Street Magic

skeleton. Patrick and Diana looked up in concert. Smoke boiled across the floor and coalesced into the form of a man, a man with burning silver eyes that seared Pete's mind, not with heat but with a cold that could stop her heart. She felt a delicate shattering behind her skull, and then her mobile started to ring.
    Pete's laptop slid to the floor as she bolted awake, her mobile trilling and dancing on the bedside table. Jack reached out in his sleep and swatted at it.
    "Hallo," Pete mumbled, trying to sound like she hadn't been nodding. Dreaming.
    "Well, you're hard enough to get hold of!" Terry snapped.
    "Terry." Pete wondered that she was relieved he'd called. He'd woken her up. That was what mattered.
    "I've faxed the new papers to your desk."
    Pete checked on Jack, whose trembling had ceased for the moment, and slipped into the hallway, shutting the bedroom door. "I'm not at work, Terry."
    She could hear the sneer coming down the line. "Then where on earth are you? It's not like you to go anywhere off your little track from flat to work and back again."
    "Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry. Grow up." Pete slapped her mobile shut. Jack groaned, and she returned to the bedside, feeling his pulse and his hot, gleaming forehead. The worst of the withdrawal was past him,
please, God, let it be over
, and when he woke he'd have raging flu symptoms and a craving like iron claws in his skull, but he'd be sober, and help her, before Patrick and Diana were lost.
    Pete used a washcloth to brush Jack's sweat-soaked hair away from his face, and went into the sitting room to let him sleep for as long as she could allow. She tried to eat what takeaway hadn't gone dodgy. Cold aloo gobi did nothing for the state of her stomach, nervous as a pacing cat. Ollie called, and she let her mobile ring through to voice mail, because she didn't have any answers for him.
    Pete swept up the broken glass from Terry's picture just to move, and after a second of consideration dropped the snapshot into the bin. It had been taken the day after Pete was promoted to detective inspector, and the day before Terry had asked her to marry him. A moment when things were right and good, and they were so no longer. The picture had no place now that Jack had reentered her life, and her flat.
    She straightened up Jack's other messes but she couldn't calm down. Sleeping in the middle of the day had put her at odds, plus the slumbering but screaming presence of the man himself in her bedroom.
    Finally, when she knew she'd go mad if she spent another second pacing the floor, back and forth past the bedroom door, she made up the sofa and lay in the twilight, watching the hands of the clock tick toward midnight.

----
Chapter Thirteen

    The sofa wasn't conducive to dreaming, and Pete was glad. She awoke at the first rays of the sun and put the kettle on, collecting Patrick and Diana's case files.
    She pushed open the bedroom door with her foot. "Jack?"
    He was curled on his side with the blankets kicked back, shaking and sweating as if he were being held to an invisible flame. He'd gotten worse, inexplicably so. Pete felt frustrated tears building and blinked them away.
    She juggled her two mugs and armload of folders and shook his shoulder. "Jack, wake up."
    His eyes flicked open and then he pressed his fists to his temples. "Jesus,
listen
to them all…"
    "Brought you some tea," said Pete. "I thought we might go over the case files, see if you can glean anything?" The words hung in the air, fragile, and Pete felt the tension shatter them.
    "There's a woman screaming," Jack muttered. "Over and over, screaming and rocking while she clutches the stillborn to her chest." He ground his teeth together and shouted, "Fucking
shut up
, the lot of you! You'll drive a man mad!"
    "What do you hear?" Pete asked.
    "Everything," Jack moaned. "Every dead thing that I could shut off with a hit is in my head and it's going to
explode
."
    Pete sipped at her tea because she didn't know what to say and burned her tongue. "You've always seen things, Jack?"
    "Always," he agreed, panting as his fever fluctuated between arctic and hellfire.
    "How did you shut it out, before?" Pete asked. "I know you weren't using when we knew each other."
    "Wasn't as bad," Jack muttered. "Wasn't as
loud
. I'd get flashes, see shades, kiddy stuff. Nothing… nothing like this fucking
bombardment
until… that day we were together."
    "What happened in that tomb, Jack?" Pete asked quietly. "What did we do?"