Street Magic

wake me up right quick."
    Hattie jumped up when Pete came back into the flat. "Jack, what's up? Can we get out of here, already? You know being out the Black always gives me fucking hives."
    "Pete is going to be joining us," Jack said, shrugging into his jacket. The screaming skull on the back leered at Pete. Hattie worried her lower lip, fingers picking idly at the hair on her opposite arm.
    "Why?"
    "Because I said so, Hattie." Jack stuck a Parliament between his lips but didn't light it.
    Pete watched Jack, and Hattie, and the look that passed between them. Jack had shifted again, this time into an edgy, aggressive mode that made him square his shoulders and jut his jaw. Hattie folded in on herself even more.
    "She don't blend in," she finally muttered. "Like a new penny in the collection box. She'll pox up the whole thing."
    "Either you two leave off talking about me like I'm deaf or I can take your skinny arse to rot the night in jail," Pete told Hattie. She turned on Jack. "That goes for you, too."
    "Except my skinny arse is cute." Jack winked at her. Hattie glared at Pete from under bruise-colored lids.

----
Chapter Thirty-five

    "This might take some time," Jack said to Pete as they walked along the narrow high street outside Jack's flat. "We're going to have to go into the Black." He looked down at her. "Not that you seem to have a problem with that any longer."
    "I do what I have to," said Pete shortly. "You wouldn't tell me the truth."
    Jack laughed once. "I have to remember you're not sixteen any longer."
    "Not for some time," Pete said. She felt a breath of wind and then suddenly it was full night and they were walking past grated and boarded-up storefronts, hunched shapes sleeping on the grates that vented the underground. A prehensile tail twitched out from under a ratty red blanket.
    "It's just up here," Hattie called from ahead of them.
    "That was easy," Pete remarked.
    "In-between places," said Jack. "Those alleys that no one ever looks down. All of Whitechapel is thin, makes it easy to pass back and forth."
    "I'm just telling you now, we don't have much time," said Pete. "Less than twelve hours if it's keeping to the same line as with the other three children."
    "Time goes differently in the Black," Jack said. "Slows down, goes backward or forward."
    "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Pete asked.
    Jack reached the metal security door that Hattie was standing in front of, her hands and shoulders twitching.
    "No," Jack said. "Once I came in for a pint and walked out at breakfast time three days hence." He slid the door back on its rollers and gestured Pete inside. "After you, luv."
    They walked down, on a set of slippery metal stairs through air that smelled like piss and sweat, droplets of moisture shaken from pipes overhead by throbbing bass.
    "What exactly are we hoping to accomplish by coming here?" Pete asked Jack, raising her voice to be heard over the muffled music.
    Hattie threw open the door and a profundo remix of "Don't Like the Drugs" smacked into Pete like a brick.
    "An impression!" Jack shouted, and then they were inside.
    The basement room could have been Fiver's, with the walls painted black and the tiny raised stage space replaced by an emaciated DJ and blocky turntables. And the people, close together in sticky knots, sliding up and down to the clotted beat of the music—they were different.
    A hand closed around her wrist and she looked over to see Jack grimacing. "Are you all right?" she mouthed at him. A ring of white had appeared around his lips and his eyes were almost colorless.
    "Too many bodies," he muttered in her ear. "Too many spirits. Wasn't ready for the sight."
    Pete glanced around and perceived nothing but a mass of sweating and mostly pasty humans clothed in shades of black and black.
    A strobe flickered across her vision and for a moment she caught flashes of horn and bone, long teeth arching over cloven lower lips as a tongue snaked toward her. Flash again, back to skin and cloth. "Come on," she said, tugging against Jack to pull him away from the dancers and their swirling auras.
    Jack swayed just a little, sweat beading in the hollow of his neck and stippling the collar of his shirt. Pete reached up and brushed it away. Jack started at her touch, and the white in his eyes deepened back to the usual blue.
    "I'm here," Pete mouthed. Jack squeezed her wrist.
    "Ta."
    Hattie was already bent over a tall glass of whisky, sucking on a borrowed cigarette held