Street Magic

'I swear, if you've hurt her again…' Jack trembled all over, as if he were in the middle of a blizzard. 'Shiftless and ugly or not, I'll turn you in. I'll run out this door and go to the police box and when you're rotting in jail I'll take all that money you stole from Mum and I'll pay a fucking skinhead to be your boyfriend until you're a fucking cripple!'

Pete, examining Jack, decided he couldn't have been more than ten or eleven. She pressed a hand over her mouth to keep herself steady.

Kev grabbed Jack by the hair, producing a flick-knife and pressing it against Jack's throat. 'Sit down, boy,' he said. Soft and pleasant, like the warning hiss of a snake. 'You move a hair, and I'll slit her from ear to ear, like the pig she is.' He sat Jack on the couch, where the boy folded like stiff cardboard, and knelt with legs on either side of Jack's mother, pressing the knife to her throat.

'Now you keep your eyes open,' said Kev. 'Eyes open, and watching. I'm giving you a lesson, boy.' He loosed the button fly on his shorts, the knife steady against Jack's mother's neck.

'Don't…' Jack's voice strangled.

Kev pushed the woman's dress up to her waist. 'Did I hear a please, Jackie? Good boys say please.' He grinned, sliding a hand over Jack's mother. She moaned feebly, but didn't try to fight him off. 'That's the lesson,' Kev said, still smiling. 'Teach you again and again, if I must.'

Jack's eyes went vacant, the whites crawling in to blot out the blue, and he began to shake.

'Stop.' Pete reached out and grabbed Kev's knife arm, but he batted her off as if she weighed a kilo. Pete stumbled into the credenza, sending a crack pipe and some glass figurines crashing to the floor.

'Don't interfere,' Kev said, leveling his knife at her. 'This isn't your show.'

Pete pushed herself up and came at him again, swinging for the hateful smile, and again he pushed her back, lifting her clean off her feet. He was so strong, the strength of a child's nightmare.

'You're not my demon,' Pete said, as Kev pushed the knife tighter against Jack's mother's throat. 'Jack wasn't afraid of you. Jack wouldn't be afraid of a piss stain like you, not even then.'

'You're afraid of me, missy,' said Kev with certainty. He looked up and started as he saw Jack standing inches from him, eyes totally white. 'I told you stay put, you little freak!'

He started to say more, but his throat twitched and closed, and he dropped the flick-knife to claw at his breast over his heart. Robotically, Jack picked up the flick-knife and put the business end into Kev's neck, the arterial blood washing the wall, Jack, and his mother in a graceful arc. She let out a feeble cry and covered her eyes.

Jack crouched on his heels, watching with unblinking attention until Kev's last ounce of life ran out of him and stained the cheap carpet with wine. 'You're right,' he told Pete finally, his voice thin and not all present. He picked up the flick-knife, cleaned it on his sleeve, and tucked it away. 'I stopped being afraid of monsters. The shadows, the transparent voices I heard… they told me how to keep the monsters back. And I listened. I learned. When did you first feel it, Pete? This was my day.'

'You're not here,' Pete said. 'That much I know. Tell me. Please? I'm running out of time so fast, Jack…'

'I see you,' young Jack said solemnly. 'I see you doomed by your need to help me. You'd rush headlong in front of a train.'

'Into Hell,' Pete answered.

'What do I do to earn your loyalty?' Jack crossed his thin little arms. 'You shine.'

'You don't make it easy, that's for bloody sure,' Pete said. 'But nobody deserves what Treadwell plans, Jack. Not even you.' She touched the little boy on the shoulder, and he winced. 'You don't have such a dark heart as you think, Jack. Hope someday you see that.'

Jack pointed to the locked door, now grown iron and arched, a portal bound up in magic.

'Through there,' he said. 'I'm there. Be careful, Pete.'

'Of what?' she said, standing slowly from the ruin of glass where she'd landed.

Jack blinked his white eyes. 'You look into Treadwell, not as Jack sees him, but as magic does. And when you do it, he can see you, too, Pete. All of you.'

Pete put both her hands flat on the door. It was cold, a cold of old things with no space in the real. 'Bloody wonderful,' she muttered before she put her hands on the massive twin latches and pushed the door free.

Chapter Forty-five

Stepping back into a graveyard caused her to stumble, because it was a calm spring night and not the boiling, fiery center of Jack's terrors she'd envisioned.

A gaslight flickered blue, casting the whole scene in black-and-white film, all shades of bright and shadow that danced in time with the flame.

Pete walked across the grass to a single headstone; crooked and tilted to one side, planted in the earth long enough to get comfortable. Jack stood, his head bowed, hair white in the light of the lamp. He stared down at the gravestone without breathing, without even a wind to move his coat. If not for the cigarette curling smoke slowly upward, he might have been a ghost himself.

Next to him, Pete stopped. 'It's really you, then.'

Jack nodded once, chin tucking down against his chest. Blue slivers of magic sluiced off him, burning away like sparks in the cool air. 'Really here. Just like you.'

The magic glowed all over him, the spirit raven a corona that Pete watched fill up with black as if something had spilled ink across Jack's ghost-form, pulsing and retreating and growing again. The taint caused a physical ache in Pete, a feeling of loss.

'We'd better hurry and get out of here,' Pete said. 'Wake up, or go away from the light, or whatever it is you do… here.'

Jack made a bitter noise in his throat. 'I never asked you to come after me, Pete. You die just like the rest of us.'

Pete felt her mouth open, forced it shut quickly. 'Jack, I didn't endure pain and kidnapping and massive internal bleeding so that I could come here and be snarled at. Now come, before Treadwell finds you.'

'He wants to take my body as a vessel,' Jack said. He raised his head and confronted Pete with a face of hollows behind his cigarette. 'Could you do it, Pete? If Treadwell wore my face? Could you kill him?'

Pete answered without thinking, too quickly. 'No. I could never make my nightmare real, Jack. Not again.'

He sneered. 'Then what good are you?' The cigarette sailed away into the grass, trailing embers. 'My nightmare is real, Pete. How's your grand plan to save me working so far?'

Pete looked at the headstone, realized with a start that the broad letters carved into it were familiar.

Jack Winter

Born 15 June

Died

But the date was scratched out. Pete faced Jack, reaching for his wrist. 'You're not dead.'

'Might as well be,' he muttered. 'What a life I've led. Every breath, every kick and scream against the pricks, all down to nothing, just a funeral no one will ever see for a man nobody cares about.'

'Oh, buggering fuck,' Pete shouted. 'You cannot expect me to believe that you're actually feeling sorry for yourself, you stupid sod! Look at me! I've fucking killed myself over you, and all that time I thought you'd already gone I carried that wound close, never let you fade all the way to memory because you were all I had to convince myself that maybe there was something out there beyond living and dying with just gray in between!' She grabbed Jack, shook him, fighting against fingers numb from encroaching passage to the land of the dead.

'I cared for you so much it nearly drove me mad,' Pete whispered. 'So, you see, you can't leave. You simply can't.'

Jack sighed. 'Sometimes the thing you want won't be yours, no matter how hard you grasp onto it, Pete. This is the end. You'd do well to walk away before any hope of saving you has passed. Leave me to Treadwell, and go get on with your life.'

You should heed the young man. Treadwell formed out of the crackling power in the air, a sure form of a man here, simply silver and ephemeral. He wore a frock coat and his long hair was combed back from a broad forehead. His eyes lit hungrily as he gazed upon Jack.

'I don't understand,' Pete whispered. 'You came to fight, Jack, and now you're giving up.'

Mr. Winter is both a product and a victim of his fears, as we all are, Treadwell said, folding his hands and looking pleased. In the end he has nothing—not faith, not hope, not love. Just fear, and fear is the most powerful agent of all.

He stepped forward, passing through Jack's headstone. Time has come, Mr. Winter, for you to step aside and for me to step in.

Jack nodded numbly, opening his arms. 'I'm yours.'

Pete cast desperately, but the graveyard was totally empty except for Jack's headstone, lone and neglected.

'Jack,' Pete said. Treadwell paused in front of him, raising one palm to brush his fingers over Jack's face. Jack didn't flinch even as ice crystals grew on his brow, but he did when Pete gripped his hand. 'You're not alone,' Pete said, all resolve to keep calm gone. She heard her voice through a tunnel, knew she was slipping away. 'That's it, isn't it—dying and more than dying, dying alone.'

Keep out of this, Treadwell hissed. He raised his hands heavenward and began to chant, the incantation rising around Pete and Jack like a black mist, a swarm of dark magic.

Pete squeezed Jack's hand, hard as she could. 'You're not alone,' she told him. 'If you've made up your mind to die, then I'll be with you here, until the end. I'd follow you into death if that's what you asked, Jack. Heaven, Hell. Anywhere at all.'

Silence! Treadwell screamed. The smoke rose and formed, an exact replica of Jack, featureless and incorporeal. I will gain a form. Do not test me.

Pete held Jack's hand, barely felt herself trembling as she made her peace, let the strands already slipping through her fingers float away. So be it. 'Anywhere at all,' she repeated.

Jack shuddered and sighed, drawing in a ragged breath. 'Oh, Pete,' he murmured. 'Why didn't you just give up on me?'

Pete smiled at him; saw a tiny lift in his shoulders. 'You told me we'd see it through together. I believed you.'

Fire flamed to life in Jack's eyes and he turned on Treadwell. 'Thought you'd trap me in the thin space and take my body? Lovely plan, if a bit flawed in the fact that I am not going to bloody let you anywhere near me.'

Treadwell smiled, the expression on him truly terrifying. Too late for theatrics, Winter. Too late, too late, always too late. He muttered, Victus. The smoke flowed into Jack, through his nose and mouth, through his eyes. Jack went to his knees, choking, gagging, and Pete saw the aura of magic around him flare and begin to change to ice-bred silver, the raven overtaken by a ravening wolf, starved and trailing spittle from its maw.

Submit to me, crow-mage, Treadwell said. And your soul's passage to the land of the dead will be swift.

'Leave him alone!' Pete screamed. The smoke engulfed Jack wholly, and he stopped fighting as Treadwell watched grimly, with the kind of terrible satisfaction vengeance brings over a