Abby took them to a turreted Victorian, black with red light shining from every window. She lifted the iron knocker, a fanged nymph's head, and let it fall once.

"What is this place?" Pete stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Mad Chen's," muttered Hattie. She let Jack half drag her up to the door. Pete looked up and down the street. Dead trees and dead leaves bent and scuttled toward her, a winter wind pushing behind.

"Pete." Jack jerked his head at her as the door opened and a hooligan in a silk jacket peered out. He looked at Abby, nodded, and then stepped back.

Mad Chen's was lit by gaslight, red as new blood spilling, burning some sort of alien fuel. Thick wispy smoke drifted toward the tin ceilings, painted over with spray-can slogans, and under the smoke a garden of beds lay scattered across the wide rooms.

The beds were of every description—day lounges and iron institutional frames. All made up in silk or satin, no filthy mattresses like where Pete had found Jack.

Most of the beds were occupied, and slow-moving, doe-eyed women passed among them holding long boxes and trays with pipes and small sticky globs of pungent brown in wooden boxes. Their breasts and nipples, ringed or studded or tattooed, gleamed in the low red light.

"Up here," said Abby as they passed through the main part of the den, and she led them up a spiral staircase and into a narrow hallway.

Some of the doors had a key sticking out, and some were locked, with cries or silence coming from behind. Abby turned a key in the second door on the left and went in, slouching down on a sofa. "Fuck, I'm bored. Should we ring Mad Chen to bring up some poppy and absinthe?"

Hattie flopped next to her. "I'd murder a hit of anything right now."

Pete remained standing. "I have to go to the loo." She narrowed her eyes at Jack before she slipped back out the door and went down the hall, trying doors until she found a narrow closet with a toilet and a bulb on a pull chain.

She shut the door and leaned against the wall, and realized once she was still that her legs were shaking. The Black pulsed against her, and she swore she could feel it on her skin, like the opium resin, sticky and visceral.

"It never really gets better."

Jack opened the door and slid into the closet with her. Pete had to turn sideways to accommodate him.

"Jack, what in all Hell are we doing here?"

He leaned his head back against the wall and produced a fag, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Abby and her twit of a brother are sorcerers. If they don't go blabbing to Whoever's trying to get rid of me before this fag's gone, I've no sort of currency left with this lot at all and I might as well chuck myself off of Tower Bridge and be done with it."

Jack smelled like whisky and rain, like lightning had just struck earth. Pete breathed in him and the tobacco, closing her eyes.

A pressure on her shoulder, as Jack closed his free hand around it. "Thank you, for going along. Probably would be bleeding internally in some dank alley if you hadn't smacked that bloody Arty." He half grinned at her. "Where did a sweet little girl like you learn to throw a punch, anyhow?"

"I was never particularly sweet, Jack," Pete said. "You would have found that out, if you'd stuck around."

He smiled humorlessly, around the cigarette. "Regrets get you nothing except a bloody face and a broken heart if you're lucky, Pete." He cracked the door of the closet and peered out. "Should be enough time for Abby to tip off whoever her master is and end this idiot idea they have of chasing me all over the bloody city. Let's get back."

He brushed past Pete, their full length touching, and then in a flutter of her heartbeat, he was gone again.

Pete pushed back against the pressure under her mind, the pressure that Jack said never really got better, and she followed him.

"Mad Chen's got some shit in from the Golden Triangle," said Abby when Pete and Jack came back. She reappraised Pete when they entered the room together. "Your friend going to take part?"

A wavy glass bottle full of slightly luminous green liquid had appeared on the table, and Jack took a tumbler, filled, and downed it.

"She won't." He coughed. "Then who would there be to knock about anyone who irritates me?"

"Why do you keep mundanes around if you're not fucking them?" Abby asked with genuine curiosity.

"This absinthe tastes like a bloody tramp pissed in a gutter and had it bottled," Jack said. "And has anyone ever told you that for such a pretty slip of a thing you ask a lot of silly sodding questions?"

Pete went to the window and watched the street, but nothing except shadows and the crooked skeletons of bare trees stared back. She drew the velvet curtains. Dust shook out of their folds, old dust that smelled like vellum and bone, and she sneezed.

Hattie watched her mournfully. "You like, a bodyguard then?"

Only one door in and out of the room, and no closet she could see—just overstuffed furniture and an old peeling sleigh bed with a ragged coverlet. Pete nodded absently at Hattie. "Something like that."

"Ever met David Beckham?" Hattie said. She looked like a sad leather-clad raggedy doll, with her featureless skinny limbs and chopped-off eggplant hair.

"I only ever looked out for Jack," Pete told her. "I'm a detective inspector with the Met."

Abby's head snaked around. "You're a what?"

"Trust me, darling, if I was going to take you in I would have done it long before you opened your mouth," Pete said. "Drink your mixer and behave yourself."

"Jack…" Abby started, but he glared at her over his second green tumbler.

"Pete's with me. Shut it." He gave her a cool smile when she pouted. "Besides, I need your help now, Abby. Need to pick that black little head of yours."

"Is that so?" Abby glared at Pete in vindication as she downed her second drink in one go.

"Yeah," said Jack easily. "Ran into some blokes a few days ago, sorcerers like you, but nowhere near as lovely."

Abby snorted, poured herself another glass, sipped it. "So?"

"So, what's a smart little sorcerer up to these days?" said Jack. "I know something big's gearing up, so don't bother to lie. You lot have been twitchy as jackrabbits ever since I dove back into the scene." He went to Abby and brushed the stark black hair out of her eyes, cupping her chin between his thin fingers. Pete felt her stomach give an uncomfortable cramp.

"Come on," Jack murmured. "You can tell old Jack Winter. Whisper it in my ear. Always had more of an affinity for your kind of magic, anyway. It wouldn't even be a betrayal, luv."

Abby swallowed, a petal flush creeping into her porcelain cheeks. "They say… well… they say that something big is right on the other side of the veil. A spirit, or some such thing… and, well, some of us are offering service. Letting it gather power, and helping it, because when he comes through, he'll reward us."

"He," said Jack. "You have anything more specific for me, darling?"

Abby gulped the rest of her third helping of absinthe. The dry scent of licorice permeated through the smoky air. "I could have my throat cut for telling you that much, mage." She hiked her black hobble skirt over her knees and cast a languid look in Jack's direction. "If the questions are over, do you want to—"

Then Abby choked, her pale slender fingers scrabbling at the hollow of her throat, her eyes going wide and the irises expanding with effort.

Hattie moved away from her, with surprising speed. "What's her problem, then?"

Abby gagged, her pale pink tongue protruding between lips that were bordered in blue. She really did look like an animated corpse, jerky and lifeless as black spittle dribbled from the corner of her mouth.