Street Magic

to face up to the mess you've caused. I, for one, think—"
    "Terry, perhaps I'm not making myself clear enough about this," Pete said softly. Terry paused.
    "Please elucidate."
    "
Sod off
!" Pete yelled into the mouthpiece, and then threw her mobile across the kitchen. She hauled the bin bag to the rubbish cart behind the building and it was as if nothing had ever happened in the flat, except for the distinct ebb and flow of the Black, just out of the corner of Pete's eyes, the aftershocks causing tiny ripples in the underground pool of magic.
    How long had she been able to feel the Black, Pete wondered, and denied it for bad dreams and shadow? How long had Jack and everything that floated around him been standing just out of view?
    Existential ponderings aside, the one fact Pete knew was that she was immeasurably tired, and wanted nothing more than a kip, but curiosity, and Jack not being about to stop her, drove her to stay awake to do a bit of snooping.
    The shadows were stretching on to evening. Pete lit the oil lamp and went to get a blanket from Jack's bedroom to wrap up in.
    Thick robes of cobwebs trailed from the ceiling in Jack's room, and the floor was littered with musty books and papers. A lone chest of drawers in the corner was the only furniture besides the mattress and scarred wardrobe.
    She put a blanket around her shoulders, and crouched to illuminate the stack of books nearest to the mattress. Most of the spines were in languages she didn't read, nor did anyone else who'd been alive in the past five hundred years, but two were in English.
Theories of Energy Magic
and
Practicum of Lesser Spirits and Their Uses
. Pete moved on to the next stack. "Mages couldn't use bloody textbooks, like everyone else," she muttered. Whatever had happened with Jack before he stormed out would not happen again, not if Pete could help it. The feeling of being the transformer on a live wire was unpleasant enough to last several lifetimes.
    Pete lofted the lamp to look for more books, catching a Poor Dead Bastards poster with curling corners on the wall opposite. She tried the drawers of the chest, found them open. "Let's see what you keep hidden," Pete muttered, half convinced that Jack would hear her, wherever he was.
    He had that odd prescient knowledge of a clever devil, one that appeared when you spoke his name.
    Herbs and crystals on leather thongs, shriveled birds' feet, a collection of vellum scraps covered over with Jack's scratchy handwriting crumpled in one corner, a marijuana pipe, and a slide whistle made up the entirety of the drawer's contents.
    "Nothing," Pete muttered. Nothing that would show why Jack had run away, again. Or why he refused to admit what had gone on when they vanquished Talshebeth.
    She sat down on Jack's dusty mattress and sneezed. It smelled like him, whisky and Parliaments and that slightly burnt scent that was his alone.
    Pete realized that all the fear and rage had left her and her limbs were lead. She scanned the pages of a few more books, making a go of it, and then gave in to her body's shouted signals to catch a few hours of sleep. If she wasn't on her game, she wouldn't be of any use to Margaret or anyone else.
    Shoving a pile of Jack's clothes off the mattress to make a space for herself, Pete heard something crackle inside the pocket of his leather jacket, the same one he'd worn the first time she'd met him. Pete pulled out a many-times-creased piece of vellum, greasy and frayed at the edges.
    Pete Caldecott
221 Croydon Place, #32
London
    Pete's hand shook as she recognized her old address, the one she'd lived at with Connor until he'd taken sick, but hadn't moved to until several years after she'd lost contact with Jack. The paper was worn enough and the ink faded to believe it was a decade old. Jack had found her and held this scrap, but he'd never come to her, never written or called. He'd just kept this little bit of information near his heart.
    She stared for a moment longer, and then Pete threw back the blanket. She was tired, of Jack's contradictions and his secrets. She pulled on her shoes and coat and left the flat, leaving the door unlocked as usual in case Jack came home.

----
Chapter Thirty-three

    Pete walked through Spitalfields, feet ringing off the cobbles that the Ripper's shadow had stalked one hundred twenty years before. She let herself be pulled from street to street, through pocket parks and alleys until she fetched up at a rusted iron gate. A padlock