Street Magic

hearing.
    Jack's jaw set, bone jumping under the skin. "Think you're a smart bastard, do you?"
    "I don't think this is working," Pete murmured. Jack was expanding another set of symbols, barely integral when drawn with his shaking fingers.
    The smoke filled the bathroom, always at the edges of Pete's vision, narrowing it down into a tunnel the size of a shilling coin. The babble of unearthly voices was joined by smells, and feelings—turned earth, blood-spattered sheets, tiny fingers on Pete's skin and sliding through her hair.
    She gripped Jack's shoulder. "For fuck's sake, Jack, I do not want to die on the floor of my loo."
    And his hand stopped shaking, and his breathing calmed, and with that the circle resolved as bright and solid as if it had been carved into the tiles. The shimmering malice dissolved like dust motes in a bar of sun, and fast as they'd seeped into the realm of the real, the whispers and the smells and the tiny grasping fingers and fangs were gone.
    Jack slumped. "Bloody hell. You couldn't have brought me someplace safer, like, say, the fucking Tower?"
    "I…" Pete pressed her hands over her nose and mouth and forced herself into a mold of composure she felt ill suited to fit. "I have no idea what that was."
    "
That
," said Jack, "is what happens when I don't get my fix."
    "You…" Pete looked at the corner where the presense had spread its oily sheen, and back at Jack. "You see… whatever that was?"
    "Shade," said Jack. "Ghost, if you want to be pedestrian about it. A poxy one allowed to hang about for far too long. Bugger all, didn't you have this place cleansed before you moved in?"
    "It never occurred to me," said Pete, although more than once on nights when rain blurred the streetlamps outside into nightmare gloom or the telly turned on by itself, she'd thought about it. The circle of protection Jack could chalk, and grow strong as iron. The five-pointed silver circlet Mum had always worn at her throat.
    Jack rolled on his side, eyes half-closed like he'd just taken the purest hit of his life. "Christ on a motorbike. I'm bloody exhausted. If I get back in the bed, could you restrain your kinky self from handcuffing me again?"
    Having seen what she had, just then, Pete simply nodded. "You won't try to run away?"
    "Pete, I'm two breaths from shaking hands with the reaper. Don't be fucking stupid."
    "Back to being a git, I see," said Pete. "Maybe there is hope, after all."
    Jack slept for a long time after Pete laid him back in her bed, and she sat at awkward angles in the wicker chair next to him, attempting to make sense of departmental e-mails on her laptop and ignore the fact that they had perhaps a day and a half left if the kidnapper worked according to method. Every time she tried to focus on the pixels, her vision shimmered and blurred just like the shade that had almost appeared.
    Just as nebulous were her thoughts, the tails and fragments of questions that wouldn't be answered. Jack moaned in his sleep, his fever dreams gripping his body and causing his hands to lash out under the sheets.
    Pete put a hand on his shoulder. "All right. No one's here except me."
    Dreaming, he didn't have the wherefore to offer venom in return, and Pete found herself curiously saddened by this. She might never find out what had intervened to make Jack hate her, and this illusion was all she had, until Patrick and Diana were found. If they were found.
    The thought stirred a blacker feeling in her than the aura of any shade.

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Chapter Twelve

    In Pete's dream, Patrick and Diana reached out to her with black and sticky fingers, their mouths smeared with offal as they feasted on the long-dead bodies of those who had come to this tomb before her. Pete tried to run but every way was bricked over, a blank wall rife with spiderwebs and scrabble marks dug by human fingernails.
    The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in bloody and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.
    He sees you, Pete Caldecott
, whispered Bridget Killigan. And he held out his hand, curled around something that fluttered and oozed blood between his knotty fingers. "Take it. Take what was always yours, tattered girl. Be mine, and whole."
    Pete pressed against the wall, grit working its way down her neck, tiny bugs and specks of graveyard dirt. A rush of wind blew through the crypt, the ends of the robed thing flapping on white bone joints, revealing armor washed clean against his rotted