Street Magic

smoking, his platinum spikes flattened on one side from where he'd slept. She stood the same distance from Jack now that she'd stood from him across the circle in the tomb. Nothing flowed over her skin now. The ripples underneath her thoughts were quiet. Jack hadn't lied to her.
    Pete went and sat down next to him, pulling out her own pack of fags. "All right, then," she said, lighting hers off the end of Jack's. "How does one call a demon?"

PART TWO
The Black
    "It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?"
    —Bram Stoker,
Dracula

----
Chapter Twenty-four

    Pete took Jack home, put the kettle on, and made two mugs. "Sugar. No cream."
    Jack accepted the mug and took a sip, then yelped. "Bloody hell, that's burning hot!"
    "It's just come off the boil, ninny," Pete said, blowing across the surface of her own tea. Jack pulled a pout.
    " 'M not a ninny."
    Pete stirred her own mug. "I'm sorry, I must have been thinking of another mage." She let herself smile, and felt a jump against her rib cage when Jack returned it, a brief flicker like a kiss of flame.
    Jack dropped his eyes and dug in his jacket pocket, finding a scrap of vellum paper and a pencil. "Going to need some things for what's ahead. You'll have to take me to the Kings Road."
    A memory of a basement shop fragrant with spices and spiderwebbed with intermingling magics stirred. Pete swallowed and nodded. Margaret. Bridget, Patrick, and Diana. Forget the rest. "Fine."
    "And there's the matter of getting my hands on a Trifold Focus," Jack said. Pete stopped her tea mid-sip.
    "You don't have one?"
    Jack laughed. "No, Pete. No, I don't happen to have one of those lying about."
    "What's so bloody amusing? How do we get one?" said Pete. "Buy it?"
    Jack snorted. "Would that it were that simple."
    "Mosswood made it sound simple," Pete muttered. Mosswood was straight ahead and trusting, solid as an oak. Jack shifted his gaze to his list. He was movable as Mosswood was still, the wind through the sacred grove.
    "The only Trifold Focus I know of is in the private collection of a bloke called Travis Grinchley," Jack said.
    "Grinchley not the lending type?" Pete guessed. Jack smiled, a predatory showing of teeth.
    "The last man who stole from him floated up in the Thames two weeks later, with his eyes and his tongue missing."
    "Could be worse," said Pete gamely. Jack stuck his pencil behind his ear.
    "They cut out his tongue to make room for his heart to be shoved in."
    "Oh."
    "Yeah."
    "So what's your grand plan?" said Pete. The sitting room had darkened as the fog outside turned from daytime silver to nighttime velvet. She flicked on the nearest lamp and shadows sprang to life on the walls.
    "Grinchley will never give it over willingly," said Jack. "And you'd be mad to fuck with a collector of dark magics. So that leaves outright treachery and low dealings."
    "You look awfully happy about that," said Pete.
    Jack smiled, dropping her a wink. "As if I'd be anything else, luv."
    "Still haven't told me the great trick to get the Focus away from this Grinchley person." Pete lifted an eyebrow, her motherly gesture, used on teenaged shoplifters and errant schoolchildren. Jack scribed a circle in the air with his finger.
    "We'll just twist him, luv. Give him a bit of street magic and shift the thing right out from under him. A minor entity of some sort should do the trick."
    "More summoning." Pete felt a ball of something hard and unpleasant grow just under her heart. "Jack…"
    "Pete." He closed his hand into a fist. "This is what I did, very well, for quite a time before I met you. Let me do my work. You promised."
    "I promised to listen to your rot," Pete shot back. "I didn't promise bugger-all about this idiotic idea you have to steal from a man who slices out people's hearts."
    "Translocation," said Jack. "My idiot idea is transloca-tion. I never have to get within a hundred meters of the man and I'll be done with the Focus before Grinchley even realizes it's missing. Devil knows he has enough arcane shite in his musty old house."
    Think of Margaret
, Connor whispered.
Think of every night after you find her dead and cold if you don't listen to Jack
. "I just hope I can," Pete muttered.
    "What?" Jack said distractedly. He stood up and sorted through the armload of books Pete had brought to him, paging through the index of the
Dictionary of Unfriendly