Bone Gods

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Pete shoved the mess into her jacket, kicked the drawer shut, and leaped across the room to a sitting position on the bed, just as Patel burst in.

  “I hope you have something damn impressive to say about all this, Miss Caldecott, because otherwise I’m going to arrest you right now.”

  Pete looked up at him. Patel’s cheeks had flushed to a deep magenta, and his regal nose flared with every breath. She considered for a moment, keeping her arm clamped to her side to hold the bundle against her stomach. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “You think I’m fucking about? I’ll have you,” Patel snarled. “You were a liability on the force, and now you’ve apparently fucked off ’round the bend with the fortune-tellers. I don’t care who your dad was—I’ll have you. Conspiracy to murder. Start talking.”

  “Felix, bloody Hell, it’s my fault,” Ollie said. He was also red, hands trembling and sweat breaking out on his temples. Some might mistake it for anger in a man of his size, but Pete knew Ollie, and Ollie was scared.

  “Don’t cover for her, Heath,” Patel said. “You’re just going to make it worse than it already is.” He sneered at Pete. “Outside consultant, my arse. Whose cock did you suck to stay out of jail thus far?”

  “Your mum’s. Disappointingly small.” Pete stood. “I’m leaving. You can charge me if you have the balls.”

  She left the crime scene, feeling curiously numb after the flashover of rage. The thing in her pocket prickled her skin and she drew her hand away. She’d be furious at Ollie for dragging her into this if he weren’t as fucked as she. He’d probably lose his job and his pension, if Newell was in a foul enough mood. Not to mention that in under an hour she’d managed to both get McCorkle killed and make an enemy of Felix Patel, the sort of hard-nosed bastard who’d probably harass her with traffic citations and littering charges until the end of time, just because he could.

  “Arse,” Pete said, though Patel was long out of earshot. She hated being out of her element, hated that she was a tourist in the world of the Black with no talent of her own besides being filled to the brim and possibly burned alive any time she came in contact with sorcery. Hated that she couldn’t find her feet, solve the problem. All she could do was walk to the fucking bus stop, sit and wait to be taken back across the river, a lost soul riding the steam and neon of London back to the underworld.

  So what are you going to do about it, then? That was Jack, all smirk and permanent halo of smoke. Not like you to just fuck off and moan about your sorry lot, luv.

  Pete hunched into her jacket inside the bus shelter. This late, it’d be nearly an hour before she could catch a night bus.

  She didn’t have Jack’s talent, nor his twenty-five years of living, breathing, and dreaming the Black, but she had his books and she had Lawrence. She could moan forever, knocking about the Black like the sad old bastard who wants to sit beside you in pubs and talk about the war, or she could admit she’d cocked up, climb back on top of the problem, and start over. She could still find the why and who of Gerard Carver’s last ritual. Fuck it, if she found that, she’d likely find who killed McCorkle.

  It all seemed like a brilliant plan, until the thing in Pete’s pocket began to whisper, rushing tides of the Black cascading over her mind, as if she were hearing snatches of esoteric radio out the windows of the few passing cars.

  Pete cast her eyes into the small patch of unlit park across the street. A darker piece of nighttime stood among the bare oaks. It was the same thin figure that had tried to accost her at the mortuary. Eyes gleamed in the dark, picking up the streetlamps.

  The figure smirked at her across Coldharbour Lane, standing perfectly still for a moment before he took a step toward her, then another. Pete looked up and down the street. This late, she could hear the thump of bass from a club a few blocks down, but there was nobody else on the pavement. The bus shelter didn’t offer any protection and the alleyway beyond even less.

  The figure picked up speed, long, loping strides closing the distance between them with frightening alacrity. Pete felt the thing in her pocket prickle, coming alive at the onslaught of the figure.

  Necromancers could call a lot of things—poltergeists, zombies, and worse. Pete decided she wasn’t going to wait until the thing made it across the street to find out exactly what it was, although the loping, bowlegged stride and the long, narrow sliver of face she could see under the streetlamps bore out her theory that it wasn’t a human thing.

  Pete ran straight toward it, dodging at the last moment and causing the thing to stumble and wheel about. It hissed, and she heard the scrape of claws on asphalt as it chased her. The Black was rising, filling the empty spaces around her as Pete bore for the park, the musty stench of something long dead breathing in her face.

  The park across the street bore stern warnings that it was closed from dusk till dawn, but she grabbed the rusty iron gate and heaved herself over. Metal bit into her hand, but she kept running.

  The thing vaulted the gate on spindly legs, closing fast, and Pete bore down. She’d been smoking too much and running too little, and her lungs scissored with every breath, but she ran. Magic dogged her every step, the moon slicing light and shadow out of the ground. The green space ended in someone’s garden wall, and she scrambled up, feeling wetness on her palm as it scraped across brick. The thing chasing her landed on top of the wall, crouched like a spider for a moment as it roved to catch her in its gaze, and then gave a hiss like an enormous kettle as it sprang back to the ground and kept chasing.

  Pete burst from between the narrow buildings onto Atlantic Road, feet nearly going on the uneven pavement. The vista there was even more deserted, National Rail tracks bordering the street on one side and dark windows on the other. Fingers, or perhaps claws, snatched at the back of her jacket; she didn’t look back to find out. A newsagent a few doors down was still lit, and she poured her last ounce of oxygen on.

  She made it halfway across Atlantic Road, and then thing caught her, wrapping too-long fingers around her thigh and pulling her off balance. Pete fell and rolled once, the thing on top of her, its hand going around her neck.

  It hissed at her, and Pete had the feeling it was talking to her, or perhaps cursing, in its own language. The hair on its head was matted, stitched into place with red thread, and Pete saw why it couldn’t speak—its blue, swollen lips were stitched as well.

  Zombie. Of course. Just her bloody luck. Zombies were like poltergeists, except where poltergeists were dead things, stripped down to anger and cruelty and honed like a blade, zombies were the same thing, summoned into corpses prepared for the purpose. The mouth was stuffed with ritual herbs, and the eyes were crossed out with black thread. Zombies weren’t bright, but they were relentless and resilient. Pete pounded ineffectually at the thing’s chest, skin cool and pulpy under her fists, like a rotted orange.

  The zombie scrabbled at her clothes, overgrown nails tearing holes in her shirt and raking at the skin beneath. Pete kicked and struggled as much as she could. Screaming was out of the question, with the thing’s hand around her throat. Zombies were strong, fueled by the rage of the ghost bound inside their flesh, and she wouldn’t have been a match even if she hadn’t just run a fucking forty-yard dash.

  It stared down at her with its eyes crossed by thick black stitches, hissing and scratching as if it were an enormous, furious housecat and Pete was the mouse.

  She didn’t really mean to use the last of her air on a spell. She wasn’t even very good at magic, at least that sort, when she was focused and calm and not being set upon by a corpse with a bad attitude. Still, the word came to mind and flew from mind to tongue with minimal intervention. It was the simplest of hexes, one Jack could throw out pissed and standing on one leg, but Pete had never been able to simply grab a handful of power and fling it outward in the same way. She gasped rather than spoke with any authority, her vision starting to spin as her last breath went. “Sciotha!”

  The Black rippled around them, as if she’
d cast a stone into it, and Pete felt a small tug on her chest. The zombie lurched, as if he’d caught a limb in a bear trap, and then fell to the side, twitching like a squashed insect.

  Pete gasped for a moment. The newsagent, who’d been closing his shutters, was on the pavement a few yards away, staring. Pete met his eyes, and the man held up his hands and retreated. In Brixton, they clearly knew not to get involved in street fights involving a petite woman and a hulking hellbeast.

  Her throat burned, and her shoulder and knees throbbed when she got up and started going through the zombie’s pockets. It was wearing a polyester suit, cheap and unidentifable. It didn’t have any marks of being embalmed, and it wasn’t decayed overmuch. Pete would lay money the body’s former owner had been murdered specifically to bind the ghost inside him. She went through the suit’s pockets with fast fingers. The paralyzer hex didn’t last forever, even when it was thrown by someone who knew what they were doing. The zombie’s legs began to thrash, and he bucked under her like an excitable pony.

  “Why you following me, eh?” Pete said, holding him by the neck as he’d pinned her. “What’re you after, you scuttling piece of shit?”

  The zombie’s cloudy eyes rolled back in its head and it made an enraged sound, low and guttural. Pete found nothing in the pockets except a dry-cleaner’s receipt and a few pennies. The zombie made a feeble swipe at her as she tossed the items aside, and she caught sight of a faded mark, not from ritual but from ink. An ace of spades nearly hidden in the webbing of the man’s thumb, the sort of thing they stamped on your hand at clubs that washed off in a few hours.

  “I don’t know if you understand any of this,” Pete said, standing as the zombie began to twitch more violently. “But if your masters send you after me again, I’m going to chop you into firewood and douse you in petrol. Right?”

  The zombie hissed.

  “Right,” Pete said, and took off running before somebody called the police.

  CHAPTER 16

  She rang Lawrence from an all-night café in Southwark, after she’d walked and doubled back enough times to satisfy her throbbing heart and twitchy nerves that no one and nothing was follwing her.

  Lawrence mumbled, “I know you’re nocturnal, but some of us ain’t.”

  “Fucking zombies,” Pete said. “Fucking zombies after me, Lawrence. Within full view of a bunch of Met officers. These bastards have got balls the size of the O2.”

  He yawned. “Who’s got zombies?”

  “Whoever killed the bloke we asked the Antiquarians about,” Pete said. “I’m bloody angry now, Lawrence.” Bad enough to top McCorkle, bad enough to try for her at the mortuary—a host of sorcerers against her was something that never would have happened six months ago. Morningstar had been right, much as she was loath to admit it—the Black was changing, and the nightmares were getting bolder.

  “You need me?” he said. “Where are you?”

  “South London,” Pete said. “And no, it’s fine for now.” She started to ring off and then put her mobile back to her ear. “Lawrence, you know of any clubs in the Black use a hand stamp? Ace of spades?”

  “Not in the Black,” he said. “But there’s one on this side, down on your side of the river. Moves around a lot—ain’t exactly got a bar license. Called Motor. Why?”

  “You have a last known?” Pete said.

  “Got a number,” Lawrence said. He banged about for a moment, read it off, and then disconnected without a goodbye. Pete wrote it down on her arm. It was a Southwark exchange, but she couldn’t very well go bursting in without any sort of preparation. Besides, she was exhausted and cut up and bruised in seven colors. She had to at least stop at home and clean up. And get her pepper spray and her baton, because if the men responsible were sending zombies, she was going to have to send back something more than wits.

  Pete caught a bus and managed to doze a bit on the way, but by the time she was back in Whitechapel she was mainly acutely aware that she’d taken a hard fall. Her hand wasn’t cut as badly as she’d thought, but it was a mess of purple where she’d slammed it into the iron fence, and she couldn’t close it very well.

  Just what she needed—to go about for the next two weeks looking as if an irate boyfriend had tossed her down a flight of stairs. She tried not to whimper as she climbed up to the flat, but even slight movement awoke fresh aches. She needed aspirin and a hot bath, preferably filled with whiskey.

  The first sign something was amiss in the flat was quiet. The building was never quiet—the neighbors shouted, the noise from their tellys drifted down the hallway, and the small neighbor boy who was constantly in the hall conducting elaborate battles with his Transformers shrieked and made laser sounds.

  Deserted, silent except for the buzzing of the overhead lights, the hallway outside the flat looked like something out of an ancient, elegant ghost story. The stamped tin ceiling and heavy wood doors were caked with decades of grime, and the scarred wood floor creaked under Pete’s feet.

  She stopped outside her own door and splayed her fingers against the wood. The protection hex that lay over the flat like finest cobweb still hung there, undisturbed. Still, Pete couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that something was off. Never had her neighbors been so dead silent. Never had the air in the building been so still, as if lightning had just struck, or was just about to.

  Could be she was paranoid. Felix Patel certainly thought she was off her rocker.

  Could be, but she still inserted her key slowly and turned the lock soundlessly, entering the flat with her back easing up to the wall.

  Everything was just as she’d left it. Faint silver light of morning was creeping through the windows and picking out motes in the air. Pete realized her heart was hammering, and she kicked the door shut, letting the crack put the lid on that. She’d had a hard night and she was exhausted, and magic would fuck with your brain chemistry quicker than any drug. That was all.

  She slung off her jacket, which was covered in dust and road muck, kicked off her shoes, and made it a few steps into the apartment when the curse wrapped around her from foot to head, cold and unyielding as chains. She fell hard, choking, icicles of magic jabbing into her skin. After all the abuse she’d endured in the past few days, one more bruise didn’t make much of a dent. What worried her more was that she couldn’t breathe. Or more accurately, she could, inhaling ice and exhaling knives.

  The owner of the curse moved into her field of view, backlight from the window turning him into a featureless man-shape, as if he were a figure on a church window, calling up a sharp memory of mornings in mass at the Catholic school Connor had insisted she attend: kneeling in her illicit fishnets, the nylon leaving hash marks on her knees, Pete squirming against the sting while the stone floor chilled her down to the bone.

  She was blacking out. Her air was going. Her mind jumped and twitched as the curse fought with her talent, and won handily. Pete wondered almost idly as the man walked over to her and nudged her with one shined Oxford shoe, if he meant to kill her or only scare her. If it was the latter, she hoped he’d let up soon. The pain was causing her to make odd, gasping noises that sounded as if she were drowning. Sooner or later, the curse would kill her nerve endings, and then her ability to breathe, and finally her brain cells, magic dissecting her into so much blood and bone.

  The curse-thrower twitched up his soft gray wool trousers and crouched, cocking his head to look in her face. “Hello, Pete,” he said, and smiled. He had the sort of smile that could stop traffic. If you didn’t know that in his private moments he was a murderer, a sorcerer, and a sadist.

  Pete tried to say Nicholas fucking Naughton, but managed a feeble sort of squeak. Naughton chucked her under the chin. “Don’t get up. I know you’re not being rude.”

  Nicholas Naughton was a necromancer. That made a bit of sense. She’d been looking for a necromancer, hadn’t she? The kind of nasty cunt who’d carve a man up and leave him for the world to see. Nicholas Naughton was precisely that k
ind of cunt. He’d nearly gotten Jack killed when he’d sent Pete and Jack to put down a poltergeist he’d lost control over. His own brother’s ghost, which he’d tortured to the point of madness.

  “I do love this flat,” Naughton said, straightening up. “It’s a piece of shit, but it’s got excellent bones. I’d shovel out the esoteric crap. Paint it white. Something tasteful yet respectful of the lines.” He passed his hands over the things on the coffee tables—Pete’s laptop, the ashtray, an empty teacup, a snowglobe she’d bought Jack when they drove to Brighton. “Wondering how I got in?” he cocked his eyebrow at Pete. “Wondering how I got here in the first place?”

  He sat on her sofa, arms out, ankle over knee like he sat there every day. “Imagine my surprise when my zombie shambles home and informs me he met a feisty little mage in Coldharbour Lane. A feisty little female mage using Fiach Dubh magic that I was under the impression had died with the last soppy little wanker who tried to throw his weight around and found himself wanting.”

  Fuck you, Pete tried for, but she couldn’t even croak this time. She was at the edge of unconsciousness, and she heard her blood rushing past her ears like a flight of birds, light and feathery as her heartbeat faded.

  “But then I remembered.” Naughton leaned forward and helped himself to a fag from the pack on the table. “That soppy wanker had himself a sweet little lady friend, who’s exactly the sort of persistently nosy bitch who’d be hanging around a dead policeman’s flat. And I found you in no time at all.” He sat back, lit, and drew a cherry on the end of his fag, and all at once Pete felt the curse lift. “You’re looking very well,” Naughton said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Pete stayed still. It wouldn’t do to move too soon. Taking a body-bind curse was like taking a cricket bat to the kidneys—blunt and stunning, until the magic had ebbed. She focused on breathing first, in and out, the sweet, stale air of the flat and Naughton’s cigarette. Moving would come in good time. Naughton wasn’t going to off her straightaway. He’d had his chance when she’d walked in like she was strolling down fucking Oxford Street. He might still torture and kill her, but right now he was going for maximum theatricality. He wanted to frighten her into something, so she had a little time.