Black 01 - Street Magic

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Wrong for what?"

  "Wrong for me to bring around someone like you," said Jack. "But oh, so bloody right for what we're trying to do." The houselights went down, and in the sudden blackness Jack's eyes burned blue.

  "Bloody hell," said someone from over Pete's shoulder, sotto voce, but in order to be heard over the music you practically had to scream. "Jack Winter, isn't it?"

  "You're fucking stoned," said a male voice. "Jack Winter's dead."

  Jack's smile slipped down the scale to predatory. "See?"

  Pete and Jack turned in concert to face a pair of young, pale, serious faces, boy and girl, both staring at Jack sidelong.

  "If so," Jack said to them, "I'd say I managed to make one bloody attractive corpse."

  The girl clutched the boy's arm, tearing a hole in his fishnet sleeve with her dead-blood nails. "By the Black! Arty, it's really him."

  Arty regarded Pete and Jack through hooded eyes, bloodshot with whatever was in his glass. He sneered when Pete returned his stare. "Yeah. Guess he hasn't kicked."

  He swung himself to face Jack, limbs heavy. Pete shifted herself to the balls of her feet, ready to deal Arty a punch to his pointy chin if he moved in on her or Jack.

  "Do you know there's a bounty out on your pretty little Billy Idol head?" Arty slurred.

  "Why, son?" Jack said. He curled his lip slightly, carrying on with the reference. "Are you going to collect?"

  "Oh, don't mind him," the girl gushed, dealing Arty a shot to the ribs. "My brother's a bloody idiot when he's in his cups. I'm Absithium, and he's Artem, but you can call us Arty and Abby." She extended her hand palm down, as though she expected Jack to kiss it, and he did. Hattie grunted at the gesture, her blotchy forehead crinkling.

  "Jack Winter," Jack told Abby, ignoring Hattie as if she were a lamp or a hatstand.

  "I knew it was you," Abby simpered. "Arty and I… we're twins, but I'm an intuitive and he's got other talents."

  Pete noticed a ripple in the crowd around them. A shifting of heads and eyes, when Jack said his name. "Chumming the bloody waters," she muttered, taking Hattie's fresh glass of whisky and draining it herself.

  Abby jerked her chin at Hattie. "I've seen you before, too. At Millie Child's?"

  "Yeah, whatever," said Hattie. "I spent a few nights there last month."

  "The new moon sex rituals," said Abby sagely. She looked Pete over and dismissed her in the space of a heartbeat. "May I ask you a question?" she demanded of Jack, tilting her heavy black beehive to one side in an expression that Pete supposed would be coquettish if Abby hadn't been made up like a dead porcelain doll.

  "Anything, my dear," Jack said.

  "Where have you been, all this time?" Abby chewed on her thin lower lip. "I mean, we all,"—she gestured at the dancers—"have our theories."

  "And wagers," said Arty with a shift of interest. "Personally, I say you were pinched by the common police and spent the last dozen years being buggered over at Pentonville." He took a swig of his pint, face knobby with belligerence. "So where'ye been, Winter?"

  Jack leaned close to Arty, meeting the boy's kohled eyes. He held there, his lips parted and barely an inch from Arty's ear, until Arty stilled completely.

  Then Jack breathed, "Hell."

  He slung his arm around Hattie, picked up Arty's pint and drained the remains. "But now I'm back, and I'm bound to raise a little infernal noise of my own." He kissed Hattie, hard, smearing her lips apart and probing with his tongue. Hattie yielded like an understaffed doll.

  Pete became aware that the music had faded to the end of the track and the club was largely silent, everyone waiting to see what Jack would do next.

  Arty cast his eyes at a few fellows of comparable size and thickness. "Sure, Winter. Play your set. Let all of them see what a bad man you are." He slid from his stool like a small mountain moving. "Hell or not, hasn't helped you much. You look bloody wasted." The other boys came to his shoulders.

  Pete pointed her finger at Arty. "Don't," she warned.

  "What are you going to do, curse me?" he sneered.

  Pete looked to Jack, who was fondling Hattie with a bored expression as he glared at Arty. His eyes flicked to hers for a second, and he was still Jack. Make an impression.

  Arty grabbed the lapel of Pete's jacket. "I asked you a question, you slag."

  The DJ began another song, and Pete hit Arty in the jaw, in the soft spot just above the bone that snaps the head around and brings unconsciousness.

  She raised her eyes to the other boys. "Jack doesn't need your meddling and I don't want you breathing my air. Piss off."

  Abby jumped in between Pete and the boys. "They didn't mean it!" she cried. Arty groaned and sat up, shaking his head. "How could you?" she hissed at him.

  "Winter's not a sorcerer!" he said defensively. "How's I supposed to know he practices bloody black magic?"

  "I practice whatever I bloody want," Jack said. He slung his other arm around Abby. "Let's leave off these cunts and find someplace private, eh, luv?"

  Abby fairly glowed. "Of course! I know just the place."

  Jack, Hattie, and Abby walked through the room, dancers parting like a furrow, and Pete followed before the passageway closed and she was trapped. Every set of eyes in the room bored holes in her back until the door boomed shut behind her.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Abby took them to a turreted Victorian, black with red light shining from every window. She lifted the iron knocker, a fanged nymph's head, and let it fall once.

  "What is this place?" Pete stopped at the foot of the steps.

  "Mad Chen's," muttered Hattie. She let Jack half drag her up to the door. Pete looked up and down the street. Dead trees and dead leaves bent and scuttled toward her, a winter wind pushing behind.

  "Pete." Jack jerked his head at her as the door opened and a hooligan in a silk jacket peered out. He looked at Abby, nodded, and then stepped back.

  Mad Chen's was lit by gaslight, red as new blood spilling, burning some sort of alien fuel. Thick wispy smoke drifted toward the tin ceilings, painted over with spray-can slogans, and under the smoke a garden of beds lay scattered across the wide rooms.

  The beds were of every description—day lounges and iron institutional frames. All made up in silk or satin, no filthy mattresses like where Pete had found Jack.

  Most of the beds were occupied, and slow-moving, doe-eyed women passed among them holding long boxes and trays with pipes and small sticky globs of pungent brown in wooden boxes. Their breasts and nipples, ringed or studded or tattooed, gleamed in the low red light.

  "Up here," said Abby as they passed through the main part of the den, and she led them up a spiral staircase and into a narrow hallway.

  Some of the doors had a key sticking out, and some were locked, with cries or silence coming from behind. Abby turned a key in the second door on the left and went in, slouching down on a sofa. "Fuck, I'm bored. Should we ring Mad Chen to bring up some poppy and absinthe?"

  Hattie flopped next to her. "I'd murder a hit of anything right now."

  Pete remained standing. "I have to go to the loo." She narrowed her eyes at Jack before she slipped back out the door and went down the hall, trying doors until she found a narrow closet with a toilet and a bulb on a pull chain.

  She shut the door and leaned against the wall, and realized once she was still that her legs were shaking. The Black pulsed against her, and she swore she could feel it on her skin, like the opium resin, sticky and visceral.

  "It never really gets better."

  Jack opened the door and slid into the closet with her. Pete had to turn sideways to accommodate him.

  "Jack, what in all Hell are we doing here?"

  He leaned his head back against the wall and produced a fag, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Abby and her twit of a brother are sorcerers. If they don't go blabbing to Whoever's trying to get rid of me before this fag's gone, I've no sort of currency left with this lot at all and I might as well
chuck myself off of Tower Bridge and be done with it."

  Jack smelled like whisky and rain, like lightning had just struck earth. Pete breathed in him and the tobacco, closing her eyes.

  A pressure on her shoulder, as Jack closed his free hand around it. "Thank you, for going along. Probably would be bleeding internally in some dank alley if you hadn't smacked that bloody Arty." He half grinned at her. "Where did a sweet little girl like you learn to throw a punch, anyhow?"

  "I was never particularly sweet, Jack," Pete said. "You would have found that out, if you'd stuck around."

  He smiled humorlessly, around the cigarette. "Regrets get you nothing except a bloody face and a broken heart if you're lucky, Pete." He cracked the door of the closet and peered out. "Should be enough time for Abby to tip off whoever her master is and end this idiot idea they have of chasing me all over the bloody city. Let's get back."

  He brushed past Pete, their full length touching, and then in a flutter of her heartbeat, he was gone again.

  Pete pushed back against the pressure under her mind, the pressure that Jack said never really got better, and she followed him.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  "Mad Chen's got some shit in from the Golden Triangle," said Abby when Pete and Jack came back. She reappraised Pete when they entered the room together. "Your friend going to take part?"

  A wavy glass bottle full of slightly luminous green liquid had appeared on the table, and Jack took a tumbler, filled, and downed it.

  "She won't." He coughed. "Then who would there be to knock about anyone who irritates me?"

  "Why do you keep mundanes around if you're not fucking them?" Abby asked with genuine curiosity.

  "This absinthe tastes like a bloody tramp pissed in a gutter and had it bottled," Jack said. "And has anyone ever told you that for such a pretty slip of a thing you ask a lot of silly sodding questions?"

  Pete went to the window and watched the street, but nothing except shadows and the crooked skeletons of bare trees stared back. She drew the velvet curtains. Dust shook out of their folds, old dust that smelled like vellum and bone, and she sneezed.

  Hattie watched her mournfully. "You like, a bodyguard then?"

  Only one door in and out of the room, and no closet she could see—just overstuffed furniture and an old peeling sleigh bed with a ragged coverlet. Pete nodded absently at Hattie. "Something like that."

  "Ever met David Beckham?" Hattie said. She looked like a sad leather-clad raggedy doll, with her featureless skinny limbs and chopped-off eggplant hair.

  "I only ever looked out for Jack," Pete told her. "I'm a detective inspector with the Met."

  Abby's head snaked around. "You're a what?"

  "Trust me, darling, if I was going to take you in I would have done it long before you opened your mouth," Pete said. "Drink your mixer and behave yourself."

  "Jack…" Abby started, but he glared at her over his second green tumbler.

  "Pete's with me. Shut it." He gave her a cool smile when she pouted. "Besides, I need your help now, Abby. Need to pick that black little head of yours."

  "Is that so?" Abby glared at Pete in vindication as she downed her second drink in one go.

  "Yeah," said Jack easily. "Ran into some blokes a few days ago, sorcerers like you, but nowhere near as lovely."

  Abby snorted, poured herself another glass, sipped it. "So?"

  "So, what's a smart little sorcerer up to these days?" said Jack. "I know something big's gearing up, so don't bother to lie. You lot have been twitchy as jackrabbits ever since I dove back into the scene." He went to Abby and brushed the stark black hair out of her eyes, cupping her chin between his thin fingers. Pete felt her stomach give an uncomfortable cramp.

  "Come on," Jack murmured. "You can tell old Jack Winter. Whisper it in my ear. Always had more of an affinity for your kind of magic, anyway. It wouldn't even be a betrayal, luv."

  Abby swallowed, a petal flush creeping into her porcelain cheeks. "They say… well… they say that something big is right on the other side of the veil. A spirit, or some such thing… and, well, some of us are offering service. Letting it gather power, and helping it, because when he comes through, he'll reward us."

  "He," said Jack. "You have anything more specific for me, darling?"

  Abby gulped the rest of her third helping of absinthe. The dry scent of licorice permeated through the smoky air. "I could have my throat cut for telling you that much, mage." She hiked her black hobble skirt over her knees and cast a languid look in Jack's direction. "If the questions are over, do you want to—"

  Then Abby choked, her pale slender fingers scrabbling at the hollow of her throat, her eyes going wide and the irises expanding with effort.

  Hattie moved away from her, with surprising speed. "What's her problem, then?"

  Abby gagged, her pale pink tongue protruding between lips that were bordered in blue. She really did look like an animated corpse, jerky and lifeless as black spittle dribbled from the corner of her mouth.

  Jack looked at Abby, looked down at his own empty glass. "Oh, fuck me." He dropped the tumbler with a splinter of crystal and dove for a decorative basin in the corner of the room, shoving his finger down his throat.

  Pete grabbed Abby, who convulsed as if she were on a string, leaving ragged red streaks along her neck as she tried to claw the obstruction from her windpipe. Pete pushed the girl's hands away from her flesh—Abby's strength was no more than that of a housecat—and laid her back, turning her head to one side and shoving index and middle fingers down her gullet to clear an airway.

  In the corner, Jack vomited violently into the basin, skinny shoulders hunched as he retched and shook.

  Viscous black closed around Pete's fingers, seemingly gallons of the stuff, flowing from Abby's mouth and filling her throat. An all-over shudder, a death rattle, Pete would think later, and Abby went still, black swimming up to cover her eyes in opaque film.

  Hattie spoke from around a fist thrust into her mouth. "That was some bad shit, I think."

  "Nothing you could have done, Pete," said Jack weakly, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and spitting into the basin. "Not that you'll ever lose sleep over failing to save a treacherous little bint like her."

  Pete sat back on her heels, the black stuff staining her fingertips. She brushed it on her jeans. "What in the hell was all that, Jack?"

  Jack took Pete's discolored fingers in his and sniffed. "Morgovina mushrooms," he said finally. "Fae plant. Melts you from the inside out. Nasty little way to die."

  "The absinthe disguised the scent," said Pete, noticing the half-dusty, half-rotted stench rising from the pool of liquid under Abby's head.

  "Brutal but not clever," said Jack.

  "You were bloody stupid to drink anything in this place. Think you'd never heard a folktale in your life," Pete said. Jack raised an eyebrow at her.

  "I'll have you know that my near-death experience has left me rather fragile and your attitude is not helping." He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it across a chair, then lit a Parliament and set it in the ashtray on the small table. "And more to the point, find a place to hide, because whoever poisoned the booze will be up to make sure the job is done any minute now."

  Hattie heaved what may have been a resigned sigh and disappeared down the hallway to the loo. Pete lit on a wardrobe open to display a collection of antique opium pipes and closed herself in it.

  "Lucy in Narnia," she whispered.

  Jack leaned against the wall behind the door, hands in his pockets, looking almost bored.

  "Not up to your usual standards of excitement?" Pete said through the keyhole.

  "This isn't excitement," said Jack. "Never could fathom why sorcerers thought sitting about cutting your forearms and doing Victorian drugs was such a great laugh." He rolled his neck from side to side. "Unless there's magic, blood, or disgustingly attractive women involved, I couldn't care bloody less at this point in me life."

  "So the
last week has been a complete loss, then," Pete said.

  Jack looked at her, and even through the small crack in the wardrobe Pete felt the snowy chill of his eyes on her skin. "Not a complete one," he said after a moment. "Not in a few ways that matter…"

  "Still yourself," Pete hissed, though she was rue to interrupt him. "Someone's coming."

  Footsteps creaked along the corridor and a hand tried the knob, pausing in surprise when the owner found the door unlocked. Slowly, it swung wide and revealed a sallow-faced man and an olive-skinned woman dressed in plain black, witchfire burning plum-colored in their hands.

  The man jerked his chin at Abby's body, and the woman clicked over on precise stiletto heels and felt for a pulse. She shook her head, and the man stepped over the threshold.

  Faster than smoke, Jack stepped out from his hiding spot and banged the door shut. "Evening, girls."

  "Winter," the man hissed.

  Jack gave a wide grin and a nod. "Observant cunt, aren't you?" He picked up the cigarette he'd lit and had a drag on. "Though I have to tell you—and take this as constructive critique, by all means—the poisoned absinthe? Tacky, mate. Look, you killed your own lapdog."

  The woman, still crouched with her back to Pete, worked a small curved blade out from the cuff of her jacket.

  "Jack!" Pete shouted, banging open the wardrobe and grabbing the closest weapon, an ivory opium pipe. She jabbed the carved and pointed tip in between the woman's shoulder blades and the sorcerer arched back with a cry.

  The man brought his hand up, the witchfire changing color into something sulfurous and corrosive, but Jack hit him before the magic could form into anything useful. Blood shot from the sorcerer's split lip, and he dropped after swaying for a moment.

  Jack reached over and grabbed Pete's hand. "Now we have to run, luv."

  "What about Hattie?"

  "Hattie will be happier locked in the loo, trust me."

  Pete followed him down the hall, her heart jackhammer-ing like she were back outside the door of her first bust, sweating inside her stab vest. Jack kicked open a thin door leading to stairs upward.