Street Magic

Hrathetoth rasped. "She did not cast it. She is not protected from what breaks through."
    Jack looked back at Pete like he'd just remembered she was still about. "So she isn't," he said after a long moment. He breathed in, nostrils flaring, and the witchfire went out. "All right, you fuzzy little bugger, you got me on a technicality. But don't think we won't be speaking again." He let go of the imp and said in a bored tone, "I release you, return no more until you are called."
    Hrathetoth vanished with a pop of palpable relief. Jack rubbed his hands over his face and got to his feet. "Sodding Hellspawn."
    "So there's no chance, then," Pete said. "This Grinchley has the Trifold Focus and the next time I see Margaret, she'll be like the others."
    "The girl will be
dead
," said Jack. "The beastie will suck her dry. The other children, there wasn't much there except innocence and maybe a few echoes of talent from some great-great-ancestor to feed on. Molly—"
    "Margaret," said Pete.
    "Whatever. She's one of us."
    "Us." Pete arched an eyebrow. Jack waved a hand.
    "I mean like me. With her significant, she's likely a witch—if she were touching dark magic she'd be skinning cats and setting other children's jumpers on fire."
    "There's a difference." Pete was honestly surprised. "'Mage' and 'sorcerer' not just a semantic thing?"
    " 'Course there's a difference," Jack snorted. "Different as punk and disco."
    Pete started to say how that was a pretty poor analogy, but Jack held up a hand. "Simply: Witches work with light energy. Sorcerers work with nightmares."
    "And mages?" asked Pete.
    "Mages dip in both," said Jack. "We're in the shadows, but not the dark." He shook his shoulders, as though he'd just taken a hit of speed. "Calling Hrathetoth was quite the workout. Energy's still up. Want to see a trick?"
    "No," said Pete, feeling her lips twitch. Just for a second, she glimpsed the Jack from a dozen years ago, without the long shadow that lay across him in the present.
    "Come on," said Jack, taking her hand. "Humor me a bit. Take your mind off the missing girl."
    "Nothing will do that," Pete said from experience. She'd dreamed of victims for months afterward—battered wives, stolen children, decimated spirits that clung to her, tearing at her hair and hissing all through her unwaking hours. Pete woke screaming so often that Terry had invested in earplugs.
    Jack cupped her hand, palm upward, and conjured a spurt of witchfire in his fingers. He blew a breath over it and the fire flared and drifted upward, settling like milkweed into Pete's palm. It turned the shape of a daisy, then a tiny, perfect oak tree, and finally a duck.
    Pete bit the inside of her cheeks and looked up into his face. Jack was grinning at her. "How can you be dour when you've got a tiny duck?" he asked.
    She laughed, short, but it was the first real laughter that had come since she'd found Jack again. "You're bloody weird, Jack Winter."
    "I'm that," he said. "Ask anybody." The fire duck snapped its bill and ruffled its wings. Pete held her hand out, watching the witchfire burn, when suddenly the duck blurred and lost cohesion as if acid had been poured over it. The fire began to
seep
, to travel inward, through her skin, lighting it from the inside so the bones of her hand stood out as if she'd been struck by lightning.
    A heat like a crematory furnace raced up Pete's arm, into her head and heart, and she screamed before everything exploded behind her eyes and she collapsed, the only sensation the shrieking feedback inside her skull.
    The black bird spread its wings before Pete, and she knew this wasn't like the other dream. She was cold, and the spider-legged sensation of being in the wrong world crawled over her.
    No longer in the Stygian darkness, she stood on the hilltop of a windswept battlefield, hundreds of bodies inkblots against blood-sodden grass.
    The crawling of magic resolved into a hooded figure with wings and a dark face. The bird cried, the force of the cold and the malevolence in its voice pushing Pete backward. She found herself pinned by glowing yellow eyes and a woman's red mouth parted to show a raven's beak.
    This is not your place. You are unwelcome here.
    The black bird's talons closed around her heart and Pete tasted her own blood frozen on her tongue, and in her ears, cawing laughter fell.
    "Take it." The shrouded man's tatters whipped in the wind from the black bird's wings, which beat up smoke from the burial fires all