Bone Gods

a prewar building in the Mile End Road that had ceased to be crumbling and simply crumbled into four stories of brick, dry rot, cooking oil residue, and dust.
    Still, for the last year, Pete had lived there with Jack. When he was there, with all his books and papers, his cigarette smoke staining the plaster, the repurposed record cabinet next to the sofa concealing the rotgut Irish whiskey that he insisted on drinking, it wasn’t a bad place. Not at all. Now, she supposed as she climbed four flights of stairs and let herself in, it was as good a place as any.
    Jack’s piles of books and grimoires still existed just as he’d left them, on the worn built-ins and on the floor in tottering stacks nearly as tall as Pete herself. She’d rearranged some as she’d read through them, at least the stuff that wasn’t in Latin or Aramaic or simply jotted down by someone with such terrible handwriting it gave her eyestrain, but she hadn’t even attempted to organize anything to her liking. The books belonged to Jack, as did the specimen jars and decks of tarot cards, divination boards and talismans Jack had bartered, bought, or stolen on his various walkabouts to the darker corners of the Black. She left them, left his horrid, bachelor-flat furniture, and even let the old punk posters that curled at the edges to reveal the chipped, water-stained plaster hang.
    Everything was just the same. Except for Jack.
    Pete threw her bag and jacket onto the sofa and rooted in the ancient Amana icebox for a bottle of lager. She opened it and lit a fresh cigarette. The ashtray on the occasional table was full, but she couldn’t be arsed to empty it just then. She rubbed the spot in the center of her forehead where a headache was brewing. It made the cuts on her hand open again and begin to sting. She sighed and looked at her distorted reflection in the lager bottle. “Aren’t you a pitiful fucking sight?” she told it, getting up and going to the bathroom for antiseptic and bandages.
    While she worked on her hand, she thought about what Jack would have done to Ethan Morningstar and his little group of elderly Goths when he’d found out what they’d tried to do to her. There wouldn’t even be a word to describe the type of fury Jack would rain down on the Order.
    Pete poured peroxide over her hand, watching the blood sluice away, leaving pink streaks on the porcelain basin. She’d met a husband and wife when she was with the Met, a pair who’d lost their son to a drug dealer with a temper when the kid was barely seventeen. Pete had told them all the right things, the things she was supposed to say—grief counseling, the loss would be difficult, but they would eventually get over it.
    Six months later, the husband started their car in a closed garage and when the wife found his body she went into care. Pete saw the dealer who’d stabbed their son put into Pentonville. It hadn’t helped.
    Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.
    Pete wrapped her hand and taped the gauze. A faint halo of red droplets soaked through and stared up at her. Jack couldn’t help her. He was gone and she was still here. And that was fucking that.
    She shut off the water and put away the first aid kit, going down the hall to Jack’s bedroom—their room, she supposed, now hers—and rifled through what had been his drawer of the wardrobe, tossing aside worn-out black denim, shredded socks, and Jack’s favorite Dead Kennedys shirt until she found his address book. Shoving it into her pocket, she turned to leave again, but the scent was too much. The stale smoke, the mix of herbs and pot that clung to Jack’s clothes, the supple creak of old, broken-in leather.
    Pete picked up the shirt, twisting it between her hands. She pressed her face into it, allowing just one second. One second to imagine he was standing behind her, just out of reach. Then, before she lost her nerve, she pulled off her plain blouse and slipped the shirt over her head. It dropped off one shoulder and hung about her like a tunic over her skinny jeans, but Pete felt settled for the first time that day, as if she’d strapped on a stab vest rather than a ratty cotton shirt.
    That done, she debated for a moment before she found her mobile and