Bone Gods

used it to go tooling around country roads during weekends at university, and still had a sheaf of speeding tickets from local police she’d never told him about.
    Too late now. Connor Caldecott was in the ground, just like Gerard Carver shortly would be. Just like …
    Pete shut the engine off again and closed her eyes. She couldn’t cry here. Not where the uniforms, Ollie, even that bloody scrubbed-faced McCorkle could see.
    Her tears didn’t care, and they still squeezed down her face. Pete had never believed that crying did a bit of good other than to waste time and give her bags under her eyes, but lately the tears had simply come, like blood comes when you slice skin with a blade.
    Being on a consulting job, with magic flowing close to the surface in a way that it hadn’t in months, not since Jack had disappeared, was too hard. She should have been smart enough to realize she wasn’t ready for the feeling. Should have waited, until his disappearance was less raw.…
    Except he didn’t disappear, did he? Didn’t pop out for fags and not come back. You know exactly where he went. Jack was gone, but it wasn’t as if he’d slipped away in the middle of the night.
    And she had to stop expecting him to appear and solve every problem, furnish every solution she didn’t have herself, work over every job that she couldn’t finish on her own. She’d thrown herself into this shadow-life, where magic was real and you saw waking nightmares every day. She’d made the choice. With or without Jack, it was done.
    She had to stop looking for him, and she had to stop seeing him. Had to get a grip on herself and make the empty spots inside stop stinging whenever she saw a familiar silhouette or heard the broad tone of a Manchester accent.
    Had to face the truth.
    She couldn’t go to him when things got too hard.
    Because Jack was in Hell, and he wasn’t coming back.

CHAPTER 3
    People who didn’t feel and taste the ley lines of power running through it didn’t realize London was a city of tides. The Thames Estuary swept seawater in and out, back and forth along the embankments and bridge pilings and bricked-over, secret places beneath the city. Underground rivers trickled through ancient waterways, and Joseph Bazalgette’s Victorian marvel of modern sewage still crawled underfoot, sharing space with everything from medieval crypts to secret Cabinet rooms and bomb shelters from the Great War.
    Beneath everything, the Black rose and fell the same way, ebbed and flowed against Pete’s mind while she drove east, the current of life force as old as the first bricks the Romans had laid down in the city walls. Older. Older than brick, older than blood spilled upon this patch of ground just inland where the Thames finally turned calm. Old as earth.
    But not of it.
    At the places of low tide, the Black and the waking world sometimes intersected, creating spots where if you turned your head just right you’d swear you saw a thin alley, an iron gate, or a shadowed doorway out of the corner of your eye, a thing that vanished when you looked straight on.
    Jack had showed Pete that such places existed, but he hadn’t been particularly strict as to how one found them. She’d spent a memorable three hours wandering up and down Covent Garden in the rain, trying to find the break she knew was there. Magic vibrated on a frequency just like sight or heat or sound; it just wasn’t a station most human receivers could tune in. Pete had heard all of the theories: magic was just another notch on the spectrum, beyond infrared and under ultraviolet. Ghosts were just electrons. Demons were just quantum disturbances that molded themselves into flesh.
    That was where it fell down for her. Demons were real. She’d met a demon in its borrowed flesh and stood close enough to feel his hot, sour breath on her face.
    She’d looked the demon in the eye before he’d taken Jack’s soul, ripped it free of his body, and crawled with it in his teeth, straight back to Hell.
    She found parking in Limehouse, and reluctantly left the Mini. Nobody drove in the city if they could help it, but Pete enjoyed it, being encapsulated in her own small world, with only shifting gears and red lights to mind, at least until she got where she was going.
    The thin space called, even if she would have rather kept driving, straight out of London, onto the M-25, east until she got to the edge of the country at Dover. The Black couldn’t be left behind, though. It