Caitlin Kittredge - Street Magic

He was begging. Fuck all, the heroin must have its jaws around him tight to make Jack Winter resort to that.

Pete drew in a breath through her nose. She met Jack's eyes and said, "No."

They narrowed and hardened to ice chips, and his pleasant visage peeled back to show the beast under the skin. "What d'you mean, 'no'?"

"Just what I said," Pete replied with a sigh. "It's late. Whatever-it-is can wait till morning."

Jack grabbed the picture of Pete and Terry and hurled it at the opposite wall. Glass shattered into snow fragments, blanketing the wood floor.

He rounded on Pete, and she tensed. The blue light flamed up in his eyes and he gripped her by the upper arms, face inches away. She could see that he hadn't shaved, that he had a faint scar vertically along his right cheek— he didn't have that before —and that if she didn't yield to his drive to get a fix, he would have no trouble at all killing her.

"Let. Me. Out," Jack said slowly.

"Won't do it, Jack," Pete whispered. "We can stand here until the sun comes up."

He squeezed and Pete bit the inside of her cheek. His misery made him bloody strong. "If you don't get me my fix," Jack said, "you can forget about our little bargain to save poor innocent Patrick and Diana. You'll have killed them over me. Now me, I could live with that on my head, but I doubt you can, Pete. You're far too good and pure."

"You don't know me so well any longer," Pete said. Jack sighed, looking at the floor between them, shaking finitely all over his body.

"Don't know what you're doing to me, do you? Probably the closest you've ever come to it is renting the Trainspotting video." He leaned in, their mouths and skin millimeters apart. "Pete, you don't know. You have no idea what it is to need this. Please. I'm asking you now. Let me out to get my fix, so it doesn't all go horribly wrong."

"I've been with the Met long enough to know what it is to be an addict," said Pete, pulling her chin back, because proximity to Jack did strange things to a person. "And I know when a bloke's trying to manipulate me. No, Jack. Nothing will go wrong and the answer is no."

One fist went up. "Open the fucking door before I bash your fucking face ."

Pete felt her jaw tighten and her lips compress. All her patience for this new Jack ran out like water. A dozen years of regret and feeling the hole in her heart, and this was what she got?

Pete used the rage of her wasted nightmares to fuel the snarl in her voice. "You won't do any such thing, Jack, because you're a fucking coward. And sod your deal, by the way. I said I'd get you washed and fed. I didn't agree to anything about your smack."

His upper lip twisted but under the surface of his sneer the fire flickered and burned out of his eyes.

Pete gripped the hand bruising her arm and twisted just enough to throw the joints out of prime. "Bollocks!" Jack yelped. Pete gripped his wrist and elbow in a control hold, propelling Jack toward the bathroom.

"Now we're going to get one thing straight," she said, shoving Jack into her old claw-footed bathtub and spinning the cold tap open all the way.

" Fuck !" he shouted, collapsing in a heap. "You fleabit-ten whore! That freezes!"

"I don't care what sort of a problem you've developed in regard to me," Pete said, ticking off on her fingers. "I care about Patrick and Diana and finding them alive and well. And you are going to help me, and you're going to do it without the assistance of your sodding heroin, or so help me, Jack, I will personally beat you senseless and deliver you to the lockup at the Yard."

He glared up at her, his bleached hair dribbling into his eyes like sodden straw. Pete glared back, watching him shiver and trying to ignore the pity shredding her intentions to be hard.

After a long rotation of the clock hands, Jack wiped a hand over his face and reached up to turn off the tap. "All right, Caldecott," he said finally. "You got yourself a deal."

The children's ward at St. John's Hospital made an effort to paint a cheery face on things with bright furniture and murals on the walls, but it had the same effect as a syphilitic prostitute smearing on expensive rouge.

Bridget Killigan's father—Dexter, " Call me Dex, they all do" —looked up when she swung open the door. "Inspector?"

"Is she sleeping?" Pete asked. Bridget lay on the hospital bed like a child bride on her funeral pyre.

"She drifts," said the father. "In and out." He stroked Bridget's hair back from her grave face, like she was a porcelain thing, smashable.

"Could I have a word?" Pete asked even though a word would get no results. Bridget's mind was gone as the ash on the end of a burning cigarette. But Pete needed groundwork, if she was going to find Patrick and Diana, needed facts to know that Jack wasn't simply wanking off over her discomfiture.

She needed truth, even if she blended or blurred or broke it, later on. Start with the truth , Connor said, and then you can draw the map, walk anywhere you please. Go to the sodding forbidden forest if you like, but start at true .

"Bridget?"

The girl stirred, the white marble eyes flicking toward Pete as if Bridget could still see, even though the doctor in A&E had assured Pete she was totally blind. "Who is it? Mum?"

"No, love," said Pete, gripping the rail of Bridget's bed. Cold and straight, inhuman. Strength. "No, this is Detective Inspector Caldecott. You can call me Pete."

Bridget's forehead creased. "Pete's a funny name for a girl."

"I know," Pete agreed, breathing deep and keeping her tone steady. "It's bloody—er, very funny. You think that's a burden, my sister's name is Morning Glory."

Bridget made no reaction.

Pete chewed her lip. "Bridget, I need to ask you about the person who took you."

Bridget's father pressed his palms together, lips moving silently. Bridget let out a small sigh, as if she'd repeated her story many times.

"We went to see the old Cold Man. He lives down the murky path, just around the bend."

Pete took Bridget's hand. Her skin was cooler than the air, dry like parchment. Bridget was a shadow child, a thin husk with nothing beating beneath the surface.

"Bridget, where is the murky path? Where does it go?"

"I think you've done quite enough," Dexter Killigan said abruptly, standing and placing his hand protectively on his daughter's shoulder. "She can't tell you anything."

"Bridget," Pete said again, squeezing the girl's papery hand. "Bridget, what did you see when you went down the murky path?"

She rolled her head toward Pete and fixed Pete with those white eyes, dead pearls in her tiny corpse-face. "We saw the bone tombs. The dead places where the dreamers go. He strides in the shadows and he reached out his hand to me."

The hospital room was warm, nearly stuffy, but Pete felt a cold that cut to her bones. Bridget's calm monotone recalled images just beneath the rippling surface of Pete's own memory, black smoke and skeletal phantoms whispering close to her ear.

"And what does he do, Bridget?" she finally managed. Her voice came out dry, as if she'd been smoking for twenty years hence. "What does the old Cold Man do?"

Bridget was still for a long moment, breath shallow, pulse beating in her translucent throat. Pete leaned in. "Bridget?"

The little girl's hand latched around Pete's wrist, touch like frost. Pete jumped.

Bridget whispered sibilantly. "He's touched both of us, Pete Caldecott. Backward and forward, up and down the years, he sees. And he waits."

Black pools spun in front of Pete's vision as her blood dropped groundward. "What did you say? How do you…"

But Bridget was gone again, still and silent and asleep. Her father shook himself and then pointed at the door. "Get out," he told Pete shakily. "Get out and don't come back. Leave my daughter alone."