Street Magic

he'd stayed there.
    Pete believed it, right up until she opened the door. The rug in the front room was crumpled and her hall table had been tipped over. "Shit." Then, "Jack?"
    He'd be gone, and the only question would be how many of her pawnable possessions he could carry.
    Pete jerked a Parliament out of the pack and stomped into the kitchen for a light. She passed the bathroom on her way. Jack lay on his side next to the toilet, the sweat beading on his face the only sign he was alive.
    The unlit fag dropped from Pete's mouth. "Damn you, Jack," she hissed. Then she was on her knees, turning his head, feeling for a pulse, pulling his eyelids back to examine his ice-chip eyes for shock. They were bloodshot but the pupils flexed at her intrusion, and Jack swatted at her weakly.
    "Go 'way."
    "Jesus, Jack," Pete breathed, sitting back on her heels.
    Jack rolled on to his back and moaned, throwing a hand over his eyes.
    "
He's
got fuck-all to do with this. I'm bloody dying. You're an evil spawn of witches, Pete Caldecott."
    Pete rolled a clean towel and slipped it under Jack's head. "You may be a lot of things, but dying isn't one. And the next time you call me a name, I'm putting my foot up your arse and leaving it there."
    A smile flashed, the devil-grin. "Same little firecracker. Always liked that you weren't afraid of me."
    "I—" Pete started, but Jack's face twisted, and then he lunged for the toilet and was violently sick.
    Pete put a hand between Jack's shoulder blades, feeling the bones grind under the skin as he retched. He was burning hot, but his sweat was like ice water.
    "I just need a little," Jack pleaded as he pressed his forehead against the porcelain rim. "Just a little to take the edge off. It's been
hours
, Pete. Fucking
days
."
    "No," said Pete without hesitation.
    "Fuck you!" Jack screamed, driving his fists into the tile floor of the bathroom. His knuckles left bloody smears.
    "Fine," Pete said, standing. "You'll either pull through it or you won't. But you did this to yourself, Jack, and if you wanted to keep spiraling down toward the rock fucking bottom, you should have kept your bloody mouth shut about Bridget."
    Jack glared at her, mouth opening to spew another curse, but his jaw slackened. "Pete," he said softly. "Pete, move out of the way."
    Pete glanced behind her, feeling a twinge of ice on the base of her neck. Jack's pupils dilated until his eyes were wormholes rimmed with frost. "Did someone die in your flat?" he whispered. "A man, your height, dark visage and eyes?"
    Because it was Jack, and not anyone else, Pete found herself nodding as the frost fingers spread out to grip her spine. "Yes, but that has to be forty years ago now."
    Jack's thin chest fluttered as he sucked in a wavering breath. "Get away from him," he told Pete. "He's hungry."
    Pete's sensible ballet flats were rooted to the tile, and even though her instincts were screaming in concert, a million pinpricks over her skin and psyche, she couldn't move.
    "Behind me," Jack rasped. "Move your arse, woman!"
    She'd never heard Jack so dead serious, and it snapped the frozen spell. Pete scrabbled across the sweat-slicked tile and crouched behind Jack against the shower curtain, which rustled like a gale had just blown through the bathroom.
    Nothing was behind her. Pete felt instantly ridiculous, the ice on her skin replaced by the flush of a paranoid caught out. "Jack…" She sighed. "Bloody hell, don't do that to me."
    "
Shut
it," he said urgently, still fixated
on
the corner near the door. "Oh, yes. You're a nasty one, aren't you? Been starving and starving all these years, you fucking shadow with teeth. Well, bollocks to you."
    The sense of evil just over the left shoulder returned full-force and Pete saw the air in the spot where she'd stood
shimmer
, as if something were trying to push into the realm of sight through sheer malevolence. "Oh, God," she said, because He was the first powerful thing that jumped to mind.
    "Forget about that," said Jack. He dipped an index finger in the ruddy smear he'd left on the tiles and began to draw, a radius filled with swirling symbols that shifted and blended into something strong and binding, like the iron scrollwork on a castle's gate.
    The air crackled and rippled, and blackness began to crowd in through the seams in the walls, the drain and faucet of Pete's bathroom sink, a shadowy smoke-ether that brought with it whispers and fluttering cries, phrases that twisted just out of