Bone Gods

holding her arm steady, breathing in and out through her nose to still her pulse and her nerves. She felt the Black tugging on her, trickling through the conduit in her, a warm and yet frozen prickle all up and down her skin. Under her, the stone began to swing, the twine tugging back and forth against her fingers.
    Quickly as it had come to her, it was gone again. When she’d hexed the zombie, she’d grabbed hold of the magic, dug her fingers into it and scraped furrows from its flesh. Now it was as if she were trying to scoop a live goldfish out of a bowl of grease.
    “Shit,” she muttered. Jack’s fingers brushed the back of her neck, resting on the nape. He’d moved behind her, his body bringing no warmth with it. Pete shivered.
    “Relax,” he murmured, his breath on her ear. Whiskey and cigarettes permeated her nostrils. “You have it,” Jack murmured, his fingers grazing her skin. “You’re so close.”
    Pete felt the floor drop away from her. Touching Jack was usually enough to make her dizzy. Touching him when the magic was up filled up her reservoirs to overflowing and started an enormous pressure against her brain. The Weir knew what needed to be done, even if Pete didn’t in her waking mind, and it wanted to drink Jack dry.
    The pendulum swung in concentric circles, the twine burning her fingers with friction. Pete shuddered, Jack’s proximity and his fingers on her skin raising goosebumps.
    She shouldn’t be so close. She shouldn’t be letting his talent fill her. When mages and Weirs allowed each other too close, terrible, terrible things could happen.
    Yet she couldn’t pull away, and she began to see, as the pendulum swung, the lines on the board move and change under her gaze. They crawled and twined back on one another, formed dragons and thorns and twisted thickets of spellcraft, writ small on the board. They reached out for Pete, psychic feelers inviting her to pick out the hidden picture in layer after layer of ink and varnish. She saw, with Jack’s power feeding her, and watched the layers of the Black peeling away before her. There was London, stinking, screaming London full of its smoke and rivers and the iron veins of the tube deep beneath the earth. The graveyards and the forgotten souls, passing through the thick yellow mist of the Thames.
    Still she watched, more and more filling in before her gaze, the ghosts and the things beyond the psychic clamor of the city, the slithering black spaces between the worlds. She saw what Jack saw and she spun onward, weightless, chasing a bright ember in the blackness populated only by screaming, clawing spirits that had lost their way between the Black and the land of the dead, sucked into the singularity of nothing that was the in-between.
    Gerard Carver’s soul was on fire, and as Pete drew closer she could hear him scream, over the howl of the Black. Before him rose the great iron gates of the Underworld, their spires poking into an orange sky, a sky reflecting the flames of Hell.
    The Bleak Gates. Pete had never been so close, never felt their overwhelming draw. In the darkness around her, things were moving. They winked across Carver’s soul like owls across the face of the moon. Pete reached out, sure that she could touch him, and then the darkness closed in, and she felt herself fall. Toward the Bleak Gates, toward the Underworld, a living soul bright amidst the silver contrails of the dead drawn to its magnetic pole. Past the Bleak Gates, past the dead, and straight down to the lowest realm, where the demons waiting beyond the turrets of Hell welcomed her living flesh with hungry cries.
    She came back with a scream, realizing she was flat on her back, staring up at the flat ceiling. Jack leaned over her, pressing his fingers into her neck. “Breathe, Petunia.”
    “I saw…” Pete tried. Her throat was raw, parched dry, and she swallowed hard. “I saw Carver.” The desert dryness was still on her skin, the barest kiss of the air of Hell, and Pete brushed herself all over, as if she were trying to rid her skin of a swarm of insects.
    Jack pulled her up and onto the sofa, putting a glass of whiskey in her hands. Pete drank it down, and the hot burn of the cheap liquor finally helped the trembling in her hands subside. “We have to stop doing that,” she told Jack.
    “Scrying?” he said, taking the bottle for himself. Pete shook her head.
    “Touching.”
    Jack grimaced. “If that’s what you’d like, luv, try wearing