Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

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 know.”

Pete pulled herself to her knees, and then, using the wall, stood up. She felt her knees wobbling, but she locked them and favored Tyrell with a glare. “People don’t just do this for a laugh. There’s a reason he’s dead.”

“Humans want to ascribe reason to everything,” Tyrell said. “It’s a failing of the breed.” He made for the door. “Our bargain is void, of course. I’m sorry that I, as an Antiquarian, could not be of service.” His awful caved-in mummy’s face composed itself into an expression that actually seemed contrite, but Pete pointed a finger at him.

“I’m desperate. You’re right. But I’m also not an idiot.” Her arm was too heavy to do anything but hang, so she let it. “You know something.”

Tyrell tugged at the door. “That’s odd.”

“Tell me,” Pete said. “Whatever it is. I can take it.”

“No, Miss Caldecott,” Tyrell snapped. “You can’t. Because you’re human, and like a human you will try to rush in and change things, push and shove them into your image of what the world should be.” He gave the door a kick. “Bastard thing. Enchantments are as dodgy as a knockoff watch.”

Pete inserted herself between Tyrell and the door, even though a fresh wave of dizziness crested and crashed over her. “Tell me,” she snarled. “I have even less patience than the average human, Tyrell.”

Tyrell worried his hands, nails clacking. “It’s not a death spell, all right? It’s not a spell at all. The carvings are Babylonian and a sort of necromancy, yes, but not in the narrow way you think. Not simply calling or repelling the dead. This thing that was done to this flesh—it has no order and no sense. It’s as if someone who didn’t speak the language wrote a book in Chinese, yeah? Nothing can come of it.”

“Clearly somebody thought different,” Pete said. The carvings had power. What she’d felt in the museum wasn’t simply psychic soot, deposited by the normal passage of the Black.

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t care. Antiquarians do not concern themselves in the affairs of the Black,” Tyrell said. “Far more pressing is the fact that I cannot open the door.”

Pete stared dumbly at him for a moment. “What?” It was certainly her day for asking obvious questions.

“The Black has been torn,” Tyrell said. “Shredded and remade, just now. It has pressurized us here, as if we were submerged deep under the ocean.” He shrugged. “Something massive is passing through, and we are feeling the ripples.”

Pete slid down the wall, until the floor of the small metal room met her bottom. “Dear lord. I’m going to die in here. With you.”

“It will pass,” Tyrell said. “These events are more regular than creatures like you realize. The Black is fragile and full of things that can cause such an event. Most are simply too old or too terrible for your kind to believe they still exist, or ever did. The wave will recede eventually.”

“How soon is eventually?” Pete said into her knees. Don’t panic, she ordered herself. Don’t breathe, don’t vomit, don’t lose your head. Easy to tell herself, hard to put into practice. The effects of Tyrell’s toxic tea were wearing off, and she was nauseated even without being trapped in a sliver of the Black she couldn’t access or escape on her own.

“Minutes,” Tyrell shrugged. “Decades.”

“I hate you,” Pete said.

Tyrell tested the door again. “Ah,” he said as it swung free. “Miss Caldecott.” He presented her a card with sleight of hand, a much cleaner and newer version of the one the long-ago Antiquarian had given Jack.

CURIOSITIES, the card read in bold script, and below it, MEMORY, ANTIQUITIES, & DREAMS, ALL TRADES CONSIDERED. The flip side contained the same gibberish chant.

“We’ll be in touch,” Tyrell said. “Good hunting, miss.”

The door slammed, and Pete was left alone to find her way back to the surface world.

Pete bent double on the sidewalk outside the shop, breathing deep, trying to quell the roiling sickness in her guts.

“I ain’t a fan of sayin’ I told you,” Lawrence said. “But I did. That Antiquarian, he’s a no-good snake.” He rubbed a hand between Pete’s shoulder blades. “You gonna sick up?”

“Not if I can help it,” Pete mumbled, trying not to move her jaw. The passing posh crowd was casting increasingly alarmed looks, and it would only be a matter of time before someone called the police on the large black man and the skinny white woman acting as if she’d just come off a fortnight heroin binge.

“You get anything useful, at least?” Lawrence said. “Make this worthwhile?”

“Walk,” Pete said, even though the pavement looked as crumpled as velvet to her eyes. She grabbed Lawrence’s elbow, and they made their slow way down the high street. “Yes,” she said, when they’d left the stares behind. “Babylonian. Necromantic. Not a death spell. Beyond that, it was all a babbling brook of bullshit.”

“Antiquarians love bein’ smarter than you,” Lawrence agreed. “Smarmy cunts.”

Pete thought the rumbling that enveloped them, along with darkness, was her own blood in her ears for a moment, until Lawrence jerked her under the awning of a sweet shop. A moment later, a flashbulb went off across the entire sky and the heavens over London opened, pissing down cold spring rain that filled the gutters and caused a taxi to nearly jump the curb, wipers flailing madly against the windscreen.

“Just what we bloody need, eh?” Lawrence said. The thunder drowned out anything else, and nerves of lightning lit the skin of the iron-gray clouds that had collected in the space of a few footsteps.

“Never seen a storm like this,” Pete said.

“My old nana used to say a storm like this could wake the dead,” Lawrence said.

“I’m sure if your grandmother was aware of how annoying folksy wisdom is, she’d’ve kept that to herself,” Pete said.

“Oi,” Lawrence told her. “Just because you in the grumps doesn’t mean we all gotta be.”

The rain abated after a few more moments, not much but enough to run for the tube. The scarcity of people on the high street was the only reason Pete noticed the man all in black standing near a close, watching her from under the dripping brim of his wide hat. Pete tugged on Lawrence. “Hold it.”

Dreisden tipped his hat to Pete with a chipper grin, and turned and slipped away before she could take more than one step toward him. A taxi blared, and Lawrence jerked her back. “What’s the matter? Now you looked good and riled, in addition to wet and hungover.”

Pete glared at the spot where Dreisden had been, then dug in her bag for the card Juniper had handed her outside the Lament. “What’s the matter is I don’t like being fucking threatened.”

Lawrence didn’t answer, but he did follow her, which Pete didn’t argue with this time. She was through being menaced by Ethan Morningstar, and he’d pushed enough. If Lawrence could help her push back, so much the better.