Bone Gods

as moonlight. She put her hand on the glass, pointed black nails leaving score marks on the pane.
    “I don’t want this,” Pete said. “I don’t want you.”
    Still you have me, Weir. You who are marked as a servant of the crossroads. Whether you desire my ministrations is irrelevant.
    Pete sat up, deciding that if the Hecate wasn’t going to shut up it was just silly to pretend she wasn’t there. The woman watched her. Like the owl, she never blinked. You allow that abomination to slumber one room away. I told you what to do.
    “I think you’re forgetting we’re not on the orders given and received system, you and I,” Pete told her. “Whatever your problem is with Jack—it’s not my problem. Far as I’m concerned, you can float away back to whatever musty corner of my dreams you came from and give me some bloody peace, because I’m not doing it.”
    You’re wrong, you know, the girl whispered. The crow-mage rides at the head of a bone army, borne on a river of red death. Forget your memory of the man, Weir. The thing he has become must die, or the world dies, and wind will scatter its ashes.
    “I’ve lost Jack once and it was bloody enough for this lifetime,” Pete said. “I won’t hurt him. He’s not a threat to you, and if you’ve got a grievance with his patron goddess, maybe you two ladies should hash it out over a cup of tea and stop bothering humans with your spats.”
    He’s not the Jack you know, the Hecate whispered. The Jack you know could not crawl from Hell unscathed, no matter your faith in him. And you know this is the truth, even if you will not speak it. What has returned in Jack Winter’s skin and bones is not Jack Winter as you knew him.
    Fingers of cold spread away from where the Hecate touched the glass, creeping over Pete’s skin, down her throat, choking off her air, and the glowing gold eyes filled up her vision, until all she could see was the flame burning at the center, flame that spread out and consumed the walls and the bed, until everything around her was ashes.
    She came awake gasping, and it took her a moment to realize she could breathe, she wasn’t freezing or burning, and she’d fallen asleep with the pillow jammed at an awkward angle under her neck.
    Pete swiped a hand over her forehead. It came away with a sheen of sweat. Her shirt was damp as well, even though the air in the room was cool enough to catch her breath and turn it white. Shivering, she burrowed under the duvet and lay very still, trying to calm her throbbing heartbeat.
    She’d had apocalyptic dreams for as long as she could remember—of Jack, when she’d thought he’d died the first time; of the Morrigan, his spectral, dark-winged goddess; and now of the owl-eyed woman. It was part and parcel of being the Weir. She was an antenna for disturbances in the unseen, and her brain was a projection screen for any and all signals slithering their way through the Black.
    This was different, though. Before, she’d known they were dreams. The visions of the Hecate, though—she couldn’t pick out the dream from the waking. Those with a talent who couldn’t see the Black and the daylight world for what they were had a nasty habit of going insane, or simply chucking themselves into the path of an express train to end the constant, blurring carnival of horrors the Black paraded before them.
    The bedroom latch clicked and the door swung ajar after she’d lain there for twenty-four minutes by the glowing clock numerals on the bedstand, and weight settled on the other side of the mattress. “You awake?” Jack said, voice faded to a rough whisper.
    “Yeah,” Pete said, not bothering to complain at him for using his talent with locks on her privacy. She didn’t turn toward him as he settled, but the dire cold finally shook off her bones.
    A lighter snapped and flared in the dark, and she listened to Jack drag and exhale before he spoke again. “I think I was a bit of a cunt back there.”
    “A bit?” Pete did face him then. “That’s kind.”
    “It’s so … cold … here,” Jack said. “I feel like I’m in my skin, behind a glass wall. Everything’s rushing around me, too fast, and I’m out of step. I…” He inhaled on the fag sharply, and Pete watched the ember flare. “I want to tell you. I want to spill my fucking guts, but I can’t.”
    “Can’t or won’t?” Pete said.
    “Can’t as in can’t bloody remember,” Jack said. “I remember…” He trailed off, coughed