Street Magic

Chapter One

Michaelmas daisies bloomed around Pete Caldecott's feet the day she met Jack Winter, just as they had twelve years ago on the day he died.

That day, the unassuming tomb in a back corner of Highgate Cemetery was overrun with the small purple flowers. Jack crushed them under his boots as he levered the mausoleum door open.

Fear had stirred in Pete's stomach as the tomb breathed out bitter-smelling air. "Jack, I don't know about all this."

He flashed a smile. "Afraid, luv? Don't be. I'm here, after all."

Biting her lip, Pete put one foot over the threshold of the tomb, then the other. A wind whispered out from the shadowed depths and ruffled her school skirt around her knees. She backed out of the doorway immediately. "We shouldn't be here, Jack."

He sighed, pushing a hand through his bleached crop of hair. It stood out in wild spikes, gleaming in the low light. His hair was the first thing Pete had seen of Jack in Fiver's club three months ago, molten under the stage lights as he gripped his microphone like a dying man and screamed.

"Don't be a ninny, Pete. Nothing in here is going to bite you. Not yet, anyway." The devil-grin appeared on his face again. Jack held out his hand to her. "Come into my parlor."

Pete grasped his hand, felt where the ridges of his fingers were callused from playing guitar, and used the warm shiver it sent through her to propel herself into the tomb. The stone structure was bigger than it appeared from the outside and her hard-soled shoes rang on the stone when she planted her stride firmly. She hugged herself to ward off the chill.

"I'm not a ninny."

Jack laughed and tossed the green canvas satchel he'd brought into a corner. "Sorry. Must have been thinking of your sister."

Pete punched him in the shoulder. "That's your girl-friend you're slagging off. You're wicked."

Jack caught her hand again and folded it into his, eyes darkening when Pete didn't pull away. "You don't know the half of it."

Pete met his stare, listening to them both breathe for a moment before she disengaged her hand. "Thought you said we were here to do some magic, Jack."

Jack cleared his throat and moved away from her. "So I did." He pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and began drawing a crooked circle on the flags, one that quickly grew lines and squiggles radiating toward the center. "And we will, luv. Just got to set up some preparations to ensure everything stays nice and nonthreatening for your first time."

The way he said it could have made any of Pete's classmates at Our Lady of Penitence blush. "Jack, why'd you bring me?" she asked abruptly. "This pagan demon-worshipper crap is MG's thing, not mine. I shouldn't even be alone with you. You're far too old."

"I'm twenty-six," Jack protested. He finished the circle, which had grown into something that resembled a cage, giving Pete the sense of flat, cold iron. Jack took two fat can-dles, black and white, from his satchel. "You act like I've got one foot in the sodding grave, you do."

And I'm sixteen, Pete had whispered to herself. And if MG ever found out the two of us have been alone—if Da ever found out…

"I asked you to come along because I need you," Jack said, sitting back on his heels. His serious tone pulled Pete back from imagining what if MG witnessed the scene. Her sister could throw a fit akin to a nuclear explosion. And Da—he'd send Pete to a convent, or a tower, or wherever angry fathers sent recalcitrant daughters in fairy tales.

Pete blinked. "Why on earth would you need me?"

Jack brushed the chalk dust off his hands and stood, patting the pockets of his battered black jeans. "Let's see—you're sensible, cool in crisis, rather adorable. What bloke wouldn't want you about?"

"Shut your gob," Pete muttered. "What'd MG say, she heard you talking like that?"

"MG," said Jack. "MG knows what I'm about. She wouldn't say a bloody thing, because she won't ask and I won't tell her." He searched his studded jacket next, without fruition. "Bloody fucking hell. You got a light?"

Pete dug in her school bag and found her Silk Cut and disposable lighter, hidden inside a tampon box. MG might treat Pete indifferently at best, but she did teach her a few good tricks.

"Cheers," Jack said when she tossed it to him, lighting the candles and placing them at the head and foot of the circle. The longer Pete looked at it, the more her eyes hurt and her head rang, so she looked away, at the bar of light that was the door back to the world.

"Almost there…" Jack muttered. He pulled his flick-knife from a hidden pocket—or maybe it just appeared, in the dim light Pete couldn't be sure—and pricked his finger, squeezing three precise droplets over the chalk.

Pete had watched Jack work magic before, simple street tricks like disappearing cards, the queen of spades slipping between his thin fingers, or small conjurations like a cigarette that came from the packet already lit.

But here, in the tomb, Pete remembered thinking, it was different. It was real magic. Silly, of course, that, through and through. She was the daughter of a police inspector, and the Caldecott family—less MG—didn't put stock in that sort of thing. But Jack… Jack made you believe, with his very existing. He crackled the air around him like a changeling among men. People looked into his eyes and believed, because you could see a devil dancing in the bright flame of his soul.

Jack Winter was magic.

"Ready?" Jack asked from the head of the circle. Pete felt something wild and electric settle around them, like a phantom storm brushing her face with rain.

"What should I do?" Pete asked. Jack beckoned to her and hissed when she almost scuffed over some of the markings.

"Mind the edge, luv. Wouldn't want you lopped off at the knees."

"Bloody hell, really?" Pete asked, eyeing the circle circumspectly. She wasn't her sister, nattering on about "the energy," but she knew, in a way that was deep and brooked no logical argument, that she had stepped into something otherworldly when she came to this place with Jack. He radiated a power she could taste on her tongue.

"The circle won't hurt you," Jack admitted, stroking the darker stubble at his jaw. "But don't disturb the sigils. You don't want what'll be inside on the outside. Trust me." He took Pete's hand as she got close and raised the flick-knife. Pete jerked, but he was too quick, scoring a neat crosscut on her palm.

"Ow!" Pete said in irritation. All of the questions she should have asked raced to mind in a sick sensation of falling and the excitement of a moment ago washed away on a red tide of fear.

She hadn't asked why they'd come here, sneaked past the admissions booth at the cemetery gates and broken into this tomb, hadn't pressed Jack on purpose, because then she'd get scared, and Jack was never scared. Not when a pack of skinheads made trouble in Fiver's. Not of Da, DI Caldecott himself, who had chased off every one of MG's previous deadbeat boyfriends. Jack just extended a hand and a smile and people would throw themselves off Tower Bridge to stand next to him, to reap a little of the danger that seemed to permeate everything he touched.

As the chalk soaked up her blood, the sigils fading to red like a blushing cheek, Pete knew she didn't want to pull back. Questions be damned. Jack wanted—needed—her here, and she was here.

"You all right, luv?" Jack said, pressing a tattered handkerchief over her cut and closing her fist around it.

"I'm fine. I'm ready," Pete said. She wouldn't think about what might crawl out of a tomb under Jack's deft hands, nor about how mad her believing that Jack had power was in the first place. She'd just know that he picked her, Pete Caldecott, who never had friends or friends who were boys, and bollocks to a boyfriend—if she had one of those, she'd go buy a lotto ticket. Jack Winter, magician and singer for the Poor Dead Bastards, needed Pete with him in this old dark place.

Jack guided Pete to the black candle at the foot of the circle, and she made sure to stand ramrod straight so he'd know she wasn't scared, not a bit, wasn't thinking this was a bit dodgy and odd. Not Pete.

"Now you hold on to me," Jack said, lacing their fingers together in a blood-smeared lattice across the markings on the floor. "And whatever happens, you keep holding on—all right?"

"What might happen that'd make me let go?" Pete's stomach churned into overdrive.

Standing at his spot by the white candle, Jack flashed her the devil-grin one more time. "That's what we're going to find out."

He started to speak Irish, long passages, rhythmic. It sounded like it should be solemn, intoned by robed priests over a stone altar, but Jack half slurred through the stanzas as though he were reciting lyrics to one of his songs and had a few pints in him while he did it.

For a moment, nothing happened. Pete looked at Jack through her lashes, half feeling pity because he seemed so set on something odd or spooky taking place.

And then something did.

Pete felt the pull, the separation of things that were comfortable and real from the dark place behind her eyes. Something was swirling up, through the layers of the veil between Pete and Jack and what lay beyond, and she could almost see it, a welter of black smoke growing in the center of the circle as Jack raised his voice, chanting rhythmically now that the fruits of his spell were visible. The chalk lines clung like bone fingers, holding the smoke-shape in place.

Jack's eyes flamed blue as the spell snapped into place, and the fire traveled over the planes of his cheeks and his arms and hands and blossomed all around him as Pete gasped, and the thing in the circle grew more and more solid.

The shape was human, a wicker man of smoke. The chalk lines did not hold it for more than a moment, and it fixated on Pete, eyeless but staring through her all the same. And then it was moving, in a straight and inexorable line, right for her. The primitive cold in her gut told Pete something was horribly wrong.

"Jack?" Her voice was high and unrecognizable to her own ears. The wicker man had a face now, and hints of silver in its eye sockets, and hands with impossibly long fingers that reached out, clawed at her. Whispers crowded Pete's brain, and a pressure fell on her skull so unbearable that she screamed, loudly.

And Jack, where was Jack? He stood watching the smoke with a measured eye, as if Pete were the mouse and he were the python enthusiast.

"Jack," she said again, summoning every steady nerve in her body to speak. "What is it?"

He bent to one knee and quickly chalked a symbol on the floor. "Binasctha," he breathed.

The wicker man stumbled, like a drunk or a man who just had a heavy load thrown on him. But he walked still, one foot straight in front of the other.

"Ah, tits," hissed Jack. He rechalked the symbol, and still the wicker man walked.

"Jack." She said it loudly, echoingly so, the first fissures of real panic opening in her gut.

"Shut it, will you!" he demanded. Pete saw from his expression that he was finally catching on to what she knew—never mind how; it had fallen into her head when that terrible pressure had eased, like waking up and suddenly knowing the answer to last night's math homework. She just knew, as if she'd experienced this ritual a thousand times before, that Jack's magic was awry and now the smoke man was awake and walking the world.

"Is that all you can say?" she cried. "Jack, do something!"

He tried. Pete would always say that, when she had to talk about the day, even though her memories of the whole event were thin and unreliable by choice. He tried. And when Jack tried to keep the wicker man from her, all that he got for his efforts was screaming, and blackness, and blood.

Chapter Two

The sign on the building, half off its hinges, optimistically proclaimed hotel. Underneath, in smaller gold script that had faded, "Grand Montresor."

The tiny purple asters grew all around the crumbling concrete steps, forcing their way out of the cracks in a great spray of example for nature versus man.

Pete stepped over them, careful to avoid crushing any blossoms, and pushed her way into bleach-scented gloom. The Montresor, like the whole of the block around it, had seen better days and couldn't remember exactly when they were. It stood out like a dark pock on the face of Blooms-bury, and Pete wondered why information always had to be garnered in the filthiest, most shadowy places of her city.

A clerk straight out of The Vampyre ruffled his Hello! magazine in annoyance when Pete came to reception. "Yeah?"

"Could you tell me about the person staying in room twenty-six?" Pete said, trying to sound bright and official. It took more than a forced smile and a chipper tone to garner a reaction from the clerk, for he just grunted.

Pete unfolded the note Oliver Heath, her desk mate at the Metropolitan Police, had handed her. "Grand Montresor, Bloomsbury by King's Cross. Room 26 @ 3 p.m."

"Said he had information on the Killigan child-snatching." Ollie had shrugged, the gesture expansive as his Midlands drawl, when she'd questioned him. "Said that the lead inspector were to come alone, and not be late."

Bridget Killigan. Six years old. Disappeared from her primary-school playground when her father was late fetching her. In normal cases Pete advised the parents to be hopeful, that children were usually found, that nothing would happen to their family. Because in normal cases, the child was snatched by a parent in a custody case or an older schoolmate as a prank, or simply said Bugger this and ran off on their own, only to be confounded by the tube system and get stranded in Brixton. Strangers took children in folktales, not Pete Caldecott's London.

Even so, when the Killigan case came to Pete, she got that sink in her chest that always heralded an unsolvable crime. Bridget had no divorced parents, no creepy uncles. The girl had been taken by a figment with no ties to the world Pete could discover, and she knew, in the leaden and otherworldly way she just knew some things, that the only way they'd find Bridget Killigan would be dead.

The clerk was giving her the eye, so Pete showed her warrant card. "Does the lift work?" she asked.

The clerk snorted. "What d'you think, Inspector?"

Pete sighed resignedly and mounted the stairs. She'd been meaning to get more time at the gym, hadn't she? One didn't become a twenty-eight-year-old detective inspector without spending every waking moment plastered to a case. At least, one didn't if one didn't want to endure the whispers about DI Caldecott the elder and how he'd worked for his position, he had, wasn't right how some young slip just waltzed right in…

Room 26 matched all the other doors in the hallway, robin's egg blue, like a door in a dirty London sky. Pete lifted her hand to knock and then dropped it. She'd tried to ignore that knowing, of course. You couldn't know things you hadn't deduced with fact. The feelings of tight pressure behind her eyes, the whispers of the future echoing down the time stream to her ears—those things were stress, or low blood sugar.

Not real. Had never been real. Maybe she'd had a good hunch a time or two, was all. She was good at her job. Nothing spooky about it.

Pete lifted her hand again and knocked this time, firmly and thrice. "C'min," someone mumbled from behind the door. "'S open."

"Not very smart in this city," Pete replied, knowing the best she could hope for on the other side of the door was a shifty-eyed informant who had heard some fifth-hand story about Bridget Killigan and needed a few quid.

She turned the knob and stepped in, keeping her chin up on the off chance that it was a shifty-eyed axe murderer, instead. "I'm DI Caldecott. You wanted to speak about Bridget Killigan?"

He was slouched on the sill, a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The sun was low over King's Cross and it lit up the man's platinum-dyed hair, a halo over a dirty hollow-cheeked face.

"Yes," said Jack Winter, exhaling smoke through his nose. "I did."

He'd been bloody and still the last time Pete saw him. Eyes staring at the ceiling of another's tomb. Pete could only stare for a moment, and her heart fluttered as the two images of Jack overlaid one another, spattering blood droplets and pain across the living incarnation's face. He'd been so still.

Younger, too. Bigger. A body gained from nights sleeping on a floor and fights outside the club after his sets. That was gone now. Jack was all sharp corners and creases. He flicked his ash on the sill and unfolded his long arms and legs, gesturing Pete to the bed.

"Sit, if you like."

Pete couldn't have, not if God himself commanded it. She was rooted surely as an old oak.

Bloody and still. Dead.

"You…" The word came out on a shiver. "You."

"Yeah, I'm surprised a bit meself," Jack said, dragging on his cigarette like he was underwater and it was oxygen. "I mean, I rang asking for the inspector on the Killigan case and they give me your name. Almost said fuck it, then. You don't deserve the success."

Pete finally managed to blink, to set the world right side up again and march ahead despite the thousand screaming questions ringing inside her skull. Jack Winter was alive. Right. On with it.

"What do you mean by that?"

He threw down the butt of his cigarette and stamped on it with a jackbooted foot. "You know bloody well what I mean, you fickle bitch."

"I don't—" Pete started, but he cut her off, grabbing up an old leather jacket from the bed and shrugging it onto shoulders that showed their bones.

"Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery," Jack cut her off. "I'd prefer five hundred pounds cash reward, but since you're a copper I know your heartfelt thanks will have to do."

He went around Pete for the door, stamping his feet in a jerky stride like he was cold. Pete decided that her mind might be standing agape, but the rest of her didn't need to be. She caught him by the wrist. "Wait! Jack, how do you know that? Please."

Please tell me why you've been alive all along and never breathed a word to me. Please tell me how you survived that day.

He sneered. "Let go of me."

Pete held on, and he wriggled in her grasp. "I just want to have a word, Jack—after twelve years, don't you?"

"No," he said. "I told you what I needed to tell you, and now I'm off to the pub. Leggo, you bloody fascist!"

He ripped his arm away and the sleeve of the jacket jerked back, revealing a miniature tube system of veins and punctures on his forearm. Numbness stole over Pete as she stared, until Jack glared and pushed his sleeve down again.

"How long?" she asked.

Jack shoved a cigarette between his lips and touched it with the tip of his finger. An ember sprang to life. "Like you bloody care."

With a slam of the broken door, he vanished.

Pete dialed MG at her commune in Sussex on her mobile when she left the Grand Montresor and hung up. She dialed her desk at Scotland Yard. Ollie picked up, but Pete rang off with him as well.

What the bloody hell would she say? "By the way, that bloke who dropped dead in front of me when I was sixteen? Saw him today. Yeah. Gives his love."

Ollie was ill equipped to offer advice, unless it was regarding Leeds United football or cheap minibreak destinations. MG already had enough reasons to think Pete was a raving nutter. After the graveyard, after Pete had started talking again a few weeks later, MG had screamed and slapped her and demanded to know what had happened to her boyfriend.

I wish I knew, I really do, Pete had said, but it wasn't good enough. MG had never really trusted her again. She had been the one to introduce Pete to Jack, taken her to hear the Poor Dead Bastards play, so in MG's mind, where the universe rotated around MG, it was MG's fault that Jack was dead, and Pete's fault that she didn't throw herself on the same sword. Picking up and getting on with things was Da's way, and MG wouldn't hear of it.

Pete leaned her head against the steering wheel of her Mini, and tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the wasted middle-aged man in room 26 with the memory she'd carried for a dozen years. She hadn't brought Jack to mind often. It was painful to think of even the first time she'd seen Jack, at Fiver's, torn up and bloody even though his set had just started. That image stayed with her, Jack screaming and bleeding and irrefutably alive.

In the dreams that came in the twelve intervening years, the two pictures of Jack—alive and inanimate—blended, and Pete often found herself standing alone in the pit at Fiver's, being sung to by a dead man.

Pete's mobile rang and she jerked, dropping it between the driver's seat and the shift console. She swore as it continued to chirp and finally dug it out from the crevice. "DI Caldecott."

"Where are you?"

Pete held the phone away and checked the caller ID screen, terry (work) blinked in red letters. She took a breath and shoved everything that had happened inside the Montresor into the tidy bin she kept at the back of her mind for information too awful or real to process.

"I was working and I turned off my mobile. I do have a job still, Terry."

Terry drew in a breath. "You were supposed to be at the estate agent's to sign the sale papers at four."

Pete turned the key in the Mini's ignition and the faulty dash clock flickered to life. Three forty-five. "Terry, there's no way I can make it in traffic," Pete said. "We're going to have to put it off until tomorrow."

"Pete." Terry sighed. "Just because we're no longer together doesn't mean you can dispose of our communal property at your leisure. I want the flat sold by summer. I'm going on holiday to Spain and I don't want to deal with it."

"God forbid I should intrude on your precious holiday," Pete muttered. "Because it's all about you, Terry. Isn't it?"

"Pete," he said. "We bought the flat together, and we're no longer together, and I am going to get my money and wash my hands of it. That's all there is."

Pete had nearly forgotten the patronizing tone Terry pulled out, the one that made her feel like a first-year recruit every time, but it came back to her in a rush. "Terry, I'm working," she snapped. "I don't have time for you."

"That was always your whole problem," said Terry. After a moment a bleep told Pete she'd been disconnected.

"And a fine afternoon to you, too," Pete muttered, tossing the mobile into the back seat. Terry had a job that began and ended at the same time every day. He never got blood on his shoes.

He never saw people return from the dead.

Pete gripped the Mini's wheel for a long thirty seconds before she felt steady enough to drive. She tried to blot Jack's face out and replace it with Bridget Killigan's, because the little girl was who she should be dwelling on. Not Mr. Risen from the Bloody Dead.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

"Bollocks," Pete said firmly, and pulled away from the curb.

Chapter Three

DI Ollie Heath was leaving for the day when Pete slumped at her desk in the warrenlike Homicide and Serious Crime division, and he stopped and folded his coat over his ample stomach. "You look a fright, Caldecott."

"Ta muchly," Pete muttered.

"Is it that tosser you were to marry?" Ollie asked. "I'm sure I could work up a traffic warrant or two if he's giving you trouble."

"It's not Terry," said Pete. "Just… someone I knew, a long while back."

"Unpleasant reunion?" Ollie said.

Jack's eyes, a blue like the coldest part of a glacier, wide and staring, his skin and his platinum hair dappled in blood. Pete pushed, hard, against the flood of grief and other, darker thoughts that Jack's face stirred up. Thoughts that she'd put away for good, denied as hallucinations and dreams covering the ugly, bloodstained truth. "No. Just old, bad memories."

Ollie patted her awkwardly on the shoulder a few times. Pete felt herself go stiff as a mannequin, and Ollie quickly drew back, his pudgy hand disappearing into his pocket. "Don't work too late, Caldecott. Can't find Bridget Killigan if you're dead from exhaustion."

"Right. 'Night, Ollie."

Ollie left without any further thought, home to his tidy flat and his cat and his telly. Pete wanted to follow him, but her flat would be cold. Too many ghosts were around her tonight for any sort of rest. Jack, MG, Terry, Da. Da would have known what to do. He would have known whether to trust Jack, if that man in the hotel was Jack. In the sharp glow of the Major Investigation Room and her computer screen, Pete found it easier to believe she'd dreamed it entirely.

"Why did you come back to me?" she muttered, putting her hands on her desk and her face on her hands. Because she knew it was Jack. Pete had known things only a few times before—that storms were blowing, and that when the oncologist took the first X-rays of Connor's lungs that he was going to die. She tried to push her intuition back at every turn, because admitting the rightness of the thing would open the door to the very path Jack's reappearance was leading her inexorably down. To that day, the thing in the center of the stone tomb…

"Stop it," Pete murmured, and only Jack's phantom voice answered her back.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

Pete sat up, rubbed her eyes, tried to fill out paperwork and ignore the heavy weight of certainty against her mind. Connor would have laughed at her, even at the end when he was strapped to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day.

"Bugger this," Pete muttered. She got her things and strode down the corridor to the rear exit, where the night air was still sharp and cold, real winter in the rain and the scent of the turning trees. Leaving the Mini in the lot, she walked for a time, going over all of the reasons why she shouldn't believe a word that came out of Jack Winter's mouth. He was dead, for a first. Untrustworthy even when alive, for a second.

But when she shut her eyes, his face would not leave her, nor what he'd said.

"I don't have anything else," Pete sighed into the air when she'd walked as far as she could before falling into the Thames. And if she wasted a few hours chasing Jack's dragons, she hadn't lost. Bridget Killigan had been missing for three days and it was as if the girl had become vapor. "I don't have anything else," Pete repeated, and at the late hour it made a bit of sense.

Chapter Four

At six a.m. silver bathed the street and cooled Pete's skin to the temperature of the air. The brick wall of the East Cemetery at her back prodded, keeping her from nodding off as she watched the plain black iron gates, locked up with a modern chain and padlock that jarred any sense of mystery right out of the scene.

Ridiculous was more like it. She was too bloody sensible to be here, with four hours of sleep behind her, waiting for a promise made by the shade of Jack Winter.

Bridget Killigan will be found tomorrow at the entrance to Highgate Cemetery.

Pete stuck a Parliament in her mouth and lit it with an inhale of regret. Hadn't she promised everyone who mattered that she'd quit? A dozen times over, at least.

But it was a hard morning, an autumn morning, and it was cold. Her jacket was too thin and she was rattled and everywhere she looked she saw bloody Bridget Killigan, six years old, grinning out from a school photo.

The smoke rubbed her throat and Pete exhaled. She couldn't erase Bridget from the backs of her eyes any more than she could erase Jack. She couldn't stop seeing her face, feeling the seconds run through her fingers as days passed.

Crying. Bridget was crying. Pete snapped her head up, the Parliament falling to the pavement. She stepped on it as she moved into the street, listening over the ever-present whisper of traffic, the slamming of doors from the block of flats nearby, a dog howling. She refused to believe she was so far gone that she was hearing phantom sobs.

Crying, issuing from under a low-hanging tree with glossy leaves near the barriers that closed off Highgate Cemetery and divided the land of the living from the land of the dead. Senseless and wordless and filled with pain, it rose and wavered and mingled with Pete's own wordless exclamation.

She shoved branches aside and saw Bridget Killigan hunched on the ivy with her knees pulled to her chin, sobbing softly but shedding no tears. She refused to look at Pete when Pete gathered her into her arms, and from what Pete saw never looked at anything with her white and staring eyes, ever again.

"Shock," said Ollie when Bridget and her crying parents had been loaded into an ambulance and sent streaming away into thick morning traffic. "Poor bit's obviously had a time of it."

Pete lit the fifth Parliament of the day.

"That's not shock, Ollie," she said. "I've seen shock."

Ollie shook out his tidy notebook with the blue cover, turning a new page because Bridget Killigan was found and there was no reason to open to her anymore. "Then what is it?"

White eyes. Tearless and staring into forever. Pete took a long drag on the cigarette. "That? That was bloody haunted."

Ollie shook his head, a forelock of ashen hair falling into his eyes. "Whatever it was, Caldecott, you'd better pull a marvelous story out of your arse as to how you found the kid. I know you're good but what you did here, that ain't good—that's witchcraft."

Pete blinked. "What'd you say, Ollie?"

"Witchcraft," said Ollie. "Ruddy magic, you going to the exact spot and finding the Killigan brat, even if she is too damaged to make heads or tails of what happened for us."

Pete chewed on her lip and kept silent. If only Ollie Heath knew how eerily prophetic he could be at times. He was busy fussing with his collar now, putting himself in order, resetting the gears to begin a new set of problems and intricacies that new cases would bring. "Say," he said after a moment, "how'd that tip come out? The dodgy one I took over the phone?"

"Oh, that," said Pete, stabbing her Parliament against the brick wall next to her and watching the smoke curl up from the dead ash. "That was nothing."

Chapter Five

In all her time, Pete would never know why she trusted Jack Winter. Why she'd put her faith in him time and time again, as a child and now, and why she willingly followed where he led. She'd had no earthly reason to go to Highgate, to think for one minute that his words were anything but the sputtering of junkie circuitry.

But she'd gone. On nothing more than a feeling and a flutter in that dark cage where she'd locked up everything when Jack had died. Pete knew what Connor would have to say about that, and it was nothing that would put a spring in her step.

The MIT room in New Scotland Yard, no longer housed in the halls of visiting monarchy but a chapel for the warriors who trod the tangled veins and arteries of London, was dark. Pete's desk lamp created an oasis, but it didn't reach far.

She was searching for Jack Winter, not in her dreams as she had so many times, stumbling over headstones and blackened brush, but with cold key clicks, seeing what the Metropolitan Police had to offer on twelve years that she'd willfully missed.

The screen turned out drugs. Arrests. Minor vagrancies and trespasses that earned Jack stints in rehabilitation. Outpatient. Inpatient. Involuntary. Jail.

His life had not been kind, and it twisted Pete up like only Connor dying had before. But Jack had died, too, once, and Pete wasn't yet sure if it was relief or fear she felt at seeing him breathing. Jack certainly hadn't been thrilled to meet her again, for whatever secreted reasons Jack held.

Pete pushed back from her desk and looked at the glowing numerals of the wall clock. It was after midnight, and she felt it in the weight of her body. She shut off her light and walked out in the dark. In the morning, she would find Jack and make him tell her how he'd done the magic of finding Bridget, and why. Why now.

And why her.

Weevil Bill tried to run when he saw Pete coming, but she grabbed him by the sleeve of his silk windcheater and he tripped, crashing into the phone box bolted to the corner where Weevil Bill spent the vast portion of his life.

"I didn't do nuffink!" Weevil Bill squeaked. He was Pete's height, run to fat, and his breath smelled like a night of cheap pints and disappointment.

"I never said you did," said Pete. "But blurting it out like that makes you seem awfully guilty."

Weevil Bill slumped. "Wot you want?" he muttered. "I got places to be, y'know. I'm a legitimate businessman."

"Dealing hash to university students is a step up for you, certainly," Pete agreed. Weevil Bill started to slide down and sideways to make his escape and Pete helped him along, sending him to the pavement on his stomach.

"My friend in the Organised Crime Command out of EK tells me that you still deal the odd bit of smack, Bill."

"No… no, I'm out of that ever since the bloody Chinese moved in… they carve your organs out if you cross them."

"Bad luck that you got picked up with three grams last week then, isn't it?" Pete said. "You tell me what I want to know, I'll take you in and let you cool off in a cell until the Chinese are more amenable. You fuck me about, and I'll leave your arse sprawled on the corner."

Weevil Bill dropped his forehead to the pavement and moaned. In this bleak corner of the city, none of the passing cars slowed down to see what the fuss was, and the scant pedestrian traffic gave Pete a wide berth. She lifted Weevil Bill's chin with the toe of her shoe. "I'm looking for a bloke named Jack Winter—about three and a half meters tall, platinum hair, fucking junkie. Anyone of that description score with you lately?"

"Mebbe they did," Weevil Bill muttered. "But you put the bracelets on before I tell you."

"Some other morning I'd be cooperative," said Pete, feeling the crawl of exhaustion along her spine. "I'm not an unreasonable woman, after all."

She hadn't slept when she'd been in bed, and when her eyes finally drifted closed the images of smoke on dark stone and Jack's eyes, his old smile and his new needle marks, made her prefer a pot of strong tea and late-night telly. "But that morning—it's not this morning," Pete told Bill. "Let's have it."

"Winter don't score from me much, but he runs with the blokes who use the galleries in Southwark, 'round where it ain't been torn down and built up so's only God himself could afford it," Weevil Bill said. "And that's all I know, as my witness."

Pete hauled Weevil Bill to his feet, handcuffing him with suitable ceremony and attaching the free end to a lamppost. "Oi!" Weevil Bill shouted. "What about my arrest?"

"Don't fret," said Pete, flipping open her mobile. "Mark. Yeah. Pete Caldecott here. Listen, I got a bust for you… he's handcuffed to a post up near the Camden Lock. You can't miss him."

The DS sputtered a laugh. "I'll hurry then."

"Oh, don't bother," Pete said, smiling at Weevil Bill.

"He's got nothing but time." She rung off with Mark and asked Weevil Bill, "Satisfied?"

Weevil Bill let out a miserable little sound, which Pete took as acquiescence. She got back into the Mini and gunned the engine.

The corner, the post, and Weevil Bill rapidly became a speck in her rearview mirror as she drove through the City and pointed the Mini across Blackfriars Bridge, toward the docks of Southwark.

Chapter Six

The smell of the Thames, rotted and salty, permeated everything in the street when Pete exited the Mini, and something darker than the damp chill in the air slithered against the underside of her mind.

She pushed it away. Nothing here except a disintegrating row of flats that exuded silent hopelessness.

A boy in a cheap leather jacket dozed on the stoop at the far end of the block, spotting for police and rival dealers and giving the place away as a shooting gallery. Pete kicked his foot once, twice. He snorted and shifted in his sleep, but nothing more. She was insubstantial as a fever dream.

A token agent's notice on the front of the building was covered with spray-painted obscenities, and faded enough that Pete thought even Susan, Terry's hopelessly cheery estate agent, would throw her hands up in despair. The door, half off its hinges from some long-ago bust, grinned at Pete with a gargoyle knocker as she pushed it open, feeling sticky dampness from the decayed wood and stippled paint. "Hello."

Shredded shades were pulled over the windows, and in the blue-gray ghost light Pete barely avoided overturned furniture, Margaret Thatcher vintage, and a surfeit of filthy mattresses and crumpled blankets, like bodies under turned earth.

Pete took her penlight from her pocket and flashed it into the corners of the room, illuminating a gaunt sleeping face. Not Jack's.

A kitchen filled with more dripping rust and cockroaches than any one room had a right to contain sped Pete up a set of rickety stairs and into a narrow hallway with bedrooms to each side. The first still held vestiges of wallpaper and an iron bed, like something one would find in an orphanage of Dickensian origin. A mother, who couldn't have been more than the age Pete was when she first met with Jack, looked up with wide black eyes. Her skinny baby let out a wail.

"Sorry," Pete muttered. "Just looking for… I'm looking for a friend."

The mother watched her silently, not breathing. "Jack Winter," Pete said desperately. "He's not here, is he?" He hadn't been at the last half-dozen squats she'd visited. No reason to think he'd turn up here. He'd vanish as surely as he had after… well. Pete didn't think about that.

"He's next door," the mother whispered. The baby grasped at the air around her face, cries weakening, and she dropped her head to soothe it without taking her eyes off Pete.

"Ah," said Pete. "Thank you." She stepped backward into the hall and went into the next room with a low thrumming in her blood, excitement and fear she had no right to feel because you didn't trust the ramblings of addicts and crazy people, Connor Caldecott's first rule in his long list.

The front bedroom looked out onto the street and the Thames, a view that would have been worth something once, just like the house and the men sleeping or murmuring on the floor.

Pete shone her light on each face in turn. They were mostly white, all thin and bones, stubble and dirt, and sometimes blood or vomit caking. Eyes glared at her dully in the thin beam of light.

Until she hit on the platinum shock topping Jack's drawn face. He threw an arm over his eyes and swore. "Who's that?"

Pete swallowed. She couldn't speak. It was the hotel room all over again, and she was dumb from the sight of him. Jack groaned and sat up. "You've got a hell of a lot of nerve, whoever you are. Got a mind to put my fist in your teeth, cunt."

"It's me," Pete managed finally.

Jack squinted for a moment, and then flopped back on his mattress with a sigh. "And just what do you want?"

The wavering blade of the penlight illuminated the dull flash of a disposable needle at his hand. "We found Bridget Killigan."

"Of course you did," said Jack. "I said it, didn't I?"

Pete crouched and touched his shoulder. Jack jerked away from her and then hissed, rubbing his arms as a shiver racked him. "Get out of here," he said.

"How did you do it?" Pete said. "How did you know where to find her? Jack, I'm not leaving without an answer."

Jack sat up and rooted through a plastic Sainsbury's tote. Disposable sharps, a battered shaving case containing a shooting kit, and empty bags coated with crystalline dust slid through his fingers as he shook.

Pete clamped her hands around his wrists. "Jack. Answer me."

His face was wreathed in droplets of sweat and she fought the urge to brush them away.

"Leave me alone, Pete," he rasped. "I don't want to see you again. Not ever." He pulled loose, picked up an empty twist of plastic and held it to the light. "Shit." His slow-burn gaze shot back to Pete. "You're still here? I said get the bloody hell out!"

There was a time, Pete knew, that those words from him would have devastated her. Words from Jack were like the tears of angels. Wounding words stabbed directly to the heart of her.

But this was the real and painful present, not a memory of the fragile girl who'd loved Jack the moment she saw him sing. "No," Pete said, jerking the bag out of Jack's hands. "No, Jack, we're going to have a word."

He snatched for it. "Give that back," he warned.

"You want this?" Pete told him, holding his sharps and drugs just out of reach. "Then you talk with me."

Jack swiped at her once more and then sat down hard, glaring. "Fuckin' hell. When did you become a raging bitch?"

Pete straightened and crumpled the bag between her fists. "I don't know, Jack, but I think it was right around the time I watched you die."

Jack threw an arm back across his face. "Did you come here merely to grasp at my balls, or was there something you wanted?"

"Tell me how you knew about Bridget Killigan," said Pete. "Right now, I'm trying to believe you had nothing to do with snatching and blinding the poor girl, but it's becoming very hard, Jack."

Jack grunted and Pete thumped him on the arm with her closed fist. "Tell me."

He opened his eyes and met hers, and Pete was swept away again as quickly as she'd been at sixteen. Damn you, Jack Winter. She bit her lower lip to keep her face expressionless.

"It's a simple thing, luv," said Jack. "Magic."

And God, she wanted to believe him. Would have, before. Even pale and scraped as his face was now, he was still Jack. And he was still feeding her lies because he thought her stupid.

"You're a bastard," she whispered, jerking her hand away. Didn't matter that she wanted him not to be taking the piss, to be telling what he at least thought was the truth.

"Takes one to know one," said Jack shortly, rolling over on his side and facing away. Pete cocked her arm and flung the plastic bag. It burst, scattering the contents across the filmy floor.

"Oi!" Jack shouted, scrambling after the needles as they clattered away.

"The person who blinded that little girl is going to get away with it because you're a git. Go to hell," Pete hissed.

Jack stood, crossing the space between them, his expression going hard quickly as a flick-knife appears. "Look around you, Pete," he grated, gripping her arm. "We're in hell."

A human-sized lump on the mattress next to Jack's stirred. "Shaddup. 'M trying to sleep."

Pete bored into Jack, hoping her gaze scorched him. "Let go of me."

His mouth twisted. "Did that a dozen years ago." He left her and went back to his mattress.

Pete backed out of the room and half fell down the shadowed stairs to the front door, sucking in cold, clean outside air as she leaned against the Mini. She didn't know why Jack was angry, but it didn't matter, did it? He was still the same charlatan, still using smoke and tricks up his sleeves to avoid the realities of the world. Pete dug her knuckles into her eyes until her tears retreated.

I will not think of him. I will not gift him my tears. I will not let Jack Winter touch me.

Chapter Seven

Scotland Yard flowed around Pete, shuffling papers and ringing phones, inspectors each wrapped in a cocoon of worry and mystery, weighted by their unsolved cases.

Pete sat at the double desk she shared with Ollie, hands pressed over her eyes. They felt of sandpaper, as if tiny grains made up the inside of her eyeballs.

Fuck, she wanted a cigarette.

"DCI Newell wants to see you." Ollie touched her shoulder, and Pete jerked. Every time she got close to Jack she came away jumpy and displaced.

She wanted to believe him, that was the problem. He'd let the word roll so indolently out. Magic.

The hiss of knowing pressed on Pete's mind, begging her to admit that it was as likely an explanation as any, but she wouldn't allow herself to think of it. Connor's voice, his strong hands gripping her shoulders. You listen and you listen good, girl. There ain't no such thing as what you say Winter did.

There ain't no such thing as magic.

"Thanks, Ollie." Pete sighed.

"You look like shite, still," said Ollie bluntly, settling his comfortable bulk into his chair and rattling a used copy of the Times.

"Love you, too, Ollie." Pete shoved her chair back. Chief Inspector Newell would have all manner of questions about the Killigan case, and Pete deflected them the only way she knew how—she came into Newell's office on the offensive.

"No, I don't know how she got there or who took her. She hasn't spoken. For God's sake, Nigel, she's been blinded."

Nigel Newell blinked twice at Pete. "Thank you for that succinct update, DI Caldecott. However, I called you in on another matter."

Pete drew in a breath, wishing desperately it was the end of a Parliament. Sod it, before this morning she'd been meaning to quit. Jack had raked all her old vices to front and center.

"Sorry, sir. What is it you wanted to see me on?"

"The Superintendent has deemed it appropriate to dedicate a small auxiliary parking structure to Inspector Caldecott, senior. Your father," said Newell as if she might have forgotten. He gave the impression of examining Pete over his glasses, even though his nose was bare. "They would like you to write a brief statement to be engraved on the plaque that will bear his name, if that isn't too taxing."

Bloody foolishness. Connor coughed at her from that hospital bed, so diminished but still full of fight. Tell him to sod his parking structure—did my job and never asked for anything more.

"Of course, sir," she said aloud, willing Newell, Don't ask about Bridget Killigan.

"Very well," said Newell. "You're dismissed."

Relief, and a fag waiting outside.

"And Inspector?" said Newell. Pete's feet ground to a halt against her will.

"Sir?"

"Don't think that I won't be asking for a full accounting of the Killigan matter when the girl is released from the hospital."

Damn you, Jack. "Of course, sir." Pete tipped her head in deference and escaped into the wider office.

"Someone sent you papers by courier," said Ollie, with a nod toward the flat tan package on Pete's desk. The return label was the crest of Terry's architectural firm. Pete ripped the package with a letter opener, being more vicious than she strictly had to be.

Tight orderly lines of black type marched across the columns and Pete swore in a whisper before she punched up an outside line and called Terry at work.

"Mr. Hanover."

"This is not the price we agreed on, you wanker," Pete gritted into the mouthpiece. Ollie raised his eyebrows at that, and strategically went to refill his tea mug with hot water.

On the other end of the line, Terry sighed. "The estate agent priced it for a quick sale, Pete, just like you wanted. You told me yourself you didn't want to waste any time haggling over the flat—just get it sold."

"Yes." Pete turned her back on the MIT room at large and stared at the National Health advisories pinned to the wall behind her desk. "Yes, I do want it sold, sold at the price we gave the estate agent."

"The market's gone downhill since then. Martha said—"

"Who the bloody hell is Martha?"

She could picture Terry's sour pout when he answered. "My new estate agent. Miss Tabram."

"She's Susan's assistant, the one who had her knees stuck in your ears when I came over to sign the credit check forms last week?"

"We're seeing each other." Terry sounded far too relaxed for Pete to do anything except get into her car, drive to his firm, and shove his drafting pencil into his ear canal. She couldn't, so she snapped, "Raise the price up, Terry. I'm not going to waste my time with your fucking about," and slammed the receiver down with a crack like bones snapping.

"Now I really do need that fag," she said to Ollie when he sat down again. "He ordered my food on our first date and he hasn't stopped shoving his bloody opinions down my throat since."

A clerk came through the maze of desks and touched Pete on the shoulder. "Sorry to bother you, Inspector… four persons to see you waiting in the visitor's room."

Pete wrapped her fist longingly around the crumpled pack of Parliaments in her pocket.

"Not the ruddy press, is it?" said Ollie suspiciously. "PR office has been ringing off the hook with tosspots wanting an interview with you, Pete."

"It's not the press," said the clerk. "It's… well…" Her tan brow crinkled nervously. "They wouldn't exactly say, Inspector… only that it was very urgent."

"All right, all right." Pete sighed. "I'll be out in a moment. Tell them to keep their knickers on that long."

Ollie found Pete half an hour later, in her customary spot near the parking shed for the armed response vehicles.

"What happened, Caldecott?"

Rain peppered the puddle at Pete's feet, and she threw her cigarette into it, where it floated on the oil-stained water like a tiny corpse. "Two more."

Ollie sagged a bit, and rubbed his forehead. "Bugger it. When?"

"This afternoon," said Pete. "After school. Two children, friends, live near each other. They didn't come home, and the parents thought they'd run away."

"I'll tell Newell," said Ollie, making a move for the door.

"I did it," said Pete. "Patrols are searching the neighborhood. I'm following momentarily." Even to her ears, she sounded flat and uninterested, as if a boring program were on BBC 4 but she couldn't be bothered to change the channel.

She could lie and say it was Jack's fault, for jerking her about rather than telling the truth, but it was hers. Two more children. An agonizing five days, if she was lucky, before they showed up in the same fashion as Bridget Killigan. Pete didn't even bother to tell herself that these were just suspicions, not fact. She was too tired to deny that she was certain.

"I'll fetch my car, head over there as well," said Ollie.

"Heath, wait," said Pete. Ollie paused. "Would you… would you mind going on ahead and taking point on the case, just for today?"

Ollie's lips pursed. "You've been eerie ever since we found the Killigan child, Caldecott. You need a bit of rest. If that's what you're asking for, take it. With my blessing."

"Not a rest," said Pete. She felt mad, as if she were standing on a cliff with paper wings strapped to her back. But the simple fact, the only fact in this at all, was that Jack had been right. Never mind how, he'd found Bridget. He would find the two new missing.

Pete didn't allow herself the glaring thought that her faith in Jack was as misplaced as it had ever been. Or the new wrinkle, that he hated her for something she couldn't fathom.

"Not a rest," Pete repeated to Ollie. "There's something that I have to do. It may take me thirty-six hours or so, Ollie… cover my arse with Newell until then?"

Ollie Heath, God bless him, just nodded. "Of course, Pete."

He went to look for the missing children, and Pete went hunting for Jack, not knowing if she was going to hit him or embrace him when they met, just that she needed to find him, and so she would.

Chapter Eight

She'd never intended to rescue him, of course. Of all the strung-out lost boys in London, Jack was the least in need of that.

Pete knew she'd been spending too much time around Southwark when the shifty bloke on the steps of Jack's squat waved to her.

And she waved back. "Jack in?"

"Nah," said the kid, sniffling and shivering even inside his parka. "He moved on last night. Prolly over near Borough High Street in the close. There's a few beds."

It was twilight, witchy and shadowed along the narrow street. The night citizens were beginning to stir, but there was enough daylight left to allow her safe passage to Jack's latest shooting gallery.

He was nodding against the wall in the front room, burning cigarette dangling between his lips and a crackling copy of London Calling on the turntable. Pete pushed the needle off track with a squeal and Jack cracked one eye.

"Hasn't anyone told you it's rude to burst into other people's houses?"

"I need to talk to you," Pete said. She crossed her arms and made sure to appear stern and unyielding. Jack was in the throes of a hit, and damn it all, he'd listen to her one way or another.

"I recall we've played this scene before," said Jack. "Only this time you haven't got my stash to threaten me with. So what are you going to do, DI Caldecott—beat me about the head with a great bloody stick?"

"Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind," Pete assured him. Jack exhaled a cloud of blue, the nubby cigarette falling to the floor. He didn't appear to notice, tapping his dirty fingertips to the time of "Clampdown." A stray line of blood painted the path between the clustered punctures on his forearm, and Pete stooped to press the napkin she'd received with her breakfast buttie against the spot. The faint smell of eggs and ham rose between them, blending the tobacco and the sour undertone of the squat into something almost home.

"Someone who didn't know would almost think you cared," Jack muttered, but he didn't pull his arm away.

"I care," Pete said. "I care about Diana Leroy and Patrick Dumbershall."

Jack yawned languidly. "Who, now?"

"You know bloody well who they are," Pete said, slipping one end of the metal links from her belt around Jack's wrist. He jerked as soon as the handcuffs clicked closed and Pete's wrist bruised with a sharp jab.

"You slag!" Jack spat when he realized what Pete had done. "If you're still trying to get into me knickers, there's better ways."

"Your knickers don't concern me in the least," Pete said crisply.

"Please, Pete," Jack said with a pathetic jangle of the cuffs. "Don't do this to me. I can't do another stretch. Prison's bloody murder for me." He was like the roving harlequin at a carnival, trying on masks until he found one that the audience favored, one to draw them into his web of seduction and illusion.

And in that other time, with the other Jack, it would have worked. Pete knew she'd be helpless, she'd go stand in his circle and feel his black magic flow through them both.

But now all she saw was Jack grinning at her as the smoke man came, and she felt the screaming vibrations inside her own head as her mind struggled to contain something that no one was meant to endure. And his pathetic attempts to con her weren't helping.

"Get up," she snarled, hauling Jack to his feet. He was light, far beneath healthy, like a starving vampire or a reanimated sack of bones. Pete turned her head determinedly so Jack wouldn't see the pity on her face. Pity was something neither of them wanted. "You're coming along to the Yard and we're going to talk about the two more missing children."

Jack dug in his heels. "I can't leave me things, some cunt'll nick them."

Pete stopped, making Jack stumble closer to her by their connected arms. "I am going to get some bloody answers out of you, Jack Winter, and I prefer to do it in the comparative clean and comfort of a place that is not a druggie squat, so you are going out that door and I don't give a fuck whether it pleases you or not."

Jack blinked. Pete had never known she had the ability to leave him at a loss, and it was rather powerful. Well, nights upon rainy nights of dealing with drunken soccer hooligans who decided just because she was small and slight that she was easily intimidated would put steel into any woman's backbone.

"I get some clean clothes, yeah?" Jack said as Pete forcibly led him out the door and down the mossy steps to the Mini. "And a drink. God, I'd murder a pint."

"You get to sit down in the car and shut your gob," said Pete, thrusting Jack into the passenger side of the Mini. She clipped her end of the cuffs to the door bar and got in.

By the time they cleared the wharves and drove over the bridge back into the City, Jack was nodding again, in the dream place between the heroin and the barren expanse of needing it. Pete slapped his shoulder with her free hand. "Keep awake. This isn't a minicab."

"Mmph," said Jack. "Bloody hell, you're violent. Got some sort of repressed urge you're takin' out on me?"

"My urges are none of your sodding business," Pete snapped, then pressed her lips together. He still had that current, that disconcerting air that made her blurt out things that should have stayed a secret.

Jack smirked. "So you say, luv."

"Why don't you make this easy on yourself and tell me what you know about the missing kids," Pete suggested as she turned onto a thoroughfare crowded with taxis and the late rush hour.

"I know fuck-all," said Jack promptly. "May I please be let go now, Inspector? I'll be ever so good and won't cause a fuss again."

Pete gripped the wheel. She wanted to throw her two hands around Jack's neck, but the Mini's steering wheel would have to do. "You told me exactly where to find Bridget Killigan and when, and you expect me to believe that you know nothing about two other children abducted by the same bloody person in the same bloody way?"

"I do, and I don't." Jack nodded. "Let me out of the fucking car, Pete. I'll crash us into an abutment if that's what it takes."

Pete crossed two lanes of traffic and screeched into the bus dropoff zone, laying on the Mini's brakes in a way the manufacturer never intended. "Sod you, you bastard!" she yelled. "You think just because you're some poor wounded addict I'm supposed to believe your line of innocent bullshit?"

"What I think," Jack yelled back, "is that you've turned from a sweet girl into a harpy from hell, and that I bloody hate the sight of you and if you don't unlock these bloody handcuffs right now, I'll hurt you, Pete. I swear to whatever gods you pray to."

It flamed up in his eyes first, the bluer light of witchfire. Pete gasped as it spilled from his fingers, his lips—pure raw magic seeping out and forming a tangible golem of Jack's rage. Of his magic.

Pete wanted more than anything to turn her eyes and pretend that she was just tired, or just crazy, or just… But the weight of knowing laid itself upon her, knowing in the pit of her stomach, the thing that wouldn't go away no matter how many years spanned between Jack holding her hands as the flames wreathed them and Jack glaring at her now, melting her skin with his stare to reach the truth underneath. And she could ignore it, but she'd never stop the knowing, stop seeing things she shouldn't know for truth or fiction, or be able to deny what the witchfire wreathing Jack meant.

It spilled off him in waves now as he jerked against the cuffs, touching the spiked tips of his hair and gathering at the corners of his mouth, racing over the dials in the Mini's dash. Where it kissed Pete's rigid body, it stung.

A shudder passed through her, like she'd just been doused with ice water. Jack's breathing was the loudest thing inside the car, ragged and enraged. Everything was bathed in blue.

"Bloody hell," Pete whispered. "You weren't lying."

"Magic," Jack agreed with a hiss, his lips parting. The witchfire retreated and coiled about his head like a blazing ice crown, angry and chained.

Pete swallowed as a lorry whooshed by her window, horn blaring. "I know you can tell me what happened to those children." She didn't add, And now I have to believe that what happened to you really happened, and God, Jack, you just made every nightmare I've had for twelve years real again. Her stomach and her vision both lurched but she kept herself steady, from the outside anyway. The outside mattered.

"Very probable," Jack agreed, settling back into his seat. The witchfire abated until there was only the slightest glow to his eyes.

"Then tell me," Pete said. She heard a begging tone creep in, and hated herself for it.

Jack eyed her for a moment and Pete tried unsuccessfully not to feel naked. The drugs had muted Jack's vitality but they did nothing for his gaze, which burned hotter than she'd ever remembered, fired with rock-bottom desperation.

"I might tell you," he considered. "But I've got a couple of conditions if I should decide to divulge my specific arcane knowledge."

"Name them," said Pete instantly. She'd clear whatever-it-was with Chief Inspector Newell later—right now Diana and Patrick's timetable was winding inexorably down.

"Condition one: I get a shower, clean clothes, a place to stay—and not some dodgy hostel you shove witnesses into either, a real place," Jack said. "Whether or not I decide to tell you anything, you take me there right now."

He'd never tell her anything useful, of course. Pete wasn't stupid and she could see from the way Jack talked and held himself that he was hating her for something, that her need for what he had was getting him off.

But she wasn't stupid, so she said, "Done."

"Condition two," said Jack. "If I tell you something, Pete, no matter how bloody outlandish it sounds to your cotton-packed copper ears—you listen. And you believe me."

How she'd wanted to do that, every second they'd spent together. Couldn't, because admitting the truth of the matter with Jack would have driven anyone reasonable mad. Believing him would be admitting that everything in the world wasn't in plain sight, and it ran contrary to Pete's whole life, the new one she'd built after Jack.

"Pete," Jack snapped. His expression was hard-edged, the mask in place, waiting to see if she'd give in to his demands.

"Yes, Jack," she said with a sigh. "I'll believe you."

Chapter Nine

Jack glared suspiciously at the door of Pete's flat. "This doesn't look like any bloody hotel I've ever seen."

"It's not," said Pete, peeling the package notices and the card from the estate agent off the door and sliding her key home. "It's my flat."

One dark eyebrow crawled upward on Jack's forehead. "And this is part of our arrangement how, exactly?"

Pete flicked on lights and put up her bag and coat, motioning Jack inside. "It's a very nice flat. You can have a shower and put on some of Terry's old clothes."

"Who in bloody fuck-all is Terry?"

"My ex-fiance," said Pete shortly, "Bath's down the hall. I'll put the kettle on."

She left Jack standing and went into the kitchen, careful to keep her back turned so he wouldn't catch on she was watching him. After a moment and a spate of muttering, she heard Jack go down the hall. A door closed and water ran in the basin, rattling the old pipes like a disgruntled poltergeist.

Pete moved swiftly. She threw the bolts on the front door and locked the padlock she and Terry had never used because the area wasn't that bad, shoving the key deep into the catch-all drawer in the kitchen. All the windows were painted shut and covered with safety lattice, so he wouldn't be getting out that way. No back stairs.

Pete crossed herself reflexively, a move she hadn't performed in the eight years since Connor's death, but which seemed highly appropriate now.

She would not allow herself to think about what Jack would say once he emerged from the loo. He'd be bloody angry, but she figured that in his diminished state she could probably take him on. Plus, there were always the handcuffs.

"I'm starved," Jack announced. "Call for takeaway."

Pete jumped and silently berated herself. He was silent as a shade, just as he'd always been, appearing practically out of ether.

Jack's mouth curled into a slow grin. "Sorry. Didn't mean to frighten you."

"Not frightened," said Pete. "You never frightened me, Jack."

"Come now, Pete," he teased. "I was the scariest thing your little head ever laid eyes on."

Pete handed him a menu for the curry stand at the corner. "For a time," she said. "A very short time, until I realized what was standing just behind you, in shadow."

The grin vanished and Jack's grim set returned. "And you didn't stick around long then, did you? Ran right back to Daddy and safety."

"Saffron rice or naan?" Pete said quietly.

Jack gauged her, seeing if his pinprick had drawn blood. Pete didn't let him know that ever since he'd appeared back at her shoulder all the old wounds had slipped their stitches. She was bleeding in the open, her scars exposed.

But fuck if she'd let Jack and his new, persistent hostility see it.

And she succeeded, because he shrugged in an elaborate display of apathy and said, "Rice, I guess."

One of these days, she'd ask him about that rage he carried like a stone on his back. Pete dialed for takeaway and ordered two curries. If Jack ate, it would be a good sign—not all was lost if he ate.

She turned from the phone and saw him examining the photograph of herself and Terry on the fireplace mantel. Pete had laid it facedown, but Jack picked it up. "This the bloke?"

"That's Terry," Pete confirmed.

"He looks like a git."

"Thank you for the assessment," Pete said. "You look like a transient, but we won't delve into that comparison, will we?"

"Ouch!" Jack said with what may have been a faint admiration. "You bloody well learned to go for the bollocks, didn't you?"

"I may have picked up a skill or two since you last knew me," Pete agreed. Jack slouched on her sofa and flicked on the telly, changing until he found a Manchester game. "You got any lager?"

"Not for you," Pete said. She crossed her arms, uncrossed them, brushed her straight black hair behind her ears, where it promptly fell free again. How could Jack Winter be sitting there, watching telly and waiting for takeaway and demanding a drink? She'd seen what Jack could do with little more than a thought and a muttered word or two of the old language, and she had entrapped him into her flat, her home.

Was she mad?

A knock made her start. Jack barely stirred, asleep within seconds once he relaxed.

"That'll be curry," Pete said. Jack snored, familiar and at the same time as alien as if she'd invited Frankenstein's monster to sleep on her sofa.

Pete paid for the takeaway and tried to eat, but she kept craning over the sounds of Manchester winning to see if Jack was awake. But he slept, still as a breathing corpse, until Pete dumped her dinner into the bin and sat down to write reports on the two missing children that Jack was supposed to help her find. Two days now, when it faded to black outside her windows, Two days—hardly any time at all.

She could wake Jack up, but what purpose would that serve? And if she were completely honest, would a part of her admit to a certain Tightness at Jack being in her flat, at Jack being alive at all?

Pete felt her eyelids drift down, dreamily, and she let herself sleep lulled by Jack's rattling breath and the receding waves of sound from the telly. She woke to the ITV logo bouncing around the screen and Jack's incensed expression, his knotty hand on her shoulder, shaking her.

"Let go!" She brushed him off.

"Open the bloody door!" he grated.

Pete yawned and blinked, not intending to appear indifferent, but she did, and Jack kicked at her scatter rug. "Fuck it, open up!"

"What could possibly be that important at this hour?" Pete said, rubbing her temples. Purely rhetorical, because she knew without having to ponder. It was the only driving force junkies obeyed.

"Well, let's start with you sodding locking me in!" Jack said.

Pete stood, flexing her foot where it had gone to sleep. "It isn't a safe neighborhood, Jack." Flimsy. Didn't Da teach you to be a better liar than that? She prayed, another habit that she'd mostly excised since Jack and Connor had died. Please, let this work out in my favor. Don't let hint see how afraid I am of what he can still do.

"I'm leaving now," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "Thanks for the curry and the washup."

"You've only just gotten here," Pete protested, in what to her ears sounded like a fairly innocent manner. "And you didn't eat a thing."

"I've just… got to go," Jack said. "Open the door, please?"

He was begging. Fuck all, the heroin must have its jaws around him tight to make Jack Winter resort to that.

Pete drew in a breath through her nose. She met Jack's eyes and said, "No."

They narrowed and hardened to ice chips, and his pleasant visage peeled back to show the beast under the skin. "What d'you mean, 'no'?"

"Just what I said," Pete replied with a sigh. "It's late. Whatever-it-is can wait till morning."

Jack grabbed the picture of Pete and Terry and hurled it at the opposite wall. Glass shattered into snow fragments, blanketing the wood floor.

He rounded on Pete, and she tensed. The blue light flamed up in his eyes and he gripped her by the upper arms, face inches away. She could see that he hadn't shaved, that he had a faint scar vertically along his right cheek—he didn't have that before—and that if she didn't yield to his drive to get a fix, he would have no trouble at all killing her.

"Let. Me. Out," Jack said slowly.

"Won't do it, Jack," Pete whispered. "We can stand here until the sun comes up."

He squeezed and Pete bit the inside of her cheek. His misery made him bloody strong. "If you don't get me my fix," Jack said, "you can forget about our little bargain to save poor innocent Patrick and Diana. You'll have killed them over me. Now me, I could live with that on my head, but I doubt you can, Pete. You're far too good and pure."

"You don't know me so well any longer," Pete said. Jack sighed, looking at the floor between them, shaking finitely all over his body.

"Don't know what you're doing to me, do you? Probably the closest you've ever come to it is renting the Trainspotting video." He leaned in, their mouths and skin millimeters apart. "Pete, you don't know. You have no idea what it is to need this. Please. I'm asking you now. Let me out to get my fix, so it doesn't all go horribly wrong."

"I've been with the Met long enough to know what it is to be an addict," said Pete, pulling her chin back, because proximity to Jack did strange things to a person. "And I know when a bloke's trying to manipulate me. No, Jack. Nothing will go wrong and the answer is no."

One fist went up. "Open the fucking door before I bash your fucking face."

Pete felt her jaw tighten and her lips compress. All her patience for this new Jack ran out like water. A dozen years of regret and feeling the hole in her heart, and this was what she got?

Pete used the rage of her wasted nightmares to fuel the snarl in her voice. "You won't do any such thing, Jack, because you're a fucking coward. And sod your deal, by the way. I said I'd get you washed and fed. I didn't agree to anything about your smack."

His upper lip twisted but under the surface of his sneer the fire flickered and burned out of his eyes.

Pete gripped the hand bruising her arm and twisted just enough to throw the joints out of prime. "Bollocks!" Jack yelped. Pete gripped his wrist and elbow in a control hold, propelling Jack toward the bathroom.

"Now we're going to get one thing straight," she said, shoving Jack into her old claw-footed bathtub and spinning the cold tap open all the way.

"Fuck!" he shouted, collapsing in a heap. "You fleabit-ten whore! That freezes!"

"I don't care what sort of a problem you've developed in regard to me," Pete said, ticking off on her fingers. "I care about Patrick and Diana and finding them alive and well. And you are going to help me, and you're going to do it without the assistance of your sodding heroin, or so help me, Jack, I will personally beat you senseless and deliver you to the lockup at the Yard."

He glared up at her, his bleached hair dribbling into his eyes like sodden straw. Pete glared back, watching him shiver and trying to ignore the pity shredding her intentions to be hard.

After a long rotation of the clock hands, Jack wiped a hand over his face and reached up to turn off the tap. "All right, Caldecott," he said finally. "You got yourself a deal."

Chapter Ten

The children's ward at St. John's Hospital made an effort to paint a cheery face on things with bright furniture and murals on the walls, but it had the same effect as a syphilitic prostitute smearing on expensive rouge.

Bridget Killigan's father—Dexter, "Call me Dex, they all do"—looked up when she swung open the door. "Inspector?"

"Is she sleeping?" Pete asked. Bridget lay on the hospital bed like a child bride on her funeral pyre.

"She drifts," said the father. "In and out." He stroked Bridget's hair back from her grave face, like she was a porcelain thing, smashable.

"Could I have a word?" Pete asked even though a word would get no results. Bridget's mind was gone as the ash on the end of a burning cigarette. But Pete needed groundwork, if she was going to find Patrick and Diana, needed facts to know that Jack wasn't simply wanking off over her discomfiture.

She needed truth, even if she blended or blurred or broke it, later on. Start with the truth, Connor said, and then you can draw the map, walk anywhere you please. Go to the sodding forbidden forest if you like, but start at true.

"Bridget?"

The girl stirred, the white marble eyes flicking toward Pete as if Bridget could still see, even though the doctor in A&E had assured Pete she was totally blind. "Who is it? Mum?"

"No, love," said Pete, gripping the rail of Bridget's bed. Cold and straight, inhuman. Strength. "No, this is Detective Inspector Caldecott. You can call me Pete."

Bridget's forehead creased. "Pete's a funny name for a girl."

"I know," Pete agreed, breathing deep and keeping her tone steady. "It's bloody—er, very funny. You think that's a burden, my sister's name is Morning Glory."

Bridget made no reaction.

Pete chewed her lip. "Bridget, I need to ask you about the person who took you."

Bridget's father pressed his palms together, lips moving silently. Bridget let out a small sigh, as if she'd repeated her story many times.

"We went to see the old Cold Man. He lives down the murky path, just around the bend."

Pete took Bridget's hand. Her skin was cooler than the air, dry like parchment. Bridget was a shadow child, a thin husk with nothing beating beneath the surface.

"Bridget, where is the murky path? Where does it go?"

"I think you've done quite enough," Dexter Killigan said abruptly, standing and placing his hand protectively on his daughter's shoulder. "She can't tell you anything."

"Bridget," Pete said again, squeezing the girl's papery hand. "Bridget, what did you see when you went down the murky path?"

She rolled her head toward Pete and fixed Pete with those white eyes, dead pearls in her tiny corpse-face. "We saw the bone tombs. The dead places where the dreamers go. He strides in the shadows and he reached out his hand to me."

The hospital room was warm, nearly stuffy, but Pete felt a cold that cut to her bones. Bridget's calm monotone recalled images just beneath the rippling surface of Pete's own memory, black smoke and skeletal phantoms whispering close to her ear.

"And what does he do, Bridget?" she finally managed. Her voice came out dry, as if she'd been smoking for twenty years hence. "What does the old Cold Man do?"

Bridget was still for a long moment, breath shallow, pulse beating in her translucent throat. Pete leaned in. "Bridget?"

The little girl's hand latched around Pete's wrist, touch like frost. Pete jumped.

Bridget whispered sibilantly. "He's touched both of us, Pete Caldecott. Backward and forward, up and down the years, he sees. And he waits."

Black pools spun in front of Pete's vision as her blood dropped groundward. "What did you say? How do you…"

But Bridget was gone again, still and silent and asleep. Her father shook himself and then pointed at the door. "Get out," he told Pete shakily. "Get out and don't come back. Leave my daughter alone."

Pete moved for the door faster than she admitted to herself. She needed to be outside, and needed a fag, not necessarily in that order. "I'm sorry," she said to Dexter Killigan before the door swished shut on the tableau in the hospital room.

He didn't answer, mourning Bridget with his stillness and his unblinking, distant stare.

Chapter Eleven

At the door to her flat, Pete paused and listened, catching not a sound from inside. "Bloody hell," she muttered. Relief, not worry, that. She'd left Jack cuffed to the headboard of her bed, after he'd passed out on it, and by the sound of things, he'd stayed there.

Pete believed it, right up until she opened the door. The rug in the front room was crumpled and her hall table had been tipped over. "Shit." Then, "Jack?"

He'd be gone, and the only question would be how many of her pawnable possessions he could carry.

Pete jerked a Parliament out of the pack and stomped into the kitchen for a light. She passed the bathroom on her way. Jack lay on his side next to the toilet, the sweat beading on his face the only sign he was alive.

The unlit fag dropped from Pete's mouth. "Damn you, Jack," she hissed. Then she was on her knees, turning his head, feeling for a pulse, pulling his eyelids back to examine his ice-chip eyes for shock. They were bloodshot but the pupils flexed at her intrusion, and Jack swatted at her weakly.

"Go 'way."

"Jesus, Jack," Pete breathed, sitting back on her heels.

Jack rolled on to his back and moaned, throwing a hand over his eyes.

"He's got fuck-all to do with this. I'm bloody dying. You're an evil spawn of witches, Pete Caldecott."

Pete rolled a clean towel and slipped it under Jack's head. "You may be a lot of things, but dying isn't one. And the next time you call me a name, I'm putting my foot up your arse and leaving it there."

A smile flashed, the devil-grin. "Same little firecracker. Always liked that you weren't afraid of me."

"I—" Pete started, but Jack's face twisted, and then he lunged for the toilet and was violently sick.

Pete put a hand between Jack's shoulder blades, feeling the bones grind under the skin as he retched. He was burning hot, but his sweat was like ice water.

"I just need a little," Jack pleaded as he pressed his forehead against the porcelain rim. "Just a little to take the edge off. It's been hours, Pete. Fucking days."

"No," said Pete without hesitation.

"Fuck you!" Jack screamed, driving his fists into the tile floor of the bathroom. His knuckles left bloody smears.

"Fine," Pete said, standing. "You'll either pull through it or you won't. But you did this to yourself, Jack, and if you wanted to keep spiraling down toward the rock fucking bottom, you should have kept your bloody mouth shut about Bridget."

Jack glared at her, mouth opening to spew another curse, but his jaw slackened. "Pete," he said softly. "Pete, move out of the way."

Pete glanced behind her, feeling a twinge of ice on the base of her neck. Jack's pupils dilated until his eyes were wormholes rimmed with frost. "Did someone die in your flat?" he whispered. "A man, your height, dark visage and eyes?"

Because it was Jack, and not anyone else, Pete found herself nodding as the frost fingers spread out to grip her spine. "Yes, but that has to be forty years ago now."

Jack's thin chest fluttered as he sucked in a wavering breath. "Get away from him," he told Pete. "He's hungry."

Pete's sensible ballet flats were rooted to the tile, and even though her instincts were screaming in concert, a million pinpricks over her skin and psyche, she couldn't move.

"Behind me," Jack rasped. "Move your arse, woman!"

She'd never heard Jack so dead serious, and it snapped the frozen spell. Pete scrabbled across the sweat-slicked tile and crouched behind Jack against the shower curtain, which rustled like a gale had just blown through the bathroom.

Nothing was behind her. Pete felt instantly ridiculous, the ice on her skin replaced by the flush of a paranoid caught out. "Jack…" She sighed. "Bloody hell, don't do that to me."

"Shut it," he said urgently, still fixated on the corner near the door. "Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you fucking shadow with teeth. Well, bollocks to you."

The sense of evil just over the left shoulder returned full-force and Pete saw the air in the spot where she'd stood shimmer, as if something were trying to push into the realm of sight through sheer malevolence. "Oh, God," she said, because He was the first powerful thing that jumped to mind.

"Forget about that," said Jack. He dipped an index finger in the ruddy smear he'd left on the tiles and began to draw, a radius filled with swirling symbols that shifted and blended into something strong and binding, like the iron scrollwork on a castle's gate.

The air crackled and rippled, and blackness began to crowd in through the seams in the walls, the drain and faucet of Pete's bathroom sink, a shadowy smoke-ether that brought with it whispers and fluttering cries, phrases that twisted just out of hearing.

Jack's jaw set, bone jumping under the skin. "Think you're a smart bastard, do you?"

"I don't think this is working," Pete murmured. Jack was expanding another set of symbols, barely integral when drawn with his shaking fingers.

The smoke filled the bathroom, always at the edges of Pete's vision, narrowing it down into a tunnel the size of a shilling coin. The babble of unearthly voices was joined by smells, and feelings—turned earth, blood-spattered sheets, tiny fingers on Pete's skin and sliding through her hair.

She gripped Jack's shoulder. "For fuck's sake, Jack, I do not want to die on the floor of my loo."

And his hand stopped shaking, and his breathing calmed, and with that the circle resolved as bright and solid as if it had been carved into the tiles. The shimmering malice dissolved like dust motes in a bar of sun, and fast as they'd seeped into the realm of the real, the whispers and the smells and the tiny grasping fingers and fangs were gone.

Jack slumped. "Bloody hell. You couldn't have brought me someplace safer, like, say, the fucking Tower?"

"I…" Pete pressed her hands over her nose and mouth and forced herself into a mold of composure she felt ill suited to fit. "I have no idea what that was."

"That," said Jack, "is what happens when I don't get my fix."

"You…" Pete looked at the corner where the presense had spread its oily sheen, and back at Jack. "You see… whatever that was?"

"Shade," said Jack. "Ghost, if you want to be pedestrian about it. A poxy one allowed to hang about for far too long. Bugger all, didn't you have this place cleansed before you moved in?"

"It never occurred to me," said Pete, although more than once on nights when rain blurred the streetlamps outside into nightmare gloom or the telly turned on by itself, she'd thought about it. The circle of protection Jack could chalk, and grow strong as iron. The five-pointed silver circlet Mum had always worn at her throat.

Jack rolled on his side, eyes half-closed like he'd just taken the purest hit of his life. "Christ on a motorbike. I'm bloody exhausted. If I get back in the bed, could you restrain your kinky self from handcuffing me again?"

Having seen what she had, just then, Pete simply nodded. "You won't try to run away?"

"Pete, I'm two breaths from shaking hands with the reaper. Don't be fucking stupid."

"Back to being a git, I see," said Pete. "Maybe there is hope, after all."

Jack slept for a long time after Pete laid him back in her bed, and she sat at awkward angles in the wicker chair next to him, attempting to make sense of departmental e-mails on her laptop and ignore the fact that they had perhaps a day and a half left if the kidnapper worked according to method. Every time she tried to focus on the pixels, her vision shimmered and blurred just like the shade that had almost appeared.

Just as nebulous were her thoughts, the tails and fragments of questions that wouldn't be answered. Jack moaned in his sleep, his fever dreams gripping his body and causing his hands to lash out under the sheets.

Pete put a hand on his shoulder. "All right. No one's here except me."

Dreaming, he didn't have the wherefore to offer venom in return, and Pete found herself curiously saddened by this. She might never find out what had intervened to make Jack hate her, and this illusion was all she had, until Patrick and Diana were found. If they were found.

The thought stirred a blacker feeling in her than the aura of any shade.

Chapter Twelve

In Pete's dream, Patrick and Diana reached out to her with black and sticky fingers, their mouths smeared with offal as they feasted on the long-dead bodies of those who had come to this tomb before her. Pete tried to run but every way was bricked over, a blank wall rife with spiderwebs and scrabble marks dug by human fingernails.

The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in bloody and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.

He sees you, Pete Caldecott, whispered Bridget Killigan. And he held out his hand, curled around something that fluttered and oozed blood between his knotty fingers. "Take it. Take what was always yours, tattered girl. Be mine, and whole."

Pete pressed against the wall, grit working its way down her neck, tiny bugs and specks of graveyard dirt. A rush of wind blew through the crypt, the ends of the robed thing flapping on white bone joints, revealing armor washed clean against his rotted skeleton. Patrick and Diana looked up in concert. Smoke boiled across the floor and coalesced into the form of a man, a man with burning silver eyes that seared Pete's mind, not with heat but with a cold that could stop her heart. She felt a delicate shattering behind her skull, and then her mobile started to ring.

Pete's laptop slid to the floor as she bolted awake, her mobile trilling and dancing on the bedside table. Jack reached out in his sleep and swatted at it.

"Hallo," Pete mumbled, trying to sound like she hadn't been nodding. Dreaming.

"Well, you're hard enough to get hold of!" Terry snapped.

"Terry." Pete wondered that she was relieved he'd called. He'd woken her up. That was what mattered.

"I've faxed the new papers to your desk."

Pete checked on Jack, whose trembling had ceased for the moment, and slipped into the hallway, shutting the bedroom door. "I'm not at work, Terry."

She could hear the sneer coming down the line. "Then where on earth are you? It's not like you to go anywhere off your little track from flat to work and back again."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry. Grow up." Pete slapped her mobile shut. Jack groaned, and she returned to the bedside, feeling his pulse and his hot, gleaming forehead. The worst of the withdrawal was past him, please, God, let it be over, and when he woke he'd have raging flu symptoms and a craving like iron claws in his skull, but he'd be sober, and help her, before Patrick and Diana were lost.

Pete used a washcloth to brush Jack's sweat-soaked hair away from his face, and went into the sitting room to let him sleep for as long as she could allow. She tried to eat what takeaway hadn't gone dodgy. Cold aloo gobi did nothing for the state of her stomach, nervous as a pacing cat. Ollie called, and she let her mobile ring through to voice mail, because she didn't have any answers for him.

Pete swept up the broken glass from Terry's picture just to move, and after a second of consideration dropped the snapshot into the bin. It had been taken the day after Pete was promoted to detective inspector, and the day before Terry had asked her to marry him. A moment when things were right and good, and they were so no longer. The picture had no place now that Jack had reentered her life, and her flat.

She straightened up Jack's other messes but she couldn't calm down. Sleeping in the middle of the day had put her at odds, plus the slumbering but screaming presence of the man himself in her bedroom.

Finally, when she knew she'd go mad if she spent another second pacing the floor, back and forth past the bedroom door, she made up the sofa and lay in the twilight, watching the hands of the clock tick toward midnight.

Chapter Thirteen

The sofa wasn't conducive to dreaming, and Pete was glad. She awoke at the first rays of the sun and put the kettle on, collecting Patrick and Diana's case files.

She pushed open the bedroom door with her foot. "Jack?"

He was curled on his side with the blankets kicked back, shaking and sweating as if he were being held to an invisible flame. He'd gotten worse, inexplicably so. Pete felt frustrated tears building and blinked them away.

She juggled her two mugs and armload of folders and shook his shoulder. "Jack, wake up."

His eyes flicked open and then he pressed his fists to his temples. "Jesus, listen to them all…"

"Brought you some tea," said Pete. "I thought we might go over the case files, see if you can glean anything?" The words hung in the air, fragile, and Pete felt the tension shatter them.

"There's a woman screaming," Jack muttered. "Over and over, screaming and rocking while she clutches the stillborn to her chest." He ground his teeth together and shouted, "Fucking shut up, the lot of you! You'll drive a man mad!"

"What do you hear?" Pete asked.

"Everything," Jack moaned. "Every dead thing that I could shut off with a hit is in my head and it's going to explode."

Pete sipped at her tea because she didn't know what to say and burned her tongue. "You've always seen things, Jack?"

"Always," he agreed, panting as his fever fluctuated between arctic and hellfire.

"How did you shut it out, before?" Pete asked. "I know you weren't using when we knew each other."

"Wasn't as bad," Jack muttered. "Wasn't as loud. I'd get flashes, see shades, kiddy stuff. Nothing… nothing like this fucking bombardment until… that day we were together."

"What happened in that tomb, Jack?" Pete asked quietly. "What did we do?" Cloudy memories that she'd written off to trauma threatened to burst through, shadows that stained her real and normal existence crept in from all corners. Pete gritted her teeth and did her best to shut it out.

Jack stared past her into nothing, eyes floating and empty. Eventually they fluttered and closed, and his breathing smoothed into sleep. "Bollocks," Pete muttered.

Jack spent the day and most of the night in and out, wandering between worlds, muttering snatches of disembodied conversations. Sometimes he sobbed, or shook, and Pete could never be sure if it was the drugs or what he was seeing.

The unpleasant realization of If he dies, it's on my head made itself known after the third time Jack had thrown up in as many hours, barely more than bile and a little blood. He hadn't eaten since the curry the first night.

"Jack," she whispered, touching his arm. It was dry now, smooth and cool, like a dead man's skin that had lain outside under a winter moon. He jerked under her, clawing at his own throat and chest.

Pete gripped Jack's bicep and bent close to his ear. "If you die on me again, Jack Winter, you'd better believe I'm coming into hell after you."

She started as Jack wrapped his fingers around her wrist, eyes open in the dark and shining blackly into hers. "That which you do not understand is not yours to offer," he rasped in a voice not his own. Then he fell back onto the mattress, and Pete jerked awake.

Finally, when dawn rolled over the edge of the window and through the gaps in the shades again, Pete staggered to the sofa, which seemed remarkably welcoming now, and collapsed on her side, weariness permeating down to her bones. She slept a little, hearing the daylight rattles of the flat and the sound of lorries and people in the street, the weak interplay of cloud-shrouded sunlight stroking across her eyelids every so often.

The springs in the sofa defeated her, finally, and Pete muttered curses as she went to forage for caffeine.

Jack sat at the kitchen table wearing denim and one of Terry's polos, bulging around his wasted torso, drinking a cup of tea and smoking a fag. Pete blinked once to ensure it wasn't just another dream.

"You're awake," Jack said helpfully.

"And you're unpleasant," said Pete. "Of course I'm awake."

"There's some hot water left," Jack said, exhaling. Pete cast a glance at the packet on the table.

"Are those my Parliaments?"

Jack nodded, dragging deeply. "Can't expect me to live a life completely free of vices, luv." His hand was almost steady. A person would have to be looking to catch the tremor or see Jack's graveyard pallor for sickness rather than affectation.

Pete snatched up the packet and shoved it in the pocket of her bathrobe. "Where did you get these?"

"From your bag," said Jack. He extinguished the butt on the table, leaving a long coal-colored streak on the vinyl.

"If this is what you're like off the junk," Pete said, "it's no wonder you did it for all those years."

"I apologize," said Jack with a bitter twist to the words. "It was bad and rude of me to go through your things. And to use your fine furniture as an ashtray." He held up one palm with fingers splayed. "Next time I'll use me hand."

White scars, ragged circles, dotted Jack's left palm and wrist. Pete nearly lost her grip on her tea mug. "God, Jack, what did you do that for?"

"Various things." He shrugged. "Got pissed, did it for a laugh. For a while pain was the best way I could think to keep the talent under control."

"That's what lets you see dead things?" Pete lit a Parliament of her own. "Talent's a funny word to use."

"So is 'mage,' but I'm that, too."

Pete exhaled. "I'm glad you're feeling better."

"Not really," said Jack. "Usually when I quit I nick some methadone or poppers off one of the other layabouts at the squat, makes things a bit easier. You're a real hellcat, making me go cold turkey like that."

"It was the only way you were going to help me," said Pete.

"Yes," agreed Jack. "And for being utterly cold as coffin nails, you get my grudging respect. But don't you make the mistake of thinking I'm fond of you, or we're squared with each other. Not after you tricked me like that."

"Any trickery I probably learned from you," said Pete. "Now, this isn't a hotel, so what are you going to do to help me find Patrick and Diana? We've got less than a day."

Jack narrowed his eyes at her, rocking his chair back on its hind legs. Just as Pete was getting ready to scream at his inscrutability he said, "Got a pen?"

She handed him the one from her message pad silently and he scribbled on the back of a Boots receipt. "Go here and get me the Grimoire de Spiritus, Hatchett's Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities, and the black briefcase that's hidden behind the LP of Dark Side of the Moon. Understand?"

Pete looked at the Bayswater address. "Why do you need some dodgy books and a briefcase? Can't you do what you did with Bridget?"

"This is what I did for Bridget… well, most of it at any rate. Look, do you want to find the sodding brats with all their vital parts or not?"

Pete sighed and ran water over her cigarette to extinguish it. "All right. Back in an hour."

Chapter Fourteen

The address belonged to a set of flats thin and sooty as a Victorian chimney sweep. The crinkled moon face of an old woman stared at Pete from the second floor before a sad floral-sprigged curtain twitched shut.

Pete climbed five flights that smelled of smoke and too many cabbage dinners until she found the door to number 57. She'd expected a shriveled old man, a gnome with a Gandalf hairdo and a sage twinkle in his eye, so the large Rastafarian who opened the door raised her eyebrow. Just a little, though.

He looked Pete up and down, flashing a gold front tooth. "May I 'elp you?"

"I…" said Pete. Then, with a thrust of her chin, "Jack Winter sent me."

"Jack Winter," said the Rasta. It came out soft and heavy with thought. Jahck. Pete desperately hoped that the man wasn't someone Jack had managed to get after him during the time he'd been away.

"He asked me to get some books for him," Pete elaborated. "And a briefcase."

A grin split the Rasta's face. "You much more beautiful than the last one who come around on Jack Winter's orders, miss. Come you in."

Pete stepped over the threshold, feeling inexplicably comfortable when she did so. The flat was spare of furniture and had only one rag rug on the scarred floor. The narrow windows were leaded and let in a weak trickle of light. What the flat did have was a proliferation of oddities that would cause P. T. Barnum to spasm with joy—jars and boxes on the wall-to-wall cases, books piled to Pete's chin in the corner, books on every surface, along with rows and rows of vinyl records and an old '78 turntable. Connor had listened to Elton John's early albums on his. It was in the hospital room when he died, needle ready to drop on "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road."

"What he send you for? You want tea maybe, and a sausage roll?" asked the Rasta, peering at Pete around the doorjamb leading deeper into the flat.

"No, no, thank you," she said. "In a bit of a hurry, you know."

"Have your look, then." He gestured at the bookshelves. "I have business to attend to."

"I… well, thanks," Pete called as she heard a door close deeper in the flat. After a moment a luxurious scent, dark and secret-tinged as a lover's trysting place under ancient trees, drifted into the main room.

Pete found the books easily enough, and after digging through a pile of LPs on the bookcase found a scratched copy of Dark Side of the Moon. Behind it, sitting dusty and patient as a faithful retainer on the shelf, was a plain black briefcase. Something rattled like knucklebones when Pete picked it up, and she decided not to get unduly curious until she had her privacy.

She straightened up and found herself face-to-face with a head in a jar. It looked like it had been in the jar for at least a hundred years. The skin was sallow and pickled, and the eyes gazed at nothing through their cataract film. "You bloody owe me, Jack," Pete muttered. She shouted, "Got everything, thanks!" to the silent flat. No one answered before she took her leave, but she could swear the head was grinning at her.

Chapter Fifteen

She called, "I'm back," to the silence of the flat when she opened her door again. Jack was sacked out on the sofa, his blond head dipped to his chest, light tremors running through his shoulders all the way down to the tips of his fingers.

Pete dumped the books and the briefcase on the floor by her front door and hurried over, kneeling down. "Jack? Jack, what's wrong?"

"Her wrists are bleeding and bleeding," Jack muttered. "It's sliding down her arms in little red rivers, swirling away down the pipes, and we're all drinking it, we're all watching and waiting for her to raise the blade and cut again."

Pete grasped his shoulders, giving a shake. "It's not real, Jack." She would have to hunt down the estate agent who sold her and Terry this flat and bloody strangle the man. First the shade and now this, some bird who had slashed herself in Pete's bathtub.

"I can hear her crying," Jack whispered.

"I got your briefcase," said Pete desperately. "Jack, please just talk to me."

He rubbed his hands over his face and with great effort met Pete's eyes. "Lawrence didn't give you any trouble?"

"His manners far exceed yours," Pete said, handing Jack the books and the briefcase.

One side of Jack's mouth curved. It was a far cry from the devil-grin, but Pete took what she could get.

"Right," said Jack, running his fingertips along the scarred leather of the briefcase. His caress revealed the case was locked and bore no combination knobs, just an engraved plate that depicted a snake, eating its own tail.

"What's in there?" said Pete.

"Something of mine," said Jack.

"Seems like you don't want anyone inside," Pete observed.

"Oh, them that know, know better than to go into anything I own," said Jack. "This bloody lock was from Marius Cross, the previous owner."

Pete had a good idea of what had happened to Marius Cross, locked briefcase or no. "Did you take it from him?"

"From his cold body," said Jack. "Believe me, luv, he had no need of it."

"Let's just get on with this," said Pete, ignoring the gnawing in her gut, the same as when she'd stood in the circle on the tomb floor.

"Be a luv and get me a needle, or a sharp paring knife… something to prick meself with," said Jack. Pete spread her hands out, already shaking her head.

"No, Jack. No more blood." Did he think she was stone stupid, after the last time?

"Every second you spend arguing with me is another one that the precious hope of our nation's future has lost," said Jack sensibly.

"You're not supposed to make even a little sense," Pete muttered. She rummaged inside her ottoman's storage for the sewing kit and handed Jack a needle. "It's disconcerting."

"Seamstressing is never a hobby I pegged as one of yours," said Jack. He pricked himself without a wince or a sigh and rubbed his bloody finger pad along the lock. The snake uncoiled and the case gave three clicks.

"It was Terry's kit," said Pete. "His shirts were hand tailored, so he mended them if they got damaged."

"Ponce." Jack snorted. The briefcase lid popped up, ominous as a crocodile's mouth.

"Just because someone can put things back together instead of breaking them down to shambles doesn't make that someone a ponce," Pete snapped. "You're a real sod, Jack."

"That's hardly news, luv." He looked at her over the battered leather of the case. "You're doing a deal to defend some bugger that you dumped out on his arse."

Pete rubbed her thumbs against her temples. Jack took a flat mirror and a velvet sack out from the case. The sack rattled again, like a snake.

"For your information," she said quietly, "Terry left me."

"Not surprising, that," said Jack. "I just guessed you'd be the one to do the leaving, since you seemed to be a hand at it when I knew you last."

"Oh, bugger you," Pete snapped. "You and your little bag of marbles." Just when Jack seemed to be letting his rage go, it burst forth again, like an infection of bad spirit.

"It's not marbles," said Jack. He set the mirror on the ottoman and shook the bag once, giving Pete a grin that made her feel cold rather than comforted.

"What is it, then?"

"Bones, luv," said Jack. He dumped out the sack. The white chips hit mirror glass with a death rattle. "It's a bag of bones."

Pete flinched away from them instinctively, feeling a frisson of cold crackling intensity from the bones, each one round with a black center where the marrow had been picked out. They had been polished to a high shine and made a sound like beads as Jack gathered them up and rattled them between his fists. "Always feel so bloody silly doing this. Marius was an old vaudun, and they do like their theatrics and their headless chickens."

"Please tell me we don't have to kill birds to get a result," Pete muttered. She was starting to feel foolish rather than bothered by Jack and his shaking of the bones. This was a scene she'd watched in too many silly films for it to carry the least hint of sincerity.

"Don't be stupid," Jack said. "Just get the brats' pictures and put them on the mirror so I have something to focus on, and stand bloody well back."

Pete extracted the wallet-sized snapshots of Patrick and Diana from their case files, and placed them carefully on the mirror, which was rimmed with a black wooden frame and was as cold as mercury in arctic air. The spine of fear, from the deep place in her mind where her nightmares lived, pricked Pete again and she drew back, as far as she could without making it outwardly obvious she was having doubts.

Jack started to shake the bones faster, the clacking blending into a low whir, and Pete thought his eyes had rolled back in his head until she realized he was still looking dead ahead, and white was rubbing out the blue of his irises, stealing out from the center of his eyes like frost.

"Jack?" Pete said hesitantly. She felt as if the air were pushing in on her, something inexplicable rising in the room as Jack's head tilted back and his hands rattled like he was seizing.

"Jack!" Pete cried as he stiffened and then with a spasmodic gasp flung the bones down onto the mirror and the pictures of the children.

The bones stayed where they fell, as if they were magnets. Pete thought she caught a glimpse of a dark reflection in the mirror before Jack sighed and rotated his head from side to side. "Fucking trances. Always give me neck a cramp."

The reflection flapped its wings and disappeared. It would have been less than a single frame of film. Pete allowed herself to be sure she'd imagined it. Jack's witchfire and his visions were his things. She did not see them, and she did not want to.

"That's it, then?" she said. Her voice came out weak and soft and she swallowed to make it hard again. "That seemed awfully simple."

Jack gave her a skewering glance before he hunched to examine the bones. He'd started to shiver again. "Well, it wasn't, so sod off."

"You can use that blanket on the back of the sofa if you like," said Pete. Jack sneezed, and used a corner of the blanket to blow his nose.

"Cheers." He passed his hand over the bones, fingers splayed, once, twice, three times. "Ah," he said at last, the syllable acres from pleased.

"No good?" Pete deflated inwardly, space containing the wild hope that Jack could repeat his magic with Bridget on the new missing children, that his pithy pronouncement would roll forth and everything would be real and simple again, collapsing.

"It's bloody good," said Jack. "But you're not going to like it. Got a city map?"

Pete fetched the battered one from her desk, marked in several places with notes from old cases. Jack tried to unfold it with his shivery fingers, managed it on the second try, and jabbed his finger at a spot near the heart of the city. "The kids are there."

Pete squinted to read "Brompton Cemetery."

"I know the area," she said. "Not too far from where I grew up, that." She looked at Jack. "You're sure?"

" 'Course I'm bloody sure," Jack muttered. He sniffled and rubbed the back of his hand against his nose. His eyes were red-rimmed and every few seconds he shivered as though a winter wind were cutting his flesh, but his cheeks weren't as yellow and sick as they'd been half a day before, and his movements had more life—less a listless marionette, more of the Jack she remembered.

"All right," said Pete. She dug in her bag for her mobile and started to dial Ollie Heath. "What's the part I'm not going to like?"

Jack made another finger-pass over the bones, and another breath of cold trailed up Pete's spine. "There's black magic around the children," said Jack. "More specifically, them that make use of black magic. Sorcerers."

Pete kept her expression composed. "I think I can handle a few gits in black capes drawing pentagrams, Jack."

"You don't understand." He sighed, as if she'd just told him London was the capital of France. "If sorcerers took the children, something is moving. You said Bridget Killigan was blinded?"

"She's got a kind of amnesia, too," said Pete.

We went to see the old Cold Man. He lives on the murky path, just around the bend.

"Ah, tits," Jack muttered. "Be prepared, Pete—the people that snatched the brats are dangerous and probably won't be in the best humor when we find them. Something's up, mark my words. I can feel it shifting in the lines—there's a darkness clustering around these kids, and the first one, too. Only scried for her because the ghost voices were cutting into the fix and I was trying to make 'em shut it." He rubbed his arms, up and down, rhythmic unconscious strokes. "Any idea how strong a shade has to be to break through an opiate high, Pete? Strong enough to light up the O2. Whole land of the dead is buzzing, and it's the thunder of the oncoming storm." His eyes were bright as he talked, and his body vibrated like a string, the frantic energy of a street preacher.

"What d'you mean 'when we find them'?" she asked Jack. "You're bloody well not coming along on an open investigation."

Jack smirked, lacing his hands behind his head. A little sweat gleamed on his forehead, and he coughed, but he'd stopped shaking for the time. "Planning to be cavalry all by yourself?"

"I very well could be," Pete said. "I'm not an incompetent."

"Yeah, but you won't go on your own," said Jack. He stood up, swaying but walking, and pulled his jackboots on. "You know that I'm right, and there's bad magic running through this entire thing. You'll take me along because you don't want to be staring into the night alone."

Pete started to protest, but Jack stopped lacing his boots and gave her a pained half-smile. "It's not a weakness, Pete—nobody wants that."

If it were anyone else, she would swear he was trying to be a comfort.

It would be far less disconcerting if Jack weren't so often right about her thoughts and secrets, but she didn't very well want to go bursting in on kidnappers alone, in a graveyard, at night. Newell would have her arse for going at this off the book. "Why do you care about these kids?" she demanded. "You didn't even want to help me. Just listening in to ghosts, isn't that right? Nothing selfless about you, not an ounce."

Jack shook his head. "We're not on about me, now." He lifted one bone-sharp shoulder. "If sorcerers are in the mix I might have a laugh, at least. Tick-tock, Inspector. You're the one banging on about time running out."

"I hate you," Pete mumbled, grabbing her coat from the hook and a torch from her hall table. After a moment's debate she also plucked her handcuffs out and hooked them to her belt. Feeble protection against what she thought might be waiting for them even in her own mind.

Jack shrugged into his leather, chains rattling on pyramid spikes, and followed Pete out of the flat. "I'll live with you hating me. At least that way, we're even."

Chapter Sixteen

The section of Brompton Jack led her to was small and personal, fallen out of use as London marched ever forward, forgetting its left-behind dead. Back gardens and leaning brick flats crowded in against the mossy walls.

"Some Goth freak has his dream view, eh?" said Jack as he rattled the padlock on a rusty crypt gate. "You got a wrench in the Mini? I know a few blokes who'd pay cold hard sterling for ground bones and graveyard dust."

Pete pinched between her eyes. "I'm not even going to dignify that."

Jack flashed her a closemouthed smile. "Good girl. Guess that's why you're the copper, eh?"

"I have moments," Pete agreed. She walked again, pushing aside waist-high weeds as the path narrowed and the tombs leaned in, crumbling from their foundations. Jack caught her wrist.

"Oi. What do you think you're doing? I'll go first."

"Sod off, it's not the bloody Victorian era," said Pete, swatting away tiny branches clawing for her face and hair. Muttering, Jack followed her through a trampled gap.

Before them, headstones tilted crazily from dead grass, a path to the two crypts at the back of the plot overgrown with stinging nettles. Pete felt the breath of ghosts brushing her cheeks, the sighs of the long-forgotten dead disturbing this silent patch of earth. She shivered. It had been much better not knowing.

Jack winced and rubbed his hands over his eyes. "You should've let me have the heroin, Pete."

"Be quiet," Pete hissed. Though it was almost invisible under the misty glow from the streetlamps, she was sure candlelight flickered from the mausoleum on the left. She touched Jack's arm. "Someone else is here."

An itchy feeling started between her shoulder blades, that of a convenient setup. Anything could be waiting in the sagging brick structure, none of the possibilities pleasant or inclined to let her go alive.

Jack squinted at the candlelit crypt. "Got a fag?"

Pete handed one over. Jack's face flickered briefly skeletal as he lit the Parliament. "Right. Let's go get your bloody brats."

"Wait!" Pete whipped him around a full one hundred eighty degrees when she snatched at his arm. She'd forgotten for a moment how light he was.

Jack glared and Pete explained, "We're not just going to rush in. Procedures to follow, plus we don't know what's in there."

"Black magic," said Jack. "Whole place stinks of it. Feels like cobweb on your face."

"Whatever the case, we should use caution," said Pete. "In the interest of not getting our bloody heads blown off."

"Whoever has the kids isn't going to give us a written invite," said Jack. "Sorcerers understand force, Pete, so I'm going to give it to them."

"But we don't know how many of them there are!" Pete whispered as Jack jerked free and strode across the brown grass crackled with early frost, crushing it under his soles.

"Damned stupid impulsive arrogant sod," Pete hissed, running after him.

Jack met the door with a planted foot, black wood shattering under his kick. Dry rot and dust swirled around Jack, turning his skinny dark-clad frame to a ghost in its own right.

Pete fetched up at his shoulder, shouting "Police!" belatedly, praying that in addition to whatever occult trappings the kidnappers carried, they hadn't gotten their hands on guns.

The two men at the center of the crypt were young—Pete noticed that first. One still had a rash of pimples up his right cheek, and their faces weren't hard or cold enough to hide the rush of guilty fear in their eyes. In a restaurant or club, they'd be any two university students trying too hard, in expensive black jackets and black denim, silver charms dangling around their necks, identical spinning-wheel shapes that looked like poisonous spiders.

One found his voice, anger twisting it. "Who the fuck are you lot?"

Jack smirked. "I'm Jack Winter, and I'm here to make your worst bloody nightmares come true."

The two black-clad boys looked at Jack in askance, then each other, questioning. The bepimpled one shrugged ignorance. Then they both laughed in Jack's face.

Pete placed a hand on Jack's shoulder. He shook under her, a leaf raging in the face of a gale. "What have you done with Patrick Dumbershall and Diana Leroy?" she asked evenly. "I warn you, lying at this juncture is only going to make me angry enough to hurt you. Both of you. Badly."

Looks traded again, a nervous shuffling of feet on the stone floor of the crypt. The sound unpleasantly evoked Pete's dream. Take what is yours, Pete Caldecott.

"Go bugger yourself," the second spoke up. "We ain't doing anything wrong."

"I'm an inspector with the Metropolitan Police and my associate has identified you as the kidnappers of two children," said Pete, stepping forward. "Those two facts plus you lot hanging about this tomb add up to me arresting you. Hands on heads, and face the wall."

Before she could move, Pete felt electricity roil upward from her gut, through her spine, exploding against her brain like a hit to the temple. Power. Like she'd felt only once when she faced Jack across the clumsily chalked circle twelve years before. In her second of hesitation, the sorcerer's magic slammed into her.

Wind, like a wall, like seeing the closed lid of the empty coffin at Jack's funeral, snatched Pete and sent her tumbling backward to land in the dirt at Jack's feet.

The sorcerer smiled, folding his hands together like a gun and drawing in a breath to say words of power.

He never got the chance.

Jack held out his right hand with fingers splayed, like he was framing a photograph. Then he twisted his hand, and the sorcerer on the right dropped to his knees, face twisted in supplication.

"I… what…" His words degenerated into breathless gurgling.

Jack took a step toward the fallen boy, and Pete felt the second sorcerer draw on the black well of magic that swirled just beyond sight and sound. She closed the distance between herself and the sorcerer and put a right cross into his half-shaven jaw. A twinge of separation stabbed her between her first and second knuckle. The sorcerer sat down hard, eyes swimming. Pete flexed her hand and said, "Stay put unless you want to take your means through a plastic straw for the foreseeable future."

The victim of Jack's attention clawed at his throat, whimpering. Pete perceived a darkness hovering over Jack and the sorcerer, like the thing in the scrying mirror, a hooded and robed figure who stared impassively with obsidian bird's eyes.

Jack spoke and shattered the vision. "I've stopped your heart, you little cunt-rag. Would you like me to make your blood come out of your eyes next? Your coffin will be closed and padlocked when I'm done." Jack clenched his fingers again and the man screamed, trails of blood oozing from his nose, his mouth, red tears forming and sliding down his face.

"Still laughing at me now, you boss-eyed wanker?" Jack snarled.

"Jack," said Pete. The expression of rage on Jack's face she'd never seen, not even when he'd hit a skinhead in Fiver's with his microphone stand during a brawl. Not that the Nazi hadn't deserved it. Not that the kidnapper didn't, now. But watching Jack torture the boy turned Pete's stomach, and she gripped him hard at the elbow. "Jack, stop."

He blinked at Pete, almost like she'd just turned visible. "Fine," he muttered. "No fun any longer, anyway." He snapped his fingers, and the sorcerer jerked and went still.

Pete felt as if her own blood had drained right along with the boy's. "Jack," she whispered, papery. "Did you kill him?"

"Hm? Yeah, probably," Jack said with a thin smile. "Not a great loss to the gene pool, trust me."

Bloody hell. Bollocks, bugger, and fuck-all to that, Pete's logical half screamed. Jack, innocent and angry Jack, had killed another human being.

A kidnapper. Someone who would blind an eight-year-old girl. Bridget Killigan turned her face to Pete, and hissed at her to let the sorcerer die.

"Tell me where the fucking children are before he does worse to you," Pete said aloud to the sorcerer she'd punched. Later, when she was alone and safeguarded, she could break down. Now, Patrick and Diana had no chance without her, the cold and unflappable detective inspector.

"G-gods…" the sorcerer quavered, looking like nothing but the frightened boy that he was. "We didn't… I mean, you can't just…"

"Your gods are not here for you," Pete rasped. "Tell me now."

The sorcerer did what many other criminals of Pete's acquaintance had done before him—he scrambled to his feet and ran, catching his shoulder on the door of the crypt, falling, up and running again for Old Brompton Road.

Jack raised his right hand and Pete felt power pull against her mind like a tide. "Let him go," she said. Jack considered, the blank slaty look back in his eyes. Coldhearted, Pete identified it. She should chase the git herself, but then she'd leave both Jack and the dead sorcerer unattended. Pete flexed her fists in frustration as she watched the live specimen clear a garden wall and disappear from view.

"Yeah, all right," Jack said. "Run on, little man. Let him tell all his mates what went on here when they're buggering each other at the disco later on. Or applying eyeliner, or whatever it is those black little bastards do nowadays…"

"Will you shut up!" Pete shouted. Something skated across her hearing, just beyond her range. A dry, strangled cry. Sobbing, from under the stones. "They're here," Pete breathed with relief. "Patrick and Diana."

Jack blinked at her, a few tendrils of ice-white curling back from the color in his eyes. Then he was himself. "I don't see anything in this musty place."

"Under the flags," said Pete by way of explanation, casting around for the trapdoor to the lower level of the crypt.

"Here," said Jack, bracing himself against a sarcophagus carved with the relief of a small girl, smaller than Bridget Killigan or Diana. Pete joined him and pushed. Something in her back gave and she tried not to think about the next time she'd have to chase down a suspect.

The sarcophagus moved with a groan and a rending of stone. A huff of stale air greeted Pete, the essence of the long dead rushing into the wider night.

Crying continued, dry heaving sobs from a body whose tears had long since dried up and was too shattered to speak.

"Patrick? Diana?" Pete shouted. "It's the police. Call out if you can hear me."

Nothing greeted her except the whispering sobs, and Pete cursed as she crouched and dropped herself into the darkness. The fall was longer than she expected and she landed hard, going down on one knee. "Bugger all!" Back, knee—she'd be in fantastic shape the next time something nasty showed up while she was helpless in the loo.

A blue shine blossomed above her, and Jack's face slid over the gap in the ceiling, witchfire dancing lazy ballet around the ringers of his right hand.

"Thanks," Pete whispered. The bottom level of the crypt was old, lichens and cobwebs undisturbed, warnings to trespassers that no one except the dead resided.

In the corner, chained to the ancient slabs by a pair of rusty manacles, Patrick and Diana crouched, naked and crying. The relief that coursed through Pete was indescribable, a slackening of muscles and a quickening of the heart.

Then she saw their eyes. They were gray in the witchfire, but under a good bulb they would be white. Blind. Drained.

Pete pressed her palms to her face. "Fuck it," she said quietly enough that no one except her and the angel and demon on her shoulders would hear. She had found the children, but their monotone whimpers told the same tale as Bridget Killigan—the fracturing of a mind and the ruination of a life.

"Anyone alive down there?" Jack called. "I'm going to feel awfully silly having topped this git if it was for nothing. 'Course, he did deserve exactly what he got…"

"I'm going to throw you my mobile," Pete said. She swallowed her defeat in a hard ball that scraped down her throat, and made sure she was in control. She was Inspector Caldecott. Finder of lost children. Logical. Unemotional.

And again, too late…

"Call the number in the memory for DI Heath and tell him you're with me. Give him the address."

"You're not going to bring the kids up?" Jack said, snatching her mobile out of the air when she threw it. He poked suspiciously at the keypad.

Pete bit her own lip hard enough to bleed it, steeled herself for the sight and turned back to the blinded children. "No. Not until someone brings the bolt cutters."

Chapter Seventeen

"Bloody hell," said Ollie Heath. He passed a hand protectively over his thinning crop of hair and regarded Pete with pity. "We're not having much luck with this, are we, Caldecott?"

The ambulance carrying Patrick and Diana to A&E had long since pulled away, leaving police and forensics to go about their grim business. Pete patted herself down for a fag. The packet was empty. She cursed.

"Er, don't take this wrong," said Ollie, lowering his voice, "but who's the dodgy bloke you were with when you called in?" He inclined his head toward Jack. Jack was slouched against the outside of the graveyard gate, under the arch with the last of Pete's Parliaments in his mouth, eyes closed. Smoke drifted up and wreathed his face. He might have been a ghost himself.

"He's the tip," said Pete. Ollie's eyebrows crinkled his expansive forehead.

"Thought you said that was nothing."

"It turned into something."

"Not like you to hang about with an informant, Caldecott," said Ollie with concern.

"I know him," Pete admitted. "He's an all-right bloke." A lie, one that came without thinking. Nobody had asked probing questions about the dead sorcerer yet, and Pete intended to be the one to have the first attempt at Jack on that score. For all of Jack's hostility, she'd thought him harmless, and now the sorcerer's blood was on her.

"Listen, I'll finish up here if you'd like," said Ollie, laying a hand on her shoulder. Jack's eyes, hooded and black under the sodium light, focused on Ollie and Pete felt a distinct vibration, like a spirit had just breathed on the back of her neck.

"Thanks, Ollie," she said, ducking out from under his hand. Ollie Heath was truly harmless, slow and dedicated to the job. Pete wouldn't be unleashing Jack on him. "Ring me as soon as the hospital will let us talk to the kids, yeah?"

"Right," Ollie agreed. "Go get some sleep, Caldecott—you're chalky."

I just saw a ghost, Pete thought. She smiled at Ollie for appearances, and went to collect Jack.

"No one's yet asked about the dead man," she told him. He shrugged.

"I'll just tell 'em you did it. You're allowed to do stuff like that. Line of duty and all that shit, yeah?"

Pete pressed her lips into a line. "You won't be telling anyone anything, because we're going home." For once, Jack was silent and he slouched obediently back to the Mini. Pete couldn't decide if it was providence or bad luck that Jack was staying with her a time longer.

They drove through Chelsea's midnight streets in silence. The Mini's lights barely sliced the fog, and more than once Pete saw black shapes move among the swirling gloom. Her spine danced as the Mini bounced over cobbles in the old, walled part of the city, the cold heart hushed and damp as a shallow grave.

"There's something out there," she said aloud, not really knowing why the words came, but knowing she was right.

"Yeah," said Jack, leaning his forehead against the glass. "There is."

"You killed someone tonight," said Pete. "We should get it clear now—don't you dare do a thing like that again while you're on my watch. Do you want to land us both in jail?"

Jack sighed and managed to look mightily annoyed with his eyes closed and his head tilted back. "Anyone ever mention you're a terrible nag? You're going to put a husband straight into an early grave."

"I bloody well mean it, Jack!" Pete cried. "What gives you the right to be executioner?"

Jack opened his eyes and sat up. "Pull over."

"You all right?" asked Pete. The Mini's headlights illuminated windowless flat blocks and closed-down shops. She wasn't stopping unless there was a dire emergency.

"Just pull over and don't argue!" Jack snapped. Pete jerked the Mini to the curb and set the brake with a squeal.

"What?"

Jack pointed to a tumbledown doorway with an unassuming lit sign over the frame: royal oaks public house. "If you insist on moralizing at me about the dead toerag, I need a drink." He unfolded his skeleton from the Mini's passenger seat and stepped into the street, crossing in front of the car. Pete felt the passing urge to press on the gas and run him over, but instead she shut off the engine and dogged his heels into the pub.

It was low and smoky inside, but older than Pete realized—the long bartop was carved from the trunk of a single tree, all the knots and scars, and mellowed paneling held in ancient cigarette smoke. Concentric rings stained the plaster ceiling and a jukebox that looked like it had weathered the Blitz burbled out Elvis Costello. The basso bounce of "Watching the Detectives" blanketed conversation in secrecy.

Jack landed on the nearest stool with a clatter of feet and bony elbows. "Pint of bitters," he told the publican, "and a whisky."

"Just the whisky," Pete said, digging for her wallet. The publican was big and shave-headed, Latin phrases in ink cascading up both of his arms under his cutoff shirt. He grunted when he caught sight of Pete's warrant card as she paid the bill.

"Mother's milk." Jack sighed as he downed the whisky.

"Don't think you can get pissed enough to avoid talking to me," Pete warned.

"Fucking hell!" Jack said, slamming his glass on the bar. "What d'you want me to do, Pete, rush up to midnight mass and confess my sins? Would it help if I sent a tin of biscuits to the wake? What?"

"I'm not saying he didn't deserve it." Pete sighed. "He kidnapped those two children, and he was going to give us a bad time. Jack, I can't tell you how often I've wanted to do just what you did, to some wankstick or other I find on the job. But you can't—"

Jack's hand snaked out and wrapped around Pete's wrist, drawing her in until she could smell the old Parliaments and the new whisky that drifted off his skin. He squeezed until her bones grated and Pete cried out, attempting to pull free. But for that second, Jack was strong again, his eyes burning with the fire that consumed whatever it touched.

"Can't what, Pete?" he whispered with a snarl. "Can't go around killing people? Can't because that's what's good and right and proper? Well, Pete, I'll tell you a secret." And his eyes went from flaming to the deepest dark, inky and wicked. "We're not dealing with everyday thieves and killers any longer. This is the world of magic. People murder in this world, and people die, and it's the bloody way of things. I'm not sorry for putting a cold fist around that git's heart and he wouldn't be sorry if it were the reverse. Magic kills, Pete. Get used to it."

After a long moment when all she heard was her heartbeat, Pete said, "You're hurting me."

Jack made a disgusted noise and released her. "'Sides, was I supposed to let those tossers laugh at me and do nothing? My name used to mean something to those demon-buggering gits. Bloody kids should learn some bloody respect."

Pete's hands still shook from the memory of the boy's face. She wrapped them around the whisky glass and downed her drink in a swallow. "Bit late for that, seeing as how one is on his way to the morgue."

"I mean," Jack continued, speaking more to his pint than to Pete, "in a way they were doing me a favor—I didn't realize until tonight how bad of a state things were in. I've been sodding forgotten, Pete! Do you have any idea what that means?"

"No fans accosting you in lifts?" Pete ventured. The whisky spread warm fingers through her and she was able to tamp down the tangle of fear and incomprehension that Jack's actions of the night had birthed.

Jack's mouth twisted upward on the left side. "You really had no idea, did you? About what I did before."

"No," said Pete honestly. Vaguely, she'd been aware that a lot of Jack's friends were older and more serious than one would typically suspect fans of the Poor Dead Bastards to be. And that Jack's tattoos never seemed exactly the same twice, and that when he was around the air tasted different, like just before a lightning storm.

"Makes no difference now, apparently," Jack grumbled in disgust.

"I'm just having a bloody hard time believing those two kids arranged this entire thing, and had the stomach to blind three children," said Pete.

"They didn't," said Jack. "Sorcerers are the outsourced labor of magic—where there's a sorcerer, there's something jerking the strings and often as not it's something hungry and not human."

"Who would they be working for, then?" Pete said. "Tell me what I need to know to catch this bastard, Jack."

He drew on his pint and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand before he spoke. "I will say, those two were a deal more experienced than your bottom-level eclectic who stumbles into magic because he read some dusty book out of the library and is slagged off at life. The one who set you on your arse had talent."

"Wasted talent, seeing as he's dead," Pete muttered.

"Bugger, Pete, are we back to that already?" Jack rolled his eyes and emptied his pint, catching the publican's eye for another.

Pete made herself consider: If the sorcerer had been a Russian mafiya thug with a black-market gun, and he'd shot at Jack, would she have hesitated before she took the gun away and spent three shells in the man's heart? She would not. "I'll let it go for now," she told Jack. "But that better have been the first person you did in, Jack. If I find out this is a habit…"

"The first in a very long time," said Jack, holding up a hand to stop her. "Death follows me and I do my best to keep a hand's-breadth ahead, but it doesn't always work. You've seen direct evidence of that."

Pete nodded. "For the time being, I'll take that as at least partial truth. Who do you believe is giving the orders to snatch the children? And why children?"

"Aside from the fact that they're small and fit snug in the boot of a car?"

Pete glared at him. Jack's mouth curved on one side. "You need to grow back that amputated sense of humor, Inspector. The Yard's got it locked in a box."

"Talk, Jack," Pete snapped. "You don't enjoy my company—you've made that much clear—so let's get this done as quickly as possible. Someone-or-thing who likes to mutilate children is still out there." How she would convince Ollie and DCI Newell of that fact was a bridge she'd build later.

"Fine, fine," he said. "Children are life. Vitality. Innocence. What have you. Some things, some hungry eldritch things, feed on it. They take away everything that keeps a child's soul unstained and when they've sucked the husk dry they take that vitality and they use it to make themselves strong again. Like taking all the blood and life from an unwilling donor, with side effects black enough to drive the donor mad."

We went to see the old Cold Man …

"What could it be, Jack?"

"Could be a lot of things. A more powerful sorcerer's flesh construct. A psychic feeder—someone who has the sight like me, but they give a touch along with their look." He rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound with his fingers against the dark stubble there. "But if it's taking children, it's probably an entity. A nonhuman, which means that you don't fuck about with it unless you want your sanity and soul siphoned out."

"Insane" would be Pete's definition for the entire evening up to this point, but she merely nodded because Jack seemed so relaxed and sure of his words, for the first time since she'd seen him again. "How do we find it? And stop it in its tracks?"

"Not easy," said Jack. "But I'll do it all the same. This beastie, this ghostly twat, seems to think that I'm awfully easy to tromp over and kick into the gutter for the sweepers. Tosser." He slammed his empty pint glass down. "It's my own fault, but no more—now I'm on the bloody warpath. Nobody dismisses me that easily."

"Why did you start looking for a fix?" Pete asked abruptly. "If things were so sodding wonderful, why did you chuck it?"

Jack regarded her for a long time, not with the burning fury of before but with a sadness, the expression of someone looking back through a photo album of much happier times. "I was alone, Pete. Alone with none but the dead for company. At the time it seemed like the only way to keep meself from going insane," he said. "And it still does."

Pete felt an uncomfortable prickle down her spine as she saw the desire for a fix pass over Jack's face and alight in his reddened eyes. Here he was, wielding something akin to an Uzi with the flick of his fingers, and she had just kicked away his remaining support. Was she bloody insane?

No, she firmly reminded herself. No, Jack had survived suffering before, and he would again, because the alternative ended with Pete in a bloody mess on the floor of her flat while Jack roamed the streets of London with his sanity in long tatters and heroin burning a path through his blood.

"I'm on now," Jack said, his high dudgeon restored. "I'm not resting until I kick this cock-smear back into beyond the beyond." He raised an eyebrow. "If you're up for it, Pete, I could use the assist."

Pete laughed, and to her surprise carried on laughing for several moments. "You? You want my help?"

Jack swirled the dregs of his drink, shoulders hunching. "Don't see what's so bloody amusing."

Pete rubbed her forehead. No one in Scotland Yard would ever believe this was the real reason behind the blinded children. But it was what it was, and it also wasn't like she could let Jack go gallivanting off on his own. Who knew what kind of dark territory he'd go toward, on the warpath as he was?

"Thought you hated me," Pete said to him. "Thought the very sight of me made you sick, or some rot. That's what's funny, and also begs a question: Why should I put up with your shite a moment longer than I have to?"

The corners of his mouth twitched. The lager and the whisky had made him more expansive. "Not every woman will fetch a sorcerer a punch across the gob when it gets thick. You could tell me to fuck off if you like. I'd probably deserve it."

"Make that definitely." Pete tapped her fingers on the knotty wood of the bar, knowing that she should leave Jack to his path and go back to her life.

But if she left him now, it would never be finished. She'd have her nightmares until the day she died. "But you helped me," she continued. "And I still have a case to close. So yes, I'll stay with you for now."

Just like time had flickered on a faulty circuit, the devil-grin spread over Jack's face and he was young again. "Brilliant. Knew you would."

Chapter Eighteen

Just as before, Pete stood in front of the bleeding shrouded figure and he extended his hand, the waxy flesh dripping red as the thing in his fist beat desperately to be free.

"Take what belongs to you, Pete Caldecott," he hissed. "Take it before it destroys your tattered heart."

"I don't know what you want!" Pete cried desperately. She was very cold and looked down to find herself in her nightdress. So much for convenient dreaming.

"Take it," said the shroud-man. "It belongs to you. It has always belonged."

"She won't listen," purred a second voice, and from over the shrouded figure's shoulder the smoke rolled, gathering around Pete's ankles and forming into a human figure. "She won't see or hear. She's taken out her own eye with a hot poker made of memory. She's blind and dumb to us forever."

Pete knew it was impossible for a column of smoke to grin, but this one did, and its voice grated against her brain, like a thousand tiny screams echoed beneath it. "Run while you can, little girl," the figure hissed. "Run far and fast and don't ever sleep."

Then he reached for Pete—she knew instinctively that slit-throat voice and long grasping hands made it a he—and she screamed and fell backward, the ridiculous Victorian nightdress tangling her feet, sending her down into the graveyard earth. It was soft and dozens of rotting hands wrapped around her arms and legs and everywhere. The shrouded figure drew a sword from the belt of his bloody armor and tried to save her, but she was pulled inward, into the grave, and the last thing she heard as she woke was the wicker man, the smoke, laughing and laughing and laughing.

"Pete!" Jack was shaking her, hard enough to snap teeth together.

She blinked, saw her flat, saw her sitting room, which really needed a good scrubbing. Cobwebs hung in all the corners.

Jack let go of her. "You were screaming in your sleep."

Pete pressed her fingers against her eyes. "I was dreaming about something worth screaming at."

Jack pressed a businesslike hand against her forehead. "You're burning up, luv," he said. "Sure it was a frightening dream and not a hot one?"

Pete swatted him on the arm when the mischief showed in his smile. "You're a great bloody help, you are."

"Can't have you keeling over in the middle of a dustup, can I?" said Jack. "However I may feel about you personally. Not worth seeing you get your time card punched when my arse is on the line."

Pete slammed her feet onto the floor, curving her hands in what she guessed was a subconscious desire to strangle Jack. "What the bloody hell is your problem with me, Winter?"

He snorted and swung his eyes to the window. The sun was high, catching motes of dust across the panes, and Pete knew she was already late for work.

"Like you don't know," Jack said finally with a shrug so disaffected Iggy and all of the Stooges would have burst into tears of envy.

"That's just it," said Pete. "I don't know, Jack." She stood up and he met her, looked down with that bitter quirk to his mouth that warned of rage just beneath. She shouldn't press, but Pete did, because she was damned if she let Jack linger on with his contempt and his silence. "What happened that day, in the tomb?" she asked softly. "I've thought and dreamed about it so much, Jack, but I never really remember. What happened that made you hate me this much?"

Jack's lip curled and his eyes blackened again, and Pete steeled herself for something, she didn't know exactly what, but the air between them had charged.

"You really don't remember?" Jack said, that predatory cold flickering in the depths. Pete shook her head, throat dry.

"How about that," Jack murmured. "If you're telling the truth."

"What reason would I have to lie?" Pete said.

"You know more than you're admitting to yourself," Jack said. "You saw him, same as me. You were there, until you let go." The last two words could have cut flesh.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Pete said automatically, although images of the smoke man flamed behind her eyes.

Jack considered her for a moment, as if he weren't sure what to do with an inconveniently dead body, and then his anger slipped back over his face and he threw up his hands. "Then bloody well figure it out, Pete," he snarled. He went into the toilet and slammed the door.

"Bollocks," Pete swore, slumping back on the sofa and pressing her pillow over her face.

Chapter Nineteen

Pete waded through the day of papers and questions and frowning stares from Chief Inspector Newell and took the tube home next to a beautiful Indian couple who smelled of sweat and spices.

"Home, Jack," Pete called reflexively as she entered her front hall. The flat was dark and she saw the glow of a cigarette tip coming from the sofa. Jack exhaled a cloud of smoke and it shone blue-white in the reflection from the streetlamp.

"About time," he said, swinging himself upright. "We've got places to go."

"Where?" said Pete. She didn't flick on the light. Talking to Jack, seeing only the ember of his fag and the flash of his eyes was oddly appropriate, a mirror of hundreds of dreams where he appeared as nothing more than shadow with bits of substance.

Jack grinned and she saw the ivory gleam of his teeth. "You'll see."

They took the tube at Jack's insistence. He jumped the gates and then threw up his hands when Pete glared at him and swiped her Oyster card twice. "Come on, Caldecott, don't give me that look."

"Where are we going?" Pete asked again as the train roared through the tunnel, slicking back Jack's hair. They were the only people in the Mornington Crescent station, alone under the flickering fluorescent tubes with smoke and graffiti on the tiles.

"You'll know when we get there," said Jack, holding the door for her. The tube rattled past Euston, on into stations that were barely lit, the humps of dozing bums flashing past, leather-clad youths staring out into the tunnel with shining animal eyes, transit police wrapped in blue nylon armor like weary sentinels. Pete wrapped her coat around her, crossing her arms across her stomach.

"Don't worry about them, luv," Jack whispered. "I'm here."

Pete turned to look at him in the intermittent flashes from the tunnel lights, each exposure imprinting Jack in stark relief. "That's why I'm worried, Jack."

He sighed and threw his head back, worrying an unlit cigarette between his lips. "We're meeting a friend of mine."

"Are you and this friend on good terms?" Pete wondered. Jack lifted one shoulder.

"Last time I saw him, probably a decade ago, he and I had a slight difference of opinion."

"About what?" said Pete, feeling the cold breath from the train window on the back of her neck.

"Long story," said Jack with a lazy grin. "But it involved two nights in Liverpool and a dancer named Cassidy. She did this bit where she put her leg up over her head…"

Pete held up a hand. "Is he going to try and bash our skulls in?"

"No," said Jack. "Not his style."

"Thank God for small favors," said Pete.

They got off the tube at Charing Cross and walked up the center of a nearby mews, the slick cobbles ringing under Pete's boot heels. Big Ben chimed eleven o'clock in the distance, amplified in the mist so that it echoed from every direction. Pete could smell the Thames, the wet rotting atmosphere that soaked into brick and clothing and hair.

"This way," said Jack, his Parliament springing to life without the aid of a light. Pete blinked. Jack exhaled and held out the fag. "Care for a taste?"

"I'm quitting," Pete said perversely. Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough.

"Bloody hell. I hate this fucking wet weather."

"Move to Arizona, then," Pete snapped. The row houses got older, arched and leaded windows staring out black and blank into the night. Pete caught movement in the corner of her vision and whipped her head to the left. A woman in black latex that gleamed like bloody skin and a man in an Arsenal jersey disappeared into an alley.

Jack snorted. "Didn't peg you for an easy shock, Caldecott."

Pete stopped in the street and crossed her arms. "I'm not, Jack. I came after you, didn't I? And on that matter, I am not going another step until you tell me what the bloody hell is going on."

Jack rolled his eyes at her, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "Anyone ever told you you're too damned stubborn for your own good?"

"Constantly," said Pete. "What is this?"

Jack sighed. "Pete, I told you the night you found me that I only had one condition for doing this, yeah?"

"You did," Pete agreed cautiously.

"I asked you to believe me," said Jack. "So believe me now when I say I can't tell you where we're going and who we're meeting. You're just going to have to hold your knickers on and see." He turned with a ripple of fog and tobacco smoke and kept walking. Pete swore under her breath and followed, trying to ignore the roiling in her stomach that told her dark things were on their heels, just outside the pools of streetlamp light.

Once or twice she heard a snuffling and squealing, nails clacking on paving stones. She kept her eyes on the uneven blond spikes of Jack's hair and didn't look back.

Then Big Ben chimed midnight.

Pete stopped and cocked her head, listening to the bell ring through to twelve and telling herself she was crazy, or the clock was faulty, or that something logical and sane was going on here.

"You heard it," Jack stated. Pete sighed and stopped trying to pretend. Clocks that chimed midnight at half-eleven and shadow creatures were what Jack asked of her. So be it.

"I did." She nodded. "What does that mean?"

Jack dropped his Parliament to the stones. It hissed and went out as he ground it under his heel. "It means we're here."

Chapter Twenty

Jack led Pete up a side passage, not even wide enough for the Mini to squeeze through, to a squat stone building with a red door bound in iron.

"They expecting an invasion?" Pete said, gesturing at the entry.

"The three bands means this is neutral territory," said Jack. "The iron is to keep out Fae."

"Fae," Pete echoed. "You mean fairies."

"Kindly folk," said Jack. "Shining ones. Unseelie. Call 'em what you will, nobody here wants the treacherous little buggers in their pub."

"And just where is 'here'?" Pete asked.

Jack took her lightly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. Calm, they were icy as a glacier under a cloud-covered sky. "We're in their place now, Pete. It's nearly always midnight and the things from your nightmares are crawling in the shadows."

"And I'm supposed to be frightened, after seeing you murder somebody casually less than a day ago?" Pete demanded, moving his hands off her ungently.

He grabbed her again, and slammed Pete against the outside wall of the pub hard enough to make breath leave her lungs. She struggled, and Jack locked his bony fingers against her flesh, more than enough to bruise. "This is not the daytime world that you know, Pete," he said, his voice grating like he'd just smoked a pack of unfiltered. "This is the Black. It is a hard realm with little mercy for the unprepared. People die here, Pete, and it's usually because someone else has decided to kill them. It is the way things are. If you can't stomach the truth then go back now."

Pete's heart danced, scraping her rib cage with panic. She allowed none of it to show on her face, raising her eyes to the sky and inhaling a sharp, cold draught.

Above her, something with stone for skin grumbled and settled itself more comfortably on its perch, ugly dog face serene.

Pete forced herself to look only at Jack. "I told you, I'd do what was necessary to catch this child-stealing bastard. That we'd end this. Not you, all alone striding into the darkness. We. Now get your bloody hands off me before I have a boot between your balls."

Jack let go of her arms and lifted the gryffon-headed knocker on the pub's door. He let it fall three times, and the red door swung open with a moan of ill-oiled age. Jack made a courtly gesture to Pete. "After you, luv." He grinned as she stepped into oil lamps and noise and smoke. "Welcome to the Lament Pub," Jack said. "And welcome to the Black."

Pete stepped over the threshold and felt a prickle, not on her skin but across the reflective surface of her consciousness, like a smooth stone stirring ripples in a pool. Ambient power drifted and swirled differently here, the air molecules arranged out of order and the light and shadow slippery. Her eyes refused to focus. She felt an overwhelming pressure on her skull, as though her senses were all overloading at once, smell and taste and sound rising to levels that threatened to drown her. This was worse than when her intuition knifed her mind Worse than her dreams, than the tomb itself, full of ghosts and darkness. The magic of the place reached inside Pete's skull and clawed it clean, leaving her trembling.

Jack's hand closed on her wrist, a touch that was steadying but not rough. "Easy, luv. It's always worst the first time you cross in."

Pete shut her eyes and breathed, just as she'd breathed the first time she'd encountered a corpse. A drowned man, a homeless drunk bumping against the pilings on the Thames. Pete shut her eyes and fixed what the pub should be in her mind, just as she'd seen the corpse as it was against the backs of her lids, no life in the black glassy eyes. She gritted her teeth and slowly opened her eyes again.

The low thread of conversation in the pub bubbled, just beyond hearing the words of the individual voices, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung low over the clusters of small round tables and bowed heads, and the massive ebony-topped bar. A man sitting with his back to her flexed his shoulders and Pete saw, just for a moment, the long reach of bone wings before they glimmered and vanished beneath a glamour of a rat-eaten coat. A dance floor and a jukebox with the original 45s crouched awkwardly in one corner, out of place in the old pub, which should have had Shakespeare and Marlowe bending their heads together in a dark nook.

And it was all slightly odd, and very usual, with none of the blurring heart-racing wrongness that had engulfed Pete when she stepped inside. The cries of magic softened, and retreated, taking the pain in her head with them. The staring faces, a few with pointed teeth, turned back to their drinks and conversation.

She glanced back to see Jack with a contemplative half-smile on his face. "Thought you'd adjust," he said as if he'd bet against Pete with himself.

"Who's this friend we're here to see?" said Pete.

"The third time you've asked me," said Jack. "If I were the devil, I'd be compelled to answer." He helped Pete out of her jacket and threw it on the curled iron hooks just inside the door. There were several others—a motocross leather, a woolen cape, a fur with the skull of the unfortunate wolf still attached.

"Yes, but you'd take my soul in return," Pete said with her own smile.

Jack stared past her into the middle distance before he returned her gaze. His was clouded and almost mourning. "What makes you think I haven't, luv?"

Pete rolled her eyes. "I'm getting a drink." She took a stool and gestured to the publican, a palely beautiful young man with black spiked hair and silver piercings cascading up both ears and gleaming in his nose. He dipped his head to acknowledge her and Pete saw flashes of Celtic warriors, branded and painted for sacrifice and battle.

"What'll you have, luv?" he intoned with a slow-burning smile and a bare muscled arm placed on the bar in front of Pete. His skin was whiter than alabaster, white as dead skin, and it fairly glowed against the dark bar top.

"I'll… a pint of…" Pete blinked. His eyes were black… a moment ago they'd been green.

"A pint of what, miss?" Amusement crinkled his mouth and lit those black stone animal eyes. Pete's throat, when she tried to swallow and speak, scraped painfully.

"A… I… lager on tap?" The necessary connective tissue for a complete sentence eluded her.

"Would you like mead? Or maybe an oaken ale," said the publican. He leaned in and Pete could hear the drums, smell the smoke of the Beltane fires and the bloody screams of the rival tribesmen who had died under his blade.

"Oaken ale," Pete murmured, thinking with that sensation of being outside herself that she was very, very close to a man whom she didn't know at all, thinking wild savage thoughts about him, and that she couldn't be arsed to care, because he was beautiful. Wild. "What's that?"

"Something you don't want," said Jack, leaning on the bar next to her.

With an audible snap, whatever was holding Pete in the publican's eye broke and she sat up straight, her cheeks hot.

"I was just having a bit of fun, mate," said the publican with an amused look that telegraphed unbearable smugness. "Didn't know she was spoken for."

"You do now," Jack snarled. "And the next time you try to pass off your bloody Fae nectar on a human, I'll shove your little horned head up your arse and hold it there until you stop twitching."

"No harm done!" the publican exclaimed, holding up his hands. "Didn't realize she was mortal. Take your ease, old-timer, and have something to drink."

Jack's hand flashed out, like a fatal serpent, and gripped the publican by the throat, fingers digging into his voice box. "Do you know who I am, you sodding barn animal?" he hissed. The publican gurgled. "I'm Jack fucking Winter," Jack said, releasing him with a push that rattled clean glasses on the bar back.

The publican bleached even paler than he already was, if it were possible. "I—I didn't know, sir. Forgive me, mage." He dipped his head again, this time to avoid eye contact with Jack.

"Give me two pints of the Newcastle," said Jack, "and piss off."

The publican filled his order and retreated to the opposite end of the bar, where he assiduously pretended to polish glasses.

"Creepy wanker," Pete muttered, shaking off the last vestiges of the publican's cold, ancient aura.

"Just a satyr," Jack said. "Walking bollocks with a brain-stem attached. Pay that one no mind."

"Please tell me he is not who we are here to see," Pete muttered. She felt like she'd touched rotted meat, or a brick wall slick with mold and moss.

"No." Jack gestured over his shoulder. "He's back there, alone. As usual."

Pete's gaze was drawn to the back corner of the pub, where roof beams and lamplight conspired to create a slice of shadow. A solitary figure sat, fragrant green-tinged smoke from his pipe rising to create the shape of a crown of young spring leaves before dissipating.

Jack nudged her arm. "Come on." He picked up the two pints of Newcastle Brown and started toward the table with a measured step. If Pete didn't know better she'd call it reluctance, or a sort of respect.

The man seated alone and smoking was unremarkable, as far as men went. Pete would pass him boarding the tube or in a queue at the news agent's without a glance, although he did have lines of mischief at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and they glowed pleasantly brown. He was older than Jack, wearing a well-trimmed black beard and a soft sport coat patched at the elbows.

Jack set the pints down on his table and grinned. "Been a long time, Knight."

When the man turned to look at them, Pete heard a rushing sound, as if a spring wind had disturbed a sacred grove, and with great clarity she saw a tree, ancient, branches piercing the sky while the roots reached down and grasped the heart of the earth.

"Well," said the man. "Jack Winter. I next expected to see you lying in state at your premature funeral, yet here you are disturbing my evening. Well done."

Shaking his head, Jack gestured between the man and Pete. "Detective Inspector Caldecott, Ian Mosswood. Mosswood, this is Pete."

Mosswood raised one eyebrow in an arch so critical Pete felt the urge to stand up straight and comb her hair. "Pete. How frightfully unusual."

"You know, Mosswood," said Jack, slapping his shoulder, "in this ever-changing world, it's good to know you're still…" He gestured to encompass Mosswood's jacket. "Tweed."

"I presume," said Mosswood, eyeing the pint of ale, "that since you came over here and bothered me you have some reason." He turned his pipe over and tapped it out against the table's edge. Fragrances of grass and cut wheat filled Pete's nostrils.

"Bloody right," said Jack, pulling out a chair and straddling it backward. "I need to pick your leafy brain, Mosswood. Brought you the requisite offering and everything, just like a proper druid. Sorry for the lack of white robe and virgin, but Pete's sheets are all striped and I wouldn't presume to guess as to her eligibility for virgin."

"Sod you," Pete responded, flicking Jack the bird.

Mosswood picked up the ale and sniffed it with distaste, his prominent nose crinkling.

"Get off it," said Jack. "You know it's your favorite."

"It is a sad day when a Green Man's allegiance can be bought for an inadequately washed pint glass of malted hops and stale yeast," said Mosswood with a disapproving curl of his lip. "But such is the way of the world, sadly. I accept your offering. What the bloody hell are you bothering me over, Jack?"

"Problems," said Jack. "Got a nasty, nasty ghost or hungry beastie on the prowl—some misty tosser with an appetite for little children. I need to find him, and find a way to hurt him bad before I exorcise the bastard back to the Inquisition."

Mosswood looked up at Pete, who stood awkwardly by his elbow, not sure she was invited into a conversation that had obviously picked up just where it left off the last time the two men had seen each other.

"Sit down, my dear," he said with a small smile. "Don't let this foolish mage's ramblings inhibit you."

"Oh," said Pete, "I don't." She pulled out the remaining chair and sat. "Thank you."

"She is considerably lovely," Mosswood told Jack. "And polite. What in the world is she doing with you?"

"Funny, you git," said Jack with a humorless smirk. "How about telling me what I need to do to flush out this bugger?"

Mosswood relit his pipe, taking tobacco that smelled like shaved bark from a leather pouch and tamping it down carefully with his thumb. The pipe was carved from a black wood, slightly glossy, the nicks from the knife that had wrought it visible, a tiny story along the well-rubbed stem and barrel. "What you want to begin your search is a Trifold Focus. I do not know of any in existence, but I'm sure one of your other… sources will be more than happy to oblige the information for the price of an immortal soul or two."

Jack drained his Newcastle and gave Pete a satisfied grin. "I told you he'd come through."

Chapter Twenty-one

They walked out of the fog and found the Mini waiting. Big Ben chimed midnight once more and Pete said a silent thank-you to be away from places where the air was not the same and she could feel invisible eyes on her all the time.

Jack sat closemouthed during the ride and he was chalk colored by the time they reached Pete's flat. "You all right?" she inquired when he stumbled and fetched against the wall just inside her door.

"Yeah…" Jack's jaw set. "No. No, I'm not." He made a run for the bathroom and Pete heard him retching miserably.

It was so easy to forget, when Jack was sarcastic and smoking a Parliament, throwing out smiles and pinning her with his hard eyes, how she'd found him less than a week ago. Skinny, wasted, and his body still screamed for a fix even now.

Pete hesitated for a few more seconds, listening to Jack choke, then nudged the bathroom door open with her toe and crouched beside him, placing a hand on the back of his neck. Jack's skin was cold and slick, like he'd just been pulled from a pool of oily, lifeless water.

"Don't… don't…" he gasped, finally managing to draw a breath. The loo stank of old ale and sweat with an undertone of something darker, burned from crossing a barrier that flesh was not meant to. "I'm all right," Jack muttered, sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat away with the flats of his palms from his face. "It takes a lot out of you. Crossing to and from the Black. I'd forgotten how fucking difficult that is."

"I feel fine," said Pete quietly.

"Well, aren't you bloody well special," Jack snapped. Pete stood and held out her right hand, trying not to let it shake with anger that Jack might take for timidity.

"Give it to me."

"Give what to you?" Jack muttered, leaning his head back against the tile wall and breathing through his nose. He hadn't stopped sweating even though rain was washing the windows of the flat with intermittent sleet and Pete's fingers were cold because the radiators were turned down.

"Your goddamned stash, Jack!" Pete bellowed, picking up her container of hairbrushes and clips off the basin and flinging it at him. Her anger rushed up from the iron-banded box where she kept it through her workdays and ever since Connor had died. Really, since Jack had died for the first time. She threw the pink ceramic cup at his lying face and felt relief, like she had just destroyed the visage of an oppressive stone idol.

Jack ducked and was pelted with clips and pins. "Oi!" he shouted. "What the in the seven bleeding hells is your problem, woman?"

"You're my problem!" Pete shouted. "You're a fucking junkie liar is my problem!" She grabbed his jacket from where it lay on the floor and dug into the pockets, her fingers shaking and still slicked with Jack's sweat.

Pete prayed again. She prayed to find nothing, to be irrational and tired and overloaded from the graveyard and the blind children and walking down the cobble street where it was always midnight.

Her fingers closed around an empty cellophane bag, gritty with a powder that felt like ground glass and a capped syringe, full of cloudy cooked heroin that three long years as a PC pulling junkies off the street prophesied she would find. Pete dropped the baggie on the tiles next to Jack. "God damn you," she said quietly. "You've been fixing the entire time."

"No," said Jack, pulling himself up and bracing one arm against the wall. Fine purple webs traveled up his forearm, spread out from red-black pinpricks, bloody spiders living under the skin. "No," Jack repeated. "That was my last dose, and my first shot in five days, which is why I'm vomiting my fucking guts out now and could do without you screaming at me. Harpy."

Pete poked Jack in the chest with her index finger. Fever heat rolled off him in a whisky-scented wave. "Don't you ever sodding lie to me again, Jack, or I will jam my boot in your arse so far I'll knock out your back teeth."

Jack dropped his head. "You asked me to see, Pete, and if you knew what crossing the Black without something to dampen my sight meant, you wouldn't have asked me. You wouldn't make me nip off to a dodgy pub loo to shoot up. You'd prime the needle and put it in my bloody arm."

"I don't want to hear your sodding excuses," said Pete. She put the tips of her fingers under Jack's chin. "Have you told me anything that's true? Anything?"

"Doubtful, luv," Jack said. He tried to smile but Pete saw a death mask. "That's all I am, a liar and a sinner."

"Did you know what would happen in that tomb?" Pete asked quietly.

Silence pulled the air between them thin. "I've always known I was going to die," said Jack eventually. "That I was going to die young, and that I was going to die badly."

"I mean about me," Pete said. "Did you know about me, Jack? What would happen if I went in there?"

"You never give up, do you?" he shouted, angry again as quickly as lightning flickered. "Sod it, Pete, realize it's not always about you and your trite little middle-class daddy-love issues and leave me alone!"

He grabbed the jacket out of her hands, so hard and quick her fingers burned from the friction of the leather.

"Where are you going?" Pete demanded. Jack shoved her aside and stomped out. A minute later the front door of the flat slammed and there was the echoing quiet left by rage and half-truths in Jack's wake.

Chapter Twenty-two

No one wanted to look at Pete when she pushed open the door to the MIT room in New Scotland Yard the next morning. They all bent their heads, pretended papers and computer screens were important, and only looked at her from the sides of their eyes. Whispers weighed heavy on the air.

"What the bloody hell is everyone in here waiting for?" she asked Ollie, once she'd made an extra-large mug of tea. "Is it common consensus I'm going to whip out a rifle and start shooting?"

"You haven't been about," said Ollie. He hunched himself up against his too-tight tie and collar, and refused to meet her eyes.

"Meaning what?" Pete said, narrowing hers.

"Meaning…" Ollie sighed. "I like you, Caldecott, so I'll say it right out: There's some here that think you're not able to handle this thing with Bridget Killigan. And after the other two kids were… well. There's talk, is all."

"This is because of Jack, isn't it?" Pete demanded. "Because I brought him into the case and because I haven't been handing in my reports to the guv every day like I'm in sodding fifth form. Is that what you're saying?"

"That's part of it," Ollie agreed. His fat fingers were splayed on the desk they shared, and he stared at them, not at Pete. "You're not yourself, Pete. Everyone sees it. Except you." He pushed back from the desk and stood. "And that's the whole of it." Ollie walked away and Pete sat in her own chair, hard enough to send electricity up her spine.

Jack and Connor gibbered at her, reminding her that she was blinded to all but herself, blinded as surely as Patrick, Diana, and Bridget Killigan. Connor stared up at her accusingly from his hospital bed, his eyes peeling her skin back to the fault underneath. Jack proffered his bruised and bloodied arms, a supplicant even as he depressed the plunger of the disposable syringe.

Connor wasn't a man given to fancy. Therapists and pills were his answer to Pete's nightmares, when she'd lost Jack. MG was the one who wanted to see magic, and never could, whose silence spoke volumes as Pete choked down small chalky Xanax and tried to pretend everything was normal.

"When you see a nightmare," Juniper Caldecott said, resting her hand on Pete's head, "you just look it right in the face and you make it go away."

For the first time since she'd packed her two teal Samsonites and left Connor, Pete, and MG, Pete wished her mother were still about. Juniper with her altars and her sage scent and her smiles like warm scarves on cold days could have exorcised these ghosts.

"Typical," she muttered, shoving case files around in an effort to occupy her hands if her mind insisted on wandering.

Pete was only aware of DCI Newell standing over her with his long and disapproving shadow after he'd said her name several times. His face was pinched when she finally looked up.

"There's been another kidnapping, Caldecott," he said, holding out a jacket. "I need you to interview the victim's mother immediately."

Pete slid her chair back a bit too quickly, stumbling over her own feet. "Yes, sir. Right away."

Newell studied her, with a stare he probably imagined was penetrating. It had all the effect on Pete of a moth against her cheek. She had that feeling of floating, one she recognized now as the aftereffect of any time in Jack's presence. When she'd walked in the fog with him something had released, a spyhole in the battlement of something immense and still and floating, that Pete had run her fingers through but never immersed in.

She was half in and half out of Jack's world now, and the real one seemed pale beside it.

"Caldecott," Newell said, "if you don't wrap this nasty business up rather quickly, I'm going to be forced to suggest a leave. And may I remind you, you've already used up several days' worth of personal time gallivanting with this informant of yours."

At least he didn't also hint that if Pete were put on leave, she'd be making an involuntary appointment with a psychiatrist. Pete ripped the file out of his hands and shoved it into her tote. "My report will be in your box as soon as possible, guv."

"Inspector…" Newell started, but Pete was already banging aside the swinging doors, running out as blindly as Jack had the night before, that immense stirring in her head brewing into a storm.

The file said the missing girl was called Margaret Smythe, and her picture was candid and unsmiling. Straight hair framed a heart face and immense eyes the color of an angry tiger's.

Pete read the single sheet three times, committing it to memory before she cranked open the Mini's door and mounted the steps of the Smythes' semidetached home. She was on a quiet street in Bromley, would not be here were it not for Margaret's strange, invisible, and inexplicable dis-appearance from within a brick house with all the windows and doors locked.

She stilled herself, mind and body, and let the imitation brass knocker fall twice. The door opened after someone scrabbled with dead bolts for a few seconds. Margaret Smythe's mother was blond and lovely despite deep blue half-moons painted in the skin under her eyes and fine lines of desperation wrought at the corners of her mouth.

"Mrs. Smythe," said Pete, flashing her warrant card and badge. "DI Caldecott from the Metropolitan Police Service. May I come in?"

"It's Ms.," said Margaret's mother, her eyes roving past Pete and out onto the pavement, searching for any shadow out of place. "Ms. Smythe. I don't understand, the police were already here… I gave my information and they did fuck-all and went away again."

"Yes, I know the local bureau have already been around," said Pete with what she hoped was a soothing demeanor. She didn't think she managed it, because Ms. Smythe's face pinched.

"We've had similar cases in London," Pete went on. "Ms. Smythe, your daughter is missing and time is of the essence. Please, just let me in for a moment."

Margaret's mother hesitated for a second more, looking Pete up and down. She would never stop being suspicious of people at her door, at footsteps behind her on the pavement. Pete stepped toward her, putting one hand flat on the mesh that separated them.

Ms. Smythe stepped aside. "Come in, then. Make it quick. I have a news conference in a little more than an hour."

Pete stepped over the threshold and something parted the air in front of her, light like the brush of fingers against a fevered cheek. An inkling of the power that burned when Jack was in a room.

"Could I see Margaret's bedroom please, Ms. Smythe?"

Ms. Smythe gestured up the stairs and went into the sitting room, slumping on a sagging sofa in front of a console television that showed a fuzzy rerun of Hollyoaks.

Shock does funny things, Pete repeated, although it was hard to reconcile the saucer overflowing with cigarette butts and the plastic cup half-full of whisky with a distraught mother. Ms. Smythe began to apply lipstick and rouge, crooked in the dim light.

Margaret's door supported a hanging hand-painted sign covered in drooping daisies and her name in crookedly precise letters. A newer, larger sign on pasteboard proclaimed keep out—this means U. Pete pushed it open and examined the purple satin bedspread, the white desk and dressing table that were still little-princess while the rest of the room was older, darker.

She sifted through the drawers and paged through the dresses hanging in Margaret's closet, most of them some variation on bruise-colored satin and silk. A sticky stack of photographs had been shoved to the back of the desk, Margaret and a dodgy-looking bloke with a wisp of ponytail that he would believe was a lot hipper than it was. "Ms. Smythe?" Pete called. "When did Margaret's father leave?"

Her mother mounted the stairs and came to the door of Margaret's room, but kept herself carefully outside. "Two years ago. All in the report those other police took down."

"Divorce," Pete said, more of a hope than a question.

"He's doing a hitch in Pentonville," Ms. Smythe said, her eyes fierce. "And we're still married, I suppose."

Pete set down the stuffed penguin that sat on the center of Margaret's bed. The penguin was wearing a black mesh shirt and his feather ruff was purple. "What did he go in for?"

"That has nothing to do with this," Ms. Smythe snapped. "My husband never wanted the bloody kid in the first place."

Pete crossed the distance between them and bored into the other woman until she dropped her eyes to the ratty pilled carpet under her bare feet. "Your daughter is gone, Ms. Smythe. She has been stolen from you without a trace of anyone coming in or leaving. She's vanished, and if I don't find her, she is going to suffer horribly, just like the three other children. You have five days, starting from last night. That's how long… he… keeps them." She stopped herself from using it just in time. "Then they're blinded, and muted, and returned to you just a husk."

Ms. Smythe swallowed a sob, her chin tucked to her chest. Pete said, very softly, "Is that what you want?"

"God help me," Ms. Smythe whispered. "I always knew something would happen to that child. She's… she's not all right, you know."

"She was abused?" Pete wondered if that might be the link between all of the children, some psychic thread that attracted hungry entities.

"No!" Ms. Smythe rounded fiercely on Pete. "I never put up with anything of the sort under my roof—you check, with your smug London smirk you're giving me. I had one of my boyfriends put away for having that very idea, last year. It's in the records. You check."

"Fine, fine. I believe you, ma'am." Pete put her hands out. "What, then? What's wrong with your daughter?"

"Who said anything was bloody wrong?" Ms. Smythe cried helplessly, then vanished down the stairs before anything else could be said. Pete smelled the tang of cheap fags and more whisky and heard the telly volume go back up.

"Crazy bint," she muttered. Ms. Smythe hadn't ejected her from the house, though, so Pete went back into Margaret's bedroom and looked out the window, down into a tiny overgrown garden that looked like a thorny green maw, a Fae place that would swallow little children. In front of her face, a ghost of a spiderweb swayed in the air. The spider had long since vacated.

Behind Pete, in the reflection of the glass, something on the far wall shimmered and twisted under her eyes, and made the center point of her forehead twinge like the symbol Jack had drawn in blood when the shade appeared.

Pete touched the spot on the wall and found it slightly warm, and took out her penknife and scraped a little bit of the paint away. Oily black stuff flaked onto her shoes, roofing tar or old. motor oil. "Ms. Smythe!" Pete shouted in a tone that brooked no argument. "I need to speak with you for a moment longer!"

She took her pocketlight and shone it at an oblique angle to the wall, and the shape under the paint jumped into sharp relief. It didn't hurt, like the things Jack painted in blood… it was solid, like pressing your forehead against a cool iron bar on a warm day.

Ms. Smythe appeared with a snuffling and a cloud of smoke. "What is it now?"

"You painted over something here," said Pete, pointing to the spot she'd scraped off. "Who did this?" She'd take a rag of paint thinner to the wall herself, if it would lead to whatever was taking children. She'd go wrestle Jack out of whatever gutter he was napping in and shove it in his face until he'd be forced to give her help.

"Margaret did it."

Pete froze, felt the prickles over the backs of her hands and the underside of the instincts that she tried to ignore, the electric fence that sparked to life when she got too close to things that were malignant. "Why on earth?"

"She were a silly child, Inspector. You have to understand that. Always seeing things where there weren't any. She said it was to keep them out."

Pete looked at the wall. The lumpy sign didn't feel wrong, it was just overwhelmingly present, on a plane that wasn't the three dimensions Pete's mind was accustomed to. She followed the line of sight, to the narrow leaded window overlooking the garden, replete with cobwebs and dead oak leaves. "Keep who out, Ms. Smythe? Margaret thought someone was trying to hurt her?"

"Something," Ms. Smythe muttered. "But you have to understand, she were just given to fancies… too many books, or not enough friends, and I fully blame myself for that part of it; if she were a normal little girl she wouldn't do those things."

"Ms. Smythe…" Pete rubbed at her forehead. It was starting to throb dully, and it had nothing to do with the magic-thick air of the bedroom. "Who? Who or what was your daughter afraid of?"

"She said…" Ms. Smythe took a large breath and let it out in a rush. "She said it were to keep the fairies out. The garden folk that lived down below. She said they whispered to her and kept her awake because she was bright and they were twilight—her words, not mine, Inspector—and they wanted to take her away." Margaret's mother's eyes glimmered and Pete saw that she'd been wrong, that real grief and desperation were hovering underneath the booze and the television interviews. Things had been wrong in the Smythes' world long before Margaret was taken. "If only she'd been a normal little girl…"

"It's all right, Ms. Smythe," said Pete, patting the taller woman on the shoulder. "Margaret has time yet, if we're dealing with the same individual."

"She always read books—thick grown-up books, with more of those symbols in them," said Ms. Smythe. "She'll be terrible bored if they're not treating her well and giving her a bit of telly and something to read."

"I'll find your daughter," said Pete with a conviction she neither felt nor believed. Ms. Smythe just shook her head and slumped slowly downstairs, and Pete followed after she shutter eyes to block the feedback from the sign on the wall out of her mind.

Chapter Twenty-three

After she finished in Bromley, Pete once again drove through the rain-grayed streets of Southwark, searching every bowed face for Jack's familiar planar cheekbones and burning glacial eyes.

She ended up in front of the rotting row house where she'd found him and realized he wasn't a phantom, a remnant of nightmare given flesh. Something tapped on her window and Pete's heart leaped along with her body. "Bloody hell," she muttered, rotating the handle to roll the glass down. The youth in the jacket leaned into her face, breathing out sausages and sour mash whisky.

"You on a bust?"

"You think I'd tell you?" Pete arched an eyebrow. He grinned wider.

"Jack's your mate. He told me, you came around, that he was in the Four Horsemen 'round the corner."

"Thank you," said Pete, more to get him and his sausage stink away than anything. She didn't want to see Jack nodding in the back booth of some cut-rate goth club. She didn't want to see the fresh needle marks. But she set the parking brake and locked the Mini and walked down the damp bricks to the small black door of the Four Horsemen.

It wasn't like she could do anything else. Jack drew you in, inexorably, like the orbit of a dying star. And besides, she owed him a smack for running off.

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?"