"Grinchley not the lending type?" Pete guessed. Jack smiled, a predatory showing of teeth.

"The last man who stole from him floated up in the Thames two weeks later, with his eyes and his tongue missing."

"Could be worse," said Pete gamely. Jack stuck his pencil behind his ear.

"They cut out his tongue to make room for his heart to be shoved in."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"So what's your grand plan?" said Pete. The sitting room had darkened as the fog outside turned from daytime silver to nighttime velvet. She flicked on the nearest lamp and shadows sprang to life on the walls.

"Grinchley will never give it over willingly," said Jack. "And you'd be mad to fuck with a collector of dark magics. So that leaves outright treachery and low dealings."

"You look awfully happy about that," said Pete.

Jack smiled, dropping her a wink. "As if I'd be anything else, luv."

"Still haven't told me the great trick to get the Focus away from this Grinchley person." Pete lifted an eyebrow, her motherly gesture, used on teenaged shoplifters and errant schoolchildren. Jack scribed a circle in the air with his finger.

"We'll just twist him, luv. Give him a bit of street magic and shift the thing right out from under him. A minor entity of some sort should do the trick."

"More summoning." Pete felt a ball of something hard and unpleasant grow just under her heart. "Jack…"

"Pete." He closed his hand into a fist. "This is what I did, very well, for quite a time before I met you. Let me do my work. You promised."

"I promised to listen to your rot," Pete shot back. "I didn't promise bugger-all about this idiotic idea you have to steal from a man who slices out people's hearts."

"Translocation," said Jack. "My idiot idea is translocation. I never have to get within a hundred meters of the man and I'll be done with the Focus before Grinchley even realizes it's missing. Devil knows he has enough arcane shite in his musty old house."

Think of Margaret, Connor whispered. Think of every night after you find her dead and cold if you don't listen to Jack. "I just hope I can," Pete muttered.

"What?" Jack said distractedly. He stood up and sorted through the armload of books Pete had brought to him, paging through the index of the Dictionary of Unfriendly Entities.

"Nothing." Pete sighed. She set her tea aside. "I'm going to go do paperwork while you do… whatever it is you're doing."

"Research," said Jack. "Got to figure which sort of entity will be willing to trade with me for this favor. Imps might do it. Imps love sneaking about."

"You don't just… know?" Pete asked. "They don't make you memorize that stuff, like?"

Jack shook his head. "There was no 'they,' Pete. I didn't go to some bloody school and get instructed by gits in robes. You either die quickly because your talent overwhelms you, or you learn quickly and stay a step ahead of whatever wants to chew on your arse." He thumped the thick black book. "Research is a mage's best friend. Why would I carry all that dusty knowledge around when I can just rely on the sods who came before me?"

"Fine." Pete held up her hands. "Like I said, I'll be upstairs in the office closet. Nothing personal, but the very idea turns my stomach."

"You'll get used to it," said Jack. "You got any chalk in case I need to set a protection hex?"

"In the kitchen drawer with the cling film," said Pete. "And no, I won't get used to it."

She turned and left Jack in the shadows and went into her tiny office—more of an artist's garret than anything, up a flight of stairs barely wide enough for two feet side by side. Her desk and her computer were wrapped in a thin film of dust. Pete clicked on her scrollwork lamp with its bright reading bulb, turning the window facing into the street to a sheet of onyx.

Jack shifted something in the sitting room, and Pete smelled the chalk dust clear as if she were next to him. That dark stirring of deep, old things pushed against the front of her skull. She searched her desk for aspirin to deal with the persistent headache, but found none.

Pete pressed her forehead against the chilled windowpane. Fog thickened and everything past the glass was invisible and gold-tinged, until the streetlight at the end of the block winked out.

She drew back and saw ice crawl across the glass where her breath met it.

Beyond the pane, the fog swirled and parted, as if Avalon were about to reveal itself. Pete felt her body and mind become entranced, the cold seeping down from her bones into her blood and her skin, ice crystals weighing her eyelashes.

Noise and sensation faded, and the fog outside swirled and twisted back on itself and coalesced into a woman's face.

Something whispered, from that dark wellspring that rippled and chattered when Pete touched things not entirely made of earth. A tiny tug on her mind, beyond the cold and the pale, pale face with eyes closed, body clothed in robes of purest silver mist that floated in the night outside.

The whispers rose to the pitch of a scream in the back of Pete's mind, a flock of tiny mouths crying out in concert. Peril.

Pete gasped, taking in air so cold it burned her chest like a gout of flame. The pale face outside opened in a soundless scream, fangs the color of old bone snowing beneath lips stained with blood, warm and steaming against the thing's frozen skin.

Pete let out a scream of her own. "Fuck me!"

The garret window shattered, throwing a snowstorm of glass inward, and Pete fell, tangling her legs in her chair's and going down hard on her left shoulder. Pain, disorientation, a sensation of fullness in her head, like she'd caught the feedback of an amplifier turned on full.

Frozen obsidian claws raked her back and the silver mist poured into the room, forming three of the female shapes. The one who broke the window hissed, staring down at Pete with empty black eyes that seemed to stretch to the bottom of the world.

Pete opened her mouth to yell for Jack, but was deafened by a scream that went straight through her, rending flesh and piercing bone.

The mist-woman closed her mouth, blood bubbling down her chin, and hissed, "Where is the crow-mage? The man called Winter?" Her voice was sibilant and split Pete's ears until she was sure she was deaf, hearing the mist-woman's voice through the echo inside her skull.

"I don't…" she said, or thought she did. She couldn't hear, not even her own heartbeat.

The mist-woman's robe smelled of marsh water and the blood of ancient battlefields. It slithered over Pete's face as she lay at their feet, body stiff and chilled, head ringing. Jack. She had to get Jack. Warn Jack.

"Where is the mage called Winter?" they demanded again, a concert of moans and sighs. Their hair floated as if they were submerged, black as muddy reeds. Behind their shoulders, a line of light glowed, the edge of the door. "The mage called Winter!" the bansidhe screamed. They looked like every one of Juniper's stories, down to the black claws that curled from sodden, wrinkled hands.

The first bansidhe swooped and brought her face close to Pete's. "Give him to us!"

Fear coiled, sprung, wrapped itself around Pete's heart like a rusty iron chain, but she met the bansidhe's black eyes, and snarled with all the pain and fury she could expel. "Go back to Hell." She rolled, wrenching all the already painful parts of her body, and wrapped her hands around the lamp, swinging it through the bansidhe's drowned corpse face.

The bansidhe howled, claws raking at its face where Pete hit, the skin melting and running over a skull alive with maggots. Stinking marsh water spattered on the floor.

Pete broke for the door. "Jack! Jack, there's trouble!"

Behind her she felt them, as if she were extending invisible fingers. She felt their blackness part the air as they flew, claws and hair lashing, catching Pete's shirt and yanking her backward.