"Street Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kittredge Caitlin)

Chapter Twelve

In Pete's dream, Patrick and Diana reached out to her with black and sticky fingers, their mouths smeared with offal as they feasted on the long-dead bodies of those who had come to this tomb before her. Pete tried to run but every way was bricked over, a blank wall rife with spiderwebs and scrabble marks dug by human fingernails.

The shadows at the far end of the tomb rippled and parted and the crowned figure, robed in bloody and rotted burial shrouds, floated forward.

He sees you, Pete Caldecott, whispered Bridget Killigan. And he held out his hand, curled around something that fluttered and oozed blood between his knotty fingers. "Take it. Take what was always yours, tattered girl. Be mine, and whole."

Pete pressed against the wall, grit working its way down her neck, tiny bugs and specks of graveyard dirt. A rush of wind blew through the crypt, the ends of the robed thing flapping on white bone joints, revealing armor washed clean against his rotted skeleton. Patrick and Diana looked up in concert. Smoke boiled across the floor and coalesced into the form of a man, a man with burning silver eyes that seared Pete's mind, not with heat but with a cold that could stop her heart. She felt a delicate shattering behind her skull, and then her mobile started to ring.

Pete's laptop slid to the floor as she bolted awake, her mobile trilling and dancing on the bedside table. Jack reached out in his sleep and swatted at it.

"Hallo," Pete mumbled, trying to sound like she hadn't been nodding. Dreaming.

"Well, you're hard enough to get hold of!" Terry snapped.

"Terry." Pete wondered that she was relieved he'd called. He'd woken her up. That was what mattered.

"I've faxed the new papers to your desk."

Pete checked on Jack, whose trembling had ceased for the moment, and slipped into the hallway, shutting the bedroom door. "I'm not at work, Terry."

She could hear the sneer coming down the line. "Then where on earth are you? It's not like you to go anywhere off your little track from flat to work and back again."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry. Grow up." Pete slapped her mobile shut. Jack groaned, and she returned to the bedside, feeling his pulse and his hot, gleaming forehead. The worst of the withdrawal was past him, please, God, let it be over, and when he woke he'd have raging flu symptoms and a craving like iron claws in his skull, but he'd be sober, and help her, before Patrick and Diana were lost.

Pete used a washcloth to brush Jack's sweat-soaked hair away from his face, and went into the sitting room to let him sleep for as long as she could allow. She tried to eat what takeaway hadn't gone dodgy. Cold aloo gobi did nothing for the state of her stomach, nervous as a pacing cat. Ollie called, and she let her mobile ring through to voice mail, because she didn't have any answers for him.

Pete swept up the broken glass from Terry's picture just to move, and after a second of consideration dropped the snapshot into the bin. It had been taken the day after Pete was promoted to detective inspector, and the day before Terry had asked her to marry him. A moment when things were right and good, and they were so no longer. The picture had no place now that Jack had reentered her life, and her flat.

She straightened up Jack's other messes but she couldn't calm down. Sleeping in the middle of the day had put her at odds, plus the slumbering but screaming presence of the man himself in her bedroom.

Finally, when she knew she'd go mad if she spent another second pacing the floor, back and forth past the bedroom door, she made up the sofa and lay in the twilight, watching the hands of the clock tick toward midnight.