Bone Gods bl-3

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “You did,” Jack agreed. “You did warn me, mate. You were very clear.” In the next moment, Pete heard the familiar snick of Jack’s flick knife, and the silver was in his hand. His other grabbed a fistful of Ethan’s coat, backing him into the brick wall of the flat hard enough to dislodge chips of paint and a shower of brick dust. “Now let me tell you something,” Jack said, in the same pleasant and oily tone. “You ever come near Pete again, you so much as look at her crossways or think about her during one of your little tent-revival wankfests, and I am going to shove your own balls so far down your throat you’ll think you’ve immaculately conceived the second coming of Jesus Christ Himself.”

  Jack pressed the blade into Ethan’s cheek, leaving a dent in the fat of his jaw that Pete watched trickle a little crimson. “I’ve never seen a witchfinder, but I’ve seen what they leave behind,” Jack said. “Their fucking so-called morality that does nothing but put the facade of God’s will on your torture squads and your hate crimes. I wager you’ve probably put the screws to a few friends of mine, mate.” Jack turned the knife, so the point pierced Ethan’s skin and blood flowed in earnest. “And unlike you,” he said, “I never had any good nature to speak of, so why don’t you jog on before I decide I’m not really in a forgiving mood?”

  Ethan managed to smirk, and Pete had to be a little impressed. Even with a knife at his neck and Jack glaring at him with witchfire behind his eyes, Ethan wasn’t even sweating. “You wouldn’t cut my throat on a street full of people in broad daylight, Winter. You’ve got an ego the size of Westminster but you’re not stupid. The Order’s got files on you that would curl hair.”

  Jack leaned in, mouth almost against Morningstar’s ear. “Then you know,” he breathed, and Pete had to lean forward to hear, “that I know so, so many ways to make you hurt that won’t leave a single mark.”

  Morningstar paled at that, blood startling crimson against his sallow skin. “If you kill me,” he said, tone measured, “there will be no corner of the earth safe enough. My brothers in the order will track you and crush you.”

  Jack stepped back, spreading his arms. “Then come find me, darling. You seem to know right where I am. I’d delight in leaving a few of you bastards twitching and pissing themselves in my wake.”

  Ethan straightened his coat, and produced a handkerchief to dab at the blood on his face. He put his pistol back in holster with a smooth motion and then looked at Pete. “I’m sorry you’ve chosen this, Miss Caldecott. Your mother will be, as well. We’ll pray for you.”

  “Do me a favor and save them for yourself, Ethan,” Pete said, making a shooing motion. “My soul’s no concern of yours.”

  Morningstar sniffed, as if the pair of Pete and Jack were unreasonable children, then turned on his heel and left, holstering his pistol.

  Jack took Pete’s chin his hand, turning her face from side to side. “You all right, luv? Did he hurt you?”

  “Him? Fuck, no,” Pete said. “He might eventually bore me to death, but he’s never put a hand on me.”

  Jack nodded, nostrils flaring as he watched Ethan retreat, coat flapping like an ill omen as he cut a swath through the crush of Mile End. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “You…” Pete chewed on her lip for a moment. “You seemed to fancy Morningstar about as much as I do.”

  “Eh, necromancers and Jesus freaks aren’t so bloody different,” Jack said. “Fucking fanatics, whatever colors they fly. Frothy-lipped, glaze-eyed tossers, the lot of them.”

  Pete let herself in and held the door for Jack. “Thank you,” she said, after she’d shut it and heard the lock click. At least Ethan hadn’t also violated her home. If she’d come back to find his Puritanical silhouette darkening her threshold, she simply would’ve had to move.

  “Nobody touches you,” Jack said simply, and mounted the steps to the fourth floor.

  Upstairs, Jack surveyed the flat slowly, while Pete took off her coat. “Hadn’t really looked around yet. You didn’t change anything,” he said with surprise. Pete threw up her hands.

  “Where to begin? It’s the fucking Mount Kilimanjaro of paper in here.”

  Jack wagged his head. “You couldn’t bear the thought of it nice and tidy in here, could you? It’s unnatural.”

  Pete dropped her eyes. “That’s it,” she said, the words more acid than she meant. Now that he was here, flesh and blood and warm and smelling how he always had, she felt pathetic. Keeping his things. Not even changing the furniture around. His clothes still in their drawers and closets, even the vintage dirty magazines he didn’t think she knew about in their box on the high shelf in the bedroom.

  She was worse than any of the victims’ families she’d seen. She’d turned the place into a fucking tomb, simply because losing one more bit of Jack would have pushed her past the point of no return.

  Jack dropped onto the sofa, and put his foot on the ottoman. A little stuffing oozed out. “I’d murder a drink.”

  Pete picked up the bottle from the side table, where she’d left it, and Jack took a pull. “Carver,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, like I said, pulling a soul from the in-between isn’t an apprentice-level trick.” Jack wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Counting on your brilliance,” Pete reminded him. “I’m just the magical spittoon, remember? There for the filling.”

  A line drew between Jack’s dark brows. “Don’t say that,” he told her. “You’re not just some dumpster for whoever wants you, Pete. You know that.”

  “Yeah? You being gone certainly seems to have raised the notion in some of the finer denizens of the Black. I’m becoming downright paranoid every time I leave the flat.”

  “Paranoia’s good at keeping you alive,” Jack said. “Take the insomnia and the facial tics as bonuses.”

  Pete smacked him on the arm. “I do not have facial tics, you wanker.”

  Jack got up and went to his books, running his fingers reverently over their battered spines. “Thought I’d never be back here again. Truly.”

  “Me, either,” Pete told him. She hadn’t meant to, but it made Jack stop moving, hold on to the shelf with one hand until his knuckles were white.

  “I’m sorry, Pete.”

  She shrugged. “Let’s just figure out how to get Ollie out of his mess, shall we? We can cry and fling things later.”

  “Or never,” Jack said. He lit a cigarette and dumped out a box he found on a high shelf onto the floor. Odd bits and bobs of crystal and feather landed in a heap, along with what looked like a round game board, painted with an unblinking eye at the center and tiny boxes, barely larger than Pete’s thumbnail, each inscribed with a character that may have been part of a language once, many thousands of years ago.

  “You can scry for lost things,” Jack said. “Never looked for a soul before. What a grand new adventure I’m on.” He grabbed up a handful of the other things in the box, a flat black stone and a ragged gray and silver feather.

  “Thought you needed a map to scry,” Pete said. She didn’t particularly like looking at the board. The lines were too close and many, imbued with a sense that they might simply crawl away at any moment.

  “That is a map,” Jack said, banging it onto the low table by his elbow. “Of Hell.” He went to the kitchen, fishing in drawers until he found a roll of DIY twine.

  Pete traced the lines with her finger. The top of the board was curiously sticky, as if the varnish on it wasn’t quite dry. She decided she didn’t want to know. “Of course it is. Silly of me to wonder.”

  “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean there’s no rhyme and reason there,” Jack said. “You know how demons love routine and regimenting.” He sat down at the table across from Pete, letting out a sigh as he crossed his legs. “We really need some more chairs in here.”

  “Awfully domestic of you,” Pete said. Jack fixed the stone and the feather to the twine. The stone was perfectly round with a hole drilled in the center. It swung free whe
n Jack let the twine unfurl from his fingers, like an eclipsed moon hovering above the concentric circles that made up the maps of Hell.

  “Fuck domestic,” Jack muttered. “Pushing forty is too old to be sitting like a bloody hippie.”

  Pete had seen Jack scry before, though never with such conventional media. Once, memorably, there had been a severed head involved. He stretched out his arm, letting his eyes fall closed. The string trembled a bit and then fell still. Pete watched him, feet tucked under her. Jack had been skinny the entire time she’d known him, but he’d sprouted wiry muscles since she’d seen him last, blue veins standing out against his pale skin.

  As she watched him, Pete saw something that made the air catch in her throat. Jack’s forearm was pale, pristine, and unmarked. But not just his ink had vanished. The track scars that had stippled his skin like a black constellation were gone. Even his wrists were bereft of the thin white lines that ran up the inside of his arm, neat and precise in the way only a razor could mark your flesh.

  Before she could look and see if he was different in any other way, Jack’s eyes popped open and he let the stone fall with a thunk. “No joy. I can see him a bit but he’s a slippery fuck. That bone magic Naughton threw on him feels like taking a power drill to the skull.”

  Pete put out her hand. “Let me try.”

  Jack blinked at her. “You serious?”

  “Please, Jack.” Pete let her eyes roll. “It’s not as if I haven’t seen it done enough times.”

  He handed over the stone, lips quirking. “Look at you. Necromancy, scrying—soon you’ll be throwing me over and pushing out Naughton at his own game.”

  “That isn’t funny,” Pete said.

  “It is a bit,” Jack said. “Remember when you thought magic was something gits in top hats did on a stage?”

  When Pete took the stone, their fingers touched, and Jack’s were icy cold. The prickle of his talent this time felt like a static shock, not like the usual warm awakening of nerve endings his touch brought to her talent. The owl-eyed woman’s words jumped into Pete’s head. He’s not the Jack you know.

  “You all right, luv?” Jack said. “I really was just taking the piss. I know you’re not a sorcerer.”

  “I’m fucking exhausted and my best friend is being held hostage by necromancer,” Pete told him. “Forgive me if I’m not turning cartwheels.”

  “Pete…” Jack said, but cut himself off, his jaw ticking. “Forget it.”

  Pete let the stone dangle from her fingertips, holding her arm steady, breathing in and out through her nose to still her pulse and her nerves. She felt the Black tugging on her, trickling through the conduit in her, a warm and yet frozen prickle all up and down her skin. Under her, the stone began to swing, the twine tugging back and forth against her fingers.

  Quickly as it had come to her, it was gone again. When she’d hexed the zombie, she’d grabbed hold of the magic, dug her fingers into it and scraped furrows from its flesh. Now it was as if she were trying to scoop a live goldfish out of a bowl of grease.

  “Shit,” she muttered. Jack’s fingers brushed the back of her neck, resting on the nape. He’d moved behind her, his body bringing no warmth with it. Pete shivered.

  “Relax,” he murmured, his breath on her ear. Whiskey and cigarettes permeated her nostrils. “You have it,” Jack murmured, his fingers grazing her skin. “You’re so close.”

  Pete felt the floor drop away from her. Touching Jack was usually enough to make her dizzy. Touching him when the magic was up filled up her reservoirs to overflowing and started an enormous pressure against her brain. The Weir knew what needed to be done, even if Pete didn’t in her waking mind, and it wanted to drink Jack dry.

  The pendulum swung in concentric circles, the twine burning her fingers with friction. Pete shuddered, Jack’s proximity and his fingers on her skin raising goosebumps.

  She shouldn’t be so close. She shouldn’t be letting his talent fill her. When mages and Weirs allowed each other too close, terrible, terrible things could happen.

  Yet she couldn’t pull away, and she began to see, as the pendulum swung, the lines on the board move and change under her gaze. They crawled and twined back on one another, formed dragons and thorns and twisted thickets of spellcraft, writ small on the board. They reached out for Pete, psychic feelers inviting her to pick out the hidden picture in layer after layer of ink and varnish. She saw, with Jack’s power feeding her, and watched the layers of the Black peeling away before her. There was London, stinking, screaming London full of its smoke and rivers and the iron veins of the tube deep beneath the earth. The graveyards and the forgotten souls, passing through the thick yellow mist of the Thames.

  Still she watched, more and more filling in before her gaze, the ghosts and the things beyond the psychic clamor of the city, the slithering black spaces between the worlds. She saw what Jack saw and she spun onward, weightless, chasing a bright ember in the blackness populated only by screaming, clawing spirits that had lost their way between the Black and the land of the dead, sucked into the singularity of nothing that was the in-between.

  Gerard Carver’s soul was on fire, and as Pete drew closer she could hear him scream, over the howl of the Black. Before him rose the great iron gates of the Underworld, their spires poking into an orange sky, a sky reflecting the flames of Hell.

  The Bleak Gates. Pete had never been so close, never felt their overwhelming draw. In the darkness around her, things were moving. They winked across Carver’s soul like owls across the face of the moon. Pete reached out, sure that she could touch him, and then the darkness closed in, and she felt herself fall. Toward the Bleak Gates, toward the Underworld, a living soul bright amidst the silver contrails of the dead drawn to its magnetic pole. Past the Bleak Gates, past the dead, and straight down to the lowest realm, where the demons waiting beyond the turrets of Hell welcomed her living flesh with hungry cries.

  She came back with a scream, realizing she was flat on her back, staring up at the flat ceiling. Jack leaned over her, pressing his fingers into her neck. “Breathe, Petunia.”

  “I saw…” Pete tried. Her throat was raw, parched dry, and she swallowed hard. “I saw Carver.” The desert dryness was still on her skin, the barest kiss of the air of Hell, and Pete brushed herself all over, as if she were trying to rid her skin of a swarm of insects.

  Jack pulled her up and onto the sofa, putting a glass of whiskey in her hands. Pete drank it down, and the hot burn of the cheap liquor finally helped the trembling in her hands subside. “We have to stop doing that,” she told Jack.

  “Scrying?” he said, taking the bottle for himself. Pete shook her head.

  “Touching.”

  Jack grimaced. “If that’s what you’d like, luv, try wearing shirts with collars for a change.”

  Pete let the remark pass without fetching him a slap. She was wrung out. “Carver was somewhere dark near the Bleak Gates. Full of screaming.” Those screams echoed in her head, and would echo for a long time, Pete had a feeling, whenever she shut her eyes at night. They were the screams of the lost, of minds ripped so far asunder they could never be put back together.

  “Thin spaces,” Jack said. “The places where things that fall through the cracks end up.” He set the bottle down. There was barely an inch left. “The good god-fearing types call it purgatory.”

  Pete shivered. “I can still feel it all over me.”

  “If Carver’s close enough that you saw the Gates, we’ve got precisely shit for time,” Jack said. “Won’t be long before something or other snaps him up, or he gets caught up with the dead and the things that live beyond the Gates tear him to bits. They don’t take kindly to trespassers.”

  “And Naughton’s got to have others looking,” Pete said. “I really doubt he’d put his faith in me.”

  “There’s only a few ways to visit the thin spaces,” Jack said, “and the only one that makes sense for something flesh and bone is to be near death. I doubt Naughton’s
brigade of matched thugs is keen to mess with that sort of acid trip.”

  Pete didn’t ask if Jack had visited the howling void where Carver resided during any of his near-death experiences—she had a feeling if he had, it probably wouldn’t be a topic of conversation that’d win her any favors. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” she said instead. Jack killed the whiskey bottle and set it on the carpet by his boot.

  “Likely.” He seemed content to let that sit, but Pete stood up, pacing the track that usually belonged to Jack, when he was thinking or simply too wound up to sleep.

  “I guess we just have to be game for it,” she said. “The thin spaces.” She’d never thought it would really work, but she owed it to Ollie and her mum to at least try and break them out of what they’d gotten into. If taking a return trip to that place was in the cards, Pete supposed it would be a deal easier than attending Ollie’s funeral.

  “No,” Jack said instantly. “No. I went along with this until we found where he was, but I’m putting me fucking foot down hard. Nobody who wants to keep on breathing in this world goes to that one, at least alive.”

  “Oh, very well,” Pete said. “Since you have all the answers, then, how else do you propose the two of us wrest Ollie back from the bosom of a dozen necromancers with bad attitudes and prevent Nick Naughton from turning this city into something out of the Book of Revelation?”

  Jack slammed his hand on the table. “Do I look like I have all the bloody answers, Petunia? Is that what you think?” He sat back and rubbed the spot between his eyes furiously. Pete recognized the telltale sign that Jack’s sight was bothering him. “Look,” Jack said. “I like Heath well enough. He’s a good bloke, and I’ll help him any way I can, but I’m not starting another ritual that ends with you, me, Ollie, or the whole bloody Kingston Trio of us in A&E or more likely, on a fucking slab.”

  The patience Pete had held on a tenuous tether snapped, and she shouted. “What then, Jack? Give up? Ask Naughton nicely to please repent and change his ways? Or roll over and let him do what he likes? Because that’s not on my list of options.”