Street Magic

Jack Winter was magic.

"Ready?" Jack asked from the head of the circle. Pete felt something wild and electric settle around them, like a phantom storm brushing her face with rain.

"What should I do?" Pete asked. Jack beckoned to her and hissed when she almost scuffed over some of the markings.

"Mind the edge, luv. Wouldn't want you lopped off at the knees."

"Bloody hell, really?" Pete asked, eyeing the circle circumspectly. She wasn't her sister, nattering on about "the energy," but she knew, in a way that was deep and brooked no logical argument, that she had stepped into something otherworldly when she came to this place with Jack. He radiated a power she could taste on her tongue.

"The circle won't hurt you," Jack admitted, stroking the darker stubble at his jaw. "But don't disturb the sigils. You don't want what'll be inside on the outside. Trust me." He took Pete's hand as she got close and raised the flick-knife. Pete jerked, but he was too quick, scoring a neat crosscut on her palm.

"Ow!" Pete said in irritation. All of the questions she should have asked raced to mind in a sick sensation of falling and the excitement of a moment ago washed away on a red tide of fear.

She hadn't asked why they'd come here, sneaked past the admissions booth at the cemetery gates and broken into this tomb, hadn't pressed Jack on purpose, because then she'd get scared, and Jack was never scared. Not when a pack of skinheads made trouble in Fiver's. Not of Da, DI Caldecott himself, who had chased off every one of MG's previous deadbeat boyfriends. Jack just extended a hand and a smile and people would throw themselves off Tower Bridge to stand next to him, to reap a little of the danger that seemed to permeate everything he touched.

As the chalk soaked up her blood, the sigils fading to red like a blushing cheek, Pete knew she didn't want to pull back. Questions be damned. Jack wanted—needed—her here, and she was here.

"You all right, luv?" Jack said, pressing a tattered handkerchief over her cut and closing her fist around it.

"I'm fine. I'm ready," Pete said. She wouldn't think about what might crawl out of a tomb under Jack's deft hands, nor about how mad her believing that Jack had power was in the first place. She'd just know that he picked her, Pete Caldecott, who never had friends or friends who were boys, and bollocks to a boyfriend—if she had one of those, she'd go buy a lotto ticket. Jack Winter, magician and singer for the Poor Dead Bastards, needed Pete with him in this old dark place.

Jack guided Pete to the black candle at the foot of the circle, and she made sure to stand ramrod straight so he'd know she wasn't scared, not a bit, wasn't thinking this was a bit dodgy and odd. Not Pete.

"Now you hold on to me," Jack said, lacing their fingers together in a blood-smeared lattice across the markings on the floor. "And whatever happens, you keep holding on—all right?"

"What might happen that'd make me let go?" Pete's stomach churned into overdrive.

Standing at his spot by the white candle, Jack flashed her the devil-grin one more time. "That's what we're going to find out."

He started to speak Irish, long passages, rhythmic. It sounded like it should be solemn, intoned by robed priests over a stone altar, but Jack half slurred through the stanzas as though he were reciting lyrics to one of his songs and had a few pints in him while he did it.

For a moment, nothing happened. Pete looked at Jack through her lashes, half feeling pity because he seemed so set on something odd or spooky taking place.

And then something did.

Pete felt the pull, the separation of things that were comfortable and real from the dark place behind her eyes. Something was swirling up, through the layers of the veil between Pete and Jack and what lay beyond, and she could almost see it, a welter of black smoke growing in the center of the circle as Jack raised his voice, chanting rhythmically now that the fruits of his spell were visible. The chalk lines clung like bone fingers, holding the smoke-shape in place.

Jack's eyes flamed blue as the spell snapped into place, and the fire traveled over the planes of his cheeks and his arms and hands and blossomed all around him as Pete gasped, and the thing in the circle grew more and more solid.

The shape was human, a wicker man of smoke. The chalk lines did not hold it for more than a moment, and it fixated on Pete, eyeless but staring through her all the same. And then it was moving, in a straight and inexorable line, right for her. The primitive cold in her gut told Pete something was horribly wrong.

"Jack?" Her voice was high and unrecognizable to her own ears. The wicker man had a face now, and hints of silver in its eye sockets, and hands with impossibly long fingers that reached out, clawed at her. Whispers crowded Pete's brain, and a pressure fell on her skull so unbearable that she screamed, loudly.

And Jack, where was Jack? He stood watching the smoke with a measured eye, as if Pete were the mouse and he were the python enthusiast.

"Jack," she said again, summoning every steady nerve in her body to speak. "What is it?"

He bent to one knee and quickly chalked a symbol on the floor. "Binasctha," he breathed.

The wicker man stumbled, like a drunk or a man who just had a heavy load thrown on him. But he walked still, one foot straight in front of the other.

"Ah, tits," hissed Jack. He rechalked the symbol, and still the wicker man walked.

"Jack." She said it loudly, echoingly so, the first fissures of real panic opening in her gut.

"Shut it, will you!" he demanded. Pete saw from his expression that he was finally catching on to what she knew—never mind how; it had fallen into her head when that terrible pressure had eased, like waking up and suddenly knowing the answer to last night's math homework. She just knew, as if she'd experienced this ritual a thousand times before, that Jack's magic was awry and now the smoke man was awake and walking the world.

"Is that all you can say?" she cried. "Jack, do something!"

He tried. Pete would always say that, when she had to talk about the day, even though her memories of the whole event were thin and unreliable by choice. He tried. And when Jack tried to keep the wicker man from her, all that he got for his efforts was screaming, and blackness, and blood.

Chapter Two

The sign on the building, half off its hinges, optimistically proclaimed hotel. Underneath, in smaller gold script that had faded, "Grand Montresor."

The tiny purple asters grew all around the crumbling concrete steps, forcing their way out of the cracks in a great spray of example for nature versus man.

Pete stepped over them, careful to avoid crushing any blossoms, and pushed her way into bleach-scented gloom. The Montresor, like the whole of the block around it, had seen better days and couldn't remember exactly when they were. It stood out like a dark pock on the face of Blooms-bury, and Pete wondered why information always had to be garnered in the filthiest, most shadowy places of her city.

A clerk straight out of The Vampyre ruffled his Hello! magazine in a

"Could you tell me about the person staying in room twenty-six?" Pete said, trying to sound bright and official. It took more than a forced smile and a chipper tone to garner a reaction from the clerk, for he just grunted.

Pete unfolded the note Oliver Heath, her desk mate at the Metropolitan Police, had handed her. "Grand Montresor, Bloomsbury by King's Cross. Room 26 @ 3 p.m."

"Said he had information on the Killigan child-snatching." Ollie had shrugged, the gesture expansive as his Midlands drawl, when she'd questioned him. "Said that the lead inspector were to come alone, and not be late."