Street Magic

Pete stood up, knocking her chair away with a clatter. 'I—I have to go. I'm sorry, Mosswood. Thank you…' She turned and managed to navigate out of the pub and back down the alley, fingers closing around the cold lumpy metal of the gate and pushing it aside. A black border closed around her vision and finally the street in front of her disappeared completely and all Pete saw as she spiraled down was Jack, Jack and his devil's grin.

PART THREE The Graveyard

When they kick at your front door How you gonna come? With your hands on your head Or on the trigger of your gun?

—The Clash

Chapter Thirty-four

Pete shoved open the door to Jack's flat so that it hit the wall with a crack. She jumped at the same time as he did, startled to actually find him slouched on his sofa. A haze of pungent blue- green smoke drifted around him.

'Who the fuck is that?' demanded the woman on the other end of the sofa. She was rail skinny, a thatch of grown-out blond hair that still held purple dye in the tips sticking out wildly around her narrow pixie face.

'Hattie, this is Pete,' Jack said. His posture instantly drew tight as he caught Pete's expression.

' 'S a bloody odd name, ain't it?' Hattie said, taking another draw on her Thai stick.

For Pete's part, she drew in a breath, letting the pot-smoke smell wash over her, and then said, very softly, 'Jack, I need to speak with you.'

He stood, and Hattie made an unsteady move to follow. 'Alone.' Pete pinned Hattie with a glare, and the spindly girl sank back down into her seat.

'What's wrong, luv?' Jack said when Pete pulled him into the hallway and slammed the flat's door.

'How long have you known?' Pete said. Jack blinked once. His eyes were clear—he wasn't stoned, had just been playing at it. Pete found herself startled again at how quickly Jack could shuck and don different skins.

'Known what, Pete?' he asked in a credible display of innocence, but Pete knew better.

'I've been trying to figure it out, the whole walk home—did you know before that day in the tomb, or did you only figure it out when that thing came out at us and went straight for my heart instead of doing what you wanted?'

Jack's eyes iced over, the deep glacial blue stealing around the iris, but Pete pressed on. 'And that convenient tip to the police, and you sticking around me right up until now. For your reputation.' She lowered her voice. 'Did you really think I wouldn't realize what you're doing, Jack?'

Jack spread his hands, and smiled at her. It was a warm smile, charming and guileless. 'I don't know what you're talking about, luv—'

Pete slapped him, hard enough to leave a crack at the corner of his mouth that dribbled blood. 'Don't lie to me again, Jack Winter,' she hissed. 'And don't call me 'luv' any longer. You lost that right the day you decided to use me like a fucking telly antenna, a dozen bloody years ago.'

His fists curled and Pete braced herself to be hit. He probably wouldn't rattle her teeth, he was so skinny.

'You put me in danger. You knew exactly what would happen and you used me,' she kept on. 'And when you found me again, you used me again. And now that little girl is probably dead and I've spent the last twelve years trying to outrun nightmares of something that wasn't even my fault in the first place. Do you know how many nights I've wished I could make up for hurting you, for letting that thing loose? Too bloody many, Jack!' Shaking, she clenched her teeth to keep her voice steady and said, 'I'm going home. You can't help me, or Margaret Smythe. You can't help anyone.'

He let her get almost to the lift before he said, 'You thought it was entirely your fault?'

'Isn't it?' Pete said. 'When a Weir and a mage meet, terrible things happen. Mosswood said it.'

'Mosswood doesn't know bloody everything.' She heard a rustle and a sizzle as Jack conjured a fag, and then his breath drawing on it. 'Listen, Caldecott, whatever happened between us before, right now all that matters is we've come to the attention of the wrong sort of people.'

He lifted away from the wall and walked over to Pete, placing the tips of his fingers on her right shoulder. Pete shuddered as his presence crackled around her. 'Don't touch me,' she whispered.

Jack slid his grip to her arm and turned her to face him. The magic that rolled over Pete sucked her air away, just as it had the first time she'd stood close enough to touch him. 'We're in danger, Pete,' he said. 'And if you don't stay with me, you're going to die. Later on, we can scream and throw crockery and shed tears over what I knew and how I used your talent and when, but right now, if you want any chance of saving Margaret Smythe from the clutches of certain death, then luv—you're with me.'

Pete glared at his hand until he removed it from her arm. 'Is the Hattie trollop strictly necessary?'

'Hattie's an old friend,' Jack said. 'She's not bad.'

'She's a fucking junkie,' Pete pointed out. Jack smiled, lips thin.

'So am I, Pete.' He stamped out his cigarette and walked back down the dim hallway to the flat. 'Hattie's got someone for us to meet, might have a line on those demon-wanking sorcerers who are after me.'

'And then we find Margaret,' Pete told him. She let him know, with the thrust of her chin, that she'd break Jack's shins and drag him with her if it came to that.

He flashed her the devil-grin, not worried in the least. 'Yes. If we find them—then we find Margaret. Can't do fuck-all for the kid if we're dead, can we?'

Pete conceded that he had a point. Whatever Jack was, wrong wasn't usually it. She gestured for him to lead the way back into the flat. 'Don't make the mistake of thinking this is good and settled between us.'

'Wouldn't dream,' Jack said, turning the knob. 'You'd wake me up right quick.'

Hattie jumped up when Pete came back into the flat. 'Jack, what's up? Can we get out of here, already? You know being out the Black always gives me fucking hives.'

'Pete is going to be joining us,' Jack said, shrugging into his jacket. The screaming skull on the back leered at Pete. Hattie worried her lower lip, fingers picking idly at the hair on her opposite arm.

'Why?'

'Because I said so, Hattie.' Jack stuck a Parliament between his lips but didn't light it.

Pete watched Jack, and Hattie, and the look that passed between them. Jack had shifted again, this time into an edgy, aggressive mode that made him square his shoulders and jut his jaw. Hattie folded in on herself even more.

'She don't blend in,' she finally muttered. 'Like a new penny in the collection box. She'll pox up the whole thing.'

'Either you two leave off talking about me like I'm deaf or I can take your skinny arse to rot the night in jail,' Pete told Hattie. She turned on Jack. 'That goes for you, too.'

'Except my skinny arse is cute.' Jack winked at her. Hattie glared at Pete from under bruise-colored lids.

Chapter Thirty-five

'This might take some time,' Jack said to Pete as they walked along the narrow high street outside Jack's flat. 'We're going to have to go into the Black.' He looked down at her. 'Not that you seem to have a problem with that any longer.'

'I do what I have to,' said Pete shortly. 'You wouldn't tell me the truth.'

Jack laughed once. 'I have to remember you're not sixteen any longer.'

'Not for some time,' Pete said. She felt a breath of wind and then suddenly it was full night and they were walking past grated and boarded-up storefronts, hunched shapes sleeping on the grates that vented the underground. A prehensile tail twitched out from under a ratty red blanket.

'It's just up here,' Hattie called from ahead of them.

'That was easy,' Pete remarked.

'In-between places,' said Jack. 'Those alleys that no one ever looks down. All of Whitechapel is thin, makes it easy to pass back and forth.'

'I'm just telling you now, we don't have much time,' said Pete. 'Less than twelve hours if it's keeping to the same line as with the other three children.'

'Time goes differently in the Black,' Jack said. 'Slows down, goes backward or forward.'

'Is that supposed to make me feel better?' Pete asked.

Jack reached the metal security door that Hattie was standing in front of, her hands and shoulders twitching.

'No,' Jack said. 'Once I came in for a pint and walked out at breakfast time three days hence.' He slid the door back on its rollers and gestured Pete inside. 'After you, luv.'

They walked down, on a set of slippery metal stairs through air that smelled like piss and sweat, droplets of moisture shaken from pipes overhead by throbbing bass.

'What exactly are we hoping to accomplish by coming here?' Pete asked Jack, raising her voice to be heard over the muffled music.

Hattie threw open the door and a profundo remix of 'Don't Like the Drugs' smacked into Pete like a brick.

'An impression!' Jack shouted, and then they were inside.

The basement room could have been Fiver's, with the walls painted black and the tiny raised stage space replaced by an emaciated DJ and blocky turntables. And the people, close together in sticky knots, sliding up and down to the clotted beat of the music—they were different.

A hand closed around her wrist and she looked over to see Jack grimacing. 'Are you all right?' she mouthed at him. A ring of white had appeared around his lips and his eyes were almost colorless.

'Too many bodies,' he muttered in her ear. 'Too many spirits. Wasn't ready for the sight.'