Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  The man let out a scream, and Belial shoved him up and back, the way Pete would knock aside an errant insect that had flown into her face. He carried the necromancer, hand reaching deep inside the man’s sternum, until he crashed through the door at the end of the hall and into the club proper. Belial tossed the body aside and picked up a neatly folded napkin on the nearest table, gingerly dabbing blood off his hand.

  Pete looked behind her at Ollie, who’d gone white, spots of crimson on either cheek. “This is not on,” he muttered, his Adam’s apple working.

  “He had it coming,” Pete said. “Trust me.”

  Shouting echoed off the low soundproofed ceiling of the club, and Naughton rushed in, backed up by the big lug who’d busted into Pete’s apartment.

  Belial turned to him and tilted his head. “Ah, one who’s not a complete chav. You must be the boss.”

  Naughton stopped dead, stumbling over his own feet. “Oh, fuck me.”

  “Just back off, Nicholas,” Pete told him. “We’re leaving, and I don’t want a fuss.”

  She expected Naughton to throw a curse, or possibly, if he was less of a bastard than she’d calculated, break down and piss himself, but she hadn’t expected him to laugh. “I never took you for the type who bargains with Hell, Petunia. Never in a million years.”

  “You don’t know everything,” Pete told him. “Now step, ’fore I have the demon pull out your spine and use it for a percussion instrument.”

  “Go ahead.” Naughton gestured her toward the door. “You can’t stop what’s coming. Not you, and not that black beastie you’ve called up out of the pit.”

  “There’s no need to get shirty,” Belial said. “I’m a bit more than a beastie. You can tell, else you wouldn’t be keeping your distance and”—his nostrils flared—“sweating that sweet, coppery mess into the air like a virgin on her wedding night.”

  “You keep away from me,” Naughton told him. “I serve something much worse than a demon on a vacation from the pit.”

  “Yeah, you and Nergal can circle-jerk until the end of days,” Belial said. “But you’re still not going to tangle with me, are you?”

  “No,” Naughton said. “I’m not.” He pointed them to the door. “Go,” he said. “The son of Nergal still rises. The ashes of this world will still fertilize the soil of the next. The dragon of my god will see to it. I’ve done my duty. Who raises him is inconsequential.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Pete told Belial. “You let him, he’ll talk for hours. Loves the sound of his own voice.”

  “It’s not going to work out the way you think, Nicky boy,” Belial told him. He examined the cuff of his shirt, which bore a halo of blood. “But yes. I’ll leave you for now. I do enjoy living things to play with.”

  Pete helped Ollie outside, although his weight combined with her own wasn’t helping her stay upright. It was nearly morning: dampness on the cobbles, and a cold bite to the air that would vanish when the sun rose higher.

  Belial inhaled deeply. “Smoke and piss and death. Smells just like home.”

  * * *

  Pete settled Ollie on the curb. “You all right?”

  Ollie nodded, swiping sweat droplets off his pudgy jaw. “I’ll live. Feel a bit like puking my guts out in the nearest drain, though.” He looked between Pete and the demon. “You all right? And who’s this tosser? Don’t like his look.”

  “But I like you a great deal, fat man.” Belial grinned. “You’d look so very pretty turning on a spit with a poker shoved up your bum.”

  “You,” Pete told Belial, “shut it. You”—she pointed at Ollie—“get yourself home, and take a few days off.”

  Ollie didn’t move his stare from Belial. He’d be feeling it, his lizard brain screaming at the intrusion of a predator into the fold, but he wouldn’t allow himself to quite answer his own question. “What am I supposed to tell Patel about falling off the map the night after me partner got himself sliced up and coming back looking like I’ve been bloody tenderized?”

  “You’ll think of something,” Pete told him. “Now please, Ollie. Go home. If anything else happens to you, it can’t be because of me.”

  Ollie narrowed his eyes, but he nodded. “Anything you need, Pete, you call me, all right? Fuck Patel and the rest.”

  Pete patted his broad shoulder. “You’re a good man, Ollie. Go on now.”

  “Sentimental git,” Belial said after Ollie walked away toward the main road.

  Pete glared. “Nobody asked you.”

  The demon sniffed the air, nostrils flaring white. “I’m famished. Everything smells so … so much. All grease and oil and digestive juices. I’d eat for days.”

  “You expect me to believe you eat food?” Pete said. She walked a little way, settling against one of the orange columns that marked the way through Southwark to the Tate Gallery on the bank. She didn’t intend to stay long, just take some of the weight off her bruises and try to curb the dizziness and nausea that had become her constant minders.

  “ ’Course I do,” Belial said. “What, did you think I gnawed on babies or summat? I like food.” He inhaled again, shutting his eyes and turning his face to the weak sunlight. “I like food, and the cinema, and feeling rain on my face. I’m not so different from a human, Pete.”

  “You’re fucking miles from human,” Pete told it. “And don’t try to lull me into thinking otherwise.”

  Belial shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

  “I’d rather give Nicholas Naughton a deep tongue kiss,” Pete said.

  “That’s rather harsh,” Belial said. “At least I’m not a necrophiliac like your little friend back there.” He walked out to the center of the street and turned in a slow circle. “I love this city. I can’t understand what humans find so terrible about their world that they try to destroy everything in it.”

  “People aren’t famous for thinking in the long term,” Pete said. “ ’Sides, Naughton’s just arrogant enough to think he’ll be some kind of king of the apocalypse if his dead gods come out ahead.”

  “It’s almost tempting to let Nergal chew him and spit him out,” Belial said. “But if Nergal returns, there won’t really be much left for me to enjoy in this world or any other, so how about you find Winter so I can gently persuade him to stop being a twat?”

  Pete dug her thumbs into the corners of her eyes. “Give me a minute, all right?”

  Belial shrugged, leaning against the column next to her. “Sure. Just stand here as long as you like. Nergal will wait patiently while you pull your shit together.”

  Pete saw a tightness in Belial’s frame she’d never witnessed before. She’d hated him, sure he’d tricked Jack somehow, sure that the pleasure he took in pulling Jack into Hell was entirely sadistic. Now she was sure of nothing. Jack could have bargained with the demon freely, could have known exactly what he was getting into. And Belial wasn’t human. The bargain was sacred to a demon. Belial had never actually broken his bargain with Jack. He’d tortured him, yes, but only after he’d given Jack his allotted thirteen years.

  Pete decided she really must be beyond exhaustion. She was considering trusting a demon. “You’re really piss-scared of Nergal, aren’t you?” she said. “He’s got your cage good and rattled.”

  “Like you’re any different,” Belial said. For once his tone wasn’t the slick sneer that made Pete want to fetch him a smack. “You’re scared, because you’ve got sense. Nergal’s been around since the beginning of before the beginning. He’s a force, a thing. Mesopotamians named him, made him the god of all ills. The Christians gave him a starring role and cribbed all the best bits for the devil. That’s a PG-rated version of what he really is, though.”

  Belial watched a pigeon land on the column above. “I’ve seen him, in the plague pits and the camps. In the mass graves and the suicide bombings. Plagues don’t have to be microscopic, Petunia. Black magic and violence and suffering and murder. Those are plagues of the soul, and they’re Nergal’s favorite kind, becau
se there’s no cure. The ancients got him nearly right,” Belial said. “The adversary. The bringer of ill wind.”

  “Sounds like a barrel of laughs.” Pete lifted herself away from the column. “I don’t know where Jack is and I don’t know how to find him. The one place he’d go that I know about, he won’t be there now.” Lawrence would never allow Jack back into the fold now. He was a good friend, but he had limits.

  “I’m sorry Winter broke your heart,” Belial said. “But you’re the one who called me, and I’m holding up my end of the bargain.” Belial put his hand over Pete’s. “He fucked you. Get over it. Screw your head on and stop him from being the weak little cunt I always knew him to be.”

  “Don’t play with me,” Pete said, slapping his hand away. “You’re not sorry. You’re prince of a race of serial killers. You don’t care how I’m feeling any more than you’d care about a cockroach crawling into the path of a lorry.”

  “I don’t feel,” Belial said. “But I understand. I understand loss and desire. It’s the fabric of the bargains we make. It’s what knits a human soul together—pain, too, and agony, and ecstasy, and love. It’s such a fragile thing. You shouldn’t work, but you do. I suppose I’m interested in how it came to this, you being here with me and Winter being gone.”

  “Like you’re interested in the cinema,” Pete said.

  Belial nodded. “Has there been a Bond flick on? I do like that new bloke they’ve got doing the part.”

  “We can go to my flat and I can see if I can figure out where he might have gone to ground,” Pete said.

  “Won’t work, but all right,” Belial said.

  “Then don’t come,” Pete snapped, “because it’s the only idea I’ve got.”

  Belial followed her after a moment. They walked in silence. The only other humans in evidence were the street cleaners and the trashmen, going about their business in their neon slickers.

  The area around Naughton’s club wasn’t made for daytime, and the street was gray and depressing in the light of the sun, weathered storefronts and pitted streets choked with garbage that sluiced away under the hissing hoses of the street cleaners. Pete realized they were being followed as they passed the entrance to the Tate and turned along the river, but she waited until they’d gone nearly a block before she turned around. She was reasonably certain it wasn’t a ghost or something like the zombie—she hadn’t felt the prickle of the Black that clung to those who’d crossed over from it.

  “Hold up,” she told Belial. He stopped, and his black shark’s eyes scanned the street.

  “It’s something alive,” he said. “Breath, blood, heartbeat. Want me to pull its limbs off until it tells us why it’s here?”

  Pete crinkled her lip. “I was thinking I’d ask them what they want first.” She cupped her hands and shouted at the street. “We know you’re there. You might as well come out.”

  After a few heartbeats, a shaggy black head leaned from the alley, followed by a lanky male body in a black leather coat and black jeans that clung like rot to the boy’s skin. He walked with the shuffling, stumbling gate of a user, staring at her warily from eyes rimmed in blue, sleepless bruises. His cheek twitched. “You Pete Caldecott?”

  “I might be,” Pete allowed. The junkie looked at Belial.

  “Who’s that?”

  “My fucking butler,” Pete said. “Who are you?”

  “Got a message to pass on,” the boy said. “Guy on the ward paid me twenty quid and hooked me up with his connection on the outside if I’d take it to this bird named Pete Caldecott.” He shoved a flat piece of flexible plastic at Pete. “Told me you might be here. Now I’m done.”

  “Wait just a bloody minute,” Pete said as he started to turn away. “What ward? Who’s the bloke?”

  “Dunno,” the boy shrugged. “Bad dye job, blue eyes, old, but he was tasty.” He rolled his shoulders. “I wouldn’t’ve charged him full price off the street.”

  “Jack?” Pete said. “Was his name Jack?”

  “Sweetheart,” said the boy, “in my line of work, they’re all named Jack.”

  “Hey!” Pete shouted at the boy as he started to slump away. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  The boy walked backward for a moment. “He said come find him,” he called. “Said you’d figure out the rest.”

  Pete looked back at the bracelet. LAVEY, GERALD was typed crookedly at the top, and a fat blue stripe warned Pete RESTRICTED PATIENT. Pete examined the hospital logo. St. Bernadette’s, a hospital near the city, as gray and unassuming as the rest of London’s postwar construction.

  “What’s Jack got himself into now?” Belial asked.

  “Fake name on a psych ward, far as I can tell,” Pete said. “Gerald Gardner and Anton LaVey—Jack’s idea of a joke.” She rubbed the strip between her fingers like rosary beads she used to count while she was waiting for mass to end as a girl, until her father hissed at her to stop the clicking. “He’s at the hospital that gave him this.” She held the bracelet, stripe out, to the demon’s view. “And apparently they think he’s gone insane.”

  CHAPTER 34

  St. Bernadette’s was doing a brisk business in the A&E when Pete and Belial arrived. A youth with a stab wound was screaming on a gurney while his hysterical mother shouted at the attending doctor in Polish and a pair of uniformed Met officers shouted at her in a counterpoint of Geordie and cockney accents.

  “You stay here,” Pete told Belial. “If Jack sees you, he’s liable to blow a hole straight through the roof of this place.”

  “Winter was always such a sensitive boy,” the demon purred, but he took a seat obediently in a salmon-pink chair bolted to the wall and picked up an ancient copy of Tattler.

  Pete avoided the check-in desk, walking with the determined stride that told any observers she knew exactly where she was going and didn’t brook interference. With any luck, the nurses would assume she was with the pair of coppers dealing with the stab victim.

  She skirted the curtains that contained patients deeper into their trauma than the boy in the entry, most lying quietly, many smelling of old lager and newer vomit. A glance at the floor map once she’d gotten past the gatekeepers told Pete that the psychiatric unit was on the fourth floor, and she got in the elevator, nodding to an orderly who got on at the same time. They rode in silence, and Pete disembarked into a low hall lit with flickering tube lights. A charge nurse sat behind a desk, and she looked up for less than a second when Pete approached.

  “Visiting hours are posted in the lobby.”

  “I’m not here for a visit,” Pete said. “Here about a patient of yours.”

  The nurse sighed and reluctantly made eye contact. “What’s this regarding?”

  “Gerald LaVey,” Pete said. “He was admitted…” Another Connor trick. Human beings were inclined to fill in relevant information. The nurse didn’t bite.

  “If you’re a copper or a social worker, let’s see some ID and I’ll see about getting someone up here to unlock him.”

  “Look,” Pete said. “I need to see him. What’s it going to cost me?”

  The nurse regarded Pete as if she were something slimy and still moving that the woman had stepped in. “It’s gonna cost you a trip to the local station now.” She picked up the phone and punched an extension.

  Pete reached out and slammed her finger on the disconnect button. The nurse jerked the phone from her. “Oi! How dare you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Pete told her, stepping back and holding her hands up. “I’m very, very sorry.”

  “You should be,” the nurse said. “And you’re gonna be sorrier when I get your arse hauled off to jail.”

  “My dear woman.” Belial appeared at Pete’s shoulder, as if out of thin air. “I assure you that our intentions toward your patient benefit you as well as him.” He reached out and put his hand over the nurse’s, as she grabbed for the telephone receiver again. “It’s all right,” Belial told her, thumb stroking across the woman’s knuckle
s. “I know. I know the bills aren’t being paid, even though you’ve been working shifts back to back. I know about young Ned and his trouble at school, about those boys who held him down and took photos down his pants and posted them all over the net.” Belial leaned in. Pete watched as the nurse’s face went slack. “I know that every day since your husband left, you think about walking into this place with his skeet rifle and doing as many as you can before you cram a handful of those pills you feed the crazies down your gullet.”

  The nurse stared at Belial, her jaw slack. One tear worked its way down her face, running into the furrow next to her nose. Her lips worked, lax and rubbery, and a pathetic sound came from her throat.

  “I know how to make it all go away,” Belial said. “I think you do, too.”

  Pete wanted to move, to tell Belial to stop, but she felt as rooted as the nurse. The demon’s power wasn’t like being touched by cold—it simply curled up and lived in her mind, as if it had always been there, whispering to her. It was like sinking under with a handful of the pills Belial had talked about. Warm, soft, a slowing heartbeat, and a flow of euphoria that made everything around Pete—the smell of the ward and the screams of the patients and the ding of the PA—matter very little.

  Belial cut his eyes to her and mouthed Go.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Pete said. She backed up a step, which lessened the thrall of Belial’s power, but not enough to completely stem the tide of fascination. She wanted him to speak to her, to touch her and read her like he was reading the nurse.

  “I want you to do it right now,” Belial said, ignoring Pete completely. “Get up and do it.”

  The nurse stood, gathered her purse and coat from behind her desk, and left the ward without a backward look. Pete watched her go, until the doors swished shut behind her ample rear.