Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Pete knew she wouldn’t throw him out. After six months of thinking she’d never smell him or see him or touch her hand to his skin again, he was here. How and why could be saved for a few hours.

  She rolled over, dislodging Jack’s hand and fumbling at the fly of his pants. He made a gravelly sound in the back of his throat when she drew out his cock, stroking with both hands between their bodies. “Thank you.…” Jack muttered, face in her hair, but Pete shook her head.

  “Shut up, Jack. Please just be quiet and fuck me.”

  He pulled her down to his mouth, hand knotted in the hair at the nape of her neck, and Pete felt him nip her bottom lip. He kissed her as if he were starving until he had his fill, then took Pete by the shoulders and put her on her back, kneeling above her.

  “You’re so fucking beautiful,” Jack said, just a hairsbreadth above a raspy cigarette whisper, and then ducked and lifted Pete’s thighs over his shoulders.

  She grabbed for his hair when he lowered his mouth onto her clit, taking long, slow strokes that made Pete tighten her fingers in the bleached strands. Jack grunted but didn’t lift his tongue, the insistent flicks against her getting quicker and rougher.

  “Fuck,” Pete gasped, lifting herself to press closer against Jack’s mouth. The motion sent a stab through her abused abdomen, but she didn’t, at that moment, particularly care. Being with Jack pushed her straight over the edge—there was no slow, no tender with him. He made her want nothing except him, and what he could do to her, and Pete spread her fingers across the top of his head, urging him on. “Please…” she managed. “Jack, I’m…”

  She felt his fingers dig into her bruises, sharp hot pain contrasting with the slow, trembling contraction of her core. Pete let out a small, involuntary cry when she came, Jack running his tongue against her until she had to fall back on the mattress, boneless.

  Jack stood for a moment, wordlessly stripped all the way out of his denim and pants, and climbed back into the bed, turning Pete onto her stomach. Her heart rate was finally coming back toward regular, and Jack stroked her back again as he nudged her knees apart, mattress sagging under his weight. “Not hurting you, am I?” he asked, urging her hips off the sheets with his hands.

  “No,” Pete muttered, muffled against the pillows. Her aches and bruises protested no matter which way she moved, but she wasn’t about to cry off because of a little pain. Jack slipped one finger, then another, into her pussy.

  “Good,” he said, free hand running across her arse to hold her hip, fingers pressed into the hollow next to her stomach. “You all right to be fucked?” he said, curling his hand inside her. Pete felt a residual rush of nerve endings from being eaten out and squirmed, pressing back into Jack’s hand. He chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  He replaced his fingers with the head of his cock, guiding it slowly until his pelvic bone pressed against Pete’s arse, Jack inside her to the hilt. “Fuck,” Jack groaned. “This’d drive lesser men mad, you know that?”

  Pete felt a giggle escape her into the pillow. Jack rocked back, then forward. Pete wrapped a handful of sheet in her fists, held on as he fucked her. The worry had gone, and all she really cared about at that moment was Jack’s breath heating the back of her neck. He bent over her, put his forehead on her shoulder, and thrust into her twice, jerkily, before he came.

  Pete lay still for a moment while Jack went to the loo and cleaned up. He came back and wrapped his arms around her. Pete tried not to whimper when he pressed into her bruises, and just focused on the fact that he was there, and that he’d still be there when she woke.

  Jack didn’t say anything else to her before he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 22

  She only slept, really slept, for a few hours—it was six a.m., glowing and red in her face, when her eyes snapped open. Jack’s breathing quickened almost as soon as hers did, and he opened his eyes. “Back to the bone-shaker’s errand, then?” he said, voice husky from smoke and sleep.

  Pete sat up and tried to work the kinks from her neck. “Suppose we have to.” Despite her resolve not to give Naughton more ammunition for whatever sort of wickedness he was up to, she couldn’t think of another way to keep Ollie from ending up like poor McCorkle.

  “You hungry?” Jack asked. “Stealing on a empty stomach’s no good.”

  Pete shook her head. “I haven’t been hungry since Naughton showed up here and gave me the hard line, like the scary bastard he is.” She found her shirt and panties and slipped them on, feeling her skin prickle when the air hit it. A scrim of frost lay on the window and the street outside, just starting to stir and growl at this hour of the morning. The radiator in the corner of the bedroom kicked on with a hiss and a clang.

  “How about you?” she said after Jack spent a quiet few moments both getting dressed and studiously avoiding her eyeline. “Hungry? We could stop on the way.”

  Jack dug in the wardrobe and pulled out a clean shirt, rolling it over his torso. “Nah. ’M fine, luv. No appetite. Let’s go.”

  Pete pulled her jeans on and took the hint. He wasn’t talking about the sex and she wasn’t going to be that sort of woman, the one who interrogated everyone she happened to take a tumble with.

  She got her bag and added the usual inventory—mobile, lighter, wallet. “I’d just gotten that pistol,” she told Jack. “Hope Naughton’s enjoying running about like he’s in MI6.”

  “Meant to ask you about that,” Jack said. He pulled on his old leather and let out a sigh. “Hello, gorgeous.”

  “You weren’t here.” Pete went to the lift. “It’s not as if I can shoot fire from my fingertips.” She started to tell him about the zombie and the paralyzer hex, then thought better of it. Best case, Jack would laugh at her. Worst case, this Jack with no memory and no marks on him would know she could throw hexes. Pete couldn’t be that kind of lovesick fool, even when she wished she could. When Jack came up with more than a blank spot in his memory about walking out of Hell, she’d tell him about the hexes.

  “Don’t think we’ll need a gun, though,” Pete said. “Assuming she hasn’t changed her mind, the ME’s a friend.”

  “Always did like the bossy detective side of you, luv,” Jack said. He placed his hands on her waist, swaying slightly as they waited for the lift. “Are you sure we have to go poach Carver right this minute?”

  Pete lifted his hands away from her. “Jack, that is not going to work.”

  “No?” His bottom lip protruded. “Not even a quick tumble? Take pity on me—being locked in Hell makes a bloke horny.”

  “Keep your pants on,” Pete said, walking ahead of him to the lift. “I mean it.” Jack didn’t get to pretend everything was normal between them, normal in bed and normal as they walked to the tube, and find his way into her knickers any time he liked. Pete could admit that she’d made a mistake ever letting him touch her, at least with so many uncertainties. That Jack was all right. That he’d really forgotten how he’d clawed free of Belial’s bargain.

  That he was still Jack.

  Pete let the tube ride pass without saying a word, and when they reached the station, waited across the street under the awning of a café until a familiar curly-haired form entered the front door, messenger bag slung over her shoulder. “That’s Dr. Nasiri. Let’s go.”

  Nasiri had disappeared down the hall to the autopsy theater by the time Pete caught up with her, but she walked on, ignoring the NO PUBLIC BEYOND THIS POINT sign and nudging open doors until she saw Nasiri shrugging into a lab coat in front of a locker stuffed with street clothes.

  She spun when Pete stepped into the room, her eyes widening at the sight of Jack. “What in the—this is the women’s changing room, Ms. Caldecott.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “Sorry about this.”

  Nasiri simply stared at her. “Never thought it’d be you,” she murmured. “Wanted to think you were better than that. Stupid.”

  “Look,” Jack said, flexing his fists and blocking the door with his bulk. �
��We just want—what’s the bastard’s name?”

  “Carver,” Pete supplied.

  Nasiri looked between the two of them. “You don’t want to do this,” she told Pete. “Whatever they’ve promised you, you have no idea what you’re about to do.”

  “They didn’t promise me anything,” Pete said. Nasiri’s calm and her lack of expression weren’t jibing. She should at least be furious, if not scared out of her wits. “What I’m doing is nothing you need to be concerned with.” She took Nasiri by the shoulder of her coat and steered her to the door. “I’m sorry to say this, but I’m going to have to get rough if you make noise or don’t cooperate. Let’s go. Get him out of the fridge.”

  Nasiri shuffled into the hall with Pete’s prodding, head down. “All right. If that’s the way you’re going to be.” She glanced back at Pete with each step as they walked to the cold room. The arctic air flowing from the vents above ruffled the plastic sheeting that lay over the corpses, transparent shrouds that did nothing to hide their last wounds and grimaces. Aside from the dead, the room was deserted.

  Jack shivered next to her. His eyes were nearly white, and she knew the dead in the tiny, metal-lined room were troubling his sight. She nudged Nasiri. “Just give us Carver and we’ll be out of your way.”

  Nasiri began checking the dead’s ID tags. “You still have to get out of here with him, you know.”

  Pete cast her eye on a pair of jumpsuits hanging on hooks by the door. “Nobody will notice one more body wheeling in and out, Nasiri. You know as well as I do the dead spook the holy Hell out of most decent sorts.”

  The doctor stopped at Carver’s corpse, double-checking the metal tag holder affixed to his body. “Then I suppose you’ve thought of everything. I won’t try to talk you out of this terrible choice again.”

  “That’d be nice,” Pete agreed. “Get his paperwork, too.” Nasiri was entirely too calm. If someone had snatched Pete and forced her to hand over a corpse, she’d at least give a try at bashing them in the teeth.

  “All right,” Nasiri said sadly, and turned to move among the carts to the wall where a row of clipboards with intake paperwork for the dead resided. Even in the arctic chill, Pete felt sweat on her palms. Her aches were a hundred times worse after having a few hours to set in, and dizziness was coursing over her in waves. At any moment they’d be discovered, by another pathologist or simply a hapless mortuary assistant going about their morning routine. Jack could take care of that. She just had to focus on getting Carver. Get the corpse, and she’d have leverage on Nick Naughton.

  She wasn’t terribly surprised, still, when Nasiri swung the metal clipboard holding Carver’s paperwork in a wide parabolic arc, slamming into Pete’s injured shoulder. The clipboard came back and smacked Pete across the temple.

  There was a flash, like a camera in her face, and Pete was on the floor. The cool tile pressed against her face, leaving a crosshatch of marks.

  Nasiri’s foot, in its plastic mule, came close and nudged Pete, who decided it was best to simply stay still. Above her, Nasiri picked up something from a surgical tray and pointed it at Jack. “I’m a doctor, crow-whore. I know how to cut a man so he bleeds. Get down there next to your woman.”

  Jack stayed where he was, the animal stillness that came over him when he faced something unexpected freezing him in place. “How’d you know who I am, luv?”

  “You people assume everyone around you is a blithering idiot,” said Nasiri. “You assume we think about takeaway and telly and football, and that we don’t see.” She went to Jack, grabbed him by the neck of his shirt, and yanked him to his knees, pressing the scalpel against the soft part of his neck, beneath his jawbone. “I see you, crow-whore. I see those bony, bloody wings across your back, and I can taste the ashes in your mouth.”

  Pete’s temple had started up a rhythmic throbbing, and she felt blood trickling down the edge of her eye socket and following her cheekbone. It cooled almost as soon as it hit the air. Another damned head wound for her collection. “Leave him alone. This was my idea.”

  Jack shook his head as he got down on all foors, and then touched his stomach to the floor, keeping his chin up. “She’s not just an especially observant sawbones, luv.”

  Nasiri narrowed her eyes. “And psychic visions on top of it. Aren’t you a bright lad?”

  Pete risked raising her head. Nasiri, from below, was a terror, her coffee-cream skin and wild black hair crackling like a storm cloud, while her eyes knifed directly into Pete’s. Not to mention the knife in her fist, sharp as the cold air and big as a house. “Whatever you think’s going on here, it’s not,” she said. “I’m not a necromancer.” The Nasiri of before, the skeptic, was long gone, and Pete felt monumentally idiotic for taking the act at face value.

  Nasiri flicked the knife toward her. “You and this piece of demon-chewed flesh here are going to give Carver over to the same bastards that sliced off pieces of him in the first place, to save your own arse. That about cover it?”

  “Not mine,” Pete said quietly. “Ollie Heath’s.”

  Nasiri’s stony expression twitched at that, but she tightened her fingers on the scalpel. “You’re a lying bitch.”

  “No,” Pete said carefully. “I wouldn’t be here if they were only on to me. Ollie got pulled in because of things I did.” She raised her head, and tried to sit up. Her spinning skull gave her mixed results. “He’s innocent in all of this. I’m just trying to fix what I put wrong, Nasiri. I swear.”

  “Then why are you here with this?” Nasiri snarled, and moved the knife to Jack. Jack met her eyes, a smirk playing across his lips.

  “I know what you are now.” He raised a finger and pointed it at her like a gun. Nasiri took a step forward.

  “Don’t fucking move, either of you!”

  “Half-breed,” Jack said. “You’ve got a bit of dirty old human in your veins, don’t you?”

  “You shut your gob,” Nasiri snarled. “You know nothing about me. Your blood is just as filthy.”

  “Filthy, yeah,” Jack said. “All of us humans are filthy and wicked. Didn’t find that out, pretending to be one?”

  Nasiri’s lips peeled back and her limbs went stiff. She was going to cut Jack, and Pete made a decision. She didn’t bother trying to leap and disarm Nasiri with her hands, but lashed out with her boot, steel toe connecting with Nasiri’s knee. The joint went pop, and Nasiri crumpled, bringing her face to face with Pete.

  “Fuck.” Nasiri’s face was pale. “You broke my fucking knee.”

  Pete knocked the scalpel away. It rattled across the tile and came to rest under a rolling gurney holding the corpse of the skinhead Nasiri had been working on. “You all right?” Pete said to Jack.

  “I’m aces, luv,” he said. “No thanks to this crazy cunt.”

  Nasiri clutched her knee. “You’re filth on my boot. That’s right—sludge at the bottom of the Black. Sewage.”

  “Enough,” Pete told her. “I don’t care about your refined sensibilities, Nasiri. I just want Carver’s body.”

  Nasiri levered herself up with difficulty, clutching the edge of Carver’s gurney and holding her leg in a lame crook. “You really have no idea what’s going on here, do you? What these men are doing to the Black?”

  “Unrest, black magic, blah fucking blah,” Pete said. “I don’t care about that. I care about Ollie.”

  “No,” Nasiri said. She twitched the sheet back from Carver’s face. “I mean him. This poor bastard. I heard you talking to Heath in the museum. I know you don’t have a clue what happened to him to bring him back here.”

  “And you do?” Pete said, folding her arms. “I find that unlikely.”

  “Listen,” Nasiri said. “Just give me five minutes to explain. I like you, Pete. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Why should we trust a fucking word that comes out of your mouth?” Jack said, folding his arms in a mirror of Pete’s gesture.

  “Because unlike you, crow-mage”—Nasiri sniffed—“I
don’t lie whenever my lips move.”

  “Fine,” Pete said, forestalling Jack with a hand from smacking Nasiri. “You have thirty seconds. Speak.”

  Nasiri reached for a mop leaning against the wall, using it as a makeshift crutch. “You didn’t have to work me over,” she told Pete. “I wasn’t going to really hurt you. I’m on your side.”

  Jack gave a laugh that echoed off the tiles, over the giant’s-breath roar of the refrigeration unit. “A thing like you, on our side?”

  “Didn’t say your side, did I?” Nasiri snapped. “On Pete’s.”

  “Oi,” Pete said. “Get on with it or I’m going to take that stick away, smack you in the skull with it, and wheel Carver out of here.”

  “You know the carvings are Babylonian, right?” Nasiri said. “The things in his skin?”

  Pete sighed. “I got that bit. Babylonia or Brighton, makes no fucking difference to me. All necromancer’s dirty tricks, isn’t it?”

  “Well, you should care,” Nasiri said. “Because this isn’t a spell. Not a hex or a curse or anything that’s usual in the Black. I’ve never seen it.” She passed her fingers over Carver’s cheek. The knife cuts had puckered and widened as his skin tightened with slow decay, and the edges were wrinkled as if he’d just stepped out of a bath. Nasiri sighed. “There’s a long, old word for it. Translated simply, it goes something like soul cage. A binding that tethers a soul to a corpse, but doesn’t animate. Not a zombie or a ghoul. More like … a lure. An anchor for something much larger than a human ghost.”

  “Fuck me,” Jack said softly. He pulled off the sheet and examined Carver more closely. “This poor sod is a bloody mess, in more ways than one, but a soul cage? Those are campfire stories.”

  Nasiri snatched the sheet and smoothed it back. “You, of all people, should know that most ghost stories start out being true.”

  “What’s Naughton going to do?” Pete said. “Roll him out at parties to impress the ladies?”