Bone Gods

a life without things like you in it,” Pete said.
    McCorkle’s hand tightened on her. “You snark again and I’ll rip your tongue out of your head and swallow it whole.” He sat back on his heels and waited. Pete stared at him, refusing to blink first, but she kept quiet. Ghosts were the worst bits of you—rage and pettiness and fear—and McCorkle had hated her more than enough in life to do everything he’d threatened.
    “I don’t know what you’re doing here.” McCorkle leaned in so he was almost whispering in her ear. “I’m just glad you came.” He lifted a finger toward the half-caved in roof. “You see those things up there? The carrion birds of the Underworld? They scavenge us like meat.” He snorted, and a bubble of bloody snot grew on one nostril. “Suppose I am that. Meat. But now…” He petted the spot under Pete’s chin where he’d cut her. “Now, we’ve got something live to feed them. Had me a snake when I was a boy, used to swallow mice that trembled just the way you are now. Predators love live meat.”
    Pete stared into McCorkle’s sunken face. She realized that the lack of panic probably meant her mind had simply said “fuck it” and gone into standby mode until she could have a proper breakdown. She had to put that off as long as possible, preferably when she wasn’t a hairsbreadth from her eternal reward. “Naughton killed you,” she said. “Those others as well?”
    “He’s been at it for a while,” McCorkle said. “Carver was very impressed with his old boss man.”
    “But not you,” Pete ventured. The old scenario—distract the mad bastard until she had time to come up with something clever. Distract herself so she didn’t simply start screaming.
    “We were schoolmates, Gerry and I,” McCorkle said. “Brain on that bastard was big and squashy, but he was a klepto even then. Mum used to beat the Hell out of him, and sweets and cigarettes would pop out of his pockets while he mewled and whinged.”
    “So naturally when you became the very brightest of the dirty coppers, you turned to your mate with all of the best scratch,” Pete said.
    “He didn’t want to sell me that thing, but his obese whore of a mother needed some hip wotsit. Could have told her fat arse to lay off the Guinness and chips and gotten the same result,” McCorkle said. “Then I start getting harassed. Sods in suits, jabbering about witchcraft. It was fucking comical. Thought so right up until Gerry got himself sliced. Thought so even as I did the same.”
    “I could’ve told you not to trust a spoiled public school brat who mucks about with corpses,” Pete said. “Honestly, McCorkle, that shouldn’t have been a hard one even for someone like you.”
    “I don’t have to justify myself to you, you fucking Irish twat,” McCorkle said. “Someone tells you you’ve bought a reliquary for a dead god, you tell them to fuck off and stay on their meds. Don’t pretend you were so open-minded, before you spread your legs for all that nonsense.”
    He drew a hunting knife out of his belt and waggled it in Pete’s vision, huge as Nelson’s column. “The only thing I need from you is to decide whether I gut you and leave you for the crows before or after I fuck you senseless.”
    Pete’s heart sped up, even though she shouldn’t have a heartbeat at all in this place. The orchid trance was tipping over into actual death, and her only hope was that Mosswood would pull her out before McCorkle carved her up. But that would leave Jack behind, so she forced herself to stop shaking, reach up, and close her fist around the blade of McCorkle’s knife. “Don’t talk your power-and-control rapist shit at me, you poncey little cunt. You’re not the worst nightmare I’ve seen. Not by fucking far.” The blade slid into her hand as though her flesh were warm and buttery, and her blood was hot when it dribbled down her forearm. The pain of severed nerves came more slowly. Pete ignored it. Pain was tertiary.
    “The only thing you can do to me,” McCorkle snarled, “is beg not to be alive when I violate you like the little Catholic whore you are.”
    “First of all,” Pete said. “I haven’t been inside a church voluntarily since I was thirteen. Second of all, if you were going to do it, you’d’ve done it by now. Not your fault. I imagine at some point, your balls rotted and fell off.” Pete didn’t think about her bloody hand, the cool steel in her grip, Mosswood or Jack or any