Bone Gods

than a meter, but she fell badly and landed on the shoulder the zombie had already scored with. The crowd pressed in above her, as if she were lying at the foot of a row of gravestones, granite angels watching her with pale, sightless eyes in the flicking strobe light.
    The music turned to indecipherable feedback through the antique PA as a boot landed in her gut, then another. Pete curled to protect herself, but there were feet and hands from all directions. The floor shook as one, then another, then a herd of the spectators dropped into the pit and crammed it even more. Another boot, a steel toe, connected with her shoulder blade and a cry escaped her lips, lost in the static and the screaming speakers.
    Dancers paid her no mind, their movements changing from pogos and flying elbows to a concentrated orgy of blunt force that began at the foot of the stage and rippled out. She saw a woman grab the man next to her and pull his head down to connect with her knee. Two other men began bashing their skulls together, the sound of bloody meat going straight to her gut.
    Around Pete, the air changed, as if the storm outside had wormed its way in. The insidious cold that she’d learned the hard way to associate with necromantic spells crept across her face. She fumbled for her pistol, attempting to protect her midsection and breasts with her free arm. She didn’t know what good, exactly, a handful of bullets would do her, but she wasn’t bloody well going to kick off on the sticky, ale-scented floorboards of a shitty metal club.
    The violence rose as if a toxic tide were sweeping the pit, and Pete felt a warm spatter of raindrops across her face. Her tongue tasted of iron. A woman in leathers jumped on the back of a shirtless skinhead, gnawing at the Aryan tattoos arrayed across his shoulder blades. A pink-haired girl, even smaller than Pete, shrieked in time with the wordless whorl of sound as she beat her spiked bracelets against her own temples.
    Feet and bodies impacted with her, buffeted her, lifted her up and slammed her back down. Pete felt a sharp, hot pain in her side and wagered a boot had cracked one of her ribs. Bodies pressed too close to allow her air, never mind space to crawl away. All around her in the pit the dancers screamed and flung themselves on one another.
    A hand closed on the back of her jacket, and strong arms yanked her free of the throng, as it howled and spat and gouged at one another’s eyes. Pete railed against the arms for a moment, until she realized they weren’t groping or clawing, simply wrapped around her torso, holding her flush against a warm, hard chest heaving with its own breathlessness, encased in a black cotton shirt scented with whiskey, tobacco, and magic.
    Pete twisted her head, in the low stuttering light of the club, and felt her body drop away from her heart. “Jack?”

PART TWO
    THE UNDERWORLD
When there is no more room in Hell,
the dead will walk the earth.

—Dawn of the Dead

CHAPTER 19
    Jack stared down at her for a pair of heartbeats. Pete stared back, unable to think of a single thing to say. The pain all over told her she was awake; the warmth of his body told Pete he was alive. She wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t dead.
    “Haven’t lost your talent for finding big fucking trouble, I see,” he said at last.
    Him speaking let Pete move again. She drew back her hand and cracked Jack hard across the mouth. “You fucking bastard! I thought you were fucking dead. ”
    “Christ and fucking Christmas,” Jack yelped, stumbling away from her. “What happened to Thanks very much, Jack ? I saved your courageous little arse just now.”
    “You left me is what you did ,” Pete hissed. “You fucking left. ”
    “Well, I’m here now!” Jack said, swiping at his lip. “Dammit to Hell, do you have to play so rough, Petunia? At least give me a chance to explain meself.”
    “Go piss up a fucking rope,” Pete snapped. “And then do me a favor and hang your lying arse with it.”
    In her dreams, when she saw Jack again, she’d never shouted at him. Of course, in her dreams, they’d both been dead and the reunions had a very different cast.
    Jack had let her think for more than half a year that he was gone for good, let her toss sleeplessly over him, shove all of his memories into cardboard boxes in the back of her mind, where they couldn’t paralyze her, and he was fucking smirking at her like he’d just done a particularly clever trick.
    He stared at her for