Bone Gods

shirts with collars for a change.”
    Pete let the remark pass without fetching him a slap. She was wrung out. “Carver was somewhere dark near the Bleak Gates. Full of screaming.” Those screams echoed in her head, and would echo for a long time, Pete had a feeling, whenever she shut her eyes at night. They were the screams of the lost, of minds ripped so far asunder they could never be put back together.
    “Thin spaces,” Jack said. “The places where things that fall through the cracks end up.” He set the bottle down. There was barely an inch left. “The good god-fearing types call it purgatory.”
    Pete shivered. “I can still feel it all over me.”
    “If Carver’s close enough that you saw the Gates, we’ve got precisely shit for time,” Jack said. “Won’t be long before something or other snaps him up, or he gets caught up with the dead and the things that live beyond the Gates tear him to bits. They don’t take kindly to trespassers.”
    “And Naughton’s got to have others looking,” Pete said. “I really doubt he’d put his faith in me.”
    “There’s only a few ways to visit the thin spaces,” Jack said, “and the only one that makes sense for something flesh and bone is to be near death. I doubt Naughton’s brigade of matched thugs is keen to mess with that sort of acid trip.”
    Pete didn’t ask if Jack had visited the howling void where Carver resided during any of his near-death experiences—she had a feeling if he had, it probably wouldn’t be a topic of conversation that’d win her any favors. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” she said instead. Jack killed the whiskey bottle and set it on the carpet by his boot.
    “Likely.” He seemed content to let that sit, but Pete stood up, pacing the track that usually belonged to Jack, when he was thinking or simply too wound up to sleep.
    “I guess we just have to be game for it,” she said. “The thin spaces.” She’d never thought it would really work, but she owed it to Ollie and her mum to at least try and break them out of what they’d gotten into. If taking a return trip to that place was in the cards, Pete supposed it would be a deal easier than attending Ollie’s funeral.
    “No,” Jack said instantly. “No. I went along with this until we found where he was, but I’m putting me fucking foot down hard. Nobody who wants to keep on breathing in this world goes to that one, at least alive.”
    “Oh, very well,” Pete said. “Since you have all the answers, then, how else do you propose the two of us wrest Ollie back from the bosom of a dozen necromancers with bad attitudes and prevent Nick Naughton from turning this city into something out of the Book of Revelation?”
    Jack slammed his hand on the table. “Do I look like I have all the bloody answers, Petunia? Is that what you think?” He sat back and rubbed the spot between his eyes furiously. Pete recognized the telltale sign that Jack’s sight was bothering him. “Look,” Jack said. “I like Heath well enough. He’s a good bloke, and I’ll help him any way I can, but I’m not starting another ritual that ends with you, me, Ollie, or the whole bloody Kingston Trio of us in A&E or more likely, on a fucking slab.”
    The patience Pete had held on a tenuous tether snapped, and she shouted. “What then, Jack? Give up? Ask Naughton nicely to please repent and change his ways? Or roll over and let him do what he likes? Because that’s not on my list of options.”
    She went to the front door of the flat, jabbing her arms into her jacket, wishing she could drive her fist into wall, slap Jack—something. “You stay here and mope if you like. I’m going to find someone who can actually help Ollie.”
    Jack jumped up from the sofa. “Pete, wait.”
    She ignored him, snatching up her keys and unlocking the deadbolt. Jack closed the space between them and slammed the door shut again, barring it with his arm. “I said wait, goddamn it! I’m not finished talking to you!”
    Pete rattled the door, which did precisely no good against Jack’s new bulk. “The time has well and truly fucking passed, Jack. I’m done talking.”
    “You still don’t get it, do you?” he asked her. “The Black isn’t like the daylight world. Things don’t always work out like they should. Bad things happen to good blokes for absolutely no fucking reason at all, and it’s shit, but you pick up and you get on with things.”
    Pete stopped trying for the door, and slumped