Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Pete felt every inch of her body begin to turn numb. It started in her fingertips, as if she’d gone outside on a cold day and forgotten mittens. The numbness crawled straight to her heart, and Pete felt her pulse slow to nearly nil.

  Just before her vision bled to solid black, she felt Jack’s fingertips touch hers, a tingle of power that rippled up her arm like electricity. She squeezed his hand, and it was the last thing she felt before the Black reached up with its great dark hand and pulled her down.

  PART THREE

  DEMONS

  They are fatherless creatures, and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past of demons and ghosts.

  —Beowulf

  CHAPTER 27

  Pete had never died before. She’d been stabbed, when Jack and Algernon Treadwell had their dust-up over his body, but she’d never seen the Bleak Gates.

  She opened her eyes to the flat, the same stained ceiling and Moorish chandelier. The same wrinkled rug under her back. For a moment, she thought the nightsong orchid hadn’t worked at all. She sat up, fuzzy headed, the walls pulsating slightly when she wobbled and grabbed the sofa for balance. She felt like nothing so much as tremendously hungover, mouth dry and eyes aching as the light from outside streamed through the shutters.

  “Jack?” She was alone, the candles at the head and foot of the circle burnt down to nubs of wax that cascaded across the wood like lava flow. The flat was dark, bulbs in the lamps burnt out in their sockets. Mosswood and his tea had vanished from the sofa. “Jack!” Pete shouted. She took a step outside the chalk marks. Her boot crunched down on a fine grit across the floor. She bent and rubbed black, oily smut between her fingers.

  “Soot,” Jack said from the kitchen archway. Pete felt her heart convulse inside her ribs at the sound.

  “You fucking sneak!” she told him. “Scared me half to fucking death.”

  “It’s soot.” Jack gestured at the black coating over every surface of the flat. Pete brushed her hand on her denim.

  “Did it work? We’re in the exact same spot.”

  “It worked.” Jack massaged his forehead. “Sight is going insane and I feel like I just drank enough whiskey to fill the Thames. That’s a nightsong trip, by the fucking book.”

  Pete pulled the shutters open, squinting against the light. London was covered over by black smoke, clinging to the rooftops and obscuring the flash of the Thames in the distance. Their usual view was wreckage, all of the post-Blitz buildings vanished: in their place were blackened bricks and crooked chimneys. The windows of the flat were cracked and in a few cases shattered altogether, letting in the sounds of the street, the clatter of cars seventy years past their prime, and the wail of an occasional air-raid siren.

  “Is this coal smoke?” Pete said, coughing as more of the stuff wafted inside. Under Victoria, the miasma got so thick it would sometimes fell infants and those with weak lungs, giving London the undesirable nickname of the Smoke. Victorian London, though, didn’t have cars, or klaxons, or their 1920s flat block.

  Jack pointed east, to where the smoke thickened to obscurity, blotting out the horizon into a blurry line. “They’re burning their dead,” Jack said.

  “Who?” Pete stared at the spot, discerning blue-white flame dancing at the horizon line. “There’s nobody out there,” she said. No footprints disturbed the soot and ash on the street below. All the noise came from far off, the empty city acting as a giant echo chamber.

  “There’s an eternal fire at the Bleak Gates,” Jack said. “The souls who don’t pass or won’t stay in the fire forever. East is the Land of the Dead.” He closed the shutters. “We’re not going that way.”

  Pete re-examined the flat, covered in the ashes of the damned souls trapped at the Bleak Gates. “Fine by me,” she said, trying again to swipe the oily stuff off her hands.

  “We should move,” Jack said. “We’re a fucking homing beacon for anything hungry out here. Live souls don’t come along every hour.” He peered into the hall before stepping out, moving tight, eyes always roving.

  “So, what will get us first?” Pete said, sticking close to his shoulder, a stagger pattern used by incident response teams. Of course, in incident response there were more than two people, and they had stab vests and rifles rather than jackboots and ragged denim.

  “Damned souls. Scavengers. Demon on a day trip up from the pit,” Jack said. “Take your pick.”

  A single bulb flickered in the hallway, and when they reached the street, Pete was assaulted by the dry, crackled scent of the funeral pyres and the flicker of shadowed, winged figures passing through the smoke overhead.

  “I thought it would be more…” She looked at the ruins of the Mile End Road, the UNDERGOUND sign outside the tube station hanging by its wires. Far below them a train rumbled, whistle screaming as it ran on without stopping. The asphalt was pitted, down to the brick below in most places, and Pete stumbled. “More … otherworldly,” she finished.

  “Think of the thin spaces like shared hallucinations,” Jack said. “We’re both pulling bits, things we’ve seen, psychic impressions, painting it onto the nothing out there. That’s what it is, you know. Sucking nothing. We stay too long and we’ll forget the street ever looked any other way.”

  “It looks more like I imagined Hell,” Pete said, boot nudging aside burned and cracked bones. Human or animal, she didn’t care to stop and be sure.

  Jack’s mouth tightened. “This is a far fucking cry from Hell. Trust me.”

  Pete decided to ignore his black expression. “How do we get Carver back?”

  Jack patted himself down for a cigarette, and then cursed. “Of everything in my pockets, you’d think I’d at least carry over the fags.”

  Pete checked her own pockets experimentally. Her mobile was missing, along with her wallet, but her crumpled pack of Parliaments was still in evidence. Her clothes had changed as well, and she realized that Jack wasn’t wearing his black shirt and denim from before. “What the fuck?” she said, gesturing at him.

  “This is what your soul chose to dress itself as,” Jack said, snatching the Parliaments from her hands. “Which is lucky, because I’ve seen blokes cross over starkers more than once.”

  “You’re actually not complaining that I’m not naked?” Pete cadged a fag back and lit it.

  “Not the time or place,” Jack said, and exhaled a cloud of blue. “More’s the fucking pity.”

  “Certainly not,” Pete said. She passed the White Hart, her and Jack’s favorite pub on Whitechapel Road, and saw that it was burned out, twisted forms of metal lying in the wreckage. “I didn’t think I had anything in my head that was quite this apocalyptic.”

  Jack flicked his fag away after a single drag. “Well, ’s not my fault. I was thinking about a Tahitian beach full of topless backup dancers when I went under.” He glanced up at the shapes moving through the shadows overhead and took Pete’s hand. “We should pick up speed. It’s going to be Mad fucking Max here in a few more minutes.”

  Pete checked herself over as they walked, realized she was back in the clothes she’d been wearing the day Jack died. Thanks so fucking much for that. See Petunia. See Petunia’s dysfunctional subconscious. See Petunia have a nervous breakdown and be taken into care.

  Jack, for his part, looked as he had the first time Pete had seen him at sixteen. Shredded Sham 69 shirt, denim that fit him like his skin, and the jacket that let him look bigger than he really was. Jack wasn’t the sort of man most sensible people would fuck with, but he definitely wasn’t going to win dust-ups on pure mass alone. The jacket was his old one, hammered with silver pyramid studs, drawn on and scraped up, the Dead Kennedys armband stained with something that was either curry sauce or blood: Pete had never asked. Subtract the lines from his face, add a little height to the bottle-blond hair, and it was Jack a dozen years ago plus change. Before he’d gone away and come back with the flatness in his eyes.

  Pete focused on not turning her ankle on the pitted pavement rather than contem
plating what she had to admit was true—Jack was different. How different, she didn’t know. Whatever Belial had done to him, though, she’d bet the admittedly anemic balance of her savings account that she’d find out soon.

  “Stay with me,” Jack told her when she got a few paces behind him. “Nothing’s real, and nothing’s to be trusted.”

  “You can die here, real enough,” Pete said, not letting it be a question. The shapes overhead were more, and lower, and she could hear the hiss of man-sized wings through the smoke-shrouded sky.

  “You can die a lot of places,” Jack said. “This one just happens to be slightly more unpleasant than a gutter, or a grave.” He glanced upward at the shadows. “If you die here, you stay here. These bastards are sharper than I thought. We’d better get inside.”

  He led the way into the burnt shell of the White Hart, mounting the creaking stairway to the upper floor. “Carver’s got to be close by.” Jack lit a fag and dragged on it. His wrist flashed free from his leather and Pete noticed that the white lines on his forearm were back. In her memory, Jack still had scars.

  Pete settled herself by the window. The glass was just jagged teeth, mostly gone, and it caught on her elbow as she shifted. “Ah, dammit. You think we’d imagine someplace that wasn’t quite so sharp.”

  “That’s the Black,” Jack said. “Putting sooty little fingers all over your third eye. You start bleeding,” he said, pointing to her torn shirt, “we’re fucked.” He came over to her and leaned out the window. “They aren’t after us yet, but live blood will light us up like Las Vegas. They’re looking for him.”

  “What are they?” Pete watched slow-descending fireworks blossom as the air raid klaxons wailed on. Billows of fire erupted where they fell to earth, a meteor shower sprung from a human hand. Juniper’s mother had lived through the Blitz, as a teenager, and in the few years that Pete had been old enough to pay attention before she passed, Nana Morrow still refused to go into tube tunnels and hated any noise above pleasant, thoroughly British conversation. She’d been a far cry from their Grandmother Caldecott, whose father had been an IRA fighter and who, when Connor stepped out for a fag during their summers in Galway, had told Pete and MG stories about the fuckin’ Black and Tan bastards what dragged him away when she was a girl.

  “Heard a lot of theories,” Jack said. “Lost souls. Things that don’t have souls. Grim reapers, if you want to get Judeo-Christian about it. They’re from the Underworld, but not welcome in it. They feed on the ones that fall by the wayside, don’t make it to the Bleak Gates. Anything that passes through. Human, demon, it doesn’t matter. They’re never short of new meat, though usually the meat’s not stupid enough to waggle itself under their noses.”

  Pete watched the shadows’ passage as they drifted to the south over Limehouse, dipping low out across the river like ink drops, ever changing and shifting, until they dropped out of the smoke to alight on the diseased, sewage-choked water.

  “There,” Jack said at her shoulder. “They’ve caught the scent. As it were, since it’d take a fucking miracle to smell anything in this place except burned bones and shit.”

  Pete backed away from the window. “South?”

  “South,” Jack agreed. “Down to the banks of the dirty river we go.”

  CHAPTER 28

  While they walked, things solidified. Pete stopped feeling as if her mind were two steps ahead of her body, and the lines of things no longer blurred when she moved her head too fast. She wondered how long she’d been under. How much pull the Bleak Gates exerted as the orchid slowly killed her.

  “This is strange,” she said to Jack.

  “We’re in fucking purgatory,” Jack said, as if she’d stated that she had black hair.

  In the next step, before Pete could take the opening to air her feelings that nothing about this vision of the thin spaces was right or proper, nothing like when she’d seen a brief snatch while bleeding from Treadwell’s stab wound, nothing that was going to help them, a bank of floodlights snapped on and sliced across her face.

  “Fuck!” Pete hissed, as her corneas flexed painfully.

  “Stay still,” Jack told her.

  Pete shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand, discerning shapes behind the blazing klieg lights but not much more. “Scavengers?” she said to Jack.

  “No bloody idea,” he said. “But no, if it was, we’d be a meal by now.”

  “At least somebody’s got their head twisted on straight around here,” said a voice from behind the lights. The largest of the shapes chopped a motion, and slowly the spots pointed at the ground rather than Pete’s eyes.

  “Don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Jack told the voice. “But we’re not sticking about long. We’ll turn one way and you turn the other. How’s that sound?”

  “I’ve not turned stupid just because I’m dead, you twat,” the voice growled. Pete could nearly place it—she’d heard it before, using the same scornful undertone.

  “You lot aren’t from this place,” it said. “You’re living and breathing, and you’ve got flesh to go home to.” The figure stepped forward, backlit by the lights.

  Pete squeezed her eyes shut as she saw the thick neck, bifurcated by a ragged cut, and the bottle-brush hair. “Shit. McCorkle, is that you?”

  “What’s left of me,” he agreed, teeth pulling back from his lips. His face was a corpse’s face, blue and swollen on one side with livor mortis. Clad in tattered leathers, he looked more like the zombie from outside his flat than a thing that had ever been alive.

  “Who the fuck’s McCorkle?” Jack said out the side of his mouth. “Boyfriend?”

  “Naughton made him kill himself,” Pete replied in kind. “He stole some kind of musty artifact Naughton needs for the ritual. Him and Carver both.”

  “Brave man,” Jack said aloud. “Stealing from a necromancer. But I see you learned the hard way, it’s ultimately idiotic.”

  “I didn’t believe in magic,” McCorkle said. “Thought I was buying a relic, not a fucking piece of the fabric of Hell.”

  “Freddy,” Pete said. “We’re just passing. We’re looking for your partner, not you.”

  McCorkle reached out and pulled her close by the front of her clothing, until their faces were less than an inch apart. He smelled dead, too sweet, and slimy, and she could see the bilious black marks creeping under his skin. McCorkle was caught decaying, eternally falling apart while he was stuck in the thin spaces. If this was what McCorkle had seen, it was no wonder Naughton was able to convince him to carve his carotid like a Christmas ham. “Freddy’s not here any longer,” he told Pete. “And I know exactly what you want. Which is why I think you’ll be spending a little time with me instead.”

  Another few of the decayed ghosts came forward and grabbed Jack, who moaned and grabbed at his temples, nails leaving long furrows, when they touched him.

  “Please,” Pete said. “He’s a sensitive.”

  McCorkle grinned at her, gums black. “Then you’d better hope I decide to let you go before his brain’s about as useful as a raw turnip, hadn’t you?”

  He hustled her with him into the tunnel of light, and Pete didn’t resist, because it was that or be left alone in the thin space, with nothing but shadows for company.

  CHAPTER 29

  The gang took them to a rotting pier with a rotting warehouse piled on top, stretching out into the Thames. The Docklands before they’d been reinvented as the shining jewel on the breast of London—dirty, rat-infested, and full of cutthroats.

  “Jack?” Pete said as what had been McCorkle prodded her along with his swollen hands. She hated the note of panic in her voice, hated that she was turning to him instead of trying to get out of this mess herself, but she looked to Jack and hoped that she wouldn’t see the same panic reflected in his face.

  Jack tried to reach out for her, but the things jerked him away, three of them. The largest had a truncheon, and he slammed Jack across the back of the knees to still his strugg
ling. Jack buckled. “Fuck! Fuck you straight up the arse, you poncey putrefied bastards!”

  One of the three stuffed a greasy kerchief into Jack’s mouth, muffling his yells. “What should we do with ’im?” it asked.

  “Chop him up!”

  “Throw him in the river and let the naiads pick his flesh!”

  McCorkle tossed Pete down to the splinter-ridden wood of the pier along with Jack. “How about you brain-rotted morons shut your gobs?”

  “Ey,” the one who’d hit Jack leered. “You wait a bit longer, bright boy. Yours’ll rot like pudding as well.”

  Jack mumbled something around the gag, and McCorkle jerked his hand. His nails were long and spotted with graveyard dirt. “Get the crow-mage out of my sight. He doesn’t have any wisdom for us.”

  The other ghosts hauled Jack away, and McCorkle crouched, lifting Pete’s chin with his fingertip. That nail dug into her, pricking the tender spot under her chin. She pulled back. “Look, Freddy, I’m fresh out of shock and dismay, so why don’t you just exposit and threaten, and we’ll take it from there?”

  McCorkle tried to grin. In the light, Pete could see his upper lip was bifurcated by a stray knife slash, exposing his full gums. “You’re a mouthy bitch, Caldecott. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Enough times that if I had a quid for each one, I’d be rich enough to buy myself a life without things like you in it,” Pete said.