Street Magic

air tasted different, like just before a lightning storm.
    "Makes no difference now, apparently," Jack grumbled in disgust.
    "I'm just having a bloody hard time believing those two kids arranged this entire thing, and had the stomach to blind three children," said Pete.
    "They didn't," said Jack. "Sorcerers are the outsourced labor of magic—where there's a sorcerer, there's something jerking the strings and often as not it's something hungry and not human."
    "Who would they be working for, then?" Pete said. "Tell me what I need to know to catch this bastard, Jack."
    He drew on his pint and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand before he spoke. "I will say, those two were a deal more experienced than your bottom-level eclectic who stumbles into magic because he read some dusty book out of the library and is slagged off at life. The one who set you on your arse had talent."
    "Wasted talent, seeing as he's
dead
," Pete muttered.
    "Bugger, Pete, are we back to that already?" Jack rolled his eyes and emptied his pint, catching the publican's eye for another.
    Pete made herself consider: If the sorcerer had been a Russian mafiya thug with a black-market gun, and he'd shot at Jack, would she have hesitated before she took the gun away and spent three shells in the man's heart? She would not. "I'll let it go for now," she told Jack. "But that better have been the first person you did in, Jack. If I find out this is a habit…"
    "The first in a very long time," said Jack, holding up a hand to stop her. "Death follows me and I do my best to keep a hand's-breadth ahead, but it doesn't always work. You've seen direct evidence of that."
    Pete nodded. "For the time being, I'll take that as at least partial truth. Who do you believe is giving the orders to snatch the children? And why children?"
    "Aside from the fact that they're small and fit snug in the boot of a car?"
    Pete glared at him. Jack's mouth curved on one side. "You need to grow back that amputated sense of humor, Inspector. The Yard's got it locked in a box."
    "Talk, Jack," Pete snapped. "You don't enjoy my company—you've made that much clear—so let's get this done as quickly as possible. Someone-or-thing who likes to mutilate children is still out there." How she would convince Ollie and DCI Newell of that fact was a bridge she'd build later.
    "Fine, fine," he said. "Children are life. Vitality. Innocence. What have you. Some things, some hungry eldritch things, feed on it. They take away everything that keeps a child's soul unstained and when they've sucked the husk dry they take that vitality and they use it to make themselves strong again. Like taking all the blood and life from an unwilling donor, with side effects black enough to drive the donor mad."
    We went to see the old Cold Man
… -
    "What could it be, Jack?"
    "Could be a lot of things. A more powerful sorcerer's flesh construct. A psychic feeder—someone who has the sight like me, but they give a touch along with their look." He rubbed his chin, making a sandpaper sound with his fingers against the dark stubble there. "But if it's taking children, it's probably an entity. A nonhuman, which means that you don't fuck about with it unless you want your sanity and soul siphoned out."
    "Insane" would be Pete's definition for the entire evening up to this point, but she merely nodded because Jack seemed so relaxed and sure of his words, for the first time since she'd seen him again. "How do we find it? And stop it in its tracks?"
    "Not easy," said Jack. "But I'll do it all the same. This beastie, this ghostly twat, seems to think that I'm awfully easy to tromp over and kick into the gutter for the sweepers. Tosser." He slammed his empty pint glass down. "It's my own fault, but no more—now I'm on the bloody warpath. Nobody dismisses me that easily."
    "Why did you start looking for a fix?" Pete asked abruptly.
    "If things were so sodding wonderful, why did you chuck it?"
    Jack regarded her for a long time, not with the burning fury of before but with a sadness, the expression of someone looking back through a photo album of much happier times. "I was alone, Pete. Alone with none but the dead for company. At the time it seemed like the only way to keep meself from going insane," he said. "And it still does."
    Pete felt an uncomfortable prickle down her spine as she saw the desire for a fix pass over Tack's face and alight in his reddened eyes. Here he was, wielding something akin to an Uzi with the