Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Jack, should have listened to Jack, should have known that you running off would go this way. Now what will you do? All of the normal whispers and shivers of magic that Pete had come to recognize in her renewed time with Jack faded in the operating theater and her skin felt slick with something else, cold and silken as spoiled milk.

  This is the Black. People die here, and usually because someone's decided to kill them.

  "Shut up, Jack. Since when are you bloody right about anything?" Pete muttered. She tried her mobile, got no signal underground, and paced a few times, keeping clear of the golem. She was truly, properly fucked. Trapped in here until Grinchley or Perkins decided what to do with her.

  "They'll find my bones when they knock-mis place down to make a motorway," Pete said. The golem keened and hissed. "Be quiet!" Pete shouted at it, because it was better than crying in frustration.

  A groaning and scrabbling began from outside the iron door, and Pete steeled herself for anything, but Perkins appeared, pushing open the massive gate with some effort.

  He caught sight of the first golem, still and spent on the floor. "Oh," Perkins said. "Oh, dear."

  Pete snatched up a scalpel from the rolling tray by the surgery, which also held bundles of half-rotted herbs and a black candle smeared in blood alongside the precise row of instruments, and stepped into Perkin's view. "He was a lightweight."

  Perkins turned to her, his eyes glittering. "Do you have any idea how long it takes to animate one of those, you stupid girl? You've cost me months."

  Pete allowed herself a smirk that she did not feel. "Well, it's not exactly a model airplane, is it?"

  Snarling, Perkins raised his hand, black mist crackling with ice trailing from his fingertips. "Pain," he said simply, and Pete felt every muscle, every tendon and joint in her, seize with the worst kind of agony. It was fever-pain and torn muscles and a dull rusty nail in her flesh all at once.

  A high buzzing scream cut the air, hers, and she fell back against the surgery table, vision blacking out. The half-golem on the table latched its teeth around her wrist and the cold pressure against her bones sent her into panic.

  Pete heaved against the golem, and the flesh of her wrist tore as the golem went flying through the air with a hiss, landing on Perkins like a sack of lead pipes. Pete scattered the herbs and the candle, feeling her hand grow slick and warm as blood pumped out of the tear in her skin. The cold wet magic in the room shifted, loosened, and the golem let out a scream of victory.

  Perkins fell over and the golem clawed at his face and chest, latching its teeth to his throat and gnawing with fierce desire until Perkins's neck artery fountained blood and he gurgled, going still. The golem continued to eat, blood flowing through it and onto the floor through its loose-ended entrails.

  The pain Perkins had laid on her lessened slowly after he died, not at all like Pete would have expected from a spell, but it did lessen and she did climb the slippery stone steps back into the too-bright scrub room, which she saw now also held an altar of bones and pickled bits of skin and flesh in jars. A skull grinned at her from the center of an omega symbol wrought into clay. Pete wished fleetingly for Jack, he'd be able to tell her what she had to do for sure, but she settled for kicking over the altar and was relieved to feel the familiar prickles along her neck and scalp return as the flow of magic pulsed into the emptiness left by Perkins.

  A tremble in her knees warned Pete that she was losing too much blood, and she saw her wrist was still pumping. "Bugger all." She tore off the bottom of her T-shirt and wrapped it tightly around the golem bite. It wasn't bleeding enough to have nicked a vein, but it hurt and there was a film of greenish spittle on the wound. "I'd bloody well better not start craving brains," Pete said, trying the door that led away from the upstairs of the house.

  It opened smoothly and led Pete down another flight of slanted stone steps into a catacomb that paralleled the operating theater. She only had to listen to the groans and cries from behind the tiny barred doors on either side of the hallway to realize that it wasn't a catacomb—this was a dungeon.

  Hands reached for Pete as she stepped into the shadow, some human and emaciated, some stiff and black with final-stage decomposition. Skin and blood sloughed off and re-grew, and rats scattered and hissed farther back in the dark.

  Someone latched on to the arm of Pete's jacket. "Help… me…" A man dressed in bum's rags clung to her, face drawn into a rictus of desperation.

  Pete recoiled. "Human?"

  "Yes," sobbed the man. "Oh, God, yes. They offered me a hot meal… took me off the street… he uses us for parts, don't you see? Spare parts." He proffered his other arm to Pete, severed at the elbow with a clumsily cauterized wound.

  The door of the man's cell wasn't locked, just bolted from the outside. Pete slid the bolt back and said, "Run. Don't stop."

  The man didn't thank her. He staggered out and back along the gauntlet of shrieks and snarls, crying and stumbling until he vanished up the stairs.

  Remains of Perkins's magic stared at Pete from behind every door she passed, all the way down the deceptively long corridor until she reached the end, the rear of the house. Men and women, young and old, most of them clumsily reanimated to spit or cry, some of them chewing on their own limbs, or each other. The air was rank with decomposition the farther Pete walked.

  Some of the subjects had symbols or sigils painted on the doors of their cells and Pete rubbed them out when she could, hoping fervently that she wasn't turning off any electric fences designed to keep in rabid dogs as she did.

  "Bitch!" something hissed from behind one of the doors. "I'll pull your eyes out and roll them on my tongue!" The hiss started up a cacophony of other noises, curses and threats filtered through ruined tongues and toothless mouths.

  "You're welcome, you wanker," Pete muttered, moving on rapidly to the corridor's end, lit with an old-fashioned oil lantern.

  The vault room was locked with an iron key that hung on a nail next to the rusty hinges. Pete started to scoff at Grinchley's idea of security, then realized that no one could be expected to walk along the trail of nightmares behind her to actually get here except Perkins and Grinchley himself.

  Pete turned the ancient lock with no small amount of effort and went inside. The vault room was packed with cases and compact shelving, everything arranged in no particular order. Three human skulls of varying size and age grinned at Pete from the nearest cabinet, and a stuffed Feejee mermaid perched in a gilt birdcage. Every inch of the room was crammed with objects of magic and vileness, human and animal body parts, books bound in skin, statues whose eyes followed Pete as she moved among the shelves.

  This is useless. Connor came into her head unbidden. Going to stand there like a flytrap with your mouth open all day, girl? Organize. Categorize. Find the piece that don't fit.

  Pete thought of the dark rooms in Grinchley's house, how everything was arranged to frighten, to misdirect.

  Someone with an ego the size of Grinchley's wouldn't hide his treasures, except in plain sight.

  Her eyes drawn back to the largest shelf, the one with the skulls, Pete discerned a sheen of silver behind the smallest skull's eyes. She picked up the thing, half expecting it to bite her, and saw a flat black box bound in silver bands lying on the shelf.

  Covered in dust and unassuming though it was, Pete knew this was what she was looking for. It shone in the Black, magic raw as a nuclear spill. She reached out carefully with a finger and flicked the latch, laying the box open.

  The Trifold Focus lay wrapped in a black silk cloth, smaller and plainer than Jack had made it out to be, just a silver circlet with three interconnected spirals at the center, flat and more like a drink coaster than anything.

  Pete touched it and a jolt of static raced up her arm. The Focus's metal strands shifted and curled beneath her hand, recoiling, and Pete quickly pulled it away. They settled immediately. "Thank bloody God," Pete muttered. Searching the rest of the vault room would be on her list o
f preferred activities straight after walking into traffic on the M-25 wearing nothing but her knickers.

  She put the box with the Focus into the pocket of her coat and saw a door with a gleam of light around it at the far end of the room. Anything to not have to walk back through Grinchley's torture chambers.

  The doorway led to a real basement, with a furnace and a collection of musty cricket equipment. Pete paused and turned the dial on the ancient oil furnace to maximum. It began to shudder and clank as she cleared the street.

  Pete pulled out her mobile and dialed 999. "This is Detective Inspector Caldecott reporting a fire at the Grinchley residence, 14 Mornington Crescent."

  She heard the wail of sirens as she walked to the cross street and hailed a taxi. The fire brigade would go where no warrantless police officer could. Considering what Grinchley had put her through, Pete thought she was being extraordinarily kind.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  "Jack!" Pete shouted as she opened the door to the flat. "Jack, you need to keep your door locked. This isn't a good neighborhood."

  "Pete!" Jack came rushing from the kitchen, Parliament dangling from the corner of his mouth. Smoke trailed behind him like a cluster of familiars. "Fuck all, Pete, where the bloody hell have you been?"

  "Are you all right?" Pete said, taking him by the chin and examining his eyes. Jack's pupils were large and wide, glimmering like glass.

  "Maybe. Yes. I don't know." Jack rumpled his hair and then slumped. "I thought you'd gone off."

  "I just went to run an errand," said Pete. She grabbed Jack's right forearm, examining the tracks for fresh bruises. He jerked it away.

  "I didn't bloody use. I took some uppers. Couldn't focus."

  "Oh, for the love of sweet infant Christ," Pete shouted. "Jack, first you despise me and then you pop pills the minute I'm gone from sight! What is it?" She formed her hands into fists, released them, because hitting Jack wouldn't make him tell her.

  "Jack," she said softly. "I'm not moving from this spot until you answer what it is I did to you to make you this way."

  He pinched the spot between his eyes, creasing a furrow in the skin. "You left me, Pete," he said. "You just fucking left me, that day. The only person I let in a little bit and she leaves me on the floor of a fucking grave and never shows her face again. Felt bloody marvelous when I woke and realized that, thanks."

  Pete looked at her feet. A splash of blood from Grinchley's operating bay sat like a teardrop on the toe of her shoe. "I thought you were dead, Jack. You were just lying there… you were gone."

  "And you never bothered to find out differently, did you?"

  "I never did anything," Pete said desperately. "I ran out of the cemetery and all the way home and I locked myself in my room for two days and cried until I couldn't breathe. But I never told a soul, because there was never a soul I could tell. Da eventually figured out we'd been seeing each other—didn't tell MG, thank all that's holy—and he lit into me right proper.

  "Da told me…" Pete chewed on her lip for a moment. She'd long since forgiven Connor for the lie, but she couldn't be sure Jack would. "Da told me you died, Jack. And that it would be best to forget you."

  "Cunt," Jack muttered.

  "Well, he never did like you," Pete said. "You shagged his oldest and put his youngest into a blind fit."

  Jack dragged on his Parliament and refused to look at her. "I waited around London for a fair time after I got out of the hospital. I guess I was hoping you'd show up looking for me."

  "I did," said Pete. "Every face on the street. Every day. For all the time until I went away to university. Eventually, though, I listened to Da. I tried to believe what I saw wasn't what happened, and that you were dead and I should put you out of mind, and I am sorry for that, Jack, but it was what I had to do to go on."

  "And then you were able to sweep me neatly into the 'Mistakes of My Youth' category with Terry's help," Jack snarled.

  "Terry has nothing to do with this," Pete snapped. "So leave it out." She took a breath. Imagining saying these things, speaking them to Jack's dream-ghost was easy. This—this was like scaling the White Tower barefoot.

  "I got it, finally," Jack muttered. "When you didn't come. You were a sweet kid but you were slumming. No future. Nothing with me."

  "Jack," Pete said. She took his hands in hers, trying not to flinch at how close to skeletal they still were. "I was a child, and I made a child's choice. I dreamed about you, up until the day I saw you again in that terrible hotel. Knowing that you were alive was probably the best day of my life." She took out the box from her pocket and opened it and folded the Trifold Focus into Jack's palm. "I went to get this for you. I'm back now. I don't leave anymore, and I won't try and forget any longer."

  She stepped past Jack and went into the loo, locking the door and sitting on the tub's edge, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. Only a few tears came, because she was too battered to really cry.

  After a long while, as Pete sat and watched the shadows move across the floor from the wavy-glass window, Jack knocked on the door. "Pete. I went to the Costa."

  He pushed open the door, cradling a cardboard cup and a fresh fag in his free hand. Pete's nose crinkled. "Jack, you hate coffee. You told me so the night we met."

  "Need to sober up," he muttered, taking a sip and wincing as if he were having his toenails pulled off. "We've got work to do."

  "The summoning," said Pete.

  "The summoning," Jack agreed. "But first, you're going to tell me how you got the Focus out of Grinchley's house. He's not going to burst in here and bash me kneecaps in, is he?"

  Pete stood, wiping away the last hints of moisture from her face. "I went, I tangled with his pet reanimator and I got the Focus and got the bloody hell out of his freaky basement."

  Jack frowned. "Reanimator?"

  "You wouldn't sodding believe the scene in that place, Jack." Pete thought about the cages, the hands, the golem on the surgery table and shivered again. "I still feel as if I need a hot shower."

  "Don't let me stop you, luv."

  Pete reached out to slap at him, but her heart wasn't in it and Jack sidestepped. "In all seriousness, now—Grinchley is animating corpses?"

  "His butler is," said Pete.

  Jack blew out a breath. "A necromancer? Really? Haven't run across one of them since the Stone Age."

  "Perkins looked as if he were from the Stone Age," Pete said.

  "That's odd, to be certain," said Jack. "Necromancy and flesh-crafting are dying arts. No one apprentices to them any longer. No need, with infernal servants being as easy to compel as they are in this day and age."

  "Grinchley set this on me, as well," Pete said, drawing out the desiccated Dead Man's Snare from her hip. "Thought maybe you'd have some use for it."

  Jack whistled. "Nicely done, Pete. Powerful little bit of conjuring on this one." He pushed it back at her. "But you keep it."

  "I really don't think I'll ever have need of this. I hope I won't, at the very least," Pete said. "Maybe you could use it to break the ice at parties or something."

  Jack sipped his coffee and grinned. "You won it fair and square in sorcerous combat, Pete. Keep it. It's yours. And when I did parties, I usually called up a few poltergeists or minor demons. Bit more flash. Speaking of which, I could use some help with this bit if you're not too knackered."

  "Show me what to do," said Pete, shutting the bathroom door behind her.

  "Come into the kitchen and have one of these overpriced pastries and I'll explain things," Jack said.

  After Pete had stirred a cup of espresso for herself, Jack slid into the seat across from her and held out a black velvet sack. "Got this for you, too."

  Pete slid out a small crescent charm on a plain silver chain. It was cool to the touch and when she held it the constant undertone of magic that hissed to the hidden part of her mind quieted.

  "It's a talisman for dreamers," said Jack. "It will keep you safe from sundown to dawn." />
  Pete admired the way the half-circle caught the light. "Will it."

  "That's the theory, anyway," said Jack. "Really, it depends on you."

  "How do you mean?" Pete said. She put the charm around her neck and felt the silver kiss her clavicle. It felt like dipping a hand into cool water, with cool stones beneath and the moon reflected above.

  "Do you want to stop dreaming?" Jack asked.

  "This particular dream, yes," Pete said emphatically. "And I could do without being haunted, as well."

  Jack's mouth quirked. "I'm afraid while you hang around me there's always a bit of ghost-light about," he said. "But the bugger shouldn't be able to get to your mind so easily with that."

  "Ta," Pete said, smiling a bit herself. Jack looked pleased, like he'd picked out a birthday gift in the proper size.

  "Kid stuff. Don't mention it." He extinguished his Parliament in the remains of his coffee. His hands shook but a little, and he collected a pen and started drawing on scraps. "Now, this is what calling the demon should entail, and what I need from you…"

  Chapter Thirty

  A few hours later, Pete followed Jack through the aisles of a DIY shop, collecting supplies from the hardware department. "You're joking, right?" she said. "This is where we get the supplies for a demonic ritual?"

  "Some of it, yeah," said Jack. "Magic isn't all eye of newt or skinning black cats."

  Pete jerked her trolley to a stop. "I am not killing a cat."

  "Dagon in a rowboat, Pete, relax. The demon we want doesn't accept animal sacrifices. It would be terribly offensive."

  "Facts I'm sure will come in handy in my day-to-day life," she muttered, following Jack as he picked out a roll of copper wire.

  "Will if you keep on with me," Jack said with a shadow of a grin. He picked up a box of roofing nails and tucked them into his jacket pocket. Pete cleared her throat vigorously. Jack gave her an exasperated look, one dark eyebrow cocked.