Street Magic

see. He shook himself and spoke. "To seek that which is lost." There was ritual behind the words the demon and Jack were speaking, and the demon gave a pleasurable shudder when Jack answered correctly.
    "First we will strike an accord, a promise of tasting blood if the oath is broken. Only then do I seek your lost object."
    "Fair enough," said Jack with a shrug. "Here." He thrust the box with the erstwhile Mrs. Towne's limb closer for the demon's examination. The demon caressed it in a hand with odd-shaped nails and uneven fingers of every color, patchier even than Grinchley's flesh golems.
    "I grant you the product of man's strongest desire," said Jack, yanking the box away from the demon's ministrations. "To honor Talshebeth, the keeper of lost things."
    Pete saw that the demon—Talshebeth—had a stitched-together scalp with wildly disparate patches of hair. He was hunchbacked and clothed in castoff rags sewn into a bright coat and had bowed legs swaddled in what appeared to be a thousand pairs of stockings. Wedding bands, dozens of them, rode his thin fingers down to the first knuckle. Across his neck stretched a crude string of baby teeth.
    "As all things lost are my domain," said Talshebeth, blinking ragged lashes over a pair of chipped glass eyes. "I accept your payment. Tell me what you seek."
    "The wandering spirit of Margaret Smythe," said Jack. "And the name of the one imprisoning her."
    Talshebeth laughed, the sound of a carefree child with an amusing pastime, tinged in tears for what could never be retrieved. "And for this, crow-mage, you call a named demon? You have indeed fallen prey to human time's passage. You are old.
You
have lost your prime."
    "Don't start up that shite with me," Jack snapped. "Tell me where the girl is or the only way you'll get the hand is when you're wanking off to it with all of the other sodding old-timers, while it lies safe and sound in my loving care."
    Talshebeth's eyes turned on Pete. "And you, young and unspoiled," he murmured. "The weight of loss hangs heavy over your tiny bones. Connor Caldecott," he recited suddenly, as if a faded memory had just been washed clean. "Beloved father. Born 2 March 1941, died 12 January 2003.
May angels usher you on to paradise
."
    "Pete," Jack said, "don't listen to it.
You
," he snarled at Talshebeth, "deal with
me
."
    "But of course," said Talshebeth with a wide smile made entirely of rotted and rusted wood and ivory false teeth. A maggot worked its way into one of the gaps, but Talshebeth did not seem to notice. "I live to serve, crow-mage. However, a search of this magnitude requires some expenditure of power, so if you were to release me from this crude circle…"
    "Forget it, you hunchbacked devil," Jack said. "You can work just fine inside the circle, where the nice copper barrier keeps your sodding teeth out of my flesh."
    At the street four stories down, the fire escape rattled, and a few chips of plaster floated down around Pete's head. Her senses pricked her, and she was distracted from Talshebeth long enough to feel the encroachment of something black and otherworldly send ripples through her feet and up to the center of fear in her stomach.
    "Jack…"
    "Quiet, Pete!" he hissed. "My concentration's shot to hell as it is. You're not helping."
    Talshebeth chuckled quietly. "She makes you lose things, crow-mage. Your composure, sanity, maybe your life. I fancy her."
    "Tell me where Margaret Smythe is," Jack warned, "and do it in the next five seconds or I am going to take out an already extraordinarily shitty day on you."
    The fire escape rattled again, and before Pete could grab Jack and force him to pay attention, the dark sensation was
there
. And then something smashed through one of the arched windows, striking the floor and setting off a flash like a phosphorous grenade. Pete shouted and leaped away from the wall as the rest of the glass exploded inward and five black-clad hooligans in masks and leather coats came through.
    One of them went straight for Jack and he dropped the Trifold Focus as the far larger man slammed into his back.
    "Get out of here, Pete!" Jack shouted just before the man fetched a punch across his head.
    Pete did run—she went straight for the kitchen, one drawer left of the sink, and pulled out Jack's squat cast-iron frying pan. One of the hooligans came chasing behind her, and she swung at him, missing his head and glancing the blow off his shoulder.
    He was holding something black and