Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Another body brushed against her, and Pete’s foot skidded over the edge of the pit. Just enough to put her off balance, and she felt herself going over. It wasn’t a far drop, less than a meter, but she fell badly and landed on the shoulder the zombie had already scored with. The crowd pressed in above her, as if she were lying at the foot of a row of gravestones, granite angels watching her with pale, sightless eyes in the flicking strobe light.

  The music turned to indecipherable feedback through the antique PA as a boot landed in her gut, then another. Pete curled to protect herself, but there were feet and hands from all directions. The floor shook as one, then another, then a herd of the spectators dropped into the pit and crammed it even more. Another boot, a steel toe, connected with her shoulder blade and a cry escaped her lips, lost in the static and the screaming speakers.

  Dancers paid her no mind, their movements changing from pogos and flying elbows to a concentrated orgy of blunt force that began at the foot of the stage and rippled out. She saw a woman grab the man next to her and pull his head down to connect with her knee. Two other men began bashing their skulls together, the sound of bloody meat going straight to her gut.

  Around Pete, the air changed, as if the storm outside had wormed its way in. The insidious cold that she’d learned the hard way to associate with necromantic spells crept across her face. She fumbled for her pistol, attempting to protect her midsection and breasts with her free arm. She didn’t know what good, exactly, a handful of bullets would do her, but she wasn’t bloody well going to kick off on the sticky, ale-scented floorboards of a shitty metal club.

  The violence rose as if a toxic tide were sweeping the pit, and Pete felt a warm spatter of raindrops across her face. Her tongue tasted of iron. A woman in leathers jumped on the back of a shirtless skinhead, gnawing at the Aryan tattoos arrayed across his shoulder blades. A pink-haired girl, even smaller than Pete, shrieked in time with the wordless whorl of sound as she beat her spiked bracelets against her own temples.

  Feet and bodies impacted with her, buffeted her, lifted her up and slammed her back down. Pete felt a sharp, hot pain in her side and wagered a boot had cracked one of her ribs. Bodies pressed too close to allow her air, never mind space to crawl away. All around her in the pit the dancers screamed and flung themselves on one another.

  A hand closed on the back of her jacket, and strong arms yanked her free of the throng, as it howled and spat and gouged at one another’s eyes. Pete railed against the arms for a moment, until she realized they weren’t groping or clawing, simply wrapped around her torso, holding her flush against a warm, hard chest heaving with its own breathlessness, encased in a black cotton shirt scented with whiskey, tobacco, and magic.

  Pete twisted her head, in the low stuttering light of the club, and felt her body drop away from her heart. “Jack?”

  PART TWO

  THE UNDERWORLD

  When there is no more room in Hell,

  the dead will walk the earth.

  —Dawn of the Dead

  CHAPTER 19

  Jack stared down at her for a pair of heartbeats. Pete stared back, unable to think of a single thing to say. The pain all over told her she was awake; the warmth of his body told Pete he was alive. She wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t dead.

  “Haven’t lost your talent for finding big fucking trouble, I see,” he said at last.

  Him speaking let Pete move again. She drew back her hand and cracked Jack hard across the mouth. “You fucking bastard! I thought you were fucking dead.”

  “Christ and fucking Christmas,” Jack yelped, stumbling away from her. “What happened to Thanks very much, Jack? I saved your courageous little arse just now.”

  “You left me is what you did,” Pete hissed. “You fucking left.”

  “Well, I’m here now!” Jack said, swiping at his lip. “Dammit to Hell, do you have to play so rough, Petunia? At least give me a chance to explain meself.”

  “Go piss up a fucking rope,” Pete snapped. “And then do me a favor and hang your lying arse with it.”

  In her dreams, when she saw Jack again, she’d never shouted at him. Of course, in her dreams, they’d both been dead and the reunions had a very different cast.

  Jack had let her think for more than half a year that he was gone for good, let her toss sleeplessly over him, shove all of his memories into cardboard boxes in the back of her mind, where they couldn’t paralyze her, and he was fucking smirking at her like he’d just done a particularly clever trick.

  He stared at her for a moment and then the smirk bloomed into that infuriating grin. He ensnared her in his embrace again and pulled her against him hard enough to make her cracked rib scream. “Fuck, it’s good to see you,” he said against her hair. “Really bloody good.”

  “Sod you, Jack Winter,” Pete responded, shoving at him until he took a hard step back from her force and nearly fell. “You don’t get to ramble back here smiling as if you’ve just landed from holiday.”

  “Fair enough,” Jack said. “But let’s move the heartfelt speech of righteous indignation elsewhere. This isn’t the place for nice girls like you, Petunia.” He gestured at the pit, floor slick with black, shimmering blood. “Point of fact, it’s not the place for naughty boys like me, either.”

  “If you think,” Pete started, “that you can just reappear from the bloody dead and start ordering me about, you’ve got another fucking thing coming, Jack. In fact…”

  He grabbed her hard by the shoulders, and Pete felt the pinpoints where his fingers would leave round bruises under her clothes. Jack’s mouth closed over hers, hard and warm, depositing the taste of whiskey on her lips. Pete sought his tongue through no accord of her own, her fingernails digging into the warm, tattooed skin of his forearms as she gripped him. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel. Nothing except him.

  “What the … what the fuck is going on? What was that?” she demanded, when she trusted herself to make whole sentences again.

  “It’s an orgy,” Jack said, tugging her past the bar and down a back hall that led to a closed door and a pair of loos that stank of bleach. “A blood orgy. You know, like sex ’cept with smashing faces instead of fucking?” He patted down his pockets, drew out a fag, and touched his finger to the end. Smoke curled up to tangle in the rancid air of Motor. “About that…” He gave her that smile again, tongue flicking across his bottom lip. “Told you. It’s good to see you.”

  “How did you even know where I was?” Pete said. She desperately wanted a cigarette of her own, but her pack was smashed, just tobacco and shredded paper, after her encounter with the pit. She tossed it away.

  “Followed you,” Jack said. “And I have to say, I was a bit disappointed you didn’t spot me. Though you’ve been busy. It’s understandable.”

  Pete cast an eye back toward the club. The violence was slowing down, going to ground, bodies twitching and choking out on their own fluids and internal bleeds. A few figures intertwined, their grunts audible above the noise of the music.

  “It’s a cantrip,” Jack said. “Musty Babylonian chanting to get you in the mood. Sounds like cats fucking in an echo chamber, don’t it?”

  “You followed me?” Pete put her eyes back on him. She could scarcely believe it was really happening, that he was here, in front of her, as if she’d wished him there. Without meaning to, she put out a hand and squeezed him on the shoulder. He was solid, there. More solid than she remembered, really. Jack had always erred to skinny and mean rather than meaty. “For how long?” she said.

  He shrugged, ash falling off the end of his fag. “Couple of days, I suppose. Which reminds me, I own Lawrence a smack right in the teeth for letting you anywhere near the Antiquarians.”

  “Days?” Pete felt the heat in her breast rise again. “I’ll fetch you a smack. Jack, I thought you were fucking dead.”

  His face closed up, all of the lines she remembered coming into relief. He shrugged off her hand. “I was dead, Pete. For a
nice long while. Now I’m not. Do we need to make more of it than that?”

  “Jack…” Pete ground her fingers into her temples. The howling, pulsing music was creeping into her, up through her feet, making her pulsate with it everywhere that hurt. “Jack, you can’t just be dead and then here…”

  Jack picked up her hand again, put it against his face, and pulled her close with his free arm, pressing them together from her waist to her breasts. “And yet, I am. You can put me off if you want.” He put his mouth against her neck, breath hot when he spoke. “You’re right. I’ve been a cunt.”

  His skin, where it touched hers, bare to bare, closed a current that Pete’s body had ached for since the first time Jack had touched her, back when she hadn’t known any man could touch her like that. “No,” she managed. “I’m giving you a pass. Just this once.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” Jack growled, and his fingers curled in the waistband of her trousers, searching and tugging at the fly button and zipper. Pete shoved his hands away, and felt a twinge low in her stomach when their skin lost contact.

  “I … I can’t…,” she managed. “We…”

  “Come on, luv.” Jack attacked her neck again, then her earlobe, tangling the fingers of his right hand in Pete’s hair to expose more flesh. “Being dead’s like being in jail. Shit food and no women. ’Specially not ones hot as you.”

  “Jack, stop it!” Pete shoved him again, putting her back into it. The shrieking music made any conversation besides screaming or lipreading impossible, but Pete put her mouth near Jack’s ear and tried. “This noise is mucking with your mind!”

  Jack blinked once, and then rubbed the heel of his hand into his temple, a gesture Pete found so familiar she felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach all over again. “Sorry!” Jack shouted. “I told you we needed to get out of here!”

  “After you!” Pete said. Jack took her hand, but before they could get far the blank door at the end of the hall opened, and a man in a black suit emerged. He pointed at Pete, and then at Jack, and beckoned.

  “Yeah, don’t think so,” Jack mumbled, tugging her along. Pete fetched up when two more figures appeared at the other end of the hallway, blocking the way to the front door and bottlenecking her with little choice but to turn around.

  “Do you know these gits?” Jack whisper-shouted at her as the trio herded them toward the blank door.

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “You’re not going to like it.”

  She’d expected something in keeping with the rest of Motor, lots of leather and rivets and maybe some light BDSM decoration, but what lay beyond the door was a blandly modern office filled with ASDA furniture and an LCD screen flickering between grainy CCTV images piped in from the larger club.

  Nick Naughton sat behind the glass desk, rocking his chair back and forth. “Now, this is confusing. I recall telling you only this morning to stay the fuck out of my business.”

  Beside her, Pete felt Jack stiffen. “You twat,” was all he said. Naughton regarded him, one eyebrow up.

  “Mr. Winter. I was under the impression you were no longer with us.”

  “Check your sources,” Jack suggested. “If you have time before I come over that desk and wring your neck.”

  “All right, all right,” Pete said, snatching Jack by the arm before he could get himself wrapped in a curse like the one Naughton had thrown at her. “No need to measure. We all know you’re the big man, Naughton.”

  One of the suits patted her down and took away the Walther. Naughton shook his head as if she’d disappointed him, and nudged the gun away from him. “Mind telling me what you think you’re doing in my place of business?”

  “Business?” Pete jerked a thumb at the door. “That’s what you call that out there?”

  “Don’t be cute,” Naughton said. “Or I might not be so calm. Why are you here?”

  “I think you’re a fucking liar and you broke into my flat,” Pete said, deciding any excuse but the truth would just get them run through a wood-chipper and scattered in someone’s garden.

  Jack twitched again at the mention of Naughton in the flat, and Pete dug her fingers into his arm. He’d definitely put on muscle—he was hard in places where he’d been stringy, and his skin was hot under her fingers.

  “Hmm,” Naughton said. He shoved his chair back and stood up. “Bring them here,” he told the suits, who hustled Pete and Jack through a door in the rear of the office and through a closed-down kitchen. Water dripped and roaches scuttled out of Pete’s way.

  “I can’t say you’re making my life easier,” Naughton said, “but it appears you may be the solution to an intractable problem.” One of the suits opened a rust-rimmed door to a walk-in freezer, and Pete nearly slipped on the damp floor when she saw inside.

  “He’s giving me the silent treatment,” Naughton said, brandishing a finger at Ollie, who was tied to a chair and sporting a cheek and eye that were swollen and starting to go blue. “I don’t fucking appreciate it.”

  “Ollie…” Pete went toward him reflexively, to insert herself between Heath and Naughton, but one of the suits hauled her back and slammed her into the metal wall. Her skull connected with a dull bong.

  “Naughty,” he said, and kept his hand on her breastbone, pinning her as if she weighed no more than an insect on a display card.

  “There’s absolutely no need for this,” Pete said. “Please. I’ll never bother you again. Just let Ollie be.”

  “No, don’t think I will,” Naughton said. He squeezed Ollie’s swollen jaw between his thumb and forefinger, forcing a whimper from Heath. “This fat bastard is being remarkably uncooperative. I think he fancies himself a hard man.” Naughton let go of Ollie and backhanded him on the bruised side of his face, reopening a cut under Ollie’s eye with his thick silver ring. “That right, hard man?”

  Ollie sucked dried blood between his teeth. “Your mum seemed to think I was a hard man when I bent her over,” he said, tongue thick from the earlier beating Pete could read all over his face.

  She bucked against the suit’s hand, but he pressed down harder, so she couldn’t do anything except breathe with ease. “There’s no need for that!” she shouted at Naughton. “You’ve no quarrel with him.”

  “I beg to differ,” Naughton said. “I’ve got quite a persistent quarrel with Inspector Heath, seeing as how he’s repeatedly refused my very simple and reasonable request.” He moved his gaze between Pete and Jack. “However, your intrusion does give me an idea.”

  Pete looked to Jack as well. He stood very still, a pillar of black cloth and pale skin, hand loose at his side. He didn’t return her look, just drilled his glacial eyes into Naughton as if he wanted very badly to slice off his face and make it into a hat. She was on her own as the rational half, then. That really wasn’t any great leap from when Jack had been alive. With her. She’d think over the proper phrasing later. Pete put her attention back on Naughton. “Can’t wait to be dazzled with your brilliance, Nicky.”

  “You’d get a lot further in this life if you at least pretended not to loathe the entirety of the human race,” he told her. Naughton removed a cloth rag from his jacket and wiped Ollie’s blood from his ring. “I’m proposing that I pass the recalcitrant inspector’s task to you, and he will stay here, receiving my hospitality, until such a time as I’m satisfied.”

  Naughton was a reptile. Not in the sense that Pete would have gladly kicked him in the teeth and called him a bloody snake if she got the chance, but in that he had cold blood and cold nerves, the kind of sociopathic politeness endemic to gangsters and professional soldiers. He was a camouflaged monster, walking and wearing a man’s clothes, buying groceries and smiling at pretty girls, until the skin shed, and the dead eyes and venom-filled mouth underneath showed themselves. All that did was make Pete more likely to acquiesce to him, not less. Naughton was a legitimately scary bastard. Pete didn’t make a habit of getting on the wrong side of those, especially not when they had her best friend tied to a cha
ir. “Fine,” she told Naughton. She lifted her hands and pointed at the suit. “I’m agreeing to be civil. Could you possibly ask your Pomeranian here to quit groping me?”

  Naughton waved his hand and the suit stepped back, giving her a smile that revealed that he had the sort of hobbies where teeth were knocked from his head with regularity. “Gerard Carver,” he said. “We want him back.”

  “Back?” Pete said. “Isn’t that more your department, Nicky?”

  “His corpse,” Naughton said. “Gerard Carver’s immortal soul can be chewed, swallowed, and shat out the arse of Dagon for all I care. But his corpse, I would very much like returned.”

  “I’m sure you’ve already thought this through,” Pete said, hoping that Naughton wasn’t even further around the bend than she’d guessed. “But can’t you, er … retrieve Carver yourself? ’S not like the Wapping mortuary has a posse of ninjas guarding the door.”

  “I’d like to,” Naughton said. “But I can’t.” He patted Heath on the cheek. “Do be quick, Petunia. I think the inspector’s already rather homesick.”

  “Why do you want Carver now?” Pete said. “He already fucked you and got himself made dead. Seems a bit moot.”

  Naughton twisted his ring. “I’m not finished with him,” he told Pete. “That will be all,” he said to the suits, and they hustled Pete and Jack back through the crush of fucking, fighting bodies and out the front door. It slammed behind Pete, and the quiet of the night street replaced the vacuum.