Chapter Twenty-one

They walked out of the fog and found the Mini waiting. Big Ben chimed midnight once more and Pete said a silent thank-you to be away from places where the air was not the same and she could feel invisible eyes on her all the time.

Jack sat closemouthed during the ride and he was chalk colored by the time they reached Pete's flat. "You all right?" she inquired when he stumbled and fetched against the wall just inside her door.

"Yeah…" Jack's jaw set. "No. No, I'm not." He made a run for the bathroom and Pete heard him retching miserably.

It was so easy to forget, when Jack was sarcastic and smoking a Parliament, throwing out smiles and pinning her with his hard eyes, how she'd found him less than a week ago. Skinny, wasted, and his body still screamed for a fix even now.

Pete hesitated for a few more seconds, listening to Jack choke, then nudged the bathroom door open with her toe and crouched beside him, placing a hand on the back of his neck. Jack's skin was cold and slick, like he'd just been pulled from a pool of oily, lifeless water.

"Don't… don't…" he gasped, finally managing to draw a breath. The loo stank of old ale and sweat with an undertone of something darker, burned from crossing a barrier that flesh was not meant to. "I'm all right," Jack muttered, sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat away with the flats of his palms from his face. "It takes a lot out of you. Crossing to and from the Black. I'd forgotten how fucking difficult that is."

"I feel fine," said Pete quietly.

"Well, aren't you bloody well special," Jack snapped. Pete stood and held out her right hand, trying not to let it shake with anger that Jack might take for timidity.

"Give it to me."

"Give what to you?" Jack muttered, leaning his head back against the tile wall and breathing through his nose. He hadn't stopped sweating even though rain was washing the windows of the flat with intermittent sleet and Pete's fingers were cold because the radiators were turned down.

"Your goddamned stash, Jack!" Pete bellowed, picking up her container of hairbrushes and clips off the basin and flinging it at him. Her anger rushed up from the iron-banded box where she kept it through her workdays and ever since Connor had died. Really, since Jack had died for the first time. She threw the pink ceramic cup at his lying face and felt relief, like she had just destroyed the visage of an oppressive stone idol.

Jack ducked and was pelted with clips and pins. "Oi!" he shouted. "What the in the seven bleeding hells is your problem, woman?"

"You're my problem!" Pete shouted. "You're a fucking junkie liar is my problem!" She grabbed his jacket from where it lay on the floor and dug into the pockets, her fingers shaking and still slicked with Jack's sweat.

Pete prayed again. She prayed to find nothing, to be irrational and tired and overloaded from the graveyard and the blind children and walking down the cobble street where it was always midnight.

Her fingers closed around an empty cellophane bag, gritty with a powder that felt like ground glass and a capped syringe, full of cloudy cooked heroin that three long years as a PC pulling junkies off the street prophesied she would find. Pete dropped the baggie on the tiles next to Jack. "God damn you," she said quietly. "You've been fixing the entire time."

"No," said Jack, pulling himself up and bracing one arm against the wall. Fine purple webs traveled up his forearm, spread out from red-black pinpricks, bloody spiders living under the skin. "No," Jack repeated. "That was my last dose, and my first shot in five days, which is why I'm vomiting my fucking guts out now and could do without you screaming at me. Harpy."

Pete poked Jack in the chest with her index finger. Fever heat rolled off him in a whisky-scented wave. "Don't you ever sodding lie to me again, Jack, or I will jam my boot in your arse so far I'll knock out your back teeth."

Jack dropped his head. "You asked me to see, Pete, and if you knew what crossing the Black without something to dampen my sight meant, you wouldn't have asked me. You wouldn't make me nip off to a dodgy pub loo to shoot up. You'd prime the needle and put it in my bloody arm."

"I don't want to hear your sodding excuses," said Pete. She put the tips of her fingers under Jack's chin. "Have you told me anything that's true? Anything?"

"Doubtful, luv," Jack said. He tried to smile but Pete saw a death mask. "That's all I am, a liar and a sinner."

"Did you know what would happen in that tomb?" Pete asked quietly.

Silence pulled the air between them thin. "I've always known I was going to die," said Jack eventually. "That I was going to die young, and that I was going to die badly."

"I mean about me," Pete said. "Did you know about me, Jack? What would happen if I went in there?"

"You never give up, do you?" he shouted, angry again as quickly as lightning flickered. "Sod it, Pete, realize it's not always about you and your trite little middle-class daddy-love issues and leave me alone!"

He grabbed the jacket out of her hands, so hard and quick her fingers burned from the friction of the leather.

"Where are you going?" Pete demanded. Jack shoved her aside and stomped out. A minute later the front door of the flat slammed and there was the echoing quiet left by rage and half-truths in Jack's wake.

Chapter Twenty-two

No one wanted to look at Pete when she pushed open the door to the MIT room in New Scotland Yard the next morning. They all bent their heads, pretended papers and computer screens were important, and only looked at her from the sides of their eyes. Whispers weighed heavy on the air.

"What the bloody hell is everyone in here waiting for?" she asked Ollie, once she'd made an extra-large mug of tea. "Is it common consensus I'm going to whip out a rifle and start shooting?"

"You haven't been about," said Ollie. He hunched himself up against his too-tight tie and collar, and refused to meet her eyes.

"Meaning what?" Pete said, narrowing hers.

"Meaning…" Ollie sighed. "I like you, Caldecott, so I'll say it right out: There's some here that think you're not able to handle this thing with Bridget Killigan. And after the other two kids were… well. There's talk, is all."

"This is because of Jack, isn't it?" Pete demanded. "Because I brought him into the case and because I haven't been handing in my reports to the guv every day like I'm in sodding fifth form. Is that what you're saying?"

"That's part of it," Ollie agreed. His fat fingers were splayed on the desk they shared, and he stared at them, not at Pete. "You're not yourself, Pete. Everyone sees it. Except you." He pushed back from the desk and stood. "And that's the whole of it." Ollie walked away and Pete sat in her own chair, hard enough to send electricity up her spine.

Jack and Connor gibbered at her, reminding her that she was blinded to all but herself, blinded as surely as Patrick, Diana, and Bridget Killigan. Connor stared up at her accusingly from his hospital bed, his eyes peeling her skin back to the fault underneath. Jack proffered his bruised and bloodied arms, a supplicant even as he depressed the plunger of the disposable syringe.

Connor wasn't a man given to fancy. Therapists and pills were his answer to Pete's nightmares, when she'd lost Jack. MG was the one who wanted to see magic, and never could, whose silence spoke volumes as Pete choked down small chalky Xanax and tried to pretend everything was normal.

"When you see a nightmare," Juniper Caldecott said, resting her hand on Pete's head, "you just look it right in the face and you make it go away."

For the first time since she'd packed her two teal Samsonites and left Connor, Pete, and MG, Pete wished her mother were still about. Juniper with her altars and her sage scent and her smiles like warm scarves on cold days could have exorcised these ghosts.