Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Here." She nudged them into Jack's hands.

  "Cheers," he muttered. "Here goes bloody nothing."

  Jack closed his eyes and knelt in front of Treadwell's burial spot, raising the coffin nail and the hemlock hammer. "Algernon Treadwell!" he commanded. "I call you forth to face me. Arise, spirit!" He hit the nail. "Rise!" Again and again the hammer fell, driving the nail into the earth to the hilt.

  Outside the shield hex, the sorcerers regained their feet but they simply stood, watching, burning witchfire the only sign of life.

  "Jack…" Pete touched his shoulder. The expectancy of the sorcerers, their smiles, sent a chill stronger than any magic through her.

  "Treadwell!" Jack shouted again. "Come on, you bastard! Come here and meet me!"

  With a tiny sigh, a point of silver light blossomed, like a pinpoint into another world. Petty and theatrical as always, Jack Winter.

  "No," Jack replied as Treadwell coalesced. "No, this time I'm just sending you back. Nothing petty about it."

  Treadwell's hollow silver eyes fastened on Pete. Your mage should learn to mind his hexes. As I am challenged, so I begin.

  The spirit exhaled Latin under his breath, and Jack grabbed his head, teeth grinding. The shield hex wavered and went out, and two sorcerers jumped in to pull Pete away from Jack, who went to his knees.

  Treadwell raised Jack's chin, one long-taloned ice finger digging a bead of blood out of Jack's skin. So easy. So very disappointing.

  "Jack…" Pete flung herself against her captors. "Jack!"

  "Kill me, if you will," Jack growled. His eyes were blue fire, no white or iris left. "But believe that I'll pull you right down into the bleak city with me, you hollowed-out misty wanker."

  I believe, but you are so very wrong about me, Jack. Your death is not my desire. Contrary to all presuppositions, you have made yourself useful.

  "The fuck are you on about?" Jack demanded.

  Your mind is corrupted and your talents are weak and fleeting, ensnared by too many bargains, Treadwell hissed. But your body—your body will do admirably.

  For the first time that Pete had seen, Jack faltered and looked utterly displaced.

  "What the fuck are you on about?" he managed. "You dead never make any bloody sense."

  It was a simple thing, Winter…to draw you out, and to draw you to me. All it took was a stroke to your pride, to give you a chance to best me. And you appeared, you and your form, mine for the taking.

  "The bansidhe. The Arkanum," Pete whispered. Treadwell froze the air around him, and her cheeks and fingers were numb.

  Lures, Treadwell agreed. The correct ones, it appears. Not enough to stop the crow-mage, but enough wind to change his flight.

  "You think I don't have a plan?" Jack snarled at him. "That I'd just rush in any door you opened?"

  I think you cannot resist the chance to prove what a wicked sort of man you are, Treadwell said. And I do not think that you have any more plan now than you did when I killed you the first time.

  Treadwell laughed, a steam hiss across the surface of Pete's mind, and at his gesture one of the sorcerers stepped in behind Jack and drove a long knife into his kidneys.

  Rebirth is painful, of course, Treadwell murmured. Transformation is by definition an agony of the soul. But rest assured, crow-mage, I've only brought you to the brink of death—the thin place of this world.

  "Now he gets into the body," said a sorcerer. "And he'll be corporeal." A frission of excitement spread through the circle.

  Pete heard someone screaming, a single "No" repeated over and over, the word running together into speechless cries. Her mouth went dry and she realized the voice belonged to her.

  "Master Treadwell," the sorcerer holding her called. "What about the woman?"

  Kill her, Treadwell told him. She is polluted by the mage.

  "Oh, God, Jack, I'm so sorry," Pete moaned. Jack lay perfectly still, his eyes open, plain and staring upward. His fingers twitched ever so slightly, and his chest barely rose.

  The sorcerer with the knife came toward Pete and the two holding her jerked her head back, exposing her throat. "Oi," said one. "We could 'ave a go before you cut her."

  "Or after," said the other.

  The sorcerer with the knife hesitated. "Be quick about it." Behind him, the others rushed to encircle Jack with chalked sigils, light candles at the five points of the star, spread their web around him. Treadwell gazed down at Jack hungrily, stroking spectral fingers over and through Jack's flesh, causing him to moan and convulse each time those terrible talons sank into his skin.

  "Hold her arm, Hodges… there's a lad," said the sorcerer who didn't care if Pete was alive or dead for his business.

  "I swear," Pete gritted. "If you get close enough, I'll bloody well end you."

  "Shut it," said Hodges. "You're just lucky it's us and not Master Treadwell."

  They laughed, Hodges loudest of all, and his grip loosened a fraction. Pete twisted down and to the side, ripped her right arm free, and drove her two longest fingers into Hodge's throat. He made a rasp like a saw and dropped to his knees.

  "Bloody hell…" started the first.

  "Forget it," said the second. "Treadwell's starting the spell. Finish her and be quick about it, 'less you want to explain to him why we weren't standing in the circle."

  The circle of magicians began chanting in Latin, forming around Jack. The sorcerer with the knife made a swipe for her, but Pete grabbed the knife above the blade, fighting the sorcerer for it, gaining a hold and breaking the man's wrist.

  He screamed, and Pete looked at the last, her blood racing in time with the swelling gusts of the Black swirling around them. She had to do something, with no magic and no power of her own.

  Pete turned the knife in her hand, placing the tip against her own abdomen.

  You can hurt and bleed and die in the thin spaces.

  She might not come back from this decision, but there was nothing else. Jack had come for her, faced Treadwell, and now he was dying again. Dying not because of his pride but because he'd stayed to help her in the first place.

  Pete felt the blade of the knife break her skin, just, a bead of hot blood sliding down her stomach.

  "Treadwell!" she screamed, her voice coming out raw. Treadwell turned his dreadful eyes on her.

  What is the meaning of this?

  "If you want Jack Winter so badly," Pete said, her hands shaking well and truly now, "then you can bloody well come and take him from me." She raised the knife and drove it into her stomach, deep and with enough force to lodge it there. The pain spread immediately, a rush of vertigo that spiraled her down and down into the icy, bottomless reaches of the Black.

  Chapter Forty-four

  She opened her eyes in a small neat room, painted blue. The sitting room, from her family's old flat. Pete was standing in the center of the braided rug their mother had bought in a jumble sale in the high street, when Pete was a baby.

  "Quite the view, isn't it?"

  Jack spoke, his back to her as he leaned against the window, his forehead pressed to the leaded glass. Pete followed his gaze and gasped.

  London was on fire, as far as the eye could see—blue flames, consuming everything down to char. Steam rose off the Thames and the city was filled with the wail of air raid sirens. The sky, what Pete could see through the smoke that burned the fine skin inside her nostrils, was streaked with bloody red as a sun wreathed in flames set to the west.

  "Jack," Pete rasped, trying not to choke on the poisoned air, "where are we?"

  "Inside my dying moments. The last flicker of my nightmares," Jack said. He exhaled smoke with each breath. "The dark place of the soul, in between."

  "In between life and death?" Pete said.

  "Of course." Jack breathed more smoke. "The world, and what comes after. I'm not really here."

  "No?" Pete edged backward a step.

  "No," said Jack with a sigh. "No, Pete, I'm already dead." As Pete watched, unable to
force herself to move, Jack's eyes flamed, and then the flame spread and became a helm, a raven's beak and a raven's sleek wings, engulfing his body, burning him away. Jack didn't scream, just looked at her, arms spread, the fire rushing across the carpet and up the walls until it was all around her.

  "No," Pete muttered. "No, no, no." She ran, keeping her body low, throwing her jacket over her head to protect it from a fiery snowfall of paint flakes and ash. The front door of the flat was locked and she beat her shoulder against it until it burst open, tumbling her into bright fluorescent light and the smell of ammonia.

  There was no disorientation this time. Pete would know the hospital room with her ears swaddled and both eyes put out. The slow hiss of oxygen and the almost imperceptible plip-plip of the IVs resounded in a space that was too small and too stale, holding a hovering, waiting Death for too long.

  Connor Caldecott slept, moving fitfully as the morphine coursed through his dreams. His chest was sunken and Pete's throat parched to realize that this was the end. The red gardenias on the nightstand were the last flowers she'd ever brought to him in the hospital.

  Outside the city was lit, sparkling like broken glass under full night. Visiting hours, Pete remembered, would be long over. Still, the door swished open and someone let in a brief burst of chatter from the hallway.

  "See you on third shift, Shirley luv," a nurse called, and then silence fell again as the door shut.

  Jack came to Connor's bedrail, his jackboots creaking on the linoleum, hair shaved into a Mohawk and blue smudges trailing under his eyes. His skinny frame exuded weariness, and he was wrapped in stiff clothes at least three days old. "Look at you, you old sod," he muttered, coming to Connor's bedrail. "Heard you were dying. Thought you were too mean for it, meself." He tossed aside a bouquet of wilted daisies and leaned on the rail. His hands shook and he glanced over his shoulder every few seconds as conversation rang in the hall, as if his nerve endings had gone on holiday and left his limbs to their own devices.

  "Can't say much, really," Jack muttered. "You never liked me. Right to. Had nothing but bad intentions for your MG." He laughed once. "Least she slipped me enough details for me to be your fake son. Did you know family can come by after visiting's closed? Bet you didn't. Doesn't look like your girls fancy hanging about too much. Can't say I blame them."

  "You bastard…" Pete hissed.

  Jack methodically searched the bedside table and pocketed the dose of Percocet the nurse had left should Connor wake up, then reached down and disconnected the IV feed to Connor's morphine bag, tying off the tube and shoving the whole thing into a shopping sack. Connor groaned in his sleep, and Jack paused. "We do what we have to. Pain's transient, old man. What's eating up your lungs—that's permanence." He patted the bag. "I need this. You're on the way out."

  Connor wheezed in his sleep, a kicked sound, pathetic. Pete's heart clutched.

  Jack sighed, his mouth thinning. He spoke as if he were convincing himself of a lie. "Your daughters will see you again," he whispered, bending close to Connor. "Not soon, but they will."

  "Stop!" Pete cried. "For God's sake, that's my da!"

  Jack turned to her. He scratched his jaw under the stubble and shrugged one shoulder. He was never quite still.

  "What am I supposed to do, Pete?" Jack spread his hands. "I'm not really here. You're just walking the halls, admiring the paintings."

  "You dream about this," Pete stated, motioning around the hospital room. "Stealing his painkillers. Talking to him."

  "Only lately," said Jack. He began to shiver. "I only nicked from the terminal cases, me, but I suppose it don't matter. Lot that I did that'll become fuel for nightmares, I'm sure. Thanks to you."

  "I don't have much time," Pete said desperately. "I wounded myself pretty badly just to get here. Where are you, Jack?"

  "I'm where he keeps me," Jack whispered, voice a husk. "At the center of it all. Stay away, Pete. Wake up. Just wake up…"

  Jack reached for her and Pete ducked him, hitting the wheelchair release for the door and backing out as Jack doubled over in a fit of shivers and coughs.

  "Bloody hell, what now?" she muttered. Her voice came out hollow and she felt as if her blood had turned to stone, cold and disconnected from her body. "Damn it," she muttered, knowing she was dying, that she'd cut too deep. "Jack, for once in your bloody life reach out to me."

  "He can't hear you." The man who spoke was tall and rangy, knotty little muscles warping his prison tattoos. He wore a stained undershirt and shorts and boots, and didn't speak to Pete but to the woman who cowered on the floor across the tiny sitting room, nursing a cut lip. The fiat was poor, wallpaper peeling off, floors scarred, and out the greasy window Pete could see a skyline that was not London.

  "Mum!" someone screamed, and a closed door across the room rattled against a padlock.

  "All right, luv," she called weakly. "I'll be right in."

  "Fucking hell you will," the man snarled. "Shut up, you whiny cunt!" he screamed at the sobs from the other side of the door.

  "He's just hungry," the woman pleaded. "Please, Kev, he just needs a bite and then he'll be quiet as a church mouse."

  "And you think I'm made of money?" Kev sneered. "You think after I latched myself on to a bloody prozzie and her brat I've got pounds to burn still? You're lucky I haven't turned you out to work and put the brat on the mercy of the council. Lord knows you're no kind of mother, laying about swallowing down pills all day instead of on the job."

  "Maybe if you stopped bloodying my face I could work," the woman muttered. Kev pulled back his foot and let loose with a kick that bent the woman on the floor around his boot, pushing a moan out of her that sank claws into Pete's chest.

  "Mum!" The banging against the door redoubled. Kev kept kicking, until the woman was still. Then he turned and slipped the padlock from the door.

  "Here now, Jackie boy," he said, dragging a skinny brunette boy into the sitting room. "You raise all that fuss because you want to come out?"

  "What did you do to her, you fucking bastard?" Jack demanded, tears streaking down his flushed face. In this nightmare, his face still held a plump gleam of childhood, but his eyes were Jack's eyes, ageless and merciless as primordial ice.

  Kev dealt him a backhanded blow, a fistful of silver rings leaving a welt on Jack's cheek. "You show some respect to the man what keeps a roof over your shiftless head!" Kev hissed. "What do you do? You're too clumsy to steal and too ugly to be turned out. You're just a little lump of shit on my boot."

  "I swear, if you've hurt her again…" Jack trembled all over, as if he were in the middle of a blizzard. "Shiftless and ugly or not, I'll turn you in. I'll run out this door and go to the police box and when you're rotting in jail I'll take all that money you stole from Mum and I'll pay a fucking skinhead to be your boyfriend until you're a fucking cripple!"

  Pete, examining Jack, decided he couldn't have been more than ten or eleven. She pressed a hand over her mouth to keep herself steady.

  Kev grabbed Jack by the hair, producing a flick-knife and pressing it against Jack's throat. "Sit down, boy," he said. Soft and pleasant, like the warning hiss of a snake. "You move a hair, and I'll slit her from ear to ear, like the pig she is." He sat Jack on the couch, where the boy folded like stiff cardboard, and knelt with legs on either side of Jack's mother, pressing the knife to her throat.

  "Now you keep your eyes open," said Kev. "Eyes open, and watching. I'm giving you a lesson, boy." He loosed the button fly on his shorts, the knife steady against Jack's mother's neck.

  "Don't…" Jack's voice strangled.

  Kev pushed the woman's dress up to her waist. "Did I hear a please, Jackie? Good boys say please." He grinned, sliding a hand over Jack's mother. She moaned feebly, but didn't try to fight him off. "That's the lesson," Kev said, still smiling. "Teach you again and again, if I must."

  Jack's eyes went vacant, the whites crawling in to blot out the blue, and he began to shake.

  "Stop." Pete
reached out and grabbed Kev's knife arm, but he batted her off as if she weighed a kilo. Pete stumbled into the credenza, sending a crack pipe and some glass figurines crashing to the floor.

  "Don't interfere," Kev said, leveling his knife at her. "This isn't your show."

  Pete pushed herself up and came at him again, swinging for the hateful smile, and again he pushed her back, lifting her clean off her feet. He was so strong, the strength of a child's nightmare.

  "You're not my demon," Pete said, as Kev pushed the knife tighter against Jack's mother's throat. "Jack wasn't afraid of you. Jack wouldn't be afraid of a piss stain like you, not even then."

  "You're afraid of me, missy," said Kev with certainty. He looked up and started as he saw Jack standing inches from him, eyes totally white. "I told you stay put, you little freak!"

  He started to say more, but his throat twitched and closed, and he dropped the flick-knife to claw at his breast over his heart. Robotically, Jack picked up the flick-knife and put the business end into Kev's neck, the arterial blood washing the wall, Jack, and his mother in a graceful arc. She let out a feeble cry and covered her eyes.

  Jack crouched on his heels, watching with unblinking attention until Kev's last ounce of life ran out of him and stained the cheap carpet with wine. "You're right," he told Pete finally, his voice thin and not all present. He picked up the flick-knife, cleaned it on his sleeve, and tucked it away. "I stopped being afraid of monsters. The shadows, the transparent voices I heard… they told me how to keep the monsters back. And I listened. I learned. When did you first feel it, Pete? This was my day."

  "You're not here," Pete said. "That much I know. Tell me. Please? I'm running out of time so fast, Jack…"

  "I see you," young Jack said solemnly. "I see you doomed by your need to help me. You'd rush headlong in front of a train."

  "Into Hell," Pete answered.

  "What do I do to earn your loyalty?" Jack crossed his thin little arms. "You shine."