Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “A soul cage is the most ancient of necromancies,” Nasiri said, almost reverently. “The first act taught to the bone-shapers by their dead gods. The man transformed is a soul but not a soul—a soul stripped bare and screaming. It’s more than a lure, really—an offering, a torch in the darkness of the Underworld. The necromancer that did this…” She shook her head. “Well, he’s a bastard you don’t want to meet up a dark alley, that’s for bloody sure.”

  “Figured that out for myself, thanks,” Pete muttered.

  Jack rubbed his chin. His fingers made the sound of match scratching over matchbook. “You’re so smart, Doc, what’s the payday? Who’s this bloke being dangled for?”

  Nasiri kept her hand on Carver. “I know the dead, crow-mage, but I’m not a necromancer. I don’t get involved with their sick little hobbies.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be so kind, luv,” Jack said. He showed Nasiri his smile that was like a knife in the kidneys—sudden and sharp. “You’ve got the stink on you, the death stain.”

  Nasiri’s nostrils flared and she backed up against the gurney as Jack invaded her space, but she didn’t blink. Pete had to give Nasiri credit for nerve. Staring at Jack’s blazing blue gaze was like putting your skull inside an oven. His magic flowed from his pores like sweat, and it could drown you.

  “You smell like funeral pyres,” Jack whispered. “Like smoke and ash. So don’t pretend you’re so holy, Doctor. You know the dead as well as old Nicky Naughton does.”

  “I know the dead enough not to twist and deform them,” Nasiri said quietly. “I know the dead through my blood, not my lust.” Her knuckles went pale on the mop handle. “Now back up to a polite distance, Mr. Winter, before I jam this in your arse.”

  Pete thought it was really too bad that she and Nasiri stood at odds. She was beginning to like her quite a lot.

  “Leaving that aside,” Nasiri said. “The necromancer in question made a bollocks of this, since Carver ended up here instead of a vessel for some tentacled beast from beyond time.”

  “She’s right,” Jack said. “His soul is still here. Hasn’t been made an offering. Faint, though. This kind of death should make one bastard of a ghost. I should be screaming.”

  Pete looked at Carver, and though she would have rather shoved her hand into a bin full of hypodermics, she reached out and put a hand on his chest. His skin felt like marble after a rain—hard and cool, but also oddly slippery, like some kind of alien life still pulsed under his pulpy muscles, rigor come and long gone.

  She couldn’t see, as Jack could, the dead, but Carver gave not a twitch to her senses, not a trickle of power into her mind. “So what’s Naughton going to do when he finds out his offering is a pile of scrap?” she said.

  “Not going to be dancing, I’d bet,” Nasiri said. “But he could still recall Carver’s soul and sacrifice him again, if he’s good as he seems. Carver’s out there somewhere, not crossed over and not bound. Waiting for the first clever bone-shaper to pick him up and use him. Your man Naughton’s got his work cut out, but it’s possible.”

  “I’d really like to know what he was supposed to be an offering for,” Pete said. Naughton wouldn’t ask for a worthless corpse. He’d have a plan. A backup, a workaround, because he was a clever bastard. Much cleverer, Pete had to admit, than she currently felt.

  “Soul cages are made for nothing nice and cuddly,” Nasiri said. “Take my word on that.”

  Pete took her hand off Carver. She looked at her feet, her plain ordinary boots that had the same plain ordinary scuff on the left toe and the same broken lace she’d knotted at least fifteen times rather than replace it. The tile beneath was still spotted with her blood, and she stooped and wiped it up on her fingers. Jack had taught her not to leave her blood lying around. The less friendly citizens of the Black could have a party with the blood of a Weir, the kind that ended with her naked body in several dozen pieces.

  “I can’t give this to him,” she said, realizing rather sadly and anticlimactically that she couldn’t simply do the quickest, easiest thing to get Ollie out of harm’s way and take Naughton off her back.

  “Pete,” Jack started, and when she turned to him with a hard look he tilted his head at the door. “Can we talk about this?” he murmured.

  Nasiri gave a grunt. “My office is a lot warmer,” she said. “And I’ve got to go find a medic and have this knee looked at before it’s the size of a melon. I won’t rat you out.”

  As soon as the door to Nasiri’s cramped office shut behind them, Jack turned on her. “What the Hell are you playing at?”

  “I can’t,” Pete said quietly. “If half of what Nasiri says is true, I’m sorry, but I can’t let Naughton even have a chance at finishing his ritual. It’d be like handing a vial of anthrax to a disgruntled mail worker and telling him to throw a bloody party.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. “You hear a spooky story and suddenly you’re Joan of fucking Arc? Ready to ride into battle?”

  Pete sank into Nasiri’s chair, unable to keep upright any longer. Her head joined the throbbing chorus of her body, and the dizziness hadn’t abated. “You’re being a cunt.”

  “I know what men like Naughton are capable of when you try and make them blink,” Jack said. “And so do you. You weren’t half as heroic a few months ago. What’s changed?”

  “I found out you’d sold your soul and then you got your arse hauled off to the pit.” Pete prodded her head, feeling the pulpy spot where she’d grow another bruise. “Kill or be killed. That’s the rule you gave me, Jack, before you fucked off to play with your good friend Belial—”

  Jack’s snatched her by her front, lifting her out of the chair and slamming her backward into Nasiri’s sagging shelves of medical references and bulging files. An avalanche of A4 slithered down on Pete’s head as the wind went out of her. “You know nothing about Hell,” Jack hissed. “And you know fuck-all about what happened to me while I was there. Fucking got it?”

  Pete felt that her eyes were wide and her expression slack, in the liquid moment when she could only stand frozen. She hated that split second, the one that let a crack of pain show through the stone-carved nonexpression she’d cultivated over a hundred dead bodies and a thousand unpleasant encounters with live men. Because this wasn’t simply another drunken hooligan or pompous DI who thought a shaft and balls gave him automatic reign. It was Jack, and he was looking at her as if she were a complete stranger.

  The falling feeling in reality lasted only a heartbeat, and then Pete’s blood sped up, and she wriggled free and hit Jack in the nose with her closed fist, not caring if she broke him or herself. Jack cursed and lost his balance, knocking into Nasiri’s desk and sending her laptop to the floor. “Fuck!” he shouted. Blood dripped down his face, landing on his chin and soaking the faded fabric of his shirt.

  “You bastard,” Pete told him. “You think I had an easy time of it alone? You think I was welcomed into your old circles with open fucking arms?” She grabbed up a handful of papers and flung them at Jack, crippled birds that landed in a snowdrift around his boots. “You fucking abandoned me, you piece of shit, and I’m supposed to put up with your crap now because you’re what? Lazarus with fucking post-traumatic stress?”

  Jack snatched at her hand and Pete yanked it away. If he touched her she was going to scream. “I can’t imagine what happened to you there,” she said. “But you didn’t even fight. You just let him take you, and…”

  The wet on her face wasn’t blood, and her eye stung. The room blurred around her. “You didn’t let me help you,” Pete said desperately. “You didn’t do anything…”

  Jack grabbed her again, by her upper arms, and Pete didn’t fight him this time. Jack pressed his lips against hers, hard enough to pulp her own lips, and Pete’s hands clutched his shirt. She tasted Jack’s blood, and shared his breath as he reached up and grabbed the back of her head with one hand, tangling her hair.

  “Pete,” he said finally, barely a rasp of air. “Pete…”r />
  She broke it off, knowing if she touched him for one more second, she could never stop. Would never be able to survive if he were gone again.

  Jack let go and pushed a hand through his hair. “What could I have done, you know? I’m just a man, Pete. And not even a very good one.”

  Pete smoothed her shirt where Jack had popped a button off. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Jack got a handful of tissue from the box on Nasiri’s desk and pressed it against his nose, red still flowing. “Suppose I had that coming,” he said through the baffle.

  “What happened to you?” Pete blurted. “How did you come back?”

  Jack pitched the bloody wad into the bin. “Pete. We’ve been over this.”

  “I meant in Hell,” she said, not wanting to look at him. If she looked at him, she could never ask the question. “Before you came back. What did Belial do?”

  “We’re on to you now,” Jack said, and Pete didn’t miss the stiffness in his voice and body. “I’m telling you, you don’t want any part of some noble scheme to save the fucking world. Not now. Just give them Carver, get Heath out of hock, and walk away.”

  “I can’t,” she told Jack, and he threw out his hands.

  “Of course you can’t. Because you’re Pete fucking Caldecott, defender of all that’s good and true. Dragonslayer to the last.”

  “I’m not any of those things,” Pete said. “But if you think I’d let a sweatstain like Naughton get exactly what he wants by threatening my life and my friends, you really have forgotten a lot about me, Jack.”

  He sniffed blood, some catching on his upper lip when he smiled. “I never forgot you, Pete. Not once, in all the time I was in Hell.”

  Pete felt the same pain she’d get, just above her gut, when she’d see something that unexpectedly reminded her of Jack these six months past. The difference was, he was here and it still hurt. And the Hecate’s voice was in her head, always, unceasing as a tape loop. Kill the crow-mage.

  She couldn’t do it. Jack might not be Jack, and the Hecate might do terrible things to her when refused, but if she could foil Naughton, she could at least go with her head up.

  Jack wiped the last of the blood off on his jeans and tilted his head toward her. “Suppose you’ll need some help dispensing justice and protecting damsels, then,” he said.

  Pete squeezed his hand. Jack squeezed it in return, and for the first time since he’d pulled her from the pit, he looked like the man she’d watched walk away from her. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “I hope you’re happy,” Pete said as they left the police station. “I’m never going to get a lick of help out of the medical examiner’s office, ever again. Nasiri will blackball me from here to Liverpool.”

  “Eh,” Jack said. “Ifrit are touchy. Territorial. Plus, I think she fancies me a bit. She’ll get over her bashed kneecap.”

  “That’s what she is?” Pete headed for the tube station, taking them through the gates and to the platform.

  “Yup.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Nasty little soul-suckers. Good thing she’s got some human blood. Otherwise she probably would’ve just gnawed on our limbs until she felt better about her life.”

  “Better question,” Pete said. “What are we going to do about Gerard Carver? Seeing as we don’t actually have him?”

  “That corpse isn’t what Naughton’s after,” Jack said. “I’d bet you a quid.”

  “Carver’s soul,” Pete said.

  “The one that should still be with his body, but is not,” Jack said. “It’s a mystery. Let’s call Scooby Doo and have done.”

  “Naughton could raise him,” Pete said. She didn’t know why she even gave the idea voice, because it was insane. “Why couldn’t we?”

  Jack favored her with a crooked eyebrow. “What?”

  “We could summon him,” Pete said. She never would have suggested such a thing even a month ago. She put it down to being desperate, dizzy, hurting, and out of ideas. Between the Order, Naughton, and Ollie being locked in a freezer waiting to get fitted for a bucket of cement around his feet, she didn’t see any way out that didn’t make her the villain even without resorting to necromancy. “Not raise him back into his corpse, but bring back his ghost. Summon him, like those gits tried to summon Algernon Treadwell last spring.”

  Jack paused near the bus stop that would return them to Whitechapel. “Have you lost your bloody mind?”

  Pete lifted one shoulder. “Like they say in America—go big or go home.”

  Jack looked hard at her for a moment, and Pete became interested in a wad of gum near her toe. Jack had his brushes with black magic, but Pete had the feeling that her being the one to bring it up was breaking some sort of silent contract between them, Pete the innocent and Jack the mage, who’d seen every unspeakable thing that crawled through the underside of the Black.

  “Even if you weren’t talking about something that could get both our intestines ripped out through our arseholes by Carver’s hungry ghost, it wouldn’t work. He’s still tied to his flesh. He’s not crossed into the Underworld, like that woman Nasiri said. Carver’s in-between, and there’s no ghost, just an echo in the flesh. His soul is in the thin spaces, wandering hither and yon. Really, it’s just a question of who gets him first—the Bleak Gates, Naughton, or some nasty like Nasiri scavenging the in-between for lost souls.”

  Pete stepped aboard the bus as it squealed to a stop at the curb. “Soul, then. What if we were the ones to recall Carver’s soul? Be one definitive fucking bargaining chit with Naughton.” Not to mention it would both solve her problem with Morningstar and prevent Ollie from having any fingers lopped off.

  “Finding a wandering soul isn’t like picking up loose change off the street,” Jack said. “And putting him back in that body is still necromancy, Pete. I know I ain’t always been the one on the bright and shining path, but black magic like that is going to leave a stain.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” Pete said. She climbed to the upper deck of the bus and took the front seat, London passing beneath her feet. “I’m past caring, Jack. This isn’t like other things we’ve come up against. This is…”

  “This is worse,” Jack said softly.

  Pete pressed her forehead against the bus window. “What’s happening, Jack?” she said, in the same tone.

  “End of the world,” he said. “End of the Black. Who knows. Been coming a long time, this storm. The smart ones, they realized. I was the stubborn sod who ran out in the rain without my umbrella.”

  “And now?” Pete said.

  “Now I don’t know what I am,” Jack said. “Trying not to let it bother me.”

  “Help me,” Pete said. “You can’t stop whatever’s happening in the Black but you can put a collar on Naughton once and for all.” She faced him. “You know I’m right,” Pete insisted. “We can’t hand Carver over and we can’t walk away unless we do. This is the only way.”

  Jack scrubbed a hand across his face. “Not going to be easy. Black magic is always the trickiest. Like playing catch with nitroglycerine.”

  The bus jerked Pete as it stopped and started, and she gripped her seat. “If it were easy, Jack, I wouldn’t be asking you for help. I’d have solved it already.”

  His mouth curled and for just a moment, he looked like himself, before the veil dropped down again and he said, “Suppose you would.”

  They rode in silence after that, disembarked in silence, and walked down Mile End Road in silence. Pete was content to keep things that way until they reached the flat, but a black shadow standing eerily still and ramrod straight on the front steps changed her mind. She plucked at Jack’s leather, stopping him a dozen meters or so from the flat.

  “Law?” he said, taking in the rangy figure and his black coat and hat.

  “Worse,” Pete said. “Self-righteous cunt.” She closed distance and jabbed her finger into the man’s chest. “What are you doing here, Ethan?”

  �
�Miss Caldecott, really,” he said, backing out of range and brushing at the front of his coat. “I don’t have endless patience, you know. So here I am, Daniel bearding the lion in her den.”

  “Please,” Pete said. “You’re about as much a man of faith as Graham Norton is a Cub Scout.”

  “My faith is as vast as my wrath,” Morningstar said, with that small, calm smile that seemed to constantly play across his crooked mouth. Pete wondered how many different times Morningstar had gotten his face bashed to make him quite so asymmetrical. “Have you what I’m looking for?” he said. “Or am I going to be forced to use more direct persuasion?”

  “Sorry, Ethan,” Pete said. “You’ve been bumped to the back of the line as far as threats and menacing.” She pulled out her key and shouldered past him to open the door. “But do take it up with Nick Naughton down in Southwark. In fact, I think you two twats would get on famously.”

  Morningstar grabbed the collar of her jacket and yanked her back down the steps to face him. “I’d really hoped I’d talked some sense into you last time, but I can see there’s only one thing you’ll understand.” He reached inside his jacket, but before he could draw his pistol Jack spoke.

  “Fuck me!” He pointed at Ethan. “Was trying to place those enchantments you’ve got riding on you, but you’re the real article, aren’t you, mate?” Jack extended the point into a poke, prodding Morningstar’s arm. “Petunia, look. A witchfinder in the flesh.”

  “We’ve met,” Pete said, struggling against Morningstar, who still held on to her as he would a naughty puppy.

  “Oh, top notch,” Jack said. “Never thought I’d see one of you blokes up close. Thought you died out about the time we stopped putting leeches on sick folks and tossing villains in the stocks.”

  Ethan drew his spine straight. He had a few good inches on Jack, and thickness as well, but amusement was no longer crawling across his face like a snake across furrows of earth. “You lay a hand on me again, Mr. Winter, and I guarantee I’ll take your filthy index finger off and carry it home for my mantlepiece.”