Street Magic

'None,' Roddy said miserably. 'There's not many of us these days and you've killed near half. The rest are out looking for you.'

Jack checked the street and then motioned Pete out. 'We take him with us.'

In the lift, Roddy's pungent sweat made Pete's nose crinkle. 'So you people just hang around thinking of ways to kill Jack? Seems silly. Completely.'

'Thought he was dead,' Roddy muttered. 'Only in the last couple of weeks, the Black started to talk about seeing him again.'

'But why?' said Pete. 'He didn't do anything to you.'

'Right here,' said Jack as the digital numbers ticked by. 'Not bloody deaf, either.'

'Do you have any idea what it would mean to be the sorcerer who killed the crow-mage?' Roddy demanded, and his face sparked back to life. 'You would be legend in your own time, with more power than any before. Feared, hated, and respected—the tenets of the Arkanum.'

'Why do you people call him 'crow-mage'?' Pete asked. The lift came to a stop.

'Don't answer that, Roddy, 'less you want it to be the last coherent thing you ever say,' Jack said, throwing a glare over his shoulder as he stepped into a narrow hallway, lit with brass sconces. One door stood at the far end.

Roddy limped after him at Pete's prodding. 'Just through there,' he said, slouching against the wall opposite the lift. 'Everything you want is in there.'

'Good man,' said Jack. He shoved Roddy aside and put his hand on the door, jiggling it. 'It's locked.'

'I haven't a key,' said Roddy with a thrust of his chin, before Jack could turn on him. 'The High Sorcerers control the access.'

'No matter,' said Jack. 'Pete, you got a hairpin or a bra wire or something?'

'Do I look like I have a hairpin, Jack?'

'Never mind,' he said, digging a skeleton key out of his pocket and working it into the lock. He leaned against the keyhole and breathed, 'Go n-iompai an iarann agus go ligfeadh lean ar aghaidh,' in a whisper meant for a lover. Pete heard ancient tumblers groaning.

'Racking up felonies by the minute, I see,' she said. Jack gave her a wide grin.

'Not breaking in if you have a key.'

'You think you can enter our sanctum with such a crude tool?' Roddy muttered.

The lock clicked and the door popped open. Jack rolled his eyes. 'Apparently I can, sonny boy. What about it?'

'Don't be waiting, then,' Roddy said sullenly. 'Burst in and save the day, Winter.'

'All right, keep your shorts on,' said Jack. He put his hand on the knob, but before it turned, pain like she'd just smacked into a ledge hit Pete. The Black rushed up at her, magic that was barren and unforgiving, nothing like the dancing fire of Jack's talent or the icy slickness of her dream. She gasped as she touched it, and Jack stopped and turned to look at her.

'What's wrong, luv?'

'I…' The pain intensified, the magic crouching, leaping, digging teeth into her brain. 'I…' She couldn't speak, just felt the magic pressing down on her. Her Black-fueled intution rocketed through the pain and she grabbed for Jack's hand on the door, trying to make him stop, turn back, before he became broken and bloody and still again.

'Sweet Lilith…' Roddy cursed. 'They know! They—' He was cut off as Jack spun around and grabbed him by the neck.

'What have you done, you slimy little cunt?'

Roddy began to smile, and then to laugh. 'It was so easy,' he said. 'I'd heard so many stories about how good you were, Winter, how quicksilver and clever. And look, a broken leg and a sob story was all it took for you to swallow it.'

'Jack,' Pete ground out. She tried pushing against the feedback from the Black, and the pain lessened, though not by much.

Roddy grinned at both of them unpleasantly. 'You came in here obedient as dogs.'

Demonstrating far more strength than Pete would have guessed a man of Jack's size to have, Jack lifted Roddy onto his tiptoes. 'What did you and your shit-sucking Arkanum mates do? Tell me before I break you in half and jam you together backward.'

Roddy laughed, shaking his head. 'It doesn't matter now, Winter. I did my job. I'll be seeing you on the other side… and her… and all the rest.' And Roddy fell forward against Jack, and shoved them back together, through the door into the Arkanum's sanctum.

The spell hovering over the flat snapped into place and Pete could move again without the feeling of ice picks being driven through her eye sockets. She was up and moving for Jack and Roddy before her mind caught up. She could see the spell, a thicket of thorns and prehensile vines that wrapped themselves around both men with blood-hungry quickness.

'Jack!' she screamed, as a shadow lashed his face and caused a line of blood droplets to erupt. 'Jack, tell me how to stop it!'

'Get this fucking fat tosser off of me, to start!' Jack bellowed, shoving at Roddy, who fought just as wildly to hold him in place. The shadows, thick as they lay on Jack, fell twice as heavy on him, wrapping Roddy up in a hungry cascade of magic and malice. The sorcerer's clothes began to disintegrate, and the skin beneath, flaking off like ash from a dead fire. Roddy's face went stone, grim— he would die to keep Jack from escaping the spell's embrace.

Pete reached for Jack, between the twisting vines of magic, and felt a lash like a thousand thorns on her skin.

Blood erupted everywhere the shadows touched, and she drew back, cursing.

Jack punched Roddy in the face, ineffectually. 'Get… off… me… cunt!'

From an archway deeper in the flat two more sorcerers appeared, and two more—four figures all burning the poisoned purple witchfire in their palms.

'Hold him, Roddy!' one shouted. 'We'll take care of the bitch.'

Jack's clothing began to flake away, like Roddy's skin—a patch of his jacket, a chunk of his pantleg, the sole of his jackboot. 'Pete, watch it!' he yelled as one of the sorcerers came for her, a telescoping police baton upraised.

'You think I'm not worth your magic?' Pete cocked her head.

'Mage groupie? I know you aren't worthy,' said the sorcerer. Pete sighed.

'You're wrong. So very wrong.' Before the sorcerer could puzzle that, she kicked out and drove her heel into the man's knee.

The sorcerer crumpled over, dropping the baton, and the other three hurled clusters of the foul-smelling offensive magic at her, giving distance in the face of their cursing, crying compatriot. Pete took a dive, landed elbows first on the parquet floor, and slid out of range, ignoring the pain that returned all through her when she hit.

She could barely see Jack any longer, obscured as he and Roddy were by the writhing mass of the spell. 'Jack,' she moaned, for just a moment not able to contemplate anything but the sight of his newly dead body. Toerag that he was, as much as he'd made her life a pit of misery over the week he'd come back, Jack being dead again was something that Pete knew would send her straight around the bend.

The spell hissed at her when she drew close, and a thorny limb lashed out to slice her flesh. Shaper of magic. I am a shaper of magic.

Then Jack's echo, Mosswood doesn't know bloody everything.

'He'd sodding better on this count,' Pete whispered, and then inhaled, held out her hand, and pushed against the mass of the Black around the spell. She pushed like she'd push on a thousand-pound beam across her chest, like she'd push to go through a door with something terrible but necessary on the other side. Feeling as if every blood vessel in her would burst with the effort, Pete held against the tide of black magic that kept the spell alive, moving it, shaping against it until with a great groan of defeat a hole appeared, pinpoint at first but tearing open to body size.

Jack's face, plus a few hundred scratches and a smearing of ash materialized, his expression genuinely shocked. Pete stuck out her hand.

'I can't hold this!' She could already feel herself begin to tremble under the strain of pushing back the spell, and another ball of energy lanced by her head to remind her that her troubles were far from over.

Jack's own hand, slicked with his blood, lanced out through the magic's gap and grabbed on to her, and Pete hauled him out, inch by inch. Roddy's hand latched on to Jack's ankle in turn, half skeletal and locked in a dead man's grasp. Jack brought his other heel down, the steel of his jackboot snapping off the encrusted bones.

Roddy gave a scream like Death itself had just wrapped a hand around his heart and yanked it free, and the spell collapsed in on him, enraged and starving and consuming.

Jack patted himself over frantically. 'Ah, tits. I lost me flick-knife.'

'Forget the bloody knife. Are you all right?' Pete demanded.

'No,' said Jack insistently, as the sorcerers began to get closer with their spells. 'I need blood . . .fresh blood,' he snapped when Pete started to point out the thousands of shallow cuts all over his exposed skin.

Pete found her pocket knife in an obscure corner of her jacket and grabbed Jack's palm, slicing it deeply as she dared. He yelped. 'Bloody hell, woman! When did you get so violent?'

'That should be sufficient, yeah?' Pete said, indicating the warm crimson stream that flowed freely over Jack's palm.

'Good gods, yes, quite sufficient if you want me to die!' Jack said.

'Give over with your drama and do something about these cunts before they finally manage to aim!' Pete shouted, ducking another blast.

Jack swore at her, but smeared the blood on the floor in front of him and said, 'An't-ok, tabhair do dhroim.'

The spell began to expand, revealing the ashy bones of Roddy, and lit across the flat, over the walls and the floor, digging in to every crevice and engulfing the three remaining sorcerers before they could react to the mass of magic that slammed them backward into the walls. The air filled with ash and the floor tilted crazily as Jack's magic met the spells living in the bones of the flat, the concussion jolting Pete down to her marrow.

Jack grabbed her arm. 'Time to run again, luv, I'm afraid.'

'I agree,' Pete said as a massive section of the outer stone wall fell away, exposing the skyline of London, twinkling serenely in the late night. 'Fucking move!'

She and Jack ended up having to jump for it as the front room of the flat collapsed, roaring in on itself with beams and stone, making an abattoir for the four men within.

Pete rolled over and sat up, dizzy, Jack swimming back into focus above her. A warm nettle of pain cut across one cheek and she touched blood. 'I felt it,' she said. 'Before Roddy pushed you through the door.' Her voice was thick and far away.

'I know you did, luv,' Jack said, dabbing at her cheek with his sleeve. He glanced back at the ruin. Two of the bodies were half out of the rubble, frozen in tableau. Their eyes stared at Pete with the stony hatred of the dead.

'He played it very well,' said Jack. 'Didn't tip off.'

Pete glared back at the bodies. 'Broken knuckles don't hurt that much.'

'I don't know about you,' said Jack, helping Pete to her feet and offering her a Parliament, which she accepted, 'but I'm about through playing with these bastards.'

'Through, and thoroughly bored of this Sturm und Drang,' said Pete. 'We need a new plan, Winter.'

Jack worried his thumbnail as he exhaled a cloud of smoke, and then said, 'First thing we need to do is find a set of pliers.'

The Arkanum's kitchen was largely intact except for cracks in the floor that let Pete look through clear to the ground story, and half the cabinets gone. Pete located a toolbox under the sink and gave Jack a pair of needle-nosed pliers, while he went to an overturned apothecary desk and rooted in the cubbies until he came up with a black bottle of liquid.

'Let me guess—the blood of virgin brides and plump, innocent babies,' Pete said.

'Ink,' said Jack. 'Black number ten. You've become very morbid.' He took a shallow stone dish, the pliers, and the ink and went to the nearest body, gripping the