Street Magic

Chapter Twenty-four

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

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

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

"'M not a ninny."

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

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

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

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

"You don't have one?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh."

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete broke for the door. "Jack! Jack, there's trouble!"

Behind her she felt them, as if she were extending invisible fingers. She felt their blackness part the air as they flew, claws and hair lashing, catching Pete's shirt and yanking her backward.

She fell, twisting, down the last stairs, rolled on her side and got up again. The bansidhe's howling cracked her skull, caused the hall lights to flicker.

Jack appeared in front of her, eyes flaming, his hands sparking with chalk dust as the mist covered them both. "Jack!" Pete gasped, or screamed. She didn't know, only the vibration in her throat even told her she was speaking. "Jack, they're behind me."

Jack's irises expanded and he let go of Pete's shoulders. He saw them. "Pete." She saw his lips move. "Pete, get behind me."

"Winter!" screeched the bansidhe, and Pete heard them perfectly. "Crow-mage! Surrender yourself!"

Jack drew in a breath and witchfire blossomed on his palms, hot as the bansidhe's skin was icy. "Bugger to that," he said. "You're not welcome here, and this is a very bad time to make me lose my temper."

The bansidhe drew back their lips from their razor-wire fangs. Their leader raised her right hand and drew her left set of talons across her wrist. Blood oozed from the cuts, and where it hit the walls and the floor smoke rose, black as the coal haze that drifted over London a hundred years ago.

Pete choked as the smoke roiled and grew. It was too much like her nightmare, and where the smoke touched her skin ice crystals appeared. The entire hallway of her flat was frozen over with ice the color of oil.

"Surrender, or the companion dies," snarled the bansidhe woman. "We have cause, crow-mage!"

"State your cause, then!" Jack snapped. "I serve no Un-seelie master and you can't compel me with your bloody Fae laws!"

"A price has been paid and a bargain set." The bansidhe smiled, or what a smile would have been wrought in her hissing rictus of a face. "Your life has a value, crow-mage. For the one who ends it, your talents are the reward."

Pete choked as she felt the ice work its way down her throat, and caught hold of Jack's hand. His body was humming like a guitar string, but he showed none of it, stock-still, the witchfire melting the ice around him quickly as it grew.

"Leave now," Jack told the bansidhe with a terrible still anger that Pete had only ever seen from Connor, "and maybe I'll decide not to rip your wretched carcasses out of the ether and turn you to mud as a repayment for this trespass."

The bansidhe screamed at the insult, and Pete staggered, but the pain slowly lessened inside her head, almost as if she could dial down the volume now that she was growing used to the sound. She dug her other set of fingers into Jack's collarbone and felt him still his shaking in return.

"This is no warded place or churchyard!" the leader screeched. Pete's small cluster of photographs tumbled to the ground under the noise, their glass shattering. "This is neutral ground, mage, and we demand your surrender! Give yourself over… or live to see your thighbones picked clean." Her shadowed spirit eyes flickered with delight.

Jack slid his gaze over to Pete, all the rage run out. He was skinny and old too soon again, and Pete saw from the tight lines along his mouth that Jack was afraid. "Run," he said. "Get to the lift."

"What are you doing?" Pete said. She could hear again, the pain almost entirely dissipated. She would not let go of Jack, not leave him for the sighing and screaming bansidhe.

"Not sure," said Jack. "Time was I could bolt for holy ground, but I've accepted that I'm not as young as I used to be. They've been given cause to take me away, by some git who cuts deals with Fae—I'm gaining the feeling rapidly that I'm rather fucked."

"My lift is holy ground?" Pete tried to arch her eyebrow but was shivering too uncontrollably. Jack cut his hand across the air.

"No, but it's steel, I'd guess. Not cold iron, but it'll keep them out long enough. Might as well save yourself, Pete."

The bansidhe rippled and swirled like a phantom wind had stirred her and then appeared inches from Jack's face. Pete lost feeling in her exposed skin, and saw blue veins crawl into being along Jack's cheeks and neck.

"Do you surrender, crow-mage?" the bansidhe demanded, her voice low and jagged as an old scar. "Or do you choose to die at my hand?"

"Jack," Pete hissed. "Jack, I may have something."

Jack looked at Pete, back at the bansidhe, staring the creature eye to eye as if she were another hooligan in the pit at Fiver's, inconsequential. "You sure?" he murmured.

Pete squeezed his shoulder hard as she could, until the bones creaked. She wasn't. They could die, and the only difference would be what room of her flat was taped off for the crime scene investigators.

The bansidhe howled and raised her claws to rake Jack's face. Pete jerked him backward. "I'm sure!"

She dragged Jack away, turned and ran, taking up his hand. Skidding on the ice, her heart thrumming like a faulty motor, she fell into the bathroom. Jack tripped over her legs and landed on top.

"The tub," Pete rasped. Trying to speak normally, she found her throat raw as if she'd stood on the Channel cliffs in a winter storm and screamed.

Jack understood and ripped the curtain off its hooks, pulling Pete after him until they landed in a heap in the basin of the old claw-foot.

And the bansidhe came, raging and screaming as if their newborn children had been ripped away, flying hair cutting like stinging nettles and their icy breath clouding the air in the bath. Pete's door fell off the hinges and the mirror and tiles cracked as they howled. She ducked her head below the lip of the tub and prayed, wordless with fear even inside her own head.

On top of her, Jack muttered, over and over, in Irish that sounded like last rites, "Cosain me, cosain si, a fhiach dhubh, cosain si."

The bansidhe howled on, and slowly their cries of rage turned into a high keening of pain. Pete raised her eyes over the lip of the basin and saw the leader ripping out her own hair, clawing at her flesh, bits and patches flaking away from decaying black bone.

"You are a deceiver, crow-mage! May you burn in hell!" the leader cried. Then a whirlwind left a slick of snow that smelled like seawater, and the bansidhe vanished into smoke.

Pete exhaled. Her hands and throat and skin were tinged with pink frostbite, and her bones hurt. The cold had cut all the way down. She groaned. "Jack, get off me."

He hauled himself out of the tub and sprawled on the tile. "Old flat. Iron tub. Iron sink and pipes as well?"

"I—I guess so," Pete muttered shakily. She sat back and then screeched as bright fire lanced between her shoulder blades. Jack was back next to her, peeling back her bloody shirt.

"Bollocks," he hissed when he saw the claw marks. "They got you, Pete."

"Cunts," Pete muttered.

"You don't know half the story." Jack sighed. "Come on, luv. That'll need cleaning, if not stitches." He offered his hand. Pete clasped it, but held on when he tried to lift her.

"You're being awfully solicitous for a man who hates me."

"Saved my arse," said Jack. "Least I can do is put yours back together." He pulled Pete to her feet and she felt a wire inside his arms that hadn't been there when she'd found him in Southwark.

"Those women," she said, sitting on the lid of the toilet while Jack searched for peroxide and gauze.

"Bansidhe, luv. The only way they resemble women is in their charming personalities. Unseelie bitches."

"Be that as it may, Jack. They called you 'crow-mage.' What does that mean?"

Jack poured peroxide on a pad and dabbed it against her back, and Pete yelped. "It means nothing. The Fae are fond of names that should be spelled out in portentous capital letters."

He dropped his eyes as he smoothed a bandage over Pete's back, not even trying to hide the lie. Pete opened her mouth, then shut it again. She hurt. Her skin, her mind, gristle and bone were all weary. Someday soon, she'd find out what the bansidhe had meant, but not now.

"Why'd you tell me to run?"

"No point in both of us getting our blood spilled and drunk up, was there?" he grunted. Pete began to say that she knew something else had moved Jack to try and save her, but that would be disastrous—he'd run and she'd never see him again. So she sat in compliant silence as Jack taped down the gauze, his hands free of tremors for the first time.

"Thank you," she said, when Jack pulled her torn shirt back over her shoulder blades.

"Yeah." He dismissed it with a shrug, and left the room. Pete sighed and tried standing on her left hip. It shot tongues of fire up and down her leg when she put weight on it, but she hobbled into the hallway, hissing as she stepped on a piece of crushed glass. "Jack, do me a favor and get my shoes from the entry?"

"Don't have time to clean up." Jack reappeared with one of Pete's duffels in hand and a fistful of Terry's hand-me-down clothing in the other. "We've got to get moving before more creatures of the night try to tear our flesh off the bones."

Pete swallowed, looking at the wreck the bansidhe had made of her flat. "Why did they come? What did you do to them, Jack?"

"Quick to blame me, aren't you?" he snapped, shoving his clothes into the duffel. "And I don't know why, Pete." He sighed and shoved a hand into his hair, spiking it downward over his eyes. "Fuck. I should have realized something would bollocks this up. Sounded so simple—find the kids, get clear of you, go on with me life. Should have known."

"Your personal angst aside, for a moment," said Pete. "The bansidhe were after you, Jack. Knew you by name."

"Which is precisely why we need to go!" he said. He turned and strode into the front entry, bringing Pete's workday shoes back to her. "I wasn't strong enough to ward your flat when I came here, Pete—and the bansidhe broke whatever barriers may have naturally occured. Anything can come inside, and trust me, there are things out there that make the bansidhe nothing more than a dream-shadow on the wall."

Pete stepped into her shoes. She knew Jack was right, in that solid and unexplainable way of magic that she was beginning to recognize when it dropped into her mind like a single raindrop into a deep well. "I promised to believe you," she said, "but I'm stretching, Jack. Close to breaking. Where can we possibly go?"

"Let's just get to the car and drive," Jack said. "I'll tell you when we're there."

Chapter Twenty-five

"Whitechapel," said Jack as Pete guided the Mini through the midnight streets. "No place like it."

"No," Pete agreed as they slid past a human dealer, slouched on a corner with a windcheater turned up against the damp. Furtive eyeshine glinted at her from farther back in the shadows. "No, there isn't."

"Up here," said Jack, and she saw his body loosen from the wire tension for the first time since the attack. "Park on the street. We'll take the fire stairs."

A four-story brick structure with arched windows, slightly Gothic, a bit of rusted ironwork added at some point when the facade became shabby, stared back at Pete with darkened windows. Jack egressed the Mini fast as she'd ever seen him move and started for a rusted set of iron stairs bolted to the bricks, leading up and up into the dark.

"What is this place?" Pete asked as they climbed, the treads under their feet shuddering and groaning like the ghost of Marley. Rust flakes rained onto Pete's head.

Jack stopped at the fourth-floor landing and produced a key from the chain around his neck. He unlocked the French windows in front of them, not without resistance from the rusted latch. "This is my flat."

Pete paused on the sill, startled. "Flat? You let it?"

"Own it. Bought and paid for ages ago," said Jack, flicking a light switch. Nothing reacted. "Ah, tits," he said. "Well, can't blame the power company, really. I don't think I ever paid a bill."

"Jack," said Pete, righting the urge to bang her forehead against the nearest hard flat surface, "if you own a flat, why the bloody hell were you crashing in a squat miles from here?"

Jack fumbled in the darkness, broken only by the skeletal arches of his flat's windows. His lighter snapped and a moment later his face was illuminated with candle flame, hollow as a death mask. "Nobody knows about this place," he said. "I bought it from a hearth witch named Jerrold. Mad as a hatter, last stages of dementia. I think he thought I was paying him to take a boil off me arse."

"You con a helpless old man out of a flat and then don't use it," Pete muttered. "When it comes to you, Jack, that almost makes sense."

"Hang about with me a bit longer, Pete, and you'll learn the value of having a place no one knows you go to," he said. "Close the shutters. You're letting all the warmth out."

Pete stepped inside, feeling a pull against her skin as if she'd brushed cobwebs. Jack watched her circumspectly for a moment and then nodded, lighting more candles off the one he held. A mantel, fireplace, and bare wood floors flickered into view along with burial mounds of furniture that smelled like dust and rot.

"What did I just touch?" Pete rubbed her arms, hugging herself.

"The flat's protection hex," Jack said. "If you'd been unfriendly you'd experience pain unlike anything I can describe, if you were human. If you were demon, or Fae, well…" He held up his hands and made a poof motion. "When it comes to home security, it does not pay to fuck about."

"You would have just watched me fry." Pete turned her back on him. Tired, sore. Nearly killed inside her own home, and now on Jack's turf completely. Wonderful way to keep in control of your situation, she could almost hear Connor scolding.

"If you'd been out to do the same to me? Absolutely," said Jack. Candles lit one after the other now, sympathetic flames springing to life of their own accord, and they threw a glow of ancient bonfires against the walls of the flat. Pete shivered. They did little to warm.

The only furniture to speak of was a plaid sofa with springs popping out of the armrests, but there were books everywhere, on the built-in shelves to either side of the fireplace and stacked high as Pete's waist under the windows. Boxes and crates were clustered in a corner, and she squinted to see glass jars, grimoires bound in leather and iron, and the white of bone. She looked away before she caught sight of something that she didn't need to see.

A little over a week with Jack now. She was learning what to do when he put her into these situations.

"I'm going to sleep, if I can," she said. "Any beds, or is that reaching for the stars?"

"I think I've got a blanket or two and a mattress that doesn't have anything living in it," said Jack. "Bedroom's down the hall. Good night."

Pete took a fat black candle off the mantel and guided herself to the door, watching Jack for a moment over her shoulder. He went to the window and looked out at the street, silent and pale as a saint's statue waiting in vigilance.

The shrouded man, and Pete felt sure this time that the figure had been a man once, held out his hand, squeezing so tightly to contain the beating thing within that bone showed through his knuckles. Blood, thickened and hot, seeped through his grasp and into the graveyard dirt below. "Take it," said the shrouded man. "Take it before it dies and goes to dust."

"I…" Pete started to tell him I can't, because she knew that no matter how natural it might seem to stretch out her hand, she could never contain the beating thing in the man's fist. In her grasp, it would gasp and shatter into a thousand pieces because she was weak.

Before she could speak, though, the smoke came out of the shadows and swallowed everything. This time it was in her throat, siphoning off her air and replacing everything with the hot, desert blackness of oblivion.

Pete knew she was dying, that only taking the shrouded man's offering could repel the smoke, and that she could do neither thing. She could just stand and let herself be replaced by the shadow-figure, filled and consumed body and mind by the malignance living in the smoke. It was pain, a slipping away of something that Pete tried to hold, until it tore the skin from her.

The blankets wrapped around Pete when she clawed to the surface of the waking world, smelling of pot smoke and cinnamon, mellowed and musty with age, were damp with her sweat. Her heart thrummed for the seconds it took her to realize she was awake, sun cutting across her face from unshaded windows.

"Christ on a motorbike!" She sighed, falling back and forgetting she had no pillow. "Ow! Bugger all!"

Jack stuck his head through the door, hair distinctly more spiky on the left side than the right. "Everything five by five, luv?"

"Bad dream," said Pete, rubbing her palms over her face. She had broken into a fresh fever sweat, despite seeing her breath on the air and her skin prickling.

"I've got breakfast on," said Jack. "Come into the kitchen."

Pete followed him, padding on bare feet that quickly went numb. "Thought the electric was off."

Jack snorted. "Think I need electric for a simple fry-up?"

Pete conceded he had a point. The kitchen's pink-sprigged wallpaper and clean white countertops reminded Pete of summer visits to her grandmother Caldecott's trim house in Galway. A kettle on the old-fashioned enamel stove radiated heat, steam roiling out of the spout. A frying pan sizzled with eggs and sausages.

"You're awfully chipper," Pete noticed as Jack fussed with mugs and tea that came from a plastic convenience-mart bag. "Your sight quiet? I find it hard to believe nobody died in a building this decrepit."

"Not that," said Jack. "It's this place. Whitechapel." He set a mug with a cartoon purple cow in front of Pete, and shoveled some eggs onto a plate for himself. Jack looked her over, like she was keeping a secret. "Can you feel it?"

Pete didn't like the way Jack was looking at her. It was that cold look, the one that calculated exactly how much your flesh and spirit were worth in his currency. "Feel what?" she said neutrally, sipping at her tea. It burned over her tongue.

"Whitechapel has a dark heartbeat," said Jack. "It breathes out malevolence and draws in them that need blackness to survive. Dampens the sight, like living under a bridge."

"But there are shadows under a bridge," Pete said.

Jack grinned, without humor. "Just so."

Chapter Twenty-six

"I'll still need to call an imp for the task at hand," said Jack later, his back turned as he did the washing-up. Pete was smoking a slow Parliament, mostly watching it burn in a saucer, taking a puff every few minutes as a token effort.

"You found out which one, then," Pete stated.

"Managed before the bloody bansidhe interrupted me," Jack said. "The Dictionary is shredded, though. Lawrence will kick my teeth in for that. Man treats his books like ruddy babies." He shut off the water and dropped the mugs and plastic plates into the rack to dry. Pete saw him shake once, and grip the counter edge, but the heroin tremors were barely visible any longer, like moth's wings fluttering.

"Look," Jack said. "Go get a Times and find a little cafe to read it in. I'll be done by the time you get back. I know how you feel about it, all that—"

"I want to watch," said Pete. The bansidhe's cuts stung her skin as she squirmed at the thought.

Jack blinked. "Pardon me?"

"I'm staying," Pete repeated. "Do what you have to do, Jack. I'll be here."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself. I'll be in the sitting room."

Pete followed after a moment. Jack was on his knees scratching an uneven chalk circle into the wood floor. In the daytime the flat was shabby in the way of an old woman on pension—faded and stained but not without a grace. The ceilings were twice as high as her own flat, the windows arched like a church with sills a fat cat could curl on. Crown molding, rotted away in places, marched around the ceiling and the lamps were Moorish iron, glass globes sooty from their previous life as gaslights. The building might have been even older than the Blitz, judging by the cracks in the plaster and the leaded panes.

"Bugger!" Jack shouted as his chalk snapped in half. He spat on the marking and erased it with his thumb. The circle encased a five-pointed star and scribbles that looked like chickens had run through a bakery. The whole affair was hopelessly lopsided and scrawled, and Pete put a hand to her mouth to hide a small smile. Jack snarled at her before he went back to drawing.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just… I imagined the whole thing would be much more sinister."

"It's been a long time since I've done this, so you can bugger yourself," said Jack. "I could go find some black cats and chicken's blood, if that would improve your experience, milady."

Pete sat on the sill, pressing her back up against the glass and letting the sunlight warm it. "Quit being childish and get the bloody imp up here. We're wasting time we could be using to help Margaret. Three days, Jack."

"All right, all right," Jack muttered. "Hold your bloody horses." He got up, dusting off his hands, and went to root around in the kitchen. He returned with a few white packets in his fist and emptied them into a red puddle at the center of the circle.

"What… ?" Pete started.

"Catsup," said Jack. "They're mad for it. I think it's the acidity. Imps eat sulfur, in the pit. Wager this tastes a deal better."

"And now I know more than I ever wanted about the preferred snack food for denizens of the underworld," said Pete, tilting her head back and shutting her eyes. "I feel so broadened."

"Hell," said Jack. "Not the underworld. You're talking about the land of the dead. Hell is another prospect entirely. It's a rather terrible insult to suggest that they're the same."

"Because God knows, the biggest concern I have right now is insulting a demon," Pete muttered. She was being snarky mostly because she could feel the pull against her skin and her mind, that same prickle that had overtaken her in the tomb long ago. Nervous twitches sprang to life in her gut.

"Jack," she said. He flicked his fingernail against a twist of paper and a slow ember started, curling a little smoke into the air. He dropped it inside the circle and the smoke curled and spread but never crossed the boundaries.

"Jack," Pete said again, louder. Jack glanced up at her.

"Yeah?"

Pete fidgeted. The circle vibrated a little at the edge of her vision, caused a ringing in her ears. "This will be different, won't it?"

Jack's irritation sluiced away and he gave her a regretful smile.

"Yeah, Pete. This time will be different. You have to trust me, right?"

To believe you, Pete thought. Trust is another thing. But she didn't say it out loud. Jack hadn't earned that, in spite of her dependence on him now that her flat was destroyed. It was just her feeling, the same one that let her know she was walking down a bad alley and would do well to turn around.

"Hrathetoth!" Jack said, not shouting but definitely commanding something. "Hrathetoth, the offering has been placed upon the consecrated ring and I command thee, at my will, appear." Jack sounded as if he were reading off a tube schedule between High Barnet and King's Cross, but the lack of ceremony did nothing to put Pete at ease. That was how it had started, before.

Something sparked and popped in the center of the circle, over the pool of catsup. "Come off it, Hrathetoth!" Jack snapped. "I compelled you; now show your weasely little face. It's not as if you have a choice."

A screech like a cat in the jaws of a bulldog stood the short hairs on Pete's neck on end, and then a snarling, twitching, fur-covered blob materialized in the circle, growing cohesive and gaining tiny horns and clawed toes and a pair of glowing yellow eyes.

Hrathetoth the imp looked, on the whole, like an angry dust lion grown to unusual size and gifted with teeth and limbs. "Crow-mage!" it shrieked when it caught sight of Jack. "Explain yourself!"

"Cut that out," Jack said, flicking another catsup packet at Hrathetoth with a bored movement. "We both know this is the most excitement you'll have in a decade."

Hrathetoth blinked his lanternlike eyes at Pete. "Who is she? She is pretty. Pretty and dark, like a starless sky, or the inside of a rhinoceros."

"You'll forgive him," said Jack as Hrathetoth decimated the packet and began licking up catsup. "Demons don't really grasp the concept of metaphor and simile."

"Is she going to heeeelp you?" Hrathetoth grinned widely, showing too many rows of spiked needle teeth. "Because you know you can't save yourself, crow-mage, and—"

He let out a gurgle as Jack's hand flashed out and wrapped around Hrathetoth's throat. "Listen here, you piece of deception given form, I'm not in the mood. I need the Trifold Focus and I need it now, so bloody go get it."

"Can't be done!" Hrathetoth squeaked. "Grinchley wards his house against intruders! Strong wards, with nasty mean teeth."

"Then find a way around them," Jack growled, and the witchfire flared to life in his eyes. His grip on Hrathetoth started to steam and the demon squealed in pain. Pete rapidly came and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Jack, maybe he's telling the truth."

"He's a bloody demon, Pete. They don't understand truth—just how much flesh they can take off your hide in exchange for the favor." He shook the imp. "Isn't that right, Hrathetoth?"

"Yes… yes…" Hrathetoth agreed. "Villainy and deceit down all the days! But Grinchley is guarded, crow-mage, by things bigger and hungrier than me and I can't change it!"

Jack jerked Hrathetoth closer to the edge of the chalk. "I told you to fucking quit with the 'crow-mage'!"

"No!" Hrathetoth screamed. "Don't break it!" Pieces of his fuzzy black fur dropped off and burned away as they touched the chalk.

"Afraid of dying? Then get me the Focus!" Jack bellowed. "I command it!"

"If you break the ring, not only will it be me, but the pretty darkling, too!" Hrathetoth rasped. "She did not cast it. She is not protected from what breaks through."

Jack looked back at Pete like he'd just remembered she was still about. "So she isn't," he said after a long moment. He breathed in, nostrils flaring, and the witchfire went out. "All right, you fuzzy little bugger, you got me on a technicality. But don't think we won't be speaking again." He let go of the imp and said in a bored tone, "I release you, return no more until you are called."

Hrathetoth vanished with a pop of palpable relief. Jack rubbed his hands over his face and got to his feet. "Sodding Hellspawn."

"So there's no chance, then," Pete said. "This Grinchley has the Trifold Focus and the next time I see Margaret, she'll be like the others."

"The girl will be dead," said Jack. "The beastie will suck her dry. The other children, there wasn't much there except innocence and maybe a few echoes of talent from some great-great-ancestor to feed on. Molly—"

"Margaret," said Pete.

"Whatever. She's one of us."

"Us." Pete arched an eyebrow. Jack waved a hand.

"I mean like me. With her significant, she's likely a witch—if she were touching dark magic she'd be skinning cats and setting other children's jumpers on fire."

"There's a difference." Pete was honestly surprised. "'Mage' and 'sorcerer' not just a semantic thing?"

" 'Course there's a difference," Jack snorted. "Different as punk and disco."

Pete started to say how that was a pretty poor analogy, but Jack held up a hand. "Simply: Witches work with light energy. Sorcerers work with nightmares."

"And mages?" asked Pete.

"Mages dip in both," said Jack. "We're in the shadows, but not the dark." He shook his shoulders, as though he'd just taken a hit of speed. "Calling Hrathetoth was quite the workout. Energy's still up. Want to see a trick?"

"No," said Pete, feeling her lips twitch. Just for a second, she glimpsed the Jack from a dozen years ago, without the long shadow that lay across him in the present.

"Come on," said Jack, taking her hand. "Humor me a bit. Take your mind off the missing girl."

"Nothing will do that," Pete said from experience. She'd dreamed of victims for months afterward—battered wives, stolen children, decimated spirits that clung to her, tearing at her hair and hissing all through her unwaking hours. Pete woke screaming so often that Terry had invested in earplugs.

Jack cupped her hand, palm upward, and conjured a spurt of witchfire in his fingers. He blew a breath over it and the fire flared and drifted upward, settling like milkweed into Pete's palm. It turned the shape of a daisy, then a tiny, perfect oak tree, and finally a duck.

Pete bit the inside of her cheeks and looked up into his face. Jack was grinning at her. "How can you be dour when you've got a tiny duck?" he asked.

She laughed, short, but it was the first real laughter that had come since she'd found Jack again. "You're bloody weird, Jack Winter."

"I'm that," he said. "Ask anybody." The fire duck snapped its bill and ruffled its wings. Pete held her hand out, watching the witchfire burn, when suddenly the duck blurred and lost cohesion as if acid had been poured over it. The fire began to seep, to travel inward, through her skin, lighting it from the inside so the bones of her hand stood out as if she'd been struck by lightning.

A heat like a crematory furnace raced up Pete's arm, into her head and heart, and she screamed before everything exploded behind her eyes and she collapsed, the only sensation the shrieking feedback inside her skull.

The black bird spread its wings before Pete, and she knew this wasn't like the other dream. She was cold, and the spider-legged sensation of being in the wrong world crawled over her.

No longer in the Stygian darkness, she stood on the hilltop of a windswept battlefield, hundreds of bodies inkblots against blood-sodden grass.

The crawling of magic resolved into a hooded figure with wings and a dark face. The bird cried, the force of the cold and the malevolence in its voice pushing Pete backward. She found herself pinned by glowing yellow eyes and a woman's red mouth parted to show a raven's beak.

This is not your place. You are unwelcome here.

The black bird's talons closed around her heart and Pete tasted her own blood frozen on her tongue, and in her ears, cawing laughter fell.

"Take it." The shrouded man's tatters whipped in the wind from the black bird's wings, which beat up smoke from the burial fires all around, swirling it faster and faster until Pete could feel herself being swept away, body replaced by the smoke-man and voice by the horrid screech of the black bird.

"Take it," said the shrouded man, thrusting his fist toward Pete. But she couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, and watched as her own hand dissolved into smoke.

Pete screamed and jerked awake into Jack, who toppled over backward. "Fucking hell! You scared the shit out of me, Caldecott!"

Panting, feeling droplets on her skin like she'd been scalded by freezing rain, Pete wrapped her arms around herself. "What… what the hell was that? That was your parlor trick?"

Jack crouched on his heels, ignoring her sputtering, and took Pete's chin between his thumb and forefinger. "You've got a ghost on you," he breathed. "It's right there, in your eyes."

"I'm… possessed?" Pete pulled away. She was freezing, and Jack's words caused gooseflesh to break out on her arms. "Shouldn't I be screaming, or levitating, or spewing obscene Latin phrases backward?"

"Not a possession," said Jack. "A spirit rider. Like… you've been touched, by someone with blood on then-hand, and they've left fingerprints on you. They follow and watch and whisper in your dreams."

Her breath misted when she exhaled, and Pete shivered. "It's the spirit. The one that's feeding on Margaret?"

"It's a good guess," said Jack. He rubbed a hand over his face. "Bollocks. I should have guessed, with your nightmares… should have bloody known."

"Don't blame yourself," said Pete. "I didn't know they were anything but bad dreams." And she didn't volunteer the other part of the dream—the shrouded man, and the beating heart, and the advent of the black bird. That was hers, and not Jack's, to know. "Nothing good ever comes from the Black," she murmured.

"This one, this isn't from the Black," Jack said. He patted down his pockets and then conjured a fag. "Coming to you in your dreams, sinking claws into your soul, it's living in the in-between."

Pete rubbed her palms over her arms and felt the heat of friction. "Wherever it's bloody from, I wish it hadn't picked me."

"The in-between, the thin space. The realm between life and death." Jack exhaled a halo. "There's not many living that touch the cold space, Pete. Be glad it didn't try to pull you in."

"I'm still alive," Pete said. She felt the small sharp-toothed gnawing of the craving for a smoke of her own. "Can't snatch my soul out from under me."

"Soul's a tricky thing." Jack grabbed his jacket and shrugged into it. "And you can hurt, bleed, and die in the thin spaces, Pete, be you flesh, phantom, or something other."

"Just make the dream stop," Pete sighed. "I haven't slept in weeks and I'm becoming distinctly peevish from it."

"FU get something for it," Jack promised. "You'll be all right by yourself for a few hours?"

Pete stood when he did, although the walls of the room pulsed ominously and she was dizzy. "Will you, Jack? You're not exactly equipped to be running around the city."

He drew back, closing off as if she'd hit him in the mouth. "After everything that's happened in the past days and you still think I'm running off to bloody score."

"Jack, it's what you've been doing for a dozen years," said Pete. "I need you to be clean and sharp when we find Margaret, and whatever has her."

"You're a cynical and mistrustful bitch," Jack said, crossing his arms.

"Yeah, and people like you made me that way," Pete snapped. She rubbed her forehead. Staying upright was a task.

"Now I remember why I walked away from you, Caldecott," Jack said. "This kind of treatment would convince a bloke to stay dead."

"Well, I bloody danced a jig on your grave!" Pete shouted, but Jack slamming the door drowned her out.

Chapter Twenty-seven

The flat was silent after Jack left, suffocatingly so. Pete poked in the wardrobe in the bedroom, the kitchen cabinets, and found nothing except dust and damp. "Sod you, Jack," she muttered. He was running off, wasting time, and she was supposed to sit home. Not bloody likely.

Leaving the flat unlocked, Pete left via the front door and found herself in a narrow hallway that could have easily hosted gaslight trysts a hundred years ago. A rickety lift with a folding gate lowered her to the street and she walked until she found a bus shelter where she could talk unobtrusively. One lesson from Jack's reappearance that tickled her spine: Things didn't need to be near you to be watching you.

Pete dialed her mobile, waded through the voice directory for New Scotland Yard, and waited with her stomach flipping while the extension rang.

"Ollie Heath." Ollie sounded as though he had a mouthful of shepherd's pie.

"Ollie, it's Pete."

"Pete!" he shouted. "Where the bloody hell have you been? Newell is shitting chestnuts!"

"That sounds uncomfortable." Pete punched on speaker-phone and pulled up her mobile mail client. "Look, I'm sending you a name and I want you to e-mail everything you find to my mobile."

"You got a lead?" Ollie said.

"I will," said Pete. "Once I talk to him." She tapped Ollie's e-mail into the address bar and sent the message.

"Got it," said Ollie a moment later. "Though Newell'll have my hide for helping you out." He whistled. "Caldecott, what the bloody hell are you doing messing about with Travis Grinchley?"

Pete drew in a breath. A pointed question and a good one. "He has something I need to move the kidnapping cases. And to find Margaret Smythe," she said.

"Be careful," said Ollie. "People that cross Grinchley end up in baggies. Little ones. For sandwiches."

"Just send me the information when you have it," Pete snapped, "and don't editorialize."

"All right, all right," said Ollie. "What should I tell Newell when he asks me yet again where you've gotten off to?"

Pete stepped out of the shelter and headed for the Stepney Green tube, weaving between taxis stopped at a red light. "Tell him I went to the graveyard."

In Hatton Cemetery, the headstones sat in neat lines, sentinels against the living. The grass stayed mowed and solitary figures and families moved among the rows, placing flowers or standing with their heads bowed.

Pete pulled a few weeds from the base of Connor's headstone. A vase of pink carnations with rotted edges sat in front, tipped over.

"MG, you sodding witch," Pete muttered, picking up the carnations and dumping them into the nearest trash can. Her sister came up from High Wycombe, always managing to miss Pete's own infrequent visits, left cheap flowers purchased outside the cemetery, but never cleaned the grave.

Connor had encased MG's feet in stone when she wanted to fly, with peyote or boys or music. Pete's adventure in Highgate hadn't helped matters. MG never forgave either of them for clipping the wings of her wild, carefree, imaginary life.

"I know you wouldn't approve, Da," Pete murmured, smoothing the turned earth over the grave. "But I know you wouldn't have me leave a little girl to get murdered, either." She sighed and stood, brushing the graveyard dirt from her knees. "What I'm saying is, if I don't come around for a while… Jack will take care of your spot. I think I can at least count on him for that."

Her mobile burbled, and Travis Grinchley's address and relevant personal details appeared onscreen. Pete stood for a moment longer, reading Connor's epitaph. May angels usher you on to paradise.

"I'm sorry, Da," she said, and left between the rows of headstones before she lost her nerve.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Travis Grinchley's narrow Camden house was three stories of red brick veined with climbing ivy and granite-block bones. Someone had spray-painted no future across the bricks at eye level.

"Bloody hooligans," said a reedy voice from Pete's left. A wizened man in a frock coat and spats clutched a cluster of plastic shopping bags filled with takeaway cartons.

"You live here?" Pete said, finding both the fact that Grinchley had a butler and that he dressed the poor man like this vaguely unbelievable.

"I'm Mr. Grinchley's manservant, among other functions," said the gnome, pulling himself upright with a creak of spine. Pete stepped in and took the bags from him, flashing her warrant card with her free hand.

"It's imperative I speak with Mr. Grinchley. Is he in?"

The butler coughed once, in what may have been a laugh a few decades and a few thousand packets of cigarettes ago. "Mr. Grinchley is always in, Inspector. Mr. Grinchley hasn't left his home in nearly fourteen years."

Pete blinked at him, words failing. "Well," she said finally. "Then it will be convenient for me to speak with him."

"I doubt it, miss," said the butler. He took an old-fashioned iron ring from the pocket of his coat and unlocked the double front doors with a skeleton key. "Mr. Grinchley hates being disturbed."

Pete mounted the steps after him, putting on her brightest official smile. "I promise not to be a bother."

The butler grunted and stepped aside to let her in. "Police are always a bother, miss. Usually, they make appointments. Out of respect for Mr. Grinchley's status in the community."

"No offense meant," said Pete, "but Mr. Grinchley's status is exactly why I came here." She stepped over the threshold and extended the bags, but before the butler relieved her, pain hit like an iron pipe across her skull.

Pete dropped to her knees on the Persian carpet in the front hall, head bulging with agony. It was as though everything she felt and heard, all those little inklings of magic that she tried to push away, were hugely amplified and splitting her forehead apart.

A pair of black leather driving shoes drifted into her field of view, rapidly blurring as she clutched her head, trying to shut out the avalanche of whispers, the sheer pressure of power causing a trickle of blood from her right nostril.

"Those are my home's protection hexes," said Travis Grinchley. "Designed to keep out unfriendly persons and things."

"I know what a protection hex is," Pete ground out.

One of the shoes, smelling of hide and polish, went under her chin and lifted Pete's face to gaze into Grinchley's. He wore spectacles and had the jaw of a matinee idol. "Interesting. I must say, you don't look terribly unfriendly, miss. Does she look unfriendly to you, Perkins?"

"The inspector asked to speak to you on a matter of some import," said Perkins. "And I got your curry for tea, sir."

Grinchley shoved his spectacles up his nose and reexamined Pete. "An inspector. Goodness. A vast improvement over the last clod the local constabulary sent out." He smiled, lips closed, stretched and bloodless. "In that case, Inspector… do come in."

The scream of feedback in her head ceased immediately, and Pete went on all fours, feeling sweat along her back sting the scratches left by the bansidhe. "Are you this hospitable with all of your visitors, Mr. Grinchley?"

He took her hand, laid a kiss that crawled along her skin on the back of it, and helped her to her feet. "Only with lovely ones."

Pete took her hand away too quickly and shoved it into her pocket. "Is there somewhere we can talk in private?"

Grinchley's eyes glittered darkly. "Of course. Perkins, bring in a tray when the tea's ready."

Perkins inclined his head and shuffled away like the macabre monster given life. "That makes you the mad doctor, then," Pete whispered at Grinchley's back as he led her into his study. A fire burned in the grate, gas whooshing in the closed space, heating the low-ceilinged room to incubatory temperatures. Grinchley kept his curtains drawn. They could be anywhere, in any time or place. Pete felt her skin dance with chill despite the fire.

"Something stronger than tea?" Grinchley held up a crystal decanter and a cut glass.

"I'm on duty," Pete lied. Grinchley poured himself a tipple.

"Pity." He swirled the whisky and swallowed. All he needs is a bloody monocle and tailcoat, Pete thought. "What did you want to speak with me about, Inspector?" said Grinchley. "I can hardly have witnessed a crime or been privy to confidential information. As you can see." He gestured at the dark oak bookshelves filled with artifacts and leather tomes. Jars and animal skulls shone in the firelight. "I'm quite comfortable within my four walls."

"I'll be blunt," said Pete, turning her back on the rows of curiosities. "Four children have been snatched in the past three weeks. Three have turned up blinded and traumatized beyond speech. The fourth is still missing." She pulled Margaret's picture from the pocket of her jacket and thrust it at Grinchley, who took a disdainful step back. "This child is ten years old, Mr. Grinchley. A close friend of mine believes you have the means to assist in finding her."

Grinchley frowned, a studied gesture with just the right crinkling of skin between his eyes and thoughtful concern twisting his mouth. Pete saw it then—the flatness behind Grinchley's blandly handsome face. Jack did something similar when he lied, but the difference was that Jack did feel, underneath his calculated masks. Grinchley was simply empty.

"You know what a protection hex is and you haven't asked me about anything in my collection that would indicate your unfamiliarity with the arcane, so I can hardly play innocent, Inspector. How can I help with your esoteric problem?" Grinchley inclined his head.

"Your Trifold Focus," said Pete. "Give it to me."

Just for a moment, Grinchley tensed, the lines around his eyes growing darker. Then he smiled again, easy and predatory. "Why, Inspector. Someone's been telling you tales. I'm a collector, it's true, but I don't possess anything on the magnitude of that particular item. I can only wish."

"Leave out the act, Grinchley," Pete snapped. "Unlike you, my friend isn't a liar… not about things of this nature, anyway. You have it."

"Your friend should check his sources," Grinchley said, his smile fleeing. He downed the last of the tumbler and slammed it on his desk. "Now I believe I've accommodated you long enough, Inspector. Please leave."

Pete breathed in, and out. Margaret, she reminded herself. "No," she said.

Grinchley froze, his face twisting into a thunderous frown. "No? Inspector, I can assure you that contradicting me is a very stupid move. Did your friend tell you that as well?"

"Give me the Focus and I'll leave," said Pete, calm as if she were ordering a pint. At the base of her spine, fear uncoiled and crawled upward. "I'm quite serious about this, Grinchley."

He crossed the space between them so quickly Pete barely saw his shadow, gripping her by the shoulders and pushing her against the nearest set of bookcases. The jars and lacquer boxes rattled over Pete's head as her skull slammed into the edge of the shelf. "What does a pretty, simple girl like you want a Trifold Focus for, hmm?" Grinchley murmured. "Such a unique item would only be of use to a sorcerer, or a cheap mage with delusions of power. So which is your friend, Inspector? Is he a true student of the blacker arts, or is he a pathetic conjure-man on the street corner with cards up his sleeve, dreaming of a power he cannot hold?"

"He's the type that would melt flesh off your bones for that insult," Pete choked. She wrapped her hand around Grinchley's wrist, which felt like a slender tree trunk, and exerted the pressure points. Grinchley grunted, lips peeling back from his teeth.

"You fight. Stirring effort, but it won't help you." He lifted his other hand to touch Pete's cheek. "I'm not surprised he picked you—the worthless mage. Beautiful, not too delicate, but easily broken by terror or sorrow." His eyes blazed, like Jack's, but their fire was gold and terrible as an angel falling in flames. "Someday he planned it, of that I'm sure. He wants to shatter you, Inspector. Pity I got there first." He reached over Pete's head and brought out a length of rotted and frayed rope. With a flick, he wrapped it around her neck.

"The Dead Man's Snare," Grinchley murmured, reverently as any curator. Pete choked as the smelly thing contracted of its own will, wrapping around her neck so tightly she felt instant bruises on the flesh beneath.

"This particular specimen was collected and cursed at Tyburn, after its length had stretched thirteen murderous bastards on the hanging tree."

The rope grew and grew, rewrapping itself around Pete's neck each time, twisting a hangman's knot. She tried to shove her fingers under the moldy cord, but to no avail. Black started to creep around the edges of her vision.

"It still hungers, Inspector," Grichley said, stroking her face. "And the more you fight, the lustier it will be. So by all means, dance. Dance the dead man's jig. Every movement you make prolongs your death."

"How will you… explain… killing… a police officer?" Pete managed. Grinchley raised one shoulder.

"It wouldn't be the first time someone in a position of authority has come sniffing at my collection. I deal with the most faithful and esteemed servants of the Black, Inspector. I am discreet."

She wasn't getting out of this with mere talk, then, and the blasted rope was so tight she could barely speak. You'll know when the time for talk is past, Connor said. You'll know it and you'd better take swift action, girl, lest you want to end life dirty and bloody and broken.

Pete drew up her knee and with the last of her air planted a kick squarely between Grinchley's legs. He moaned and doubled over, and Pete reached out and swiped what looked like a bone-handled athame from a low display. She shoved it between her flesh and the Dead Man's Snare, and the ancient strands parted, recoiling from the metal and freeing her air.

"All right, Grinchley," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper. She touched her throat and the flesh was tender and rigid with forming bruises. "Get over behind the desk."

The skin of an affable older gentleman had slipped away entirely and Grinchley staggered to the desk under her guidance. He was lumpy and ill formed, like a golem, and his eyes and teeth glittered in the low light. Pete knew this was what Grinchley's last thief must have seen, just before he ended his nightmare in the Thames.

She tucked the snare into her back pocket, and then unplugged the telephone and tossed the cord to Grinchley. "Tie your legs, and use a real knot."

"You really think you can do anything, command anything of me?" Grinchley hissed. "My magic will tear you limb from limb and then—"

"Firstly," said Pete as she pulled out the cord of a lamp and tied Grinchley's arms behind him. "If there's one thing I've learned in the past week it's that real mages don't ramble on, they just do it." She secured the knot with a tug. "If you had magic other than tawdry rope tricks, you would have used it, you silly git."

Grinchley started to spit invectives, but Pete picked up a wadded message slip from his desk and stuck it in his mouth. "Secondly, I'm leaving here with the Trifold Focus, and I am out of time to fuck about with you, Grinchley, so either tell me where you keep it or I start slicing." She raised the knife and let it catch the light of the fireplace.

After a long moment of staring into her eyes, Grinchley grunted and spat out the paper. "You're made of less breakable porcelain than it appears at first glance, Inspector."

"Lucky, lucky me. Where's the Focus?" said Pete, keeping her voice flat. All she needed to hurt Grinchley, to bleed him, was contained in the memory of Bridget Killigan, of the bleeding tracks in Jack's skin, and the invisible pressure of a Fate measuring off the last moments of Margaret Smythe's existence. But she'd let the threat do the work unless he pressed her. She was still the detective inspector, not a thug.

"The Focus is in my vault room." Grinchley sighed. "In the cellar, at the back of the house."

"There," said Pete. "Isn't being reasonable a simple thing?"

"You'll pay," Grinchley said as she left him tied. "You'll pay in blood for this, little Inspector. Not today and not tomorrow and perhaps not until the end of your time on this earth, but you've put your hand in a wolf's mouth and you'll—"

Pete slammed the library door shut on him and followed a dark broad hallway toward the rear of the town house. The cellar door wasn't locked, and Pete paused at the foot of the stairs. Connor would have said this was too easy by half. Grinchley should have fought harder. He should have locked his doors, at the very bloody least.

Her footfalls were nearly silenced on thick Persian carpet over the stones and it was only a draft against her neck that warned Pete of someone behind her. She spun to see a huge man in an undershirt and black trousers swing a massive fist at her face.

She ducked, but not fast enough and the blow glanced off her skull. Pete fell and the air sang out of her as she hit the floor. The man hulked above her. A line of stitches paraded across his neck and around his right arm at the shoulder, purple and infected. His eyes were mismatched, green and blue, and he grinned at Pete through bloody teeth. "Trespasser." The word ground out from a throat that might have been patched together after a cutting.

For a few precious seconds, Pete was unable to do anything except stare. It cost her any chance to get away—the golem grabbed her by her collar and simply dragged her along, ignoring Pete's kicks and shouted curses except for a grunt.

They turned a corner and the smell of bleach invaded Pete's nostrils as she slid along a floor of worn linoleum. The golem hauled her to a stop in a scrub room, brightly lit as the rest of Grinchley's town house was shadowed.

"I'd so hoped you wouldn't cause any trouble, Inspector." Perkins sighed. His frock coat was missing and a dish-towel was over his shoulder. "But it appears you were rash. Take her into the operating theater, if you will."

The reanimated servant grunted and picked Pete up again. "It takes orders from you…" she said. The thickness in her head lifted a fraction and she saw past Perkins's stooped shoulders and sagging skin. "You're the sorcerer."

"Of course," said Perkins. "One of Mr. Grinchley's objets d'art, if you will. He does pay handsomely for my services, and my brethren benefit from Grinchley's expertise in antiquities of an… impure nature. Now I don't believe I'll bore you with the details, Inspector. We've all watched a James Bond film or two." He nodded to the servant. "I'll be down momentarily."

The servant half dragged Pete to a metal security door and worked the handle clumsily with his free hand. One limb was small and boyish with manicured nails and the other was flat and scarred; a dock worker's hand.

The operating theater was a catacomb, buried long before the town house sat atop it, slimy stone steps leading down to the round killing floor. Pete skidded and fell the last three steps, landing in a heap. The servant kicked her in the stomach, rolling her along like a lumpy carpet.

Pete felt something prick her as she hit the opposite wall of the stone chamber. A numbness spread over a patch of skin on her hip and she slipped her hand into her trouser pocket. The syringe she'd taken away from Jack greeted her, cap loosened and tip dripping. The golem dragged a heavy pair of shackles from their bolt in the wall toward her, moaning softly to himself.

When he came near, reaching for her arms with a grasping gesture, Pete rolled over and jammed the syringe into the inside of the golem's thigh, where a fat artery would have pulsed in life.

The golem shuddered and let out a choked sound that was almost a sob. He took one more shambling step and collapsed backward.

Pete pulled herself up on the ragged blocks of the wall and checked for injuries. She was bruised but not bleeding, her knees and the back of one hand scraped from the fall. She made the executive decision that she'd live, and stepped over the downed creature to fix on a door.

The operating theater had iron shackles bolted into the walls at intervals along the curve of the stones and a modern drain set into the floor over a steel autopsy table. Blood trickled down the table's grooves, an insistent hollow dripping against the damp stone.

On the tabletop, a half-assembled golem blinked milky eyes as a spinal cord waiting for hips and legs twitched like a tail. Pete skirted it as widely as she could, but the eyes still rolled after her and teeth unfettered by a tongue chattered.

Just beyond the table was a door, iron bubbled with rust and age. It had no visible handle that Pete could see, and she pried her fingers into the cracks at the edge and only succeeded in bloodying her nails. "Sod your aunt," she hissed in frustration.

The ceiling of the theater had no skylight or vent, and the walls, for all their age, were bricked tightly with mortar and moss. The golem on the table hissed at Pete, jerking its arms as it tried to reach for her.

Pete leaned against the wall and shut her eyes, trying to keep her panic in check enough so that she wouldn't scream. She'd be all right. One way or another, she'd be all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete recoiled. "Human?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twenty-nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Cunt," Jack muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The summoning," said Pete.

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

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

Jack frowned. "Reanimator?"

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

"Don't let me stop you, luv."

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

"His butler is," said Pete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a talisman for dreamers," said Jack. "It will keep you safe from sundown to dawn."

Pete admired the way the half-circle caught the light. "Will it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete pointed to the trolley basket. "In."

"They're fifteen quid!" Jack protested. "For a box of ruddy nails!"

"I'm sure all the girls at Fiver's would swoon over your criminal behavior," said Pete. "But if we get pinched we're never going to track down this ghostie or beastie or whatever in time, so put the bloody nails in the trolley and grow the bloody hell up."

Jack glared at her, but he dropped the box in the basket and stalked off, leaving Pete to pay for everything.

"Where are we going now?" Pete demanded. She was trailing Jack through the Kings Road, passing between tourists with cameras and pimply children in tight black jeans and Mohawks trying to grasp on to the heyday of punk outside what used to be Sex.

"Picking up a few last odds and ends," said Jack, turning down a narrow flight of steps to a nameless shop with a black door.

Pete stopped just short of the entrance. "Jack, this is a dodgy porn shop."

"Among other things," he agreed, opening the door, causing an obscenely pleasant bell to jingle.

"Bloody hell," Pete muttered, following him inside.

"I got what I needed from the spellcrafter's supply when I bought your talisman," said Jack. "Just need to see a friend about one last thing."

The shop was gray—gray carpet, walls that had once been white but lay coated with a decade's worth of grime, grim fluorescent tubes overhead like a morgue. Even the covers of the magazines and videos looked deflated and drained of color, posters on the walls curling up at the edges and exposing mildew.

Jack went straight to the counter and slapped his hand on it, waking the snoring clerk so abruptly he slid off his stool. "Oi!"

"Mmph?" said the clerk. "Wotcha want?" He had a ponytail, sad and greasy like a rat's and, if it were possible, was even skinnier than Jack.

"Where's Mr. Towne?" Jack said. "I know he still owns the place so don't bother to lie."

"T-Towne?" said the clerk nervously.

"Towne, Melvin," Jack snapped. "Manky Mel, the sultan of snuff, wizard of wanking, whatever bloody silly thing he calls himself."

"L-look," said the clerk. "I don't want any trouble with the coppers…"

Jack grabbed the clerk by the ponytail and jerked him down to eye level. "I'm not a copper."

"She is," the clerk squeaked, pointing at Pete. "And you're probably just here for the money Mr. Towne owes to Left-handed Dick."

Pete cocked her head at Jack. "This friend of yours got in with a gangster who calls himself Left-handed Dick?"

"Trust me," said Jack, tightening his hold on the clerk's ponytail. "If you knew him you wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Now where is he, you sodding little piece of wormshit?"

The clerk sighed in an almost resigned manner. "He's on the set, in the back."

Jack released him with a little push. "Obliged."

"What's gotten into you?" Pete muttered as she followed Jack through the musty rows of dirty books and bins of toys. "Is your sight channeling Guy Ritchie?"

"You'll see," Jack murmured. His eyes glinted like winter sun on a glacier. "Now if you value your dignity, keep your mouth shut and stay close to me in here. And for the sake of whatever god you believe in, don't try to be Miss Detective Inspector Caldecott of the Metropolitan Police. It'll just get us both beat to shit and dumped in some gutter."

Pete started to ask what, exactly, the history between Jack and Towne entailed, but Jack banged through a fire door and shouted, "Melvin! Look who's back from the dead!"

A heavyset redhead in ill-fitting PVC squealed and covered herself with a sheet, and a voice from Pete's left shouted, "Fuck! Cut!"

Melvin Towne was nearing Pete's height, which put his eyes roughly even with Jack's chin. He had run to fat but his hands were large and soft, arms straining the pristine white T-shirt he wore. At one time, Pete would have hesitated to attempt an arrest on him by herself—Towne was powerful still and the creases on his brow and at the edge of his expressive hazel eyes leaked violence like a ruptured chemical drum. "Jack Winter," he rasped. "Don't you ever stay dead?"

"Not as of yet, you great cumstain," Jack replied genially. "I've come for the limb."

Towne crossed his twin hams of forearm. "Threw the sodding thing away."

"You're a liar, Melvin," Jack said easily. "Not only a liar, but a filthy liar, a dog-fucking liar even."

Melvin sniffed, deep and wet like he had a bad cold, or put roughly a gram of coke up his nose on a regular basis. Pete bet firmly on the latter.

"I don't have your bloody limb," he said again. He walked over to the redhead and jerked the sheet away from her. "I don't fucking pay you to sit on your fat arse with your legs crossed." The girl obligingly resumed the pose she'd been in when Pete and Jack interrupted, wrapping a silk noose hanging from the sprinkler pipes above around her neck and posing on a battered metal dinette chair.

"Choke," Melvin directed. "I want to see the eyes popping out of your fat head when you come, bitch."

Pete would have hesitated, alone, but she wasn't alone now.

She walked over to Towne, picked up his high-end digital camera, and dropped it hard on the cement floor. "Jack asked you a question," she said calmly, making herself look Towne in his pockmarked moon face.

"You fucking cunt!" he exclaimed. "I ought to ram that camera up your arse until I've shot three grand worth of video, because that's what it'll cost to replace!"

Pete pulled out the Dead Man's Snare and wrapped it around Towne's neck, less gracefully than Grinchley had managed, but the effect was the same. "You are wasting our time," she snarled. "Give Jack his fucking limb before I use my other hand to tear your bollocks off, cunt."

"She'll do it, mate," Jack said, fishing a packet of Parliaments out of his jacket. He offered one to the plump girl, who silently shook her head.

"Bad for your health."

"Speaking of which." Pete grinned at Towne and dug her nails into his sweaty chin, forcing him to look at her as he wheezed. "Ever shot a brain aneurysm in one of your little faux-death films? I wonder, will you be a twitcher? I think you're too fat. You'll probably just gurgle, shit yourself, and die."

"In the lockbox!" Towne shouted. "For fuck's sake! The key's in my pocket."

Pete tugged at the Snare, and it uncoiled, folding back into her hand. She smiled at her feet, unaccountably pleased. To Towne she said, "Good man." To Jack, "You are getting the key."

Back on the street, Pete snatched the brown-wrapped parcel out of Jack's hands and tore it open. "Oi!" he shouted. "That's me personal property, I'll have you know."

The parcel contained a plastic box, sealed with packing tape. The box was clear and inside… Pete nearly dropped the box on the pavement. "Jack, this is a human hand. A mummified human hand."

"Towne's wife," he agreed. "Caught her cheating about fifteen or twenty years ago and chopped off bits and pieces until she was sorry. Filmed it all. Was his first big hit, as I recall."

Pete stopped walking and thrust the box back into Jack's hands. "Is this your way of telling me you enjoy the company of people like Towne?"

"I'm not that oblique, luv." He grinned. "Saw the video, noticed with my sight Towne had an Egregor, a demon of rage, hanging around him. I bargained the Egregor back into the Black and compelled Towne to give me this as payment."

"But it's a hand," Pete reminded him.

"It's desire," said Jack. "Desire for pain and desire for revenge and desire for love so powerful that it destroyed what it touched. This is a powerful temptation for any demon, Pete. They trade in desire—breathe it. I'm sure every infernal thing in the greater London area has got a hard-on already."

"How reassuring," Pete muttered. Jack turned into the Fulham Broadway tube station.

"We can go home now. We've got everything we need."

Chapter Thirty-one

At home in the sitting room, Pete watched Jack lay copper wire out in a circle and nail it down at the four corners with the iron nails. He chalked symbols at the four points, punctuating the northernmost with a black candle. He drew another, seemingly random set of symbols inside the wire and then said to Pete, "Be a love and get me the table salt."

Pete handed him the carton they'd bought at Tesco and Jack scattered a liberal handful inside the copper. "Earth," he said, and then took out his flick-knife and cut the tip of his finger. He squeezed a few fat blood droplets into the circle, as well. "And spirit."

Jack opened Grinchley's lacquer box and took out the Trifold Focus, holding it in the palm of his hand as if it were a dead, dried butterfly. "The best thing for you would be to go in the other room, Pete," he said without taking his eyes off it. "This probably isn't going to be pretty."

"If I wanted pretty I would have become a bloody decorator," said Pete, crossing her arms. "I'm staying."

Jack wanted to object, she could tell, but he pressed his lips together and then said, "Fine. But you stand against that wall. No talking. No matter what happens, no flying off the handle and threatening to rip someone's bollocks off. Got that?"

"Towne deserved to have them ripped off," Pete muttered.

"That he did," Jack agreed. "I've never seen you so fiery, Pete. I rather enjoyed it." His grin suggested exactly how much.

"Shut up and get on with this," Pete snapped. "This thing has had Margaret Smythe for nearly three days, and your reputation in the Black isn't getting any better."

"Your wish is my command, or some rot," said Jack. He placed the box containing the late Mrs. Towne's hand near his feet and stood at the bottom edge of the circle. He gripped the Focus and Pete heard the slide of metal on flesh as twin spikes flashed out from the bottom of the flat metal disc and drove into Jack's palms.

He didn't make a sound. Milky pale rolled across his eyes and they slowly went back in his head, exposing tiny crimson veins like spiderwebs inside his skull.

"Jack?" Pete said, alarmed. She started to go toward him but a shriek cut the air and went straight through her, all the way to the bone, and Pete stumbled back, crying out. "Fuck!"

The shriek crested and stabilized into a low whine and then with a strained pop Pete felt a give in the air, the shifting of something from one world to another.

"Jack Winter," said the demon. "Why do you call upon me?"

After a heartbeat Jack's eyes flicked back to blue faster than Pete could see. He shook himself and spoke. "To seek that which is lost." There was ritual behind the words the demon and Jack were speaking, and the demon gave a pleasurable shudder when Jack answered correctly.

"First we will strike an accord, a promise of tasting blood if the oath is broken. Only then do I seek your lost object."

"Fair enough," said Jack with a shrug. "Here." He thrust the box with the erstwhile Mrs. Towne's limb closer for the demon's examination. The demon caressed it in a hand with odd-shaped nails and uneven fingers of every color, patchier even than Grinchley's flesh golems.

"I grant you the product of man's strongest desire," said Jack, yanking the box away from the demon's ministrations. "To honor Talshebeth, the keeper of lost things."

Pete saw that the demon—Talshebeth—had a stitched-together scalp with wildly disparate patches of hair. He was hunchbacked and clothed in castoff rags sewn into a bright coat and had bowed legs swaddled in what appeared to be a thousand pairs of stockings. Wedding bands, dozens of them, rode his thin fingers down to the first knuckle. Across his neck stretched a crude string of baby teeth.

"As all things lost are my domain," said Talshebeth, blinking ragged lashes over a pair of chipped glass eyes. "I accept your payment. Tell me what you seek."

"The wandering spirit of Margaret Smythe," said Jack. "And the name of the one imprisoning her."

Talshebeth laughed, the sound of a carefree child with an amusing pastime, tinged in tears for what could never be retrieved. "And for this, crow-mage, you call a named demon? You have indeed fallen prey to human time's passage. You are old. You have lost your prime."

"Don't start up that shite with me," Jack snapped. "Tell me where the girl is or the only way you'll get the hand is when you're wanking off to it with all of the other sodding old-timers, while it lies safe and sound in my loving care."

Talshebeth's eyes turned on Pete. "And you, young and unspoiled," he murmured. "The weight of loss hangs heavy over your tiny bones. Connor Caldecott," he recited suddenly, as if a faded memory had just been washed clean. "Beloved father. Born 2 March 1941, died 12 January 2003. May angels usher you on to paradise."

"Pete," Jack said, "don't listen to it. You," he snarled at Talshebeth, "deal with me."

"But of course," said Talshebeth with a wide smile made entirely of rotted and rusted wood and ivory false teeth. A maggot worked its way into one of the gaps, but Talshebeth did not seem to notice. "I live to serve, crow-mage. However, a search of this magnitude requires some expenditure of power, so if you were to release me from this crude circle…"

"Forget it, you hunchbacked devil," Jack said. "You can work just fine inside the circle, where the nice copper barrier keeps your sodding teeth out of my flesh."

At the street four stories down, the fire escape rattled, and a few chips of plaster floated down around Pete's head. Her senses pricked her, and she was distracted from Talshebeth long enough to feel the encroachment of something black and otherworldly send ripples through her feet and up to the center of fear in her stomach.

"Jack…"

"Quiet, Pete!" he hissed. "My concentration's shot to hell as it is. You're not helping."

Talshebeth chuckled quietly. "She makes you lose things, crow-mage. Your composure, sanity, maybe your life. I fancy her."

"Tell me where Margaret Smythe is," Jack warned, "and do it in the next five seconds or I am going to take out an already extraordinarily shitty day on you."

The fire escape rattled again, and before Pete could grab Jack and force him to pay attention, the dark sensation was there. And then something smashed through one of the arched windows, striking the floor and setting off a flash like a phosphorous grenade. Pete shouted and leaped away from the wall as the rest of the glass exploded inward and five black-clad hooligans in masks and leather coats came through.

One of them went straight for Jack and he dropped the Trifold Focus as the far larger man slammed into his back.

"Get out of here, Pete!" Jack shouted just before the man fetched a punch across his head.

Pete did run—she went straight for the kitchen, one drawer left of the sink, and pulled out Jack's squat cast-iron frying pan. One of the hooligans came chasing behind her, and she swung at him, missing his head and glancing the blow off his shoulder.

He was holding something black and fat-barreled—a tranquilizer gun, Pete thought—and he pointed it at her with the arm she hadn't hit. "Cute trick, bitch. Bad luck for you that after your stunt with the bansidhe they sent humans."

He took aim at Pete. "Cold iron doesn't work on us. Stupid cow." He whispered words of power under his breath and Pete's body tensed of its own accord, anticipating pain.

No dart slammed into Pete, and it wasn't a gun, either—it was magic. Ice-cold and like slamming into a lorry headfirst, it swept Pete up and tumbled her end over end until she hit the far wall of the kitchen and slid down it into a crumpled heap.

The sorcerer came to her, pointing the sleek black wand between her eyes. "Got anything to say, mage-whore?"

Pete grasped the edge of the counter and tensed. She had to make the single second she would receive count. "I say I'd take that wand and shove it up your arse, except you'd probably enjoy that."

The sorcerer snarled and raised his wand again, and Pete sprang, twisting his arm and driving it backward into his stomach. The spell fired a half-second later, and the sorcerer screamed. A pit of flesh exploded at close range, as though the sorcerer had just collided with a car.

Pete left him to bleed and ran to find Jack.

Two of the masked men were holding him down and a third was hitting Jack in the face, cursing at him unintelligibly. "Pete…" he managed between blows. "Pete… get back…"

Pete hit the closest with the frying pan, every ounce of her strength behind the blow. The man didn't shout or scream, he just crumpled with a crease in the side of his skull. The one hitting Jack turned and swiped at her with a skinning knife that appeared from his sleeve. Pete ducked the blade and planted her foot in his gut, and when he doubled, slammed the iron into the back of his head.

"Stop!" The man holding Jack held his wand to Jack's head. His was spindly and brown, like a piece of root. "Leave off or I spread his brains like jelly, you tart."

Pete's eyes flicked to Jack's face. Her heart was slamming into her breastbone and she wanted nothing more than to beat the men who'd beaten Jack until they were pulpy sacks of flesh.

"Listen to him," Jack mumbled through a split lip. "They're sorcerers, they mean it." His hand worked into the pocket of his jeans as the sorcerer glared at Pete. She ignored him and frowned at Jack, ever so slightly. He stared back and then dropped her a wink, so quickly Pete wondered if she'd imagined it.

She dearly hoped she hadn't.

"Are you deaf, missy? Drop the kitchenware and get your arse over here!"

"You'll wish you'd taken your chances with me," Pete said. She dropped the frying pan.

"Move!" the sorcerer snarled. To Jack he said, "I'm going to fuck her before I kill you. She's tasty, Winter, I'll give you credit for that."

Pete sighed. "That was the worst thing you could have said."

Jack's flick-knife sprang open in his pocket, and he pulled his hand free. A little bit of blue fire burst around him, more spark than flame, and when Pete looked again Jack had slipped the sorcerer's grip.

The man stared, slack and confused for a breath too long. Jack's hand whipped out and he drove the thin blade into the sorcerer's throat to the hilt. "Last thing, too," Jack said, and then his legs went out from under him and he sat awkwardly on the floor with a thump.

The sorcerer gurgled and fell back, his wand rolling away and blood pulsing out of the wound in time with his heartbeat. Pete knelt down next to Jack, lifting him up with a hand behind his head. Her fingers met a sticky cut.

"Oh, God," she said. "Jack…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack looked at Pete. "He's right."

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

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

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

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

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

"—mind the circle," Jack finished.

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

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

"Oi!" she protested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the Black. People die here…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jack—"

"Let it go, Pete!" he shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jack…" Pete started.

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

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

Chapter Thirty-two

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Please elucidate."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirty-three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Mosswood."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't—" Pete started.

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

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

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

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

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

"What's so impressive about that?" Pete said.

"Mages, in the great order of the Black, are candle dames," Mosswood said. "Jack Winter is an acetylene torch turned on full. Do you see?"

"I just want to know what happened when I touched him," said Pete.

"Afraid of it, are you?" Mosswood nodded. "Bright girl."

"I'm not afraid of anything," Pete snapped. "If it was just my life, I wouldn't be here. There's an innocent child at stake and I need to know that Jack is telling me the truth, when he decides to tell me anything. Whatever happened could affect my ability to help her. Or anyone."

"Jack Winter telling the truth," Mosswood mused. "There's something I'd like to see."

"Listen," Pete said. "I'm not stupid. I know something happened that wasn't meant to the first time Jack and I tried magic together. I don't think mages make a habit of working rituals that leave them on Death's doorstep. And now, the same thing almost blew his flat to smithereens earlier tonight."

"It is not a thing," said Mosswood. "Magic is not an object."

Pete dropped her eyes at the rebuke, wishing she'd never come. Being in the Black made her feel as if she were half in and half out of icy water, displaced and distracted.

Mosswood finally sighed. "I can only venture a guess, you understand…"

"Anything," said Pete with relief. "Wild speculation, baseless rumor… I've already spent over a decade thinking I'm crazy for believing any of this."

"Many thousands of years ago," said Mosswood, "there was a class of magicians, used by the old gods to speak for them… druids, priestesses of the Morrigan, a class of the Celt's battle shamans… you see?"

Pete nodded. The brownie set a cup of strong hot tea at her elbow, and she sipped reflexively. The way Mosswood spoke, it was easy to imagine sitting at the foot of the great standing stones, watching hooded figures dance in the starlight.

"The term 'magician' is a fallacy, really," said Mosswood. "They were called 'Weirs,' in the old tongues. Shapers of magic."

"Weir." Pete tasted the word, swallowed it down with her next swig of tea. "And what did the Weirs do, Mr. Mosswood?"

"Just Mosswood," he said again. "Weirs are odd and frightening, Miss Caldecott, because…" He sighed and sucked his pipe. "I fear I am doing you a disservice by saying this, but… Weirs escape classification. They do not tend toward magic the same way mages and sorcerers do. They are transformers, amplifiers, able to perceive the truth in dreaming, and if they are connected to a mage or sorcerer, terrible, terrible things have happened."

"What sort of things?" Pete drained her mug to the bottom, bitter tea leaves touching her tongue.

"Well," said Mosswood, "you don't think the Hindenburg explosion was really an accident, do you? Or Three Mile Island? Or the Tunguska meteor?"

Pete sat back, rubbing her arms. The cozy pub had become freezing cold. "So if I am… a Weir, and I've connected with Jack…"

Mosswood blew a ring of smoke, his eyes murky. "Then may whatever god you believe in watch over you both. Someone of Jack's abilities, amplified by a Weir, would be like a storm sweeping from the netherworld to flatten everything outside the Black."

"Weirs amplify mage's talents?" Pete felt her heartbeat slow in numb anticipation.

"Of course," said Mosswood mildly. "Why do you think virgin girls were so popular with magicians in the old times? It wasn't for their conversation."

A low shudder started in Pete's stomach and worked its way toward becoming a clear thought. She saw Jack, in his torn T-shirt and black jeans, jackboots and metal bracelets gleaming in the candlelight. Standing across the circle from her, inside the dark still tomb. Reaching out, to take her by the hand.

Afraid, luv? Don't be. I'm here, after all.

Pete stood up, knocking her chair away with a clatter. "I—I have to go. I'm sorry, Mosswood. Thank you…" She turned and managed to navigate out of the pub and back down the alley, fingers closing around the cold lumpy metal of the gate and pushing it aside. A black border closed around her vision and finally the street in front of her disappeared completely and all Pete saw as she spiraled down was Jack, Jack and his devil's grin.