Bone Gods

we?”
    Jack favored her with a crooked eyebrow. “What?”
    “We could summon him,” Pete said. She never would have suggested such a thing even a month ago. She put it down to being desperate, dizzy, hurting, and out of ideas. Between the Order, Naughton, and Ollie being locked in a freezer waiting to get fitted for a bucket of cement around his feet, she didn’t see any way out that didn’t make her the villain even without resorting to necromancy. “Not raise him back into his corpse, but bring back his ghost. Summon him, like those gits tried to summon Algernon Treadwell last spring.”
    Jack paused near the bus stop that would return them to Whitechapel. “Have you lost your bloody mind?”
    Pete lifted one shoulder. “Like they say in America—go big or go home.”
    Jack looked hard at her for a moment, and Pete became interested in a wad of gum near her toe. Jack had his brushes with black magic, but Pete had the feeling that her being the one to bring it up was breaking some sort of silent contract between them, Pete the innocent and Jack the mage, who’d seen every unspeakable thing that crawled through the underside of the Black.
    “Even if you weren’t talking about something that could get both our intestines ripped out through our arseholes by Carver’s hungry ghost, it wouldn’t work. He’s still tied to his flesh. He’s not crossed into the Underworld, like that woman Nasiri said. Carver’s in-between, and there’s no ghost, just an echo in the flesh. His soul is in the thin spaces, wandering hither and yon. Really, it’s just a question of who gets him first—the Bleak Gates, Naughton, or some nasty like Nasiri scavenging the in-between for lost souls.”
    Pete stepped aboard the bus as it squealed to a stop at the curb. “Soul, then. What if we were the ones to recall Carver’s soul? Be one definitive fucking bargaining chit with Naughton.” Not to mention it would both solve her problem with Morningstar and prevent Ollie from having any fingers lopped off.
    “Finding a wandering soul isn’t like picking up loose change off the street,” Jack said. “And putting him back in that body is still necromancy, Pete. I know I ain’t always been the one on the bright and shining path, but black magic like that is going to leave a stain.”
    “Then I’ll do it,” Pete said. She climbed to the upper deck of the bus and took the front seat, London passing beneath her feet. “I’m past caring, Jack. This isn’t like other things we’ve come up against. This is…”
    “This is worse,” Jack said softly.
    Pete pressed her forehead against the bus window. “What’s happening, Jack?” she said, in the same tone.
    “End of the world,” he said. “End of the Black. Who knows. Been coming a long time, this storm. The smart ones, they realized. I was the stubborn sod who ran out in the rain without my umbrella.”
    “And now?” Pete said.
    “Now I don’t know what I am,” Jack said. “Trying not to let it bother me.”
    “Help me,” Pete said. “You can’t stop whatever’s happening in the Black but you can put a collar on Naughton once and for all.” She faced him. “You know I’m right,” Pete insisted. “We can’t hand Carver over and we can’t walk away unless we do. This is the only way.”
    Jack scrubbed a hand across his face. “Not going to be easy. Black magic is always the trickiest. Like playing catch with nitroglycerine.”
    The bus jerked Pete as it stopped and started, and she gripped her seat. “If it were easy, Jack, I wouldn’t be asking you for help. I’d have solved it already.”
    His mouth curled and for just a moment, he looked like himself, before the veil dropped down again and he said, “Suppose you would.”
    They rode in silence after that, disembarked in silence, and walked down Mile End Road in silence. Pete was content to keep things that way until they reached the flat, but a black shadow standing eerily still and ramrod straight on the front steps changed her mind. She plucked at Jack’s leather, stopping him a dozen meters or so from the flat.
    “Law?” he said, taking in the rangy figure and his black coat and hat.
    “Worse,” Pete said. “Self-righteous cunt.” She closed distance and jabbed her finger into the man’s chest. “What are you doing here, Ethan?”
    “Miss Caldecott, really,” he said, backing out of range and brushing at the front of his coat. “I don’t have endless patience, you know. So