Bone Gods

black, the eyes of a ghost, seeing countries and dreamscapes far beyond living sight.
    “The crow-mage isn’t your man, Weir. He’s come through fire. He’s changed.”
    Pete waited for a rebuttal, but there was silence from Jack, and Carver began to laugh. The sound was like a nail in Pete’s skull. She became aware Jack was out of her eyeline, standing just behind her and to the side, looking down at his boots. “Jack?” she said softly, the plunge in her stomach having nothing to do with the cant of the bridge.
    He said nothing, didn’t move, and Carver continued to laugh.
    “You crawled out of Hell, you came through fire, and she didn’t find that suspicious?” He shook his head at Pete. “You stupid, stupid bitch.”
    Pete pointed a finger at him. “You, shut your gob. Jack, what is he talking about?”
    Jack finally raised his head. “You didn’t know what it was like there. In Hell. I was there for good. I belonged to Belial.”
    “Jack…,” Pete started. “You didn’t…” Jack had never believed in destiny, any more than Pete had. The Morrigan had marked him as her own, but to Jack it didn’t mean anything more than his sight and a mildly irritating nickname. Jack detested his patron goddess even more than Belial. He wouldn’t have.
    “She came to me at my lowest, and she explained what I’d always known, really. She’d put her mark on me, named me as the crow-mage for this moment, when the Black is in flux, dying and coming up from the ashes. Who’s standing when that happens is up to her. She’s the Hag, Pete. She’s the raven of war, the bedmate of death.”
    Pete’s throat tightened as Jack went on in a flat shell-shocked tone barely audible over the rush of water. “There is a storm sweeping over the Black, and when it clears the shadow of the crow will reach across every face in it. It’s the Hag’s time, and the crow-mage stands at the head of the Hag’s army of the dead. Not the necromancers, not the Hecate, and nobody else. I’m her walker, Pete. I’m the hand of death. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
    He stepped forward, stretching out his hand to Carver. “Gerard Carver, I bind you soul and spirit to your earthly flesh, life after death, until my word says otherwise. My will is your will, living and dead, ashes and dust.”
    Pete felt the flare of magic, dark and sooty as the air around them. Black magic always felt like a needle, loaded with a drug and primed straight into her senses. It was hot coals and glacial ice, the stench of decaying flesh and of the fires of Hell, all at once. Jack shivered as the incantation passed through him.
    Carver kept grinning. “You wait,” he told Pete. “He’s not finished.”
    Pete couldn’t stir herself. She thought another bargain with Belial would be hard enough to take, but this … this told her that Jack had well and truly been broken. Hell had taken the one man she’d thought unbreakable and snapped him in two. He was the crow-mage now, truly, and he was to the Morrigan what she’d sworn she’d never be to the Hecate.
    “Jack,” she said at last, “just let go.” She grabbed his shoulders and faced him toward her. “I don’t care. I know why you did it, and I would’ve done the same. I was wrong to say those things about you. I couldn’t survive Hell. I’m sorry, Jack. But you can walk away. You’re not the Morrigan’s slave. You don’t have to help her burn the Black.”
    The Hecate hadn’t been wrong. That was the worst bit. If she’d killed Jack, the moment he’d come back, none of this would be happening. The Morrigan wouldn’t have her walker and Naughton wouldn’t have a shot at Carver, because Pete never could have done this ritual herself.
    If she’d killed Jack, she’d have also killed Ollie, and let Naughton get away with two murders, at the very least.
    There was no if for her, though, right as the Hecate was.
    She never could have done it. She’d still be standing right here, because much as heroin and adrenaline were Jack’s drugs of choice, he was hers. The only thing she could never kick. The only person she’d ever needed, in the way of aching bones and desperate, clawing craving.
    All she could do now was show him that was the truth.
    “Just come back,” Pete whispered. “Don’t let her, Jack.”
    “You are a servant of the Morrigan, Gerard Carver,” was all he said. “Bound to serve the crow-mage and only him. So it is now, so it is forever until you pass