Bone Gods

souls. Scavengers. Demon on a day trip up from the pit,” Jack said. “Take your pick.”
    A single bulb flickered in the hallway, and when they reached the street, Pete was assaulted by the dry, crackled scent of the funeral pyres and the flicker of shadowed, winged figures passing through the smoke overhead.
    “I thought it would be more…” She looked at the ruins of the Mile End Road, the UNDERGOUND sign outside the tube station hanging by its wires. Far below them a train rumbled, whistle screaming as it ran on without stopping. The asphalt was pitted, down to the brick below in most places, and Pete stumbled. “More … otherworldly,” she finished.
    “Think of the thin spaces like shared hallucinations,” Jack said. “We’re both pulling bits, things we’ve seen, psychic impressions, painting it onto the nothing out there. That’s what it is, you know. Sucking nothing. We stay too long and we’ll forget the street ever looked any other way.”
    “It looks more like I imagined Hell,” Pete said, boot nudging aside burned and cracked bones. Human or animal, she didn’t care to stop and be sure.
    Jack’s mouth tightened. “This is a far fucking cry from Hell. Trust me.”
    Pete decided to ignore his black expression. “How do we get Carver back?”
    Jack patted himself down for a cigarette, and then cursed. “Of everything in my pockets, you’d think I’d at least carry over the fags.”
    Pete checked her own pockets experimentally. Her mobile was missing, along with her wallet, but her crumpled pack of Parliaments was still in evidence. Her clothes had changed as well, and she realized that Jack wasn’t wearing his black shirt and denim from before. “What the fuck?” she said, gesturing at him.
    “This is what your soul chose to dress itself as,” Jack said, snatching the Parliaments from her hands. “Which is lucky, because I’ve seen blokes cross over starkers more than once.”
    “You’re actually not complaining that I’m not naked?” Pete cadged a fag back and lit it.
    “Not the time or place,” Jack said, and exhaled a cloud of blue. “More’s the fucking pity.”
    “Certainly not,” Pete said. She passed the White Hart, her and Jack’s favorite pub on Whitechapel Road, and saw that it was burned out, twisted forms of metal lying in the wreckage. “I didn’t think I had anything in my head that was quite this apocalyptic.”
    Jack flicked his fag away after a single drag. “Well, ’s not my fault. I was thinking about a Tahitian beach full of topless backup dancers when I went under.” He glanced up at the shapes moving through the shadows overhead and took Pete’s hand. “We should pick up speed. It’s going to be Mad fucking Max here in a few more minutes.”
    Pete checked herself over as they walked, realized she was back in the clothes she’d been wearing the day Jack died. Thanks so fucking much for that. See Petunia. See Petunia’s dysfunctional subconscious. See Petunia have a nervous breakdown and be taken into care.
    Jack, for his part, looked as he had the first time Pete had seen him at sixteen. Shredded Sham 69 shirt, denim that fit him like his skin, and the jacket that let him look bigger than he really was. Jack wasn’t the sort of man most sensible people would fuck with, but he definitely wasn’t going to win dust-ups on pure mass alone. The jacket was his old one, hammered with silver pyramid studs, drawn on and scraped up, the Dead Kennedys armband stained with something that was either curry sauce or blood: Pete had never asked. Subtract the lines from his face, add a little height to the bottle-blond hair, and it was Jack a dozen years ago plus change. Before he’d gone away and come back with the flatness in his eyes.
    Pete focused on not turning her ankle on the pitted pavement rather than contemplating what she had to admit was true—Jack was different. How different, she didn’t know. Whatever Belial had done to him, though, she’d bet the admittedly anemic balance of her savings account that she’d find out soon.
    “Stay with me,” Jack told her when she got a few paces behind him. “Nothing’s real, and nothing’s to be trusted.”
    “You can die here, real enough,” Pete said, not letting it be a question. The shapes overhead were more, and lower, and she could hear the hiss of man-sized wings through the smoke-shrouded sky.
    “You can die a lot of places,” Jack said. “This one just happens to be slightly