Black 01 - Street Magic

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Perhaps," said Pete, trying to shrug him off. He held her arms harder. "Ow! AU 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 fie
ld 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."

  Read on for a preview of

  Demon Bound

  By Caitlin Kittredge

  Coming from St. Martin's Paperbacks in December 2009

  Jack Winter has a problem. Thirteen years ago, as he lay dying on the floor of a tomb in Highgate Cemetery, Jack called up a demon and bartered his soul for his life. Now the debt has come due, and the demon has appeared to take Jack to Hell. Trouble is, Jack has finally found a reason to live. Her name is Pete Caldecott.

  Pete saved Jack from himself—she got him clean, helped him control his psychic sight, and with her help, he's making a living cleansing ghosts and minor supernatural annoyances in the greater London area. Pete doesn't know about Jack's bargain, but she knows that something is wrong. Something vast and terrible is moving out of the supernatural realm of the Black. A magical cataclysm, and she won't be able to stop it without Jack's help…

  Part One

  Clockwork

  Listen to the army march across my coffin lid Fire in the east and sunrise in the west I'm just a dead man, walking with the rest.

  —The Poor Dead Bastards, "Dead Man Marching"

  A crow sat on the dead branch of the dead tree that watched over two gravestones in the corner of Brompton Cemetery. It watched Jack Winter with its black eyes like beads, and he watched the crow in turn, with eyes that most people called ice, but that he simply called blue.

  Jack drew a Parliament out of the air and touched his finger to the tip. He sucked a lungful of smoke and blew it at the crow, which flapped its wings and snapped its beak in irritation. "Fuck off, then," Jack told it. "Not like I want you hanging about."

  "Leave that beast alone," said his companion. "If the map I got from Tourist Information is right, the graves should be around here, very close." Her circular ramble through the graves came to a stop next to Jack. "Oh."

  "Mary and Stuart Poole," Jack said, flicking the end of his fag at Mary's headstone. "Who says the gods don't have the occasional bout of humor?"

  Pete Caldecott gave Jack what he'd describe as a dirty look, and not in the manner that led to being naked and sweaty. She strode over and picked up his litter, shoving it into her coat pocket. "You're a bloody child, you know that? Emotionally twelve."

  "I've been accused of worse," Jack said. He felt in the inside pocket of his motorbike jacket for another Parliament, but thought better of it when Pete put a hand on her hip.

  "We've a job to do, and if we don't do it, we don't get paid, so are you going to stand there all day with your thumb in your arse or are you going to get to work?"

  Pete was, at the first look, nothing to write your mum about, but Jack knew better. Shorter than he by a head, big green eyes straight from the Emerald Isle, Snow White in torn denim and an army-green jacket. Lips plump like rubyfruit, a body that a bloke could spend hours on and still feel like he was starving for it.

  But right now, she was glaring at him, tapping her foot on the dead grass over the Pooles' final rest. Jack picked up the black canvas tote they'd brought along and crouched between the headstones. Out of a host of attributes, the one Pete used with greatest efficiency was her temper, and besides, she was right—they did have a job.

  "Stupid bloody job, just like I said when you took it," Jack told her. Pete folded her arms.

  "I spent near a decade of my life pushing paper around a desk at New Scotland Yard, so once you've dealt with expense reports and a DCI who thinks that equipment that works is a luxury, not a necessity, you can jabber on about stupid jobs."

  Jack grimaced. "This is my talent, Pete, and I'm not a party trick. This is… well… frankly, luv, it's demeaning."

  Pete pointed down at the grave. "Get to work, Winter. Before I lay you a smack in the head."

  Jack heaved a sigh and unzipped the satchel, pulling out his spirit heart. The clockwork contraption, about the size of a melon, round, and made of brass, hung from a chain with a small chamber in the bottom hollowed out. Jack dug the plastic Baggie of galangal root out of the bottom of the satchel and breathed on a pinch of the stuff.

  Just a touch of sorcery, just enough to wake up the strands of magic that lived in the galangal. Jack rubbed the pinch between his fingers and tamped it into the chamber of the spirit heart. A stab of pressure hit him in the temple, and he rubbed his forehead before standing.

  Pete reached out and touched him on the arm, the lightest of touches, on his leathers no less, but he still felt it, dancing down through his blood and nerves to his bones. Her power felt like goose flesh, like being touched by a girl you fancied for the first time, every time. "You all right, Jack?"

  He gave her a smile. His head throbbed harder. "Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, luv. Let's have this over with."

  Pete wasn't fooled by the lie, but she had the grace to step back and pretend that Jack was as skillful a liar as he claimed. Worry only showed in the space between her eyes, a small black line of a frown, as she got a small digital camcorder from the bag and readied it.

  Jack supposed if he had any sense, he'd be worried, loo. Using magic wasn't supposed to hurt, not him, not a mage of the Fiach Dubh. No one had ever accused Jack Winter of having sense, though. Of being a wanker, yes. A thief, a sinner, heartless scum, and a murderer, certainly. But sense, no. Jack thought that when someone did accuse him of sense, it would likely be time to hang up his spurs.

  "All right, you dusty lot," he murmured, so low only the dead could hear. "Time to come give me a haunt."

  Jack shut his eyes, holding the spirit heart directly out, arm straight as a divining rod. The clockwork pendulum swung gently, aimlessly. Jack inhaled and held the air. Panic chewed on the ends of his guts, scratched at his neck, and wormed into his brain. His body knew what he was about to do, and it was screaming.

  It was times like this that Jack felt the longing for a fix like the grasp of a familiar lover—tight, hot, gathered behind his eyes, knotting him up, making him cold, telling him /

  have what you need. Take it and make yourself warm, make yourself safe, taste the golden delights of the floating world.

  But Jack tightened his grip on the spirit heart, the cold brass warming to the same degree as his palm, and the murmuring of the fix was drowned in a tide of other whispers, crying and shouting, faint and fierce, buried and so old no one knew they were buried any longer.

  The dead came to Jack, and he let himself see.

  In his hands, the spirit heart gave a tick.

  Jack opened his eyes, the ghosts his second sight found thick here as a crowd in Trafalgar Square. They stood, for the most part, silent and staring at the living intruder on their pale, witch-lit world. A few hissed at him, the black-eyed
revenants with their flesh hanging off their bones, the malice of their lives following them in death like a shroud cloth.

  Pete stepped closer to him. She couldn't see what he saw, but she knew. She knew the chill of having the dead always just out of view. "Should I say it?"

  The spirit heart gave another tick, louder, stronger, and Jack nodded. "Wake them up, luv."

  "Mary and Stuart Poole," Pete raised her voice and pitched it sharp. Jack flinched as a ghost drifted closer to Pete, a girl with dark wet hair still tangled with the garbage she'd drowned in. The salt-sour stink of the Thames at low tide tickled his nostrils.

  The girl ran her hand longingly across Pete's cheek. Jack narrowed his eyes. "Oi. Not yours, missy. Shove off."

  Pete shivered, and continued, "Mary and Stuart Poole, we call you to this place. Come back to your bones. Answer to us."

  The ghost drifted away, her torn dress and lank hair trailing behind her in a remembered river current. Jack felt a pull at his arm, and the spirit heart began to tick faster and faster, clockwork innards spinning like the earth was revolving too fast.

  "Mary and Stuart Poole," Pete said again. "Come back to your bones."

  There was power in triplets. Jack had taught her that. Pete never forgot something when you told her once. She was sharp, the fine edge of a knife.

  A tug on his arm warned Jack that his dwelling on Pete's skill at this, only her second spirit-raising, might have cost him his arse. The spirit heart was twirling now, like someone had spun a globe and walked away. The brass caught the low afternoon sun and threw off light, the whirring of the clockwork like a bird's heartbeat.

  Jack pushed against the swirl of power generated by the beating clockwork, forced it into a shape. A focus like the heart, or salt, or stone, was important—raw magic pulled from something like a spirit could blow your insides out surely as a shotgun blast.

  A halo, black, gathered around the spirit heart, touched it experimentally, the lightest of caresses, while the spirit heart shot blue sparks through the realm of the dead. Pete couldn't see them, but she stepped back all the same. "They coming?"