Street Magic

move again without the feeling of ice picks being driven through her eye sockets. She was up and moving for Jack and Roddy before her mind caught up. She could
see
the spell, a thicket of thorns and prehensile vines that wrapped themselves around both men with blood-hungry quickness.
    "Jack!" she screamed, as a shadow lashed his face and caused a line of blood droplets to erupt. "Jack, tell me how to stop it!"
    "Get this fucking fat tosser off of me, to start!" Jack bellowed, shoving at Roddy, who fought just as wildly to hold him in place. The shadows, thick as they lay on Jack, fell twice as heavy on him, wrapping Roddy up in a hungry cascade of magic and malice. The sorcerer's clothes began to disintegrate, and the skin beneath, flaking off like ash from a dead fire. Roddy's face went stone, grim—he would die to keep Jack from escaping the spell's embrace.
    Pete reached for Jack, between the twisting vines of magic, and felt a lash like a thousand thorns on her skin.
    Blood erupted everywhere the shadows touched, and she drew back, cursing.
    Jack punched Roddy in the face, ineffectually. "Get… off… me… cunt!"
    From an archway deeper in the flat two more sorcerers appeared, and two more—four figures all burning the poisoned purple witchfire in their palms.
    "Hold him, Roddy!" one shouted. "We'll take care of the bitch."
    Jack's clothing began to flake away, like Roddy's skin—a patch of his jacket, a chunk of his pantleg, the sole of his jackboot. "Pete, watch it!" he yelled as one of the sorcerers came for her, a telescoping police baton upraised.
    "You think I'm not worth your magic?" Pete cocked her head.
    "Mage groupie? I
know
you aren't worthy," said the sorcerer. Pete sighed.
    "You're wrong. So very wrong." Before the sorcerer could puzzle that, she kicked out and drove her heel into the man's knee.
    The sorcerer crumpled over, dropping the baton, and the other three hurled clusters of the foul-smelling offensive magic at her, giving distance in the face of their cursing, crying compatriot. Pete took a dive, landed elbows first on the parquet floor, and slid out of range, ignoring the pain that returned all through her when she hit.
    She could barely see Jack any longer, obscured as he and Roddy were by the writhing mass of the spell. "Jack," she moaned, for just a moment not able to contemplate anything but the sight of his newly dead body. Toerag that he was, as much as he'd made her life a pit of misery over the week he'd come back, Jack being dead again was something that Pete knew would send her straight around the bend.
    The spell hissed at her when she drew close, and a thorny limb lashed out to slice her flesh.
Shaper of magic. I am a shaper of magic
.
    Then Jack's echo,
Mosswood doesn't know bloody everything
.
    "He'd sodding better on this count," Pete whispered, and then inhaled, held out her hand, and
pushed
against the mass of the Black around the spell. She pushed like she'd push on a thousand-pound beam across her chest, like she'd push to go through a door with something terrible but necessary on the other side. Feeling as if every blood vessel in her would burst with the effort, Pete held against the tide of black magic that kept the spell alive, moving it, shaping against it until with a great groan of defeat a hole appeared, pinpoint at first but tearing open to body size.
    Jack's face, plus a few hundred scratches and a smearing of ash materialized, his expression genuinely shocked. Pete stuck out her hand.
    "I can't hold this!" She could already feel herself begin to tremble under the strain of pushing back the spell, and another ball of energy lanced by her head to remind her that her troubles were far from over.
    Jack's own hand, slicked with his blood, lanced out through the magic's gap and grabbed on to her, and Pete hauled him out, inch by inch. Roddy's hand latched on to Jack's ankle in turn, half skeletal and locked in a dead man's grasp. Jack brought his other heel down, the steel of his jackboot snapping off the encrusted bones.
    Roddy gave a scream like Death itself had just wrapped a hand around his heart and yanked it free, and the spell collapsed in on him, enraged and starving and consuming.
    Jack patted himself over frantically. "Ah, tits. I lost me flick-knife."
    "Forget the bloody knife. Are you all right?" Pete demanded.
    "No," said Jack insistently, as the sorcerers began to get closer with their spells. "I need blood . .
.fresh
blood," he snapped when Pete