Street Magic

He went to look for the missing children, and Pete went hunting for Jack, not knowing if she was going to hit him or embrace him when they met, just that she needed to find him, and so she would.

Chapter Eight

She'd never intended to rescue him, of course. Of all the strung-out lost boys in London, Jack was the least in need of that.

Pete knew she'd been spending too much time around Southwark when the shifty bloke on the steps of Jack's squat waved to her.

And she waved back. 'Jack in?'

'Nah,' said the kid, sniffling and shivering even inside his parka. 'He moved on last night. Prolly over near Borough High Street in the close. There's a few beds.'

It was twilight, witchy and shadowed along the narrow street. The night citizens were beginning to stir, but there was enough daylight left to allow her safe passage to Jack's latest shooting gallery.

He was nodding against the wall in the front room, burning cigarette dangling between his lips and a crackling copy of London Calling on the turntable. Pete pushed the needle off track with a squeal and Jack cracked one eye.

'Hasn't anyone told you it's rude to burst into other people's houses?'

'I need to talk to you,' Pete said. She crossed her arms and made sure to appear stern and unyielding. Jack was in the throes of a hit, and damn it all, he'd listen to her one way or another.

'I recall we've played this scene before,' said Jack. 'Only this time you haven't got my stash to threaten me with. So what are you going to do, DI Caldecott—beat me about the head with a great bloody stick?'

'Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind,' Pete assured him. Jack exhaled a cloud of blue, the nubby cigarette falling to the floor. He didn't appear to notice, tapping his dirty fingertips to the time of 'Clampdown.' A stray line of blood painted the path between the clustered punctures on his forearm, and Pete stooped to press the napkin she'd received with her breakfast buttie against the spot. The faint smell of eggs and ham rose between them, blending the tobacco and the sour undertone of the squat into something almost home.

'Someone who didn't know would almost think you cared,' Jack muttered, but he didn't pull his arm away.

'I care,' Pete said. 'I care about Diana Leroy and Patrick Dumbershall.'

Jack yawned languidly. 'Who, now?'

'You know bloody well who they are,' Pete said, slipping one end of the metal links from her belt around Jack's wrist. He jerked as soon as the handcuffs clicked closed and Pete's wrist bruised with a sharp jab.

'You slag!' Jack spat when he realized what Pete had done. 'If you're still trying to get into me knickers, there's better ways.'

'Your knickers don't concern me in the least,' Pete said crisply.

'Please, Pete,' Jack said with a pathetic jangle of the cuffs. 'Don't do this to me. I can't do another stretch. Prison's bloody murder for me.' He was like the roving harlequin at a carnival, trying on masks until he found one that the audience favored, one to draw them into his web of seduction and illusion.

And in that other time, with the other Jack, it would have worked. Pete knew she'd be helpless, she'd go stand in his circle and feel his black magic flow through them both.

But now all she saw was Jack grinning at her as the smoke man came, and she felt the screaming vibrations inside her own head as her mind struggled to contain something that no one was meant to endure. And his pathetic attempts to con her weren't helping.

'Get up,' she snarled, hauling Jack to his feet. He was light, far beneath healthy, like a starving vampire or a reanimated sack of bones. Pete turned her head determinedly so Jack wouldn't see the pity on her face. Pity was something neither of them wanted. 'You're coming along to the Yard and we're going to talk about the two more missing children.'

Jack dug in his heels. 'I can't leave me things, some cunt'll nick them.'

Pete stopped, making Jack stumble closer to her by their connected arms. 'I am going to get some bloody answers out of you, Jack Winter, and I prefer to do it in the comparative clean and comfort of a place that is not a druggie squat, so you are going out that door and I don't give a fuck whether it pleases you or not.'

Jack blinked. Pete had never known she had the ability to leave him at a loss, and it was rather powerful. Well, nights upon rainy nights of dealing with drunken soccer hooligans who decided just because she was small and slight that she was easily intimidated would put steel into any woman's backbone.

'I get some clean clothes, yeah?' Jack said as Pete forcibly led him out the door and down the mossy steps to the Mini. 'And a drink. God, I'd murder a pint.'

'You get to sit down in the car and shut your gob,' said Pete, thrusting Jack into the passenger side of the Mini. She clipped her end of the cuffs to the door bar and got in.

By the time they cleared the wharves and drove over the bridge back into the City, Jack was nodding again, in the dream place between the heroin and the barren expanse of needing it. Pete slapped his shoulder with her free hand. 'Keep awake. This isn't a minicab.'

'Mmph,' said Jack. 'Bloody hell, you're violent. Got some sort of repressed urge you're takin' out on me?'

'My urges are none of your sodding business,' Pete snapped, then pressed her lips together. He still had that current, that disconcerting air that made her blurt out things that should have stayed a secret.

Jack smirked. 'So you say, luv.'

'Why don't you make this easy on yourself and tell me what you know about the missing kids,' Pete suggested as she turned onto a thoroughfare crowded with taxis and the late rush hour.

'I know fuck-all,' said Jack promptly. 'May I please be let go now, Inspector? I'll be ever so good and won't cause a fuss again.'

Pete gripped the wheel. She wanted to throw her two hands around Jack's neck, but the Mini's steering wheel would have to do. 'You told me exactly where to find Bridget Killigan and when, and you expect me to believe that you know nothing about two other children abducted by the same bloody person in the same bloody way?'

'I do, and I don't.' Jack nodded. 'Let me out of the fucking car, Pete. I'll crash us into an abutment if that's what it takes.'

Pete crossed two lanes of traffic and screeched into the bus dropoff zone, laying on the Mini's brakes in a way the manufacturer never intended. 'Sod you, you bastard!' she yelled. 'You think just because you're some poor wounded addict I'm supposed to believe your line of innocent bullshit?'

'What I think,' Jack yelled back, 'is that you've turned from a sweet girl into a harpy from hell, and that I bloody hate the sight of you and if you don't unlock these bloody handcuffs right now, I'll hurt you, Pete. I swear to whatever gods you pray to.'

It flamed up in his eyes first, the bluer light of witchfire. Pete gasped as it spilled from his fingers, his lips—pure raw magic seeping out and forming a tangible golem of Jack's rage. Of his magic.

Pete wanted more than anything to turn her eyes and pretend that she was just tired, or just crazy, or just… But the weight of knowing laid itself upon her, knowing in the pit of her stomach, the thing that wouldn't go away no matter how many years spanned between Jack holding her hands as the flames wreathed them and Jack glaring at her now, melting her skin with his stare to reach the truth underneath. And she could ignore it, but she'd never stop the knowing, stop seeing things she shouldn't know for truth or fiction, or be able to deny what the witchfire wreathing Jack meant.

It spilled off him in waves now as he jerked against the cuffs, touching the spiked tips of his hair and gathering at the corners of his mouth, racing over the dials in the Mini's dash. Where it kissed Pete's rigid body, it stung.

A shudder passed through her, like she'd just been doused with ice water. Jack's breathing was the loudest thing inside the car, ragged and enraged. Everything was bathed in blue.

'Bloody hell,' Pete whispered. 'You weren't lying.'

'Magic,' Jack agreed with a hiss, his lips parting. The witchfire retreated and coiled about his head like a blazing ice crown, angry and chained.

Pete swallowed as a lorry whooshed by her window, horn blaring. 'I know you can tell me what happened to those children.' She didn't add, And now I have to believe that what happened to you really happened, and God, Jack, you just made every nightmare I've had for twelve years real again. Her stomach and her vision both lurched but she kept herself steady, from the outside anyway. The outside mattered.

'Very probable,' Jack agreed, settling back into his seat. The witchfire abated until there was only the slightest glow to his eyes.

'Then tell me,' Pete said. She heard a begging tone creep in, and hated herself for it.

Jack eyed her for a moment and Pete tried unsuccessfully not to feel naked. The drugs had muted Jack's vitality but they did nothing for his gaze, which burned hotter than she'd ever remembered, fired with rock-bottom desperation.

'I might tell you,' he considered. 'But I've got a couple of conditions if I should decide to divulge my specific arcane knowledge.'

'Name them,' said Pete instantly. She'd clear whatever-it-was with Chief Inspector Newell later—right now Diana and Patrick's timetable was winding inexorably down.

'Condition one: I get a shower, clean clothes, a place to stay—and not some dodgy hostel you shove witnesses into either, a real place,' Jack said. 'Whether or not I decide to tell you anything, you take me there right now.'

He'd never tell her anything useful, of course. Pete wasn't stupid and she could see from the way Jack talked and held himself that he was hating her for something, that her need for what he had was getting him off.

But she wasn't stupid, so she said, 'Done.'

'Condition two,' said Jack. 'If I tell you something, Pete, no matter how bloody outlandish it sounds to your cotton-packed copper ears—you listen. And you believe me.'

How she'd wanted to do that, every second they'd spent together. Couldn't, because admitting the truth of the matter with Jack would have driven anyone reasonable mad. Believing him would be admitting that everything in the world wasn't in plain sight, and it ran contrary to Pete's whole life, the new one she'd built after Jack.

'Pete,' Jack snapped. His expression was hard-edged, the mask in place, waiting to see if she'd give in to his demands.

'Yes, Jack,' she said with a sigh. 'I'll believe you.'

Chapter Nine

Jack glared suspiciously at the door of Pete's flat. 'This doesn't look like any bloody hotel I've ever seen.'

'It's not,' said Pete, peeling the package notices and the card from the estate agent off the door and sliding her key home. 'It's my flat.'

One dark eyebrow crawled upward on Jack's forehead. 'And this is part of our arrangement how, exactly?'

Pete flicked on lights and put up her bag and coat, motioning Jack inside. 'It's a very nice flat. You can have a shower and put on some of Terry's old clothes.'

'Who in bloody fuck-all is Terry?'