Bone Gods

her side, letting her know she’d vomit the moment she stopped running.
    Pete felt every inch of her body begin to turn numb. It started in her fingertips, as if she’d gone outside on a cold day and forgotten mittens. The numbness crawled straight to her heart, and Pete felt her pulse slow to nearly nil.
    Just before her vision bled to solid black, she felt Jack’s fingertips touch hers, a tingle of power that rippled up her arm like electricity. She squeezed his hand, and it was the last thing she felt before the Black reached up with its great dark hand and pulled her down.

PART THREE
    DEMONS
They are fatherless creatures, and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past of demons and ghosts.

—Beowulf

CHAPTER 27
    Pete had never died before. She’d been stabbed, when Jack and Algernon Treadwell had their dust-up over his body, but she’d never seen the Bleak Gates.
    She opened her eyes to the flat, the same stained ceiling and Moorish chandelier. The same wrinkled rug under her back. For a moment, she thought the nightsong orchid hadn’t worked at all. She sat up, fuzzy headed, the walls pulsating slightly when she wobbled and grabbed the sofa for balance. She felt like nothing so much as tremendously hungover, mouth dry and eyes aching as the light from outside streamed through the shutters.
    “Jack?” She was alone, the candles at the head and foot of the circle burnt down to nubs of wax that cascaded across the wood like lava flow. The flat was dark, bulbs in the lamps burnt out in their sockets. Mosswood and his tea had vanished from the sofa. “Jack!” Pete shouted. She took a step outside the chalk marks. Her boot crunched down on a fine grit across the floor. She bent and rubbed black, oily smut between her fingers.
    “Soot,” Jack said from the kitchen archway. Pete felt her heart convulse inside her ribs at the sound.
    “You fucking sneak!” she told him. “Scared me half to fucking death.”
    “It’s soot.” Jack gestured at the black coating over every surface of the flat. Pete brushed her hand on her denim.
    “Did it work? We’re in the exact same spot.”
    “It worked.” Jack massaged his forehead. “Sight is going insane and I feel like I just drank enough whiskey to fill the Thames. That’s a nightsong trip, by the fucking book.”
    Pete pulled the shutters open, squinting against the light. London was covered over by black smoke, clinging to the rooftops and obscuring the flash of the Thames in the distance. Their usual view was wreckage, all of the post-Blitz buildings vanished: in their place were blackened bricks and crooked chimneys. The windows of the flat were cracked and in a few cases shattered altogether, letting in the sounds of the street, the clatter of cars seventy years past their prime, and the wail of an occasional air-raid siren.
    “Is this coal smoke?” Pete said, coughing as more of the stuff wafted inside. Under Victoria, the miasma got so thick it would sometimes fell infants and those with weak lungs, giving London the undesirable nickname of the Smoke. Victorian London, though, didn’t have cars, or klaxons, or their 1920s flat block.
    Jack pointed east, to where the smoke thickened to obscurity, blotting out the horizon into a blurry line. “They’re burning their dead,” Jack said.
    “Who?” Pete stared at the spot, discerning blue-white flame dancing at the horizon line. “There’s nobody out there,” she said. No footprints disturbed the soot and ash on the street below. All the noise came from far off, the empty city acting as a giant echo chamber.
    “There’s an eternal fire at the Bleak Gates,” Jack said. “The souls who don’t pass or won’t stay in the fire forever. East is the Land of the Dead.” He closed the shutters. “We’re not going that way.”
    Pete re-examined the flat, covered in the ashes of the damned souls trapped at the Bleak Gates. “Fine by me,” she said, trying again to swipe the oily stuff off her hands.
    “We should move,” Jack said. “We’re a fucking homing beacon for anything hungry out here. Live souls don’t come along every hour.” He peered into the hall before stepping out, moving tight, eyes always roving.
    “So, what will get us first?” Pete said, sticking close to his shoulder, a stagger pattern used by incident response teams. Of course, in incident response there were more than two people, and they had stab vests and rifles rather than jackboots and ragged denim.
    “Damned