Street Magic Part 10

Pete's gaze was drawn to the back corner of the pub, where roof beams and lamplight conspired to create a slice of shadow. A solitary figure sat, fragrant green-tinged smoke from his pipe rising to create the shape of a crown of young spring leaves before dissipating.

Jack nudged her arm. "Come on." He picked up the two pints of Newcastle Brown and started toward the table with a measured step. If Pete didn't know better she'd call it reluctance, or a sort of respect.

The man seated alone and smoking was unremarkable, as far as men went. Pete would pa.s.s him boarding the tube or in a queue at the news agent's without a glance, although he did have lines of mischief at the corners of his mouth and eyes, and they glowed pleasantly brown. He was older than Jack, wearing a well-trimmed black beard and a soft sport coat patched at the elbows.

Jack set the pints down on his table and grinned. "Been a long time, Knight."

When the man turned to look at them, Pete heard a rushing sound, as if a spring wind had disturbed a sacred grove, and with great clarity she saw a tree, ancient, branches piercing the sky while the roots reached down and grasped the heart of the earth.

"Well," said the man. "Jack Winter. I next expected to see you lying in state at your premature funeral, yet here you are disturbing my evening. Well done."

Shaking his head, Jack gestured between the man and Pete. "Detective Inspector Caldecott, Ian Mosswood. Moss-wood, this is Pete."

Mosswood raised one eyebrow in an arch so critical Pete felt the urge to stand up straight and comb her hair. "Pete. How frightfully unusual."

"You know, Mosswood," said Jack, slapping his shoulder, "in this ever-changing world, it's good to know you're still&" He gestured to encompa.s.s Mosswood's jacket. "Tweed."

"I presume," said Mosswood, eyeing the pint of ale, "that since you came over here and bothered me you have some reason." He turned his pipe over and tapped it out against the table's edge. Fragrances of gra.s.s and cut wheat filled Pete's nostrils.

"b.l.o.o.d.y right," said Jack, pulling out a chair and straddling it backward. "I need to pick your leafy brain, Mosswood. Brought you the requisite offering and everything, just like a proper druid. Sorry for the lack of white robe and virgin, but Pete's sheets are all striped and I wouldn't presume to guess as to her eligibility for virgin."

"Sod you," Pete responded, flicking Jack the bird.

Mosswood picked up the ale and sniffed it with distaste, his prominent nose crinkling.

"Get off it," said Jack. "You know it's your favorite."

"It is a sad day when a Green Man's allegiance can be bought for an inadequately washed pint gla.s.s of malted hops and stale yeast," said Mosswood with a disapproving curl of his lip. "But such is the way of the world, sadly. I accept your offering. What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l are you bothering me over, Jack?"

"Problems," said Jack. "Got a nasty, nasty ghost or hungry beastie on the prowlsome misty t.o.s.s.e.r with an appet.i.te for little children. I need to find him, and find a way to hurt him bad before I exorcise the b.a.s.t.a.r.d back to the Inquisition."

Mosswood looked up at Pete, who stood awkwardly by his elbow, not sure she was invited into a conversation that had obviously picked up just where it left off the last time the two men had seen each other.

"Sit down, my dear," he said with a small smile. "Don't let this foolish mage's ramblings inhibit you."

"Oh," said Pete, "I don't." She pulled out the remaining chair and sat. "Thank you."

"She is considerably lovely," Mosswood told Jack. "And polite. What in the world is she doing with you?"

"Funny, you git," said Jack with a humorless smirk. "How about telling me what I need to do to flush out this b.u.g.g.e.r?"

Mosswood relit his pipe, taking tobacco that smelled like shaved bark from a leather pouch and tamping it down carefully with his thumb. The pipe was carved from a black wood, slightly glossy, the nicks from the knife that had wrought it visible, a tiny story along the well-rubbed stem and barrel. "What you want to begin your search is a Trifold Focus. I do not know of any in existence, but I'm sure one of your other& sources will be more than happy to oblige the information for the price of an immortal soul or two."

Jack drained his Newcastle and gave Pete a satisfied grin. "I told you he'd come through."

Chapter Twenty-one

They walked out of the fog and found the Mini waiting. Big Ben chimed midnight once more and Pete said a silent thank-you to be away from places where the air was not the same and she could feel invisible eyes on her all the time.

Jack sat closemouthed during the ride and he was chalk colored by the time they reached Pete's flat. "You all right?" she inquired when he stumbled and fetched against the wall just inside her door.

"Yeah&" Jack's jaw set. "No. No, I'm not." He made a run for the bathroom and Pete heard him retching miserably.

It was so easy to forget, when Jack was sarcastic and smoking a Parliament, throwing out smiles and pinning her with his hard eyes, how she'd found him less than a week ago. Skinny, wasted, and his body still screamed for a fix even now.

Pete hesitated for a few more seconds, listening to Jack choke, then nudged the bathroom door open with her toe and crouched beside him, placing a hand on the back of his neck. Jack's skin was cold and slick, like he'd just been pulled from a pool of oily, lifeless water.

"Don't& don't&" he gasped, finally managing to draw a breath. The loo stank of old ale and sweat with an undertone of something darker, burned from crossing a barrier that flesh was not meant to. "I'm all right," Jack muttered, sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat away with the flats of his palms from his face. "It takes a lot out of you. Crossing to and from the Black. I'd forgotten how f.u.c.king difficult that is."

"I feel fine," said Pete quietly.

"Well, aren't you b.l.o.o.d.y well special," Jack snapped. Pete stood and held out her right hand, trying not to let it shake with anger that Jack might take for timidity.

"Give it to me."

"Give what to you?" Jack muttered, leaning his head back against the tile wall and breathing through his nose. He hadn't stopped sweating even though rain was washing the windows of the flat with intermittent sleet and Pete's fingers were cold because the radiators were turned down.

"Your G.o.dd.a.m.ned stash, Jack!" Pete bellowed, picking up her container of hairbrushes and clips off the basin and flinging it at him. Her anger rushed up from the iron-banded box where she kept it through her workdays and ever since Connor had died. Really, since Jack had died for the first time. She threw the pink ceramic cup at his lying face and felt relief, like she had just destroyed the visage of an oppressive stone idol.

Jack ducked and was pelted with clips and pins. "Oi!" he shouted. "What the in the seven bleeding h.e.l.ls is your problem, woman?"

"You're my problem!" Pete shouted. "You're a f.u.c.king junkie liar is my problem!" She grabbed his jacket from where it lay on the floor and dug into the pockets, her fingers shaking and still slicked with Jack's sweat.

Pete prayed again. She prayed to find nothing, to be irrational and tired and overloaded from the graveyard and the blind children and walking down the cobble street where it was always midnight.

Her fingers closed around an empty cellophane bag, gritty with a powder that felt like ground gla.s.s and a capped syringe, full of cloudy cooked heroin that three long years as a PC pulling junkies off the street prophesied she would find. Pete dropped the baggie on the tiles next to Jack. "G.o.d d.a.m.n you," she said quietly. "You've been fixing the entire time."

"No," said Jack, pulling himself up and bracing one arm against the wall. Fine purple webs traveled up his forearm, spread out from red-black pinp.r.i.c.ks, b.l.o.o.d.y spiders living under the skin. "No," Jack repeated. "That was my last dose, and my first shot in five days, which is why I'm vomiting my f.u.c.king guts out now and could do without you screaming at me. Harpy."

Pete poked Jack in the chest with her index finger. Fever heat rolled off him in a whisky-scented wave. "Don't you ever sodding lie to me again, Jack, or I will jam my boot in your a.r.s.e so far I'll knock out your back teeth."

Jack dropped his head. "You asked me to see see, Pete, and if you knew what crossing the Black without something to dampen my sight meant, you wouldn't have asked me. You wouldn't make me nip off to a dodgy pub loo to shoot up. You'd prime the needle and put it in my b.l.o.o.d.y arm."

"I don't want to hear your sodding excuses," said Pete. She put the tips of her fingers under Jack's chin. "Have you told me anything that's true? Anything?"

"Doubtful, luv," Jack said. He tried to smile but Pete saw a death mask. "That's all I am, a liar and a sinner."

"Did you know what would happen in that tomb?" Pete asked quietly.

Silence pulled the air between them thin. "I've always known I was going to die," said Jack eventually. "That I was going to die young, and that I was going to die badly."

"I mean about me," Pete said. "Did you know about me, Jack? What would happen if I went in there?"

"You never give up, do you?" he shouted, angry again as quickly as lightning flickered. "Sod it, Pete, realize it's not always about you and your trite little middle-cla.s.s daddy-love issues and leave me alone!"

He grabbed the jacket out of her hands, so hard and quick her fingers burned from the friction of the leather.

"Where are you going?" Pete demanded. Jack shoved her aside and stomped out. A minute later the front door of the flat slammed and there was the echoing quiet left by rage and half-truths in Jack's wake.

Chapter Twenty-two

No one wanted to look at Pete when she pushed open the door to the MIT room in New Scotland Yard the next morning. They all bent their heads, pretended papers and computer screens were important, and only looked at her from the sides of their eyes. Whispers weighed heavy on the air.

"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l is everyone in here waiting for?" she asked Ollie, once she'd made an extra-large mug of tea. "Is it common consensus I'm going to whip out a rifle and start shooting?"

"You haven't been about," said Ollie. He hunched himself up against his too-tight tie and collar, and refused to meet her eyes.

"Meaning what?" Pete said, narrowing hers.

"Meaning&" Ollie sighed. "I like you, Caldecott, so I'll say it right out: There's some here that think you're not able to handle this thing with Bridget Killigan. And after the other two kids were& well. There's talk, is all."

"This is because of Jack, isn't it?" Pete demanded. "Because I brought him into the case and because I haven't been handing in my reports to the guv every day like I'm in sodding fifth form. Is that what you're saying?"

"That's part of it," Ollie agreed. His fat fingers were splayed on the desk they shared, and he stared at them, not at Pete. "You're not yourself, Pete. Everyone sees it. Except you." He pushed back from the desk and stood. "And that's the whole of it." Ollie walked away and Pete sat in her own chair, hard enough to send electricity up her spine.

Jack and Connor gibbered at her, reminding her that she was blinded to all but herself, blinded as surely as Patrick, Diana, and Bridget Killigan. Connor stared up at her accusingly from his hospital bed, his eyes peeling her skin back to the fault underneath. Jack proffered his bruised and bloodied arms, a supplicant even as he depressed the plunger of the disposable syringe.

Connor wasn't a man given to fancy. Therapists and pills were his answer to Pete's nightmares, when she'd lost Jack. MG was the one who wanted to see magic, and never could, whose silence spoke volumes as Pete choked down small chalky Xanax and tried to pretend everything was normal.

"When you see a nightmare," Juniper Caldecott said, resting her hand on Pete's head, "you just look it right in the face and you make it go away."

For the first time since she'd packed her two teal Sam-sonites and left Connor, Pete, and MG, Pete wished her mother were still about. Juniper with her altars and her sage scent and her smiles like warm scarves on cold days could have exorcised these ghosts.

"Typical," she muttered, shoving case files around in an effort to occupy her hands if her mind insisted on wandering.

Pete was only aware of DCI Newell standing over her with his long and disapproving shadow after he'd said her name several times. His face was pinched when she finally looked up.

"There's been another kidnapping, Caldecott," he said, holding out a jacket. "I need you to interview the victim's mother immediately."

Pete slid her chair back a bit too quickly, stumbling over her own feet. "Yes, sir. Right away."

Newell studied her, with a stare he probably imagined was penetrating. It had all the effect on Pete of a moth against her cheek. She had that feeling of floating, one she recognized now as the aftereffect of any time in Jack's presence. When she'd walked in the fog with him something had released released, a spyhole in the battlement of something immense and still and floating, that Pete had run her fingers through but never immersed in.

She was half in and half out of Jack's world now, and the real one seemed pale beside it.

"Caldecott," Newell said, "if you don't wrap this nasty business up rather quickly, I'm going to be forced to suggest a leave. And may I remind you, you've already used up several days' worth of personal time gallivanting with this informant of yours."

At least he didn't also hint that if Pete were put on leave, she'd be making an involuntary appointment with a psychiatrist. Pete ripped the file out of his hands and shoved it into her tote. "My report will be in your box as soon as possible, guv."

"Inspector&" Newell started, but Pete was already banging aside the swinging doors, running out as blindly as Jack had the night before, that immense stirring in her head brewing into a storm.

The file said the missing girl was called Margaret Smythe, and her picture was candid and unsmiling. Straight hair framed a heart face and immense eyes the color of an angry tiger's.

Pete read the single sheet three times, committing it to memory before she cranked open the Mini's door and mounted the steps of the Smythes' semidetached home. She was on a quiet street in Bromley, would not be here were it not for Margaret's strange, invisible, and inexplicable dis-appearance from within a brick house with all the windows and doors locked.

She stilled herself, mind and body, and let the imitation bra.s.s knocker fall twice. The door opened after someone scrabbled with dead bolts for a few seconds. Margaret Smythe's mother was blond and lovely despite deep blue half-moons painted in the skin under her eyes and fine lines of desperation wrought at the corners of her mouth.

"Mrs. Smythe," said Pete, flashing her warrant card and badge. "DI Caldecott from the Metropolitan Police Service. May I come in?"

"It's Ms.," said Margaret's mother, her eyes roving past Pete and out onto the pavement, searching for any shadow out of place. "Ms. Smythe. I don't understand, the police were already here& I gave my information and they did f.u.c.k-all and went away again."

"Yes, I know the local bureau have already been around," said Pete with what she hoped was a soothing demeanor. She didn't think she managed it, because Ms. Smythe's face pinched.

"We've had similar cases in London," Pete went on. "Ms. Smythe, your daughter is missing and time is of the essence. Please, just let me in for a moment."

Margaret's mother hesitated for a second more, looking Pete up and down. She would never stop being suspicious of people at her door, at footsteps behind her on the pavement. Pete stepped toward her, putting one hand flat on the mesh that separated them.

Ms. Smythe stepped aside. "Come in, then. Make it quick. I have a news conference in a little more than an hour."

Pete stepped over the threshold and something parted the air in front of her, light like the brush of fingers against a fevered cheek. An inkling of the power that burned when Jack was in a room.

"Could I see Margaret's bedroom please, Ms. Smythe?"

Ms. Smythe gestured up the stairs and went into the sitting room, slumping on a sagging sofa in front of a console television that showed a fuzzy rerun of Hollyoaks Hollyoaks.

Shock does funny things, Pete repeated, although it was hard to reconcile the saucer overflowing with cigarette b.u.t.ts and the plastic cup half-full of whisky with a distraught mother. Ms. Smythe began to apply lipstick and rouge, crooked in the dim light.

Margaret's door supported a hanging hand-painted sign covered in drooping daisies and her name in crookedly precise letters. A newer, larger sign on pasteboard proclaimed keep outthis means U. Pete pushed it open and examined the purple satin bedspread, the white desk and dressing table that were still little-princess while the rest of the room was older, darker.

She sifted through the drawers and paged through the dresses hanging in Margaret's closet, most of them some variation on bruise-colored satin and silk. A sticky stack of photographs had been shoved to the back of the desk, Margaret and a dodgy-looking bloke with a wisp of ponytail that he would believe was a lot hipper than it was. "Ms. Smythe?" Pete called. "When did Margaret's father leave?"

Her mother mounted the stairs and came to the door of Margaret's room, but kept herself carefully outside. "Two years ago. All in the report those other police took down."

"Divorce," Pete said, more of a hope than a question.