Street Magic

'No, love,' said Pete, gripping the rail of Bridget's bed. Cold and straight, inhuman. Strength. 'No, this is Detective Inspector Caldecott. You can call me Pete.'

Bridget's forehead creased. 'Pete's a funny name for a girl.'

'I know,' Pete agreed, breathing deep and keeping her tone steady. 'It's bloody—er, very funny. You think that's a burden, my sister's name is Morning Glory.'

Bridget made no reaction.

Pete chewed her lip. 'Bridget, I need to ask you about the person who took you.'

Bridget's father pressed his palms together, lips moving silently. Bridget let out a small sigh, as if she'd repeated her story many times.

'We went to see the old Cold Man. He lives down the murky path, just around the bend.'

Pete took Bridget's hand. Her skin was cooler than the air, dry like parchment. Bridget was a shadow child, a thin husk with nothing beating beneath the surface.

'Bridget, where is the murky path? Where does it go?'

'I think you've done quite enough,' Dexter Killigan said abruptly, standing and placing his hand protectively on his daughter's shoulder. 'She can't tell you anything.'

'Bridget,' Pete said again, squeezing the girl's papery hand. 'Bridget, what did you see when you went down the murky path?'

She rolled her head toward Pete and fixed Pete with those white eyes, dead pearls in her tiny corpse-face. 'We saw the bone tombs. The dead places where the dreamers go. He strides in the shadows and he reached out his hand to me.'

The hospital room was warm, nearly stuffy, but Pete felt a cold that cut to her bones. Bridget's calm monotone recalled images just beneath the rippling surface of Pete's own memory, black smoke and skeletal phantoms whispering close to her ear.

'And what does he do, Bridget?' she finally managed. Her voice came out dry, as if she'd been smoking for twenty years hence. 'What does the old Cold Man do?'

Bridget was still for a long moment, breath shallow, pulse beating in her translucent throat. Pete leaned in. 'Bridget?'

The little girl's hand latched around Pete's wrist, touch like frost. Pete jumped.

Bridget whispered sibilantly. 'He's touched both of us, Pete Caldecott. Backward and forward, up and down the years, he sees. And he waits.'

Black pools spun in front of Pete's vision as her blood dropped groundward. 'What did you say? How do you…'

But Bridget was gone again, still and silent and asleep. Her father shook himself and then pointed at the door. 'Get out,' he told Pete shakily. 'Get out and don't come back. Leave my daughter alone.'

Pete moved for the door faster than she admitted to herself. She needed to be outside, and needed a fag, not necessarily in that order. 'I'm sorry,' she said to Dexter Killigan before the door swished shut on the tableau in the hospital room.

He didn't answer, mourning Bridget with his stillness and his unblinking, distant stare.

Chapter Eleven

At the door to her flat, Pete paused and listened, catching not a sound from inside. 'Bloody hell,' she muttered. Relief, not worry, that. She'd left Jack cuffed to the headboard of her bed, after he'd passed out on it, and by the sound of things, he'd stayed there.

Pete believed it, right up until she opened the door. The rug in the front room was crumpled and her hall table had been tipped over. 'Shit.' Then, 'Jack?'

He'd be gone, and the only question would be how many of her pawnable possessions he could carry.

Pete jerked a Parliament out of the pack and stomped into the kitchen for a light. She passed the bathroom on her way. Jack lay on his side next to the toilet, the sweat beading on his face the only sign he was alive.

The unlit fag dropped from Pete's mouth. 'Damn you, Jack,' she hissed. Then she was on her knees, turning his head, feeling for a pulse, pulling his eyelids back to examine his ice-chip eyes for shock. They were bloodshot but the pupils flexed at her intrusion, and Jack swatted at her weakly.

'Go 'way.'

'Jesus, Jack,' Pete breathed, sitting back on her heels.

Jack rolled on to his back and moaned, throwing a hand over his eyes.

'He's got fuck-all to do with this. I'm bloody dying. You're an evil spawn of witches, Pete Caldecott.'

Pete rolled a clean towel and slipped it under Jack's head. 'You may be a lot of things, but dying isn't one. And the next time you call me a name, I'm putting my foot up your arse and leaving it there.'

A smile flashed, the devil-grin. 'Same little firecracker. Always liked that you weren't afraid of me.'

'I—' Pete started, but Jack's face twisted, and then he lunged for the toilet and was violently sick.

Pete put a hand between Jack's shoulder blades, feeling the bones grind under the skin as he retched. He was burning hot, but his sweat was like ice water.

'I just need a little,' Jack pleaded as he pressed his forehead against the porcelain rim. 'Just a little to take the edge off. It's been hours, Pete. Fucking days.'

'No,' said Pete without hesitation.

'Fuck you!' Jack screamed, driving his fists into the tile floor of the bathroom. His knuckles left bloody smears.

'Fine,' Pete said, standing. 'You'll either pull through it or you won't. But you did this to yourself, Jack, and if you wanted to keep spiraling down toward the rock fucking bottom, you should have kept your bloody mouth shut about Bridget.'

Jack glared at her, mouth opening to spew another curse, but his jaw slackened. 'Pete,' he said softly. 'Pete, move out of the way.'

Pete glanced behind her, feeling a twinge of ice on the base of her neck. Jack's pupils dilated until his eyes were wormholes rimmed with frost. 'Did someone die in your flat?' he whispered. 'A man, your height, dark visage and eyes?'

Because it was Jack, and not anyone else, Pete found herself nodding as the frost fingers spread out to grip her spine. 'Yes, but that has to be forty years ago now.'

Jack's thin chest fluttered as he sucked in a wavering breath. 'Get away from him,' he told Pete. 'He's hungry.'

Pete's sensible ballet flats were rooted to the tile, and even though her instincts were screaming in concert, a million pinpricks over her skin and psyche, she couldn't move.

'Behind me,' Jack rasped. 'Move your arse, woman!'

She'd never heard Jack so dead serious, and it snapped the frozen spell. Pete scrabbled across the sweat-slicked tile and crouched behind Jack against the shower curtain, which rustled like a gale had just blown through the bathroom.

Nothing was behind her. Pete felt instantly ridiculous, the ice on her skin replaced by the flush of a paranoid caught out. 'Jack…' She sighed. 'Bloody hell, don't do that to me.'

'Shut it,' he said urgently, still fixated on the corner near the door. 'Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you fucking shadow with teeth. Well, bollocks to you.'

The sense of evil just over the left shoulder returned full-force and Pete saw the air in the spot where she'd stood shimmer, as if something were trying to push into the realm of sight through sheer malevolence. 'Oh, God,' she said, because He was the first powerful thing that jumped to mind.

'Forget about that,' said Jack. He dipped an index finger in the ruddy smear he'd left on the tiles and began to draw, a radius filled with swirling symbols that shifted and blended into something strong and binding, like the iron scrollwork on a castle's gate.

The air crackled and rippled, and blackness began to crowd in through the seams in the walls, the drain and faucet of Pete's bathroom sink, a shadowy smoke-ether that brought with it whispers and fluttering cries, phrases that twisted just out of hearing.

Jack's jaw set, bone jumping under the skin. 'Think you're a smart bastard, do you?'

'I don't think this is working,' Pete murmured. Jack was expanding another set of symbols, barely integral when drawn with his shaking fingers.

The smoke filled the bathroom, always at the edges of Pete's vision, narrowing it down into a tunnel the size of a shilling coin. The babble of unearthly voices was joined by smells, and feelings—turned earth, blood-spattered sheets, tiny fingers on Pete's skin and sliding through her hair.

She gripped Jack's shoulder. 'For fuck's sake, Jack, I do not want to die on the floor of my loo.'

And his hand stopped shaking, and his breathing calmed, and with that the circle resolved as bright and solid as if it had been carved into the tiles. The shimmering malice dissolved like dust motes in a bar of sun, and fast as they'd seeped into the realm of the real, the whispers and the smells and the tiny grasping fingers and fangs were gone.

Jack slumped. 'Bloody hell. You couldn't have brought me someplace safer, like, say, the fucking Tower?'

'I…' Pete pressed her hands over her nose and mouth and forced herself into a mold of composure she felt ill suited to fit. 'I have no idea what that was.'

'That,' said Jack, 'is what happens when I don't get my fix.'

'You…' Pete looked at the corner where the presense had spread its oily sheen, and back at Jack. 'You see… whatever that was?'

'Shade,' said Jack. 'Ghost, if you want to be pedestrian about it. A poxy one allowed to hang about for far too long. Bugger all, didn't you have this place cleansed before you moved in?'

'It never occurred to me,' said Pete, although more than once on nights when rain blurred the streetlamps outside into nightmare gloom or the telly turned on by itself, she'd thought about it. The circle of protection Jack could chalk, and grow strong as iron. The five-pointed silver circlet Mum had always worn at her throat.

Jack rolled on his side, eyes half-closed like he'd just taken the purest hit of his life. 'Christ on a motorbike. I'm bloody exhausted. If I get back in the bed, could you restrain your kinky self from handcuffing me again?'

Having seen what she had, just then, Pete simply nodded. 'You won't try to run away?'

'Pete, I'm two breaths from shaking hands with the reaper. Don't be fucking stupid.'

'Back to being a git, I see,' said Pete. 'Maybe there is hope, after all.'

Jack slept for a long time after Pete laid him back in her bed, and she sat at awkward angles in the wicker chair next to him, attempting to make sense of departmental e-mails on her laptop and ignore the fact that they had perhaps a day and a half left if the kidnapper worked according to method. Every time she tried to focus on the pixels, her vision shimmered and blurred just like the shade that had almost appeared.

Just as nebulous were her thoughts, the tails and fragments of questions that wouldn't be answered. Jack moaned in his sleep, his fever dreams gripping his body and causing his hands to lash out under the sheets.

Pete put a hand on his shoulder. 'All right. No one's here except me.'

Dreaming, he didn't have the wherefore to offer venom in return, and Pete found herself curiously saddened by this. She might never find out what had intervened to make Jack hate her, and this illusion was all she had, until Patrick and Diana were found. If they were found.

The thought stirred a blacker feeling in her than the aura of any shade.