Street Magic

Chapter Forty-six

The sky spat rain as winter took hold, and Pete crouched inside her slicker, trying to hoist her umbrella over Jack's much higher head while still gaining the benefit of coverage.

"Give it up, luv," he said, taking it from her and handing it to a hobo nodding near a tube vent.

"I'm cold," Pete protested, her teeth chattering. "If I catch pneumonia and die I'll rattle around your flat for the rest of your life, throwing vases across the room and making the telly explode."

"First of all," Jack said, pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, "that's a poltergeist. You'd be a shade. Second of all, I don't own a telly."

"That bit about me dying didn't faze you at all, eh?" Pete asked. Jack shrugged.

"You haven't yet, luv."

Pete checked her wristwatch. "I should go. I have my last postsurgery checkup in an hour."

"Going to have a nice Frankenstein scar, are you?" Jack asked.

Pete unbuttoned her slicker and pulled up her jumper to show the slightly jagged line of stitches on her stomach, like an elongated Z. Jack winced. "You stuck yourself a good one, didn't you?"

"I had to be sure I'd make it over to you," Pete said. "I don't think a light scratch would have exactly done it."

"I should get you a taxi," Jack said, stepping to the curb. Pete pulled him back.

"I'll manage on the tube—I've made it a whole week without getting so dizzy I fall over."

They paused at the entrance to the Metropolitan line. Finally Pete said, "It's all right. I know you don't like hospitals." She didn't mention that thanks to her injury-fueled journey into Jack's nightmares, she knew exactly why he didn't care for them.

"Meet you at the Mayfair afterward." The Mayfair Arms was the pub around the corner from Pete's doctor's surgery. She nodded.

"We'll have a bite of supper. Jack, there's something I need to ask you, now that things have settled…"

Jack's eyes unfocused and he looked past her, down the stairs of the tube. "Oh, bugger all…"

Pete was spun around and into a portly gentleman wielding a briefcase as Jack shoved past her and took the stairs into the tube two at a time. Pete blinked the rain out of her eyes. "Bloody hell. Sorry. Sorry," she apologized to the man.

"Those louts should be arrested," the man huffed. Pete took off after Jack as quickly as her healing incision would allow. She'd been at her desk in MIT ever since she'd been released from the hospital three weeks ago, and it was driving her mad. Newell refused to tell her when she might be back on duty as an active inspector. Her only comfort was that he seemed to believe her story of following the kidnap suspects to Highgate and getting stabbed in the ensuing struggle. Ollie, bless him, had covered his end and made no mention of Jack in his reports.

"Jack!" she shouted over the rumble of late-afternoon commuters packing the station. His blond head bobbed behind a pillar, headed for the tracks.

Pete caught up with him just as his feet crossed the safety line and his arms reached out in a scooping motion, to pull an invisible phantom back from the spitting rails.

The shriek of the train's horn blinded Pete to everything else, and she snatched Jack by the collar of his coat and deliberately fell backward, praying her weight would be enough to hold him.

The train blew hot dragon's breath in her face as the brakes locked and it squealed to a stop. The sound mingled with a few screams from waiting passengers who had witnessed Jack's attempted swan dive.

"It's fine!" Pete shouted above the echoes of the train. She dug out her warrant card and flashed it to the four corners, keeping one knee firmly planted on Jack's arm as he struggled under her. "Metropolitan Police. I have the situation under control."

Missing a train was worse than a man almost landing on the tracks to most of the commuters around Pete, and they moved on, whispering among themselves.

"The girl… she went right over the edge… she burned up on the rails…" Jack's eyes were mostly white, and he twitched restlessly as if in a fever dream.

"What girl?" Pete demanded. "Jack, there was nobody going over the edge but you."

He blinked at her, and then sagged. "Fucking hell, Pete, I'm sorry."

Pete slumped when she realized that Jack had not, in fact, gone any madder than he already was. Her knife wound hurt a great deal from the fall. "Your sight."

He nodded, rubbing his eyes with his fingertips. They were their natural color when he took his hands away. "I saw her clear as day. Pretty little blond thing, couldn't have been more than fifteen. She went down those steps with such purpose… I knew what she was about, just had to be in time to stop her…"

Pete got to her feet with some difficulty and offered Jack an arm. He took it, and kept leaning on her. "I can't do this, Pete. I maintained while we were trying to find Treadwell but I can't anymore. I'm very sorry."

Hearing Jack speak in a defeated tone wasn't normal—it was tilt-the-sun-the-wrong-way odd, in fact. Pete looked up at him. "No, Jack."

"You should go on to your appointment," he said. "I'm going to take care of this problem. I'll be at home if you're looking for me." He grinned without humor. "Though I don't suppose you would."

"If you go get a fix," Pete said. "Enjoy it. It will be the last time."

Jack laughed, not a pleasant sound, knife-edged with desperation. "Going to chain me up in your cellar and take my demons out, Pete?"

"No," Pete said. "You and I are going to do what you should have done at the start of all this, and find a way to hold back your sight without sticking death up your arm twice a day."

"Can't be done," said Jack. He shook his head, speaking more, but Pete's train pulled into the station and drowned him out. She inserted herself into the line of boarding passengers, looking back at Jack as he walked away.

"Use a clean sharp!" she shouted after him, drawing any number of odd looks.

"Can't be done, Petunia!" he yelled again, without looking at her. "You can't ride in on the white steed and pull me back from the dragon's jaws!"

Pete glared at the back of Jack's head as the train moved out of the station. "Just watch me."

Chapter Forty-seven

It was nearly eight by the time Pete arrived at Jack's flat, long dark. Her wound was pleasantly numb after the shot of painkillers Dr. Abouhd had given her, clucking over the recent inflammation.

She tried the door and found it unlocked, as usual. The flat was dark and still except for the rotten ice-cold spittle of rain brushing against the high windows.

"Jack?" Pete said softly, fearing the worst. He grunted and turned on a low lamp with a red shade, a new addition since the last time she'd been. He had a new, marginally less tatty sofa with lion's feet, and a matching chair as well. "Been shopping?" It was the most inoffensive thing Pete could think to say.

Jack grunted again. "Downstairs neighbor died. Mrs. Ramamurthy. Nicked them before her ruddy son and his ruddy MP3 player blaring ruddy techno music could sell it off." His eyes were hooded and dreamy, and his voice had that underwater quality of deep sleep.

"How long ago did you take the hit?" Pete asked.

"Not long…" Jack murmured. "Forgot how bloody sweet it tastes."

"Then you'll have a good memory to tide you through yet another long and painful withdrawal," Pete said pleasantly. Jack moaned.

"Sodding sadist."

"And enjoying every minute of it, make no mistake," Pete said. She patted his leg. "I'll put the kettle on and get started."

"With what?" Jack demanded, throwing an arm dramatically over his eyes as Pete switched on the wall sconces.

"Jack, you have eight billion bloody books in this place—one of them has got to have something to help hold back the sight."

"You think I haven't checked?" Jack demanded. His petulance was a relief, much closer to normal.

"I think that I am going to check to satisfy myself," Pete said. "And that you are going to help me."

Jack moaned and sank back on the sofa again.

Pete put the kettle on and went to the wall of books. They were in no discernable order she could see, the volumes in languages she could read few and far between. Wasn't this a brilliant bloody idea?

"Have you thought about tattooing?" she said a good time later, after Jack was sitting upright and had poured three mugs of hot tea and a glass of whisky into himself.

Jack shrugged. "Got a few. Tattoos protect you from the physical, though, hexes and the like. The sight is a doorway between this land and the land of the dead."

"What if you, I don't know, forced your will into them or something?" Pete asked. "To hold back the sight?"

"I can't hold it back to begin with," Jack said. "Magic tattoos—can't believe I'm bloody considering this, by the way. I sound like a New Age git. Bespelled tattoos aren't unheard of, but it takes an enormous charge to make the magic stick, here in this world, under the skin." He downed the dregs of his tea. "Much as it pains me to admit it, more power than I have."

"Not more power than I have," Pete said, but Jack was already shaking his head.

"No, Pete. You don't know how to control yourself, even if it did work. You could melt the flesh off me bones."

"I don't see any difference between that chance and the chance you take that your sodding smack dealer slipped you a bad hit because he was running low on protection money this month," Pete said, folding her arms. Jack recognized the posture and threw up his hands.

"Forget it! Not going to happen, Pete."

She sank down, holding the old dusty book that outlined symbols of protection, where she'd gotten the idea for the tattoos. "Do you want to keep on this way, Jack? Do you like being an addict, or a madman?" She took a deep breath. "Tell me now. Please. Before I break my heart against you again."

" 'Course I don't," Jack muttered after a long moment. "But there is no other way, Pete. I can either wander the streets not knowing what's real and what the sight is showing me, or I can poison myself and keep a grip on what little life I have left. I choose that. So hate me if you want. It'd be better if you left now, I think."

He lit a cigarette and moved to go into his bedroom.

"If the tattoos don't work," Pete said, "you haven't lost anything. And it's not like you have a needle phobia."

Jack's eyebrows went up. "There you go, morbid again."

"You're a bad influence on me," said Pete. "Jack," she said impulsively, when his back was turned. "We were interrupted this afternoon, but there's really something I need to ask you about the cemetery, about what happened…"

He sighed. "Don't tell me that sodding Inspector Heath has been after you with more questions about 'What really happened.'" He made finger quotes around the phrase.

"No, it's not that," said Pete. "Ollie's taken care of it. It's about… it's something I saw, when I was in-between with you. When you were standing in front of that headstone, you were… well… sort of glowing and the glow was… unpleasant."

"Aural echo," said Jack. "My spirit and magic outside my body. Not unusual for mages caught in-between."

"I know what an aura is," said Pete impatiently. "MG was always on about auras. This was different." Thinking about the inky flames that covered Jack's spirit being, the raven shape so similar to the woman who had watched Pete receive the heart, made her skin crawl, the way the animal mind backs away from something utterly alien.

"What did you see, Pete? All of it. You're hiding something."

"The woman… the one who took Treadwell back to the land of the dead. She spoke to him like she knew him."

Jack got up, paced a few steps, came back to the sofa. "The raven woman, you called her when you woke up."

Pete nodded. "She was. Black feathers for hair. Cruel bird's eyes, staring right through me." She waited for Jack's scoffing, but it didn't come. "What is it?"

"Nothing," Jack muttered finally. "Probably nothing. But Treadwell did have help to stay for so long and her being there, so close… it just crawls my skin is all."

Pete came and sat next to him. "Who was she?"

"She was exactly who you said she was," Jack murmured. "The raven woman. The Goddess of the Morrigan. Death's walker in the Black."

"Does me seeing her mean some horrible omen?" Pete guessed. Jack shook his head.

"She won't be bothering you again, Pete. She came for Treadwell because you called her. You spoke to her with the magic of a Weir, and she took back a spirit that had more than outstayed his welcome. More than that… I don't know. She's a treacherous companion, the raven woman."

"Let's work it out, then," said Pete. "Let's summon, or read books, or ask Mosswood…"

Jack held up a hand. "Pete. One lesson you learn quickly if you live any length of time with magic is that you leave the old gods to their old ways, and don't meddle." He worried the fringe on the arm of the sofa. "The Morrigan is the patron of the Fiach Dubh, the sort of magic I learned to work in. I'm not afraid of you seeing her, but I sure as bloody fuck-all wouldn't go looking for her to have a spot of tea. Unless you've got some reason to be concerned you've offended her, Pete… we're letting go of it."

"Have you always had that shadow over you, the crow?" Pete said. "Because of her?"

Jack nodded. "Yes. It's what I am—the crow-mage. Can't change that. Not something you volunteer for."

"If you're sure it's all right…" Pete murmured, pushing down half-formed suspicions that croaked underneath her thoughts, about Treadwell and his screams and the Morrigan and her multitude of black shadow-crows. She stood, collected more books to give her hands something to do. She wouldn't tell Jack about her dreams. The shrouded man. The bird's heart, and the merciless gaze of the Morrigan. How Pete still saw it against the backs of her eyes when she shut them, inhuman and indescribably ancient. Because Jack would worry more than he already was, and she was trying to protect him, wasn't she?

"What about you, Jack? What I saw in your nightmare, the black around your spirit-form? Don't tell me that was right and natural as well, because it wasn't. I felt it, and it was rotten and evil."

Jack came and put his hands on her shoulders, sliding them down to grip her arms. "Pete. I'm going to ask you something and I want you to do it, with no questions, and no argument. Understand?"

"Perhaps," said Pete, trying to shrug him off. He held her arms harder. "Ow! All right!" Pete cried. "Let go before I smack you one in the gob, Winter."

"For your own good, Pete. Do as I say."

Pete rolled her eyes. "Fine." She glared at him until Jack dropped her arms.

"Forget what you saw in the nightmarescape," he said. "What you saw around me, and for me. Put it out of your memory and out of your dreams."

"I've been trying," Pete said.

"I'm serious, Petunia."

"So am I, Jack."

He ruffled his hair, not looking entirely satisfied, but it was the best he was getting. Damn Jack if he thought he could order her about, anyway.

"Right," he said finally. "Let's go see if we can find a tattooist still doing business at the late hour, shall we?"

"We want two of these," Pete said, opening the heavy volume of Parnell's Spells, Signs, and Symbols of Greater Protection. The tattoo artist sneezed when he leaned in to examine the twin wadjets, the eyes of the peregrine falcon glaring back from the page.

"Oh, sure," he said. "Egyptian stuff. Pretty common, yeah? Where you want 'em?"

Pete turned to Jack, who was sitting sourly in the canvas chair next to the table full of needle packets and pots of ink.

He shrugged, pulling off his black knit jersey. "Wherever you can find room, mate."

Pete had only ever seen Jack's arms, which were both banded with ink in no real pattern—Celtic knotwork, a raven's feather, a black band of letters on his forearm that spelled out never mind the bollocks. His chest and back were also partially inked, his back with an enormous Celtic cross twined with an oaken garland and his stomach with a grinning skull that chewed on a snake.

"Collarbones?" the tattooist asked. His sign proclaimed his name as hal nutter, fine art tattoos. Hal Nutter himself was rather round and pale, like a collection of small moons rotating around a great central body wrapped in an ink-stained T-shirt touting Journey's 1978 tour.

"Fine," Jack agreed.

"One light, one dark," Pete reminded Hal. "For Thoth and Horus." Jack muttered something rude under his breath and she kicked him in the ankle.

"Right you are," said Hal, giving the pair of them a skeptical look. Jack sighed impatiently.

"I've got some heavy drinking waiting on me down at the pub, mate. Could we get on with it?"

Hal Nutter made quick work of the basic tattoos, one a black eye and one a pale outline. Pete touched them both after the last of the excess ink had been wiped away. "One for the land of the living. One for the land of the dead. You're in between. A door, like you said, but now it has a lock and key."

Jack took her hands and placed the full palms, gently, against his chest. "Only way this idiot plan of yours has a chance of working, luv."

"Er, I should really put some cream on those…" Hal Nutter started, and Pete glared at him.

"Give us one bloody minute, will you?"

Nutter held up his hands and backed off a pace.

Pete put her attention back on Jack. Now that she was here, so close to him, the plan seemed utterly ridiculous. Jack exuded power, like a transformer throwing off sparks. How could she hope to push against that?

"It's all right, luv," Jack whispered in her ear. "I'm here."

Pete thought about the first time she'd seen him, on stage at Fiver's, and later, again, on the floor of the squatter's house by the river. She remembered the shade in her bathroom and Jack's wide-eyed journeying into the land beyond.

Come back to me.

Again, a feeling of standing on the edge of a vast and windy chasm. Her hands began to burn and Jack said, "Fuck me!"

Stay with me, Jack. See what walks as a living thing and what floats on spare sorrow as shade.

Stay.

Because, Pete thought, that was what she wanted more than anything else. To know that she could knock on his door and he'd answer, or be rung up on the telephone if she felt like talking to him. To know that if he walked out the door, he'd walk back in again someday, however far later it might be.

Stay.

"Pete," said Jack after a long moment. "That's done it." He stretched and examined the tattoos in a hand mirror. "Not half bad, Nutter."

"Er," said Hal Nutter, who was on the far side of the shop, looking as if he wished he could fade into the walls. "Yes. Yes, quite right. That'll be one hundred twenty pounds fifty with VAT."

"Are you crying?" Jack asked Pete, examining her face as he put his shirt on.

"Not a bit," Pete said, truthfully. She felt almost a gleam on her, the vibrations of power still feeding back through the Black, through her bones.

"Good," Jack said. "Nothing to be upset over. Ink is charged. Doubt they'll hold anything back except maybe a bad hangover, but you did bloody well for someone with no training." He pulled his jacket on while Pete wrote Hal Nutter a check.

"Fancy a pint?" he asked. Pete took his hand, and he started to pull away but then slung his arm around her. "You all right, then?"

"Yes," said Pete, deciding she was as they walked outside and she felt the rain on her face. Jack had stayed. She'd done it, this time. "And yes. A pint would be gorgeous."

Jack hailed a taxi, and Pete let it whisk her away through the rain-washed streets, secure just for a moment that she was with Jack, rather than chasing after him, trying to catch a half-glimpsed phantom between her fingers.

Chapter Forty-eight

Two and a half weeks to the day later the cabbie—a human, Pete was quite sure—let her off in front of Jack's building reluctantly, staring out the windscreen with plain suspicion. "You sure the young man's expecting you, miss?"

Pete hauled her two suitcases and trunk out of the cab's boot, panting. "No."

"I don't think much of this neighborhood," the cabbie warned her as Pete paid him the extra for transporting herself and an inordinate amount of luggage from her old, now-sold flat to Whitechapel.

"It has its charms," Pete told him. She hoisted a duffel over each shoulder and gripped her wheeled trunk, making the four-flight journey to Jack's front door in only slightly less than a decade.

This was patently insane, she reminded herself once more. She should just find a hotel, or take up Ollie Heath's offer of a spare bedroom until she could rent a new flat, in her price range and her name only, until her half of the sale proceeds came through and she could afford to eat something other than cheap takeaway and noodles.

I'm just checking on Jack, she compromised. With all of my things that I could stuff into Terry's old luggage.

Perfectly reasonable. She knocked. A sensation of power, a whisper against the part of her mind that dwelled in the Black, answered. That hadn't been there before.

"Got a new warding hex on," said Jack, opening the door. He was wearing torn denim and a black button-down shirt stained with some kind of white phosphorescent powder, a cigarette tucked behind his ear. "Lot cheaper than an alarm, and I think that ruddy son of Mrs. Ramamurthy's has begun cooking speed in his dear departed mum's kitchen. Fucking criminal element's everywhere these days."

He took in her suitcases, and the sheepish expression Pete knew she was wearing. "Going on holiday? Need me to water your plants and feed the cat?"

"You know I don't have a cat." Pete couldn't look anywhere except the toes of her shoes.

"I do," said Jack, "but I'm at a loss as to why you're on my doorstep, so I figured small talk would be the route to take."

"How are you holding up?" Pete blurted. Jack shrugged.

"Can't complain. Those tattoos are bloody effective, except for the one incident with the cursed monkey doll. Who would have thought it?" He smiled at her, the full force of the devil-grin. "We both know you didn't come here to check on me, Pete, so why don't you just spit out the real reason."

Pete started to turn around, to leave without another word, but Jack caught her arm. "Pete. Tell me."

"The flat's been sold, and with everything going on—work, being back to field duty, this idiotic dedication ceremony I had to go to so they could open my da's memorial auxiliary parking structure—I haven't been able to let another place," Pete rushed out. "It's not that I don't have a little savings—I do, but it can't be just anyplace and I know this is terrible and last-minute and that the worst thing for you would be to have some pushy woman intruding and me especially, seeing as how I can't really hold any kind of control over my talents, and well, I guess I just thought I'd ask you if I could stay. Just for a few weeks."

Jack blinked, and then took the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth. The ember glowed. "I keep odd hours," he said.

"Police inspector," Pete reminded him. "Not a nine-to-five job, either."

"I've been on a kick for the Anti-Nowhere League and I play them loudly."

"Love them," Pete shot back. Jack grimaced.

"You're bloody mad to pick me out of all the possible sofas you could sleep on, Caldecott. I mean—"

"I've accepted that, Jack. Nowhere I'd rather be."

He sighed and stepped away from the door, pulling it wide. "Then you're welcome, is what I was going to say if you'd let me finish."

Pete grinned at him, and he finally grinned back, shaking his head. "You mean it?" she asked. Jack nodded once.

"I mean it. Come in."