Street Magic

roving harlequin at a carnival, trying on masks until he found one that the audience favored, one to draw them into his web of seduction and illusion.
    And in that other time, with the other Jack, it would have worked. Pete knew she'd be helpless, she'd go stand in his circle and feel his black magic flow through them both.
    But now all she saw was Jack grinning at her as the smoke man came, and she felt the screaming vibrations inside her own head as her mind struggled to contain something that no one was meant to endure. And his pathetic attempts to con her weren't helping.
    "Get up," she snarled, hauling Jack to his feet. He was light, far beneath healthy, like a starving vampire or a reanimated sack of bones. Pete turned her head determinedly so Jack wouldn't see the pity on her face. Pity was something neither of them wanted. "You're coming along to the Yard and we're going to talk about the two more missing children."
    Jack dug in his heels. "I can't leave me things, some cunt'll nick them."
    Pete stopped, making Jack stumble closer to her by their connected arms. "I am going to get some bloody answers out of you, Jack Winter, and I prefer to do it in the comparative clean and comfort of a place that is not a druggie squat, so you are
going
out that door and I don't give a fuck whether it pleases you or not."
    Jack blinked. Pete had never known she had the ability to leave him at a loss, and it was rather powerful. Well, nights upon rainy nights of dealing with drunken soccer hooligans who decided just because she was small and slight that she was easily intimidated would put steel into any woman's backbone.
    "I get some clean clothes, yeah?" Jack said as Pete forcibly led him out the door and down the mossy steps to the Mini. "And a drink. God, I'd murder a pint."
    "You get to sit down in the car and shut your gob," said Pete, thrusting Jack into the passenger side of the Mini. She clipped her end of the cuffs to the door bar and got in.
    By the time they cleared the wharves and drove over the bridge back into the City, Jack was nodding again, in the dream place between the heroin and the barren expanse of needing it. Pete slapped his shoulder with her free hand. "Keep awake. This isn't a minicab."
    "Mmph," said Jack. "Bloody hell, you're violent. Got some sort of repressed urge you're takin' out on me?"
    "My urges are none of your sodding business," Pete snapped, then pressed her lips together. He still had that current, that disconcerting air that made her blurt out things that should have stayed a secret.
    Jack smirked. "So you say, luv."
    "Why don't you make this easy on yourself and tell me what you know about the missing kids," Pete suggested as she turned onto a thoroughfare crowded with taxis and the late rush hour.
    "I know fuck-all," said Jack promptly. "May I please be let go now, Inspector? I'll be ever so good and won't cause a fuss again."
    Pete gripped the wheel. She wanted to throw her two hands around Jack's neck, but the Mini's steering wheel would have to do. "You told me exactly where to find Bridget Killigan and when, and you expect me to believe that you know nothing about two other children abducted by the same bloody person in the same bloody way?"
    "I do, and I don't." Jack nodded. "Let me out of the fucking car, Pete. I'll crash us into an abutment if that's what it takes."
    Pete crossed two lanes of traffic and screeched into the bus dropoff zone, laying on the Mini's brakes in a way the manufacturer never intended. "Sod you, you bastard!" she yelled. "You think just because you're some poor wounded addict I'm supposed to believe your line of innocent bullshit?"
    "What I
think
," Jack yelled back, "is that you've turned from a sweet girl into a harpy from hell, and that I bloody hate the sight of you and if you don't unlock these bloody handcuffs right now, I'll hurt you, Pete. I swear to whatever gods you pray to."
    It flamed up in his eyes first, the bluer light of witchfire. Pete gasped as it spilled from his fingers, his lips—pure raw magic seeping out and forming a tangible golem of Jack's rage. Of his magic.
    Pete wanted more than anything to turn her eyes and pretend that she was just tired, or just crazy, or just… But the weight of
knowing
laid itself upon her,
knowing
in the pit of her stomach, the thing that wouldn't go away no matter how many years spanned between Jack holding her hands as the flames wreathed them and Jack glaring at her now, melting her skin with his