Bone Gods

more unpleasant than a gutter, or a grave.” He glanced upward at the shadows. “If you die here, you stay here. These bastards are sharper than I thought. We’d better get inside.”
    He led the way into the burnt shell of the White Hart, mounting the creaking stairway to the upper floor. “Carver’s got to be close by.” Jack lit a fag and dragged on it. His wrist flashed free from his leather and Pete noticed that the white lines on his forearm were back. In her memory, Jack still had scars.
    Pete settled herself by the window. The glass was just jagged teeth, mostly gone, and it caught on her elbow as she shifted. “Ah, dammit. You think we’d imagine someplace that wasn’t quite so sharp.”
    “That’s the Black,” Jack said. “Putting sooty little fingers all over your third eye. You start bleeding,” he said, pointing to her torn shirt, “we’re fucked.” He came over to her and leaned out the window. “They aren’t after us yet, but live blood will light us up like Las Vegas. They’re looking for him.”
    “What are they?” Pete watched slow-descending fireworks blossom as the air raid klaxons wailed on. Billows of fire erupted where they fell to earth, a meteor shower sprung from a human hand. Juniper’s mother had lived through the Blitz, as a teenager, and in the few years that Pete had been old enough to pay attention before she passed, Nana Morrow still refused to go into tube tunnels and hated any noise above pleasant, thoroughly British conversation. She’d been a far cry from their Grandmother Caldecott, whose father had been an IRA fighter and who, when Connor stepped out for a fag during their summers in Galway, had told Pete and MG stories about the fuckin’ Black and Tan bastards what dragged him away when she was a girl.
    “Heard a lot of theories,” Jack said. “Lost souls. Things that don’t have souls. Grim reapers, if you want to get Judeo-Christian about it. They’re from the Underworld, but not welcome in it. They feed on the ones that fall by the wayside, don’t make it to the Bleak Gates. Anything that passes through. Human, demon, it doesn’t matter. They’re never short of new meat, though usually the meat’s not stupid enough to waggle itself under their noses.”
    Pete watched the shadows’ passage as they drifted to the south over Limehouse, dipping low out across the river like ink drops, ever changing and shifting, until they dropped out of the smoke to alight on the diseased, sewage-choked water.
    “There,” Jack said at her shoulder. “They’ve caught the scent. As it were, since it’d take a fucking miracle to smell anything in this place except burned bones and shit.”
    Pete backed away from the window. “South?”
    “South,” Jack agreed. “Down to the banks of the dirty river we go.”

CHAPTER 28
    While they walked, things solidified. Pete stopped feeling as if her mind were two steps ahead of her body, and the lines of things no longer blurred when she moved her head too fast. She wondered how long she’d been under. How much pull the Bleak Gates exerted as the orchid slowly killed her.
    “This is strange,” she said to Jack.
    “We’re in fucking purgatory,” Jack said, as if she’d stated that she had black hair.
    In the next step, before Pete could take the opening to air her feelings that nothing about this vision of the thin spaces was right or proper, nothing like when she’d seen a brief snatch while bleeding from Treadwell’s stab wound, nothing that was going to help them, a bank of floodlights snapped on and sliced across her face.
    “Fuck!” Pete hissed, as her corneas flexed painfully.
    “Stay still,” Jack told her.
    Pete shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand, discerning shapes behind the blazing klieg lights but not much more. “Scavengers?” she said to Jack.
    “No bloody idea,” he said. “But no, if it was, we’d be a meal by now.”
    “At least somebody’s got their head twisted on straight around here,” said a voice from behind the lights. The largest of the shapes chopped a motion, and slowly the spots pointed at the ground rather than Pete’s eyes.
    “Don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Jack told the voice. “But we’re not sticking about long. We’ll turn one way and you turn the other. How’s that sound?”
    “I’ve not turned stupid just because I’m dead, you twat,” the voice growled. Pete could nearly place it—she’d heard it before, using the same