Street Magic

'My ex-fiance,' said Pete shortly, 'Bath's down the hall. I'll put the kettle on.'

She left Jack standing and went into the kitchen, careful to keep her back turned so he wouldn't catch on she was watching him. After a moment and a spate of muttering, she heard Jack go down the hall. A door closed and water ran in the basin, rattling the old pipes like a disgruntled poltergeist.

Pete moved swiftly. She threw the bolts on the front door and locked the padlock she and Terry had never used because the area wasn't that bad, shoving the key deep into the catch-all drawer in the kitchen. All the windows were painted shut and covered with safety lattice, so he wouldn't be getting out that way. No back stairs.

Pete crossed herself reflexively, a move she hadn't performed in the eight years since Connor's death, but which seemed highly appropriate now.

She would not allow herself to think about what Jack would say once he emerged from the loo. He'd be bloody angry, but she figured that in his diminished state she could probably take him on. Plus, there were always the handcuffs.

'I'm starved,' Jack announced. 'Call for takeaway.'

Pete jumped and silently berated herself. He was silent as a shade, just as he'd always been, appearing practically out of ether.

Jack's mouth curled into a slow grin. 'Sorry. Didn't mean to frighten you.'

'Not frightened,' said Pete. 'You never frightened me, Jack.'

'Come now, Pete,' he teased. 'I was the scariest thing your little head ever laid eyes on.'

Pete handed him a menu for the curry stand at the corner. 'For a time,' she said. 'A very short time, until I realized what was standing just behind you, in shadow.'

The grin vanished and Jack's grim set returned. 'And you didn't stick around long then, did you? Ran right back to Daddy and safety.'

'Saffron rice or naan?' Pete said quietly.

Jack gauged her, seeing if his pinprick had drawn blood. Pete didn't let him know that ever since he'd appeared back at her shoulder all the old wounds had slipped their stitches. She was bleeding in the open, her scars exposed.

But fuck if she'd let Jack and his new, persistent hostility see it.

And she succeeded, because he shrugged in an elaborate display of apathy and said, 'Rice, I guess.'

One of these days, she'd ask him about that rage he carried like a stone on his back. Pete dialed for takeaway and ordered two curries. If Jack ate, it would be a good sign—not all was lost if he ate.

She turned from the phone and saw him examining the photograph of herself and Terry on the fireplace mantel. Pete had laid it facedown, but Jack picked it up. 'This the bloke?'

'That's Terry,' Pete confirmed.

'He looks like a git.'

'Thank you for the assessment,' Pete said. 'You look like a transient, but we won't delve into that comparison, will we?'

'Ouch!' Jack said with what may have been a faint admiration. 'You bloody well learned to go for the bollocks, didn't you?'

'I may have picked up a skill or two since you last knew me,' Pete agreed. Jack slouched on her sofa and flicked on the telly, changing until he found a Manchester game. 'You got any lager?'

'Not for you,' Pete said. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, brushed her straight black hair behind her ears, where it promptly fell free again. How could Jack Winter be sitting there, watching telly and waiting for takeaway and demanding a drink? She'd seen what Jack could do with little more than a thought and a muttered word or two of the old language, and she had entrapped him into her flat, her home.

Was she mad?

A knock made her start. Jack barely stirred, asleep within seconds once he relaxed.

'That'll be curry,' Pete said. Jack snored, familiar and at the same time as alien as if she'd invited Frankenstein's monster to sleep on her sofa.

Pete paid for the takeaway and tried to eat, but she kept craning over the sounds of Manchester winning to see if Jack was awake. But he slept, still as a breathing corpse, until Pete dumped her dinner into the bin and sat down to write reports on the two missing children that Jack was supposed to help her find. Two days now, when it faded to black outside her windows, Two days— hardly any time at all.

She could wake Jack up, but what purpose would that serve? And if she were completely honest, would a part of her admit to a certain Tightness at Jack being in her flat, at Jack being alive at all?

Pete felt her eyelids drift down, dreamily, and she let herself sleep lulled by Jack's rattling breath and the receding waves of sound from the telly. She woke to the ITV logo bouncing around the screen and Jack's incensed expression, his knotty hand on her shoulder, shaking her.

'Let go!' She brushed him off.

'Open the bloody door!' he grated.

Pete yawned and blinked, not intending to appear indifferent, but she did, and Jack kicked at her scatter rug. 'Fuck it, open up!'

'What could possibly be that important at this hour?' Pete said, rubbing her temples. Purely rhetorical, because she knew without having to ponder. It was the only driving force junkies obeyed.

'Well, let's start with you sodding locking me in!' Jack said.

Pete stood, flexing her foot where it had gone to sleep. 'It isn't a safe neighborhood, Jack.' Flimsy. Didn't Da teach you to be a better liar than that? She prayed, another habit that she'd mostly excised since Jack and Connor had died. Please, let this work out in my favor. Don't let hint see how afraid I am of what he can still do.

'I'm leaving now,' he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. 'Thanks for the curry and the washup.'

'You've only just gotten here,' Pete protested, in what to her ears sounded like a fairly innocent manner. 'And you didn't eat a thing.'

'I've just… got to go,' Jack said. 'Open the door, please?'

He was begging. Fuck all, the heroin must have its jaws around him tight to make Jack Winter resort to that.

Pete drew in a breath through her nose. She met Jack's eyes and said, 'No.'

They narrowed and hardened to ice chips, and his pleasant visage peeled back to show the beast under the skin. 'What d'you mean, 'no'?'

'Just what I said,' Pete replied with a sigh. 'It's late. Whatever-it-is can wait till morning.'

Jack grabbed the picture of Pete and Terry and hurled it at the opposite wall. Glass shattered into snow fragments, blanketing the wood floor.

He rounded on Pete, and she tensed. The blue light flamed up in his eyes and he gripped her by the upper arms, face inches away. She could see that he hadn't shaved, that he had a faint scar vertically along his right cheek—he didn't have that before—and that if she didn't yield to his drive to get a fix, he would have no trouble at all killing her.

'Let. Me. Out,' Jack said slowly.

'Won't do it, Jack,' Pete whispered. 'We can stand here until the sun comes up.'

He squeezed and Pete bit the inside of her cheek. His misery made him bloody strong. 'If you don't get me my fix,' Jack said, 'you can forget about our little bargain to save poor innocent Patrick and Diana. You'll have killed them over me. Now me, I could live with that on my head, but I doubt you can, Pete. You're far too good and pure.'

'You don't know me so well any longer,' Pete said. Jack sighed, looking at the floor between them, shaking finitely all over his body.

'Don't know what you're doing to me, do you? Probably the closest you've ever come to it is renting the Trainspotting video.' He leaned in, their mouths and skin millimeters apart. 'Pete, you don't know. You have no idea what it is to need this. Please. I'm asking you now. Let me out to get my fix, so it doesn't all go horribly wrong.'

'I've been with the Met long enough to know what it is to be an addict,' said Pete, pulling her chin back, because proximity to Jack did strange things to a person. 'And I know when a bloke's trying to manipulate me. No, Jack. Nothing will go wrong and the answer is no.'

One fist went up. 'Open the fucking door before I bash your fucking face.'

Pete felt her jaw tighten and her lips compress. All her patience for this new Jack ran out like water. A dozen years of regret and feeling the hole in her heart, and this was what she got?

Pete used the rage of her wasted nightmares to fuel the snarl in her voice. 'You won't do any such thing, Jack, because you're a fucking coward. And sod your deal, by the way. I said I'd get you washed and fed. I didn't agree to anything about your smack.'

His upper lip twisted but under the surface of his sneer the fire flickered and burned out of his eyes.

Pete gripped the hand bruising her arm and twisted just enough to throw the joints out of prime. 'Bollocks!' Jack yelped. Pete gripped his wrist and elbow in a control hold, propelling Jack toward the bathroom.

'Now we're going to get one thing straight,' she said, shoving Jack into her old claw-footed bathtub and spinning the cold tap open all the way.

'Fuck!' he shouted, collapsing in a heap. 'You fleabit-ten whore! That freezes!'

'I don't care what sort of a problem you've developed in regard to me,' Pete said, ticking off on her fingers. 'I care about Patrick and Diana and finding them alive and well. And you are going to help me, and you're going to do it without the assistance of your sodding heroin, or so help me, Jack, I will personally beat you senseless and deliver you to the lockup at the Yard.'

He glared up at her, his bleached hair dribbling into his eyes like sodden straw. Pete glared back, watching him shiver and trying to ignore the pity shredding her intentions to be hard.

After a long rotation of the clock hands, Jack wiped a hand over his face and reached up to turn off the tap. 'All right, Caldecott,' he said finally. 'You got yourself a deal.'

Chapter Ten

The children's ward at St. John's Hospital made an effort to paint a cheery face on things with bright furniture and murals on the walls, but it had the same effect as a syphilitic prostitute smearing on expensive rouge.

Bridget Killigan's father—Dexter, 'Call me Dex, they all do'—looked up when she swung open the door. 'Inspector?'

'Is she sleeping?' Pete asked. Bridget lay on the hospital bed like a child bride on her funeral pyre.

'She drifts,' said the father. 'In and out.' He stroked Bridget's hair back from her grave face, like she was a porcelain thing, smashable.

'Could I have a word?' Pete asked even though a word would get no results. Bridget's mind was gone as the ash on the end of a burning cigarette. But Pete needed groundwork, if she was going to find Patrick and Diana, needed facts to know that Jack wasn't simply wanking off over her discomfiture.

She needed truth, even if she blended or blurred or broke it, later on. Start with the truth, Connor said, and then you can draw the map, walk anywhere you please. Go to the sodding forbidden forest if you like, but start at true.

'Bridget?'

The girl stirred, the white marble eyes flicking toward Pete as if Bridget could still see, even though the doctor in A&E had assured Pete she was totally blind. 'Who is it? Mum?'