Caitlin Kittredge - Bone Gods

Ollie’s voice made Pete start, heart slamming against her rib bones before it began hammering again. “Well?”

Pete pulled the dead man’s shirt open fully, exposing the spreading ruin of scar tissue, down both his arms and peeking out from his cuffs as well. “I think it’s good you called me.”

Ollie took Pete outside, to get a breath of air he said, but Pete knew the real reason and she was just as glad to leave the oppressive web of black magic around the body as Ollie’s subconscious was.

They stood on the steps of the British Museum, its long gravel lawn and the iron gates holding back the world, which passed beyond them without a care or a notion of what had taken place behind the museum’s granite edifice.

Pete took her pack of cigarettes from her bag and lit up, waiting for Ollie to speak first so she could gauge his mood.

“So,” he sighed after she’d taken a few drags. “We’re in the shit with this one, aren’t we?”

“Just a bit,” Pete agreed, flicking ash onto the museum’s steps.

“What, then?” Ollie said. “If it’s cults or a serial bloke taking orders from the neighborhood Alsatian, I’d like to know now before the press come howling over my threshold.”

Pete sucked on her Parliament to buy her a few seconds, but it didn’t change the answer. “It’s black magic, and fucking strong stuff. I could feel it all the way across the room. Beyond that…” She watched the smoke dissipate into the bright morning air. “I don’t know, Ollie. I’ve never run into anything like this before.”

“You can’t, I dunno…” Ollie gestured in a vague circle. “Read the scene? Sense the vibrations of the ether or summat?”

Pete sighed. “Maybe if I were a bloody TV psychic, Ollie. I’ve told you, it doesn’t work that way for me.” It being a talent, and Pete’s talent being even less use than a fake medium’s in situations like the one inside. Murder wasn’t something she could conjure an answer to, besides feeling the black magic seeping out of the museum even now, laying cold bony fingers on the back of her neck.

Ollie waved her smoke away from his face and fidgeted, the next bit not coming to him easily. “You think you could get your Jack to take a look? I’ve seen him do all the mumbo-jumbo stuff.” He squinted at Pete. “You two didn’t split up, did you?”

Pete dropped her fag-end to the granite steps, grinding it under her toe. Ollie was just fishing for a reaction. She was careful not to give him one. “No. Jack’s not about anymore.”

“Oh,” Ollie said, sounding almost disappointed. “Well then,” he continued, after a moment where Pete watched a valiant struggle not to ask for gory details play out in his florid face, “anything else you can give me about the dead bloke? Preferably something I can use to put a squeeze on whoever did him a bad turn?”

Pete breathed in, out, clearing her lungs of smoke and her mind of the tight squeeze of emotions that Jack’s name conjured up. As if she’d called his ghost into being, she swore she could hear his raspy laughter from just behind the next pillar, smell his scent of leather and stale tobacco and soap and whiskey, see a curl of blue across the air, the visible tinge of the magic that followed Jack everywhere he went.…

But she couldn’t see it, not really. Because Jack was gone. And he wasn’t coming back.

“Pete,” Ollie said. “Hullo. Come back. I could use the assist. Hasn’t been a banner year for clearing cases, since me brilliant lady partner shoved off for the private sector.”

Pete rubbed a hand down the side of her face. She couldn’t speak to the dead or even know by sight and sense what kind of spell she’d stumbled onto, but she could at least act like she had a brain in her head. “Give me his particulars. Maybe I can scare up his contacts or at least tell you what his poison was, sorcery-wise.” She didn’t have much in the way of a useful talent, but she could at least talk to the people who did, which was more than Ollie would get. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get his heart pulled out, or at the very least his head stove in.

Ollie consulted his PDA, a blipping, annoying little device that Pete had always thought he put entirely too much stock in. “According to the museum’s human resources, the name’s Gerard Carver, he was an assistant curator of the Egyptian Collection, an excellent worker according to his boss (a Mr. Something-Egyptian-with-Ten-Thousand-Syllables), diploma from London City College, nary an enemy in the world as far as the museum was concerned.” He scrolled through the notes. “Lives with his mum in Knightsbridge. Ah, shite, I’m going to have to be going there next.” Ollie closed his eyes and sighed. Pete had all sympathy—telling someone their son was dead wasn’t a task anyone should have to do with regularity.

“I’ll find out,” Pete said. “I’ll need to get a few pictures of the marks. That all right?”

Ollie grimaced. “Officially, no, but go and be quick about it. Newell could have me out on my arse if he even knew you were here.”

Pete nodded her thanks. Nigel Newell, her old DCI, was about as stolid and unimaginative an officer as any Channel Four procedural could have thought up. His last words to Pete before she’d left the Met had been How disappointing you’ve let your imagination run away with you. Not having to contend with Newell every day was one of the few upsides that Pete had found in quitting.

Before she could express her thoughts about what exactly Newell could do to himself if he found out Ollie had called her, a blond man came across the lawn, waving and shouting something Pete couldn’t make out. She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Who the fuck’s that?”

Ollie sighed. “Frederick McCorkle. New partner,” he explained. “Useless as an armless lesbian with a box of dildos, that one. Freddy!” he bellowed, waving at the man. “You’re bloody late!”

He descended the steps to berate McCorkle further, leaving Pete by herself.

She turned away and went back into the museum, across the broad modern lobby, past the glass case holding the Rosetta Stone, past the winged Assyrian statues arranged as they had been in their birthplace, as gates into a stranger world. It shouldn’t sting that Ollie had finally gotten around to being assigned a new partner. She’d been gone from the Met for over a year. If she was going to come back, she’d be back. Ollie should be moved on, and the only sorrow she should feel was that Newell had saddled him with some baby-faced detective constable, still dazzled at the thought of being in plainclothes.

She walked past the smaller pharaohs—at least in relation to Ramses—and back to poor Gerard Carver’s corpse. Whatever his proclivities in life, bleeding out on a cold floor was a hard end for anyone. But it wasn’t as if he’d been a victim chosen out of a hat. Jack had at least taught her that the innocent and pure rarely got swept up in the undertow of black magic completely without their accord. People turned to sorcery for lots of reasons, most of them utterly mundane, and those people usually ended up exactly like Carver, plus or minus a few stab wounds.

Magic wasn’t really so different from everyday life. People were petty, selfish, spiteful bastards no matter what side of the river you walked on. Pete took her mobile from her bag, tapped over to the camera screen, snapped a clear shot of Carver’s exposed torso. She shoved the phone back into her bag before Nasiri caught her.

Again, this close to the corpse, she felt the vibration in the air, the spells that the symbols on Carver’s body had woven when he was alive lingering as if a cluster of spectral flies still hovered above the dead man’s carcass.