Street Magic Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Eleven

At the door to her flat, Pete paused and listened, catching not a sound from inside. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," she muttered. Relief, not worry, that. She'd left Jack cuffed to the headboard of her bed, after he'd pa.s.sed out on it, and by the sound of things, he'd stayed there.

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

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

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

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

"Go 'way."

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

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

"He's got f.u.c.k-all to do with this. I'm b.l.o.o.d.y dying. You're an evil sp.a.w.n of witches, Pete Caldecott." got f.u.c.k-all to do with this. I'm b.l.o.o.d.y dying. You're an evil sp.a.w.n of witches, Pete Caldecott."

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

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

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

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

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

"No," said Pete without hesitation.

"f.u.c.k you!" Jack screamed, driving his fists into the tile floor of the bathroom. His knuckles left b.l.o.o.d.y smears.

"Fine," Pete said, standing. "You'll either pull through it or you won't. But you did this to yourself, Jack, and if you wanted to keep spiraling down toward the rock f.u.c.king bottom, you should have kept your b.l.o.o.d.y mouth shut about Bridget."

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

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

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

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

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

"Behind me," Jack rasped. "Move your a.r.s.e, woman!"

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

Nothing was behind her. Pete felt instantly ridiculous, the ice on her skin replaced by the flush of a paranoid caught out. "Jack&" She sighed. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, don't do that to me."

"Shut it," he said urgently, still fixated it," he said urgently, still fixated on on the corner near the door. "Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you f.u.c.king shadow with teeth. Well, b.o.l.l.o.c.ks to you." the corner near the door. "Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you f.u.c.king shadow with teeth. Well, b.o.l.l.o.c.ks to you."

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

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

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

Jack's jaw set, bone jumping under the skin. "Think you're a smart b.a.s.t.a.r.d, do you?"

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

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

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

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

Jack slumped. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. You couldn't have brought me someplace safer, like, say, the f.u.c.king Tower?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pete, I'm two breaths from shaking hands with the reaper. Don't be f.u.c.king stupid."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twelve

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

The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in b.l.o.o.d.y and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What do you hear?" Pete asked.

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

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

"Always," he agreed, panting as his fever fluctuated between arctic and h.e.l.lfire.

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