Bone Gods

of it. McCorkle was all that mattered. He was standing between her and Carver. Between her and getting back to the daylight world with her soul.
    McCorkle tried to pull his knife back, but Pete grabbed the hilt with her other hand, closing her fingers over his slimy digits. “I can help you,” she said, not blinking. If she blinked, or thought, she’d go mad with terror. Fear was the only sane response to something like McCorkle, to being in the thin spaces and so close to death at all.
    “Help me? Do you realize where we are?” McCorkle barked a dead man’s deformed laugh, born from collapsed lungs.
    “I know that you can’t leave again, unlike me,” Pete said. “I know it was Naughton who fucked you in the arse and sent you here. All of you. All I want in return is Carver.”
    McCorkel’s face twitched spastically, his nerves running wild. “And what’ll you do for me?”
    “I’ll send Nicholas Naughton down here in my place,” Pete said. “And him, you can do whatever you like with.”
    She watched him with all her copper instincts, trying to pick a hint off of his mangled face. McCorkle sniffed deeply. “Why should I trust you? Naughton’s sent near a dozen of us down here, trying to cage his bloody demon or demigod or whatever it is. You won’t do any better against him.”
    “I’m not like these sad things.” Pete pointed at the other ghosts, clustered a little way away. “As for Nick Naughton—I hate that bastard more than Hitler.”
    “You’d slice him cold-blooded, for me?” McCorkle grinned and slowly released his grip on the knife. “I think I’m in love.”
    The blade clattered to the boards, and Pete tucked her hand under her T-shirt, trying to sop up the free-flowing blood. It felt like she’d pressed a poker against her palm, red hot and prickling.
    “Give me Carver,” she said, “you get Naughton. Soul for a soul. Even you can do that math, Freddy.” She got to her feet and raised the index finger on her good hand. “Oh, and Jack’s leaving here, too.”
    “No,” McCorkle said at once. “The crow-mage stays.”
    “Fine,” Pete said. “Then you might as well get on with the cutting and the raping, because Naughton is far too clever for the likes of you. You’ll be here until the crows out there suck you dry like a milkshake.”
    “For a good little girl, you do seem to love sticking your fingers into the fires,” McCorkle said, and then bellowed gutturally. The trio of ghosts reappeared, dragging Jack.
    Pete narrowed her eyes, a black sense of unease crawling up from the pit of her mind, where her talent lay. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “He hasn’t told you?” McCorkle said. “How he crawled up out of Belial’s charnel house, like the snake in the garden of Eden?”
    “I don’t care what Jack did for Belial,” Pete told McCorkle. It was none of his bloody buisness. He was a ghost. She was allowed to lie to those sorts of creatures.
    “Belial?” McCorkle’s tongue flicked in, out. “No, I don’t think it’s the Prince you have to worry about. I’d wager it’s the Hag.”
    “Jack’s a servant of the Morrigan,” Pete said. “It doesn’t mean a bloody thing.” She turned to go, but McCorkle snatched her arm. Jack extricated the kerchief from his mouth and started for them.
    “Get your fucking hands off her.”
    “Don’t think I will,” McCorkle told him. “You hear things, out here in the nothingness. Echoes from the Underworld, from the Hag herself, and the army she’s gathering at her feet. We hear the dead whispering, from inside the wall. So unless you want me to tell your little flower here what I’ve heard … you be sweet to me, crow-mage.”
    Pete expected Jack to curse, sneer, and possibly set McCorkle on fire with his mind. She didn’t expect him to freeze, an expression close to panic on his face.
    “Don’t,” he told McCorkle. “Or I’ll…”
    “Or you’ll what, crow-mage?” McCorkle snarled. He let go of Pete and spread his arms. “I’m a piece of flesh and soul trapped in the maw of Hell, Winter! Do your fucking worst!”
    Jack closed distance and took Pete’s hand. “Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s get the fuck away from here.”
    “Go!” McCorkle crowed. “Carver’s on Blackfriars Bridge. He’s waiting for you, Petunia Caldecott. And so’s the truth!”
    Jack yanked her along and they were clear of the warehouse and the horrid mortuary stink of the Thames. “Move it,” he