Street Magic

not even then."
    "
You're
afraid of me, missy," said Kev with certainty. He looked up and started as he saw Jack standing inches from him, eyes totally white. "I told you stay put, you little freak!"
    He started to say more, but his throat twitched and closed, and he dropped the flick-knife to claw at his breast over his heart. Robotically, Jack picked up the flick-knife and put the business end into Kev's neck, the arterial blood washing the wall, Jack, and his mother in a graceful arc. She let out a feeble cry and covered her eyes.
    Jack crouched on his heels, watching with unblinking attention until Kev's last ounce of life ran out of him and stained the cheap carpet with wine. "You're right," he told Pete finally, his voice thin and not all present. He picked up the flick-knife, cleaned it on his sleeve, and tucked it away. "I stopped being afraid of monsters. The shadows, the transparent voices I heard… they told me how to keep the monsters back. And I listened. I learned. When did you first feel it, Pete? This was my day."
    "You're not here," Pete said. "That much I know. Tell me. Please? I'm running out of time so fast, Jack…"
    "I see you," young Jack said solemnly. "I see you doomed by your need to help me. You'd rush headlong in front of a train."
    "Into Hell," Pete answered.
    "What do I do to earn your loyalty?" Jack crossed his thin little arms. "You shine."
    "You don't make it easy, that's for bloody sure," Pete said. "But nobody deserves what Treadwell plans, Jack. Not even you." She touched the little boy on the shoulder, and he winced. "You don't have such a dark heart as you think, Jack. Hope someday you see that."
    Jack pointed to the locked door, now grown iron and arched, a portal bound up in magic.
    "Through there," he said. "I'm there. Be careful, Pete."
    "Of what?" she said, standing slowly from the ruin of glass where she'd landed.
    Jack blinked his white eyes. "You look into Treadwell, not as Jack sees him, but as magic does. And when you do it, he can see you, too, Pete. All of you."
    Pete put both her hands flat on the door. It was cold, a cold of old things with no space in the real. "Bloody wonderful," she muttered before she put her hands on the massive twin latches and pushed the door free.

----
Chapter Forty-five

    Stepping back into a graveyard caused her to stumble, because it was a calm spring night and not the boiling, fiery center of Jack's terrors she'd envisioned.
    A gaslight flickered blue, casting the whole scene in black-and-white film, all shades of bright and shadow that danced in time with the flame.
    Pete walked across the grass to a single headstone; crooked and tilted to one side, planted in the earth long enough to get comfortable. Jack stood, his head bowed, hair white in the light of the lamp. He stared down at the gravestone without breathing, without even a wind to move his coat. If not for the cigarette curling smoke slowly upward, he might have been a ghost himself.
    Next to him, Pete stopped. "It's really you, then."
    Jack nodded once, chin tucking down against his chest. Blue slivers of magic sluiced off him, burning away like sparks in the cool air. "Really here. Just like you."
    The magic glowed all over him, the spirit raven a corona that Pete watched fill up with black as if something had spilled ink across Jack's ghost-form, pulsing and retreating and growing again. The taint caused a physical ache in Pete, a feeling of loss.
    "We'd better hurry and get out of here," Pete said. "Wake up, or go away from the light, or whatever it is you do… here."
    Jack made a bitter noise in his throat. "I never asked you to come after me, Pete. You die just like the rest of us."
    Pete felt her mouth open, forced it shut quickly. "Jack, I didn't endure pain and kidnapping and massive internal bleeding so that I could come here and be snarled at. Now
come
, before Treadwell finds you."
    "He wants to take my body as a vessel," Jack said. He raised his head and confronted Pete with a face of hollows behind his cigarette. "Could you do it, Pete? If Treadwell wore my face? Could you kill him?"
    Pete answered without thinking, too quickly. "No. I could never make my nightmare real, Jack. Not again."
    He sneered. "Then what good are you?" The cigarette sailed away into the grass, trailing embers. "
My
nightmare is real, Pete. How's your grand plan to save me working so far?"
    Pete looked at the headstone, realized with a start that the broad letters carved into it were