Street Magic

Chapter Twelve

In Pete's dream, Patrick and Diana reached out to her with black and sticky fingers, their mouths smeared with offal as they feasted on the long-dead bodies of those who had come to this tomb before her. Pete tried to run but every way was bricked over, a blank wall rife with spiderwebs and scrabble marks dug by human fingernails.

The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in bloody and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.

He sees you, Pete Caldecott, whispered Bridget Killigan. And he held out his hand, curled around something that fluttered and oozed blood between his knotty fingers. 'Take it. Take what was always yours, tattered girl. Be mine, and whole.'

Pete pressed against the wall, grit working its way down her neck, tiny bugs and specks of graveyard dirt. A rush of wind blew through the crypt, the ends of the robed thing flapping on white bone joints, revealing armor washed clean against his rotted skeleton. Patrick and Diana looked up in concert. Smoke boiled across the floor and coalesced into the form of a man, a man with burning silver eyes that seared Pete's mind, not with heat but with a cold that could stop her heart. She felt a delicate shattering behind her skull, and then her mobile started to ring.

Pete's laptop slid to the floor as she bolted awake, her mobile trilling and dancing on the bedside table. Jack reached out in his sleep and swatted at it.

'Hallo,' Pete mumbled, trying to sound like she hadn't been nodding. Dreaming.

'Well, you're hard enough to get hold of!' Terry snapped.

'Terry.' Pete wondered that she was relieved he'd called. He'd woken her up. That was what mattered.

'I've faxed the new papers to your desk.'

Pete checked on Jack, whose trembling had ceased for the moment, and slipped into the hallway, shutting the bedroom door. 'I'm not at work, Terry.'

She could hear the sneer coming down the line. 'Then where on earth are you? It's not like you to go anywhere off your little track from flat to work and back again.'

'Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry. Grow up.' Pete slapped her mobile shut. Jack groaned, and she returned to the bedside, feeling his pulse and his hot, gleaming forehead. The worst of the withdrawal was past him, please, God, let it be over, and when he woke he'd have raging flu symptoms and a craving like iron claws in his skull, but he'd be sober, and help her, before Patrick and Diana were lost.

Pete used a washcloth to brush Jack's sweat-soaked hair away from his face, and went into the sitting room to let him sleep for as long as she could allow. She tried to eat what takeaway hadn't gone dodgy. Cold aloo gobi did nothing for the state of her stomach, nervous as a pacing cat. Ollie called, and she let her mobile ring through to voice mail, because she didn't have any answers for him.

Pete swept up the broken glass from Terry's picture just to move, and after a second of consideration dropped the snapshot into the bin. It had been taken the day after Pete was promoted to detective inspector, and the day before Terry had asked her to marry him. A moment when things were right and good, and they were so no longer. The picture had no place now that Jack had reentered her life, and her flat.

She straightened up Jack's other messes but she couldn't calm down. Sleeping in the middle of the day had put her at odds, plus the slumbering but screaming presence of the man himself in her bedroom.

Finally, when she knew she'd go mad if she spent another second pacing the floor, back and forth past the bedroom door, she made up the sofa and lay in the twilight, watching the hands of the clock tick toward midnight.

Chapter Thirteen

The sofa wasn't conducive to dreaming, and Pete was glad. She awoke at the first rays of the sun and put the kettle on, collecting Patrick and Diana's case files.

She pushed open the bedroom door with her foot. 'Jack?'

He was curled on his side with the blankets kicked back, shaking and sweating as if he were being held to an invisible flame. He'd gotten worse, inexplicably so. Pete felt frustrated tears building and blinked them away.

She juggled her two mugs and armload of folders and shook his shoulder. 'Jack, wake up.'

His eyes flicked open and then he pressed his fists to his temples. 'Jesus, listen to them all…'

'Brought you some tea,' said Pete. 'I thought we might go over the case files, see if you can glean anything?' The words hung in the air, fragile, and Pete felt the tension shatter them.

'There's a woman screaming,' Jack muttered. 'Over and over, screaming and rocking while she clutches the stillborn to her chest.' He ground his teeth together and shouted, 'Fucking shut up, the lot of you! You'll drive a man mad!'

'What do you hear?' Pete asked.

'Everything,' Jack moaned. 'Every dead thing that I could shut off with a hit is in my head and it's going to explode.'

Pete sipped at her tea because she didn't know what to say and burned her tongue. 'You've always seen things, Jack?'

'Always,' he agreed, panting as his fever fluctuated between arctic and hellfire.

'How did you shut it out, before?' Pete asked. 'I know you weren't using when we knew each other.'

'Wasn't as bad,' Jack muttered. 'Wasn't as loud. I'd get flashes, see shades, kiddy stuff. Nothing… nothing like this fucking bombardment until… that day we were together.'

'What happened in that tomb, Jack?' Pete asked quietly. 'What did we do?' Cloudy memories that she'd written off to trauma threatened to burst through, shadows that stained her real and normal existence crept in from all corners. Pete gritted her teeth and did her best to shut it out.

Jack stared past her into nothing, eyes floating and empty. Eventually they fluttered and closed, and his breathing smoothed into sleep. 'Bollocks,' Pete muttered.

Jack spent the day and most of the night in and out, wandering between worlds, muttering snatches of disembodied conversations. Sometimes he sobbed, or shook, and Pete could never be sure if it was the drugs or what he was seeing.

The unpleasant realization of If he dies, it's on my head made itself known after the third time Jack had thrown up in as many hours, barely more than bile and a little blood. He hadn't eaten since the curry the first night.

'Jack,' she whispered, touching his arm. It was dry now, smooth and cool, like a dead man's skin that had lain outside under a winter moon. He jerked under her, clawing at his own throat and chest.

Pete gripped Jack's bicep and bent close to his ear. 'If you die on me again, Jack Winter, you'd better believe I'm coming into hell after you.'

She started as Jack wrapped his fingers around her wrist, eyes open in the dark and shining blackly into hers. 'That which you do not understand is not yours to offer,' he rasped in a voice not his own. Then he fell back onto the mattress, and Pete jerked awake.

Finally, when dawn rolled over the edge of the window and through the gaps in the shades again, Pete staggered to the sofa, which seemed remarkably welcoming now, and collapsed on her side, weariness permeating down to her bones. She slept a little, hearing the daylight rattles of the flat and the sound of lorries and people in the street, the weak interplay of cloud-shrouded sunlight stroking across her eyelids every so often.

The springs in the sofa defeated her, finally, and Pete muttered curses as she went to forage for caffeine.

Jack sat at the kitchen table wearing denim and one of Terry's polos, bulging around his wasted torso, drinking a cup of tea and smoking a fag. Pete blinked once to ensure it wasn't just another dream.

'You're awake,' Jack said helpfully.

'And you're unpleasant,' said Pete. 'Of course I'm awake.'

'There's some hot water left,' Jack said, exhaling. Pete cast a glance at the packet on the table.

'Are those my Parliaments?'

Jack nodded, dragging deeply. 'Can't expect me to live a life completely free of vices, luv.' His hand was almost steady. A person would have to be looking to catch the tremor or see Jack's graveyard pallor for sickness rather than affectation.

Pete snatched up the packet and shoved it in the pocket of her bathrobe. 'Where did you get these?'

'From your bag,' said Jack. He extinguished the butt on the table, leaving a long coal-colored streak on the vinyl.

'If this is what you're like off the junk,' Pete said, 'it's no wonder you did it for all those years.'

'I apologize,' said Jack with a bitter twist to the words. 'It was bad and rude of me to go through your things. And to use your fine furniture as an ashtray.' He held up one palm with fingers splayed. 'Next time I'll use me hand.'

White scars, ragged circles, dotted Jack's left palm and wrist. Pete nearly lost her grip on her tea mug. 'God, Jack, what did you do that for?'

'Various things.' He shrugged. 'Got pissed, did it for a laugh. For a while pain was the best way I could think to keep the talent under control.'

'That's what lets you see dead things?' Pete lit a Parliament of her own. 'Talent's a funny word to use.'

'So is 'mage,' but I'm that, too.'

Pete exhaled. 'I'm glad you're feeling better.'

'Not really,' said Jack. 'Usually when I quit I nick some methadone or poppers off one of the other layabouts at the squat, makes things a bit easier. You're a real hellcat, making me go cold turkey like that.'

'It was the only way you were going to help me,' said Pete.

'Yes,' agreed Jack. 'And for being utterly cold as coffin nails, you get my grudging respect. But don't you make the mistake of thinking I'm fond of you, or we're squared with each other. Not after you tricked me like that.'

'Any trickery I probably learned from you,' said Pete. 'Now, this isn't a hotel, so what are you going to do to help me find Patrick and Diana? We've got less than a day.'

Jack narrowed his eyes at her, rocking his chair back on its hind legs. Just as Pete was getting ready to scream at his inscrutability he said, 'Got a pen?'

She handed him the one from her message pad silently and he scribbled on the back of a Boots receipt. 'Go here and get me the Grimoire de Spiritus, Hatchett's Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities, and the black briefcase that's hidden behind the LP of Dark Side of the Moon. Understand?'

Pete looked at the Bayswater address. 'Why do you need some dodgy books and a briefcase? Can't you do what you did with Bridget?'

'This is what I did for Bridget… well, most of it at any rate. Look, do you want to find the sodding brats with all their vital parts or not?'