Street Magic

Pete glanced around and perceived nothing but a mass of sweating and mostly pasty humans clothed in shades of black and black.

A strobe flickered across her vision and for a moment she caught flashes of horn and bone, long teeth arching over cloven lower lips as a tongue snaked toward her. Flash again, back to skin and cloth. 'Come on,' she said, tugging against Jack to pull him away from the dancers and their swirling auras.

Jack swayed just a little, sweat beading in the hollow of his neck and stippling the collar of his shirt. Pete reached up and brushed it away. Jack started at her touch, and the white in his eyes deepened back to the usual blue.

'I'm here,' Pete mouthed. Jack squeezed her wrist.

'Ta.'

Hattie was already bent over a tall glass of whisky, sucking on a borrowed cigarette held out by a Mohawked man with a bare chest and studded jacket.

'Hattie.' Pete indicated the glass with her chin. 'Give it here.'

'Oi,' said the Mohawk. 'I paid for that, you tart. Leave 'er be.'

'Excuse me,' said Pete, reaching across Hattie's nonexistent chest and taking the tumbler, 'but kindly bugger off back to 1985 and leave us the bloody hell alone.'

Jack tilted the whisky down in one swallow, coughed, and then settled on the nearest barstool with a sigh.

The Mohawk looked at Jack, at Pete and Hattie, and then held up his hands. 'Didn't realize she was with you, mate. Apologies.'

'Fuck off,' Jack said plainly. The man left.

'This the sort of impression you were after?' Pete shouted-muttered under the throb of the music. She kept her back to the bar, her hands at her sides, and wished she had something other than wit and fists at her disposal.

Jack faced the body sea with his elbows on the bar, a serene smile playing between his lips and his eyes. 'You ever shill at cards, Pete?'

'I went into the Met straight out of university so… no,' said Pete.

His fingers twitched and produced a card from his sleeve, a tarot picture of the Hanged Man. 'You lose a few rounds at first,' said Jack, still roving his gaze across the club. 'You chum the waters with your weakness. You stand back and you let them get close, close enough, and you jam the knife in so tight and deep they never stop bleeding.' Jack made the card disappear again, witchfire eating it into nothingness.

Pete eased near enough to speak into Jack's ear. 'So who's getting close to us now?'

A girl in a satin slip adorned with roses, thorny twists of vine when Pete blinked, a dress again when the lights flared, grinned at Jack with needlelike teeth as she slipped past. Jack lit a cigarette and let the smoke trail out through his nostrils. 'The wrong kind of people.' His magic no longer crackled, it rolled off him in the slow honeyed way that made everyone in the club with the least sensitivity turn to look at him. Pete felt it cling to her and shook it off. If Mosswood was right, she was going to have to find a way to shut off the hum, the ripples, and the cries that seemed to resonate through London.

'Wrong for what?'

'Wrong for me to bring around someone like you,' said Jack. 'But oh, so bloody right for what we're trying to do.' The houselights went down, and in the sudden blackness Jack's eyes burned blue.

'Bloody hell,' said someone from over Pete's shoulder, sotto voce, but in order to be heard over the music you practically had to scream. 'Jack Winter, isn't it?'

'You're fucking stoned,' said a male voice. 'Jack Winter's dead.'

Jack's smile slipped down the scale to predatory. 'See?'

Pete and Jack turned in concert to face a pair of young, pale, serious faces, boy and girl, both staring at Jack sidelong.

'If so,' Jack said to them, 'I'd say I managed to make one bloody attractive corpse.'

The girl clutched the boy's arm, tearing a hole in his fishnet sleeve with her dead-blood nails. 'By the Black! Arty, it's really him.'

Arty regarded Pete and Jack through hooded eyes, bloodshot with whatever was in his glass. He sneered when Pete returned his stare. 'Yeah. Guess he hasn't kicked.'

He swung himself to face Jack, limbs heavy. Pete shifted herself to the balls of her feet, ready to deal Arty a punch to his pointy chin if he moved in on her or Jack.

'Do you know there's a bounty out on your pretty little Billy Idol head?' Arty slurred.

'Why, son?' Jack said. He curled his lip slightly, carrying on with the reference. 'Are you going to collect?'

'Oh, don't mind him,' the girl gushed, dealing Arty a shot to the ribs. 'My brother's a bloody idiot when he's in his cups. I'm Absithium, and he's Artem, but you can call us Arty and Abby.' She extended her hand palm down, as though she expected Jack to kiss it, and he did. Hattie grunted at the gesture, her blotchy forehead crinkling.

'Jack Winter,' Jack told Abby, ignoring Hattie as if she were a lamp or a hatstand.

'I knew it was you,' Abby simpered. 'Arty and I… we're twins, but I'm an intuitive and he's got other talents.'

Pete noticed a ripple in the crowd around them. A shifting of heads and eyes, when Jack said his name. 'Chumming the bloody waters,' she muttered, taking Hattie's fresh glass of whisky and draining it herself.

Abby jerked her chin at Hattie. 'I've seen you before, too. At Millie Child's?'

'Yeah, whatever,' said Hattie. 'I spent a few nights there last month.'

'The new moon sex rituals,' said Abby sagely. She looked Pete over and dismissed her in the space of a heartbeat. 'May I ask you a question?' she demanded of Jack, tilting her heavy black beehive to one side in an expression that Pete supposed would be coquettish if Abby hadn't been made up like a dead porcelain doll.

'Anything, my dear,' Jack said.

'Where have you been, all this time?' Abby chewed on her thin lower lip. 'I mean, we all,'—she gestured at the dancers—'have our theories.'

'And wagers,' said Arty with a shift of interest. 'Personally, I say you were pinched by the common police and spent the last dozen years being buggered over at Pentonville.' He took a swig of his pint, face knobby with belligerence. 'So where'ye been, Winter?'

Jack leaned close to Arty, meeting the boy's kohled eyes. He held there, his lips parted and barely an inch from Arty's ear, until Arty stilled completely.

Then Jack breathed, 'Hell.'

He slung his arm around Hattie, picked up Arty's pint and drained the remains. 'But now I'm back, and I'm bound to raise a little infernal noise of my own.' He kissed Hattie, hard, smearing her lips apart and probing with his tongue. Hattie yielded like an understaffed doll.

Pete became aware that the music had faded to the end of the track and the club was largely silent, everyone waiting to see what Jack would do next.

Arty cast his eyes at a few fellows of comparable size and thickness. 'Sure, Winter. Play your set. Let all of them see what a bad man you are.' He slid from his stool like a small mountain moving. 'Hell or not, hasn't helped you much. You look bloody wasted.' The other boys came to his shoulders.

Pete pointed her finger at Arty. 'Don't,' she warned.

'What are you going to do, curse me?' he sneered.

Pete looked to Jack, who was fondling Hattie with a bored expression as he glared at Arty. His eyes flicked to hers for a second, and he was still Jack. Make an impression.

Arty grabbed the lapel of Pete's jacket. 'I asked you a question, you slag.'

The DJ began another song, and Pete hit Arty in the jaw, in the soft spot just above the bone that snaps the head around and brings unconsciousness.

She raised her eyes to the other boys. 'Jack doesn't need your meddling and I don't want you breathing my air. Piss off.'

Abby jumped in between Pete and the boys. 'They didn't mean it!' she cried. Arty groaned and sat up, shaking his head. 'How could you?' she hissed at him.

'Winter's not a sorcerer!' he said defensively. 'How's I supposed to know he practices bloody black magic?'

'I practice whatever I bloody want,' Jack said. He slung his other arm around Abby. 'Let's leave off these cunts and find someplace private, eh, luv?'

Abby fairly glowed. 'Of course! I know just the place.'

Jack, Hattie, and Abby walked through the room, dancers parting like a furrow, and Pete followed before the passageway closed and she was trapped. Every set of eyes in the room bored holes in her back until the door boomed shut behind her.

Chapter Thirty-six

Abby took them to a turreted Victorian, black with red light shining from every window. She lifted the iron knocker, a fanged nymph's head, and let it fall once.

'What is this place?' Pete stopped at the foot of the steps.

'Mad Chen's,' muttered Hattie. She let Jack half drag her up to the door. Pete looked up and down the street. Dead trees and dead leaves bent and scuttled toward her, a winter wind pushing behind.

'Pete.' Jack jerked his head at her as the door opened and a hooligan in a silk jacket peered out. He looked at Abby, nodded, and then stepped back.

Mad Chen's was lit by gaslight, red as new blood spilling, burning some sort of alien fuel. Thick wispy smoke drifted toward the tin ceilings, painted over with spray-can slogans, and under the smoke a garden of beds lay scattered across the wide rooms.

The beds were of every description—day lounges and iron institutional frames. All made up in silk or satin, no filthy mattresses like where Pete had found Jack.

Most of the beds were occupied, and slow-moving, doe-eyed women passed among them holding long boxes and trays with pipes and small sticky globs of pungent brown in wooden boxes. Their breasts and nipples, ringed or studded or tattooed, gleamed in the low red light.

'Up here,' said Abby as they passed through the main part of the den, and she led them up a spiral staircase and into a narrow hallway.

Some of the doors had a key sticking out, and some were locked, with cries or silence coming from behind. Abby turned a key in the second door on the left and went in, slouching down on a sofa. 'Fuck, I'm bored. Should we ring Mad Chen to bring up some poppy and absinthe?'

Hattie flopped next to her. 'I'd murder a hit of anything right now.'

Pete remained standing. 'I have to go to the loo.' She narrowed her eyes at Jack before she slipped back out the door and went down the hall, trying doors until she found a narrow closet with a toilet and a bulb on a pull chain.

She shut the door and leaned against the wall, and realized once she was still that her legs were shaking. The Black pulsed against her, and she swore she could feel it on her skin, like the opium resin, sticky and visceral.

'It never really gets better.'

Jack opened the door and slid into the closet with her. Pete had to turn sideways to accommodate him.