Street Magic

to get him and his sausage stink away than anything. She didn't want to see Jack nodding in the back booth of some cut-rate goth club. She didn't want to see the fresh needle marks. But she set the parking brake and locked the Mini and walked down the damp bricks to the small black door of the Four Horsemen.
    It wasn't like she could do anything else. Jack drew you in, inexorably, like the orbit of a dying star. And besides, she owed him a smack for running off.
    The pub—it was a pub, not a club or a dodgy bar—was dark and smelled like damp rot with an overtone of grease baked onto every surface. Jack's bleached head flashed under the half-dark fluorescent tube lights, dipping toward a glass. A bird's bill and a bird's body in the shadows, dark-feathered wings and gleaming eyes.
    "Another girl is missing," said Pete without preamble when she reached his table. Jack raised his head, red-shot eyes and a blurry smile swimming into view.
    "Knew you'd come looking for me."
    Pete took the glass out of his hand, the gesture feeling as if it were carved in granite. "You're drunk."
    "Very good, Inspector." He grabbed a green bottle with a black label and swigged directly. "I am pissed, in body and spirit, and I will continue to crawl inside this whisky bottle until that bloke in the corner with the slit throat shuts up about his mother."
    Pete glanced over her shoulder. The corner booth was empty. "You're not fixing."
    "Aren't we the bright penny," Jack slurred, taking another drink. Pete grabbed him by the arm, but he slipped it and batted at her. "No, Inspector, this time we're not making any clever deals. No threats and no banter. You shot your bolt with me and while in a moment of insanity I may have asked for your help, I now fully agree that I am worthless to the world at large. You've put me in my place, right and proper."
    Pete grabbed Jack's bottle and upended it, letting the whisky flow out into his lap. He yelped and jumped up, the amber stain spreading like a gut shot. "Stop sodding crying," Pete told him. "Another girl is missing."
    "So?" Jack muttered, slumping squishily back into his seat. Pete waved at the lurking publican.
    "Coffee. Black and hot as you can make it. So, Jack, she was like you. Or at least had the potential to be."
    As if she'd dropped him in a porcelain tub of ice, the unfocused sorrow flowed out of Jack's face and the edge, sharp as a flick-knife, returned. "Are you sure?"
    "I wouldn't be in this bloody place if I wasn't," Pete said. "What in bugger-all is that
smell
?"
    "It's kidney pie every lunch hour. Specialty of the house," Jack said. "The girl. How old?"
    "Ten," said Pete. "Her name is Margaret—"
    Jack cut the air with a finger. "I don't care what her name is." The publican slammed down a dingy cup of coffee in a saucer with sugar and cream packets tottering at his elbow. Jack swigged it and made a face. "Bloody hell. Could strip paint off your motor, that. What's really important is the significant."
    "What's a significant?" Pete said.
    "Novices usually have something around them, an animal or a piece of the earth, a physical piece of the magic that they can cling to. Anything in the room, feathers or odd rocks or a pet poisonous spider?"
    Pete closed her eyes and rotated slowly through Margaret's room, the pink bedspread worn thin, the secondhand desk. The little girl's mobile over the bed, gently drifting make-believe constellations that repeated in paint on the ceiling.
    "Stars," she said. "A star. They were on everything. Pink, mostly, if that makes a difference."
    Jack swore into his coffee. "What kind of star?"
    "Five-pointed," said Pete. "Just a usual star."
    "Not usual," said Jack. "The star is the witch, a white practitioner and a channel for pure energy. A bloody open line to the white side of the next world."
    "I'm not going to like where this is going," Pete stated. Already she felt it, the dark undertow of magic against her skin. The thing that blinded children, that ate their memories and their life force, laughed at her quietly from the corner of her dream crypt. "The girl was drawing symbols on her walls. She said Fae were after her."
    Jack lifted a shoulder. "Probably are, but this thing isn't a Fae. They have their rules and their ceremonies and their love of shine and innocence, but what's taken the girl isn't Fae, and we've got bigger problems now than those little bastards. If whatever is out there starts feeding on Megan—"
    "Margaret."
    "Bloody whatever.