Street Magic

Chapter Thirty-four

Pete shoved open the door to Jack's flat so that it hit the wall with a crack. She jumped at the same time as he did, startled to actually find him slouched on his sofa. A haze of pungent blue-green smoke drifted around him.

"Who the fuck is that?" demanded the woman on the other end of the sofa. She was rail skinny, a thatch of grown-out blond hair that still held purple dye in the tips sticking out wildly around her narrow pixie face.

"Hattie, this is Pete," Jack said. His posture instantly drew tight as he caught Pete's expression.

" 'S a bloody odd name, ain't it?" Hattie said, taking another draw on her Thai stick.

For Pete's part, she drew in a breath, letting the pot-smoke smell wash over her, and then said, very softly, "Jack, I need to speak with you."

He stood, and Hattie made an unsteady move to follow. "Alone." Pete pinned Hattie with a glare, and the spindly girl sank back down into her seat.

"What's wrong, luv?" Jack said when Pete pulled him into the hallway and slammed the flat's door.

"How long have you known?" Pete said. Jack blinked once. His eyes were clear—he wasn't stoned, had just been playing at it. Pete found herself startled again at how quickly Jack could shuck and don different skins.

"Known what, Pete?" he asked in a credible display of innocence, but Pete knew better.

"I've been trying to figure it out, the whole walk home—did you know before that day in the tomb, or did you only figure it out when that thing came out at us and went straight for my heart instead of doing what you wanted?"

Jack's eyes iced over, the deep glacial blue stealing around the iris, but Pete pressed on. "And that convenient tip to the police, and you sticking around me right up until now. For your reputation." She lowered her voice. "Did you really think I wouldn't realize what you're doing, Jack?"

Jack spread his hands, and smiled at her. It was a warm smile, charming and guileless. "I don't know what you're talking about, luv—"

Pete slapped him, hard enough to leave a crack at the corner of his mouth that dribbled blood. "Don't lie to me again, Jack Winter," she hissed. "And don't call me 'luv' any longer. You lost that right the day you decided to use me like a fucking telly antenna, a dozen bloody years ago."

His fists curled and Pete braced herself to be hit. He probably wouldn't rattle her teeth, he was so skinny.

"You put me in danger. You knew exactly what would happen and you used me," she kept on. "And when you found me again, you used me again. And now that little girl is probably dead and I've spent the last twelve years trying to outrun nightmares of something that wasn't even my fault in the first place. Do you know how many nights I've wished I could make up for hurting you, for letting that thing loose? Too bloody many, Jack!" Shaking, she clenched her teeth to keep her voice steady and said, "I'm going home. You can't help me, or Margaret Smythe. You can't help anyone."

He let her get almost to the lift before he said, "You thought it was entirely your fault?"

"Isn't it?" Pete said. "When a Weir and a mage meet, terrible things happen. Mosswood said it."

"Mosswood doesn't know bloody everything." She heard a rustle and a sizzle as Jack conjured a fag, and then his breath drawing on it. "Listen, Caldecott, whatever happened between us before, right now all that matters is we've come to the attention of the wrong sort of people."

He lifted away from the wall and walked over to Pete, placing the tips of his fingers on her right shoulder. Pete shuddered as his presence crackled around her. "Don't touch me," she whispered.

Jack slid his grip to her arm and turned her to face him. The magic that rolled over Pete sucked her air away, just as it had the first time she'd stood close enough to touch him. "We're in danger, Pete," he said. "And if you don't stay with me, you're going to die. Later on, we can scream and throw crockery and shed tears over what I knew and how I used your talent and when, but right now, if you want any chance of saving Margaret Smythe from the clutches of certain death, then luv—you're with me."

Pete glared at his hand until he removed it from her arm. "Is the Hattie trollop strictly necessary?"

"Hattie's an old friend," Jack said. "She's not bad."

"She's a fucking junkie," Pete pointed out. Jack smiled, lips thin.

"So am I, Pete." He stamped out his cigarette and walked back down the dim hallway to the flat. "Hattie's got someone for us to meet, might have a line on those demon-wanking sorcerers who are after me."

"And then we find Margaret," Pete told him. She let him know, with the thrust of her chin, that she'd break Jack's shins and drag him with her if it came to that.

He flashed her the devil-grin, not worried in the least. "Yes. If we find them—then we find Margaret. Can't do fuck-all for the kid if we're dead, can we?"

Pete conceded that he had a point. Whatever Jack was, wrong wasn't usually it. She gestured for him to lead the way back into the flat. "Don't make the mistake of thinking this is good and settled between us."

"Wouldn't dream," Jack said, turning the knob. "You'd wake me up right quick."

Hattie jumped up when Pete came back into the flat. "Jack, what's up? Can we get out of here, already? You know being out the Black always gives me fucking hives."

"Pete is going to be joining us," Jack said, shrugging into his jacket. The screaming skull on the back leered at Pete. Hattie worried her lower lip, fingers picking idly at the hair on her opposite arm.

"Why?"

"Because I said so, Hattie." Jack stuck a Parliament between his lips but didn't light it.

Pete watched Jack, and Hattie, and the look that passed between them. Jack had shifted again, this time into an edgy, aggressive mode that made him square his shoulders and jut his jaw. Hattie folded in on herself even more.

"She don't blend in," she finally muttered. "Like a new penny in the collection box. She'll pox up the whole thing."

"Either you two leave off talking about me like I'm deaf or I can take your skinny arse to rot the night in jail," Pete told Hattie. She turned on Jack. "That goes for you, too."

"Except my skinny arse is cute." Jack winked at her. Hattie glared at Pete from under bruise-colored lids.

Chapter Thirty-five

"This might take some time," Jack said to Pete as they walked along the narrow high street outside Jack's flat. "We're going to have to go into the Black." He looked down at her. "Not that you seem to have a problem with that any longer."

"I do what I have to," said Pete shortly. "You wouldn't tell me the truth."

Jack laughed once. "I have to remember you're not sixteen any longer."

"Not for some time," Pete said. She felt a breath of wind and then suddenly it was full night and they were walking past grated and boarded-up storefronts, hunched shapes sleeping on the grates that vented the underground. A prehensile tail twitched out from under a ratty red blanket.

"It's just up here," Hattie called from ahead of them.

"That was easy," Pete remarked.

"In-between places," said Jack. "Those alleys that no one ever looks down. All of Whitechapel is thin, makes it easy to pass back and forth."

"I'm just telling you now, we don't have much time," said Pete. "Less than twelve hours if it's keeping to the same line as with the other three children."

"Time goes differently in the Black," Jack said. "Slows down, goes backward or forward."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Pete asked.

Jack reached the metal security door that Hattie was standing in front of, her hands and shoulders twitching.

"No," Jack said. "Once I came in for a pint and walked out at breakfast time three days hence." He slid the door back on its rollers and gestured Pete inside. "After you, luv."

They walked down, on a set of slippery metal stairs through air that smelled like piss and sweat, droplets of moisture shaken from pipes overhead by throbbing bass.

"What exactly are we hoping to accomplish by coming here?" Pete asked Jack, raising her voice to be heard over the muffled music.

Hattie threw open the door and a profundo remix of "Don't Like the Drugs" smacked into Pete like a brick.

"An impression!" Jack shouted, and then they were inside.

The basement room could have been Fiver's, with the walls painted black and the tiny raised stage space replaced by an emaciated DJ and blocky turntables. And the people, close together in sticky knots, sliding up and down to the clotted beat of the music—they were different.

A hand closed around her wrist and she looked over to see Jack grimacing. "Are you all right?" she mouthed at him. A ring of white had appeared around his lips and his eyes were almost colorless.

"Too many bodies," he muttered in her ear. "Too many spirits. Wasn't ready for the sight."

Pete glanced around and perceived nothing but a mass of sweating and mostly pasty humans clothed in shades of black and black.

A strobe flickered across her vision and for a moment she caught flashes of horn and bone, long teeth arching over cloven lower lips as a tongue snaked toward her. Flash again, back to skin and cloth. "Come on," she said, tugging against Jack to pull him away from the dancers and their swirling auras.

Jack swayed just a little, sweat beading in the hollow of his neck and stippling the collar of his shirt. Pete reached up and brushed it away. Jack started at her touch, and the white in his eyes deepened back to the usual blue.

"I'm here," Pete mouthed. Jack squeezed her wrist.

"Ta."

Hattie was already bent over a tall glass of whisky, sucking on a borrowed cigarette held out by a Mohawked man with a bare chest and studded jacket.

"Hattie." Pete indicated the glass with her chin. "Give it here."

"Oi," said the Mohawk. "I paid for that, you tart. Leave 'er be."

"Excuse me," said Pete, reaching across Hattie's nonexistent chest and taking the tumbler, "but kindly bugger off back to 1985 and leave us the bloody hell alone."

Jack tilted the whisky down in one swallow, coughed, and then settled on the nearest barstool with a sigh.

The Mohawk looked at Jack, at Pete and Hattie, and then held up his hands. "Didn't realize she was with you, mate. Apologies."

"Fuck off," Jack said plainly. The man left.

"This the sort of impression you were after?" Pete shouted-muttered under the throb of the music. She kept her back to the bar, her hands at her sides, and wished she had something other than wit and fists at her disposal.

Jack faced the body sea with his elbows on the bar, a serene smile playing between his lips and his eyes. "You ever shill at cards, Pete?"

"I went into the Met straight out of university so… no," said Pete.

His fingers twitched and produced a card from his sleeve, a tarot picture of the Hanged Man. "You lose a few rounds at first," said Jack, still roving his gaze across the club. "You chum the waters with your weakness. You stand back and you let them get close, close enough, and you jam the knife in so tight and deep they never stop bleeding." Jack made the card disappear again, witchfire eating it into nothingness.

Pete eased near enough to speak into Jack's ear. "So who's getting close to us now?"

A girl in a satin slip adorned with roses, thorny twists of vine when Pete blinked, a dress again when the lights flared, grinned at Jack with needlelike teeth as she slipped past. Jack lit a cigarette and let the smoke trail out through his nostrils. "The wrong kind of people." His magic no longer crackled, it rolled off him in the slow honeyed way that made everyone in the club with the least sensitivity turn to look at him. Pete felt it cling to her and shook it off. If Mosswood was right, she was going to have to find a way to shut off the hum, the ripples, and the cries that seemed to resonate through London.

"Wrong for what?"

"Wrong for me to bring around someone like you," said Jack. "But oh, so bloody right for what we're trying to do." The houselights went down, and in the sudden blackness Jack's eyes burned blue.

"Bloody hell," said someone from over Pete's shoulder, sotto voce, but in order to be heard over the music you practically had to scream. "Jack Winter, isn't it?"

"You're fucking stoned," said a male voice. "Jack Winter's dead."

Jack's smile slipped down the scale to predatory. "See?"

Pete and Jack turned in concert to face a pair of young, pale, serious faces, boy and girl, both staring at Jack sidelong.

"If so," Jack said to them, "I'd say I managed to make one bloody attractive corpse."

The girl clutched the boy's arm, tearing a hole in his fishnet sleeve with her dead-blood nails. "By the Black! Arty, it's really him."

Arty regarded Pete and Jack through hooded eyes, bloodshot with whatever was in his glass. He sneered when Pete returned his stare. "Yeah. Guess he hasn't kicked."

He swung himself to face Jack, limbs heavy. Pete shifted herself to the balls of her feet, ready to deal Arty a punch to his pointy chin if he moved in on her or Jack.

"Do you know there's a bounty out on your pretty little Billy Idol head?" Arty slurred.

"Why, son?" Jack said. He curled his lip slightly, carrying on with the reference. "Are you going to collect?"

"Oh, don't mind him," the girl gushed, dealing Arty a shot to the ribs. "My brother's a bloody idiot when he's in his cups. I'm Absithium, and he's Artem, but you can call us Arty and Abby." She extended her hand palm down, as though she expected Jack to kiss it, and he did. Hattie grunted at the gesture, her blotchy forehead crinkling.

"Jack Winter," Jack told Abby, ignoring Hattie as if she were a lamp or a hatstand.

"I knew it was you," Abby simpered. "Arty and I… we're twins, but I'm an intuitive and he's got other talents."

Pete noticed a ripple in the crowd around them. A shifting of heads and eyes, when Jack said his name. "Chumming the bloody waters," she muttered, taking Hattie's fresh glass of whisky and draining it herself.

Abby jerked her chin at Hattie. "I've seen you before, too. At Millie Child's?"

"Yeah, whatever," said Hattie. "I spent a few nights there last month."

"The new moon sex rituals," said Abby sagely. She looked Pete over and dismissed her in the space of a heartbeat. "May I ask you a question?" she demanded of Jack, tilting her heavy black beehive to one side in an expression that Pete supposed would be coquettish if Abby hadn't been made up like a dead porcelain doll.

"Anything, my dear," Jack said.

"Where have you been, all this time?" Abby chewed on her thin lower lip. "I mean, we all,"—she gestured at the dancers—"have our theories."

"And wagers," said Arty with a shift of interest. "Personally, I say you were pinched by the common police and spent the last dozen years being buggered over at Pentonville." He took a swig of his pint, face knobby with belligerence. "So where'ye been, Winter?"

Jack leaned close to Arty, meeting the boy's kohled eyes. He held there, his lips parted and barely an inch from Arty's ear, until Arty stilled completely.

Then Jack breathed, "Hell."

He slung his arm around Hattie, picked up Arty's pint and drained the remains. "But now I'm back, and I'm bound to raise a little infernal noise of my own." He kissed Hattie, hard, smearing her lips apart and probing with his tongue. Hattie yielded like an understaffed doll.

Pete became aware that the music had faded to the end of the track and the club was largely silent, everyone waiting to see what Jack would do next.

Arty cast his eyes at a few fellows of comparable size and thickness. "Sure, Winter. Play your set. Let all of them see what a bad man you are." He slid from his stool like a small mountain moving. "Hell or not, hasn't helped you much. You look bloody wasted." The other boys came to his shoulders.

Pete pointed her finger at Arty. "Don't," she warned.

"What are you going to do, curse me?" he sneered.

Pete looked to Jack, who was fondling Hattie with a bored expression as he glared at Arty. His eyes flicked to hers for a second, and he was still Jack. Make an impression.

Arty grabbed the lapel of Pete's jacket. "I asked you a question, you slag."

The DJ began another song, and Pete hit Arty in the jaw, in the soft spot just above the bone that snaps the head around and brings unconsciousness.

She raised her eyes to the other boys. "Jack doesn't need your meddling and I don't want you breathing my air. Piss off."

Abby jumped in between Pete and the boys. "They didn't mean it!" she cried. Arty groaned and sat up, shaking his head. "How could you?" she hissed at him.

"Winter's not a sorcerer!" he said defensively. "How's I supposed to know he practices bloody black magic?"

"I practice whatever I bloody want," Jack said. He slung his other arm around Abby. "Let's leave off these cunts and find someplace private, eh, luv?"

Abby fairly glowed. "Of course! I know just the place."

Jack, Hattie, and Abby walked through the room, dancers parting like a furrow, and Pete followed before the passageway closed and she was trapped. Every set of eyes in the room bored holes in her back until the door boomed shut behind her.

Chapter Thirty-six

Abby took them to a turreted Victorian, black with red light shining from every window. She lifted the iron knocker, a fanged nymph's head, and let it fall once.

"What is this place?" Pete stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Mad Chen's," muttered Hattie. She let Jack half drag her up to the door. Pete looked up and down the street. Dead trees and dead leaves bent and scuttled toward her, a winter wind pushing behind.

"Pete." Jack jerked his head at her as the door opened and a hooligan in a silk jacket peered out. He looked at Abby, nodded, and then stepped back.

Mad Chen's was lit by gaslight, red as new blood spilling, burning some sort of alien fuel. Thick wispy smoke drifted toward the tin ceilings, painted over with spray-can slogans, and under the smoke a garden of beds lay scattered across the wide rooms.

The beds were of every description—day lounges and iron institutional frames. All made up in silk or satin, no filthy mattresses like where Pete had found Jack.

Most of the beds were occupied, and slow-moving, doe-eyed women passed among them holding long boxes and trays with pipes and small sticky globs of pungent brown in wooden boxes. Their breasts and nipples, ringed or studded or tattooed, gleamed in the low red light.

"Up here," said Abby as they passed through the main part of the den, and she led them up a spiral staircase and into a narrow hallway.

Some of the doors had a key sticking out, and some were locked, with cries or silence coming from behind. Abby turned a key in the second door on the left and went in, slouching down on a sofa. "Fuck, I'm bored. Should we ring Mad Chen to bring up some poppy and absinthe?"

Hattie flopped next to her. "I'd murder a hit of anything right now."

Pete remained standing. "I have to go to the loo." She narrowed her eyes at Jack before she slipped back out the door and went down the hall, trying doors until she found a narrow closet with a toilet and a bulb on a pull chain.

She shut the door and leaned against the wall, and realized once she was still that her legs were shaking. The Black pulsed against her, and she swore she could feel it on her skin, like the opium resin, sticky and visceral.

"It never really gets better."

Jack opened the door and slid into the closet with her. Pete had to turn sideways to accommodate him.

"Jack, what in all Hell are we doing here?"

He leaned his head back against the wall and produced a fag, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Abby and her twit of a brother are sorcerers. If they don't go blabbing to Whoever's trying to get rid of me before this fag's gone, I've no sort of currency left with this lot at all and I might as well chuck myself off of Tower Bridge and be done with it."

Jack smelled like whisky and rain, like lightning had just struck earth. Pete breathed in him and the tobacco, closing her eyes.

A pressure on her shoulder, as Jack closed his free hand around it. "Thank you, for going along. Probably would be bleeding internally in some dank alley if you hadn't smacked that bloody Arty." He half grinned at her. "Where did a sweet little girl like you learn to throw a punch, anyhow?"

"I was never particularly sweet, Jack," Pete said. "You would have found that out, if you'd stuck around."

He smiled humorlessly, around the cigarette. "Regrets get you nothing except a bloody face and a broken heart if you're lucky, Pete." He cracked the door of the closet and peered out. "Should be enough time for Abby to tip off whoever her master is and end this idiot idea they have of chasing me all over the bloody city. Let's get back."

He brushed past Pete, their full length touching, and then in a flutter of her heartbeat, he was gone again.

Pete pushed back against the pressure under her mind, the pressure that Jack said never really got better, and she followed him.

Chapter Thirty-seven

"Mad Chen's got some shit in from the Golden Triangle," said Abby when Pete and Jack came back. She reappraised Pete when they entered the room together. "Your friend going to take part?"

A wavy glass bottle full of slightly luminous green liquid had appeared on the table, and Jack took a tumbler, filled, and downed it.

"She won't." He coughed. "Then who would there be to knock about anyone who irritates me?"

"Why do you keep mundanes around if you're not fucking them?" Abby asked with genuine curiosity.

"This absinthe tastes like a bloody tramp pissed in a gutter and had it bottled," Jack said. "And has anyone ever told you that for such a pretty slip of a thing you ask a lot of silly sodding questions?"

Pete went to the window and watched the street, but nothing except shadows and the crooked skeletons of bare trees stared back. She drew the velvet curtains. Dust shook out of their folds, old dust that smelled like vellum and bone, and she sneezed.

Hattie watched her mournfully. "You like, a bodyguard then?"

Only one door in and out of the room, and no closet she could see—just overstuffed furniture and an old peeling sleigh bed with a ragged coverlet. Pete nodded absently at Hattie. "Something like that."

"Ever met David Beckham?" Hattie said. She looked like a sad leather-clad raggedy doll, with her featureless skinny limbs and chopped-off eggplant hair.

"I only ever looked out for Jack," Pete told her. "I'm a detective inspector with the Met."

Abby's head snaked around. "You're a what?"

"Trust me, darling, if I was going to take you in I would have done it long before you opened your mouth," Pete said. "Drink your mixer and behave yourself."

"Jack…" Abby started, but he glared at her over his second green tumbler.

"Pete's with me. Shut it." He gave her a cool smile when she pouted. "Besides, I need your help now, Abby. Need to pick that black little head of yours."

"Is that so?" Abby glared at Pete in vindication as she downed her second drink in one go.

"Yeah," said Jack easily. "Ran into some blokes a few days ago, sorcerers like you, but nowhere near as lovely."

Abby snorted, poured herself another glass, sipped it. "So?"

"So, what's a smart little sorcerer up to these days?" said Jack. "I know something big's gearing up, so don't bother to lie. You lot have been twitchy as jackrabbits ever since I dove back into the scene." He went to Abby and brushed the stark black hair out of her eyes, cupping her chin between his thin fingers. Pete felt her stomach give an uncomfortable cramp.

"Come on," Jack murmured. "You can tell old Jack Winter. Whisper it in my ear. Always had more of an affinity for your kind of magic, anyway. It wouldn't even be a betrayal, luv."

Abby swallowed, a petal flush creeping into her porcelain cheeks. "They say… well… they say that something big is right on the other side of the veil. A spirit, or some such thing… and, well, some of us are offering service. Letting it gather power, and helping it, because when he comes through, he'll reward us."

"He," said Jack. "You have anything more specific for me, darling?"

Abby gulped the rest of her third helping of absinthe. The dry scent of licorice permeated through the smoky air. "I could have my throat cut for telling you that much, mage." She hiked her black hobble skirt over her knees and cast a languid look in Jack's direction. "If the questions are over, do you want to—"

Then Abby choked, her pale slender fingers scrabbling at the hollow of her throat, her eyes going wide and the irises expanding with effort.

Hattie moved away from her, with surprising speed. "What's her problem, then?"

Abby gagged, her pale pink tongue protruding between lips that were bordered in blue. She really did look like an animated corpse, jerky and lifeless as black spittle dribbled from the corner of her mouth.

Jack looked at Abby, looked down at his own empty glass. "Oh, fuck me." He dropped the tumbler with a splinter of crystal and dove for a decorative basin in the corner of the room, shoving his finger down his throat.

Pete grabbed Abby, who convulsed as if she were on a string, leaving ragged red streaks along her neck as she tried to claw the obstruction from her windpipe. Pete pushed the girl's hands away from her flesh—Abby's strength was no more than that of a housecat—and laid her back, turning her head to one side and shoving index and middle fingers down her gullet to clear an airway.

In the corner, Jack vomited violently into the basin, skinny shoulders hunched as he retched and shook.

Viscous black closed around Pete's fingers, seemingly gallons of the stuff, flowing from Abby's mouth and filling her throat. An all-over shudder, a death rattle, Pete would think later, and Abby went still, black swimming up to cover her eyes in opaque film.

Hattie spoke from around a fist thrust into her mouth. "That was some bad shit, I think."

"Nothing you could have done, Pete," said Jack weakly, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and spitting into the basin. "Not that you'll ever lose sleep over failing to save a treacherous little bint like her."

Pete sat back on her heels, the black stuff staining her fingertips. She brushed it on her jeans. "What in the hell was all that, Jack?"

Jack took Pete's discolored fingers in his and sniffed. "Morgovina mushrooms," he said finally. "Fae plant. Melts you from the inside out. Nasty little way to die."

"The absinthe disguised the scent," said Pete, noticing the half-dusty, half-rotted stench rising from the pool of liquid under Abby's head.

"Brutal but not clever," said Jack.

"You were bloody stupid to drink anything in this place. Think you'd never heard a folktale in your life," Pete said. Jack raised an eyebrow at her.

"I'll have you know that my near-death experience has left me rather fragile and your attitude is not helping." He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it across a chair, then lit a Parliament and set it in the ashtray on the small table. "And more to the point, find a place to hide, because whoever poisoned the booze will be up to make sure the job is done any minute now."

Hattie heaved what may have been a resigned sigh and disappeared down the hallway to the loo. Pete lit on a wardrobe open to display a collection of antique opium pipes and closed herself in it.

"Lucy in Narnia," she whispered.

Jack leaned against the wall behind the door, hands in his pockets, looking almost bored.

"Not up to your usual standards of excitement?" Pete said through the keyhole.

"This isn't excitement," said Jack. "Never could fathom why sorcerers thought sitting about cutting your forearms and doing Victorian drugs was such a great laugh." He rolled his neck from side to side. "Unless there's magic, blood, or disgustingly attractive women involved, I couldn't care bloody less at this point in me life."

"So the last week has been a complete loss, then," Pete said.

Jack looked at her, and even through the small crack in the wardrobe Pete felt the snowy chill of his eyes on her skin. "Not a complete one," he said after a moment. "Not in a few ways that matter…"

"Still yourself," Pete hissed, though she was rue to interrupt him. "Someone's coming."

Footsteps creaked along the corridor and a hand tried the knob, pausing in surprise when the owner found the door unlocked. Slowly, it swung wide and revealed a sallow-faced man and an olive-skinned woman dressed in plain black, witchfire burning plum-colored in their hands.

The man jerked his chin at Abby's body, and the woman clicked over on precise stiletto heels and felt for a pulse. She shook her head, and the man stepped over the threshold.

Faster than smoke, Jack stepped out from his hiding spot and banged the door shut. "Evening, girls."

"Winter," the man hissed.

Jack gave a wide grin and a nod. "Observant cunt, aren't you?" He picked up the cigarette he'd lit and had a drag on. "Though I have to tell you—and take this as constructive critique, by all means—the poisoned absinthe? Tacky, mate. Look, you killed your own lapdog."

The woman, still crouched with her back to Pete, worked a small curved blade out from the cuff of her jacket.

"Jack!" Pete shouted, banging open the wardrobe and grabbing the closest weapon, an ivory opium pipe. She jabbed the carved and pointed tip in between the woman's shoulder blades and the sorcerer arched back with a cry.

The man brought his hand up, the witchfire changing color into something sulfurous and corrosive, but Jack hit him before the magic could form into anything useful. Blood shot from the sorcerer's split lip, and he dropped after swaying for a moment.

Jack reached over and grabbed Pete's hand. "Now we have to run, luv."

"What about Hattie?"

"Hattie will be happier locked in the loo, trust me."

Pete followed him down the hall, her heart jackhammer-ing like she were back outside the door of her first bust, sweating inside her stab vest. Jack kicked open a thin door leading to stairs upward.

"Stop!" The male sorcerer appeared in the door, a fan of blood and spittle on his chin and down the front of his shirt. He pressed his hands together and muttered a stream of guttural Latin, and black smoke boiled from around his feet to form two small lithe shadows, that in turn gave birth to a twin pair of their own.

"Bollocks," Jack hissed, taking the stairs two at a time.

"Are they ghosts?" Pete shouted as she pounded after him.

"Worse!" Jack shouted. "Thought-forms! Shadowy bloodhounds!"

They crossed the attic, tumbling over trunks and bundles, and Jack used his elbow to smash a window that had been painted shut. "You first," he panted. "Out."

Pete looked at the street fifteen meters below, back at Jack. "Are you quite mad?"

The smoke-shadows flowed under the door, through the cracks in the floor. They had grown steel claws and teeth, and darker hollows for eyes.

Jack opened his mouth to cajole, or yell, but Pete held up a hand. "Never mind. I'm going." She hoisted herself through the broken window and onto the slippery roof, but instead of letting go and plummeting for the street she gripped the gutter so hard she thought the skin on her knuckles would split and climbed toward the ridgeline.

She watched the shadows swipe at Jack, catching the leg he still had inside the window and leaving lines of crimson. "Bugger!" Jack yelped. He spread his ringers wide and exhaled, and a flock of smoke-crows blossomed from his palm. The crows cawed and swooped, catching the sorcerer's hounds with their talons and bills.

The shadows screamed and vanished, the crows with them. Jack grinned. "Couldn't sustain his will when someone co-opted his trick. Probably has a small cock, too."

"Come on," Pete yelled, nearly losing her grip. She pulled herself up onto the flat square top of Mad Chen's turret roof and helped Jack, who flopped over with a wheeze.

His coughing turned to chuckles, then to laughter. "Bloody hell. I'd forgotten how much fun this is."

Pete cocked her head. "Fun? You've got a fucking strange idea of fun."

The wood next to Jack's head exploded, driving splinters into Pete's arm. Another sorcerer appeared out of the shadows, the yellow clouds oozing corrosive fumes from his hands. "How many of these wankers are there?" Pete shouted. The sorcerer stopped just short of her feet and smiled in the manner of a small boy who likes to burn ants.

"Looks like I get your skin and your talent, Winter, and the chance to get over." He grinned.

Jack rolled on his side and stood, ducking the sorcerer's reach. He grabbed the shorter man by the back of the neck. "You'll get over something, that's sure." He rotated his grip and tossed the sorcerer off the edge of the roof. The man screamed until a sound like a breaking tree trunk cut off the cry.

Pete peered over the edge, saw the broken doll shape and a dark stain spreading. "Think he's dead?"

Jack lit a Parliament, drew once, and flicked the rest after the sorcerer. "About to wish he was."

The man was conscious, groaning, when Pete and Jack climbed down to the street. "If more are coming after us," said Pete, "we're a bit exposed."

Jack gripped the sorcerer under the arms, struggling against the stocky weight. " 'S why we're getting the fuck out of here." He attempted to pull the moaning sorcerer along the pavement. The man's leg was twisted, a lump of displaced bone under his skin, and he yelled. Jack wheezed and dropped him. "You need to get on a diet, boyo."

Pete rolled her eyes and banded her arm across the sorcerer's chest, a lifesaving carry on dry land. The door of Mad Chen's banged open and the male sorcerer appeared, trailed by his renewed thought-forms, which seemed to have grown a few dozen more steel teeth since Pete saw them last.

"Bollocks," she said, dragging the sorcerer along the pavement. "What the hell happens now, Jack? I don't think your little trick with the birds will be quite as scary out in the open."

"Never fear, Pete. Our chariot awaits." Jack stepped into the street and let out a piercing whistle. "Taxi!"

One moment the street was empty and the next a gleaming black cab, smooth lines and lantern headlights, something from the black-and-white era, sat idling at the curb, stopped in a swirl of leaves and winter wind. The rear door swung open of its own accord.

Jack grabbed the sorcerer's legs. "Get him in."

Pete folded the quietly sobbing man into the back of the cab and scrambled inside, sliding on butter-colored leather seats. Jack knocked on the partition and told the shadowed driver, "Sodding floor it!"

The cab lit out with a squeal of tires, taking the corner with a lurch that threw Pete against the door, the handle thudding into her gut.

"One thing about the Black," Jack said as they roared through empty nighttime streets. "You can always find a cab when you really need one."

The driver turned his head slightly. "What destination, please?" His voice was smooth and bell-like, more suited to an angelic choir than a slightly threadbare cab. It gave Pete a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach.

A gas streetlamp caught the driver's eyes, and they shone silver.

Jack grunted softly and held his forehead. "Fae," he said through clenched teeth.

"Driving a cab?" Pete raised an eyebrow.

"Fae love human devices," Jack muttered. "Plays hell on the sight, let me tell you." To the driver he said, "Whitechapel, Mile End Road, number forty-six."

"Right away, sir," purred the Fae. His teeth, silver like his eyes, were a row of needles.

The sorcerer moaned, his eyes flicking weakly between Pete and Jack. "Where are you taking me?"

Jack thumped him on the crown of his head. "Shut it. No questions from you."

"What are we going to do with him?" Pete whispered. "Can't very well leave him on the street to be picked over."

"Who says I can't?" Jack muttered. "Tosser tried to kill me. But no, I've got something in mind."

After a time the cab glided to a stop in front of Jack's flat and he jumped out quickly, leaving Pete to drag the sorcerer onto the curb. She banged the man's broken leg against the running board and he screamed.

"Sorry, mate," Pete apologized. "But you did rather bring it on yourself." She leaned back into the cab. "How much do I owe you?"

Jack grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back out. Pete struggled furiously, and reared back to slap him. He caught her hand, fingers squeezing her wrist bones together. "Don't you know better than to make deals with the Fae?"

"He's a bloody cab driver!" Pete protested as the taxi disappeared at the end of the street, taillights winking when it rounded the corner.

"Never offer to repay a Fae," Jack said tightly. "And never allow them to strike a bargain with you. The cab is on my account. I'll pay up when they decide my debt is due and not a moment before."

"I'm truly sorry. I didn't know," Pete said. "Now let go of me before I fetch you a smack."

Jack heaved a sigh and pushed his hair every which way with his fingers. "You wanted to learn the Black, and how to survive in it… consider that lesson the first." He dropped her wrist. "Sorry if I hurt you."

" 'S all right," Pete muttered. Her skin was slightly pink where Jack had touched her.

The sorcerer managed to haul himself onto his elbows, attempting to crawl away down the street. "Will you look at this git," Jack exclaimed. He pointed a finger at the sorcerer and muttered, "Sioctha." The sorcerer jerked, all of his limbs going rigid. Pete put her face in her hands.

"Did you explode this one's heart, too?"

"Nope," Jack said triumphantly. "Just stiff. A little magic rigor mortis until he tells me what I want to know. Get his other arm."

Together they dragged the sorcerer up the creaking fire escape to the flat, and once inside Jack rolled the man onto his back and put a boot in the center of his chest.

"Get the frying pan, or a phone directory—something heavy to bash him in the good kneecap if he gets smart," he said to Pete. "Right," he addressed the sorcerer. "You know who I am, and what I can do, and I'm going to let you go now with the provision that if you try any tricks, what's left of you will fit inside a syringe. Got it?"

The sorcerer tried to speak, huffed breath through his nose and his immobile lips, eyes going wide.

"Good," Jack said conversationally. "Bi scaoilte." The sorcerer shuddered and relaxed. Jack pressed down harder with his boot. "Who are you bloody working for?"

"Roast in hell, Winter, you doped-up has-been!" the sorcerer shouted.

"Oi," Pete said. She picked up a heavy bookend from Jack's shelf. "What's your name?"

"Roddy," the sorcerer spat. "Roddy Post."

"Well, Roddy Post," said Pete. "Are you going to answer my friend's questions?"

"Go bugger yourself!" Roddy moaned. His face was pale, twin stains of crimson in the hollows of his cheeks.

Pete knelt, lifted the bookend, and brought it down on Roddy's right hand. He howled. Jack raised his eyebrows.

"You've got issues, luv."

"Fine…" Roddy sobbed. "Fine, I'll sodding tell you whatever you want."

"Like a cheap notebook, you are," Jack said. "Folding when she only tapped you with that thing."

"Don't be too hard on him," Pete said, giving Roddy a thin smile. "You'd be amazed at what a couple of broken knuckles will do for a bloke's outlook."

Jack's expression went from amused to something darker, deeper, as if he were taking Pete's measure. "All for the sake of the child, eh?" he asked her.

Pete looked at Roddy, his pale drawn face. "Of course," she murmured, and set the bookend down because it was suddenly very heavy.

"Now, then," said Jack. He went into the kitchen and brought back a chair. "Pete, help the bloke to sit up."

Pete heaved Roddy into the seat and Jack stood in front of him. "Talk. Who's trying to kill me and why?"

Roddy's ragged breathing smoothed. "I can't tell you."

"Bloody hell…" Jack muttered, raising his palm and opening his mouth to speak another word of magic.

"I can show you," Roddy said sullenly. Jack cocked his head, as if weighing Roddy's sins to decide if he lived or died.

"Well, all right then," he finally said with his old grin. "Pete, let's bear up poor Roddy's leg and let him lead the way."

Chapter Thirty-eight

They drove through stone canyons, the old parts of the city, strongholds of visiting royalty, reclaimed as hotels and bars, neon hidden in crevices between the hand-hewn rock walls.

"Here," Roddy muttered. "Pull over here."

Pete eased the Mini to the curb on Ironmonger Lane and looked up at the stone edifice. "What's here?"

Roddy looked at his feet. "The Arkanum."

Jack choked. "You're not serious." He craned out the window to look up at the building. "Incredible."

"What's the Arkanum?" Pete asked Roddy.

"The Arkanum is the collective of darkness, the society of secret and shadow. We see and do what you only dream of, and we pull the strings of the bright, living world." Roddy muttered all of this, his voice blurry with pain and resignation.

Jack rolled his eyes and popped the door open. "A eighteenth-century collective of sorcerers wiped out by witchfinders and who never got the bloody hint." He leaned back in. "How many in there, Roddy?"

"None," Roddy said miserably. "There's not many of us these days and you've killed near half. The rest are out looking for you."

Jack checked the street and then motioned Pete out. "We take him with us."

In the lift, Roddy's pungent sweat made Pete's nose crinkle. "So you people just hang around thinking of ways to kill Jack? Seems silly. Completely."

"Thought he was dead," Roddy muttered. "Only in the last couple of weeks, the Black started to talk about seeing him again."

"But why?" said Pete. "He didn't do anything to you."

"Right here," said Jack as the digital numbers ticked by. "Not bloody deaf, either."

"Do you have any idea what it would mean to be the sorcerer who killed the crow-mage?" Roddy demanded, and his face sparked back to life. "You would be legend in your own time, with more power than any before. Feared, hated, and respected—the tenets of the Arkanum."

"Why do you people call him 'crow-mage'?" Pete asked. The lift came to a stop.

"Don't answer that, Roddy, 'less you want it to be the last coherent thing you ever say," Jack said, throwing a glare over his shoulder as he stepped into a narrow hallway, lit with brass sconces. One door stood at the far end.

Roddy limped after him at Pete's prodding. "Just through there," he said, slouching against the wall opposite the lift. "Everything you want is in there."

"Good man," said Jack. He shoved Roddy aside and put his hand on the door, jiggling it. "It's locked."

"I haven't a key," said Roddy with a thrust of his chin, before Jack could turn on him. "The High Sorcerers control the access."

"No matter," said Jack. "Pete, you got a hairpin or a bra wire or something?"

"Do I look like I have a hairpin, Jack?"

"Never mind," he said, digging a skeleton key out of his pocket and working it into the lock. He leaned against the keyhole and breathed, "Go n-iompai an iarann agus go ligfeadh lean ar aghaidh," in a whisper meant for a lover. Pete heard ancient tumblers groaning.

"Racking up felonies by the minute, I see," she said. Jack gave her a wide grin.

"Not breaking in if you have a key."

"You think you can enter our sanctum with such a crude tool?" Roddy muttered.

The lock clicked and the door popped open. Jack rolled his eyes. "Apparently I can, sonny boy. What about it?"

"Don't be waiting, then," Roddy said sullenly. "Burst in and save the day, Winter."

"All right, keep your shorts on," said Jack. He put his hand on the knob, but before it turned, pain like she'd just smacked into a ledge hit Pete. The Black rushed up at her, magic that was barren and unforgiving, nothing like the dancing fire of Jack's talent or the icy slickness of her dream. She gasped as she touched it, and Jack stopped and turned to look at her.

"What's wrong, luv?"

"I…" The pain intensified, the magic crouching, leaping, digging teeth into her brain. "I…" She couldn't speak, just felt the magic pressing down on her. Her Black-fueled intution rocketed through the pain and she grabbed for Jack's hand on the door, trying to make him stop, turn back, before he became broken and bloody and still again.

"Sweet Lilith…" Roddy cursed. "They know! They—" He was cut off as Jack spun around and grabbed him by the neck.

"What have you done, you slimy little cunt?"

Roddy began to smile, and then to laugh. "It was so easy," he said. "I'd heard so many stories about how good you were, Winter, how quicksilver and clever. And look, a broken leg and a sob story was all it took for you to swallow it."

"Jack," Pete ground out. She tried pushing against the feedback from the Black, and the pain lessened, though not by much.

Roddy grinned at both of them unpleasantly. "You came in here obedient as dogs."

Demonstrating far more strength than Pete would have guessed a man of Jack's size to have, Jack lifted Roddy onto his tiptoes. "What did you and your shit-sucking Arkanum mates do? Tell me before I break you in half and jam you together backward."

Roddy laughed, shaking his head. "It doesn't matter now, Winter. I did my job. I'll be seeing you on the other side… and her… and all the rest." And Roddy fell forward against Jack, and shoved them back together, through the door into the Arkanum's sanctum.

The spell hovering over the flat snapped into place and Pete could move again without the feeling of ice picks being driven through her eye sockets. She was up and moving for Jack and Roddy before her mind caught up. She could see the spell, a thicket of thorns and prehensile vines that wrapped themselves around both men with blood-hungry quickness.

"Jack!" she screamed, as a shadow lashed his face and caused a line of blood droplets to erupt. "Jack, tell me how to stop it!"

"Get this fucking fat tosser off of me, to start!" Jack bellowed, shoving at Roddy, who fought just as wildly to hold him in place. The shadows, thick as they lay on Jack, fell twice as heavy on him, wrapping Roddy up in a hungry cascade of magic and malice. The sorcerer's clothes began to disintegrate, and the skin beneath, flaking off like ash from a dead fire. Roddy's face went stone, grim—he would die to keep Jack from escaping the spell's embrace.

Pete reached for Jack, between the twisting vines of magic, and felt a lash like a thousand thorns on her skin.

Blood erupted everywhere the shadows touched, and she drew back, cursing.

Jack punched Roddy in the face, ineffectually. "Get… off… me… cunt!"

From an archway deeper in the flat two more sorcerers appeared, and two more—four figures all burning the poisoned purple witchfire in their palms.

"Hold him, Roddy!" one shouted. "We'll take care of the bitch."

Jack's clothing began to flake away, like Roddy's skin—a patch of his jacket, a chunk of his pantleg, the sole of his jackboot. "Pete, watch it!" he yelled as one of the sorcerers came for her, a telescoping police baton upraised.

"You think I'm not worth your magic?" Pete cocked her head.

"Mage groupie? I know you aren't worthy," said the sorcerer. Pete sighed.

"You're wrong. So very wrong." Before the sorcerer could puzzle that, she kicked out and drove her heel into the man's knee.

The sorcerer crumpled over, dropping the baton, and the other three hurled clusters of the foul-smelling offensive magic at her, giving distance in the face of their cursing, crying compatriot. Pete took a dive, landed elbows first on the parquet floor, and slid out of range, ignoring the pain that returned all through her when she hit.

She could barely see Jack any longer, obscured as he and Roddy were by the writhing mass of the spell. "Jack," she moaned, for just a moment not able to contemplate anything but the sight of his newly dead body. Toerag that he was, as much as he'd made her life a pit of misery over the week he'd come back, Jack being dead again was something that Pete knew would send her straight around the bend.

The spell hissed at her when she drew close, and a thorny limb lashed out to slice her flesh. Shaper of magic. I am a shaper of magic.

Then Jack's echo, Mosswood doesn't know bloody everything.

"He'd sodding better on this count," Pete whispered, and then inhaled, held out her hand, and pushed against the mass of the Black around the spell. She pushed like she'd push on a thousand-pound beam across her chest, like she'd push to go through a door with something terrible but necessary on the other side. Feeling as if every blood vessel in her would burst with the effort, Pete held against the tide of black magic that kept the spell alive, moving it, shaping against it until with a great groan of defeat a hole appeared, pinpoint at first but tearing open to body size.

Jack's face, plus a few hundred scratches and a smearing of ash materialized, his expression genuinely shocked. Pete stuck out her hand.

"I can't hold this!" She could already feel herself begin to tremble under the strain of pushing back the spell, and another ball of energy lanced by her head to remind her that her troubles were far from over.

Jack's own hand, slicked with his blood, lanced out through the magic's gap and grabbed on to her, and Pete hauled him out, inch by inch. Roddy's hand latched on to Jack's ankle in turn, half skeletal and locked in a dead man's grasp. Jack brought his other heel down, the steel of his jackboot snapping off the encrusted bones.

Roddy gave a scream like Death itself had just wrapped a hand around his heart and yanked it free, and the spell collapsed in on him, enraged and starving and consuming.

Jack patted himself over frantically. "Ah, tits. I lost me flick-knife."

"Forget the bloody knife. Are you all right?" Pete demanded.

"No," said Jack insistently, as the sorcerers began to get closer with their spells. "I need blood . . .fresh blood," he snapped when Pete started to point out the thousands of shallow cuts all over his exposed skin.

Pete found her pocket knife in an obscure corner of her jacket and grabbed Jack's palm, slicing it deeply as she dared. He yelped. "Bloody hell, woman! When did you get so violent?"

"That should be sufficient, yeah?" Pete said, indicating the warm crimson stream that flowed freely over Jack's palm.

"Good gods, yes, quite sufficient if you want me to die!" Jack said.

"Give over with your drama and do something about these cunts before they finally manage to aim!" Pete shouted, ducking another blast.

Jack swore at her, but smeared the blood on the floor in front of him and said, "An't-ok, tabhair do dhroim."

The spell began to expand, revealing the ashy bones of Roddy, and lit across the flat, over the walls and the floor, digging in to every crevice and engulfing the three remaining sorcerers before they could react to the mass of magic that slammed them backward into the walls. The air filled with ash and the floor tilted crazily as Jack's magic met the spells living in the bones of the flat, the concussion jolting Pete down to her marrow.

Jack grabbed her arm. "Time to run again, luv, I'm afraid."

"I agree," Pete said as a massive section of the outer stone wall fell away, exposing the skyline of London, twinkling serenely in the late night. "Fucking move!"

She and Jack ended up having to jump for it as the front room of the flat collapsed, roaring in on itself with beams and stone, making an abattoir for the four men within.

Pete rolled over and sat up, dizzy, Jack swimming back into focus above her. A warm nettle of pain cut across one cheek and she touched blood. "I felt it," she said. "Before Roddy pushed you through the door." Her voice was thick and far away.

"I know you did, luv," Jack said, dabbing at her cheek with his sleeve. He glanced back at the ruin. Two of the bodies were half out of the rubble, frozen in tableau. Their eyes stared at Pete with the stony hatred of the dead.

"He played it very well," said Jack. "Didn't tip off."

Pete glared back at the bodies. "Broken knuckles don't hurt that much."

"I don't know about you," said Jack, helping Pete to her feet and offering her a Parliament, which she accepted, "but I'm about through playing with these bastards."

"Through, and thoroughly bored of this Sturm und Drang," said Pete. "We need a new plan, Winter."

Jack worried his thumbnail as he exhaled a cloud of smoke, and then said, "First thing we need to do is find a set of pliers."

The Arkanum's kitchen was largely intact except for cracks in the floor that let Pete look through clear to the ground story, and half the cabinets gone. Pete located a toolbox under the sink and gave Jack a pair of needle-nosed pliers, while he went to an overturned apothecary desk and rooted in the cubbies until he came up with a black bottle of liquid.

"Let me guess—the blood of virgin brides and plump, innocent babies," Pete said.

"Ink," said Jack. "Black number ten. You've become very morbid." He took a shallow stone dish, the pliers, and the ink and went to the nearest body, gripping the sorcerer's index finger and working the pliers under the nail.

"Mage's manicure, then?" Pete asked. Jack grunted and yanked, and with a wet sound of torn paper the man's nail came off. Jack examined it.

"A bit sticky, but it will do," he pronounced. He set the bowl on the floor and told Pete, "Find north."

Pete peered out the massive gap where the wall once was and located the Thames. "That way." She pointed out a rough north, over her shoulder.

Jack oriented himself and poured the ink into the bowl, then dropped in the nail. It floated, tiny tendrils of sundered flesh disappearing into the black viscous pool.

He blew on the ink and muttered, "Amharc." Jack's breath made ripples in the ink. The nail began to spin, lazily at first and then faster and faster, carving a trough in the liquid.

"The Black sees him," Jack muttered, ink from the center of his eye spilling across the blue. Pete felt that electric prickle on her skin as magic took hold.

"The ghost?"

Jack nodded grimly. "He's touched this bloke. Touched all of them, if what Abby said held any truth at all. It's tied to them, and now I can see it right back."

Abruptly, the fingernail stopped spinning and sat deathly still, pointing directly northeast. The surface of the ink quivered ever so slightly as the magic pulsed.

"You know what's northeast, don't you?" Jack asked as he stood, his eyes flickering plain again.

Pete nodded once, over an icy knot in her gut. "Highgate Cemetery."

Chapter Thirty-nine

Pete had never walked through the cemetery gates again after the emergency responders had taken her out through the small stone arch on the day of the ritual. She'd passed them hundreds of times, though, always aware.

But she'd stayed on the outside. Never walked in. Never broken that unspoken barrier between her nightmares and the reality she'd constructed after Jack's death and her break with feeling anything, believing anything except what the light showed her.

"You're sure this is the place?" Pete said. "I mean, 'northeast' is a rather general classification."

"The scrying medium said northeast," Jack said, "and there aren't any other great bloody haunted cemeteries in this direction that I know of."

The wind kicked up and Pete shivered, although it was a late-autumn wind, not a cutting winter gale. Jack stopped walking, his boots crunching on gravel. "You going to be all right, Pete?"

"Of course," she said. She took out her mobile, hoping it made her look brisk and businesslike—anything but afraid, which she was, and hating herself for it. She couldn't shake afterimages of black smoke and flickering candle flames, and the echoes of Jack's screaming.

"Ollie Heath, please," Pete said when New Scotland Yard's operator picked up. Ollie had just mumbled "Hullo" when Jack snatched the mobile from her and shut it off.

"Oi!" Pete protested, but he shushed her.

"Hear that?"

Pete listened, heard nothing but the wind twisting through the trees and through her hair like the searching fingers of a ghost.

Twined with the wind, a cluster of whispers fluttered against her mind.

"Something's awake," Jack muttered. "Awake and walking, and ten to one it's our boy. Hold off on the copper brigade just for now. Don't want those nice blokes' wives collecting their pensions because they got eaten, do you?"

Pete shook her head. The whispers weren't audible, not really; they just filled her skull from the inside like razor blades, multitudinous and harsh. "Right," said Jack, starting to walk again. He moved slowly, with a noiseless control, and looked much younger and fitter than his scars and sunken cheeks, "Ghost-killing, first form: You can't. Don't try—don't shriek or throw rocks at it or try to send it on to its final reward. If little Maggie—"

"Margaret."

"Close enough, aren't I? If she's still alive you grab her and you run like the fucking legions of Hell are snapping at your heels."

"And what do you do, while I'm running?" Pete asked.

Jack lit a cigarette with a click of his tongue and inhaled. "Distract it long enough to fill my end of our deal and get my arse back to a normal sort of existence."

"So in just a few minutes, we'll be all through?" Pete felt her forehead wrinkle. "I don't think I like that, Jack."

"Plenty of unlikable things in life," he said. "Save the sorrys for when we actually make it away from here with our souls and sanity intact. If the ghost is strong enough to compel living humans to snatch children and then feed off them, it had one hell of a temper in life, and death is piss-poor for softening your impulses."

"How do we hold it off?" Pete swiveled her gaze through the shadows. The headstones tilted and faded and grew older, granite and angels with their arms and wings fallen off. The path narrowed, for pallbearers and mourners instead of automobiles.

"We're alive," said Jack. "We belong here. It doesn't. So there's that, and I've got a shield hex if things get uncivilized." He looked Pete over and she felt calculated and weighed again, Jack still testing her worth. "I won't lie," he said. "If you were an experienced Weir you'd be a real help directing my magic, but as it is, just try not to leave your arse in the wind."

Pete bristled, the quick sting of accumulated intolerance from her fellow inspectors and now from Jack sending her anger to the surface. "I am not helpless."

"Neither is the ghost," Jack said. "And unlike you, it has the benefit of already being dead."

Pete didn't respond. She thought about the children's blank white eyes, and tried to force her feet to move forward and follow Jack.

He stopped, and came back and took her hand. "Be fast. Be strong. Don't look it in the face," he said. "That's the best and only advice I can give."

"Not like the last time," Pete said quietly. Jack shook his head.

"Nothing like it. Come on, let's get the girl and get out of here."

As they walked, toward a pool of silver light growing around a bend in the path, Jack didn't let go of Pete's hand and she didn't try to pull away.

The whispers crested and dissipated as they rounded the corner and found themselves faced with a half-collapsed mausoleum, two sorcerers fidgeting to either side of the entrance, and between them—

Pete choked as the air went out of her, and she felt the buzz-saw whine of magic all around her. The ghost was a column of black smoke, vaguely human, burning silver sockets where eyes should be.

"I told you not to look at it!" Jack hissed, digging his nails into her palm. The air rippled and a shield hex blossomed in front of Pete, heavy and gleaming.

"Oi, you!" one of the sorcerers shouted. "You, get out of here!"

"Fucking hell," said the other. "That's really Jack Winter. He came."

Slowly, the ghost coalesced into a figure made of shadow wisps and dark, the eyes topping a cruel mouth that curved in a black slit.

Jack Winter, it hissed. Pete's body was numb, stiff with shock.

"Jack," she said. "It's from my dreams… that's the thing… I saw it." No response came, and she became aware that Jack was no longer holding her hand.

"Jack?"

He was staring at the ghost, shaking his head slowly back and forth. Jack's eyes had gone white, whiter than Bridget Killigan's, a snow-driven color that was icy and depthless. "No," Jack murmured. "No, no, no. I sent you back…"

Pitiful words, crow-mage, for one arrogant as yourself, the ghost said. I will feed on your spirit and sculpt your bones.

"Let's give 'em some room," said one of the sorcerers.

"What about the bloody kid?" hissed the other.

"Leave her, 'less you want to get mage guts all over you!" the first shouted, as the ghost let out a howl that ground Pete's teeth together. "Let's sodding go!"

They vacated the entrance to the tomb and Pete saw Margaret Smythe crouched, with her arms around her knees, eyes blessedly brown and impossibly wide peeking over the tops.

Pete looked back at Jack. He stared at the ghost, and the ghost grinned at him, gaping and toothsome. No more chatter, crow-mage? No more pithy words from the old tongues to expunge me?

"You're not him!" Jack shouted. He held up his hand and the shield hex became like a wall of heavy water, rippling and impenetrable. "Now piss off!"

The ghost laughed, a scrape against Pete's mind that hurt so much she staggered. It turned, its face sliding along the smoke column of its body to regard her.

Your dreams are most intriguing, young miss. The pity lies in the weakness of your flesh.

"Not weak," Pete ground out. She held out her hand. "Margaret. Come along, luv."

"No!" Margaret shook her head furiously, scooting backward into the mausoleum.

She has grown fond of me, you see. Children are sometimes so very foolish, the ghost murmured, like the moan of a dying mother.

Pete turned on it, careful not to meet the silver orbs distorted by the shield hex. "I swear to everything above and below that if you've hurt her I'll follow you all the way down to the underworld and find a way to kill you again."

The ghost snarled and raised a smoke-hand tipped with black claws. Pete made a dive for Margaret. She felt the swipe, felt it grab the ends of her hair and the seams of her shirt, barely missing skin, the magic burning as if she'd touched supercooled metal.

She had the thought I should be dead as she hit the ground, snagging Margaret's hand and pulling her close, balling up her body around the little girl and rolling away from the shrieking spirit.

When she opened her eyes Jack stood above her, both hands extended, the shield hex glowing blue-hot around the edges as the ghost struck it again and again. Jack wobbled under each blow, and Pete saw a ribbon of blood begin to leak out of his nose.

"Not exactly like you remember, is it, you wispy cunt," he ground out. "Pete, run," he said. "Run for your life."

The light of the shield hex reflected off the ghost's teeth and Pete shook her head. "Not leaving you. Can't."

Margaret was sobbing, but in relief, not terror. Pete reached out her free hand and laid it on Jack's arm.

"Pete…" he started, but she gripped his hand before he could protest.

"I know what I'm doing," she said. It was a complete lie, and it didn't seem to appease Jack, but by then it was too late.

Just as with Talshebeth, Pete felt the dial on her senses pushed to maximum—the shriek of magic and the burning of Jack's skin on hers, the same wind roaring through the well-kept trees and between the tombs. The storm discor-porated the ghost, all except a black skeleton that thrashed and howled as the gale of shield magic pelted it.

Jack pulled both of them away, scooping Margaret up in one arm and dragging Pete with the other, although he told her later that he'd had to half carry her because as soon as the ghost's silver eyes winked out under the assault of Jack's talents, Pete blacked out and woke up on Jack's mattress, in his flat, alone.

Chapter Forty

"Inspector." A hand gripped her shoulder, tentative and shaky. Not Jack. "Inspector."

Pete opened her eyes, though the light seemed very bright, and ached, forcing her to lower her lids and peer at whoever-it-was through a forest of eyelashes.

"Ollie."

Ollie Heath sat back on his heels, the tight set of his jaw loosening when she spoke. "Thank God. Thought you'd gone and punched your ticket."

"No," Pete said, soft and brief out of necessity. She felt as if she'd drunk up all the alcohol in London, and then vomited it back up and drunk some more. Her tongue was cottony and her skull pulsated steadily as if one of those cymbal-clashing monkey dolls had her head in its grasp.

Pete saw milling figures in somber blue outside Jack's bedroom door, and two in green carrying a paramedic's case.

She bolted up. "Margaret."

"The girl's fine, just fine," said Ollie. "I called the bus for your friend, actually. He could barely stand upright, and he's got himself some nasty burns on his hand… scratched all to Hades too, all over his body. Strangest bloody thing I've ever seen."

Ollie propped pillows against the wall, staying crouched next to Pete as she craned to see into the rest of the flat. "Margaret is safe."

"Safe and sound and gone home with her mum," Ollie confirmed. "Now, I know DCI Newell is waiting to hear you tell exactly what the bloody hell happened and where you've been for the last three days, and I have to say I wondered myself—"

Pete clasped her hand around Ollie's wrist. "I can't. You have to just trust me, Ollie, and not breathe a word to Newell."

Ollie nodded slowly. "I'll always want to know how you found that child in time, Pete."

"You wouldn't believe it," Pete assured him. Ollie stood.

"Likely not. I'll go let Mr. Winter know you're awake. He was troubled when he called. Claimed you passed out."

"I did," Pete said. Everything after she took Jack's hand was an inkblot on the narrative, obscured by folds of pain and ghostly hisses. "Wait," she said as Ollie walked out, the belated truth breaking through her foggy mind. "Jack called you?"

"Took your mobile and did it," said Ollie. "He was terribly concerned over you and the fate of the girl."

"How about that," Pete mused; She could only imagine Jack's conversation with Ollie when he called to report the missing Margaret Smythe found.

"Seems an all-right bloke, if a bit on the shifty side," Ollie observed. "Want me to send him in?"

"Please," Pete said, pulling her hair into a knot at the base of her neck and attempting to work the kinks out of her arms and shoulders. Everything hurt, as though she'd run for kilometers beyond measure and then gone a few rounds with a drunken Chelsea fan on game day.

Ollie disappeared and a moment later Jack replaced him, not hurrying or rushing in but just there, as if Pete had willed him into being. She blinked and then narrowed her eyes. "One day you're going to tell me how you do that."

"Do what, luv?" He pulled the straight-backed chair up to the mattress and leaned down to put one finger under her chin. "You look a bit worse for wear." The corners of his mouth crinkled a little and his eyes darkened to a deep-sea color with what Pete would classify as relief, if it were anyone but Jack.

Pete examined him in turn. Except for neatly wrapped bandages on his palms he was untouched, rumpled, and smelling of day-old tobacco. As usual, and Pete couldn't have been more grateful.

"If it wasn't for your hands I'd believe I dreamed the ghost, everything," she said.

Jack's eyes rippled again, slate. "You didn't."

"I know," Pete said quietly. "What have you told the police?"

"Not a bloody thing," said Jack. "I've taken a pinch before, Pete. I can keep me mouth shut."

Pete tilted her head back and shut her eyes, the solid and the real finally seeping back into her skin. "Then it's over. I'll make up a story for Newell, and you'll corroborate it, and it will be over."

A silence stretched, and Pete opened one eye. Jack was staring out the window, past the telephone wires and the chimney pots on the opposite block of flats, watching as slivers of mist collected and filtered the sun to a tarnished sheen that turned his hair molten and his skin paper.

"It's not," he said finally. "It's not finished."

Pete swung her legs over the side of the mattress and sat up, even though dizziness rocked her like a ship in high wind. "What do you mean, Jack?"

He stood up, knocking the chair over, and paced away. "Come on, Pete!" he snarled. "Don't play the sweet school-girl with me. You know what that thing was in the graveyard! You saw it."

"I don't," said Pete, shaking her head once. "I was focused on Margaret. And you. It was from my dream. That's all."

"From your dream because you've bloody seen it before." Jack slumped. He looked like a doll with cut strings, disjointed and laid aside. Pete got up and made her unsteady way to him.

"Whatever it is, Jack—just tell me."

"It's worse," he said. "It's about to get much worse. That ghost… I swear I sent him back, Pete. I did." Jack's voice threaded with frustration, as if he'd reached into his top hat to produce a dove and found a dead cat instead. "He can't have existed in the thin spaces for a dozen years on his own."

"Well, obviously he did," Pete murmured. "I have a notion feeding on children helped with that."

"No," said Jack firmly. "No, it doesn't work that way, Pete. He should have been called back into the land of the dead. For him to linger, to get so strong… he's had assistance, of the most grievous kind."

"Don't like the sound of that," Pete said.

"And you shouldn't," said Jack. "Whoever would keep him close to this world… there's a nutter with black plans, mark my words."

"Got a theory?" she asked, and Jack rubbed at the point between his eyes as if he were trying to erase something.

"Haven't a bloody clue. I swear, Pete," he said again, more to himself than to anyone present. "I sent him back."

"Who is he?" Pete asked, rising and stepping around Jack to face him. Jack closed his eyes, rubbing his hands over his face. In the direct foggy sunlight, all of his scars and premature lines were stark. Jack looked old, hollowed out and collapsing.

"His name is Algernon Treadwell," Jack said finally, from behind his hands. "And he's what I summoned out of the tomb twelve years ago."

"Pete." Ollie stuck his head into the bedroom. "We're clearing out—you'll need a lift back to your flat, yeah?"

"No," Pete said faintly, not taking her eyes from Jack. He looked resigned, dragging the toe of one boot back and forth across the dust on the floorboards.

"No," Pete said louder. "I need to stay here for a bit."

"Well… ring me when you're in," said Ollie. "I'll be at the Yard doing up the reports."

Pete nodded, and Ollie backed away. A few seconds later the front door banged shut.

Sighing, Pete went to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass.

"Jasper Gorson," said Jack. Pete didn't move. She felt like a column of ice, frangible and nerveless.

"Don't tell me this is the one time you're not going to ask 'Who's that.'" Jack sighed. "You want to know what happened, I can see it."

"I want to know?" Pete murmured. She saw that limestone door scaled with moss roll back, and felt the cool dry breath of the tomb on her face. She had made a circuit and come back to stand in front of it, a dozen years hence. There was nothing to do but face up.

"I suppose I do," she said. "I would like to know the hours of my life that I've spent in nightmares since you did this, Jack. I would know how long I waited for you to come back, and tell me it was all a terrible mistake. I would like to know, because then I could quantify exactly how much of my suffering whatever you were hoping to accomplish was worth to you."

Jack's jaw knotted. "I was a stupid kid, Pete, the same as you. I didn't know what would happen."

"The hell you didn't," Pete hissed, stepping in and jabbing a finger into his chest. Jack took a hasty step back.

"When things went wrong you bolted without a glance backward. All that rot… 'Oh, Pete, I waited for you for so very long…' Pure rubbish. You didn't bloody care what happened to me! I should bash your bloody face in, you fucking bastard!" The high ceiling rattled echoes back and Pete realized she was shouting.

"Fine. I didn't, when I started," Jack said. "And when Treadwell came after us, you ran away and left me for dead."

"I thought you were dead—"

"And then you were able to shut out the Black, and I hated you for it. But I know now, Pete, so do you want to hear it or not?"

Pete nodded tightly, knotting and unknotting her fists to keep from hitting a wall, or Jack.

"This is how it was," Jack said softly. "Back then the two most reputable mages in the Black were me and Jasper Gorson. Gorson had been bragging for weeks that he'd raised a black spirit, flashing this grimoire it had supposedly transcribed for him." He produced a Parliament and chewed on the end before an ember flared. "So me back got up, and I went looking for a spirit to raise and tap into, as well."

"Jack, did it ever occur to you that Gorson may have been a fucking liar?" Pete asked.

"Of course he was a liar," Jack snapped, "but try telling that to the stupid sods who hang around the Lament pub."

Pete thought of Arty and Abby, and Hattie Page. "Go on."

"I got the books and I looked and I found him," Jack said. "Algernon Treadwell." He shivered and sat down, resting his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands. "He was a sorcerer, the worst of his time. Feared. Tried, tortured, and killed by witchfinders in the winter of 1836. I paid off a groundskeeper to show me Treadwell's tomb, and then…" He looked up at Pete, smoke drifting from his nose and mouth. "Then your bloody sister brought you to see me play at Fiver's."

"Did you know what I was?" Pete asked quietly. "Was it that from the first minute?"

"No," Jack said. "No, it took me a few days to realize why I always felt like I was grasping at power lines when you were in the room."

"And then you wasted no time at all." Pete clapped her hands together. "Bravo."

"Pete, you have to believe I didn't mean—"

"I believe you," she said. "I believe that you didn't want to get killed." She went to the hooks in the entry and took her coat and bag.

"You can't leave!" Jack exclaimed. "Treadwell is still about!"

"What's he going to do?" Pete snapped. "Rattle chains and write redrum on the mirrors?"

Jack crossed the room in a blur of bleached head and angry burning gaze and grabbed Pete's arm. "Bugger all, Pete, stop being so fucking righteous. I'm sorry you got involved again, but you are, until Treadwell's back where he belongs."

"And you are a bloody fucking expert on that, aren't you," Pete said. Jack winced, and finally went silent. "I'll be at home," said Pete. "Don't come find me. Don't call. In point of fact, Jack, I don't want to bloody know of your existence ever again."

He didn't try to stop her when she walked out, and slammed the door hard enough to rattle every ghost in the building.

Chapter Forty-one

Pete didn't go home. She walked through the fog, into the City, listening to her footsteps ring and eventually came to St. James's Park. She followed a gravel path until hedgerows and mist hid her from all human eyes, and then stopped, her face tilted back, feeling the cold sprinkle of rain on her cheeks.

In a day as damply vibrant as this one, it was difficult to believe a sorcerer's spirit bent on mayhem had an eye out for her.

It was even difficult to believe that Jack had used her.

Afraid, luv? Don't be.

She'd trusted him, that was the thing that finally made Pete shiver, not with cold, and blink twin tears down her cheeks that were not rain. Things that she'd rather forget were swimming near the surface, about Jack. About the day. About everything.

And finally, for the first time since she'd run screaming from the tomb, Pete let them come.

She had trusted him to be with her and keep her safe and she'd gone with it when he'd lit the candles and guided her to the foot of the circle, natural, like it was an everyday thing.

"So what dark pagan gods are we invoking?" she joked, standing on her tiptoes to keep Jack's hand tight against hers across the circle. Jack chuckled when his invocation finished, and snapped his lighter closed, snuffing the brighter flame and leaving just the flickering faerie light of the candles on the floor. The carvings on the tomb's wall threw long shadows, scraping fingers and grasping mouths.

"No gods. That's next week's exercise. Today we're just testing an academic theory."

"Share with the class?" Pete's feet hurt from the long uphill walk from the tube in her school shoes and she fidgeted.

"It wouldn't be a surprise then, luv." Jack smiled, thin and white, his thumb circling the hollow part of her palm. "You want to be surprised, don't you?"

"Not sure," Pete said honestly. It was cold inside the tomb, and unnaturally dark when contrasted with the strong sun outside. Jack held his free hand out, palm down over the circle, and Pete's stomach did a nervous flip-flop.

The blood they had both spilled began to move across each line of the circle, turning the crooked chalk marks crimson. Jack twisted his fingers, cat's-cradle, until the blood spread and pooled at the very center of the mark.

"It's working," he whispered, a boyish grin breaking out. "Bloody hell, it's working."

The crimson began to fade, and Jack cursed. "Fuck it. Not enough…"

Pete watched him, and she didn't know why she spoke up again, because never in a million days would she, Connor Caldecott's sensible daughter through and through, believe so outlandish a thing, but the words flew out. "This is real."

Twin points of witchfire sprang to life in Jack's eyes. Harmless, beautiful witchfire that she'd seen him conjure before, only now it burned Pete hot enough to melt her under the force of Jack's gaze. "No bloody kidding," was all he said, before he pulled his flick-knife with his free hand and cut his thumb again. Three drops of his blood landed in the center of the chalk lines.

They disappeared, sucked inward through the stone floor. A sensation of wrongness crept up Pete's spine, as if the floor had tilted underneath her feet just slightly.

"Don't move," Jack ordered, licking the remaining blood off his palm. He repeated the cut on her hand as well, dropping her blood onto the stones next to his and Pete coiled in on herself, knowing that if she moved now things would go even worse than they already had.

Jack held on to her, their blood mingling and slicking her skin. "Look at you, still holding strong. Don't let go, yeah?"

"Never," Pete whispered.

Jack shut his eyes, face tilted upward into the dark. Pete could picture him in a gold circlet and a white robe just then, at the head of a coven in a circle of stones.

"Eitil dom, a spiorad," Jack muttered. "Eitil dom, a spi-orad. Tar do mo fhuil beo." He opened his eyes and spoke aloud. "Algernon Treadwell. Hound-sorcerer. I command you into my circle, spirit and soul. Tar do mo fhuil beo."

For a long minute, the only sounds to Pete were her own breathing and the faraway rush of traffic through the afternoon. "Come on…" Jack whispered. "You ruddy bastard. Come to me."

The skin on the back of Pete's neck twinged as though someone had dropped ice cubes down her collar. With a shivering sigh of magic black smoke began to issue forth from all the walls and flagstones of the tomb, creeping through the crevices and forming in the air, the shape beginning to breathe.

Transfixed, Pete watched as smoke grew hands, and fingers, and a soundless mouth. When it spoke, no real sound slipped into the small echoing space, but Pete heard it just the same and it made the space behind her eyes hurt.

Who might this be, who has so rudely called?

Jack's shoulders dropped, the tension wire cut when the thing spoke. "Jack Winter." He grinned broadly. "Jack Winter compels you, hound-sorcerer."

The smoke drifted around to face Pete as if on a spindle. Not entirely, it seems.

"Oi," Jack ordered. "Leave her out of it."

But why? She is deliciously vulnerable, an Uncorrupted conduit. Open and willing. The smoke was smoke, but Pete swore that its hollow mouth smiled. I believe I see why you protect this one, Jack Winter.

Jack's jaw knotted but his voice remained steady and low as ever. Maybe, Pete thought, the smoke-man couldn't see the twin flames in his eyes because the smoke-man appeared to have none. "Get off it. My circle compels you to obey me."

It would, the smoke agreed, it would if properly drawn. Your filthy marsh-mouthed language betrays you as a trainee of the Fiach Duhb. Your hag's blood holds no sway. Stand aside if you value your scrabbling misery of a life, mage.

And the smoke-man walked. It came straight for Pete, one hand with trailing wisp-claws reaching for her. Jack went to his knee, chalked a hasty symbol on the floor with his unencumbered hand, and the smoke-man slowed, but Pete was rooted and stilled even though she wanted to run, far and fast as her legs would take her. She could not move, not against the assault of cries and the raw, heavy power, like iron buried deep within frozen earth that the smoke pressed down around her.

Jack said, "Fuck," and pushed the toe of his boot over the circle's outer line, smudging the symbols within beyond recognition. "Go back!" Jack ordered loudly. "Return to the city of the dead and no more with the living will you be. Your time here is at an end, hound-sorcerer."

Just as it had gathered the blood, the chalk star began to gather the smoke, pulling the ghost inexorably downward. It let out a scream that bled Pete's eardrums, swiping at her wildly and close enough to leave ice crystals on her brow.

This is NOT the last, Jack Winter! it howled. If I must return to the bleak spires then you return as well! The smoke-man thrust out his one remaining hand and seized Jack, pushing talons made of black ice through his abdomen. Jack granted and doubled as the black smoke flowed into him.

"Stop!" Pete screamed. Jack tried to motion her away, but he was atrophying, his skin paling to blue-yellow, dark lines sprouting in all the crevices of his face, dead dull gray growing from the roots of his hair. As the ghost flowed into him Jack's life flowed out, his cheeks and eyes sinking and his body falling to the floor.

Their hands broke apart. Pete could not move, could not even work her jaws to scream.

A spout of crimson blood, the color of rose petals against his sallow sunken face, dribbled from Jack's mouth.

"Go back," Jack ground, barely above a whisper. Night-shaded smoke drifted out in lieu of breath when he spoke. "You are shapeless and shadow. You are dead, and you belong with the dead. The living world holds no place for you. Go back."

The ghost shrieked, and clutched at Jack. More and more blood poured from his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils.

Seeing Jack's life leach out of him broke her paralysis, and Pete picked up the black candle, because it was the only thing within her reach, and flung it at the ghost. "Go back!" she echoed Jack, feeling tears on her cheeks. "Leave him alone!"

Jack coughed weakly, and went still. Pete let out a cry. "He's not! You haven't killed him!"

The ghost hissed, arching back as if in agony, and then with a rush it disappeared completely, the chalk lines of the circle vibrating with displaced power.

Jack was still, silent and bloody. The light of the guttering candle threw the shadow of an enormous crow, stooped and spreading its wings around Jack to embrace him. The crow became a girl, a woman, a hag. All bent to touch Jack's blood-smeared forehead, their gestures those of disbelieving and mournful lovers.

Pete didn't run to Jack, because of the hopping, sentient shadow and because the thought of him dead—as he surely was; she'd been to enough funerals to know cloudy eyes and dead stillness—became too much to bear. She ran instead, screaming, through the cemetery until she found the visitor's hut, pounding on the door and scraping her knuckles free of skin.

Connor told her Jack was dead, when she finally decided she had to talk to someone, days later. And she cried. Relegated him to her nightmares, until she'd seen him again in the Montresor Hotel.

And never, ever admitted to herself that she'd been the one to let go.

That was it, Pete realized as she shivered under the chill from the overcast and fog, and started the walk back to the street from the footpath. She had seen Jack die, known that the ghost killed him before she broke the candle.

Pete sighed as she turned back toward the Mall, Whitechapel invisible at this distance through the fog. She'd never be free of Jack Winter. But now, unlike then, she wasn't running away.

Chapter Forty-two

She pounded on Jack's door three times with the side of her fist. "Sod off!" he shouted.

Pete knocked again. Jack threw the door open, a frying pan in his hand. "Listen, you bloody—"

"I want to know how you came back," Pete said. "You were dead. I saw Death hunched over you that day, the bird's form. I want to know how you survived it."

Jack's expression flickered at that, but he pulled the door wide enough for a person and motioned her in. Pete folded her arms, and nudged the door shut with her foot. "So. How did you?"

"That bit is a story for another day," said Jack, eyes darting. "What made you come back?" He went into the kitchen and tossed the frying pan into a cabinet, and lit the burner under the kettle.

Pete had asked herself the question repeatedly as she walked back to Whitechapel. "I guess I can't walk away from you. Even though I should."

Jack's mouth quirked. "Make it difficult, do I?"

"Don't take it that way," Pete warned. "The way I see it, you didn't put Treadwell back where he belonged before, and I have no reason to think you're up for the task this time."

Jack rubbed his gut in mock-pain. "You do go for the vulnerable spots, luv."

"We're going to find out what Treadwell wants," Pete said firmly, pulling the kettle off the burner when it squealed. "And then, that other day is going to come, and you're going to tell me how you survived him the first time."

"Is there ever anything you're not absolutely certain of?" Jack added sugar to his mug.

"Any number of things," said Pete. "None of which have to do with you."

"I don't know what Treadwell wants." Jack sighed. "He's been hovering between this world and the land of the dead for a dozen years, just gathering rage, and power with no rhyme or reason behind it."

Pete sipped her tea. It was stale, and the water tasted like minerals. "He's seen you now. He knows you're still about."

Jack's eyes gleamed, like midnight ice. "Good. Been an age since I had a decent fight."

"Treadwell is a ghost," Pete said. "Like you so helpfully pointed out, he is already passed on. I seriously doubt a few lines of Irish and some witchfire are going to put a dent in his plans. Assuming angry ghosts have plans."

"Without a doubt," said Jack. "Haven't the foggiest what they are, but I don't think it involves rainbows and leprechauns doing a jig."

Pete put her mug into the sink and held out her hand to Jack. "What?" he demanded suspiciously.

"Give me a fag," she said. "I need it if I'm going to help you."

Jack conjured a Parliament, but held it back. "Pete… you don't have to be involved. Treadwell doesn't want you—I'm the one who called him, challenged him."

"Jack Winter," said Pete, "if you expect me to believe you have gone altruistic and noble at this late date, you must be around the fucking bend."

He handed her the cigarette and she lit it from the burner. "Can't put much past you."

"No," Pete agreed. She inhaled, exhaled, felt the slow burn down her throat. More cases solved over fags and tea than she cared to count. This should be no different. She shouldn't be panicking, but her stomach bounced as Jack rubbed the point between his eyes and sighed.

"Why did you?" she asked. "Why try to give me an out, after all that yelling you did about having to work with me in the first place?"

He smiled, grim. "Pete, I've gone to a lot of funerals. Forgive me if I didn't want to spend another Sunday in a wet graveyard and choke down warm pasta salad in some pub, because I know that flaky sister of yours wouldn't kick out for anything decent at the wake."

Pete dragged, watched the column of ash grow long and gray, and said, "You think I'm going to die."

Jack shrugged. "Someone is, luv. This isn't one of the times that there's a happy ending."

"Is there ever?" Pete muttered. She stubbed out the Parliament and threw it down the drain. Jack watched her, eyes narrowed.

"You having second thoughts?"

Pete turned on him. He wasn't calculating her any longer, wasn't weighing. His face was folded shut, but his eyes gleamed with a light Pete had never witnessed.

"I'm thinking that at least I won't die in a bed with needles and tubes stuck in me," she said, softer than a sigh. Jack unfolded himself from the wall and took up her hands. He'd gotten more solid, Pete realized, his hands heavy and the fingers free from tremors.

"It will end badly, Pete, but we'll be together this time around. I promise you."

"You're promising me, now?" She smiled a little, and the afterimage of Connor and the road she had looked down toward him faded.

"You promised me," Jack said. "Even if I'm a bloody liar, it's the least I can do."

"And are you? A liar, I mean," Pete asked. Jack let go of her and picked up his jacket.

"We'll find out."

Chapter Forty-three

"So we just hang around Highgate and wait for Treadwell to show up again?" Pete asked as they crossed into the Black in an alleyway behind a kebab shop.

"I have a distinct feeling that when Treadwell wants his presence known, he'll send me a message," Jack said.

The Lament's red door was shut, and no music drifted to Pete's ears. "Closed on Sundays," Jack said by way of explanation.

"It's Friday…" Pete started, but then shook her head. "Never mind."

Jack kicked aside the mud mat, and examined the square granite flower pots on either side of the door. "Ah, leave it out. Where does that ruddy publican hide it?"

"Looking for this?" Mosswood stood in the street with a newspaper under his arm, backlit by the gaslight on the corner. He swung a small iron key on a fob chain.

"Even better than breaking in," Jack said. "Need to speak with you."

"I should think so," said Mosswood. He opened the Lament's three locks and pushed the door wide, motioning Pete and Jack in. "The Black has been a veritable hive of gossip since your and Miss Caldecott's ghostly assignation."

"What's old chilly-boy after?" Jack asked.

"Why, your suffering, I imagine," said Mosswood. "Algernon Treadwell was not known for his humor in life, or his mercy. I once saw him put out a man's eyes for daring to meet his."

Mosswood stalked across the main floor and led Pete and Jack to a private room done like a club in leather wingback chairs and Persian rugs. Bookshelves lined the walls and an ornate fire grate nested in the corner. Mosswood muttered and green flames sprang to life.

Jack paced, examining the books, but Pete sat opposite Mosswood. "Thanks for your help."

"And who said I was helping you?" Mosswood raised his eyebrows and began to tamp tobacco into his pipe.

"You don't have a choice," said Jack with an unpleasant smile. "Treadwell will know I came calling on you. He won't believe you didn't help me, so you might as well."

Mosswood sighed and looked at Pete. "I see you made the choice to continue. Regretting it yet?"

Pete looked to Jack, who reiterated the question with his expression. "Not yet," Pete said honestly.

"I don't know how much time we have," Jack said to Mosswood. "Mind if I get on with it? Everything on my account, as per usual."

The Green Man sighed and puffed his pipe. "Do your worst."

Jack went to a set of apothecary drawers on the other side of the snug room, drawers that made up a dizzyingly vast section of shelf with their tiny, precise labels, and began opening them at random, examining their contents with the avid enthusiasm of a fetishist in an underwear store.

"Is there anything I can do?" Pete asked.

"Not until Treadwell shows up and tries to push me heart out through my nose again," Jack said. He took two leather pouches on thongs from a drawer and tossed one to Pete. She loosened the thong and looked inside.

"Salt?"

"Earth. Life," said Jack. "Wear it when we go back to the graveyard." He tucked what looked like charcoal into his pocket along with a fresh chunk of chalk. "Got to piss. Back in a moment."

"So we just sit here," said Pete glumly, when Jack had left.

"One word of advice." Mosswood tapped his pipe stem against his teeth. "Jack is taking everything with him that he can think of. Charcoal is a focus for mage talents. He's got the salt because he doesn't believe his shield hex will protect him. But the only certain way to exorcise Treadwell is the way it's always been. Take a coffin nail and drive it into the spot where he was buried."

"That seems awfully simple," Pete said. "Are you saying Jack doesn't—"

"Jack will try to make his point before he gets down to business," Mosswood said. "He has the unfortunate human vice of pride. I'm telling you this in case Jack doesn't get his chance to deal with Treadwell. For your own good, accept the possibility of that occurrence."

Pete looked into the fire. She tried to imagine facing Treadwell alone, Jack gone away, and couldn't. She knew her inability made her the sad, guileless little girl who couldn't protect herself, just as before. Pete swallowed a lump of bitter acid at the memory of her own trust, and how last time it had led to the end of everything.

Not this time, she promised. Treadwell won't take Jack away again.

The embers pulsed, and the fire snuffed out as the front door of the Lament creaked open and brought the knife-edged autumn gale with it. "I'll go shut it," Pete said, relieved to be out of the weighty silence of Mosswood's presence.

"Don't—" Mosswood started, but Pete stepped into the main room of the pub and immediately saw her mistake. Felt it, as the dark magic wrapped around her. Three sorcerers wielding the bruise-colored witchfire she'd come to recognize stood arrayed between her, the entrance, and any possible weapon behind the bar.

"Jack—" Pete opened her mouth to shout, at the same time balling her fists. Magic be damned—she would go down kicking and punching, if that was what it took.

One of the sorcerers flowed across the floor in a haze of blue-black fire and clamped one hand over her mouth, his other arm pinning Pete in a breath-taking hug. "Don't scream," he hissed. "Time enough for that later."

"Let her go," said Mosswood. He stood well clear of the sorcerer's reach, but he looked stern and not like someone Pete would trifle with, were she in a position to.

"Bugger off, Knight." The second sorcerer sneered. "Matters of the Arkanum don't concern you."

"Matters in my pub do," said Mosswood. "And if you sorry lot are the best of the Arkanum I will eat my tobacco pouch with salt."

"We just want the crow-mage," the one holding Pete snarled. "But if you'd like to become incentive, feel free to step between us and him."

Jack appeared from the archway painted with gents, wiping his hands on his shirt. He stopped when he saw the tableau. "What's the matter—couldn't Treadwell come out and play? Or did a spare wind get him stuck in a chimney pot somewhere?"

"If you want her back, come to Highgate and don't try any of your mage's cleverness," said the sorcerer holding Pete.

"You honestly think I couldn't drop you dead where you stand?" Jack asked, pleasant and soft.

The sorcerer began to laugh. "Anything you do would put the chit at risk, and I don't think you want that."

"Maybe I don't care," Jack said. His eyes flamed to life.

"Maybe you should do as you're told," the sorcerer snapped, "and maybe you'll be in time to keep your girlfriend from the touch of him."

Jack looked at Pete, and sighed. "They've got me bent over properly. I'm sorry, luv."

Pete tried to say, "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing letting me become a hostage," but she was too muffled by the sorcerer's fingers. She kicked at him instead and caused a groan but no loosening of his grip on her.

"Pete. Pete." Jack held up his hands. "I'll be right behind you, luv. I promise. Believe me. No harm will come to you. Believe me, please."

He was coming as close to begging as Jack would ever come, Pete knew. And fuck, she wasn't going to die on the floor of a pub, at the hand of a reject from the Cure reunion tour.

She worked her head free of the sorcerer's grip. "I believe you." Before she heard Jack's reply, if there was one, the walls of the Lament blurred and fell away to rushing black, and everything fell away, leaving Pete dangling before she slammed back to earth.

"You like that?" The sorcerer's face was in the light now, the electric lamps of the regular world's Highgate Cemetery. "Shadow-stepping. Mages can't translocate like that. Only sorcerers."

"My knees are positively weak," Pete said. Treadwell's sorcerer jerked her arm, black petals of smoke blossoming on his other palm.

"Don't be smart. I could take your face off."

"Will it save me from having to listen to you rattle on?" Pete gave the sorcerer her worst glare as he marched her through leaning rows of headstones.

"Winter doesn't like his women mouthy. Wonder he let you stick around as long as you did."

"There's a lot you don't know about Jack Winter," Pete said.

The sorcerer barked a laugh. "As much as you did when you got tangled up with him in the first place, you silly chit?"

Pete looked at her feet for a few steps. "No," she said finally. "I knew far, far less. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm here now, stolen and harmed by you, and that because you stole me you're fucked when Jack finds us."

"Petrifying," said the sorcerer. "Move your little damsel act right along." He shoved her and she tripped over a low tombstone.

"Let go of me!" Pete cried, jerking against the man's grasp. He stopped her, grabbing her by the upper arms, squeezing until Pete knew most women would let tears slide down their cheeks. She stayed silent, still. She would never cry.

"You listen," growled the sorcerer. "Winter doesn't care about you, you understand that? He let us steal you away. Now, you keep your mouth shut and your head down and our master might see his way to letting you go… or keeping you as an amusement. That's a better future than what Winter can offer you on his best day." He pulled her along the path again, Pete's feet digging furrows in the earth as she resisted him.

They walked, or rather the sorcerer walked, dragging Pete, for a long while, clear across the old part of the cemetery. Pete smirked. "Looks like your teleporter is off prime. You should have Scotty in to calibrate that."

The sorcerer paused when they were in the oldest part of the cemetery, amid the weeds and the forgotten sunken graves. "You're not afraid of what we're going to do to you," the sorcerer stated, disappointment pulling at his face. His witchfire flared with a snap and he patted Pete down, taking away her mobile, the keys to the Mini, and anything else that might constitute a weapon.

"Jack will come for me," said Pete with a thrust of her chin. "And when he does I—far from a damsel, thank you—am personally going to make you sorry for this entire night and the rest of your wasted life." She could lie convincingly to everyone—it was her own doubts that were the problem. Jack wasn't here and the Black wasn't snapping and hissing in the way that meant he was near.

"You tell yourself anything you like, girl," said the sorcerer, tossing her things into the weeds. "But the fact remains, you're all alone." He turned Pete so they were pressed back to front, his arm across her throat. "Look there."

Over the humped, half-collapsed roof of the closest mausoleum, Pete could see torchlight, and hear low voices in the sort of contemplative chant that should accompany confession and absolution.

"That," hissed the sorcerer, his hand sliding up and down Pete's throat, stroking her skin and leaving a trail of shivers. "That is magic's future. Not Jack Winter. Not the old ways or the old gods. It's men, taking what they want. What our master started, we'll finish."

"They might," said a Manchester drawl from Pete's back. "But you? All you'll be getting is a concussion and some pretty new bruises."

Jack raised a burial urn over his head and smashed the sorcerer's skull with it, ash and bone fragments raining around Pete. The sorcerer staggered and went to the ground, raising his hand, his magic gathering.

"Don't," Jack snarled. "If you value the bits that make you a man, don't."

Pete jumped away from the sorcerer as he made a grab for her, his teeth bared in fury. She stomped on his outstretched hand, eliciting a howl.

Before she could find something to tie the sorcerer up with, Jack stepped in and snapped his head backward with a jackboot to the face. "The next time you touch Pete, I kill you where you stand," he said.

Trembling in Pete's hands and everywhere reminded her that she was still in the cemetery, that Treadwell was there, sending tendrils of ice across the Black.

Jack came to her, his chest rising and falling in time with the waves of fire in his eyes, and the icy whispers quieted when he got close enough to touch.

He took Pete's chin in his hand, turned her face side to side, brushed her cheek with his thumb. "You still got all your fingers and toes, then?"

Pete jerked her head away. "What the bloody hell took you so long?"

"I did have to bargain for a means of transport that'd get me here before they carved your eyes out, didn't I?" Jack said. "And let me tell you, riding with the dullahan is not something a bloke ever gets used to. The smell alone—"

"Treadwell is over there, beyond the tomb," Pete broke in. "Jack, Mosswood told me that the only way to exorcise him—"

"The coffin nail, I know." Jack waved the notion away. "I want you to stay with me, do you understand?"

"Oh, like you stayed with me in the pub?" Pete followed him between the gravestones, Jack marking a straight line, not even attempting to hide his advance. "Answer me!" she demanded. "How could you let them snatch me? I don't like being the damsel in distress, Jack. It's bloody demeaning."

Jack stopped walking, heaving a dramatic sigh. "Treadwell wanted to play with me, and he wanted to make me suffer. I could sit around wringing my hands and waiting for his flunkies to bring back sliced-off bits of Pete, or I could let him think he'd gotten one over and meet him head-on." He grinned. "So relax, Pete. You weren't a damsel. You were bait."

Pete slapped him, so hard he rocked back on his heels. Jack rubbed his jaw. "Are you quite finished?" he asked.

"Now I am." Pete nodded. "Do something like this again and I'll rip your sodding balls off."

"Received loud and clear," Jack agreed. He started walking again. "Hello, you bastards!" he bellowed. "Here I am! The crow-mage, come walking to your doorstep!"

The sorcerers of the Arkanum appeared, some blending out from the shadows, some stepping out from hiding spots. "Winter," one hissed, teeth flashing under the sodium lights.

"Ready, luv?" Jack said to her, barely a rumble in his chest.

"It's Petunia." Pete gripped Jack's hand firmly, a slow spread of warmth passing up her arm.

Jack looked at her in askance as the sorcerers conjured red witchfire, a circle of bloody pinpoints springing to life around them. "What is?"

"My name," Pete told him. "It's Petunia." She could feel Treadwell behind her eyes, pushing and guiding with fingers like living icicles.

"Dreadful," Jack muttered. "Don't blame you for shortening it."

"I wanted you to know," Pete said.

Jack squeezed her hand. "I do, Pete." He breathed in and the magic crackled around him, the Black leaching from the ether to gather and swarm.

Pete shut her eyes. Jack exhaled and said, "Cosain."

The shield hex blossomed, growing and spreading outward, a stone bubble that decimated the circle of sorcerers, breaking bones and bloodying faces. The hex coalesced and held, shimmering against the night light. "In my bag," said Jack, indicating a battered satchel with his chin. "Take out the hammer and the coffin nail while I hold the hex, will you, luv?"

Pete dug in the satchel, which contained any number of unpleasantly slimy and smelly things, and pulled out a wooden mallet and a large square-headed nail. The nail sent a jolt of white-heat magic through her hand when she touched it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Or after," said the other.

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

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

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

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

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

"Bloody hell…" started the first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the meaning of this?

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

Chapter Forty-four

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

"Quite the view, isn't it?"

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

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

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

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

"In between life and death?" Pete said.

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

"No?" Pete edged backward a step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You bastard…" Pete hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't…" Jack's voice strangled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Into Hell," Pete answered.

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

"You don't make it easy, that's for bloody sure," Pete said. "But nobody deserves what Treadwell plans, Jack. Not even you." She touched the little boy on the shoulder, and he winced. "You don't have such a dark heart as you think, Jack. Hope someday you see that."

Jack pointed to the locked door, now grown iron and arched, a portal bound up in magic.

"Through there," he said. "I'm there. Be careful, Pete."

"Of what?" she said, standing slowly from the ruin of glass where she'd landed.

Jack blinked his white eyes. "You look into Treadwell, not as Jack sees him, but as magic does. And when you do it, he can see you, too, Pete. All of you."

Pete put both her hands flat on the door. It was cold, a cold of old things with no space in the real. "Bloody wonderful," she muttered before she put her hands on the massive twin latches and pushed the door free.

Chapter Forty-five

Stepping back into a graveyard caused her to stumble, because it was a calm spring night and not the boiling, fiery center of Jack's terrors she'd envisioned.

A gaslight flickered blue, casting the whole scene in black-and-white film, all shades of bright and shadow that danced in time with the flame.

Pete walked across the grass to a single headstone; crooked and tilted to one side, planted in the earth long enough to get comfortable. Jack stood, his head bowed, hair white in the light of the lamp. He stared down at the gravestone without breathing, without even a wind to move his coat. If not for the cigarette curling smoke slowly upward, he might have been a ghost himself.

Next to him, Pete stopped. "It's really you, then."

Jack nodded once, chin tucking down against his chest. Blue slivers of magic sluiced off him, burning away like sparks in the cool air. "Really here. Just like you."

The magic glowed all over him, the spirit raven a corona that Pete watched fill up with black as if something had spilled ink across Jack's ghost-form, pulsing and retreating and growing again. The taint caused a physical ache in Pete, a feeling of loss.

"We'd better hurry and get out of here," Pete said. "Wake up, or go away from the light, or whatever it is you do… here."

Jack made a bitter noise in his throat. "I never asked you to come after me, Pete. You die just like the rest of us."

Pete felt her mouth open, forced it shut quickly. "Jack, I didn't endure pain and kidnapping and massive internal bleeding so that I could come here and be snarled at. Now come, before Treadwell finds you."

"He wants to take my body as a vessel," Jack said. He raised his head and confronted Pete with a face of hollows behind his cigarette. "Could you do it, Pete? If Treadwell wore my face? Could you kill him?"

Pete answered without thinking, too quickly. "No. I could never make my nightmare real, Jack. Not again."

He sneered. "Then what good are you?" The cigarette sailed away into the grass, trailing embers. "My nightmare is real, Pete. How's your grand plan to save me working so far?"

Pete looked at the headstone, realized with a start that the broad letters carved into it were familiar.

Jack Winter

Born 15 June

Died

But the date was scratched out. Pete faced Jack, reaching for his wrist. "You're not dead."

"Might as well be," he muttered. "What a life I've led. Every breath, every kick and scream against the pricks, all down to nothing, just a funeral no one will ever see for a man nobody cares about."

"Oh, buggering fuck," Pete shouted. "You cannot expect me to believe that you're actually feeling sorry for yourself, you stupid sod! Look at me! I've fucking killed myself over you, and all that time I thought you'd already gone I carried that wound close, never let you fade all the way to memory because you were all I had to convince myself that maybe there was something out there beyond living and dying with just gray in between!" She grabbed Jack, shook him, fighting against fingers numb from encroaching passage to the land of the dead.

"I cared for you so much it nearly drove me mad," Pete whispered. "So, you see, you can't leave. You simply can't."

Jack sighed. "Sometimes the thing you want won't be yours, no matter how hard you grasp onto it, Pete. This is the end. You'd do well to walk away before any hope of saving you has passed. Leave me to Treadwell, and go get on with your life."

You should heed the young man. Treadwell formed out of the crackling power in the air, a sure form of a man here, simply silver and ephemeral. He wore a frock coat and his long hair was combed back from a broad forehead. His eyes lit hungrily as he gazed upon Jack.

"I don't understand," Pete whispered. "You came to fight, Jack, and now you're giving up."

Mr. Winter is both a product and a victim of his fears, as we all are, Treadwell said, folding his hands and looking pleased. In the end he has nothing—not faith, not hope, not love. Just fear, and fear is the most powerful agent of all.

He stepped forward, passing through Jack's headstone. Time has come, Mr. Winter, for you to step aside and for me to step in.

Jack nodded numbly, opening his arms. "I'm yours."

Pete cast desperately, but the graveyard was totally empty except for Jack's headstone, lone and neglected.

"Jack," Pete said. Treadwell paused in front of him, raising one palm to brush his fingers over Jack's face. Jack didn't flinch even as ice crystals grew on his brow, but he did when Pete gripped his hand. "You're not alone," Pete said, all resolve to keep calm gone. She heard her voice through a tunnel, knew she was slipping away. "That's it, isn't it—dying and more than dying, dying alone."

Keep out of this, Treadwell hissed. He raised his hands heavenward and began to chant, the incantation rising around Pete and Jack like a black mist, a swarm of dark magic.

Pete squeezed Jack's hand, hard as she could. "You're not alone," she told him. "If you've made up your mind to die, then I'll be with you here, until the end. I'd follow you into death if that's what you asked, Jack. Heaven, Hell. Anywhere at all."

Silence! Treadwell screamed. The smoke rose and formed, an exact replica of Jack, featureless and incorporeal. I will gain a form. Do not test me.

Pete held Jack's hand, barely felt herself trembling as she made her peace, let the strands already slipping through her fingers float away. So be it. "Anywhere at all," she repeated.

Jack shuddered and sighed, drawing in a ragged breath. "Oh, Pete," he murmured. "Why didn't you just give up on me?"

Pete smiled at him; saw a tiny lift in his shoulders. "You told me we'd see it through together. I believed you."

Fire flamed to life in Jack's eyes and he turned on Treadwell. "Thought you'd trap me in the thin space and take my body? Lovely plan, if a bit flawed in the fact that I am not going to bloody let you anywhere near me."

Treadwell smiled, the expression on him truly terrifying. Too late for theatrics, Winter. Too late, too late, always too late. He muttered, Victus. The smoke flowed into Jack, through his nose and mouth, through his eyes. Jack went to his knees, choking, gagging, and Pete saw the aura of magic around him flare and begin to change to ice-bred silver, the raven overtaken by a ravening wolf, starved and trailing spittle from its maw.

Submit to me, crow-mage, Treadwell said. And your soul's passage to the land of the dead will be swift.

"Leave him alone!" Pete screamed. The smoke engulfed Jack wholly, and he stopped fighting as Treadwell watched grimly, with the kind of terrible satisfaction vengeance brings over a person.

You are too late, Treadwell whispered, already beginning to thin around the edges as Jack began to strengthen, stop choking, and stand upright. Helpless little thing. How I pity you.

The cemetery scene washed out, the ink of nightmares running off the page, and Pete felt the cord, frayed down to a few strands, pull her backward and away. She reached for Jack, tried desperately to stay, but he stood tall now, Treadwell's magic in him.

"I'm sorry…" Pete called. "I'm sorry…"

And she woke. The pain from the knife wound was incendiary, blade still lodged in her stomach. She pressed down on the cut and pulled the knife out, wincing as a dribble of dark red-black blood came with it. Pain was good, Pete reminded herself. Pain means you are not in shock, that you have a chance to stand up and walk away. Still, she retched from dizziness as she tried to sit up, and fell again, body shrieking alarm.

Beside her, Jack stirred and then opened his eyes, sucking in air as if he'd forgotten how. His eyes were gray and ringed, shined like two-pound coins, and the smile that split his face was cruel as a straight razor.

"Treadwell," Pete said, her voice thickened with shock.

"My stars," said Treadwell softly, through Jack's lips. The voice was Jack's, but also not Jack's, the accent lilting into something musical and antiquated instead of a Manchester drawl, timbre scaling downward into menace. "If someone had told me what abominable condition the crow-mage had left himself in, I would have attempted this with another candidate entirely."

He blinked and looked all around, eyes widening. "I say, who are these people?"

Pete saw no one except the few sorcerers who had remained, al! watching anxiously just out of arm's easy reach. "Master… ?" one said hesitantly. "Master Treadwell, is there anything you need?"

Treadwell groaned and pressed a hand against Jack's wound, slicking his palm with blood. "A surgeon, you fool. Fetch me a surgeon before I pass through the bleak gates a second time!" He shook his head, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of Jack's hand. "Who are these silent, staring imbeciles? Why are they permitted to bear witness?"

Pete pushed harder against her wound and spoke. "You didn't know? About Jack's sight, I mean."

Treadwell turned on her with a hiss, his eyes flaring silver. "What do you speak of…" And then he cried out and threw his hands over his eyes, stumbling away from Pete. "Treachery! What are you, woman?"

"You see me," Pete repeated the words of the child in Jack's nightmare, of Bridget and Patrick and Diana. "You know what I am, Treadwell."

Treadwell gasped, and pulled himself straight, staring at her with one hand shading his eyes. "A speaker for the old ones. Of course. How else would Winter have bested me?"

"You think about that for a minute, Algy." Pete tossed her head with a carelessness she did not feel, one that sent rolling breakers of nausea all through her. "You can have Jack—you do have Jack, and his talents. You can have his sight and his body that's probably going to give out on you in another ten or fifteen years—you didn't know back in the old days what long-term heroin abuse will do to a person." She got to one knee, putting all her weight on a headstone—steady, Pete—and even though unconsciousness seemed like a blessed port she stood, and faced Treadwell.

"His sight almost drove him mad, and that was with a lifetime of practice, of years and years and bloody decades to try to control what he sees. With you coming into it all at once, Treadwell…" She managed to shake her head. "It doesn't look sunny for you, mate."

"I have seen the dead!" Treadwell bellowed. "I know what phantoms may appear! I am not frightened by death!"

"No, 'course not," Pete said. "That's why you tried so bloody hard to cheat it. You're a terrible liar, Treadwell. You see the shades even now, all around us, and you can't shut them off. Nothing shuts them off. Jack used the needle every day for twelve years and even that didn't completely take the sight away. So you're welcome to it—sit there in your rotting body and be reminded every second of what's waiting for you when it ends."

Treadwell's eyes narrowed and he stepped toward Pete, obvious from the set of his shoulders that he thought he frightened her. "A woman who talks as much as you is surely bargaining, Weir. What do you propose for me?"

This was the place she should have come the first time, Pete thought. The last dozen years were a borrowed echo, a desire not to see the true road to her death.

"Me," she said, her voice coming out a whisper. "Use me, Treadwell. Give Jack back the time he has left and take me. I'm strong. I have power." Admitting it nearly broke her, a final dismantlement of the careful construct she'd placed around her mind after the first ritual. "I have all the power you'll ever need, Treadwell. You can shape me any way you like. Take me."

Treadwell considered for only a second, his gaze gleaming with a hunger that was nearly palpable. "I accept."

"Master…" the sorcerer started. Treadwell turned on him.

"I am your master now! Keep silent!" The sorcerer cowered. Treadwell's eyes rolled back in his head and he exhaled, silver smoke running out of Jack's mouth and nose and silver tears coursing down his cheeks. It crossed the small space between them, unbelievably cold, it should be killing her, something this cold. Pete's lungs seized as crystalline chill spread across her skin, her face, and she felt Treadwell all through her, a malignant reptile mind, power and ice.

Dimly, she watched Jack shake himself awake, take in the scene, grab his hair in anguish as Treadwell's soul flowed through her, freezing and killing her. It's all right, Pete thought, wishing she could speak.

Treadwell laughed inside her mind, icicles growing over and around her few shreds of precious consciousness, and Pete stopped fighting.

I am a conduit, she whispered. I am a shaper of magic. Treadwell cried out as their power touched and sparked.

The pain ceased and Pete had the giddy feeling of standing on a precipice, toes hanging into open space. Behind her, the freezing encroachment of Treadwell traveled ever forward, and in front was something vast and deep.

Take my power, Pete told Treadwell. Take it into yourself and rid me of it. I do not want this. I never wanted to be this. Take it, take it, take it…

She touched the void in front of her, felt it flood through her being, painless but so vast it was as if all the pieces of her had blown away. She had ceased to be Petunia Caldecott, had joined into the ancient mystery of what came after life, and what had come before. The power formed and shaped and bowed and when Pete opened her eyes, she saw the shrouded man standing before her.

"This is yours," he said, and held out his hand, hot and slick with blood. Pete looked into his face for the first time, a young face, a human face, streaked with dirt and old scars on top of his chieftain's armor, washed clean of the blood of battle.

"This is no one else's," the shrouded man said, and over his shoulder Pete discerned a thousand shadows, ravens all, and below them a tall woman with eyes like marbles and hair made from feathers who touched the shrouded man's shoulder and gibbered in his ear. A single tear worked down his cheek, and he reached out and grabbed Pete's hand, uncurling her fingers to expose her frozen blue palm. "You must take it now, at last."

Into her hand, Pete let him drop the small beating bird's heart, and then the magic took away her vision and she couldn't see the shrouded man or the raven woman anymore. From the heart, warmth spread and just for a moment Pete felt right and at home here, on the edge of everything.

Then Treadwell's freezing talons clamped down around her neck, the completion of the circuit, and he took all the magic from her, drew it into himself with a cry of ecstasy as Pete felt herself husking away.

He pulled back, or tried to, and a heat rose around them, all of Treadwell's icy power going to steam. You… you tricked me! Treadwell howled.

"I didn't," Pete told him softly. She felt their two talents rubbing ragged edges against each other, Treadwell's fraying as he wailed. "But I will die to keep you from coming back."

The magic rushed into him, more and more, filling up the reservoirs, and Pete clamped her own hand around Treadwell's skeletal one, refusing to break their connection.

You are mine! Treadwell shouted. Mine, and I will live… I will live…

The magic did not burn Pete, but filled her, lit every corner of her, burned down into her darkest core, where all her knotted fears lay. She saw Treadwell for what he was, a shattered, tattered echo of the sorcerer he'd once been, stretched thin between too many worlds. She saw the magic for hers, and how it could not be anyone else's.

"Go back," Pete commanded, locking her grip around his wrist, watching the magic burn him from the inside, turning his shadow to ash. "You are dead, and you belong with the dead. Go back, Algernon Treadwell, and trouble the living no more."

Treadwell screamed defiance, but even as he howled he was pulled backward, away from Pete. The raven woman seized him, raked her talons through Treadwell, stared him in the face.

"Your circle has closed, Algernon. So it must be for us all."

He tried to scream, but the ravens fell on Treadwell, lifted him up and took away his eyes and his tongue and carried him through the bleak gates of iron and sorrow, the signpost to Purgatory atop their spires.

I will find another. Treadwell sighed, the last tremor of his existence in the Black. I will find another who lives for power and cares not, and then I will come to claim you, Weir.

"Piss off, wanker," Pete told him. "I'm not afraid of you."

Treadwell's mouth gaped wide in wordless agony and then the raven woman cawed and the gates slammed shut with a clang that sent blackness into Pete's bones. The magic faded, the vision along with it, and she felt damp grass under her knees and palms, night dew soaking her trousers and cuffs.

Jack grabbed her, held her, looked into her eyes. "Pete. Oh, bloody hell, Pete, you're all right?"

"Yes." Pete tested her voice, found it raspy, as though she'd been out in a cold day for too long. "I mean, no. Bloody hell, Jack, I'm stabbed." She hacked out a cough and saw a few droplets of blood fly forth to land on the wilted grass. "Oh… that's not very good…"

"Come on." Jack helped her up as if she weighed no more than a sack of flour. "Got to get you to a hospital. And me, too—sodding sorcerers jabbed me well and good. Probably get lockjaw."

"He's gone," Pete murmured. "Treadwell. Back… back into the bleak gates. I sent him away… to the raven woman, and she took him…"

Jack looked down at her, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Un-bound exorcism is a nice trick, Petunia. Only met a handful that could manage it without a circle."

"Treadwell made me mad," Pete said. "And don't sodding call me 'Petunia.' Just because… I shared a confidence… doesn't make it a bloody invitation."

"Glad to see near death hasn't softened you," Jack said. "I'd be disappointed if nearly losing your soul to a hungry ghost was all it took."

The neat visitor's hut came into view a few hundred meters down the path.

"Jack…" Pete ground her feet to a stop, causing them both to stumble. "I touched magic. I… I used it. What does that mean? What's going to happen?"

Jack wrapped his arm more tightly around her shoulders and didn't answer for too long, time enough to choose what not to say, but Pete didn't care any longer, just cared that he was there, next to her, solid and corporeal and Jack.

"It means just what I thought all along, luv—you're strong. No matter what any toerag psychiatrist says, you've got a talent. And a temper."

"I tried so hard not to…" Pete started to cry, and choked it back with a breath that made her hack more blood, in turn.

"Pete." Jack held her, rocked her. "It doesn't mean the end of your life, luv. May seem that way, but you'll still pay your electric and go to work and eat greasy takeaway when you're too tired to cook supper. You're not cursed. You've got magic, and people will try to abuse it, but you're in control of it. You're holding it in your hands."

Pete swallowed and managed to nod. "I suppose I am."

Jack lifted her chin and looked in her eyes. "Oi. You believe me, don't you?"

Pete started walking again, arm around Jack's waist. She let herself lean on him, and he stumbled a bit so she let him lean on her.

"Of course I do."