Bone Gods

bomb. Pete pressed the buzzer. The Black was thick here, gathering in what had once been a sacred place, profane as a swastika across the face of the Virgin Mary. The energy wasn’t friendly, as much as the Black was ever friendly. Pete felt it tighten against her skull, trying to worm its way inside and fill up her reservoirs. She shut her eyes and breathed short and sharp through her nose. Pressed the buzzer again.
    Thunder cracked somewhere close, and a smattering of rain fell on Pete before a slot in the door slid open, and an eye regarded her. “Yeah?”
    “I’m…” Pete started, ready to flirt, threaten, or lie her way inside as the occasion called for. She knew enough names to chat a good game, at least until someone more intelligent than a door minder got involved.
    “Pete Caldecott,” said the eye’s owner. “Hang on.”
    Pete composed herself in the few seconds it took the fire door to unlock itself and roll open. She’d never thought her name would get her anything in the Black except grief.
    The eye belonged to a bouncer, and the bouncer was, contrary to gravelly growl and shaved head, a woman, half a foot taller and probably twice as wide as Pete. “You’re not much, are you?” she asked Pete.
    “You look like enough for both of us,” Pete said. The bouncer stepped aside and clapped her on the back hard enough to realign her vertebrae.
    “Have fun, little girl.”
    Motor started out in a long, oppressive hall that seemed to vanish into an event horizon, painted as it was in jet black with white, light-reactive graffiti over the entire length that faded as the dark encroached again with the slamming of the door.
    Music flowed through the walls, up through the soles of her boots and into her bones. Hard, percussive, post-apocalyptic music that made you want to put a fist through someone’s face. She caught the tail end of “Ace of Spades” before it switched over to an old track by Slayer.
    A beaded curtain parted before her, and a couple stumbled out, girl and boy attired almost identically in studs, denim, and blunt, face-breaking boots. Pete gave them a berth, as their clothes were already starting to come off.
    She pushed the curtain, sticky with nicotine residue, aside, and stepped into the club proper. There had been plenty of shady dives in her days following Jack’s band around, but none made her feel quite so much as if she’d stepped into the Wild West.
    The music emanated from an ancient, scarred Wurlitzer that dominated one wall, red lights rotating over the gathering of faces in a gibbous, arhythmic pattern, like living blood spatter. PA speakers grew from snaking cables and sprouted over the pit like cubist flowers.
    Gleaming white paintings continued over all the walls, flaring and fading as light hit. Giant eyes, inverted pentagrams, all of it just a bit too sharp and real to be random graffiti. Motor might have been a club on the daylight side, but Naughton’s fleshcrafters had been busy decorating.
    The club consisted of a bar, blocked in with razor wire except for a few small gaps through which a bartender roughly the size and shape of a lorry pushed pints, the pit, and a stage. The stage was empty, but the pit was full, flashing metal and flowing ink over skin, the crunch and thud of flesh and bone connecting, hard.
    Pete joined the crowd around the bar, taking an inventory of the locals before she did anything foolish, like open her mouth. If Naughton had really been serious, somebody would find her and scold her soon enough. The song changed again, and the rhythm of the pit increased, bodies heaving like corpses on a tide.
    Arms shoved her, and a bloke with a mohawk held stiff by orange spray-paint knocked into her, moving her away from the bar and toward the edge of the pit. Pete turned around and shouted “Oi!” but the mass had their backs to her, focused on shouting orders at the bartenders. “Fucking Hell,” Pete said. Her bruises reminded her to be more careful about being shoved while she studied the crowd. No faces popped out. What had she been expecting? A sinister backroom where all of Naughton’s secrets would be revealed? Dark rites conducted in the VIP lounge? The reality was a grungy, passé club full of metalheads and smells she could just as well do without.
    Another body brushed against her, and Pete’s foot skidded over the edge of the pit. Just enough to put her off balance, and she felt herself going over. It wasn’t a far drop, less