Bone Gods

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?”
    “I might be,” Pete allowed. The junkie looked at Belial.
    “Who’s that?”
    “My fucking butler,” Pete said. “Who are you?”
    “Got a message to pass on,” the boy said. “Guy on the ward paid me twenty quid and hooked me up with his connection on the outside if I’d take it to this bird named Pete Caldecott.” He shoved a flat piece of flexible plastic at Pete. “Told me you might be here. Now I’m done.”
    “Wait just a bloody minute,” Pete said as he started to turn away. “What ward? Who’s the bloke?”
    “Dunno,” the boy shrugged. “Bad dye job, blue eyes, old, but he was tasty.” He rolled his shoulders. “I wouldn’t’ve charged him full price off the street.”
    “Jack?” Pete said. “Was his name Jack?”
    “Sweetheart,” said the boy, “in my line of work, they’re all named Jack.”
    “Hey!” Pete shouted at the boy as he started to slump away. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
    The boy walked backward for a moment. “He said come find him,” he called. “Said you’d figure out the rest.”
    Pete looked back at the bracelet. LAVEY, GERALD was typed crookedly at the top, and a fat blue stripe warned Pete RESTRICTED PATIENT. Pete examined the hospital logo. St. Bernadette’s, a hospital near the city, as gray and unassuming as the rest of London’s postwar construction.
    “What’s Jack got himself into now?” Belial asked.
    “Fake name on a psych ward, far as I can tell,” Pete said. “Gerald Gardner and Anton LaVey—Jack’s idea of a joke.” She rubbed the strip between her fingers like rosary beads she used to count while she was waiting for mass to end as a girl, until her father hissed at her to stop the clicking. “He’s at the hospital that gave him this.” She held the bracelet, stripe out, to the demon’s view. “And apparently they think he’s gone insane.”

CHAPTER 34
    St. Bernadette’s was doing a brisk business in the A&E when Pete and Belial arrived. A youth with a stab wound was screaming on a gurney while his hysterical mother shouted at the attending doctor in Polish and a pair of uniformed Met officers shouted at her in a counterpoint of Geordie and cockney accents.
    “You stay here,” Pete told Belial. “If Jack sees you, he’s liable to blow a hole straight through the roof of this place.”
    “Winter was always such a sensitive boy,” the demon purred, but he took a seat obediently in a salmon-pink chair bolted to the wall and picked up an ancient copy of Tattler .
    Pete avoided the check-in desk, walking with the determined stride that told any observers she knew exactly where she was going and didn’t brook interference. With any luck, the nurses would assume she was with the pair of coppers dealing with the stab victim.
    She skirted the curtains that contained patients deeper into their trauma than the boy in the entry, most lying quietly, many smelling of old lager and newer vomit. A glance at the floor map once she’d gotten past the gatekeepers told Pete that the psychiatric unit was on the fourth floor, and she got in the elevator, nodding to an orderly who got on at the same time. They rode in silence, and Pete disembarked into a low hall lit with flickering tube lights. A charge nurse sat behind a desk, and she looked up for less than a second when Pete approached.
    “Visiting hours are posted in the lobby.”
    “I’m not here for a visit,” Pete said. “Here about a patient of yours.”
    The nurse sighed and reluctantly made eye contact.