Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

Pete watched as Jack stood, and the Morrigan drew something from her great dress of feathers and blackness. She handed Jack a black blade, and pressed her thumb to his forehead. All over Jack’s naked form new markings blossomed, tattoos that painted themselves onto his skin, burst to the surface like shattered veins. Jack screamed, going to his knees, clutching the blade so that blood flowed from his palms.

Belial was not stirring, and Pete tried to reach for him, but the Black was whirling, colliding with the daylight world. The London outside was burning, and Pete could hear screams and klaxons.

The dragon fed. Unwinding, devouring Carver’s soul, it fed and Pete felt the swell of all the things Belial had spoken of—the plagues of rage and greed and base human nature.

Give them permission to do what they like, and they’re like animals.

Jack’s ink became wings, claws, agonized faces of spirits frozen against his skin. He stood before the Morrigan naked, blood flowing over his hands, and watched as the dragon laid its coils over the city, a darkness so complete not even sound could pierce it.

“Jack,” Pete said. “Please don’t. Remember why you came here.”

“I am,” Jack mumured. “It’s like I told you, Pete. I did it so you could be safe. Aren’t you glad now?”

Come. The Morrigan folded him beneath her wings, pressed their lips together. Blood dribbled from their kiss, down the Morrigan’s chin, where she lapped it up.

Pete looked to Belial again, and saw his eyes open, cloudy and staring. She followed his gaze and saw the owl, sitting on the sill beyond the mesh and bars, amid the rain of ash.

“Jack,” she tried, one last time. He wouldn’t look at her, locked in the embrace of the Morrigan.

“This is what has to happen, Pete,” he said. “You can’t stop it. Nothing can stop it. Worlds have to die for a new world to be born.”

“A world of more death?” Pete whispered.

“I’m a part of it,” Jack said. “You never accepted it, but it’s always been that way. I’m one of the dead, Pete. I just didn’t know it until now.”

Pete felt the Morrigan’s death sense replaced with something else. It was the knowing, the truth she couldn’t lie her way out of.

The owl watched her. Behind it, Pete saw something larger rise, something beyond the dragon, older and larger, a vast intelligence without form, an ill wind blowing the ashes of the old London, the one she’d thought was real until she met Jack, before it.

She took a step toward Jack, then another. Reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. She shook, fingers vibrating, tears flowing thick down her face, running to the corners of her lips, salt in her mouth.

The Morrigan hissed, but Pete pulled Jack to face her. “I know,” she said. “I do. I know what you are, Jack.”

She gripped his wrists, and they were close enough to share a heartbeat. “That’s why I’m sorry,” Pete whispered.

Jack grabbed the back of her neck, pulled them so their foreheads touched. “Don’t be,” he said. Pete kissed him, and tasted his blood on her tongue. She let herself take just a moment, an extra heartbeat, to remember him. His scent, his warmth, the firmness of his hands and the feel of his palm against hers. Then she turned the black blade of the Morrigan, and drove it into Jack’s chest.

The Morrigan screamed, and all around them, in this burning London, thousands of crows took flight.

Do you have any idea, the Morrigan screamed at her, any idea what you’ve done?

Pete saw the owl take flight, join the crows. She felt nothing. Not like screaming, not like weeping, nothing. Jack was gone. Jack had always been gone. Touched by death, his presence in her life was a reprieve, not a certainty. And she’d fought, and refused to let go. Now there was nothing to hold at all, just ashes, and plagues, and the taste of blood in her mouth.

She met the Morrigan’s black, burning eyes, like oil burning on black water. “What I had to,” she whispered.

Beyond the window, the thing retreated, the prison doors rolling shut. The dragon gave a scream that shook the city to its foundations. The crows circled and then shot east, a great flock that could blot out ten suns, straight to the Bleak Gates.

Pete hoped Jack’s soul was among them, borne on to a place that would be, if not better than the one he’d found here, at least a place that wasn’t Hell.

Mark my words, Weir, the Morrigan snarled. You cannot cheat death. You cannot stop it or placate it or bargain with it. You and I, we know this. And someday, you’ll be at the Gates yourself.

Pete let the blade slip from her grasp. It landed by her feet with a dull thunk. “Until that day comes?” she told the Morrigan. “You can fuck right off.”

Tired beyond all reason, battered by the Black like driftwood, Pete felt herself slipping. Back from the Bleak Gates, back from the disturbance caused by the Morrigan, back into the cold, hard edges of the daylight world.

The Morrigan took flight, joining her crows, and the fires in the east winked out.

Pete heard rushing feet, the snap of surgical gloves, the thud of bodies. Shouts.

This one’s conscious!

Check the one in the hall—looks like bloody roadkill.

The fuck’s happening? Who is this git?

She lay on the ground. Jack lay a few feet away, a single long line in his abdomen, straight and thin, trailing surprisingly little blood. A pair of orderlies in white jumpsuits worked over him, bag on his face while the other prepped a defibrillator.

“Clear!” he shouted, and Jack’s body jumped. His new ink covered nearly every inch of him, from neck to feet, and he was still, and pale, and dead.

Pete choked, and that was all she could give. She was too wrung to cry, too spent to even try. A doctor in pink scrubs loomed over her, flashed a light in her eyes, checked her neck.

“You hurt, love?” she said. Pete managed to shake her head. The doctor helped her up.

“Let’s get you down to A&E,” she said. “Stand up, there’s a good girl. The hospital’s going to have some forms it’ll want you to sign about the patient who got out.”

An orderly came up on her left side and took her arm. “I’ll escort Miss Caldecott, Doctor. You tend the wounded.”

The doctor ran back inside the cell, where the other orderly shocked Jack again. She leaned over his chest and then shook her head. “Jolt him again. He’s not going to bleed out just yet, but it won’t do a bit of good if he’s brain-dead, will it?”

Psychic death. Would stop your heart surely as plunging onto concrete. Pete tugged against the orderly’s grasp, trying to be somewhere she didn’t have to look.

Don’t be.

He’d told her to. Told her to let him go. Pete saw the owl again, on the sill as if it had never left, gray and unremarkable in the sun. “Leave me alone,” she whispered. “I did what you wanted. Tell your bitch that.”

He was gone this time. Gone, to the land of the dead. She would never see him, talk to him, touch him. He was gone, and she was still here, and he wasn’t coming back.

The owl blinked, tilted its head, then took flight, as if it had suddenly remembered there was no need to hang about.

In the next moment, one of the machines working over Jack pipped. “I’ve got a rhythm,” the orderly shouted. The doctor took over the bag and pointed out the cell door. “Call trauma and get a surgery prepped. Get me some blood and a fucking surgeon. Fucking git, tries to kill two people and kick himself off. Doesn’t bloody deserve the fuss.”

Pete did sag then, against the orderly who grabbed her. “Best we be going,” Belial said in her ear.