Street Magic Part 23

"Mage groupie? I know know you aren't worthy," said the sorcerer. Pete sighed. 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 ma.s.s 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 th.o.r.n.y limb lashed out to slice her flesh. Shaper of magic. I am a shaper of magic Shaper of magic. I am a shaper of magic.

Then Jack's echo, Mosswood doesn't know b.l.o.o.d.y everything Mosswood doesn't know b.l.o.o.d.y everything.

"He'd sodding better on this count," Pete whispered, and then inhaled, held out her hand, and pushed pushed against the ma.s.s 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. against the ma.s.s 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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, t.i.ts. I lost me flick-knife."

"Forget the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 .fresh blood," he snapped when Pete started to point out the thousands of shallow cuts all over his exposed skin. 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. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.ds G.o.ds, yes, quite quite sufficient if you want me to sufficient if you want me to die!" die!" Jack said. Jack said.

"Give over with your drama and do something about these c.u.n.ts 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sive section of the outer stone wall fell away, exposing the skyline of London, twinkling serenely in the late night. "f.u.c.king 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 that much." 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

"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 guessthe 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 p.r.o.nounced. He set the bowl on the floor and told Pete, "Find north."

Pete peered out the ma.s.sive 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sification."

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

The wind kicked up and Pete s.h.i.+vered, 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 businesslikeanything 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 cl.u.s.ter 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, mult.i.tudinous 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 trydon'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 f.u.c.king legions of h.e.l.l 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 a.r.s.e 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 s.n.a.t.c.h children and then feed off them, it had one h.e.l.l of a temper in life, and death is p.i.s.s-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 s.h.i.+eld 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 a.r.s.e in the wind."

Pete bristled, the quick sting of acc.u.mulated intolerance from her fellow inspectors and now from Jack sending her anger to the surface. "I am not not helpless." 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 s.h.i.+eld hex blossomed in front of Pete, heavy and gleaming.

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

"f.u.c.king h.e.l.l," 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 I will feed on your spirit and sculpt your bones.

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

"What about the b.l.o.o.d.y 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 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 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 s.h.i.+eld hex became like a wall of heavy water, rippling and impenetrable. "Now p.i.s.s off!"

The ghost laughed, a sc.r.a.pe 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."