Street Magic

asked as he stood, his eyes flickering plain again.
    Pete nodded once, over an icy knot in her gut. "Highgate Cemetery."

----
Chapter Thirty-nine

    Pete had never walked through the cemetery gates again after the emergency responders had taken her out through the small stone arch on the day of the ritual. She'd passed them hundreds of times, though, always aware.
    But she'd stayed on the outside. Never walked in. Never broken that unspoken barrier between her nightmares and the reality she'd constructed after Jack's death and her break with feeling anything, believing anything except what the light showed her.
    "You're sure this is the place?" Pete said. "I mean, 'northeast' is a rather general classification."
    "The scrying medium said northeast," Jack said, "and there aren't any other great bloody haunted cemeteries in this direction that I know of."
    The wind kicked up and Pete shivered, although it was a late-autumn wind, not a cutting winter gale. Jack stopped walking, his boots crunching on gravel. "You going to be all right, Pete?"
    "Of course," she said. She took out her mobile, hoping it made her look brisk and businesslike—anything but afraid, which she was, and hating herself for it. She couldn't shake afterimages of black smoke and flickering candle flames, and the echoes of Jack's screaming.
    "Ollie Heath, please," Pete said when New Scotland Yard's operator picked up. Ollie had just mumbled "Hullo" when Jack snatched the mobile from her and shut it off.
    "Oi!" Pete protested, but he shushed her.
    "Hear that?"
    Pete listened, heard nothing but the wind twisting through the trees and through her hair like the searching fingers of a ghost.
    Twined with the wind, a cluster of whispers fluttered against her mind.
    "Something's awake," Jack muttered. "Awake and walking, and ten to one it's our boy. Hold off on the copper brigade just for now. Don't want those nice blokes' wives collecting their pensions because they got eaten, do you?"
    Pete shook her head. The whispers weren't audible, not really; they just filled her skull from the inside like razor blades, multitudinous and harsh. "Right," said Jack, starting to walk again. He moved slowly, with a noiseless control, and looked much younger and fitter than his scars and sunken cheeks, "Ghost-killing, first form: You can't. Don't try—don't shriek or throw rocks at it or try to send it on to its final reward. If little Maggie—"
    "Margaret."
    "Close enough, aren't I? If she's still alive you grab her and you run like the fucking legions of Hell are snapping at your heels."
    "And what do you do, while I'm running?" Pete asked.
    Jack lit a cigarette with a click of his tongue and inhaled. "Distract it long enough to fill my end of our deal and get my arse back to a normal sort of existence."
    "So in just a few minutes, we'll be all through?" Pete felt her forehead wrinkle. "I don't think I like that, Jack."
    "Plenty of unlikable things in life," he said. "Save the sorrys for when we actually make it away from here with our souls and sanity intact. If the ghost is strong enough to compel living humans to snatch children and then feed off them, it had one hell of a temper in life, and death is piss-poor for softening your impulses."
    "How do we hold it off?" Pete swiveled her gaze through the shadows. The headstones tilted and faded and grew older, granite and angels with their arms and wings fallen off. The path narrowed, for pallbearers and mourners instead of automobiles.
    "We're alive," said Jack. "We belong here. It doesn't. So there's that, and I've got a shield hex if things get uncivilized." He looked Pete over and she felt calculated and weighed again, Jack still testing her worth. "I won't lie," he said. "If you were an experienced Weir you'd be a real help directing my magic, but as it is, just try not to leave your arse in the wind."
    Pete bristled, the quick sting of accumulated intolerance from her fellow inspectors and now from Jack sending her anger to the surface. "I am
not
helpless."
    "Neither is the ghost," Jack said. "And unlike you, it has the benefit of already being dead."
    Pete didn't respond. She thought about the children's blank white eyes, and tried to force her feet to move forward and follow Jack.
    He stopped, and came back and took her hand. "Be fast. Be strong. Don't look it in the face," he said. "That's the best and only advice I can give."
    "Not like the last time," Pete said quietly. Jack shook his head.
    "Nothing like