Bone Gods

her talent. She heard herself scream, or maybe it was just the scream of wind past her ears, and then as quickly as the feeling had started, it stopped, and white light burned out Pete’s eyesight.
    Blinking furiously, tears sliding over her cheeks, she reached out for anything, anything at all, but there was nothing but cool wind and wet droplets plastering her skin. Her knees buckled and falling down seemed like an extraordinarily good idea, so Pete did, landing on something soft that smelled of green and dirt.
    Do you recognize this place? The Hecate, no longer the owl but the girl with the long, narrow face and the yellow eyes, placed her hand on the nape of Pete’s neck, pulling her close.
    Pete, for her part, gulped and tried to assess whether she was still alive, and if alive, whether she had all her bits attached. “What did you do to me?”
    Crossed you , said the Hecate. Through the gateways. You’re with me now, Pete. To do with as I see fit. Her slender fingers and their blunt nails tightened. Now, do you know what you see?
    Pete tried to focus her eyes, tears drying cold on her cheeks and leaving salt trails like nerveless scar tissue. She sat with her legs akimbo at the top of a green hillock, looking down on a white clapboard cottage with a leaning chimney, surrounded by an untidy garden and a path that led down to a dirt road. Far away, over the humps of the blindingly green hills on the other side of the valley, Pete could glimpse the sea.
    Pete knew the place. She hadn’t been in nearly fifteen years, but she knew it well enough to be able to pick out every missing brick in the garden path and avoid them.
    Well? The Hecate stared at her. The wind running off the water ruffled her straight brown hair, spun it around her face like a spider’s web.
    “It’s my grandmother’s house,” Pete said. Her throat was raw from screaming and her voice came out a rasp that blended with the breeze and the shriek of gulls overhead.
    Very good , the Hecate told her. She gripped Pete’s arm. She was even smaller than Pete, but her fingers were like iron and she hauled Pete to her feet as easily as you’d toss an empty chip sack into the bin.
    “I don’t understand,” Pete said. It couldn’t be anything good. Some part of her had always known that when she went to the thin spaces, not by design but by death, this was what she’d see. The ramshackle little house and the endless verdancy of Ireland, bound on all sides by salt and sea.
    The Hag has her patron , said the Hecate, and I had mine. And she has failed me. So here you will stay, Petunia Caldecott. Not alive and not dead. At the crossroads of all worlds, buried for your sins until I see fit to release you. Or until the world burns down around you. It’s a toss-up at this point, I think.
    “Wait!” Pete said as the Hecate started to walk away. “That’s it? I don’t turn to murder because you snap your fingers and so you just leave me here to rot?”
    Not to rot , said the Hecate. Your body will be in what your friends will call a coma, and your soul will be here. Some day they may reunite, but by then you’ll be quite mad. She lifted her face to the weak sun peering through the wispy lace curtains of mist that floated across the hillside. Perhaps you and the gulls will learn to speak to one another, in the creaks and croaks of your ruined throat.
    The Hecate turned away again, and Pete raced after her up the hill, feet sinking into the mucky peat. “Fuck you, you glassy-eyed bitch! You don’t own me! And if it was so important that Jack and Naughton not get Carver, you should’ve left me there to get him back!”
    Pete could see only one of her glowing eyes and the razor edge of her child’s profile as the Hecate glared at her. You still don’t understand. Even on the brink of death, you maintain that the world will go on. And I do own you, Petunia. As the Hag owns Jack Winter, and as his dead god owns Nicholas Naughton, you are an avatar. You are one of the touched, the people who in the past would be saints and madmen.
    “So then tell me what I’ve missed!” Pete shouted. “Give me a chance to fix it, if I’m your bloody chosen child!”
    There is no chosen one , the Hecate hissed. There are the touched, and you are replaceable. I owe you nothing.
    “Oh yeah?” Pete folded her arms. “Then why are you so angry?”
    The Hecate sighed. The wind kicked up and raked fingers through Pete’s hair and over her chilled skin.