Street Magic

dragged Pete to a metal security door and worked the handle clumsily with his free hand. One limb was small and boyish with manicured nails and the other was flat and scarred; a dock worker's hand.
    The operating theater was a catacomb, buried long before the town house sat atop it, slimy stone steps leading down to the round killing floor. Pete skidded and fell the last three steps, landing in a heap. The servant kicked her in the stomach, rolling her along like a lumpy carpet.
    Pete felt something prick her as she hit the opposite wall of the stone chamber. A numbness spread over a patch of skin on her hip and she slipped her hand into her trouser pocket. The syringe she'd taken away from Jack greeted her, cap loosened and tip dripping. The golem dragged a heavy pair of shackles from their bolt in the wall toward her, moaning softly to himself.
    When he came near, reaching for her arms with a grasping gesture, Pete rolled over and jammed the syringe into the inside of the golem's thigh, where a fat artery would have pulsed in life.;
    The golem shuddered and let out a choked sound that was almost a sob. He took one more shambling step and collapsed backward.
    Pete pulled herself up on the ragged blocks of the wall and checked for injuries. She was bruised but not bleeding, her knees and the back of one hand scraped from the fall. She made the executive decision that she'd live, and stepped over the downed creature to fix on a door.
    The operating theater had iron shackles bolted into the walls at intervals along the curve of the stones and a modern drain set into the floor over a steel autopsy table. Blood trickled down the table's grooves, an insistent hollow dripping against the damp stone.
    On the tabletop, a half-assembled golem blinked milky eyes as a spinal cord waiting for hips and legs twitched like a tail. Pete skirted it as widely as she could, but the eyes still rolled after her and teeth unfettered by a tongue chattered.
    Just beyond the table was a door, iron bubbled with rust and age. It had no visible handle that Pete could see, and she pried her fingers into the cracks at the edge and only succeeded in bloodying her nails. "Sod your aunt," she hissed in frustration.
    The ceiling of the theater had no skylight or vent, and the walls, for all their age, were bricked tightly with mortar and moss. The golem on the table hissed at Pete, jerking its arms as it tried to reach for her.
    Pete leaned against the wall and shut her eyes, trying to keep her panic in check enough so that she wouldn't scream. She'd be all right. One way or another, she'd be all right.
    Jack, should have listened to Jack, should have known that you running off would go this way. Now what will you do
? All of the normal whispers and shivers of magic that Pete had come to recognize in her renewed time with Jack faded in the operating theater and her skin felt slick with something else, cold and silken as spoiled milk.
    This is the Black. People die here, and usually because someone's decided to kill them.
    "Shut up, Jack. Since when are you bloody right about anything?" Pete muttered. She tried her mobile, got no signal underground, and paced a few times, keeping clear of the golem. She was truly, properly fucked. Trapped in here until Grinchley or Perkins decided what to do with her.
    "They'll find my bones when they knock-mis place down to make a motorway," Pete said. The golem keened and hissed. "Be quiet!" Pete shouted at it, because it was better than crying in frustration.
    A groaning and scrabbling began from outside the iron door, and Pete steeled herself for anything, but Perkins appeared, pushing open the massive gate with some effort.
    He caught sight of the first golem, still and spent on the floor. "Oh," Perkins said. "Oh, dear."
    Pete snatched up a scalpel from the rolling tray by the surgery, which also held bundles of half-rotted herbs and a black candle smeared in blood alongside the precise row of instruments, and stepped into Perkin's view. "He was a lightweight."
    Perkins turned to her, his eyes glittering. "Do you have any idea how long it takes to animate one of those, you stupid girl? You've cost me
months
."
    Pete allowed herself a smirk that she did not feel. "Well, it's not exactly a model airplane, is it?"
    Snarling, Perkins raised his hand, black mist crackling with ice trailing from his fingertips. "Pain," he said simply, and Pete felt every muscle, every tendon and joint in her, seize with the worst kind