Street Magic

'What if you, I don't know, forced your will into them or something?' Pete asked. 'To hold back the sight?'

'I can't hold it back to begin with,' Jack said. 'Magic tattoos—can't believe I'm bloody considering this, by the way. I sound like a New Age git. Bespelled tattoos aren't unheard of, but it takes an enormous charge to make the magic stick, here in this world, under the skin.' He downed the dregs of his tea. 'Much as it pains me to admit it, more power than I have.'

'Not more power than I have,' Pete said, but Jack was already shaking his head.

'No, Pete. You don't know how to control yourself, even if it did work. You could melt the flesh off me bones.'

'I don't see any difference between that chance and the chance you take that your sodding smack dealer slipped you a bad hit because he was running low on protection money this month,' Pete said, folding her arms. Jack recognized the posture and threw up his hands.

'Forget it! Not going to happen, Pete.'

She sank down, holding the old dusty book that outlined symbols of protection, where she'd gotten the idea for the tattoos. 'Do you want to keep on this way, Jack? Do you like being an addict, or a madman?' She took a deep breath. 'Tell me now. Please. Before I break my heart against you again.'

' 'Course I don't,' Jack muttered after a long moment. 'But there is no other way, Pete. I can either wander the streets not knowing what's real and what the sight is showing me, or I can poison myself and keep a grip on what little life I have left. I choose that. So hate me if you want. It'd be better if you left now, I think.'

He lit a cigarette and moved to go into his bedroom.

'If the tattoos don't work,' Pete said, 'you haven't lost anything. And it's not like you have a needle phobia.'

Jack's eyebrows went up. 'There you go, morbid again.'

'You're a bad influence on me,' said Pete. 'Jack,' she said impulsively, when his back was turned. 'We were interrupted this afternoon, but there's really something I need to ask you about the cemetery, about what happened…'

He sighed. 'Don't tell me that sodding Inspector Heath has been after you with more questions about 'What really happened.'' He made finger quotes around the phrase.

'No, it's not that,' said Pete. 'Ollie's taken care of it. It's about… it's something I saw, when I was in-between with you. When you were standing in front of that headstone, you were… well… sort of glowing and the glow was… unpleasant.'

'Aural echo,' said Jack. 'My spirit and magic outside my body. Not unusual for mages caught in-between.'

'I know what an aura is,' said Pete impatiently. 'MG was always on about auras. This was different.' Thinking about the inky flames that covered Jack's spirit being, the raven shape so similar to the woman who had watched Pete receive the heart, made her skin crawl, the way the animal mind backs away from something utterly alien.

'What did you see, Pete? All of it. You're hiding something.'

'The woman… the one who took Treadwell back to the land of the dead. She spoke to him like she knew him.'

Jack got up, paced a few steps, came back to the sofa. 'The raven woman, you called her when you woke up.'

Pete nodded. 'She was. Black feathers for hair. Cruel bird's eyes, staring right through me.' She waited for Jack's scoffing, but it didn't come. 'What is it?'

'Nothing,' Jack muttered finally. 'Probably nothing. But Treadwell did have help to stay for so long and her being there, so close… it just crawls my skin is all.'

Pete came and sat next to him. 'Who was she?'

'She was exactly who you said she was,' Jack murmured. 'The raven woman. The Goddess of the Morrigan. Death's walker in the Black.'

'Does me seeing her mean some horrible omen?' Pete guessed. Jack shook his head.

'She won't be bothering you again, Pete. She came for Treadwell because you called her. You spoke to her with the magic of a Weir, and she took back a spirit that had more than outstayed his welcome. More than that… I don't know. She's a treacherous companion, the raven woman.'

'Let's work it out, then,' said Pete. 'Let's summon, or read books, or ask Mosswood…'

Jack held up a hand. 'Pete. One lesson you learn quickly if you live any length of time with magic is that you leave the old gods to their old ways, and don't meddle.' He worried the fringe on the arm of the sofa. 'The Morrigan is the patron of the Fiach Dubh, the sort of magic I learned to work in. I'm not afraid of you seeing her, but I sure as bloody fuck-all wouldn't go looking for her to have a spot of tea. Unless you've got some reason to be concerned you've offended her, Pete… we're letting go of it.'

'Have you always had that shadow over you, the crow?' Pete said. 'Because of her?'

Jack nodded. 'Yes. It's what I am—the crow-mage. Can't change that. Not something you volunteer for.'

'If you're sure it's all right…' Pete murmured, pushing down half-formed suspicions that croaked underneath her thoughts, about Treadwell and his screams and the Morrigan and her multitude of black shadow-crows. She stood, collected more books to give her hands something to do. She wouldn't tell Jack about her dreams. The shrouded man. The bird's heart, and the merciless gaze of the Morrigan. How Pete still saw it against the backs of her eyes when she shut them, inhuman and indescribably ancient. Because Jack would worry more than he already was, and she was trying to protect him, wasn't she?

'What about you, Jack? What I saw in your nightmare, the black around your spirit-form? Don't tell me that was right and natural as well, because it wasn't. I felt it, and it was rotten and evil.'

Jack came and put his hands on her shoulders, sliding them down to grip her arms. 'Pete. I'm going to ask you something and I want you to do it, with no questions, and no argument. Understand?'

'Perhaps,' said Pete, trying to shrug him off. He held her arms harder. 'Ow! All right!' Pete cried. 'Let go before I smack you one in the gob, Winter.'

'For your own good, Pete. Do as I say.'

Pete rolled her eyes. 'Fine.' She glared at him until Jack dropped her arms.

'Forget what you saw in the nightmarescape,' he said. 'What you saw around me, and for me. Put it out of your memory and out of your dreams.'

'I've been trying,' Pete said.

'I'm serious, Petunia.'

'So am I, Jack.'

He ruffled his hair, not looking entirely satisfied, but it was the best he was getting. Damn Jack if he thought he could order her about, anyway.

'Right,' he said finally. 'Let's go see if we can find a tattooist still doing business at the late hour, shall we?'

'We want two of these,' Pete said, opening the heavy volume of Parnell's Spells, Signs, and Symbols of Greater Protection. The tattoo artist sneezed when he leaned in to examine the twin wadjets, the eyes of the peregrine falcon glaring back from the page.

'Oh, sure,' he said. 'Egyptian stuff. Pretty common, yeah? Where you want 'em?'

Pete turned to Jack, who was sitting sourly in the canvas chair next to the table full of needle packets and pots of ink.

He shrugged, pulling off his black knit jersey. 'Wherever you can find room, mate.'

Pete had only ever seen Jack's arms, which were both banded with ink in no real pattern—Celtic knotwork, a raven's feather, a black band of letters on his forearm that spelled out never mind the bollocks. His chest and back were also partially inked, his back with an enormous Celtic cross twined with an oaken garland and his stomach with a grinning skull that chewed on a snake.

'Collarbones?' the tattooist asked. His sign proclaimed his name as hal nutter, fine art tattoos. Hal Nutter himself was rather round and pale, like a collection of small moons rotating around a great central body wrapped in an ink-stained T-shirt touting Journey's 1978 tour.

'Fine,' Jack agreed.

'One light, one dark,' Pete reminded Hal. 'For Thoth and Horus.' Jack muttered something rude under his breath and she kicked him in the ankle.

'Right you are,' said Hal, giving the pair of them a skeptical look. Jack sighed impatiently.

'I've got some heavy drinking waiting on me down at the pub, mate. Could we get on with it?'

Hal Nutter made quick work of the basic tattoos, one a black eye and one a pale outline. Pete touched them both after the last of the excess ink had been wiped away. 'One for the land of the living. One for the land of the dead. You're in between. A door, like you said, but now it has a lock and key.'

Jack took her hands and placed the full palms, gently, against his chest. 'Only way this idiot plan of yours has a chance of working, luv.'

'Er, I should really put some cream on those…' Hal Nutter started, and Pete glared at him.

'Give us one bloody minute, will you?'

Nutter held up his hands and backed off a pace.

Pete put her attention back on Jack. Now that she was here, so close to him, the plan seemed utterly ridiculous. Jack exuded power, like a transformer throwing off sparks. How could she hope to push against that?

'It's all right, luv,' Jack whispered in her ear. 'I'm here.'

Pete thought about the first time she'd seen him, on stage at Fiver's, and later, again, on the floor of the squatter's house by the river. She remembered the shade in her bathroom and Jack's wide-eyed journeying into the land beyond.

Come back to me.

Again, a feeling of standing on the edge of a vast and windy chasm. Her hands began to burn and Jack said, 'Fuck me!'

Stay with me, Jack. See what walks as a living thing and what floats on spare sorrow as shade.

Stay.

Because, Pete thought, that was what she wanted more than anything else. To know that she could knock on his door and he'd answer, or be rung up on the telephone if she felt like talking to him. To know that if he walked out the door, he'd walk back in again someday, however far later it might be.

Stay.

'Pete,' said Jack after a long moment. 'That's done it.' He stretched and examined the tattoos in a hand mirror. 'Not half bad, Nutter.'

'Er,' said Hal Nutter, who was on the far side of the shop, looking as if he wished he could fade into the walls. 'Yes. Yes, quite right. That'll be one hundred twenty pounds fifty with VAT.'

'Are you crying?' Jack asked Pete, examining her face as he put his shirt on.

'Not a bit,' Pete said, truthfully. She felt almost a gleam on her, the vibrations of power still feeding back through the Black, through her bones.

'Good,' Jack said. 'Nothing to be upset over. Ink is charged. Doubt they'll hold anything back except maybe a bad hangover, but you did bloody well for someone with no training.' He pulled his jacket on while Pete wrote Hal Nutter a check.

'Fancy a pint?' he asked. Pete took his hand, and he started to pull away but then slung his arm around her. 'You all right, then?'

'Yes,' said Pete, deciding she was as they walked outside and she felt the rain on her face. Jack had stayed. She'd done it, this time. 'And yes. A pint would be gorgeous.'

Jack hailed a taxi, and Pete let it whisk her away through the rain-washed streets, secure just for a moment that she was with Jack, rather than chasing after him, trying to catch a half- glimpsed phantom between her fingers.