Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The pub—it was a pub, not a club or a dodgy bar—was dark and smelled like damp rot with an overtone of grease baked onto every surface. Jack's bleached head flashed under the half-dark fluorescent tube lights, dipping toward a glass. A bird's bill and a bird's body in the shadows, dark-feathered wings and gleaming eyes.

  "Another girl is missing," said Pete without preamble when she reached his table. Jack raised his head, red-shot eyes and a blurry smile swimming into view.

  "Knew you'd come looking for me."

  Pete took the glass out of his hand, the gesture feeling as if it were carved in granite. "You're drunk."

  "Very good, Inspector." He grabbed a green bottle with a black label and swigged directly. "I am pissed, in body and spirit, and I will continue to crawl inside this whisky bottle until that bloke in the corner with the slit throat shuts up about his mother."

  Pete glanced over her shoulder. The corner booth was empty. "You're not fixing."

  "Aren't we the bright penny," Jack slurred, taking another drink. Pete grabbed him by the arm, but he slipped it and batted at her. "No, Inspector, this time we're not making any clever deals. No threats and no banter. You shot your bolt with me and while in a moment of insanity I may have asked for your help, I now fully agree that I am worthless to the world at large. You've put me in my place, right and proper."

  Pete grabbed Jack's bottle and upended it, letting the whisky flow out into his lap. He yelped and jumped up, the amber stain spreading like a gut shot. "Stop sodding crying," Pete told him. "Another girl is missing."

  "So?" Jack muttered, slumping squishily back into his seat. Pete waved at the lurking publican.

  "Coffee. Black and hot as you can make it. So, Jack, she was like you. Or at least had the potential to be."

  As if she'd dropped him in a porcelain tub of ice, the unfocused sorrow flowed out of Jack's face and the edge, sharp as a flick-knife, returned. "Are you sure?"

  "I wouldn't be in this bloody place if I wasn't," Pete said. "What in bugger-all is that smell?"

  "It's kidney pie every lunch hour. Specialty of the house," Jack said. "The girl. How old?"

  "Ten," said Pete. "Her name is Margaret—"

  Jack cut the air with a finger. "I don't care what her name is." The publican slammed down a dingy cup of coffee in a saucer with sugar and cream packets tottering at his elbow. Jack swigged it and made a face. "Bloody hell. Could strip paint off your motor, that. What's really important is the significant."

  "What's a significant?" Pete said.

  "Novices usually have something around them, an animal or a piece of the earth, a physical piece of the magic that they can cling to. Anything in the room, feathers or odd rocks or a pet poisonous spider?"

  Pete closed her eyes and rotated slowly through Margaret's room, the pink bedspread worn thin, the secondhand desk. The little girl's mobile over the bed, gently drifting make-believe constellations that repeated in paint on the ceiling.

  "Stars," she said. "A star. They were on everything. Pink, mostly, if that makes a difference."

  Jack swore into his coffee. "What kind of star?"

  "Five-pointed," said Pete. "Just a usual star."

  "Not usual," said Jack. "The star is the witch, a white practitioner and a channel for pure energy. A bloody open line to the white side of the next world."

  "I'm not going to like where this is going," Pete stated. Already she felt it, the dark undertow of magic against her skin. The thing that blinded children, that ate their memories and their life force, laughed at her quietly from the corner of her dream crypt. "The girl was drawing symbols on her walls. She said Fae were after her."

  Jack lifted a shoulder. "Probably are, but this thing isn't a Fae. They have their rules and their ceremonies and their love of shine and innocence, but what's taken the girl isn't Fae, and we've got bigger problems now than those little bastards. If whatever is out there starts feeding on Megan—"

  "Margaret."

  "Bloody whatever. It will gain energy like there's no next minute. It will infuse itself with pure magic until it's bright as a dwarf star and then I won't be able to do fuck-all with an exorcism, and we're all buggered."

  "Mosswood told you how to find this thing," said Pete. She raised her index finger when Jack opened his mouth to object. "I know that you can find it, so why aren't we looking right now? Before Margaret ends up blind and spiritless?"

  "It's not that simple," Jack grumbled.

  "Oh, no," said Pete, jerking the whisky bottle away as Jack went for it again. "What happened to 'Poor me, the Robert Smith Fan Club doesn't respect me, now I've to prove what a big strong mage I am?'"

  Jack glared at her, pursing his lips when she set the whisky bottle out of reach. Finally he said, "Anyone ever tell you you're a stubborn little bit?"

  "You," said Pete. "And I knew it already. Come on, then." She took Jack by the elbow and helped him out of his chair. He stumbled against her and Pete snaked an arm under his. "Don't you dare try to get a feel."

  "I don't even like you, remember?" said Jack. Pete grumbled under her breath as they came out of the tavern into dim silver sunlight.

  "Let's walk for a bit," said Jack when she pointed them toward the Mini. "Clear me head."

  Pete nodded. Jack turned them to the river, the salty, laden air seeming to soothe him. He still leaned heavily on Pete and she let the silence stretch, allowing herself to think for a few footsteps rung on brick that there were no missing children, no ghosts. Just her, and Jack, together in a day full of mist.

  "This isn't going to be easy, you know," Jack said. His hand on Pete's shoulder tightened for a pulse beat, and she looked up at him. Jack caught her eye and curled his mouth in a not-quite smile. He looked to Pete as if he were smiling at a story of a grimly ironic death.

  "Mosswood said all we needed was the Trifold Focus thing," said Pete. She didn't like the smile. It shot straight to the same black place where the daylight echoes of her nightmares resided. Her skin chilled where it touched Jack, like she'd brushed the hide of something swampy and old.

  "Mosswood says a lot of things, but in all the years I've known him, I've never heard the whole truth," said Jack. "The Trifold Focus is a scrying tool, not a magic wand."

  "You use magic wands?"

  "Don't be a smartarse," Jack said. "The fastest way to find a ghost is to ask something that traffics in them."

  "Something?" Pete demanded.

  "A mage on his own could spend years sorting through all the pathetic bits of spirit left behind from suicide and traffic accidents and bugger knows what else," said Jack. He stopped at the rust-bubbled iron railing at the edge of the Thames, the slimy bricks breathing sea smell over the boiling brown water. "Mosswood's given me a direct line."

  "Will you stop being cryptic?" said Pete. She put her hands on Jack's shoulders and said, "Tell me what I have to do to save Margaret Smythe. Whatever it is. I'll do it."

  Jack shook his head, staring at the water. "You call in a favor, Pete. You ask what's already on the other side, the things that crawl in the tunnels between the veils. You call up a demon and cut a deal."

  Pete's carefully practiced expressionlessness, the mask she wore just like Jack wore his devilish smiles, slipped then. She felt her lips part and knew the disbelief had started in her eyes. "You did say demon. We're talking Faust. 'The Devil and Daniel Webster,' Dorian bloody Gray…"

  "The Devil," said Jack. "The Devil doesn't exist, Pete. He's the fear in our reptile brains. Demons exist. The Trifold Focus is used to call them and compel them into your will."

  Pete pressed a hand to her forehead and turned her back on Jack. The Thames stirred gently, black ripples shivering like raven feathers.

  "I can't let you do this," she said finally. "There's got to be another way."

  "No," said Jack. "And if you really believed there was, you'd be able to look me in the eye." He walked over to her, swaying just a little. The air around Pete crackled. "Was a time I did this sort
of thing often," said Jack quietly.

  "Was there a time when you asked me to help you?" Pete whispered. Jack sucked in a breath, then sighed and sat down on the curb. Pete watched him light a Parliament and draw deep. Blue smoke drifted out of his nose to mingle with the haze above the river.

  "Not that time," said Jack. "Or any other. Not demons. Never you."

  Pete watched him sit, hunched, smoking, his platinum spikes flattened on one side from where he'd slept. She stood the same distance from Jack now that she'd stood from him across the circle in the tomb. Nothing flowed over her skin now. The ripples underneath her thoughts were quiet. Jack hadn't lied to her.

  Pete went and sat down next to him, pulling out her own pack of fags. "All right, then," she said, lighting hers off the end of Jack's. "How does one call a demon?"

  PART TWO

  The Black

  "It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?"

  —Bram Stoker, Dracula

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Pete took Jack home, put the kettle on, and made two mugs. "Sugar. No cream."

  Jack accepted the mug and took a sip, then yelped. "Bloody hell, that's burning hot!"

  "It's just come off the boil, ninny," Pete said, blowing across the surface of her own tea. Jack pulled a pout.

  "'M not a ninny."

  Pete stirred her own mug. "I'm sorry, I must have been thinking of another mage." She let herself smile, and felt a jump against her rib cage when Jack returned it, a brief flicker like a kiss of flame.

  Jack dropped his eyes and dug in his jacket pocket, finding a scrap of vellum paper and a pencil. "Going to need some things for what's ahead. You'll have to take me to the Kings Road."

  A memory of a basement shop fragrant with spices and spiderwebbed with intermingling magics stirred. Pete swallowed and nodded. Margaret. Bridget, Patrick, and Diana. Forget the rest. "Fine."

  "And there's the matter of getting my hands on a Trifold Focus," Jack said. Pete stopped her tea mid-sip.

  "You don't have one?"

  Jack laughed. "No, Pete. No, I don't happen to have one of those lying about."

  "What's so bloody amusing? How do we get one?" said Pete. "Buy it?"

  Jack snorted. "Would that it were that simple."

  "Mosswood made it sound simple," Pete muttered. Mosswood was straight ahead and trusting, solid as an oak. Jack shifted his gaze to his list. He was movable as Mosswood was still, the wind through the sacred grove.

  "The only Trifold Focus I know of is in the private collection of a bloke called Travis Grinchley," Jack said.

  "Grinchley not the lending type?" Pete guessed. Jack smiled, a predatory showing of teeth.

  "The last man who stole from him floated up in the Thames two weeks later, with his eyes and his tongue missing."

  "Could be worse," said Pete gamely. Jack stuck his pencil behind his ear.

  "They cut out his tongue to make room for his heart to be shoved in."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah."

  "So what's your grand plan?" said Pete. The sitting room had darkened as the fog outside turned from daytime silver to nighttime velvet. She flicked on the nearest lamp and shadows sprang to life on the walls.

  "Grinchley will never give it over willingly," said Jack. "And you'd be mad to fuck with a collector of dark magics. So that leaves outright treachery and low dealings."

  "You look awfully happy about that," said Pete.

  Jack smiled, dropping her a wink. "As if I'd be anything else, luv."

  "Still haven't told me the great trick to get the Focus away from this Grinchley person." Pete lifted an eyebrow, her motherly gesture, used on teenaged shoplifters and errant schoolchildren. Jack scribed a circle in the air with his finger.

  "We'll just twist him, luv. Give him a bit of street magic and shift the thing right out from under him. A minor entity of some sort should do the trick."

  "More summoning." Pete felt a ball of something hard and unpleasant grow just under her heart. "Jack…"

  "Pete." He closed his hand into a fist. "This is what I did, very well, for quite a time before I met you. Let me do my work. You promised."

  "I promised to listen to your rot," Pete shot back. "I didn't promise bugger-all about this idiotic idea you have to steal from a man who slices out people's hearts."

  "Translocation," said Jack. "My idiot idea is translocation. I never have to get within a hundred meters of the man and I'll be done with the Focus before Grinchley even realizes it's missing. Devil knows he has enough arcane shite in his musty old house."

  Think of Margaret, Connor whispered. Think of every night after you find her dead and cold if you don't listen to Jack. "I just hope I can," Pete muttered.

  "What?" Jack said distractedly. He stood up and sorted through the armload of books Pete had brought to him, paging through the index of the Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities.

  "Nothing." Pete sighed. She set her tea aside. "I'm going to go do paperwork while you do… whatever it is you're doing."

  "Research," said Jack. "Got to figure which sort of entity will be willing to trade with me for this favor. Imps might do it. Imps love sneaking about."

  "You don't just… know?" Pete asked. "They don't make you memorize that stuff, like?"

  Jack shook his head. "There was no 'they,' Pete. I didn't go to some bloody school and get instructed by gits in robes. You either die quickly because your talent overwhelms you, or you learn quickly and stay a step ahead of whatever wants to chew on your arse." He thumped the thick black book. "Research is a mage's best friend. Why would I carry all that dusty knowledge around when I can just rely on the sods who came before me?"

  "Fine." Pete held up her hands. "Like I said, I'll be upstairs in the office closet. Nothing personal, but the very idea turns my stomach."

  "You'll get used to it," said Jack. "You got any chalk in case I need to set a protection hex?"

  "In the kitchen drawer with the cling film," said Pete. "And no, I won't get used to it."

  She turned and left Jack in the shadows and went into her tiny office—more of an artist's garret than anything, up a flight of stairs barely wide enough for two feet side by side. Her desk and her computer were wrapped in a thin film of dust. Pete clicked on her scrollwork lamp with its bright reading bulb, turning the window facing into the street to a sheet of onyx.

  Jack shifted something in the sitting room, and Pete smelled the chalk dust clear as if she were next to him. That dark stirring of deep, old things pushed against the front of her skull. She searched her desk for aspirin to deal with the persistent headache, but found none.

  Pete pressed her forehead against the chilled windowpane. Fog thickened and everything past the glass was invisible and gold-tinged, until the streetlight at the end of the block winked out.

  She drew back and saw ice crawl across the glass where her breath met it.

  Beyond the pane, the fog swirled and parted, as if Avalon were about to reveal itself. Pete felt her body and mind become entranced, the cold seeping down from her bones into her blood and her skin, ice crystals weighing her eyelashes.

  Noise and sensation faded, and the fog outside swirled and twisted back on itself and coalesced into a woman's face.

  Something whispered, from that dark wellspring that rippled and chattered when Pete touched things not entirely made of earth. A tiny tug on her mind, beyond the cold and the pale, pale face with eyes closed, body clothed in robes of purest silver mist that floated in the night outside.

  The whispers rose to the pitch of a scream in the back of Pete's mind, a flock of tiny mouths crying out in concert. Peril.

  Pete gasped, taking in air so cold it burned her chest like a gout of flame. The pale face outside opened in a soundless scream, fangs the color of old bone snowing beneath lips stained with blood, warm and steaming against the thing's frozen skin.

  Pete let ou
t a scream of her own. "Fuck me!"

  The garret window shattered, throwing a snowstorm of glass inward, and Pete fell, tangling her legs in her chair's and going down hard on her left shoulder. Pain, disorientation, a sensation of fullness in her head, like she'd caught the feedback of an amplifier turned on full.

  Frozen obsidian claws raked her back and the silver mist poured into the room, forming three of the female shapes. The one who broke the window hissed, staring down at Pete with empty black eyes that seemed to stretch to the bottom of the world.

  Pete opened her mouth to yell for Jack, but was deafened by a scream that went straight through her, rending flesh and piercing bone.

  The mist-woman closed her mouth, blood bubbling down her chin, and hissed, "Where is the crow-mage? The man called Winter?" Her voice was sibilant and split Pete's ears until she was sure she was deaf, hearing the mist-woman's voice through the echo inside her skull.

  "I don't…" she said, or thought she did. She couldn't hear, not even her own heartbeat.

  The mist-woman's robe smelled of marsh water and the blood of ancient battlefields. It slithered over Pete's face as she lay at their feet, body stiff and chilled, head ringing. Jack. She had to get Jack. Warn Jack.

  "Where is the mage called Winter?" they demanded again, a concert of moans and sighs. Their hair floated as if they were submerged, black as muddy reeds. Behind their shoulders, a line of light glowed, the edge of the door. "The mage called Winter!" the bansidhe screamed. They looked like every one of Juniper's stories, down to the black claws that curled from sodden, wrinkled hands.

  The first bansidhe swooped and brought her face close to Pete's. "Give him to us!"

  Fear coiled, sprung, wrapped itself around Pete's heart like a rusty iron chain, but she met the bansidhe's black eyes, and snarled with all the pain and fury she could expel. "Go back to Hell." She rolled, wrenching all the already painful parts of her body, and wrapped her hands around the lamp, swinging it through the bansidhe's drowned corpse face.

  The bansidhe howled, claws raking at its face where Pete hit, the skin melting and running over a skull alive with maggots. Stinking marsh water spattered on the floor.