Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

Pete considered. Necromancy was not something people who wanted to live long, healthful lives got themselves involved with. More like people who wanted to live short, bloody lives and rise back up to feast on the family cat. “Attempted?” she asked Mosswood.

He blew a smoke ring. “If they’d succeeded, I wager London would look a bit like the set of a cheap zombie film now.”

“But you don’t know?” Pete said. “I mean, what specifically they were trying to do, by killing Carver?” Other than get rid of a mole reporting their moves to his little club of god-botherers.

The Green Knight curled his lip back, showing his teeth. “I don’t and never have dabbled in flesh-crafting, Pete. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. And neither do you, if you want to keep on breathing.”

“Well, haven’t got a bloody choice, do I?” Pete said. Mosswood tapped out his pipe, and then carefully put it back in his jacket. He faced her, and put his hands on her shoulders. Pete saw the rush of green, great trees with roots down to the bottom of the world, trembling green buds passing into dry dead leaves that fell and rotted and gave birth to new shoots when they touched, the sting of electrostatic transference that allowed her talent, should she allow it, to siphon his power down like it was her own blood.

That was Mosswood. Life and sex and death. A druid like Jack respected his kind above all else. Except one. “You do have a choice, whether you think of it that way or not,” Mosswood said. “I know what you’re doing, keeping calm and carrying on, but in this case you mustn’t. You’re too valuable to necromancers, especially ones virulent as this. You and your particular quirk of talent.”

“Jack wouldn’t walk,” Pete said. Jack never walked away, even when he knew better. Pete could at least give him that, prove that he’d taught her well now that he wasn’t standing beside her any longer.

“My dear,” Mosswood sighed. “Jack isn’t here any longer. He belongs to Belial now, and if he were here, he’d say the same as I am.”

Pete smacked his hands off her. “As if I’d forgotten that, you fucking bastard.” It wasn’t a memory like her memories of Juniper, but more like a series of grainy snapshots that flicked in front of her mind impossibly fast, too fast to ever be stopped and put away, with the other nightmares. The snowy white of the demon’s pointed smile. The black, endless depths of its eyes as it dragged Jack to Hell. The snap and thump against her heart of two worlds vastly far apart shutting off from one another when they’d gone, leaving her standing in wet morning dew, smelling black smoke. Alone, as only those who’d seen and touched real evil, war zones and terrorist bombs and demon’s smiles, could be.

Mosswood didn’t reply, just went inside, door slapping closed behind him. Pete stayed, until the dizziness of memory and the sickness of seeing Belial’s face faded enough for her to go back through the layers of hidden London to the one where it was still daylight, find the Mini, and drive home.

The long, honey light of sunset had cast long shadows by the time Pete made it back to Whitechapel and parked in the alley next to Number forty-six. Jack’s flat sat on top of a prewar building in the Mile End Road that had ceased to be crumbling and simply crumbled into four stories of brick, dry rot, cooking oil residue, and dust.

Still, for the last year, Pete had lived there with Jack. When he was there, with all his books and papers, his cigarette smoke staining the plaster, the repurposed record cabinet next to the sofa concealing the rotgut Irish whiskey that he insisted on drinking, it wasn’t a bad place. Not at all. Now, she supposed as she climbed four flights of stairs and let herself in, it was as good a place as any.

Jack’s piles of books and grimoires still existed just as he’d left them, on the worn built-ins and on the floor in tottering stacks nearly as tall as Pete herself. She’d rearranged some as she’d read through them, at least the stuff that wasn’t in Latin or Aramaic or simply jotted down by someone with such terrible handwriting it gave her eyestrain, but she hadn’t even attempted to organize anything to her liking. The books belonged to Jack, as did the specimen jars and decks of tarot cards, divination boards and talismans Jack had bartered, bought, or stolen on his various walkabouts to the darker corners of the Black. She left them, left his horrid, bachelor-flat furniture, and even let the old punk posters that curled at the edges to reveal the chipped, water-stained plaster hang.

Everything was just the same. Except for Jack.

Pete threw her bag and jacket onto the sofa and rooted in the ancient Amana icebox for a bottle of lager. She opened it and lit a fresh cigarette. The ashtray on the occasional table was full, but she couldn’t be arsed to empty it just then. She rubbed the spot in the center of her forehead where a headache was brewing. It made the cuts on her hand open again and begin to sting. She sighed and looked at her distorted reflection in the lager bottle. “Aren’t you a pitiful fucking sight?” she told it, getting up and going to the bathroom for antiseptic and bandages.

While she worked on her hand, she thought about what Jack would have done to Ethan Morningstar and his little group of elderly Goths when he’d found out what they’d tried to do to her. There wouldn’t even be a word to describe the type of fury Jack would rain down on the Order.

Pete poured peroxide over her hand, watching the blood sluice away, leaving pink streaks on the porcelain basin. She’d met a husband and wife when she was with the Met, a pair who’d lost their son to a drug dealer with a temper when the kid was barely seventeen. Pete had told them all the right things, the things she was supposed to say—grief counseling, the loss would be difficult, but they would eventually get over it.

Six months later, the husband started their car in a closed garage and when the wife found his body she went into care. Pete saw the dealer who’d stabbed their son put into Pentonville. It hadn’t helped.

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.

Pete wrapped her hand and taped the gauze. A faint halo of red droplets soaked through and stared up at her. Jack couldn’t help her. He was gone and she was still here. And that was fucking that.

She shut off the water and put away the first aid kit, going down the hall to Jack’s bedroom—their room, she supposed, now hers—and rifled through what had been his drawer of the wardrobe, tossing aside worn-out black denim, shredded socks, and Jack’s favorite Dead Kennedys shirt until she found his address book. Shoving it into her pocket, she turned to leave again, but the scent was too much. The stale smoke, the mix of herbs and pot that clung to Jack’s clothes, the supple creak of old, broken-in leather.

Pete picked up the shirt, twisting it between her hands. She pressed her face into it, allowing just one second. One second to imagine he was standing behind her, just out of reach. Then, before she lost her nerve, she pulled off her plain blouse and slipped the shirt over her head. It dropped off one shoulder and hung about her like a tunic over her skinny jeans, but Pete felt settled for the first time that day, as if she’d strapped on a stab vest rather than a ratty cotton shirt.

That done, she debated for a moment before she found her mobile and dialed her sister, MG, in Sussex.

MG and Pete hadn’t been on what she’d call civil terms since Jack had shown up, the first time. MG hadn’t taken kindly to her boyfriend stepping out with her teenage kid sister, and hadn’t taken kindly to Pete for reciprocating the interest. Pete had always thought that considering all the New Age crap MG preached, she’d be able to forgive and forget, but it wasn’t so, and they’d barely spoken after Connor had died. After a few rings, a voice mail box clicked on and continued the tradition.