Bone Gods

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