Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Oh, God," she said. "Jack…"

  " 'M all right, luv," he mumbled. He spat blood and sat up, wiggling his jaw experimentally. "Nothing broken, a few sexy bruises… all in all, could've ended much worse."

  One of Jack's eyes was blacked and he had a triple set of cuts along his cheekbone overriding his old scar. Blood trickled freely down his chin, but he managed to grin at Pete, even though he gave a soft grunt of pain.

  "You look like you just faced off against the entire starting line of Man United," she said. "And the bruises are not sexy."

  "That's what your lips say, but your adorable little blush tells me they are," Jack said.

  "I was worried you had been killed," Pete said severely. She worried her lip with her teeth. "Something's bothering me…" She couldn't make it come clear with all of the adrenaline from the fight still in her veins, but it roiled her stomach nervously.

  "Don't tell me 'It was too easy, Jack,' because there's nothing about five sorcerers busting into my flat and working me over that's bloody easy," Jack said.

  Pete's stomach flip-flopped like she'd gone over the edge of the world. "Bollocks. Five of them."

  The fifth sorcerer unfolded from a dark corner of the sitting room in a swirl of black, freezing smoke. He aimed a revolver at Pete and Jack. "You're a fucking wonder with the magic, Winter, but I'm willing to bet even you can't stop a bullet."

  Jack looked at Pete. "He's right."

  "I told them," the sorcerer said. "Told them that we should have found you and plugged your junkie arm with an overdose when we had the chance, but no. You weren't a threat. I can't tell you how happy I am that you finally managed to become one."

  Jack heaved a sigh. "Sonny boy, do I know you?"

  "No," the sorcerer said, a grin spreading under his mask. "But soon everyone in the Black will know me—they will turn when I go by and whisper, 'There goes the killer of Jack Winter, the murderer who stood on the body of the crow-mage and claimed his magic for his own.' You've held your talent and your gift long enough, Winter. Time to give up the ghost."

  He started for Jack and Pete, thumb pulling back the hammer of the revolver.

  "Wait—" Jack started as the sorcerer's foot displaced the copper wire of the circle. Faster than Pete could see, Talshebeth fell upon the sorcerer, blunt teeth pulling and tearing at the skin, consuming the sorcerer's flesh while his magic was absorbed into the folds and crannies of Talshe-beth's form.

  "—mind the circle," Jack finished.

  "Oh, yes," Talshebeth breathed. "So much rage. So much shadow inside him." The copper wire at his feet glowed molten and the circle broke, running into the cracks in the floor.

  "Ah, tits." Jack reached out and shoved Pete behind him without taking his eyes off Talshebeth, with more strength than she would suspect a man twice his size of.

  "Oi!" she protested.

  "Shut it," Jack said in a low voice, his eyes on Talshebeth. The demon took one step over the liquid copper, then another, placing his mismatched human and cloven feet right together with a sigh of happiness.

  "It appears our bargain is void, crow-mage," he said, tongue darting out to taste the air.

  "If you know what's good for you, you'll take the hand and leave," Jack said. Talshebeth laughed, gutturally now, pure pleasure in pain.

  "Why would I take your offering, crow-mage, when I can have you?"

  Jack grabbed Pete's wrist. "Run," he said. "Fast and far as you can, and don't look back, don't come back no matter what you hear or feel."

  "I'm not going anywhere," Pete muttered. "You're no good to me dead."

  "Good woman," said Talshebeth. "Loyal, brave, and shining to a fault. Stay, little one. Watch what becomes of the crow-mage when he faces a truer evil."

  Jack backed up, almost stumbling over her, and Pete went with him. "You should have run for it," said Jack. "Demons aren't like Fae or like us—they're of another world and there's not a bloody thing I can do to stop him once he's free."

  Talshebeth raised his hands as though he were trying to stop a lorry and a greenish aura of magic blossomed around him. He was no longer awkwardly ugly and misshapen. Freed, he was inhuman and terrible to behold.

  Jack threw up a hand in turn and Pete felt the crackle of air around him, the energy that was achingly familiar. Jack turned his head and met her eyes. "I'll protect you," he said in an almost earnest tone.

  Talshebeth showed his teeth and sent a wave of the sickly green forward, blotting out all the light in Pete's field of vision.

  She heard Jack yell and felt the energy around him shudder under the blast. Twisting in his grip on her wrist, Pete grabbed his hand, blind. She wanted to tell Jack so many things and they would all sound trite now. She didn't want to die. She didn't want to be helpless, letting a junkie mage be her human shield when she should be shielding him. She was the bright one, the protector… and she was helpless to stop Talshebeth's fury of toothsome, shrieking magic.

  This is the Black. People die here…

  I don't want to die, Pete thought, bell clear and solid in the face of the ethereal hurricane. Jack's shoulder shuddered under her cheek where she pressed her face low to keep her eyes off the demon, and like a stinking river rushes through a broken dam she felt his magic give, cracking under the demon's. I don't want to die I don't want to die Idon'twantJacktodieagain…

  In the hand holding Jack's, it started, a vibration as if she'd sat on her hand for a few hours and then abruptly released it. The numbness spread up her arm and where Jack's skin met hers heat like red iron burned.

  Light exploded in front of her eyes, and she heard Jack yell, felt his magic gather and rush outward, and when she opened her eyes Talshebeth was consumed by something gray-black and dense, a flight of magic that reduced him to ashes until his screams blew away on a conjured wind.

  Jack slumped, sitting down hard and taking Pete with him.

  "What the bloody hell just happened?" she demanded. Jack turned on her.

  "You tell me, darling! One moment I'm barely holding off a demon from gnawing flesh off my bones and the next he's a little pile of matchsticks on my floor!"

  "I may not know bugger-all about magic," said Pete slowly. "But I know that was not normal." She unclenched her hand from Jack's. The bones creaked in protest and a vivid red imprint of his fingers remained on her palm. "It happened when we touched, then and when you called your witchfire," she told Jack. "Whatever it was."

  "Nothing," said Jack. "Nothing, is what that was."

  "It was not nothing." Pete sounded more outraged than she meant to, or even knew she was, underneath the crushing relief to still be breathing. "You kept your promise—this was different from the last time, because last time you didn't incinerate a demon. Jack—"

  "Pete, it was nothing!" Jack shouted. "Let it bloody well go!" He got up with difficulty and paced away from her, rubbing his left forearm.

  "Why won't you just tell me what happened?" Pete said quietly.

  "Because sometimes, Pete, you don't need to know everything," Jack snapped. He grabbed his jacket off the hook and unlocked the door of the flat.

  "That's no kind of answer! Where are you going?" Pete demanded. "You can't leave—I need your help still to find Margaret! We're out of time!"

  "In case you missed the five armed psychopaths who just burst into my flat, and the sidhe bitches before them, someone is trying to kill me," said Jack. "And I can't find out who's passed down the order dragging a square copper along with me."

  "Jack—"

  "Let it go, Pete!" he shouted.

  "Fine." Pete threw up her hands. "You want to keep playing your little secrecy game, that's fine. But before you go storming out of here, might I point out the matter of the five bodies on your sitting-room floor?"

  Jack grinned crookedly. "Bodies? All I see are some bundles of rags." He went to one of the crates stacked against the wall, rooted, tossing out a stack of vintage dirty magazines, a pair of tattered leopard-print pants, which Pete
picked up and examined in horror, and finally yanked out a tightly wrapped cloth bundle. "Stand back. It's about to get hot."

  He unfurled the canvas and held up a bundle of smoky-smelling herbs, whispering "Aithinne." The herbs swirled up and out from his palm, catching the bodies alight and burning them from the inside, like the spent end of a cigarette. Soon there was nothing but rags, just as Jack had said.

  "See? No fuss," he said. "Although that was my last batch of inferno weed. Practically extinct now. Very dear."

  Pete watched ash drift up from where the bodies had lain, wordlessly. "It's so very simple in your world, isn't it, Jack?"

  "You'd think that," he said, grabbing his jacket from the hook. "But little things like staying alive? Not simple in the least. Now I'm going out to find out who wants to stop me from doing that. Got any more objections?"

  "Jack…" Pete started.

  "Good," he said, walking out and slamming the door in her face.

  Pete slumped down against the wall again. "Bugger."

  Chapter Thirty-two

  After Pete swept up the ashes of Talshebeth and the sorcerers and binned them, and put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea, she finally realized that Jack wasn't coming back.

  Her mobile rang as she was struggling with the bin bag and she grabbed it up. "Hullo."

  "Pete, I'm very patiently waiting for you to sign the revised offer papers. I faxed them to your desk at the Yard days ago. Have you quite taken leave of the last vestiges of your so-called responsibility?"

  "It's just hit where I am, Terry. I don't have time for this—" Pete started.

  "You know something, Pete, you are going to make time for me," Terry fussed. "You're the one who couldn't let the disposition of our assets go on in a civilized manner, and now you can't be bothered to face up to the mess you've caused. I, for one, think—"

  "Terry, perhaps I'm not making myself clear enough about this," Pete said softly. Terry paused.

  "Please elucidate."

  "Sod off!" Pete yelled into the mouthpiece, and then threw her mobile across the kitchen. She hauled the bin bag to the rubbish cart behind the building and it was as if nothing had ever happened in the flat, except for the distinct ebb and flow of the Black, just out of the corner of Pete's eyes, the aftershocks causing tiny ripples in the underground pool of magic.

  How long had she been able to feel the Black, Pete wondered, and denied it for bad dreams and shadow? How long had Jack and everything that floated around him been standing just out of view?

  Existential ponderings aside, the one fact Pete knew was that she was immeasurably tired, and wanted nothing more than a kip, but curiosity, and Jack not being about to stop her, drove her to stay awake to do a bit of snooping.

  The shadows were stretching on to evening. Pete lit the oil lamp and went to get a blanket from Jack's bedroom to wrap up in.

  Thick robes of cobwebs trailed from the ceiling in Jack's room, and the floor was littered with musty books and papers. A lone chest of drawers in the corner was the only furniture besides the mattress and scarred wardrobe.

  She put a blanket around her shoulders, and crouched to illuminate the stack of books nearest to the mattress. Most of the spines were in languages she didn't read, nor did anyone else who'd been alive in the past five hundred years, but two were in English. Theories of Energy Magic and Practicum of Lesser Spirits and Their Uses. Pete moved on to the next stack. "Mages couldn't use bloody textbooks, like everyone else," she muttered. Whatever had happened with Jack before he stormed out would not happen again, not if Pete could help it. The feeling of being the transformer on a live wire was unpleasant enough to last several lifetimes.

  Pete lofted the lamp to look for more books, catching a Poor Dead Bastards poster with curling corners on the wall opposite. She tried the drawers of the chest, found them open. "Let's see what you keep hidden," Pete muttered, half convinced that Jack would hear her, wherever he was.

  He had that odd prescient knowledge of a clever devil, one that appeared when you spoke his name.

  Herbs and crystals on leather thongs, shriveled birds' feet, a collection of vellum scraps covered over with Jack's scratchy handwriting crumpled in one corner, a marijuana pipe, and a slide whistle made up the entirety of the drawer's contents.

  "Nothing," Pete muttered. Nothing that would show why Jack had run away, again. Or why he refused to admit what had gone on when they vanquished Talshebeth.

  She sat down on Jack's dusty mattress and sneezed. It smelled like him, whisky and Parliaments and that slightly burnt scent that was his alone.

  Pete realized that all the fear and rage had left her and her limbs were lead. She scanned the pages of a few more books, making a go of it, and then gave in to her body's shouted signals to catch a few hours of sleep. If she wasn't on her game, she wouldn't be of any use to Margaret or anyone else.

  Shoving a pile of Jack's clothes off the mattress to make a space for herself, Pete heard something crackle inside the pocket of his leather jacket, the same one he'd worn the first time she'd met him. Pete pulled out a many-times-creased piece of vellum, greasy and frayed at the edges.

  Pete Caldecott

  221 Croydon Place, #32

  London

  Pete's hand shook as she recognized her old address, the one she'd lived at with Connor until he'd taken sick, but hadn't moved to until several years after she'd lost contact with Jack. The paper was worn enough and the ink faded to believe it was a decade old. Jack had found her and held this scrap, but he'd never come to her, never written or called. He'd just kept this little bit of information near his heart.

  She stared for a moment longer, and then Pete threw back the blanket. She was tired, of Jack's contradictions and his secrets. She pulled on her shoes and coat and left the flat, leaving the door unlocked as usual in case Jack came home.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Pete walked through Spitalfields, feet ringing off the cobbles that the Ripper's shadow had stalked one hundred twenty years before. She let herself be pulled from street to street, through pocket parks and alleys until she fetched up at a rusted iron gate. A padlock dangled limply from a chain that was nearly eaten away, and a swift kick sent it clattering.

  Inside the gate was unlit night. Pete wrapped her coat around her more tightly and walked into it.

  She would swear up and down that the pub Jack had taken her to the first time was in an open street, bright red door banded with iron facing out, but now it was simply there, at the other end of the alley.

  Music drifted out when Pete pulled on the great iron handle, and a bouncer who hadn't been about the last time stopped her with a large hand, nails lacquered black. "Going somewhere special, miss?"

  Pete drew in a breath. The man was massive, shaven-headed with Maori tattoos crawling over the bare flesh. He grinned and displayed a missing front tooth when she gaped at him. "I'm looking for Mr. Mosswood," she said finally, willing herself to be firm.

  "You got business with the Green Man." The bouncer raised an eyebrow in surprise, but didn't question her. He stepped aside and Pete walked in.

  The band onstage could have been playing an Irish folksong, or "God Save the Queen"… the music dove and dipped, never more than a snatch intelligible, but it was still beautiful and at the same time left Pete feeling stricken, as though she'd left pieces of herself scattered everywhere to be picked over by the crows.

  "The eponymous Lament," said a familiar voice. Pete spun to see Mosswood sitting cross-legged at a table, chewing on the end of his pipe.

  "Mr. Mosswood."

  "Just Mosswood," he said, blowing a lazy smoke ring.

  "Lament for who?" Pete said. "Or what?"

  "You've heard of Nero, surely, and the music he played while the empire burned," said Mosswood. "This is the same music. The music that played when Cain slew Abel and the sound that will be at the end of the world."

  Even though a fire was roaring in the pub's wide grate, Pete shivered. Mosswood i
ndicated the chair opposite him. "You are obviously troubled a great deal to come here without an escort, Miss Caldecott. Please. Sit down."

  "I don't need an escort," said Pete reflexively.

  "I suppose you don't." Mosswood knocked out his pipe against the edge of the table and took his leather tobacco pouch out of his coat. "You wouldn't have been able to find your way here again if you were not touched by the Black."

  A cup of tea appeared on the edge of the table, a tiny hand sliding back below eye level, and Pete started.

  "Thank you, Nora," said Mosswood. "And another of the same for Miss Caldecott. Sugar?"

  "No sugar," Pete said, regarding the small earthy-colored creature with an arched eyebrow.

  "Brownies," said Mosswood when Nora had scuttled away. "Not very intelligent, but love menial tasks. Useful for housework, if you need someone to come in."

  "I'm here about Jack," Pete said, putting her palms flat on the table.

  "Oh, I doubt that." Mosswood blew on his pipe and smoke sprouted as the tobacco lit of its own volition. "You are here about what's happening to you, my dear. Jack is merely a side effect of all this."

  "I don't—" Pete started.

  "How much has Jack told you about this? The Black? The magic that he works?"

  Pete sighed. "Not much, and before tonight I didn't want to know. I'd convinced myself a long time ago that all this"—and here she gestured at the pub, the music, and brownies scuttling under tables—"wasn't real. But tonight…"

  "Tonight was different," Mosswood said, examining her with a penetrating gaze. For all of his well-groomed shab-biness, the patched coat and sleek beard, Mosswood's eyes were inhuman, black and flat like stones. "Tell me."

  "I… Jack and I were trying to get rid of a demon—that's a long story, entirely separate—and I touched him, really touched him because I was scared, and all this power just… appeared."

  Mosswood scratched his beard and sucked on his pipe. "More power than the irredeemable Mr. Winter usually commands. Impressive."