Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

“You’re all right,” she said as he dragged her to the lift. She was flat. Jack was alive. At least for the moment, and she was being dragged from the hospital by a demon.

“I’ve had better days,” Belial said. “Bitch walloped me a good one, tried to push me right out of my skin and back to the pit like a tube of toothpaste. But fortunately she’s only good at swanning about and looking terrifying. Piss-poor exorcist.” The demon cackled.

“I saw him,” Pete said, as they wound through the packed A&E lobby. “Nergal. I saw the dragon.”

They came out the door, and the scent of smoke went up Pete’s nose and choked her. She saw a motor accident in the street, ambulance versus taxi, and people sitting on the sidewalk, staring, some walking in circles. She heard screams over the klaxons that were no longer in her imagination. Saw two youths in hoodies pick up a rolling garbage can and toss it through a shop window, grabbing handfuls of pocket cameras and MP3 players.

“What the fuck…” Pete started. She was having a hard time standing, her eyes going unfocused in slow, rolling waves.

“The dragon,” Belial said. “Creeping up through the layers. It’ll die down.” He put her off and stood at arm’s length, looking at her. “It’s been fun, Petunia Caldecott,” he said. “And I’ll be dropping by, sooner or later, to collect my end. But until then…” Belial dropped her a wink. “You and Winter have a nice little life.”

“You’re not…” Pete breathed in, out, tried to keep on her feet. “You won’t try for Jack?”

“Winter gave me his soul,” Belial said. “I lost it because I was a stupid twat, and that winged bitch is stronger. For now.” He tipped his head back at the hospital. “Not to worry. I’ll have another try at the crow-mage’s soul, Petunia. You just wait and see.”

Belial faded away into the roiling crowd, and Pete sat down on the curb, holding her head. Jack was alive. The dragon was free, but Nergal was still in whatever hole the old gods had stuffed him in. The Black was shredded—she could feel it rolling and pulsing in her skull even now. She still owed Naughton, Ethan, still had McCorkle’s death hanging over her head.

It was a bad world, sooty and broken and hard. Full of nothing but trouble, if you listened to Jack. But Jack didn’t speak for her.

Pete stood up, and started for the tube. Whatever world she was in now, she reasoned, she would adapt and so would Jack. They would be survivors, together. The way it should be.

Nearly three weeks later, Pete met Felix Patel at the Dogstar on Coldharbour Lane. She watched him check the bar from the door, eyes scanning the entire room before he made his way to the two-top where she sat beneathed the arched window. The sun hit the blue paint on the bar’s exterior walls and reflected harsh silver light across Patel’s face.

“What is it?” He didn’t even take his coat off, just sat and folded his hands as if he were in the interrogation room rather than a bar.

Patel had deep grooves under his eyes, and Pete detected stubble on his formerly pristine jawline. London to the north had settled down, the isolated riots, murder, car accidents, and random acts of mayhem wrapped up, but London to the south was still evacuated in wide swaths, the British army running backup to the Met. Ollie had gone back to work the week before and declared the entire city, “A fuckin’ mess from top to fuckin’ bottom.”

Pete didn’t bother even trying to explain. The cataclysm that had rolled outward from the Black was gone, but the twilight world was even worse off than the daylight one. Lawrence had become a virtual hermit. Pete hadn’t even tried to go to the Lament and check in with Mosswood—she figured if the Green Knight was ever going to speak to her again, it would be on his own terms. She wasn’t going to force the issue.

“You look tired, Felix,” she said. “Can I buy you a pint?”

“I’m on duty,” Patel said. “And I haven’t ruled you out in the McCorkle matter, Ms. Caldecott. If that’s what you brought me here to ask.”

“McCorkle and Gerard Carver were schoolmates,” Pete said. “Ask Ollie for the details from his case file, but Carver was caging artifacts from his job and selling them on the black market. He sold McCorkle a reliquary, Babylonian. Carver’d promised that particular item gratis to a bloke named Nicholas Naughton.”

Patel narrowed his eyes. “This means what to me?”

“Naughton is wanted in Devon for the murder of his brother Danny,” Pete said. “He killed McCorkle, and Carver, and I wager if you wander down the lane to Southwark, you’ll find some talkative mates of his in a club called Motor.”

Patel stood up, chair shoving back with a screech of wood on wood. “Caldecott, I don’t like you. I don’t trust you, and I don’t believe a word of that shit you spout to Heath. Until I say otherwise, you’re still a suspect.”

“But you’ll look into it?” Pete said. “You’ll talk to Heath about Carver?”

“ ’Course I bloody will,” Patel snapped. “Unlike you, I’m a good fucking police detective.”

Pete stood as well and put a tenner on the table for her drink. “That’s all that matters, then.”

Patel pointed a finger at her. “Don’t cross paths with me again, Petunia. Unless you want me to get a lot more interested in your business than is comfortable.”

“When you find Naughton, Sergeant, do me a favor,” Pete said. Patel held the door for her as they left the Dogstar.

“And what’s that?”

“Tell him to enjoy it while it lasts.”

She watched until she was sure Patel was in his unmarked and driving back down the lane toward the Lambeth station before she walked back to McCorkle’s flat.

Naughton wouldn’t last in prison. He’d been unseated as the baddest man on the block. He might skate on McCorkle’s murder, but not on Carver’s. And if the other inmates of Pentonville didn’t get him, sooner or later an angry ghost he’d had a hand in creating would. Without his protection hexes and thugs in their matched suits, Naughton was just another sad bastard grasping at magic. He’d get sent on soon enough. What was waiting for him in the thin spaces was worse than anything Pete could wish on him while he was alive.

She waited on McCorkle’s steps until one of his neighbors came out, and slipped through the door. The third floor was still taped off, but Pete ducked under it and stood in McCorkle’s living room. No one had bothered to clear away the blood, and the room was musty and stank faintly of rotted things. Flies buzzed around the bin in the kitchen, and the taps dripped out of sync.

Pete found it behind the kitchen wall—a patch of plaster half-covered by a cheap generic poster of Tower Bridge, curling at the edges. The plaster had been painted, but the patching was rough. She searched McCorkle’s drawers until she found a tenderizing hammer, and smashed the plaster in three short blows.

Nergal’s reliquary was smaller than she’d imagined. A stone jar, rough and round, chipped into a circle by hand, covered in incantations and covered over with a bronze seal that had oxidized from the thousands of years it had lain untouched.

The magic crawled around it, faint but there, holding a tiny snip of the essence she’d felt from the thing that had followed the dragon out of the pit.

Pete rolled it in a tea towel, put the tea towel in her bag, and left, not bothering to lock the door behind her. While she rode to Regent’s Park, she went over all the reasons this was a terrible idea. And all the reasons she had to do it no matter what.