Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

“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, because 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?”