Street Magic

going to try and bash our skulls in?"
    "No," said Jack. "Not his style."
    "Thank God for small favors," said Pete.
    They got off the tube at Charing Cross and walked up the center of a nearby mews, the slick cobbles ringing under Pete's boot heels. Big Ben chimed eleven o'clock in the distance, amplified in the mist so that it echoed from every direction. Pete could smell the Thames, the wet rotting atmosphere that soaked into brick and clothing and hair.
    "This way," said Jack, his Parliament springing to life without the aid of a light. Pete blinked. Jack exhaled and held out the fag. "Care for a taste?"
    "I'm quitting," Pete said perversely. Jack laughed, and it turned into a cough.
    "Bloody hell. I hate this fucking wet weather."
    "Move to Arizona, then," Pete snapped. The row houses got older, arched and leaded windows staring out black and blank into the night. Pete caught movement in the corner of her vision and whipped her head to the left. A woman in black latex that gleamed like bloody skin and a man in an Arsenal jersey disappeared into an alley.
    Jack snorted. "Didn't peg you for an easy shock, Caldecott."
    Pete stopped in the street and crossed her arms. "I'm not, Jack. I came after you, didn't I? And on that matter, I am not going another step until you tell me what the bloody hell is going on."
    Jack rolled his eyes at her, taking a long drag on his cigarette. "Anyone ever told you you're too damned stubborn for your own good?"
    "Constantly," said Pete. "What is this?"
    Jack sighed. "Pete, I told you the night you found me that I only had one condition for doing this, yeah?"
    "You did," Pete agreed cautiously.
    "I asked you to believe me," said Jack. "So believe me now when I say I can't tell you where we're going and who we're meeting. You're just going to have to hold your knickers on and see." He turned with a ripple of fog and tobacco smoke and kept walking. Pete swore under her breath and followed, trying to ignore the roiling in her stomach that told her dark things were on their heels, just outside the pools of streetlamp light.
    Once or twice she heard a snuffling and squealing, nails clacking on paving stones. She kept her eyes on the uneven blond spikes of Jack's hair and didn't look back.
    Then Big Ben chimed midnight.
    Pete stopped and cocked her head, listening to the bell ring through to twelve and telling herself she was crazy, or the clock was faulty, or that
something
logical and sane was going on here.
    "You heard it," Jack stated. Pete sighed and stopped trying to pretend. Clocks that chimed midnight at half-eleven and shadow creatures were what Jack asked of her. So be it.
    "I did." She nodded. "What does that mean?"
    Jack dropped his Parliament to the stones. It hissed and went out as he ground it under his heel. "It means we're here."

----
Chapter Twenty

    Jack led Pete up a side passage, not even wide enough for the Mini to squeeze through, to a squat stone building with a red door bound in iron.
    "They expecting an invasion?" Pete said, gesturing at the entry.
    "The three bands means this is neutral territory," said Jack. "The iron is to keep out Fae."
    "Fae," Pete echoed. "You mean fairies."
    "Kindly folk," said Jack. "Shining ones. Unseelie. Call 'em what you will, nobody here wants the treacherous little buggers in their pub."
    "And just where is 'here'?" Pete asked.
    Jack took her lightly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. Calm, they were icy as a glacier under a cloud-covered sky. "We're in their place now, Pete. It's nearly always midnight and the things from your nightmares are crawling in the shadows."
    "And I'm supposed to be frightened, after seeing you murder somebody casually less than a day ago?" Pete demanded, moving his hands off her ungently.
    He grabbed her again, and slammed Pete against the outside wall of the pub hard enough to make breath leave her lungs. She struggled, and Jack locked his bony fingers against her flesh, more than enough to bruise. "This is not the daytime world that you know, Pete," he said, his voice grating like he'd just smoked a pack of unfiltered. "This is the Black. It is a hard realm with little mercy for the unprepared. People die here, Pete, and it's usually because someone else has decided to kill them. It is
the way things are
. If you can't stomach the truth then go back now."
    Pete's heart danced, scraping her rib cage with panic. She allowed none of it to show on her face, raising her eyes to the sky and inhaling a