Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

Tyrell held up a small brown bottle. “You’re not a sensitive, am I right? You want a look at the archives, you take this.”

“Like Hell I’m drinking something out of a bottle some skeevy old man brandishes at me,” Pete said.

Tyrell coughed, or perhaps he was trying to laugh and not making much of a go. “My dear, you’re so generous.” He showed his teeth again. “Calling me a man.”

He busied himself finding a pair of cups and an ancient tin half-eaten by rust, measuring the tea into the strainer by hand. Pete felt her gaze slipping to the front of the shop. She’d lost sight of Lawrence, even though she could hear him rustling around and the sounds of the street outside. Not far at all, but she had the distinct feeling that if she made a break for the door, Tyrell would spring like a great insect and wrap his skinny limbs around her.

He wore his human skin poorly, as far as things disguising themselves as men went. It sagged around his face, and his hair was matted and greasy, as if he’d climbed inside a homeless man and hadn’t bothered to clean up. His eyes burned too bright, and whatever his real shape looked like hadn’t quite mastered blinking. Tyrell displaced just a little too much air for his size, the thing living under his skin larger than his concentration camp limbs and cavernous face.

“What should I call you instead?” Pete said.

“Whatever’s your pleasure.” Tyrell brushed his fingers against hers when he handed her the teacup and added a drop from his bottle.

“Don’t do that,” Pete warned. She sniffed the tea. It was gave off musty steam and smelled rather like the inside of a pensioner’s purse, but not like poison.

“I’ll do what I like,” Tyrell said, downing his own cup, sans potion. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me, desperately, and I don’t think you’re really in a position to boss me about.” He clinked his empty porcelain against Pete’s. “So drink up, Alice, and quit pretending you’re not quivering with anticipation.”

“Fuck off,” Pete said, and tossed the tea back in one long swallow. Tyrell banged his cup down.

“That’s the spirit. Give me a hand with this.” He wrenched at the wheel of the hatch in the floor and hauled the rusted, creaking thing free. Pete peered over the edge and saw a pitted metal ladder leading down into night.

“After you,” Tyrell said. Pete didn’t argue. He had her number—she didn’t have another bright idea if the Antiquarian wouldn’t help her. As she descended her center of gravity shifted, as if she’d passed through a sheet of running water. By the time her feet hit brick, she was seeing everything with a bleeding edge and hearing sounds down a long, convex tunnel.

“Dammit,” she said. Her own voice came across like a wax record, warped and tinny. “What did you give me, Tyrell?”

“Opened your eyes,” he said. When Pete looked at him from the corner of her vision, something much thinner and taller was in his place, and when she looked full on, he was the same grotty old man she’d cross the street to avoid.

“I asked for help, not … not this,” Pete said. She reached out, grabbed at chipped concrete. “Where the Hell are we?”

“Down the rabbit hole,” Tyrell said, and passed a hand across her neck with a chuckle. Pete felt claws, long multi-jointed fingers that could search through pages, or bones, with equal alacrity. An elongated jaw, yellow teeth made for slurping and grinding living flesh. Robes made from dirty grave winding cloth that concealed a body with more legs than two, with eyes that stared from between Tyrell’s rib bones, and soft insides that pulsed wetly behind an exoskeleton. Vast, unblinking hunger, but not for Pete. Tyrell wanted something much more, was trying to touch not her skin but the talent underneath, searching and seeking like a needle hunting a vein.

Pete became aware that she’d fallen over when she tasted blood from a cut cheek and felt the cool of brick against her face.

“See anything you like?” Tyrell crouched, and looked at her with his head twisted halfway round.

“What are you?” Pete mumbled, feeling her face. Wet on her fingers, but her nerve ends were blunted. Her face was completely numb. She remembered the few times she’d tried acid in school, how her dirty laundry in the hamper had turned into a crowd of black, flapping things and the paint had begun to bleed and reform on the walls of her room into scenes from MG’s tarot cards. That had been dreadful, and this was ten times worse.

“I told you,” Tyrell said. “I’m an Antiquarian.” He scuttled down the curved corridor ahead. Bare bulbs in cages hissed and spat above his head, and he stopped at a second metal door. “Coming?” he said, casting a look over his shoulder.

All right, Petunia, Pete said. Get your arse up. You’ve had worse.

She couldn’t remember when, but she got herself on her feet, and tried to ignore the ship’s-deck feeling of a bad trip rocking under her feet. “Where are we?” she said.

Tyrell pointed to a faded seal on the metal door. Pete saw it was from the War Office, decades out of date. It also kept moving, skating from one side of the door to the other. “Bomb shelter,” he said. “Thin here. Lots of fear, lots of people all shut up together, feeding off one another.” He spun the hatch. “A bit of the lost Black, for the lost library.”

“I can cross into the Black,” Pete insisted, knowing she sounded as if she’d drunk an entire pub’s worth of lager.

Tyrell extended his hand to pull her through the door. “Not like this.”

Pete ignored the gesture. Even wasted out of her skull, she knew better than to willingly touch Tyrell. She stepped through the hatch, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. The Black closed over her head, intractable as freezing water. Her head felt as if she’d left her skull floating a meter away, her brain flopping uselessly. The connection, to the currents and tides, was gone here. The Black was a bubble, trapped under glass, and Pete quivered under the psychic feedback.

“I do enjoy this place,” Tyrell said. “The world rushes to and fro, and the Black creeps into every crevice like tar, but here…” He inhaled, nostrils flaring white. “Here, it bends to the Antiquarians.”

Pete pressed a hand over her mouth, hoping the pressure would keep her together. Sweat chilled all over her bare skin.

“If you’re going to vomit,” Tyrell told her, “kindly do it in the corner and not near me.”

“This isn’t right…” Pete managed. All around her, the Black was screaming, rent open and bleeding magic into the void. She’d gotten sick the first time Jack had brought her over, but nothing like this. Something larger and more powerful than any single mage had torn a rip in the fabric of the Black here, and it was clinging to her mind, sinking in a million tiny needles that made all of her senses scream. For the Antiquarians to do such a thing, they were far worse than Lawrence had imagined. And she was here with them alone. Brilliant.

“Breathe,” Tyrell said, taking the folded photo from his vest with a clipped motion. “If I can stand it, so can you.”

Pete forced herself to focus on anything except her irregular heartbeat and the roar of the Black all around. The feeling wasn’t any worse than when they’d run suicide drills during her police training, back and forth in the rain and muck, until a cadet either passed out or chucked up their guts. “Hurry,” she mumbled at Tyrell, loathing the fact he’d made her beg. “Please.”

Tyrell pressed the photo to his lips, mumbled something Pete couldn’t understand, and then dropped it to the floor.

Blue flame crept in everywhere, over the walls, across the floor, through Tyrell’s hair, caressing his face and hands. Pete watched it raise the hairs on her arm, but she didn’t scream. It wasn’t really fire; it was power, bleeding out of the Black and into the physical realm. Jack could do the same trick.