Bone Gods by Caitlin Kittredge

“Coming?” he said, casting a look over his shoulder.
    All right, Petunia, Pete said. Get your arse up. You’ve had worse.
    She couldn’t remember when, but she got herself on her feet, and tried to ignore the ship’s-deck feeling of a bad trip rocking under her feet. “Where are we?” she said.
    Tyrell pointed to a faded seal on the metal door. Pete saw it was from the War Office, decades out of date. It also kept moving, skating from one side of the door to the other. “Bomb shelter,” he said. “Thin here. Lots of fear, lots of people all shut up together, feeding off one another.” He spun the hatch. “A bit of the lost Black, for the lost library.”
    “I can cross into the Black,” Pete insisted, knowing she sounded as if she’d drunk an entire pub’s worth of lager.
    Tyrell extended his hand to pull her through the door. “Not like this.”
    Pete ignored the gesture. Even wasted out of her skull, she knew better than to willingly touch Tyrell. She stepped through the hatch, and the bottom fell out of her stomach. The Black closed over her head, intractable as freezing water. Her head felt as if she’d left her skull floating a meter away, her brain flopping uselessly. The connection, to the currents and tides, was gone here. The Black was a bubble, trapped under glass, and Pete quivered under the psychic feedback.
    “I do enjoy this place,” Tyrell said. “The world rushes to and fro, and the Black creeps into every crevice like tar, but here…” He inhaled, nostrils flaring white. “Here, it bends to the Antiquarians.”
    Pete pressed a hand over her mouth, hoping the pressure would keep her together. Sweat chilled all over her bare skin.
    “If you’re going to vomit,” Tyrell told her, “kindly do it in the corner and not near me.”
    “This isn’t right…” Pete managed. All around her, the Black was screaming, rent open and bleeding magic into the void. She’d gotten sick the first time Jack had brought her over, but nothing like this. Something larger and more powerful than any single mage had torn a rip in the fabric of the Black here, and it was clinging to her mind, sinking in a million tiny needles that made all of her senses scream. For the Antiquarians to do such a thing, they were far worse than Lawrence had imagined. And she was here with them alone. Brilliant.
    “Breathe,” Tyrell said, taking the folded photo from his vest with a clipped motion. “If I can stand it, so can you.”
    Pete forced herself to focus on anything except her irregular heartbeat and the roar of the Black all around. The feeling wasn’t any worse than when they’d run suicide drills during her police training, back and forth in the rain and muck, until a cadet either passed out or chucked up their guts. “Hurry,” she mumbled at Tyrell, loathing the fact he’d made her beg. “Please.”
    Tyrell pressed the photo to his lips, mumbled something Pete couldn’t understand, and then dropped it to the floor.
    Blue flame crept in everywhere, over the walls, across the floor, through Tyrell’s hair, caressing his face and hands. Pete watched it raise the hairs on her arm, but she didn’t scream. It wasn’t really fire; it was power, bleeding out of the Black and into the physical realm. Jack could do the same trick.
    Tyrell panted slightly, and while the witchfire crept over every surface, Pete felt more than saw something vast and fathomless open before her. This sliver of the Black bumped against another, connected, slippery as soap bubbles. “The archives say they know nothing,” Tyrell said presently. “I’m sorry, my dear.”
    “Piss off,” Pete said. She could feel a bit of herself again, enough to know that she’d be miserable with bruises by the next day. If she even made it out here without her brain turning into cauliflower. “Try again.”
    “I’m sorry.” Tyrell crumpled the photo between his fists. “The archives have spoken. If they don’t know, it’s not there to