'd sat on her hand for a few hours and then abruptly released it. The numbness spread up her arm and where Jack's skin met hers heat like red iron burned.

Light exploded in front of her eyes, and she heard Jack yell, felt his magic gather and rush outward, and when she opened her eyes Talshebeth was consumed by something gray-black and dense, a flight of magic that reduced him to ashes until his screams blew away on a conjured wind.

Jack slumped, sitting down hard and taking Pete with him.

'What the bloody hell just happened?' she demanded. Jack turned on her.

'You tell me, darling! One moment I'm barely holding off a demon from gnawing flesh off my bones and the next he's a little pile of matchsticks on my floor!'

'I may not know bugger-all about magic,' said Pete slowly. 'But I know that was not normal.' She unclenched her hand from Jack's. The bones creaked in protest and a vivid red imprint of his fingers remained on her palm. 'It happened when we touched, then and when you called your witchfire,' she told Jack. 'Whatever it was.'

'Nothing,' said Jack. 'Nothing, is what that was.'

'It was not nothing.' Pete sounded more outraged than she meant to, or even knew she was, underneath the crushing relief to still be breathing. 'You kept your promise—this was different from the last time, because last time you didn't incinerate a demon. Jack—'

'Pete, it was nothing!' Jack shouted. 'Let it bloody well go!' He got up with difficulty and paced away from her, rubbing his left forearm.

'Why won't you just tell me what happened?' Pete said quietly.

'Because sometimes, Pete, you don't need to know everything,' Jack snapped. He grabbed his jacket off the hook and unlocked the door of the flat.

'That's no kind of answer! Where are you going?' Pete demanded. 'You can't leave—I need your help still to find Margaret! We're out of time!'

'In case you missed the five armed psychopaths who just burst into my flat, and the sidhe bitches before them, someone is trying to kill me,' said Jack. 'And I can't find out who's passed down the order dragging a square copper along with me.'

'Jack—'

'Let it go, Pete!' he shouted.

'Fine.' Pete threw up her hands. 'You want to keep playing your little secrecy game, that's fine. But before you go storming out of here, might I point out the matter of the five bodies on your sitting-room floor?'

Jack grinned crookedly. 'Bodies? All I see are some bundles of rags.' He went to one of the crates stacked against the wall, rooted, tossing out a stack of vintage dirty magazines, a pair of tattered leopard-print pants, which Pete picked up and examined in horror, and finally yanked out a tightly wrapped cloth bundle. 'Stand back. It's about to get hot.'

He unfurled the canvas and held up a bundle of smoky-smelling herbs, whispering 'Aithinne.' The herbs swirled up and out from his palm, catching the bodies alight and burning them from the inside, like the spent end of a cigarette. Soon there was nothing but rags, just as Jack had said.

'See? No fuss,' he said. 'Although that was my last batch of inferno weed. Practically extinct now. Very dear.'

Pete watched ash drift up from where the bodies had lain, wordlessly. 'It's so very simple in your world, isn't it, Jack?'

'You'd think that,' he said, grabbing his jacket from the hook. 'But little things like staying alive? Not simple in the least. Now I'm going out to find out who wants to stop me from doing that. Got any more objections?'

'Jack…' Pete started.

'Good,' he said, walking out and slamming the door in her face.

Pete slumped down against the wall again. 'Bugger.'

Chapter Thirty-two

After Pete swept up the ashes of Talshebeth and the sorcerers and binned them, and put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea, she finally realized that Jack wasn't coming back.

Her mobile rang as she was struggling with the bin bag and she grabbed it up. 'Hullo.'

'Pete, I'm very patiently waiting for you to sign the revised offer papers. I faxed them to your desk at the Yard days ago. Have you quite taken leave of the last vestiges of your so-called responsibility?'

'It's just hit where I am, Terry. I don't have time for this—' Pete started.

'You know something, Pete, you are going to make time for me,' Terry fussed. 'You're the one who couldn't let the disposition of our assets go on in a civilized manner, and now you can't be bothered to face up to the mess you've caused. I, for one, think—'

'Terry, perhaps I'm not making myself clear enough about this,' Pete said softly. Terry paused.

'Please elucidate.'

'Sod off!' Pete yelled into the mouthpiece, and then threw her mobile across the kitchen. She hauled the bin bag to the rubbish cart behind the building and it was as if nothing had ever happened in the flat, except for the distinct ebb and flow of the Black, just out of the corner of Pete's eyes, the aftershocks causing tiny ripples in the underground pool of magic.

How long had she been able to feel the Black, Pete wondered, and denied it for bad dreams and shadow? How long had Jack and everything that floated around him been standing just out of view?

Existential ponderings aside, the one fact Pete knew was that she was immeasurably tired, and wanted nothing more than a kip, but curiosity, and Jack not being about to stop her, drove her to stay awake to do a bit of snooping.

The shadows were stretching on to evening. Pete lit the oil lamp and went to get a blanket from Jack's bedroom to wrap up in.

Thick robes of cobwebs trailed from the ceiling in Jack's room, and the floor was littered with musty books and papers. A lone chest of drawers in the corner was the only furniture besides the mattress and scarred wardrobe.

She put a blanket around her shoulders, and crouched to illuminate the stack of books nearest to the mattress. Most of the spines were in languages she didn't read, nor did anyone else who'd been alive in the past five hundred years, but two were in English. Theories of Energy Magic and Practicum of Lesser Spirits and Their Uses. Pete