Bone Gods

scornful undertone.
    “You lot aren’t from this place,” it said. “You’re living and breathing, and you’ve got flesh to go home to.” The figure stepped forward, backlit by the lights.
    Pete squeezed her eyes shut as she saw the thick neck, bifurcated by a ragged cut, and the bottle-brush hair. “Shit. McCorkle, is that you?”
    “What’s left of me,” he agreed, teeth pulling back from his lips. His face was a corpse’s face, blue and swollen on one side with livor mortis. Clad in tattered leathers, he looked more like the zombie from outside his flat than a thing that had ever been alive.
    “Who the fuck’s McCorkle?” Jack said out the side of his mouth. “Boyfriend?”
    “Naughton made him kill himself,” Pete replied in kind. “He stole some kind of musty artifact Naughton needs for the ritual. Him and Carver both.”
    “Brave man,” Jack said aloud. “Stealing from a necromancer. But I see you learned the hard way, it’s ultimately idiotic.”
    “I didn’t believe in magic,” McCorkle said. “Thought I was buying a relic, not a fucking piece of the fabric of Hell.”
    “Freddy,” Pete said. “We’re just passing. We’re looking for your partner, not you.”
    McCorkle reached out and pulled her close by the front of her clothing, until their faces were less than an inch apart. He smelled dead, too sweet, and slimy, and she could see the bilious black marks creeping under his skin. McCorkle was caught decaying, eternally falling apart while he was stuck in the thin spaces. If this was what McCorkle had seen, it was no wonder Naughton was able to convince him to carve his carotid like a Christmas ham. “Freddy’s not here any longer,” he told Pete. “And I know exactly what you want. Which is why I think you’ll be spending a little time with me instead.”
    Another few of the decayed ghosts came forward and grabbed Jack, who moaned and grabbed at his temples, nails leaving long furrows, when they touched him.
    “Please,” Pete said. “He’s a sensitive.”
    McCorkle grinned at her, gums black. “Then you’d better hope I decide to let you go before his brain’s about as useful as a raw turnip, hadn’t you?”
    He hustled her with him into the tunnel of light, and Pete didn’t resist, because it was that or be left alone in the thin space, with nothing but shadows for company.

CHAPTER 29
    The gang took them to a rotting pier with a rotting warehouse piled on top, stretching out into the Thames. The Docklands before they’d been reinvented as the shining jewel on the breast of London—dirty, rat-infested, and full of cutthroats.
    “Jack?” Pete said as what had been McCorkle prodded her along with his swollen hands. She hated the note of panic in her voice, hated that she was turning to him instead of trying to get out of this mess herself, but she looked to Jack and hoped that she wouldn’t see the same panic reflected in his face.
    Jack tried to reach out for her, but the things jerked him away, three of them. The largest had a truncheon, and he slammed Jack across the back of the knees to still his struggling. Jack buckled. “Fuck! Fuck you straight up the arse, you poncey putrefied bastards!”
    One of the three stuffed a greasy kerchief into Jack’s mouth, muffling his yells. “What should we do with ’im?” it asked.
    “Chop him up!”
    “Throw him in the river and let the naiads pick his flesh!”
    McCorkle tossed Pete down to the splinter-ridden wood of the pier along with Jack. “How about you brain-rotted morons shut your gobs?”
    “Ey,” the one who’d hit Jack leered. “You wait a bit longer, bright boy. Yours’ll rot like pudding as well.”
    Jack mumbled something around the gag, and McCorkle jerked his hand. His nails were long and spotted with graveyard dirt. “Get the crow-mage out of my sight. He doesn’t have any wisdom for us.”
    The other ghosts hauled Jack away, and McCorkle crouched, lifting Pete’s chin with his fingertip. That nail dug into her, pricking the tender spot under her chin. She pulled back. “Look, Freddy, I’m fresh out of shock and dismay, so why don’t you just exposit and threaten, and we’ll take it from there?”
    McCorkle tried to grin. In the light, Pete could see his upper lip was bifurcated by a stray knife slash, exposing his full gums. “You’re a mouthy bitch, Caldecott. Anyone ever tell you that?”
    “Enough times that if I had a quid for each one, I’d be rich enough to buy myself