"Jack—" Pete opened her mouth to shout, at the same time balling her fists. Magic be damned—she would go down kicking and punching, if that was what it took.

One of the sorcerers flowed across the floor in a haze of blue-black fire and clamped one hand over her mouth, his other arm pinning Pete in a breath-taking hug. "Don't scream," he hissed. "Time enough for that later."

"Let her go," said Mosswood. He stood well clear of the sorcerer's reach, but he looked stern and not like someone Pete would trifle with, were she in a position to.

"Bugger off, Knight." The second sorcerer sneered. "Matters of the Arkanum don't concern you."

"Matters in my pub do," said Mosswood. "And if you sorry lot are the best of the Arkanum I will eat my tobacco pouch with salt."

"We just want the crow-mage," the one holding Pete snarled. "But if you'd like to become incentive, feel free to step between us and him."

Jack appeared from the archway painted with gents, wiping his hands on his shirt. He stopped when he saw the tableau. "What's the matter—couldn't Treadwell come out and play? Or did a spare wind get him stuck in a chimney pot somewhere?"

"If you want her back, come to Highgate and don't try any of your mage's cleverness," said the sorcerer holding Pete.

"You honestly think I couldn't drop you dead where you stand?" Jack asked, pleasant and soft.

The sorcerer began to laugh. "Anything you do would put the chit at risk, and I don't think you want that."

"Maybe I don't care," Jack said. His eyes flamed to life.

"Maybe you should do as you're told," the sorcerer snapped, "and maybe you'll be in time to keep your girlfriend from the touch of him."

Jack looked at Pete, and sighed. "They've got me bent over properly. I'm sorry, luv."

Pete tried to say, "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing letting me become a hostage," but she was too muffled by the sorcerer's fingers. She kicked at him instead and caused a groan but no loosening of his grip on her.

"Pete. Pete." Jack held up his hands. "I'll be right behind you, luv. I promise. Believe me. No harm will come to you. Believe me, please."

He was coming as close to begging as Jack would ever come, Pete knew. And fuck, she wasn't going to die on the floor of a pub, at the hand of a reject from the Cure reunion tour.

She worked her head free of the sorcerer's grip. "I believe you." Before she heard Jack's reply, if there was one, the walls of the Lament blurred and fell away to rushing black, and everything fell away, leaving Pete dangling before she slammed back to earth.

"You like that?" The sorcerer's face was in the light now, the electric lamps of the regular world's Highgate Cemetery. "Shadow-stepping. Mages can't translocate like that. Only sorcerers."

"My knees are positively weak," Pete said. Treadwell's sorcerer jerked her arm, black petals of smoke blossoming on his other palm.

"Don't be smart. I could take your face off."

"Will it save me from having to listen to you rattle on?" Pete gave the sorcerer her worst glare as he marched her through leaning rows of headstones.

"Winter doesn't like his women mouthy. Wonder he let you stick around as long as you did."

"There's a lot you don't know about Jack Winter," Pete said.

The sorcerer barked a laugh. "As much as you did when you got tangled up with him in the first place, you silly chit?"

Pete looked at her feet for a few steps. "No," she said finally. "I knew far, far less. But that doesn't change the fact that I'm here now, stolen and harmed by you, and that because you stole me you're fucked when Jack finds us."

"Petrifying," said the sorcerer. "Move your little damsel act right along." He shoved her and she tripped over a low tombstone.

"Let go of me!" Pete cried, jerking against the man's grasp. He stopped her, grabbing her by the upper arms, squeezing until Pete knew most women would let tears slide down their cheeks. She stayed silent, still. She would never cry.

"You listen," growled the sorcerer. "Winter doesn't care about you, you understand that? He let us steal you away. Now, you keep your mouth shut and your head down and our master might see his way to letting you go… or keeping you as an amusement. That's a better future than what Winter can offer you on his best day." He pulled her along the path again, Pete's feet digging furrows in the earth as she resisted him.

They walked, or rather the sorcerer walked, dragging Pete, for a long while, clear across the old part of the cemetery. Pete smirked. "Looks like your teleporter is off prime. You should have Scotty in to calibrate that."

The sorcerer paused when they were in the oldest part of the cemetery, amid the weeds and the forgotten sunken graves. "You're not afraid of what we're going to do to you," the sorcerer stated, disappointment pulling at his face. His witchfire flared with a snap and he patted Pete down, taking away her mobile, the keys to the Mini, and anything else that might constitute a weapon.

"Jack will come for me," said Pete with a thrust of her chin. "And when he does I—far from a damsel, thank you—am personally going to make you sorry for this entire night and the rest of your wasted life." She could lie convincingly to everyone—it was her own doubts that were the problem. Jack wasn't here and the Black wasn't snapping and hissing in the way that meant he was near.

"You tell yourself anything you like, girl," said the sorcerer, tossing her things into the weeds. "But the fact remains, you're all alone." He turned Pete so they were pressed back to front, his arm across her throat. "Look there."

Over the humped, half-collapsed roof of the closest mausoleum, Pete could see torchlight, and hear low voices in the sort of contemplative chant that should accompany confession and absolution.

"That," hissed the sorcerer, his hand sliding up and down Pete's throat, stroking her skin and leaving a trail of shivers. "That is magic's future. Not Jack Winter. Not the old ways or the old gods. It's men, taking what they want. What our master started, we'll finish."

"They might," said a Manchester drawl from Pete's back. "But you? All you'll be getting is a concussion and some pretty new bruises."

Jack raised a burial urn over his head and smashed the sorcerer's skull with it, ash and bone fragments raining around Pete. The sorcerer staggered and went to the ground, raising his hand, his magic gathering.

"Don't," Jack snarled. "If you value the bits that make you a man, don't."

Pete jumped away from the sorcerer as he made a grab for her, his teeth bared in fury. She stomped on his outstretched hand, eliciting a howl.

Before she could find something to tie the sorcerer up with, Jack stepped in and snapped his head backward with a jackboot to the face. "The next time you touch Pete, I kill you where you stand," he said.

Trembling in Pete's hands and everywhere reminded her that she was still in the cemetery, that Treadwell was there, sending tendrils of ice across the Black.

Jack came to her, his chest rising and falling in time with the waves of fire in his eyes, and the icy whispers quieted when he got close enough to touch.

He took Pete's chin in his hand, turned her face side to side, brushed her cheek with his thumb. "You still got all your fingers and toes, then?"

Pete jerked her head away. "What the bloody hell took you so long?"

"I did have to bargain for a means of transport that'd get me here before they carved your eyes out, didn't I?" Jack said. "And let me tell you, riding with the dullahan is not something a bloke ever gets used to. The smell alone—"

"Treadwell is over there, beyond the tomb," Pete broke in. "Jack, Mosswood told me that the only way to exorcise him—"