Street Magic

Everyone sees it. Except you." He pushed back from the desk and stood. "And that's the whole of it." Ollie walked away and Pete sat in her own chair, hard enough to send electricity up her spine.
    Jack and Connor gibbered at her, reminding her that she was blinded to all but herself, blinded as surely as Patrick, Diana, and Bridget Killigan. Connor stared up at her accusingly from his hospital bed, his eyes peeling her skin back to the fault underneath. Jack proffered his bruised and bloodied arms, a supplicant even as he depressed the plunger of the disposable syringe.
    Connor wasn't a man given to fancy. Therapists and pills were his answer to Pete's nightmares, when she'd lost Jack. MG was the one who wanted to see magic, and never could, whose silence spoke volumes as Pete choked down small chalky Xanax and tried to pretend everything was normal.
    "
When you see a nightmare
," Juniper Caldecott said, resting her hand on Pete's head, "
you just look it right in the face and you make it go away
."
    For the first time since she'd packed her two teal Sam-sonites and left Connor, Pete, and MG, Pete wished her mother were still about. Juniper with her altars and her sage scent and her smiles like warm scarves on cold days could have exorcised these ghosts.
    "Typical," she muttered, shoving case files around in an effort to occupy her hands if her mind insisted on wandering.
    Pete was only aware of DCI Newell standing over her with his long and disapproving shadow after he'd said her name several times. His face was pinched when she finally looked up.
    "There's been another kidnapping, Caldecott," he said, holding out a jacket. "I need you to interview the victim's mother immediately."
    Pete slid her chair back a bit too quickly, stumbling over her own feet. "Yes, sir. Right away."
    Newell studied her, with a stare he probably imagined was penetrating. It had all the effect on Pete of a moth against her cheek. She had that feeling of floating, one she recognized now as the aftereffect of any time in Jack's presence. When she'd walked in the fog with him something had
released
, a spyhole in the battlement of something immense and still and floating, that Pete had run her fingers through but never immersed in.
    She was half in and half out of Jack's world now, and the real one seemed pale beside it.
    "Caldecott," Newell said, "if you don't wrap this nasty business up rather quickly, I'm going to be forced to suggest a leave. And may I remind you, you've already used up several days' worth of personal time gallivanting with this informant of yours."
    At least he didn't also hint that if Pete were put on leave, she'd be making an involuntary appointment with a psychiatrist. Pete ripped the file out of his hands and shoved it into her tote. "My report will be in your box as soon as possible, guv."
    "Inspector…" Newell started, but Pete was already banging aside the swinging doors, running out as blindly as Jack had the night before, that immense stirring in her head brewing into a storm.
    The file said the missing girl was called Margaret Smythe, and her picture was candid and unsmiling. Straight hair framed a heart face and immense eyes the color of an angry tiger's.
    Pete read the single sheet three times, committing it to memory before she cranked open the Mini's door and mounted the steps of the Smythes' semidetached home. She was on a quiet street in Bromley, would not be here were it not for Margaret's strange, invisible, and inexplicable disappearance from within a brick house with all the windows and doors locked.
    She stilled herself, mind and body, and let the imitation brass knocker fall twice. The door opened after someone scrabbled with dead bolts for a few seconds. Margaret Smythe's mother was blond and lovely despite deep blue half-moons painted in the skin under her eyes and fine lines of desperation wrought at the corners of her mouth.
    "Mrs. Smythe," said Pete, flashing her warrant card and badge. "DI Caldecott from the Metropolitan Police Service. May I come in?"
    "It's Ms.," said Margaret's mother, her eyes roving past Pete and out onto the pavement, searching for any shadow out of place. "Ms. Smythe. I don't understand, the police were already here… I gave my information and they did fuck-all and went away again."
    "Yes, I know the local bureau have already been around," said Pete with what she hoped was a soothing demeanor. She didn't think she managed it, because Ms. Smythe's face pinched.
    "We've