Street Magic

or spooky taking place.
    And then something did.
    Pete felt the
pull
, the separation of things that were comfortable and real from the dark place behind her eyes. Something was swirling up, through the layers of the veil between Pete and Jack and what lay beyond, and she could almost see it, a welter of black smoke growing in the center of the circle as Jack raised his voice, chanting rhythmically now that the fruits of his spell were visible. The chalk lines clung like bone fingers, holding the smoke-shape in place.
    Jack's eyes flamed blue as the spell snapped into place, and the fire traveled over the planes of his cheeks and his arms and hands and blossomed all around him as Pete gasped, and the thing in the circle grew more and more solid.
    The shape was human, a wicker man of smoke. The chalk lines did not hold it for more than a moment, and it fixated on Pete, eyeless but staring through her all the same. And then it was moving, in a straight and inexorable line, right for her. The primitive cold in her gut told Pete something was horribly wrong.
    "Jack?" Her voice was high and unrecognizable to her own ears. The wicker man had a face now, and hints of silver in its eye sockets, and hands with impossibly long fingers that reached out,
clawed
at her. Whispers crowded Pete's brain, and a pressure fell on her skull so unbearable that she screamed, loudly.
    And Jack, where was Jack? He stood watching the smoke with a measured eye, as if Pete were the mouse and he were the python enthusiast.
    "Jack," she said again, summoning every steady nerve in her body to speak. "What is it?"
    He bent to one knee and quickly chalked a symbol on the floor. "
Binasctha
," he breathed.
    The wicker man stumbled, like a drunk or a man who just had a heavy load thrown on him. But he walked still, one foot straight in front of the other.
    "Ah, tits," hissed Jack. He rechalked the symbol, and still the wicker man walked.
    "
Jack."
She said it loudly, echoingly so, the first fissures of real panic opening in her gut.
    "Shut it, will you!" he demanded. Pete saw from his expression that he was finally catching on to what she knew—never mind how; it had fallen into her head when that terrible pressure had eased, like waking up and suddenly knowing the answer to last night's math homework. She just knew, as if she'd experienced this ritual a thousand times before, that Jack's magic was awry and now the smoke man was awake and walking the world.
    "Is that all you can say?" she cried. "Jack, do something!"
    He tried. Pete would always say that, when she had to talk about the day, even though her memories of the whole event were thin and unreliable by choice. He tried. And when Jack tried to keep the wicker man from her, all that he got for his efforts was screaming, and blackness, and blood.

----
Chapter Two

    The sign on the building, half off its hinges, optimistically proclaimed hotel. Underneath, in smaller gold script that had faded, "Grand Montresor."
    The tiny purple asters grew all around the crumbling concrete steps, forcing their way out of the cracks in a great spray of example for nature versus man.
    Pete stepped over them, careful to avoid crushing any blossoms, and pushed her way into bleach-scented gloom. The Montresor, like the whole of the block around it, had seen better days and couldn't remember exactly when they were. It stood out like a dark pock on the face of Bloomsbury, and Pete wondered why information always had to be garnered in the filthiest, most shadowy places of her city.
    A clerk straight out of
The Vampyre
ruffled his
Hello
! magazine in annoyance when Pete came to reception. "Yeah?"
    "Could you tell me about the person staying in room twenty-six?" Pete said, trying to sound bright and official. It took more than a forced smile and a chipper tone to garner a reaction from the clerk, for he just grunted.
    Pete unfolded the note Oliver Heath, her desk mate at the Metropolitan Police, had handed her. "Grand Montresor, Bloomsbury by King's Cross. Room 26 @ 3 p.m."
    "Said he had information on the Killigan child-snatching." Ollie had shrugged, the gesture expansive as his Midlands drawl, when she'd questioned him. "Said that the lead inspector were to come alone, and not be late."
    Bridget Killigan. Six years old. Disappeared from her primary-school playground when her father was late fetching her. In normal cases Pete advised the parents to be hopeful, that children were usually found, that nothing would