Street Magic bl-1

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "It's not," he said finally. "It's not finished."

  Pete swung her legs over the side of the mattress and sat up, even though dizziness rocked her like a ship in high wind. "What do you mean, Jack?"

  He stood up, knocking the chair over, and paced away. "Come on, Pete!" he snarled. "Don't play the sweet school-girl with me. You know what that thing was in the graveyard! You saw it."

  "I don't," said Pete, shaking her head once. "I was focused on Margaret. And you. It was from my dream. That's all."

  "From your dream because you've bloody seen it before." Jack slumped. He looked like a doll with cut strings, disjointed and laid aside. Pete got up and made her unsteady way to him.

  "Whatever it is, Jack—just tell me."

  "It's worse," he said. "It's about to get much worse. That ghost… I swear I sent him back, Pete. I did." Jack's voice threaded with frustration, as if he'd reached into his top hat to produce a dove and found a dead cat instead. "He can't have existed in the thin spaces for a dozen years on his own."

  "Well, obviously he did," Pete murmured. "I have a notion feeding on children helped with that."

  "No," said Jack firmly. "No, it doesn't work that way, Pete. He should have been called back into the land of the dead. For him to linger, to get so strong… he's had assistance, of the most grievous kind."

  "Don't like the sound of that," Pete said.

  "And you shouldn't," said Jack. "Whoever would keep him close to this world… there's a nutter with black plans, mark my words."

  "Got a theory?" she asked, and Jack rubbed at the point between his eyes as if he were trying to erase something.

  "Haven't a bloody clue. I swear, Pete," he said again, more to himself than to anyone present. "I sent him back."

  "Who is he?" Pete asked, rising and stepping around Jack to face him. Jack closed his eyes, rubbing his hands over his face. In the direct foggy sunlight, all of his scars and premature lines were stark. Jack looked old, hollowed out and collapsing.

  "His name is Algernon Treadwell," Jack said finally, from behind his hands. "And he's what I summoned out of the tomb twelve years ago."

  "Pete." Ollie stuck his head into the bedroom. "We're clearing out—you'll need a lift back to your flat, yeah?"

  "No," Pete said faintly, not taking her eyes from Jack. He looked resigned, dragging the toe of one boot back and forth across the dust on the floorboards.

  "No," Pete said louder. "I need to stay here for a bit."

  "Well… ring me when you're in," said Ollie. "I'll be at the Yard doing up the reports."

  Pete nodded, and Ollie backed away. A few seconds later the front door banged shut.

  Sighing, Pete went to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass.

  "Jasper Gorson," said Jack. Pete didn't move. She felt like a column of ice, frangible and nerveless.

  "Don't tell me this is the one time you're not going to ask 'Who's that.'" Jack sighed. "You want to know what happened, I can see it."

  "I want to know?" Pete murmured. She saw that limestone door scaled with moss roll back, and felt the cool dry breath of the tomb on her face. She had made a circuit and come back to stand in front of it, a dozen years hence. There was nothing to do but face up.

  "I suppose I do," she said. "I would like to know the hours of my life that I've spent in nightmares since you did this, Jack. I would know how long I waited for you to come back, and tell me it was all a terrible mistake. I would like to know, because then I could quantify exactly how much of my suffering whatever you were hoping to accomplish was worth to you."

  Jack's jaw knotted. "I was a stupid kid, Pete, the same as you. I didn't know what would happen."

  "The hell you didn't," Pete hissed, stepping in and jabbing a finger into his chest. Jack took a hasty step back.

  "When things went wrong you bolted without a glance backward. All that rot… 'Oh, Pete, I waited for you for so very long…' Pure rubbish. You didn't bloody care what happened to me! I should bash your bloody face in, you fucking bastard!" The high ceiling rattled echoes back and Pete realized she was shouting.

  "Fine. I didn't, when I started," Jack said. "And when Treadwell came after us, you ran away and left me for dead."

  "I thought you were dead—"

  "And then you were able to shut out the Black, and I hated you for it. But I know now, Pete, so do you want to hear it or not?"

  Pete nodded tightly, knotting and unknotting her fists to keep from hitting a wall, or Jack.

  "This is how it was," Jack said softly. "Back then the two most reputable mages in the Black were me and Jasper Gorson. Gorson had been bragging for weeks that he'd raised a black spirit, flashing this grimoire it had supposedly transcribed for him." He produced a Parliament and chewed on the end before an ember flared. "So me back got up, and I went looking for a spirit to raise and tap into, as well."

  "Jack, did it ever occur to you that Gorson may have been a fucking liar?" Pete asked.

  "Of course he was a liar," Jack snapped, "but try telling that to the stupid sods who hang around the Lament pub."

  Pete thought of Arty and Abby, and Hattie Page. "Go on."

  "I got the books and I looked and I found him," Jack said. "Algernon Treadwell." He shivered and sat down, resting his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands. "He was a sorcerer, the worst of his time. Feared. Tried, tortured, and killed by witchfinders in the winter of 1836. I paid off a groundskeeper to show me Treadwell's tomb, and then…" He looked up at Pete, smoke drifting from his nose and mouth. "Then your bloody sister brought you to see me play at Fiver's."

  "Did you know what I was?" Pete asked quietly. "Was it that from the first minute?"

  "No," Jack said. "No, it took me a few days to realize why I always felt like I was grasping at power lines when you were in the room."

  "And then you wasted no time at all." Pete clapped her hands together. "Bravo."

  "Pete, you have to believe I didn't mean—"

  "I believe you," she said. "I believe that you didn't want to get killed." She went to the hooks in the entry and took her coat and bag.

  "You can't leave!" Jack exclaimed. "Treadwell is still about!"

  "What's he going to do?" Pete snapped. "Rattle chains and write redrum on the mirrors?"

  Jack crossed the room in a blur of bleached head and angry burning gaze and grabbed Pete's arm. "Bugger all, Pete, stop being so fucking righteous. I'm sorry you got involved again, but you are, until Treadwell's back where he belongs."

  "And you are a bloody fucking expert on that, aren't you," Pete said. Jack winced, and finally went silent. "I'll be at home," said Pete. "Don't come find me. Don't call. In point of fact, Jack, I don't want to bloody know of your existence ever again."

  He didn't try to stop her when she walked out, and slammed the door hard enough to rattle every ghost in the building.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Pete didn't go home. She walked through the fog, into the City, listening to her footsteps ring and eventually came to St. James's Park. She followed a gravel path until hedgerows and mist hid her from all human eyes, and then stopped, her face tilted back, feeling the cold sprinkle of rain on her cheeks.

  In a day as damply vibrant as this one, it was difficult to believe a sorcerer's spirit bent on mayhem had an eye out for her.

  It was even difficult to believe that Jack had used her.

  Afraid, luv? Don't be.

  She'd trusted him, that was the thing that finally made Pete shiver, not with cold, and blink twin tears down her cheeks that were not rain. Things that she'd rather forget were swimming near the surface, about Jack. About the day. About everything.

  And finally, for the first time since she'd run screaming from the tomb, Pete let them come.

  She had trusted him to be with her and keep her safe and she'd gone with it when he'd lit the candles and guided her to the foot of the circle, natural, like it was an everyday thing.

  "So what dark pagan gods are w
e invoking?" she joked, standing on her tiptoes to keep Jack's hand tight against hers across the circle. Jack chuckled when his invocation finished, and snapped his lighter closed, snuffing the brighter flame and leaving just the flickering faerie light of the candles on the floor. The carvings on the tomb's wall threw long shadows, scraping fingers and grasping mouths.

  "No gods. That's next week's exercise. Today we're just testing an academic theory."

  "Share with the class?" Pete's feet hurt from the long uphill walk from the tube in her school shoes and she fidgeted.

  "It wouldn't be a surprise then, luv." Jack smiled, thin and white, his thumb circling the hollow part of her palm. "You want to be surprised, don't you?"

  "Not sure," Pete said honestly. It was cold inside the tomb, and unnaturally dark when contrasted with the strong sun outside. Jack held his free hand out, palm down over the circle, and Pete's stomach did a nervous flip-flop.

  The blood they had both spilled began to move across each line of the circle, turning the crooked chalk marks crimson. Jack twisted his fingers, cat's-cradle, until the blood spread and pooled at the very center of the mark.

  "It's working," he whispered, a boyish grin breaking out. "Bloody hell, it's working."

  The crimson began to fade, and Jack cursed. "Fuck it. Not enough…"

  Pete watched him, and she didn't know why she spoke up again, because never in a million days would she, Connor Caldecott's sensible daughter through and through, believe so outlandish a thing, but the words flew out. "This is real."

  Twin points of witchfire sprang to life in Jack's eyes. Harmless, beautiful witchfire that she'd seen him conjure before, only now it burned Pete hot enough to melt her under the force of Jack's gaze. "No bloody kidding," was all he said, before he pulled his flick-knife with his free hand and cut his thumb again. Three drops of his blood landed in the center of the chalk lines.

  They disappeared, sucked inward through the stone floor. A sensation of wrongness crept up Pete's spine, as if the floor had tilted underneath her feet just slightly.

  "Don't move," Jack ordered, licking the remaining blood off his palm. He repeated the cut on her hand as well, dropping her blood onto the stones next to his and Pete coiled in on herself, knowing that if she moved now things would go even worse than they already had.

  Jack held on to her, their blood mingling and slicking her skin. "Look at you, still holding strong. Don't let go, yeah?"

  "Never," Pete whispered.

  Jack shut his eyes, face tilted upward into the dark. Pete could picture him in a gold circlet and a white robe just then, at the head of a coven in a circle of stones.

  "Eitil dom, a spiorad," Jack muttered. "Eitil dom, a spi-orad. Tar do mo fhuil beo." He opened his eyes and spoke aloud. "Algernon Treadwell. Hound-sorcerer. I command you into my circle, spirit and soul. Tar do mo fhuil beo."

  For a long minute, the only sounds to Pete were her own breathing and the faraway rush of traffic through the afternoon. "Come on…" Jack whispered. "You ruddy bastard. Come to me."

  The skin on the back of Pete's neck twinged as though someone had dropped ice cubes down her collar. With a shivering sigh of magic black smoke began to issue forth from all the walls and flagstones of the tomb, creeping through the crevices and forming in the air, the shape beginning to breathe.

  Transfixed, Pete watched as smoke grew hands, and fingers, and a soundless mouth. When it spoke, no real sound slipped into the small echoing space, but Pete heard it just the same and it made the space behind her eyes hurt.

  Who might this be, who has so rudely called?

  Jack's shoulders dropped, the tension wire cut when the thing spoke. "Jack Winter." He grinned broadly. "Jack Winter compels you, hound-sorcerer."

  The smoke drifted around to face Pete as if on a spindle. Not entirely, it seems.

  "Oi," Jack ordered. "Leave her out of it."

  But why? She is deliciously vulnerable, an Uncorrupted conduit. Open and willing. The smoke was smoke, but Pete swore that its hollow mouth smiled. I believe I see why you protect this one, Jack Winter.

  Jack's jaw knotted but his voice remained steady and low as ever. Maybe, Pete thought, the smoke-man couldn't see the twin flames in his eyes because the smoke-man appeared to have none. "Get off it. My circle compels you to obey me."

  It would, the smoke agreed, it would if properly drawn. Your filthy marsh-mouthed language betrays you as a trainee of the Fiach Duhb. Your hag's blood holds no sway. Stand aside if you value your scrabbling misery of a life, mage.

  And the smoke-man walked. It came straight for Pete, one hand with trailing wisp-claws reaching for her. Jack went to his knee, chalked a hasty symbol on the floor with his unencumbered hand, and the smoke-man slowed, but Pete was rooted and stilled even though she wanted to run, far and fast as her legs would take her. She could not move, not against the assault of cries and the raw, heavy power, like iron buried deep within frozen earth that the smoke pressed down around her.

  Jack said, "Fuck," and pushed the toe of his boot over the circle's outer line, smudging the symbols within beyond recognition. "Go back!" Jack ordered loudly. "Return to the city of the dead and no more with the living will you be. Your time here is at an end, hound-sorcerer."

  Just as it had gathered the blood, the chalk star began to gather the smoke, pulling the ghost inexorably downward. It let out a scream that bled Pete's eardrums, swiping at her wildly and close enough to leave ice crystals on her brow.

  This is NOT the last, Jack Winter! it howled. If I must return to the bleak spires then you return as well! The smoke-man thrust out his one remaining hand and seized Jack, pushing talons made of black ice through his abdomen. Jack granted and doubled as the black smoke flowed into him.

  "Stop!" Pete screamed. Jack tried to motion her away, but he was atrophying, his skin paling to blue-yellow, dark lines sprouting in all the crevices of his face, dead dull gray growing from the roots of his hair. As the ghost flowed into him Jack's life flowed out, his cheeks and eyes sinking and his body falling to the floor.

  Their hands broke apart. Pete could not move, could not even work her jaws to scream.

  A spout of crimson blood, the color of rose petals against his sallow sunken face, dribbled from Jack's mouth.

  "Go back," Jack ground, barely above a whisper. Night-shaded smoke drifted out in lieu of breath when he spoke. "You are shapeless and shadow. You are dead, and you belong with the dead. The living world holds no place for you. Go back."

  The ghost shrieked, and clutched at Jack. More and more blood poured from his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils.

  Seeing Jack's life leach out of him broke her paralysis, and Pete picked up the black candle, because it was the only thing within her reach, and flung it at the ghost. "Go back!" she echoed Jack, feeling tears on her cheeks. "Leave him alone!"

  Jack coughed weakly, and went still. Pete let out a cry. "He's not! You haven't killed him!"

  The ghost hissed, arching back as if in agony, and then with a rush it disappeared completely, the chalk lines of the circle vibrating with displaced power.

  Jack was still, silent and bloody. The light of the guttering candle threw the shadow of an enormous crow, stooped and spreading its wings around Jack to embrace him. The crow became a girl, a woman, a hag. All bent to touch Jack's blood-smeared forehead, their gestures those of disbelieving and mournful lovers.

  Pete didn't run to Jack, because of the hopping, sentient shadow and because the thought of him dead—as he surely was; she'd been to enough funerals to know cloudy eyes and dead stillness—became too much to bear. She ran instead, screaming, through the cemetery until she found the visitor's hut, pounding on the door and scraping her knuckles free of skin.

  Connor told her Jack was dead, when she finally decided she had to talk to someone, days later. And she cried. Relegated him to her nightmares, until she'd seen him again in the Montresor Hotel.

  And never, ever admitted to herself that she'd been the one to le
t go.

  That was it, Pete realized as she shivered under the chill from the overcast and fog, and started the walk back to the street from the footpath. She had seen Jack die, known that the ghost killed him before she broke the candle.

  Pete sighed as she turned back toward the Mall, Whitechapel invisible at this distance through the fog. She'd never be free of Jack Winter. But now, unlike then, she wasn't running away.

  Chapter Forty-two

  She pounded on Jack's door three times with the side of her fist. "Sod off!" he shouted.

  Pete knocked again. Jack threw the door open, a frying pan in his hand. "Listen, you bloody—"

  "I want to know how you came back," Pete said. "You were dead. I saw Death hunched over you that day, the bird's form. I want to know how you survived it."

  Jack's expression flickered at that, but he pulled the door wide enough for a person and motioned her in. Pete folded her arms, and nudged the door shut with her foot. "So. How did you?"

  "That bit is a story for another day," said Jack, eyes darting. "What made you come back?" He went into the kitchen and tossed the frying pan into a cabinet, and lit the burner under the kettle.

  Pete had asked herself the question repeatedly as she walked back to Whitechapel. "I guess I can't walk away from you. Even though I should."

  Jack's mouth quirked. "Make it difficult, do I?"

  "Don't take it that way," Pete warned. "The way I see it, you didn't put Treadwell back where he belonged before, and I have no reason to think you're up for the task this time."

  Jack rubbed his gut in mock-pain. "You do go for the vulnerable spots, luv."

  "We're going to find out what Treadwell wants," Pete said firmly, pulling the kettle off the burner when it squealed. "And then, that other day is going to come, and you're going to tell me how you survived him the first time."

  "Is there ever anything you're not absolutely certain of?" Jack added sugar to his mug.

  "Any number of things," said Pete. "None of which have to do with you."