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itself.
    As Pete murmured in his ear, her breath warm and her hands cool, her presence bringing him equilibrium like he was the wheel and she was the spoke, Jack’s own eyes in the mirror told him that Pete could never know the truth.

Chapter Five
    Pounding on the front door of the flat broke the spell. Pete heaved a sigh. “Bollocks, if it’s that neighbor brat from 402 again, I’m going to feed him his Transformer toys.” She grabbed a rag, ran water over it, and placed it on the back of Jack’s neck. “Stay put. Back in two ticks.”
    That was Pete, quick and commanding and certain. Never wavered, never doubted that she’d solve everything and set it right side up again.
    Jack pressed his forehead against the rim of the toilet bowl. He’d been low when he was shooting junk, but never as low as this. His lies had been small lies, of survival, cowardice, or necessity. The black dog treading in his footprints had never mattered, because no one else had ever been in range of its jaws. And now, just when the dog was close enough that Jack could feel breath on his neck, it mattered. Pete was an innocent, someone who hadn’t come to the Black willingly and borne the terrible price it exacted from anyone human. All the scars she bore were dream-scars, a set of nightmares about him and their timetogether, when she’d been barely sixteen. About the visitation of Algernon Treadwell and the hunger of Talshebeth, but the Black had left her relatively untouched. She was its child, a speaker for magic. She wasn’t a citizen of its bleak, hungry streets and alleys on sufferance, like Jack.
    Pete hadn’t paid the price Jack and his brethren had, and she wasn’t going to if he could still draw a breath into his useless lungs. Jack was skilled at lying to himself as he was to anyone else, but he admitted that Pete being here, being close enough for the demon to use against him, was his fault. Entirely his.
    His stomach clenched again, but nothing came up. He was empty, hollowed out, ready to be filled by the demon’s bargain.
    But not yet. He had time. Enough time to put things right and to keep the one who’d pulled him from the Pit from harm. He owed a second debt, an unspoken one, to Pete. He owed her at least the decency of staying alive to teach her to survive the vagaries of a life with a talent. They’d barely begun. He couldn’t leave yet.
    “Pete,” he called, standing up and slinging the cloth into the basin. No reply echoed from the front of the flat. “Pete!” he said again, padding into the narrow hallway. “Petunia, where’ve you gone to?”
    She turned away from the flat’s front door, beyond which Jack could see, standing, the sort of man who would have told Jack to
Find a job, you miserable cunt
when he was sleeping on the streets, shaking in the dead of winter and thirty pounds underweight. The visitor wore a black sport coat, black sweater, and soft heather trousers. His hair was trimmed over his ears, expensively, and his eyes were soft brown. A trustworthy soft, a grasping, sinking soft. Jack disliked him instantly.
    “What sod’s this, then?” he demanded, letting the fullburr of a Manchester childhood creep into his voice. Nothing like a reminder of factories, dirty hands, and steel boots to warn off a ponce at the door.
    “Mr. Naughton,” Pete said, shooting Jack her customary
Shut up afore I kill you
look, “this is my associate, Jack Winter. Please, come in.”
    Naughton smiled at Pete, and she smiled back. Jack felt his jaw twitch. He didn’t get tetchy or jealous easily, because birds were the cause of nearly all of life’s avoidable ills, but this was Pete, and she was giving the nonce her
real
smile, the one that curled up one side of her mouth more than the other, that spread into her eyes.
    “Thank you, miss,” Naughton said. He looked between Jack and Pete, feigning polite confusion. “It is
Miss
Caldecott?”
    “You can call me Pete,” she said. “Would you like a