Street Magic

and pushed the toe of his boot over the circle's outer line, smudging the symbols within beyond recognition. "Go back!" Jack ordered loudly. "Return to the city of the dead and no more with the living will you be. Your time here is at an end, hound-sorcerer."
    Just as it had gathered the blood, the chalk star began to gather the smoke, pulling the ghost inexorably downward. It let out a scream that bled Pete's eardrums, swiping at her wildly and close enough to leave ice crystals on her brow.
    This is NOT the last, Jack Winter
! it howled.
If I must return to the bleak spires then you return as well
! The smoke-man thrust out his one remaining hand and seized Jack, pushing talons made of black ice through his abdomen. Jack granted and doubled as the black smoke flowed into him.
    "Stop!" Pete screamed. Jack tried to motion her away, but he was atrophying, his skin paling to blue-yellow, dark lines sprouting in all the crevices of his face, dead dull gray growing from the roots of his hair. As the ghost flowed into him Jack's life flowed out, his cheeks and eyes sinking and his body falling to the floor.
    Their hands broke apart. Pete could not move, could not even work her jaws to scream.
    A spout of crimson blood, the color of rose petals against his sallow sunken face, dribbled from Jack's mouth.
    "Go back," Jack ground, barely above a whisper. Night-shaded smoke drifted out in lieu of breath when he spoke. "You are shapeless and shadow. You are dead, and you belong with the dead. The living world holds no place for you. Go back."
    The ghost shrieked, and clutched at Jack. More and more blood poured from his mouth, his eyes, his nostrils.
    Seeing Jack's life leach out of him broke her paralysis, and Pete picked up the black candle, because it was the only thing within her reach, and flung it at the ghost. "Go back!" she echoed Jack, feeling tears on her cheeks. "Leave him alone!"
    Jack coughed weakly, and went still. Pete let out a cry. "He's not! You haven't killed him!"
    The ghost hissed, arching back as if in agony, and then with a rush it disappeared completely, the chalk lines of the circle vibrating with displaced power.
    Jack was still, silent and bloody. The light of the guttering candle threw the shadow of an enormous crow, stooped and spreading its wings around Jack to embrace him. The crow became a girl, a woman, a hag. All bent to touch Jack's blood-smeared forehead, their gestures those of disbelieving and mournful lovers.
    Pete didn't run to Jack, because of the hopping, sentient shadow and because the thought of him dead—as he surely was; she'd been to enough funerals to know cloudy eyes and dead stillness—became too much to bear. She ran instead, screaming, through the cemetery until she found the visitor's hut, pounding on the door and scraping her knuckles free of skin.
    Connor told her Jack was dead, when she finally decided she had to talk to
someone
, days later. And she cried. Relegated him to her nightmares, until she'd seen him again in the Montresor Hotel.
    And never, ever admitted to herself that she'd been the one to let go.
    That was it, Pete realized as she shivered under the chill from the overcast and fog, and started the walk back to the street from the footpath. She had
seen
Jack die, known that the ghost killed him before she broke the candle.
    Pete sighed as she turned back toward the Mall, Whitechapel invisible at this distance through the fog. She'd never be free of Jack Winter. But now, unlike then, she wasn't running away.

----
Chapter Forty-two

    She pounded on Jack's door three times with the side of her fist. "Sod off!" he shouted.
    Pete knocked again. Jack threw the door open, a frying pan in his hand. "Listen, you bloody—"
    "I want to know how you came back," Pete said. "You were dead. I saw Death hunched over you that day, the bird's form. I want to know how you survived it."
    Jack's expression flickered at that, but he pulled the door wide enough for a person and motioned her in. Pete folded her arms, and nudged the door shut with her foot. "So. How did you?"
    "That bit is a story for another day," said Jack, eyes darting. "What made you come back?" He went into the kitchen and tossed the frying pan into a cabinet, and lit the burner under the kettle.
    Pete had asked herself the question repeatedly as she walked back to Whitechapel. "I guess I can't walk away from you. Even though I should."
    Jack's mouth quirked. "Make it difficult, do I?"
    "Don't take it that