"Jack…" Pete started.

"Good," he said, walking out and slamming the door in her face.

Pete slumped down against the wall again. "Bugger."

After Pete swept up the ashes of Talshebeth and the sorcerers and binned them, and put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea, she finally realized that Jack wasn't coming back.

Her mobile rang as she was struggling with the bin bag and she grabbed it up. "Hullo."

"Pete, I'm very patiently waiting for you to sign the revised offer papers. I faxed them to your desk at the Yard days ago. Have you quite taken leave of the last vestiges of your so-called responsibility?"

"It's just hit where I am, Terry. I don't have time for this—" Pete started.

"You know something, Pete, you are going to make time for me," Terry fussed. "You're the one who couldn't let the disposition of our assets go on in a civilized manner, and now you can't be bothered to face up to the mess you've caused. I, for one, think—"

"Terry, perhaps I'm not making myself clear enough about this," Pete said softly. Terry paused.

"Please elucidate."

"Sod off!" Pete yelled into the mouthpiece, and then threw her mobile across the kitchen. She hauled the bin bag to the rubbish cart behind the building and it was as if nothing had ever happened in the flat, except for the distinct ebb and flow of the Black, just out of the corner of Pete's eyes, the aftershocks causing tiny ripples in the underground pool of magic.

How long had she been able to feel the Black, Pete wondered, and denied it for bad dreams and shadow? How long had Jack and everything that floated around him been standing just out of view?

Existential ponderings aside, the one fact Pete knew was that she was immeasurably tired, and wanted nothing more than a kip, but curiosity, and Jack not being about to stop her, drove her to stay awake to do a bit of snooping.

The shadows were stretching on to evening. Pete lit the oil lamp and went to get a blanket from Jack's bedroom to wrap up in.

Thick robes of cobwebs trailed from the ceiling in Jack's room, and the floor was littered with musty books and papers. A lone chest of drawers in the corner was the only furniture besides the mattress and scarred wardrobe.

She put a blanket around her shoulders, and crouched to illuminate the stack of books nearest to the mattress. Most of the spines were in languages she didn't read, nor did anyone else who'd been alive in the past five hundred years, but two were in English. Theories of Energy Magic and Practicum of Lesser Spirits and Their Uses. Pete moved on to the next stack. "Mages couldn't use bloody textbooks, like everyone else," she muttered. Whatever had happened with Jack before he stormed out would not happen again, not if Pete could help it. The feeling of being the transformer on a live wire was unpleasant enough to last several lifetimes.

Pete lofted the lamp to look for more books, catching a Poor Dead Bastards poster with curling corners on the wall opposite. She tried the drawers of the chest, found them open. "Let's see what you keep hidden," Pete muttered, half convinced that Jack would hear her, wherever he was.

He had that odd prescient knowledge of a clever devil, one that appeared when you spoke his name.

Herbs and crystals on leather thongs, shriveled birds' feet, a collection of vellum scraps covered over with Jack's scratchy handwriting crumpled in one corner, a marijuana pipe, and a slide whistle made up the entirety of the drawer's contents.

"Nothing," Pete muttered. Nothing that would show why Jack had run away, again. Or why he refused to admit what had gone on when they vanquished Talshebeth.

She sat down on Jack's dusty mattress and sneezed. It smelled like him, whisky and Parliaments and that slightly burnt scent that was his alone.

Pete realized that all the fear and rage had left her and her limbs were lead. She scanned the pages of a few more books, making a go of it, and then gave in to her body's shouted signals to catch a few hours of sleep. If she wasn't on her game, she wouldn't be of any use to Margaret or anyone else.

Shoving a pile of Jack's clothes off the mattress to make a space for herself, Pete heard something crackle inside the pocket of his leather jacket, the same one he'd worn the first time she'd met him. Pete pulled out a many-times-creased piece of vellum, greasy and frayed at the edges.

Pete's hand shook as she recognized her old address, the one she'd lived at with Connor until he'd taken sick, but hadn't moved to until several years after she'd lost contact with Jack. The paper was worn enough and the ink faded to believe it was a decade old. Jack had found her and held this scrap, but he'd never come to her, never written or called. He'd just kept this little bit of information near his heart.

She stared for a moment longer, and then Pete threw back the blanket. She was tired, of Jack's contradictions and his secrets. She pulled on her shoes and coat and left the flat, leaving the door unlocked as usual in case Jack came home.

Pete walked through Spitalfields, feet ringing off the cobbles that the Ripper's shadow had stalked one hundred twenty years before. She let herself be pulled from street to street, through pocket parks and alleys until she fetched up at a rusted iron gate. A padlock dangled limply from a chain that was nearly eaten away, and a swift kick sent it clattering.

Inside the gate was unlit night. Pete wrapped her coat around her more tightly and walked into it.

She would swear up and down that the pub Jack had taken her to the first time was in an open street, bright red door banded with iron facing out, but now it was simply there, at the other end of the alley.

Music drifted out when Pete pulled on the great iron handle, and a bouncer who hadn't been about the last time stopped her with a large hand, nails lacquered black. "Going somewhere special, miss?"

Pete drew in a breath. The man was massive, shaven-headed with Maori tattoos crawling over the bare flesh. He grinned and displayed a missing front tooth when she gaped at him. "I'm looking for Mr. Mosswood," she said finally, willing herself to be firm.

"You got business with the Green Man." The bouncer raised an eyebrow in surprise, but didn't question her. He stepped aside and Pete walked in.

The band onstage could have been playing an Irish folksong, or "God Save the Queen"… the music dove and dipped, never more than a snatch intelligible, but it was still beautiful and at the same time left Pete feeling stricken, as though she'd left pieces of herself scattered everywhere to be picked over by the crows.

"The eponymous Lament," said a familiar voice. Pete spun to see Mosswood sitting cross-legged at a table, chewing on the end of his pipe.

"Mr. Mosswood."

"Just Mosswood," he said, blowing a lazy smoke ring.

"Lament for who?" Pete said. "Or what?"

"You've heard of Nero, surely, and the music he played while the empire burned," said Mosswood. "This is the same music. The music that played when Cain slew Abel and the sound that will be at the end of the world."

Even though a fire was roaring in the pub's wide grate, Pete shivered. Mosswood indicated the chair opposite him. "You are obviously troubled a great deal to come here without an escort, Miss Caldecott. Please. Sit down."

"I don't need an escort," said Pete reflexively.

"I suppose you don't." Mosswood knocked out his pipe against the edge of the table and took his leather tobacco pouch out of his coat. "You wouldn't have been able to find your way here again if you were not touched by the Black."