Bone Gods

you save your brilliant insights for things you know nothing about, like my time in Hell?”
    “Oh, very well, fuck you,” Pete snapped. “When I’ve gotten Ollie out of harm’s way, you can just pack up and move along. I don’t want your shit piled on me.”
    “Then maybe you should stop opening your legs and pining after me,” Jack said. Pete grabbed the mug from his hand, resisting the urge to spill it on his crotch, and dunked a teabag for Mosswood.
    “Don’t worry. As soon as I’ve got Ollie back from Naughton, you and I are done.” She moved to take the tea to the sitting room. “You’re not the same. You never would have said that to me six months ago.”
    “I’ve been to Hell, Pete,” Jack said. “You try it, and see if you’re still a ray of fucking sunshine.”
    Pete took Ian his tea rather than respond. Jack had a lot of enemies in the Black, people who’d breathed easier when he was secreted away in the pit. They couldn’t be happy he was back, and they would spread any rumor that would get more of the Black wanting him gone all over again. Like Irina, with her stone expression, and the Hecate, with her incessant, unchanging order. Pete couldn’t ignore the signs, no matter how badly she might want to.
    Something was wrong about Jack, and his coming back hadn’t been a reprieve. His appearing back in her life wasn’t fortune. Quite the opposite. Jack’s secret, whatever it was, had the Black in an uproar, and because of that, Pete knew it could only be a few things. Not possession, but perhaps something else. Belial wouldn’t need Jack’s body if Jack gave his soul over voluntarily.
    Had he cut a deal with Belial? Here on a demon’s errand, tempered and remade in the fires of Hell into the one thing the old Jack would have spit on without a second thought? Jack as a sorcerer was a terrifying enough thought. Jack as a sorcerer with powers gifted to him by one of the generals of Hell didn’t even bear contemplating.
    But right now, Ollie came first. He couldn’t defend himself. Pete could handle Jack Winter. And if she couldn’t, at least nobody else would be dead because of it.
    “You should probably lie down,” Jack said, coming in behind her, as if nothing had happened in the kitchen. Pete’s face was still hot where his fingers had gouged her, as if she’d stood too close to a fireplace.
    “On the floor?” she said. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d swept the sitting room.
    “Either that or keel over where you stand once you’ve dosed yourself.” Jack stretched out on the carpet. “Your choice.”
    Pete stripped off her jacket and lay down next to him on the threadbare Persian, foot to head. Jack sat up and chalked a crooked circle around them, into the pile. “Bit of binding, he said. “So our souls don’t fly straight up the fucking chimney.” He handed the chalk to Mosswood. “Anything dodgy happens, you close that bastard and pull us straight back. Not more than a few hours in any case. This shit will eat holes in your brain.”
    “I have done a ritual before, you know.” Ian crouched stiffly next to Pete. He pressed a clump of the sticky silver flower into her palm. “Chew, and spit it out before you go under,” he said. “Don’t choke.”
    “You do realize this is completely fucking mad,” Jack said, before he shoved a clump of the stuff into his own mouth and chewed.
    Pete bit down on her share of the orchid. It didn’t taste like much at first, as if she were outside on Guy Fawkes and had breathed in a taste of cordite from the fireworks. A cold tingle stole over her tongue, and Pete tasted rusty iron that spilled over into the taste of blood, and down her throat with a grasp like freezing water. She managed to turn her head and retch the vile thing out, as Mosswood had instructed, before blackness crawled across her vision, and her heart roared in her ears like a tube train passing by.
    Pete felt as if she were stripped of skin and muscle and bone and only her nerves were left, throbbing. Her heart thudded like she was still running suicides at Hendon with the other PCs. She could almost smell the mud, her own sweat, breath razoring in and out in time with the thump-thump-thump of her heart as her boots dug into the peat and her own cold sweat wet down her clothes. Could almost see the weak dawn light that cast everything cold and blue while she and the other recruits ran the course. Could feel the sharp stab of exhaustion in