Street Magic

and some were locked, with cries or silence coming from behind. Abby turned a key in the second door on the left and went in, slouching down on a sofa. "Fuck, I'm bored. Should we ring Mad Chen to bring up some poppy and absinthe?"
    Hattie flopped next to her. "I'd murder a hit of anything right now."
    Pete remained standing. "I have to go to the loo." She narrowed her eyes at Jack before she slipped back out the door and went down the hall, trying doors until she found a narrow closet with a toilet and a bulb on a pull chain.
    She shut the door and leaned against the wall, and realized once she was still that her legs were shaking. The Black pulsed against her, and she swore she could feel it on her skin, like the opium resin, sticky and visceral.
    "It never really gets better."
    Jack opened the door and slid into the closet with her. Pete had to turn sideways to accommodate him.
    "Jack, what in all Hell are we doing here?"
    He leaned his head back against the wall and produced a fag, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Abby and her twit of a brother are sorcerers. If they don't go blabbing to Whoever's trying to get rid of me before this fag's gone, I've no sort of currency left with this lot at all and I might as well chuck myself off of Tower Bridge and be done with it."
    Jack smelled like whisky and rain, like lightning had just struck earth. Pete breathed in him and the tobacco, closing her eyes.
    A pressure on her shoulder, as Jack closed his free hand around it. "Thank you, for going along. Probably would be bleeding internally in some dank alley if you hadn't smacked that bloody Arty." He half grinned at her. "Where did a sweet little girl like you learn to throw a punch, anyhow?"
    "I was never particularly sweet, Jack," Pete said. "You would have found that out, if you'd stuck around."
    He smiled humorlessly, around the cigarette. "Regrets get you nothing except a bloody face and a broken heart if you're lucky, Pete." He cracked the door of the closet and peered out. "Should be enough time for Abby to tip off whoever her master is and end this idiot idea they have of chasing me all over the bloody city. Let's get back."
    He brushed past Pete, their full length touching, and then in a flutter of her heartbeat, he was gone again.
    Pete pushed back against the pressure under her mind, the pressure that Jack said never really got better, and she followed him.

----
Chapter Thirty-seven

    "Mad Chen's got some shit in from the Golden Triangle," said Abby when Pete and Jack came back. She reappraised Pete when they entered the room together. "Your
friend
going to take part?"
    A wavy glass bottle full of slightly luminous green liquid had appeared on the table, and Jack took a tumbler, filled, and downed it.
    "
She
won't." He coughed. "Then who would there be to knock about anyone who irritates me?"
    "Why do you keep mundanes around if you're not fucking them?" Abby asked with genuine curiosity.
    "This absinthe tastes like a bloody tramp pissed in a gutter and had it bottled," Jack said. "And has anyone ever told you that for such a pretty slip of a thing you ask a lot of silly sodding questions?"
    Pete went to the window and watched the street, but nothing except shadows and the crooked skeletons of bare trees stared back. She drew the velvet curtains. Dust shook out of their folds, old dust that smelled like vellum and bone, and she sneezed.
    Hattie watched her mournfully. "You like, a bodyguard then?"
    Only one door in and out of the room, and no closet she could see—just overstuffed furniture and an old peeling sleigh bed with a ragged coverlet. Pete nodded absently at Hattie. "Something like that."
    "Ever met David Beckham?" Hattie said. She looked like a sad leather-clad raggedy doll, with her featureless skinny limbs and chopped-off eggplant hair.
    "I only ever looked out for Jack," Pete told her. "I'm a detective inspector with the Met."
    Abby's head snaked around. "You're a what?"
    "Trust me, darling, if I was going to take you in I would have done it long before you opened your mouth," Pete said. "Drink your mixer and behave yourself."
    "Jack…" Abby started, but he glared at her over his second green tumbler.
    "Pete's with me. Shut it." He gave her a cool smile when she pouted. "Besides, I need your help now, Abby. Need to pick that black little head of yours."
    "Is that so?" Abby glared at Pete in vindication as she downed her second drink in one go.
    "Yeah," said Jack easily. "Ran into some blokes a few