Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Your goddamned 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 hells is your problem, woman?"

  "You're my problem!" Pete shouted. "You're a fucking 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 glass 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. "God damn 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 pinpricks, bloody 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 fucking 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 arse so far I'll knock out your back teeth."

  Jack dropped his head. "You asked me to 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 bloody 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-class 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 bloody hell 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 Samsonites 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, 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 brass
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 fuck-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.

  Shock does funny things, Pete repeated, although it was hard to reconcile the saucer overflowing with cigarette butts 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 out—this 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.

  "He's doing a hitch in Pentonville," Ms. Smythe said, her eyes fierce. "And we're still married, I suppose."

  Pete set down the stuffed penguin that sat on the center of Margaret's bed. The penguin was wearing a black mesh shirt and his feather ruff was purple. "What did he go in for?"

  "That has nothing to do with this," Ms. Smythe snapped. "My husband never wanted the bloody kid in the first place."

  Pete crossed the distance between them and bored into the other woman until she dropped her eyes to the ratty pilled carpet under her bare feet. "Your daughter is gone, Ms. Smythe. She has been stolen from you without a trace of anyone coming in or leaving. She's vanished, and if I don't find her, she is going to suffer horribly, just like the three other children. You have five days, starting from last night. That's how long… he… keeps them." She stopped herself from using it just in time. "Then they're blinded, and muted, and returned to you just a husk."

  Ms. Smythe swallowed a sob, her chin tucked to her chest. Pete said, very softly, "Is that what you want?"

  "God help me," Ms. Smythe whispered. "I always knew something would happen to that child. She's… she's not all right, you know."

  "She was abused?" Pete wondered if that might be the link between all of the children, some psychic thread that attracted hungry entities.

  "No!" Ms. Smythe rounded fiercely on Pete. "I never put up with anything of the sort under my roof—you check, with your smug London smirk you're giving me. I had one of my boyfriends put away for having that very idea, last year. It's in the records. You check."

  "Fine, fine. I believe you, ma'am." Pete put her hands out. "What, then? What's wrong with your daughter?"

  "Who said anything was bloody wrong?" Ms. Smythe cried helplessly, then vanished down the stairs before anything else could be said. Pete smelled the tang of cheap fags and more whisky and heard the telly volume go back up.

  "Crazy bint," she muttered. Ms. Smythe hadn't ejected her from the house, though, so Pete went back into Margaret's bedroom and looked out the window, down into a tiny overgrown garden that looked like a thorny green maw, a Fae place that would swallow little children. In front of her face, a ghost of a spiderweb swayed in the air. The spider had long since vacated.

  Behind Pete, in the reflection of the glass, something on the far wall shimmered and twisted under her eyes, and made the center point of her forehead twinge like the symbol Jack had drawn in blood when the shade appeared.

  Pete touched the spot on the wall and found it slightly warm, and took out her penknife and scraped a little bit of the paint away. Oily black stuff flaked onto her shoes, roofing tar or old. motor oil. "Ms. Smythe!" Pete shouted in a tone that brooked no argument. "I need to speak with you for a moment longer!"

  She took her pocketlight and shone it at an oblique angle to the wall, and the shape under the paint jumped into sharp relief. It didn't hurt, like the things Jack painted in blood… it was solid, like pressing your forehead against a cool iron bar on a warm day.

  Ms. Smythe appeared with a snuffling and a cloud of smoke. "What is it now?"

  "You painted over something here," said Pete, pointing to the spot she'd scraped off. "Who did this?" She'd take a rag of paint thinner to the wall herself, if it would lead to whatever was taking children. She'd go wrestle Jack out of whatever gutter he was napping in and shove it in his face until he'd be forced to give her help.

  "Margaret did it."

  Pete froze, felt the prickles over the backs of her hands and the underside of the instincts that she tried to ignore, the electric fence that sparked to life when she got too close to things that were malignant. "Why on earth?"

  "She were a silly child, Inspector. You have to understand that. Always seeing things where there weren't any. She said it was to keep them out."

  Pete looked at the wall. The lumpy sign didn't feel wrong, it was just overwhelmingly present, on a plane that wasn't the three dimensions Pete's mind was accustomed to. She followed the line of sight, to the narrow leaded window overlooking the garden, replete with cobwebs and dead oak leaves. "Keep who out, Ms. Smythe? Margaret thought someone was trying to hurt her?"

  "Something," Ms. Smythe muttered. "But you have to understand, she were just given to fancies… too many books, or not enough friends, and I fully blame myself for that part of it; if she were a normal little girl she wouldn't do those things."

  "Ms. Smythe…" Pete rubbed at her forehead. It was starting to throb dully, and it had nothing to do with the magic-thick air of the bedroom. "Who? Who or what was your daughter afraid of?"

  "She said…" Ms. Smythe took a large breath and let it out in a rush. "She said it were to keep the fairies out. The garden folk that lived down below. She said they whispered to her and kept her awake because she was bright and they were twilight—her words, not mine, Inspector—and they wanted to take her away." Margaret's mother's eyes glimmered and Pete saw that she'd been wrong, that real grief and desperation were hovering underneath the booze and the television interviews. Things had been wrong in the Smythes' world long
before Margaret was taken. "If only she'd been a normal little girl…"

  "It's all right, Ms. Smythe," said Pete, patting the taller woman on the shoulder. "Margaret has time yet, if we're dealing with the same individual."

  "She always read books—thick grown-up books, with more of those symbols in them," said Ms. Smythe. "She'll be terrible bored if they're not treating her well and giving her a bit of telly and something to read."

  "I'll find your daughter," said Pete with a conviction she neither felt nor believed. Ms. Smythe just shook her head and slumped slowly downstairs, and Pete followed after she shutter eyes to block the feedback from the sign on the wall out of her mind.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  After she finished in Bromley, Pete once again drove through the rain-grayed streets of Southwark, searching every bowed face for Jack's familiar planar cheekbones and burning glacial eyes.

  She ended up in front of the rotting row house where she'd found him and realized he wasn't a phantom, a remnant of nightmare given flesh. Something tapped on her window and Pete's heart leaped along with her body. "Bloody hell," she muttered, rotating the handle to roll the glass down. The youth in the jacket leaned into her face, breathing out sausages and sour mash whisky.

  "You on a bust?"

  "You think I'd tell you?" Pete arched an eyebrow. He grinned wider.

  "Jack's your mate. He told me, you came around, that he was in the Four Horsemen 'round the corner."

  "Thank you," said Pete, more to get him and his sausage stink away than anything. She didn't want to see Jack nodding in the back booth of some cut-rate goth club. She didn't want to see the fresh needle marks. But she set the parking brake and locked the Mini and walked down the damp bricks to the small black door of the Four Horsemen.

  It wasn't like she could do anything else. Jack drew you in, inexorably, like the orbit of a dying star. And besides, she owed him a smack for running off.